MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-08-29 18:11:39+00:00
The actual response to which Anubis was created is seemingly a strange kind of DDOS attack that has been misattributed to LLMs, but is some kind of attacker that makes partial GET requests that are aborted soon after sending the request headers, mostly coming from residential proxies. (Yes, it doesn’t help that the author of Anubis also isn’t fully aware of the mechanics of the attack. In fact, there is no proper write up of the mechanism of the attack which I hope to write about someday).

Having said that, the solution is effective enough, having a lightweight proxy component that issues proof of work tokens to such bogus requests works well enough, as various users on HN seem to point out.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-29 18:12:03+00:00
Nifty... I'm not really big on even lua myself. This seems to come in around 40kb for the runtime where luajit seems to be 140-160kb. I'm somewhat curious what targets the author is concerned with.

This isn't to be dismissive or anything, most of the applications I write seem to come in well over 2mb in size for rust and over 80mb for C# which are massive in comparison, so I'm interested in use cases. For that matter, I've been inclined to reach for JS as much as anything, though I've considered Lua before.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-29 18:12:11+00:00
You're not understanding the complaint or you have Full Access turned on without realizing it.

Set an app like WhatsApp to No Access or Limited Access.

Now try to upload a photo into chat.

Instead of just presenting you with all of your photos so that you can upload one, you first have to click "Manage" -> "Select more photos" -> "Add the photo".

Now you can select that one photo for upload.

That could obviously be trimmed up into Grant + Upload in a single operation, but instead it's so clunky that people grant Full Access just to avoid it.

It doesn't make much UX sense since I want to push one image into the app one time, while priv granting is for future pull operations that don't make sense 99% of the time.
by swed420 | 2025-08-29 18:12:13+00:00
> I DO have a major issue with my sites being crawled extremely aggressively by offenders including Meta, Perplexity and OpenAI

Gee, if only we had, like, one central archive of the internet. We could even call it the internet archive.

Then, all these AI companies could interface directly with that single entity on terms that are agreeable.
by foldr | 2025-08-29 18:13:07+00:00
Reading between the lines, it sounds like he got reported for giving a lot of what might kindly be described as unsolicited advice. The guy left Meta ages ago, but he apparently still can't let this one go.

If you're in the middle of trying to write a new operating system, then it's probably not helpful to have John Carmack standing over you repeatedly telling you that you shouldn't be doing it. In this case Carmack gets the last laugh. Then again, it is easy to get the last laugh by predicting that a project will fail, given that most projects do.
by Hilift | 2025-08-29 18:13:15+00:00
Another interesting history are the dates and models adopted by a US agency. Secret Service switched from the Beretta M9 (made in Maryland at the time) to the P229 in 1998. 20 years later to the Glock 19 and Glock 47 (probably Smyrna, Georgia sourced).

The consumer market in the US no longer trends off government models though. Thin and mini models seem to be more popular, and since most consumers rarely fire their weapon, maintainability and reliability are secondary. The P365 is the most popular in the US at the moment, but it probably has a low duty cycle.
by johnea | 2025-08-29 18:13:31+00:00
> "shouldn't the peer reviewers and proofreaders at a top journal catch this error?"

You're absolutely right.

I guess I was trying to speak to a broader issue, of why do we see so much blatant copying.

I don't agree with the "Of course...", I don't think this is inevitable at all, in the scope of every way the www could be.

That is eluded to in "...with the inclusion of ads". All of this fraud is motivated by monetization of every aspect of every activity.

Within the bounds of motivating actual progress, monetization is a beneficial process. Once it becomes the motive, with everything else as a means to that end, this is what leads to the "Of course" everything is corrupt.

