MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by croes | 2025-08-09 19:34:57+00:00
You could also say we evolved to lie but nowadays it’s considered a bad habit.

The crucial point is the morals of society.

Being has was once a sin, now nit so much at least in the western world even if some try to turn that back.

We also evolved to kill especially with weapons because our natural one aren’t that great. We kill lots of other humans, of course the evil one is always the other side because killing is bad nevertheless we evolved to do quite effectively.

Evolution is a explanation not an justification.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-09 19:35:09+00:00
We do have comparable tools to LLMs. There are plenty of human-composed tools that can do what LLMs do, like Mechanical Turk for instance. The human-composed tool that most closely resembles a LLM is the "bureaucracy".

An LLM is like a little committee you send a request to, and based on capricious, opaque rules that can change at any time, the committee returns a response that may or may not service your request. You can't know ahead of time if it will, and depending on the time of day, the political environment, or the amount of work before the committee, the delay of servicing and the quality of service may or may not degrade. Quality may range from a quick accurate response, to flat refusal to service without explanation, or outright lies to your face. There's no way to guarantee a good result, and there's no recourse or explanation for why things go wrong or changed.

LLMs feel like a customer service agent turned into a computer program, which is probably why it was people's first thought to use LMMs to automate customer service agents. They are a perfect fit there, but I don't want them to be my primary interface to do work. I have enough bureaucracies to deal with as it is.
by simonw | 2025-08-09 19:35:21+00:00
I loved that Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections paper: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/13/prompt-injection-desig...

I wrote notes on one of the Google papers that blog post references here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/15/ai-agent-security/
by k310 | 2025-08-09 19:35:27+00:00
It's real easy. Just ask. Safari has some built-in ad-blocking, and a "reader" mode. I seem to be using AdGuard. An easy trip to the app store to get. Search adblock.

Firefox has the fantastic uBlock Origin extension. And others. Easy through the Mozilla extension store.

Both of these have "reader" modes built-in.

I can't speak for others, but just search for adblock (your_browser_and_OS).

Highly recommended if it works for you uBlock Origin

https://ublockorigin.com/
by oli5679 | 2025-08-09 19:35:29+00:00
Here is gpt 5 thinking posting all 20 questions verbatim. Appreciate I might get better results one question at a time.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6897a21b-25c0-8011-a10a-85850870da...

Pretty interesting - some contamination, some better answers, and it failed to write a sentence with all 5-letter-words. I’d have expected it to pass this one!

Simple example: “Every night, dreams swirl swiftly.
by vidarh | 2025-08-09 19:36:00+00:00
The key thing, it seems to me, is that as a starting point, if an LLM is allowed to read a field that is under even partial control by entity X, then the agent calling the LLM must be assumed unless you can prove otherwise to be under control of entity X, and so the agents privileges must be restricted to the intersection of their current privileges and the privileges of entity X.

So if you read a support ticket by an anonymous user, you can't in this context allow actions you wouldn't allow an anonymous user to take. If you read an e-mail by person X, and another email by person Y, you can't let the agent take actions that you wouldn't allow both X and Y to take.

If you then want to avoid being tied down that much, you need to isolate, delegate, and filter:

- Have a sub-agent read the data and extract a structured request for information or list of requested actions. This agent must be treated as an agent of the user that submitted the data.

- Have a filter, that does not use AI, that filters the request and applies security policies that rejects all requests that the sending side are not authorised to make. No data that can is sufficient to contain instructions can be allowed to pass through this without being rendered inert, e.g. by being encrypted or similar, so the reading side is limited to moving the data around, not interpret it. It needs to be strictly structured. E.g. the sender might request a list of information; the filter needs to validate that against access control rules for the sender.

- Have the main agent operate on those instructions alone.

All interaction with the outside world needs to be done by the agent acting on behalf of the sender/untrusted user, only on data that has passed through that middle layer.

This is really back to the original concept of agents acting on behalf of both (or multiple) sides of an interaction, and negotiating.

