frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

Show HN: I developed the logging, notification back end for your app

https://www.notifylog.com/
1•ata11ata•58s ago•0 comments

Heart Rate Pulse Monitor

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fdimm.app&hl=en_US
2•socketnet•1m ago•0 comments

Mobile industry charts course to smartphone satellite broadband

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/06/mobile_satellite_broadband_roadmap/
2•rntn•1m ago•0 comments

1•1jayeshpoduval•3m ago

Version control: how I combat the rise of generative AI in the classroom

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01814-5
1•sohkamyung•4m ago•0 comments

Constitution.congress.gov/constitution 6/8/25 –> 8/4/25 Diff

https://web.archive.org/web/diff/20250601021212/20250806023110/https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
1•ortusdux•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Principles of Building AI Agents book [pdf]

https://github.com/mastra-ai/mastra/blob/main/book/principles-of-building-ai-agents.pdf
1•calcsam•5m ago•0 comments

Digital Hygiene: Notifications

https://herman.bearblog.dev/notifications/
2•HermanMartinus•6m ago•0 comments

The Cost of a Call: From Voice Phishing to Data Extortion

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/voice-phishing-data-extortion
2•gnabgib•7m ago•0 comments

'Facial recognition tech mistook me for wanted man'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqxg8v74d8jo
1•pseudolus•8m ago•0 comments

Thinking in Hoses and Wires, Not Bolted Gears (Protocol-Driven Development)

https://github.com/MickDuprez/Protocol-Driven-Development
2•mickduprez•8m ago•1 comments

The Militarization of Silicon Valley

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/technology/google-meta-openai-military-war.html
2•cadertots•9m ago•0 comments

Providing ChatGPT to the entire U.S. federal workforce

https://openai.com/index/providing-chatgpt-to-the-entire-us-federal-workforce/
1•gmays•11m ago•0 comments

Disaster Informatics after the Covid-19 Pandemic

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16820
1•PaulHoule•12m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Stuck in a slow moving company

3•bookworm123•12m ago•1 comments

Buy now, pay later is taking over the world. Good

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/08/04/buy-now-pay-later-is-taking-over-the-world-good
2•speckx•12m ago•0 comments

After the Bomb

https://worldhistory.substack.com/p/after-the-bomb
1•crescit_eundo•14m ago•0 comments

The Headaches of LLM Inference for App Developers

https://tower.dev/blog/the-hidden-headaches-of-llm-inference-for-app-developers
1•bradhe•14m ago•0 comments

A Cold Wind (poem about being donor conceived)

https://tyler.boyd.cloud/?p=554
1•tboyd47•14m ago•0 comments

AlmaLinux Introduces Native Nvidia Support Using Open-Source Kernel Driver

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AlmaLinux-Native-NVIDIA-Support
2•mikece•16m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What's your AI flow for development?

2•cauliflower99•16m ago•0 comments

Open Conference of AI Agents for Science 2025

https://agents4science.stanford.edu/
1•jruohonen•17m ago•1 comments

Google suffers data breach in ongoing Salesforce data theft attacks

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-suffers-data-breach-in-ongoing-salesforce-data-theft-attacks/
10•mikece•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Bridge Days Calculator SPA

https://bridgedays.github.io/
1•FeepingCreature•19m ago•0 comments

The Semiconductor Industry and Regulatory Compliance

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/08/its-time-for-the-semiconductor-industry-to-step-up.html
2•speckx•20m ago•0 comments

3 TSMC engineers detained in Taiwan for leaking 2nm process trade secrets

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/6172580
3•ilamont•20m ago•1 comments

The Canadian drone industry is spinning up – with lessons from Ukraine

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-forces-drone-warfare-1.7600299
2•jszymborski•21m ago•0 comments

Kubernetes for Snowflake

https://espresso.ai/post/introducing-kubernetes-for-snowflake
8•karamazov•22m ago•1 comments

LurkHub – Store your bookmarks, articles, feeds and posts in GitHub

https://lurkhub.com
2•leslielurker•22m ago•0 comments

Research Team Discovers Natural Immune Mechanism That Stops Metastatic Cancer

https://montefioreeinsteinnow.org/update/2025-aug-6/research-team-discovers-natural-immune-mechanism-stops-metastatic-cancer
2•mannykannot•23m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Slopsquatting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slopsquatting
83•gregnavis•2h ago