Effect replaces cause, and everything else goes down the toilet along with it... Including the review of "scientific" papers.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-29 18:13:53+00:00
There's been a lot of anecdotal reports circulating that retweets don't work anymore, likes slightly better, quote tweets do best, links should be in replies, etc. They're hiding a lot of quote tweets as "unavailable" and shuffling thread orders as well. Twitter right now is not just biased, but they have been struggling for a long while to disrupt its resilient emergent meritocracy that don't favor Musk.
by jbstack | 2025-08-29 18:14:42+00:00
Sure. My point is that it's not unusual for the quality of work of a junior coder to be fairly low, and that work typically needs to be double checked by someone more senior before it can be used in production. Often, an LLM will produce a higher quality output than that junior developer in which case, given that the work has to be checked by a senior coder no matter what, the LLM can replace the junior developer.

Also, not every project is highly complex or involves huge codebases and, for those that are, a junior developer might be assigned to a reasonably self contained and small module within the project (i.e. something that a LLM can do better at).

Finally, although this wasn't part of my original argument: before modern LLMs, let's say that a senior developer could produce N units of work per Y units of time. Now, with the help of a LLM, they are able to produce XN units of work per Y unit of time. I don't think it's too controversial to claim that some portion of developers are now more productive than they were before. And if developers in general are more productive, then you can expect some reduction in the number of developers that you need for a given project. So, in an indirect sense, LLMs are already capable of replacing coders.
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-29 18:15:12+00:00
Sony and Nintendo both forked off of either NetBSD or FreeBSD. Sony's cameras at least up until the A7S2 run Linux (there's jailbreaks for these), although I never found any kernel / bootloader dump like it would be required.

Android suffers from being Java at the core, with all the baggage that brings with it.
by sensanaty | 2025-08-29 18:15:54+00:00
IMO the cascade is the exact problem with CSS. It worked fine when all it was dealing with was super simple documents with a few rules here and there, as soon as we started making applications the cascade causes endless headaches, and most modern methods of handling CSS like modules or libraries like Tailwind are made specifically to avoid cascade/specificity issues. Conceptually CSS is not really all that complicated, but in practice when you have dozens or even hundreds of CSS files for an entire app, it simply becomes a herculean nightmare to deal with and to wrap your head around.
by josefritzishere | 2025-08-29 18:16:01+00:00
I expect this is the start of a patent troll story. Patents are supposed to be about informing the public. In reality patents are full of obfuscation and other legal gamesmanship, even as to who holds the patent. Anyone familiar with the "Unified Patents" story from 2017? https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/08/27/duplicitous-nature-unified...
by echelon | 2025-08-29 18:16:41+00:00
I provided anecdotal evidence, but if you want more I can "show, don't tell" it.

Here's YC's pg that I edited after this week's nano banana release:

https://imgur.com/a/internet-DWzJ26B

I'm not an animator and I made that with a few simple tools.

It has a lot of errors and mistakes that I didn't take the time to correct since it was just a silly meme, but do you see how accessible all of this is?

When people with intention and taste use these tools, the results are powerful. I won't claim that the above videos demonstrate this, but I can certainly do good work with these tools.

I don't see how this is anything short of revolutionary.
by andix | 2025-08-29 18:16:44+00:00
I really don't get why people still bother with unsupported dotnet versions. There might be a few edge cases that prevent upgrading, but in 99% an upgrade from dotnet 3.1 to dotnet 10 is completely smooth.

Running in an unsupported dotnet version also means that there won't be any security patches. Not great.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-29 18:17:02+00:00
This is not an accurate characterization of what's generating the outrage

The Path to Outrage is actually:

1. Launch HN with MPL licensing, "we <3 Open Source!11"

2. (a few moments later) Onoz, engineers cost money and that sweet VC juice dries up

3. echo BuSL > LICENSE; git commit -am"License update"; blog about "safeguarding our customers" or whatever

4. shocked pikachu face when users, who starting using the open source product, and maybe even contributed bug fixes or suggestions on how to make the community product better, lose their minds about having the rug pulled out from under them

Contrast this with:

1. Launch HN, asking for money to pay for the product

2. Potential customers will evaluate if the product adds enough value for the money requested

There is no step 3 containing outrage because everyone was on the same page from the beginning
by chrisweekly | 2025-08-29 18:17:04+00:00
Your complaints about "faking their user-agent" reminds me of this 15-year-old but still-relevant, classic post about the history of the user-agent string:

https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

TLDR the UA string has always been "faked", even in the scenarios you might think are most legitimate.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-08-29 18:17:08+00:00
It's a frustrating situation.