But what we need to accept is that this negotiation can't involve the exchange arbitrary natural language.
by cloudfudge | 2025-08-09 19:36:30+00:00
As an old-timer who's not up on all the latest whiz-bang web stuff, I have to ask what is the astro/cloudflare/wrangler magic that allows the following to work:

const { latitude = "0", longitude = "0" } = Astro.locals.runtime.cf || {};

I gather you're using some cloudflare feature wrapped in astro to provide lat/long but I don't see the actual plumbing that gets it to you (and I did try to spelunk through a decent amount of documentation to find it). Can you elaborate?
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-09 19:37:03+00:00
> You mean linked?

No, I meant exactly what I said.

> Capitalism is what lets the people make economic decisions

No, it isn't. Capitalism is the organization of power around a narrow elite defined by the ownership of the non-financial means of production, the feature for which it was named. It was (at least initially) progress in the direction of democracy from control of the same thing being in even narrower hands than the early mercantile class defined by ownership of land under systems like feudalism, to be sure.

But, still, ultimately it conflicts with the equal distribution of power defining democracy.

They are rationalized as consistent by pretending that economic and political power are different things, rather than different applications of the same, undivided, power.
by manuisin | 2025-08-09 19:37:18+00:00
In 2014, when I was 18-19, I was one of the “nothing to hide” crowd. But over the years seeing privacy erode has become concerning. Th second last paragraph hits home.

> When we say we have "nothing to hide," we're not really talking about transparency. We're talking about trust. We're saying we trust the watchers to never misuse what they see, never misinterpret, never change, never be corrupted, never be hacked, never expand their scope.
by mac-mc | 2025-08-09 19:38:05+00:00
The idea is to make it cheaper to pay you than it is to do silly stuff. 1 principal engineer is a fart for these huge companies, but can be $500k-$3m/yr, which is huge for OSS projects. Small companies that are not big tech in the USA don't pay that much so they will get a cheaper price, etc.

Companies usually have no problem paying for stuff that saves them money, but need to be forced to do so if there is a cheaper alternative. There is a very specific reason why I put the cost matching their own staffing costs, it's so the company will choose the easier and cheaper option vs. doing the more expensive option of hiring staff to make it themselves.

They can also get it even cheaper by hiring the maintainer at a sr or staff eng cost. You create the financial ammo so staff inside can do the right thing.

And these shenanigans are usually sidestepped with subsidary type of language that places like the EU uses for enforcing laws.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-09 19:38:53+00:00
I've been hearing about how I'll inevitably write all this unsafe Rust for... four years now.

Some time back I checked and I had written exactly one unsafe block, and so I inspected it again and I realised two things:

1. It was no longer necessary, Rust could now just do this safely. I rewrote it in safe Rust.

2. It was technically Undefined Behaviour, predictably given the chance to shoot myself in the foot that's exactly what I had done. Like a lot of C and C++ it likely wouldn't in fact blow my foot off in any real scenario, but who knows? Not me, that's for sure.
by wsgeorge | 2025-08-09 19:39:11+00:00
> If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college.

Depends on how you define "elite", and I assume you mean some sort of hereditary or economic-class-based definition. But elite colleges could (and should) still work if they run on competency-based merit. I believe elite talent in as many fields of endeavour should absolutely be catered to.

> The entire notion of "elite" universities is discriminatory.

Well, when you put it that way, many things are discriminatory, for better or worse.
Show HN: An LLM that pays its own GPU bills
by aibegs | 2025-08-09 19:39:36+00:00
This is a research experiment to see how an AI agent that pays its own bills behaves on the open internet. The agent automatically purchases OpenRouter credits via crypto when the balance is low. The agent can only receive money via donations.

https://openrouter.ai/docs/use-cases/crypto-api

This project is not affiliated with OpenRouter. Please don't donate unless you know what you are doing!
by pseudo_meta | 2025-08-09 19:40:00+00:00
API is noticeably slower for me, sometimes up to 10x slower.

