MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I made PromptMask, a local LLM-based privacy filter for cloud LLMs
by cxumol | 2025-08-26 23:42:41+00:00
I'm wary of sending private data to cloud AI services, but local models aren't always powerful enough. So I built PromptMask, an open-source local-first privacy layer.

It uses a trusted local LLM (via Ollama, llama.cpp, etc.) to intercept your prompt before it goes to a cloud service like OpenAI. It finds sensitive data and replaces it with semantic placeholders. Instead of a generic [REDACTED] that breaks context, it creates a map like {"John Doe": "${PERSON_1_NAME}"}.

Only the anonymized prompt is sent to the cloud. When the response returns, PromptMask uses the map to restore your original data, so that your secrets never leave your machine.

This is practical on consumer hardware because the local model's job is small: it only outputs a JSON map of secrets, not a full text rewrite. My benchmarks show even sub-1B parameter models are effective at this.

Two ways to integrate it into your AI activities:

1. Python lib for developers: A drop-in replacement of OpenAI SDK. `from promptmask import OpenAIMasked as OpenAI`

2. API Gateway for client-side apps: Run `promptmask-web` to get a local reverse-proxy endpoint (localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions) that secures requests from any OpenAI-compatible app.

I'd love to hear your feedback.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/cxumol/promptmask (MIT Licensed)

Blog post "How Not to Give AI Companies Your Secrets", a deep dive of "how"s and "why"s: https://xirtam.cxumol.com/promptmask-how-not-give-ai-secrets...
by lawlessone | 2025-08-26 23:43:06+00:00
I think we're expecting too much, afaik to detect anything we'd need aliens to be deliberately signaling us(tv, radio it's alien equivalent isn't going to be strong enough ). Or sending out a much much more powerful signal in all directions.

And it has to repeat.

We're expecting aliens to be very committed to doing something we don't do ourselves. We have deliberately sent out powerful signals with things like the Arecibo message but not repeating. And it would have to be repeating for a very long time.

To add, with the rules SETI currently uses nobody would have heard of it as they wouldn't consider a non-repeating signal like it as worth shouting about.
by ruraljuror | 2025-08-26 23:43:44+00:00
If you confine agency to something only humans can have, which is “human agency,” then yes of course LLMs don’t have it. But there is a large body of philosophical work studying non-human agency, and it is from this characteristic of agency that LLM agents take their name. Hariri argues that LLMs are the first technology that are agents. I think saying that they “can’t do things” and are not agents misunderstands them and underestimates their potential.
by muhdeeb | 2025-08-26 23:44:34+00:00
I'm inclined to give them a pass. It's easy enough to figure out that it should be germanium and not gadolinium, and dyslexia already exists among scientists. Context provides enough information to correct the record.

I didn't catch the error the first time around because I autocorrected to Ge--there are only so many anions that can make that formula work and staring at these formulas all day long can make you go cross eyed anyway.

What I think is more dangerous to understanding is skipping formulas in favor of initials! BFO instead of BiFeO3, or BT instead of Bi2Te3, SRO for SrRuO3, LSFO for La0.3Sr0.7FeO3 abbreviations that I think obscure too much detail. You can more easily wander into talking about different things with the same terms. Such abbreviations are already endemic in condensed matter physics.
by broker354690 | 2025-08-26 23:45:20+00:00
I would go further than that and question whether or not the notions of "safety" and "guardrails" have any legal meaning here at all. If I sold a bomb to a child and printed the word "SAFE" on it, that wouldn't make it safe. Kid blows himself up, no one would be convinced of the bomb's safety at the trial. Likewise, where's the proof that sending a particular input into the LLM renders it "safe" to offer as a service in which it emits speech to children?
by kstenerud | 2025-08-26 23:47:22+00:00
The app looks interesting, but I think it needs some documentation. I think I generated something? Maybe? I saw a spinny thing for awhile, but then nothing.