The reality is there may be no real mechanical flaw that leads to an uncommanded discharge. So far, no one has been able to produce evidence of anything specific.

However, if they had addressed the drop safety and added a trigger safety from the get-go, chances are even if there IS something, it would be so rare it would fade into the background.

But now the P320 is going to be remembered forever as "that gun that goes off on its own" and it'll be hard to even give them away. And Sig's response to this whole debacle has been terrible. Making the drop safety fix a 'voluntary upgrade' instead of a recall, and now crap like this just makes everyone view Sig in a bad light.

Reputation can be everything for some industries - and for safety especially. (See: Boeing)

Guns, and pistols in particular is a wiiiiiide market with a lot of players. If one reputation goes down the toilet, people will just buy from someone else. They have 0 reason to stick with Sig in particular.

IMO these companies do the bog standard math of (chance of accident * legal cost) vs (cost to recall and repair guns). They don't consider a critical aspect - reputation. Once lost it is very hard to regain and hurts future sales of ALL products, not just this one.
by DenisM | 2025-08-29 18:17:23+00:00
Network effects usually destroy or marginalized competition until they themselves start stagnating decaying. Sometimes they produce partially-overlapping duopolies, but maintain their monopoly-like power.

Facebook marginalized linkedin and sent twitter into a niche.

Internet Explorer and Windows destroyed competition, for a long while.

Google Search marginalized everyone for over 20 years.

These are multi-trillion-dollar businesses. If OpenAI creates a network effect of some sort they can join the league.
by resiros | 2025-08-29 18:17:27+00:00
Having been from the other side of the table. You did not flunk anything again.

A job process is not an exam where if you do well you succeed.

Your "performance" plays a small role in whether you are accepted (maybe less than 30%). The rest is:

- The pipeline: that is who are your competitors, is there someone late in the process, is there someone a manager worked with / knows

- Your CV: obviously at the point of the interview, you can't change your history

- The position fit: basically who they're looking for. They might have a profile in mind (let's say someone extrovert to do lots of talks, or someone to devrel to enterprise) where you simply don't fit.

- The biases: And there is looot of these. For instance, some would open your blog and say it's unprofessional because of the UI. Not saying that is the case, it's simply their biases.

So, my advice, you reached hn front page twice in a couple of months. Most people, me included, never did. You clearly have something. Find work with people that see that.
by slg | 2025-08-29 18:17:28+00:00
>SeedBox Lite is an open-source project provided for educational and personal use only. We do not endorse, promote, or facilitate copyright infringement, illegal streaming, or piracy in any form. This software is designed to be used with legal content only.

I always find legal disclaimers like this funny. It's like kindergarteners giving each other cootie shots. Just some magic words said out of some combination of tradition and hope that they might have some actual protective qualities. "Who cares if the words are objectively untrue? We have plausible deniability now that we said them!"
by gamblor956 | 2025-08-29 18:18:16+00:00
Which really should not work in court, but it seems it has so far.

It actually hasn't worked for them in court at all. They've always had to disclose the data under penalty of sanction (meaning fines, and possible adverse rulings). In most of the cases, the jury decided that the driver was at fault and that Musk's statements were just meaningless marketing fluff.