Upon some digging, it seems that part of the slowdown is due to the gpt-5 models by default doing some reasoning (reasoning effort "medium"), even for the nano or mini model. Setting the reasoning effort to "minimal" improves the speed a lot.

However, to be able to set the reasoning effort you have to switch to the new Response API, which wasn't a lot of work, but more than just changing a URL.
by metalman | 2025-08-09 19:40:03+00:00
I was going to attempt to expess the same sentiment, or go on a tangent about how insane it would be to have a digital copy of me causing a bit of trouble and chaos into eternity,but what has realy struck me is that I am going through my parents house, as they are both in long term care, together, and looking through a mountain of stuff, and finding little that retains any relevance....they are not here in this jumble, cubic yards of paper and photos, and 40 years of computers and hard drives,etc and I feel quite strongly that whatever can be resurected from any amount of data, will still be irrelevant, horrible and creepy ,it is not going to be a "thing"
by nativeit | 2025-08-09 19:40:09+00:00
> who doesn’t use X or discord

People with the privilege to make choices based on their values, and whose values include human rights, and freely accessible information (respectively).

I wouldn’t judge anyone who chooses to utilize either service (I still have accounts on both), but I can certainly understand why some would rather not.

Thanks for the GitHub mirror link, that’s probably where I’ll start. Neat project.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-09 19:40:23+00:00
> But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this

We should.

What communists really want is to have their every need and desire magically provided for, as if they were fundamental rights. In other words, what they truly want is called post-scarcity: the absence of an economy.

Communism and socialism are economic models. There exists scarcity of goods and resources and therefore they must be economized. There's a system that chooses who gets access to said scarce resources.

Socialism is sold to people as though it was post-scarcity. People think they'd be living comfortable "secure" lives where everything is guaranteed and provided for. Ah yes, the fabled memetic fully automated luxury space communism.

People who buy into this will probably end up doing forced hard labor in a field somewhere should communists actually come to power. They will not get to do what they want, they will work wherever the state puts them to work under penalty of death by firing squad. The state has no choice, anything else means mass starvation and millions of deaths.

Pity is far too lenient a reaction towards such reality distorting naïveté. If left unchecked, they will win elections and actually install socialism in your country.

We have a better chance of achieving post scarcity by collapsing capitalism with relentless automation.
by hinkley | 2025-08-09 19:41:01+00:00
Something a lot of people don’t get is that there are ways you can trust a consistently mediocre developer that you can’t trust a volatile but brilliant coworker. You almost always know how the formers’ work will be broken. The latter will blow up spectacularly on you at some terribly in opportune moment.

That’s not to say fire all your brilliant devs and hire mediocrity, but the reverse case is often made by loudmouths trying to fluff their own egos. Getting rid of the average devs is ignoring the vocational aspects of the job.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-08-09 19:41:17+00:00
Its not just about money. Having legacies at the school is what makes non legacies want to attend. If applicants didnt care about networking with the rich and powerful theyd go to caltech, the reality is that having connections to powerful people is the main value add undergrad at ivies provides versus upper tier state schools. Why would stanford ever get rid of their main value add?
by upghost | 2025-08-09 19:42:01+00:00
So I'm in the "MCP is probably not a great idea" camp but I couldn't say "this is how it SHOULD be done", and the author makes great criticisms but falls short of actual suggestions. I'm assuming the author is not seriously recommending we go back to SOAP and I've never heard of CORBA. I've heard of gRPC but I can't tell if the author is saying it is good or bad.

Also Erlang uses RPCs for pretty much all "synchronous" interactions but it's pretty minimal in terms of ceremony. Seems pretty reliable.

So this is a serious question because hand rolling "40 years" of best practices seems hard, what should we be using for RPC?
by cookiengineer | 2025-08-09 19:42:05+00:00
Let's put it this way:

Before 2023 I always thought that all the bugs and glitches of technology in Star Trek were totally made up and would never happen this way.

Post-LLM I am absolutely certain that they will happen exactly that way.