Comments

ic_fly2•2h ago
I’ve used the reverse. When making a new module I’ve let the llm make up an api and I’ve used the names suggested as inspiration of what might come natural to others, to make the use more intuitive.
Invictus0•2h ago
We need to have a professional software engineering license, at least for applications that are handling sensitive data. Why is it that it takes 1000 hours of study to cut people's hair, but anyone off the street can write some software that collects people's driver's licenses? (Looking at you, Tea app developers)
snapcaster•2h ago
I think something like professional licenses are easy to see benefits of but really hard to see the downsides. How many wonderful things _wont_ be created when you start gatekeeping something? Maybe it is worth it but it's not some free win
prmoustache•2h ago
Mandating a professional license for hairdressers to work professionally does not prevent you from cutting your partner/friends/family hair as long as you don't ask any money in return.
Invictus0•1h ago
Like I said, the license should be for handling sensitive data. You're free to make doodle jump if you like.
Aurornis•1h ago
> easy to see benefits of but really hard to see the downsides

I think like most hypothetical discussions, the commenters proposing these ideas aren’t interested in practical versions of the idea with tradeoffs. They imagine a perfect version of it in their minds with no downsides that accomplishes everything they want.

The demand for professional licensure doesn’t even make sense in this context. Is professional licensing supposed to stop developers from naming their packages names that LLMs produce? Is it going to force the package repos to check that everyone has a professional license before submitting packages from the United States (or other countries with licensure)? Can it be worked around by changing your country in the drop-down box to a country that doesn’t have licensing?

The calls for software licensure never seem to take into account the global nature of the Internet and software development.

vincnetas•1h ago
no one is prohibiting hackers from hacking. i do my haircut at home without any licenses. what you need license for is to provide services to other people for money.
lan321•1h ago
Uni graduates do that still. I wouldn't trust myself to set that up either, as a matter of fact.

Optimally, you'd probably have seniors do some "Security Compliance Certification" and the company do it, then the product has to be approved by the certified, and if an issue arises, the certified get to be reprimanded, especially the company certification in some exponentially scaling manner so that it doesn't become the cost of doing business.

Aurornis•1h ago
What does this have to do with the article? Naming a package to match LLM patterns has nothing to do with licensing.
add-sub-mul-div•1h ago
1. Most everyone needs haircuts and licensure allows us to take it for granted that we'll get someone with basic competence and that there won't be a citywide outbreak of lice. So much so that we've forgotten the point of the licensure and cite it as folly.

2. Computing was new and mysterious and developed faster than lawmakers could understand it, and by now it's given so much power to the top 1% that they're for all intents and purposes above the law. Cosmetology licensure is from a time when legislation still helped us.

EvanAnderson•1h ago
> Why is it that it takes 1000 hours of study to cut people's hair...

Protectionism by a de facto trade guild was always my assumption.

There are a lot of activities where bad practitioners present significant danger to society and licensure makes sense. I never understood how cutting hair rises to that level. I'd love to know how licensure in the barber profession is anything other than a bald-faced attempt at building a moat. It seems like the market could correct for a bad practitioner in the barber space pretty easily, and with little risk to society.

ysofunny•1h ago
then you will need to input your license everytime you open develop tools...

sooner or later command line interfaces will require background checks and be limited to a close select group of government approved individuals, e.g. like guns in japan.

jen729w•1h ago
In 2023 I was at a talk at the National Press Club in Canberra, Australia, by the deputy head of one of our national intelligence services.

This was just after the Optus leak. Some hundreds of thousands of customers' data, down to the passport and DOB level, leaked. Again. I was going to ask him whether we, the collected IT consultants in the room, simply couldn't be trusted any more.

We've proven that we can't. I firmly believe that independent companies should no longer, by law, be able to collect my identifying information. If you must identify me, the state should provide a service. You hand off to them, they validate me, they send you a token back, I'm validated.

Sadly the microphone never made it to my corner of the room.

ants_everywhere•2h ago
How is this its own article and not a single sentence on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting ?
sphars•2h ago
It's in the first sentence?