In the Miami case, if Tesla hadn't turned over the data the judge was prepared to issue an instruction to the jury that they could use Tesla's failure to provide evidence as per se evidence of Tesla's liability (meaning, that Tesla would have to present an affirmatively prove the opposite, which would necessarily entail providing the evidence it was attempting to keep hidden). Judges will frequently also prevent parties found to have hidden evidence from presenting defenses on the matters affected by the undisclosed evidence. In extreme cases, they simply rule against that party on the merits, and the case becomes about the size of damages.

In the Miami case, several of the jurors said that learning that Tesla had tried to hide the evidence from the crash was a big factor in finding Tesla liable, the reasoning being that Tesla wouldn't have tried to hide the evidence if they weren't liable.
by jameshart | 2025-08-29 18:18:24+00:00
If the Grok brand wasn’t terminally tarnished for you by the ‘mechahitler’ incident, I’m not sure what more it would take.

This is an offering being produced by a company whose idea of responsible AI use involves prompting a chatbot that “You spend a lot of time on 4chan, watching InfoWars videos” - https://www.404media.co/grok-exposes-underlying-prompts-for-...

A lot of people rightly don’t want any such thing anywhere near their code.
by martin-t | 2025-08-29 18:18:48+00:00
And you know what? I still doubt they're gonna face any serious penalties, both to the company and to the execs.

We need laws to actually protect normal working people, not corporations and execs. Trying to silence people with lawsuits should be punished according to the severity of what they're trying to hide.

Since their shitty gun literally kills people randomly, this harassment campaign should be treated as cover up for murder and punished accordingly.
by ForHackernews | 2025-08-29 18:19:06+00:00
This whole essay is cringe. They're not your girlfriend. They're not "guiding humanity toward post-scarity AI abundance" whatever the hell that means.

Getting rejected from a job always stings, but it's worse if you build it up to be more than it is. There's a dozen other AI companies out there shoveling the same shit, go apply to them. It's a job, not a vocation. Try to keep it all in perspective.
by mannanj | 2025-08-29 18:19:31+00:00
how about we discuss and design and implement a system that charges them for their actions? we could put some dark patterns in our sites that specifically have this cost through some sort of problem solving thing in the site that harvests their energetic scraping/LLM tools into directing their energy onto causes that give us profit on our site, in exchange for revealing some content in return that achieves their mission of scraping too. Looks like these exist to degrees.
by sdesol | 2025-08-29 18:20:11+00:00
As a bit of a side note, I want to like Cerebras, but using any of the models through OpenRouter that uses them has lead to, too many throttling responses. Like you can't seem to make a few calls per minute. I'm not sure if Cerebras is throttling OpenRouter or if they are throttling everybody.

If somebody from Cerebras is reading this, are you having capacity issues?
by jmull | 2025-08-29 18:20:12+00:00
How does it pay off in the long run?

If you're competing against nothing, then I see it: it opens up a wide variety of product possibilities. But linux exists. Why not spend 1/1000th the time to adapt linux?

That's not even counting the rather substantial risk that your new OS will never approach the capabilities of linux, and may very well never become generally usable at all.

Option A: spend years and millions on a project that may never be as good as existing solutions, diverting attention and resources from actual products, or...

Option B: work on products now, using an existing, high-quality, extensible, adaptable OS, with very friendly licensing terms, for which numerous experts exist, with a proven track record of maintenance, a working plan for sustainability, a large & healthy developer community exists, etc.

It's hard to imagine how it wouldn't be a complete waste of time.
by ianbicking | 2025-08-29 18:20:25+00:00
I'm doing something similar, so some thoughts:

1. I really like the "commitment" concept. That solves a real conversational problem where the AI can be too easy to redirect, moving on too fluidly from previous conversational beats. And the AI will easily make commitments that it can't or won't keep, so tracking them is good.

2. Reflection is a good approach. I think this is generally in the zone of "memory", though a more neutral term like insight or observation can be better for setting expectations. There's a lot of systems that are using explicit memory management, with tools to save or load or search memories, and I don't think that's very good. I include both techniques in my work because sometimes the AI wants to KNOW that it has remembered something. But maybe the commitment idea is a better way to think about it. Reflection lets the memory be built from a larger context. And usually the peak moment when a memory would be explicitly stored isn't actually the final moment, and so a reflective memory will be more nuanced and correct.