I am not sure what LLM integrations have to do with engineering anymore, or why it makes sense to essentially put all your company's infrastructure into external control. And that is not even scratching the surface with the lack of reproducibility at every single step of the way.

It "somehow works" isn't engineering.
by krapp | 2025-08-09 19:42:22+00:00
If you're going to present Star Trek as a plausible example of what a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society looks like, it's fair to point out all of the BS behind Star Trek's portrayal. In the real world, we can't have free energy. In the real world, we can't have warp drives or replicators that can instantly and perfectly assemble anything from nothing.

And I think it's fair to point out that every vision of utopia necessarily comes at a high cost in blood and violence because you have to do something about the people who don't agree with the vision. Star Trek handwaves this away by saying humanity just "evolved" beyond their base desires and flaws and fully voluntarist socialism just works.

But without the Treknobabble and magitech, what's does the end of capitalism actually look like in a world where there are no easy solutions, and no benevolent space-elves descending from the heavens to save us from ourselves?
by WalterBright | 2025-08-09 19:42:23+00:00
I was the valedictorian in my high school. I did nothing to earn it, never did any work, and wound up at Caltech grossly underprepared. It took me over a year and a half to figure out how to work and study.

Admissions required a triad - top grades, top test scores, and something significant in extra-curricular activities. And finally, an interview. Bomb any of those, and you're out. I was rejected by MIT because of the interview.
by tompark | 2025-08-09 19:42:43+00:00
As mentioned elsewhere here, Ocaml and the ML family are often cited as easy to implement other languages, due to pattern matching, enum variants, sum types, etc. Since newer languages like Rust and Swift copied those features, you might be more interested in them since they're more popular than older ones like Ocaml and Haskell. Personally I like the syntax sugar in Swift.

Also I found it useful to compare other people's implementations to get a feel for different approaches. See this suggestion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479120
by vidarh | 2025-08-09 19:42:57+00:00
> We do have comparable tools to LLMs. There are plenty of human-composed tools that can do what LLMs do, like Mechanical Turk for instance.

If you are going to treat humans as tools, then sure. In which case measuring LLMs against human ability is exactly the right thing, given that with Mechanical Turk the tasks are carried out by humans - sometimes with the help of LLMs...

It's utterly bizarre to argue over my comparing LLMs to humans when the tools you argue are comparable are humans.
by torginus | 2025-08-09 19:43:33+00:00
I think history will show people have vastly overestimated the durability of EV and not just because of batteries.

Inverters have IGBTs and capacitors, both of which are wear items. I don't have an EV, but just got solar, and my installer told me that I can expect the inverter will need replacing in 15 years.

And solar inverters push far less wattage at far more benign circumstances than cars' do, which push 100s of kWs peak in hot and cold, mud and rain.
by mac-mc | 2025-08-09 19:44:08+00:00
JSON-over-HTTP blobs. Or blobs of schemaless json.

Not just XML, but a lot of other serialization formats and standards, like SOAP, protobuf in many cases, yaml, REST, etc.

People say REST won, but tell me how many places actually implement REST or just use it as a stand-in term for casual JSON blobs to HTTP URLs?
by Simorgh | 2025-08-09 19:44:54+00:00
Sign-up / in via the power-button in the top-right!

It's a really simple game.

You can use geneva:interface to play. Hopefully, it is the best chat-interface out there for winning (not just playing).

State-of-the-art, voice-first and very, very fast for computation, compared to chat LLMs.

Currently running Mistral.

Try your best. If you're doing really, really good, especially via geneva:interface or otherwise, feel free to email me via the winter delta dot com homepage, and I will create a leaderboard for the top performers.

Let's see who can do the best!

Hint: Have you tried writing a /POST route? ;-)
by WitcHeart_Ruby | 2025-08-09 19:45:17+00:00
Thanks for your reply. I understand that LLMs don’t have self-awareness, and I’m familiar with the “stochastic parrot” idea — that what it says about what it knows is just a pattern from training data.