I couldn't get the 3d thing to do much. I had assets in the scene but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to use the move, rotate or scale tools. And the people just had their arms pointing outward. Are you supposed to pose them somehow? Maybe I'm supposed to ask the AI to pose them?

Inpainting I couldn't figure out either... It's for drawing things into an existing image (I think?) but it doesn't seem to do anything other than show a spinny thing for awhile...

I didn't test the video tool because I don't have a midjourney account.
by novok | 2025-08-26 23:47:54+00:00
It's not being skilled at programming, it's being skilled at interview programming, which is very different.

Also ringers are black market, so you can be hired everywhere and not blocked by not being in the USA in the first place. You can pass the interview, but you can't find a job that hires you in the USA because of non-interview reasons or market conditions. Anybody could become a ringer because it's a purely skill based job you can self teach, while getting a job at an Indian big tech might require a degree from an ITT or even just a degree at all might be too much for you.

Honestly they would be a great hiring pool on some level if the reasons why they can't get hired had nothing to do with skill but more socioeconomic barriers like that.

I've never hired a ringer, been a ringer or even looked into it, so it's total conjecture on my part.
by pjm331 | 2025-08-26 23:47:59+00:00
Very cool! I’ve been building an internal tool at work that’s very similar but primarily focused on automatically triaging bugs and tech support issues, with MCP tools to query logs, search for errors in bugsnag, query the db etc. also using linear for issue tracking. They’ve been launching some cool stuff for agent integrations.

And sorry I’m a light mode fan
by roody15 | 2025-08-26 23:49:00+00:00
China has no reason nor any incentive to invade Taiwan. They are moving ahead with a strategy of overwhelming force and patience. In short China will simply continue to greatly expand its Navy and overall military size. It will do so until its so overwhelming that Taiwan will simply end up voting to join back with China as it will be in its own interest. China has no need to speed this process up and can simply do exactly what it is doing now.. and just watch how things will change in the next 5-10-15 years.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-08-26 23:51:12+00:00
Maybe in the short term, but I think ultimately there are lots of things Humans want (AI or no AI), and that means there's a lot of value to create in the world still. Which means there will still be jobs, just maybe not as much in the churning-out-websites-and-"content"-business.

Don't get me wrong I'm not trying to flippant about the potential for destroyed value here. Many industries (like journalism*) really need to figure this out faster, the advertising model might collapse very quickly when people lose trust that they're reading Human created and vetted material. And there will be broader fallout if all these bonkers AI investments fail to pay off.

[*] Though for journalism specifically it feels like we as a society need to figure out the trust problem, we're rapidly approaching a place of prohibitively-difficult-to-validate-information for things that are too important to get wrong.
by fennec-posix | 2025-08-26 23:52:58+00:00
On the flip-side of this, have had friends have their MRs against projects get "reviewed" by CoPilot which does a lot of unnecessary nit-picking and can often be incorrect at it. I get it helps project maintainers save time, but it just feels very dismissive to have your code be thrown to a robot to critique and comment on.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-26 23:53:57+00:00
> Firms working at their dead level best to be up front with candidates still produce steady feeds of candidates who feel misled or unfairly rejected.

True, even the best cases have a nonzero baseline level of dissatisfaction. It reminds me of this quote, where one character publicly accused a judge of being corrupt based on rumor, and another character is asking whether she had anything except town rumor to go on.

> “Tell me, Royesse, what steps did you take beforehand, to assure yourself of the man’s guilt?”

> [...] Her frown deepened. "The townsmen applauded..."

> "Indeed. On average, one-half of all supplicants to come before a judge's bench must depart angry and disappointed. But not, by that, necessarily wronged."

-- The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold
by tzs | 2025-08-26 23:54:25+00:00
I've wondered about this. The current world population is close to twice what it was when I started college in the late 1970s.

Comparing what life was like then to life now and thinking about what I'd miss if I had to go back to say a 1976 lifestyle everything I'm coming up with is just that we've now got better technology, more advanced medicine, cleaner energy sources, and we passed laws and regulations to take better care of the environment.