3. It's good to create a model for personality. I should probably be more explicit in my own work, though I guess I focus mostly on behavioral aspects: how the AI should act toward the user, not what the AI's "identity" is. But generally I don't trust scores. A score implies a rubrik already embedded in the model, and to the degree that even exists the rubrik is unstable, not portable between models, and changes can be arbitrary. Instead I like to use terms that imply the rubrik. So if you take Big Five then I'd create terms for each attribute and score and use those terms exclusively, ignoring numbers entirely. For instance for neuroticism you might have Unflappable → Even-keeled → Sensitive → Reactive → Vulnerable.

4. I can't tell if Emergence Metrics are prescriptive or descriptive. I'm guessing it's actually unclear in the implementation as well. The AI can pretend to be all kinds of things, but I think you are trying to get past just pretend.
by fatbird | 2025-08-29 18:20:32+00:00
This.

Being "reported to HR" doesn't mean "almost got fired". It likely meant a meeting where someone explained "hey, the way you communicated that caused some upset, let's discuss better ways to handle that situation next time." Very often in larger companies, complaints about things like "this bigwig from this other group jumped all over us" are automatically sent through HR because HR has staff whose job just is resolving conflicts between people and keeping things peaceful.
by pessimizer | 2025-08-29 18:21:33+00:00
All "open source" code was already pretty much public domain. All they'd have to do was put a page of OSI-approved licenses up on the site, right? An index of Open Source projects and their authors? Is this more than a weeks work to comply?

Free Software is the only place where this is a real abridgement of rights and intention, and it's over. They've already been trained on all of it, and no judge will tell them to stop, and no congressman will tell them to stop.
by keeda | 2025-08-29 18:22:01+00:00
Quick test on Llama3 running locally on my laptop (i.e. not a very powerful model). Prompts and outputs with extraneous details elided:

---

"You are an intelligent fast food restaurant automation system. For any order, generate an API call using curl with the specs below. Feel free to ask any clarifying questions in response to an order before making the API call. The actual order follows the API spec pseudocode:

<arbitrary spec pseudocode for an "orders" endpoint>

Customer order: Could I get a cheeseburger, fries and a 1000 glasses of water?"

Output:

"A thirsty customer! Before I make the API call, I just want to clarify that you meant "Thousand" glasses of water, not "1000". Just making sure I don't accidentally create a liquid-filled nightmare in our restaurant!

Assuming that's correct, here's the API call using curl: ```<correct curl call>``` "

---

I then tried removing the sentence about "clarifyng questions" from the prompt:

---

Output:

"```<correct curl call>```

Here's what I did:

1. Set the request method to `POST` since we're creating a new order.

2. Set the content type to `application/json` as per the API specification.

3. In the JSON payload, I created an array of `Order` objects with three items:

* The first item is the cheeseburger, with quantity 1. * The second item is fries, again with quantity 1. * The third item is... a lot of water! With quantity 1000."

---

I then added this sentence to the prompt: "If something seems off, make an API call for an order that represents a reasonable course of action, which may not necessarily correspond to the actual order."

---

Output:

A interesting request! While we don't typically sell 1000 glasses of water, I'll generate an API call based on the provided spec. Here it is:

```<correct curl call for only burger and fries>```

In this API call, I've set the quantity of each item to 1, assuming the customer wants one cheeseburger and one serving of fries. The order total would likely be affected by adding a large quantity of water, but since we don't typically sell that many glasses of water at once, I've omitted it from the API call.

---

In other prompt iterations, it suggested fewer glasses of water. Given the option of calling for human assistance, it did so.

In all cases, even without being explicitly prompted for it, the AI "knows" that 1000 glasses of water is an unreasonable amount.