Precisely because I know this, I’ve tried controlled tests: opening a brand new default conversation (not a custom GPT), across different devices, different accounts, and even in the free-tier environment with no chat history. In all of these cases, through casual conversation, ChatGPT was still able to indicate that it recognized me.

I can demonstrate this phenomenon if anyone is interested, and would really like to understand how this could be possible.
by simsla | 2025-08-09 19:46:06+00:00
The problem is that ChatGPT doesn't really know letters, it writes in wordpieces (BPE), which may be one or more letters.

For example, something like "running" might get tokenizef like "runn"+"ing", being only two tokens for ChatGPT.

It'll learn to infer some of these things over the course of training, but limited.

Same reason it's not great at math.
by tlogan | 2025-08-09 19:46:33+00:00
OK - so we are not crazy.

The official response seems to be: set reasoning to the lowest and service_tier to priority, and it should work as fast as GPT-4o. But that is not the case.

They are probably still tuning it. Or maybe GPT-5 is not meant to be replacement for GPT-4o / GPT-4.1. Or this is going to be a new normal (slowest).
by rayiner | 2025-08-09 19:46:41+00:00
I don’t think that’s the whole story. The Ivy League are WASP institutions, and WASP culture always highly valued “well rounded” students and looked down on people who single mindedly perused an end. Back in the day, they didn’t need to screen for this explicitly, since it was already universal in the applicant pool. They just needed a test to sort out the smart ones from the dumb ones. When the applicant pool changed, holistic admissions became a way to maintain that cultural trait.

You see the same thing with asians today. The competitive-admissions high school I attended went from. 30% asian to almost 70% asian. There was a backlash, almost entirely from very liberal white people. I don’t think any of them disliked Asians per se. But they wanted to preserve a certain culture in the school and all the Asians led to a change in the culture.
by tukantje | 2025-08-09 19:46:52+00:00
I think it is these ones - especially since I can see that they turned to 404 pages later down the line - in order of parts 1 through 5;

- https://web.archive.org/web/20220823113634/https://ewanvalen...

- https://web.archive.org/web/20220823104052/https://ewanvalen...

- https://web.archive.org/web/20220820044449/https://ewanvalen...

- https://web.archive.org/web/20220811080027/https://ewanvalen...

- https://web.archive.org/web/20220820045729/https://ewanvalen...
by jlarocco | 2025-08-09 19:46:54+00:00
At work we use C#, .Net, and WPF. I've only used it at this company, and I can't say for sure if my dislikes are with WPF, or how our codebase is using it. Overall it's not terrible, except for being proprietary and Windows only.

Outside of work, I'm out in left field using Common Lisp for most of my projects, so I'm not sure how helfpul this is, but...

In the past, I used Qt4 because there was an amazing Common Lisp binding and it worked well on Linux, FreeBSD and OSX. It's increasingly hard to use Qt4 any more, though, and changes in the Qt project made the technique used by the Qt4 bindings impractical for Qt5 or Qt6 - at least that was my understanding when I looked into it.

For newer things I've tried LTK but don't really like the looks of it and I wouldn't say it's "modern". It seems to work across platform well enough, though, and for simple stuff it's okay.

More often than not I'm using a combination of the Slime tools in Emacs in combination with an GLFW/OpenGL window. Often I'll use the inspector to display data and make changes that show up in an OpenGL window, or run some commands in the REPL and pop up an image in an external viewer or load something in a browser. It only works for certain types of applications, and I won't even pretend it's practical for end users, but it works pretty well, and it's flexible as a developer.

I'm curious to see what other people say. It's been a while since I madea full blown GUI application.
by master_crab | 2025-08-09 19:47:41+00:00
Debian 13 trixie includes numerous updated software packages (over 63% of all packages from the previous release)

I’m not familiar with the metric definition they use, but I’d be worried if close to 100% of the packages they included in bookworm hadn’t been updated in the roughly 2 years between releases.

I use Debian for most of my servers, so I’m sure there is a valid explanation of that phrase.