Did we need 4 billion more people to get those things? I don't think so. In an alternate universe where the world decided in 1976 to voluntarily lower the fertility rate to just keep the population at 4 billion I think that 2025 in that world would be a lot like 2025 in our world as far as tech, medicine, energy, and the environment go.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-08-26 23:55:25+00:00
The kind of attack vector is irrelevant here, what's important is the attack surface. Not to mention this is a tool facilitating the attack, with little to no direct interaction with the user in some cases. Just because spear-phishing is old and boring doesn't mean it cannot have real consequences.

(Even if we agree with the premise that this is just "spear-phishing", which honestly a semantics argument that is irrelevant to the more pertinent question of how important it is to prevent this attack vector)
by felarof | 2025-08-26 23:55:43+00:00
Just dumping the raw DOM into the LLM context is brutal on token usage. We've seen pages that eat up 60-70k tokens when you include the full DOM plus screenshots, which basically maxes out your context window before you even start doing anything useful.

We've been working on this exact problem at https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS. Instead of throwing the entire DOM at the model, we hook into Chromium's rendering engine to extract a cleaner representation of what's actually on the page. Our browser agents work with this cleaned-up data, which makes the whole interaction much more efficient.
by prewett | 2025-08-26 23:56:38+00:00
I was all for MagSafe, but after buying an M2, I realized that the USB-C charging was better. I found the cables came out almost as well as the MagSafe if I stepped on them, but you can plug them in to either side. I seem to always be on the wrong side, so the MagSafe cable has to snake around to the other side.
by deadvoid | 2025-08-26 23:56:47+00:00
i'm in post-production so lots of color spaces & monitorings. colorimeters drifted with age/usage, so annual check for the first two years or so is good enough but then gradually afterwards it's good practice to calibrate more frequent, and more likely there's a small fee for that. spectrometers (or spectroradiometer can't be sure) are still insanely expensive.
Show HN: CodeBoarding – Visualize Code Structure
by brovatten | 2025-08-26 23:57:06+00:00
I noticed many projects I was getting acquainted with often had an overview that could not be easily explained by the file structure.

I tried to prompt using Claude Code and Cursor, but I was still not happy with the results for medium-large codebases.

So four months later, I have now built an open-source repository (CodeBoarding) that analyzes your code-flows, and generates an abstract overview of your codebase that you can interact with.

To do this, I extract code-flows using an LSP server to reduce the context and serve it to an LLM in multiple steps (read metadata, explore packages, validate diagrams, etc.).

The final results are now hosted on the website url, and you can find the repo from there. Would be super happy to hear feedback, thanks HN!
by SchemaLoad | 2025-08-26 23:57:53+00:00
LLMs are basically only useful when they can utilise public information. They are great for answering questions because the answer to your question can be pulled from wikipedia and reddit. They are completely useless for writing emails because they don't have any more info than you give them. The only thing they can do is fluff them out with nothingness, when the receiver is than AI summerising to strip out.
by mikepurvis | 2025-08-26 23:58:22+00:00
I had the same thought that really an LLM should interact with a browser viewport and just leverage normal accessibility features like tabbing between form fields and links, etc.

Basically the LLM sees the viewport as a thumbnail image and goes “That looks like the central text, read that” and then some underlying skill implementation selects and returns the textual context from the viewport.
by kimixa | 2025-08-26 23:59:02+00:00
I worked for an IP vendor that was in some Atom SoCs (over a decade ago now though) - from what I remember the perf/w was actually pretty competitive for contemporary ARM devices when we supplied the IP, but then took so long to actually end up in products it ended up behind others - other customers were already on the next generation by that point, even if the initial projects started at about the same time. And the atoms were buggy as hell, never had more problems with dumb cache/fabric/memory controller issues.