> Slopsquatting is a type of cybersquatting.

nemomarx•2h ago
Right but why not a redirect to that one and a subsection?

I feel like this is going to fall under notability eventually

ants_everywhere•2h ago
I'm asking more how this meets the notability requirements for a separate Wikipedia article.

I'm all for having lots of small Wikipedia articles, but the past few years they've been tending toward combining small articles together. And this is more like a dictionary entry than an encyclopedia entry.

Mistletoe•1h ago
I think it’s much better like this. It is it’s own fascinating thing and not lost in a long general Wikipedia entry.
blueflow•1h ago
It needs to be a big thing on its own so security people can be onto something important.
kouteiheika•2h ago
> LLMs hallucinated a package named "huggingface-cli" [...] it is not the name of the package [...] software is correctly installed with [...] huggingface_hub

It would be a good idea to disallow registering packages which only differ by '-'/'_'. Rust's crates.io does this, so if you register `foo-bar` you cannot register `foo_bar` anymore.

voidUpdate•1h ago
That wouldnt help in this case though, one is -cli, the other is _hub
Pxtl•1h ago
Case insensitivity is so important.

Underscore is just capital hyphen.

ikari_pl•1h ago
I’d rather say underscore is a capital space :D
Pxtl•18m ago
I'm tempted to make a keybind for this. Then I might actually start using snake_case instead of CamelCase, which on a certain level I know is better I just hate typing it.
mapmeld•1h ago
It is a command line tool "huggingface-cli", it's just installed with a differently-named package pypi. I wouldn't call this a full hallucination because anyone could make this mistake.
woodruffw•1h ago
That’s already how Python packages work. The problem here isn’t the hyphen/underscore.
mouse_•2h ago
What distro/repo though?
ysofunny•1h ago
all I want to figure out

is how to "manually" (semi-manually) tweak the LLMs parameters so we can alter what it 'knows for sure'

is this doable yet??? or is this one of those questions whose answer is best kept behind NDAs and other such practices?

jen729w•1h ago
This question makes no sense (logically, not grammatically) in the context of LLMs.

They don't 'know' anything. They are a many-dimensional matrix of the next most likely syllable given all syllables that have come before (roughly speaking).

To ask what it 'knows' is to ask why a chicken crossed the road.

zwnow•1h ago
We still barely know how LLMs really work. Hard to tune things you dont understand.

Inbefore people telling me "akshually we know all about bla bla bla..." no we dont.

aklemm•48m ago
It could be that we do know how they work, we just don’t know how to contextualize their output (as in, we ascribe way too much humanity to it) and that obscures what we think must be happening.
ysofunny•33m ago
which is why in order to appear smart and well informed, it's recommended to point out how my question is nonensense rather than legitimately trying to figure it out.
iaiuse•1h ago
Correct—they don’t “know” in the epistemic sense, but they do encode a latent world model that shows up as useful priors.

Put differently: GPT-4 isn’t a knowledge base, it’s a *Bayesian autocomplete* over dense vectors. That’s why it can draft Python faster than many juniors, yet fail a trivial chain-of-thought step if the token path diverges.

The trick in production is to sandwich it: retrieval (facts) LLM (fluency) rule checker (logic). Without that third guardrail, you’re betting on probability mass, not truth.

glenstein•41m ago
>In May 2025, the potential and prevalence of slopsquatting was detailed in the academic paper "We Have a Package for You! A Comprehensive Analysis of Package Hallucinations by Code Generating LLMs".[1][11] Some of the paper's main findings are that 19.7% of the LLM recommended packages did not exist

At the risk of perhaps misunderstanding or committing a category error, I wonder if there's such a thing as a category of "correct" hallucinating, distinct from things that are, in some sense, "known" via training (e.g. I read about prompting of one model showing it was able to accurately recreate most of the text of Harry Potter, so clearly it's "in there" somewhere).

An interesting upshot of that could be that models "grow" their own knowledge in an evolutionary way via hallucinations that are retained rather than pruned as part of routine filtering and training.

Though I'm sure some might suggest "hallucinating correctly" is just one of the same with ordinary b function. I wouldn't agree with that but I could at least see the argument.