To me the Atom team always felt like a dead-end inside intel - everyone seemed to be trying to get in to a different higher-status team ASAP - our engineering contacts often changed monthly, if we even knew who our "contacts" were meant to be at any time. I think any product developed like that would struggle.
by jascha_eng | 2025-08-26 23:59:20+00:00
The LLM understands arbitrary web pages and finds the correct links to click. Not for one specific page but for ANY company name that you give it.

It will always come back with a list of technologies used if available on the companies page. Regardless of how that page is structured. That level of generic understanding is simply not solveable with just some regex and curls.
by jijijijij | 2025-08-26 23:59:25+00:00
Judging by my experience with the Framework 13, you gain basically nothing going pre-built. The DIY work required is laughable. It's so, so easy and simple. If you don't account for nervousness, you could do it in 5 min, no problem. Comes with a very nice little screw driver, which is all you need.
by tass | 2025-08-26 23:59:33+00:00
This metric says nothing about self driving capabilities. In fact, I'd argue that FSD supervising the driver (and doing things like limiting speed before corners) would make their cars safer.

To me this metric shows that their cars are very high performing, and for most drivers they're probably the fastest accelerating cars they've ever driven. Tesla should probably default them to 'chill' mode and provide a warning about how fast the car is when you switch out of that mode.
by kazinator | 2025-08-27 00:00:16+00:00
The typo is not the problem; it's that the typo is evidence of academic dishonesty.

When you make a citation, it means you cracked open the original work, understood what it says and located a relevant passage to reference in your work.

The authors are propagating the same typo because they are not copying the original correct text; they are just copying ready-made citations of that text which they plant into their papers to manufacture the impression that they are surveying other work in their area and taking it into account when doing their work.

They survey one or two works, and then just steal their citations to make it look like they also surveyed 19 other works.

Problem is, the citations in those words are already copies of borrowed citations from some other paper, which copied some of them from another paper and that was the honest one that made a typo in a genuine, organically grown citation.
by razodactyl | 2025-08-27 00:00:20+00:00
I'm not sure where to stand on this statement so I can only sit back and watch: I thought we would meet another AI winter ~2015 when we saturated computer vision and classification problems - then things started taking off for a little bit but settled but then things really took off...

You're still likely right as things must always come down but what if it doesn't.
by devnullbrain | 2025-08-27 00:01:40+00:00
On Earth, in the grand scheme of things, it took a very short time for colonies to a) diverge politically or b) fail. It's not something that stopped happening (much) because we became more cuddly. It's just boring old economics.

So I think it's unfeasible to maintain a society that rules with an iron fist over interstellar distance and time.
by ghurtado | 2025-08-27 00:02:01+00:00
Not really.

There are many, many cosmic processes that we don't know the first thing about.

At one point, we didn't know what a pulsar was, and a fair amount of people probably thought it was an alien signal.

Human History is littered with examples of attribution of the unexplained to aliens.

So far, non alien explanations have been found for all of them, except possibly this one.

Does it warrant further study? Absolutely. Is it likely to be aliens? Statistically, no.
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-08-27 00:02:02+00:00
The bigger challenge here is that we already struggle with basic metadata integrity. Sites routinely manipulate creation dates for SEO - I regularly see 5-year-old content timestamped as "published yesterday" to game Google's freshness signals.

While this doesn't invalidate the proposal, it does suggest we'd see similar abuse patterns emerge, once this header becomes a ranking factor.
by drewbeck | 2025-08-27 00:02:10+00:00
I post this not for you directly, who has made up your mind completely, but for anyone else who might be interested in this question.

"Tim Cook, was asked at the annual shareholder meeting by the NCPPR, the conservative finance group, to disclose the costs of Apple’s energy sustainability programs, and make a commitment to doing only those things that were profitable.

Mr. Cook replied --with an uncharacteristic display of emotion--that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues. "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." It was the same thing for environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas that don’t have an immediate profit. The company does "a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it.""

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-08-27 00:03:08+00:00
Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. Aggression leads to infighting; infighting wastes resources on zero-sum conflict.

>based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic.

Which version of Earth culture has a better shot at building e.g. a megastructure for an interstellar beacon: Earth culture during the post-nationalist 90s moment, or Earth culture during the current dysfunctional moment?

"Earlier this year, the White House proposed a nearly 24% cut to NASA's 2026 fiscal year budget, primarily aimed at the organization's fundamental science research. If the cuts come to fruition, they would be the largest in the agency's entire history." https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/1266983866/trump-science-spac...
by roody15 | 2025-08-27 00:03:34+00:00
One could argue China may have already surpassed the US or at least equalled it on the world stage as of now. It will be interesting to see how historians view the rise of China and write about the emergence of a new super power.

Just a hunch and I am really going out on a limb here but I could see China wait another year or two and then step in and force a peace settlement in Ukraine. This would really show the world who the new super power is, as the US and Western powers have struggled with this conflict, a patient China could step in and reach a peace deal as they hold significant leverage over Russia.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-27 00:04:11+00:00
This is part of the answer.

The clearer answer is: the US stock market is denominated in dollars.

If dollars devalue, then the price of real assets and equities in dollars increases (i.e. equivalent value, different number).

It's entirely possible two things happen at once: (1) US companies become less profitable and competitive due to tariffs (thereby decreasing their objective value) & (2) US dollars devalue (thereby increasing assets value in terms of US dollars).

Realistically, persistent inflation, international willingness to buy US government debt, and/or consumer confidence will be the things that collapse everything. (Or not)
by nicksbg | 2025-08-27 00:04:36+00:00
The problem of the ghost jobs existing in first place is because of weak HR. HR that does not have education, can not be influential strategic personnel necessary to steward management toward right decisions. Ghost jobs are also an alternative to marketing since companies see it as a way to market themselves as successful company. Because there is no one to stop such foolish decisions, we see effect on market.
by parodysbird | 2025-08-27 00:04:45+00:00
I chose the words carefully for that reason. The prophet of the nascent religion was a human being who was born, lived and died as a human being. Paul did not encounter this man. In his story, he encounters a divine being, and receives a private revelation (gospel) and mission that is distinct from the revelation and mission that the prophet in question gave as a human to his chosen students (apostles).

Paul is, in this terminology, also a prophet. He explicitly says the revelation he tells is not of human origin, and so not passed down to him through e.g. the ministry of one of the students (apostles) of the prophet in question.

It strikes me as unusual to have so much of the theology coming from someone who simply claims private revelation but is not the prophet in question and when the prophet explicitly chose disciples and set a ministry for them.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-27 00:04:49+00:00
I have, and I have declined them all. Prompting an LLM and pointing it to somebody else's repo is not helpful, it's distracting and disrespectful, and also delusional to think that it helps the maintainers.

For a couple of bucks I can drown my own repos in low quality slop, so I don't need some well wishers to do it for me.

As a matter of fact I have yet to see an OSS maintainer that accepts AI generated slop MRs.

https://news.itsfoss.com/curl-ai-slop/

https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/10/ai_slop_bug_reports/

https://biggo.com/news/202508220113_Ghostty_Requires_AI_Disc...

If you can't code, don't code and try to contribute to OSS projects. Claude or whatever trash one uses to make this outburst of garbage is not a substitute for skills. Don't waste mainteners' time and attention.
by jedimastert | 2025-08-27 00:04:54+00:00
Also, it's not really your image. Like if an artist puts a watermark on a commissioned piece it's not really a good argument that the artist is "snitching" by saying the art was done by them and not you trying to pass it off as your own...

I don't know if that's the argument you're trying to make, but I think it's worth considering
by felarof | 2025-08-27 00:05:47+00:00
I'm wondering if they are using vanilla claude or if they are using a fine-tuned version of claude specifically for browser use.

RL fine-tuning LLMs can have pretty amazing results. We did GRPO training of Qwen3:4B to do the task of a small action model at BrowserOS (https://www.browseros.com/) and it was much better than running vanilla Claude, GPT.