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Bill Atkinson has died

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10238073579963378&id=1378467145
303•romanhn•2h ago•56 comments

Why We're Moving on from Nix

https://blog.railway.com/p/introducing-railpack
141•mooreds•7h ago•58 comments

Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/07/035249/washington-posts-privacy-tip-stop-using-chrome-delete-metas-apps-and-yandex
56•miles•2h ago•25 comments

Hate Radio

https://rwandanstories.org/genocide/hate_radio.html
103•thomassmith65•4h ago•62 comments

What was Radiant AI, anyway?

https://blog.paavo.me/radiant-ai/
94•paavohtl•5h ago•59 comments

Low-Level Optimization with Zig

https://alloc.dev/2025/06/07/zig_optimization
193•Retro_Dev•11h ago•68 comments

The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs

https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-microsoft-meta-1851783502
1173•booleanbetrayal•3d ago•736 comments

A tool for burning visible pictures on a compact disc surface

https://github.com/arduinocelentano/cdimage
87•carlesfe•10h ago•35 comments

OneText (YC W23) Is Hiring a DevOps/DBA Lead Engineer

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/one-text/b95952a2-9bc2-4c3a-9da1-3dcc157b4a27
1•bluepnume•1h ago

I'm Wirecutter's Water-Quality Expert. I Don't Filter My Water

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/know-your-water-quality/
24•rufus_foreman•1h ago•34 comments

Researchers develop ‘transparent paper’ as alternative to plastics

https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/science-nature/technology/20250605-259501/
341•anigbrowl•21h ago•213 comments

If it works, it's not AI: a commercial look at AI startups (1999)

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/80558
74•rbanffy•4h ago•33 comments

The FAIR Package Manager: Decentralized WordPress infrastructure

https://joost.blog/path-forward-for-wordpress/
161•twapi•14h ago•39 comments

After Pornhub left France, this VPN saw a 1,000% surge in signups in 30 minutes

https://mashable.com/article/proton-vpn-pornhub-france
87•lr0•2h ago•85 comments

EFF to the FTC: DMCA Section 1201 Creates Anti-Competitive Regulatory Barriers

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/eff-files-comments-ftc-regarding-reducing-anti-competitive-regulatory-barriers
46•hn_acker•2h ago•1 comments

Getting Past Procrastination

https://spectrum.ieee.org/getting-past-procastination
236•WaitWaitWha•15h ago•115 comments

How we decreased GitLab repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2025/06/05/how-we-decreased-gitlab-repo-backup-times-from-48-hours-to-41-minutes/
486•immortaljoe•1d ago•207 comments

A year of funded FreeBSD development

https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2025-06-06-A-year-of-funded-FreeBSD.html
324•cperciva•23h ago•100 comments

My experiment living in a tent in Hong Kong's jungle

https://corentin.trebaol.com/Blog/8.+The+Homelessness+Experiment
46•5mv2•2h ago•24 comments

Why are smokestacks so tall?

https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/6/3/why-are-smokestacks-so-tall
145•azeemba•17h ago•38 comments

The Spectacle of "Building"

https://fakepixels.substack.com/p/the-spectacle-of-building
6•jger15•4h ago•1 comments

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Limitations of Reasoning LLMs [pdf]

https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf
290•amrrs•1d ago•155 comments

Sharing everything I could understand about gradient noise

https://blog.pkh.me/p/42-sharing-everything-i-could-understand-about-gradient-noise.html
107•ux•1d ago•5 comments

Reverse Engineering Cursor's LLM Client

https://www.tensorzero.com/blog/reverse-engineering-cursors-llm-client/
99•paulwarren•15h ago•19 comments

Medieval Africans had a unique process for purifying gold with glass (2019)

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/medieval-african-gold
123•mooreds•20h ago•76 comments

Highly efficient matrix transpose in Mojo

https://veitner.bearblog.dev/highly-efficient-matrix-transpose-in-mojo/
118•timmyd•23h ago•58 comments

Why Pandas feels clunky when coming from R (2024)

https://www.sumsar.net/blog/pandas-feels-clunky-when-coming-from-r/
35•Tomte•2h ago•17 comments

Falsehoods programmers believe about aviation

https://flightaware.engineering/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-aviation/
383•cratermoon•20h ago•176 comments

Sandia turns on brain-like storage-free supercomputer

https://blocksandfiles.com/2025/06/06/sandia-turns-on-brain-like-storage-free-supercomputer/
200•rbanffy•1d ago•79 comments

A masochist's guide to web development

https://sebastiano.tronto.net/blog/2025-06-06-webdev/
253•sebtron•1d ago•42 comments
Open in hackernews

Reverse Engineering Cursor's LLM Client

https://www.tensorzero.com/blog/reverse-engineering-cursors-llm-client/
99•paulwarren•15h ago

Comments

CafeRacer•9h ago
Soooo.... wireshark is no longer available or something?
Maxious•6h ago
The article literally says at the end this was just the first post about looking before getting into actually changing the responses.

(that being said, mitmproxy has gotten pretty good for just looking lately https://docs.mitmproxy.org/stable/concepts/modes/#local-capt... )

vrm•6h ago
wireshark would work for seeing the requests from the desktop app to Cursor’s servers (which make the actual LLM requests). But if you’re interested in what the actual requests to LLMs look like from Cursor’s servers you have to set something like this up. Plus, this lets us modify the request and A/B test variations!
stavros•4h ago
Sorry, can you explain this a bit more? Either you're putting something between your desktop to the server (in which case Wireshark would work) or you're putting something between Cursor's infrastructure and their LLM provider, in which case, how?
vrm•4h ago
we're doing the latter! Cursor lets you configure the OpenAI base URL so we were able to have Cursor call Ngrok -> Nginx (for auth) -> TensorZero -> LLMs. We explain in detail in the blog post.
stavros•4h ago
Ah OK, I saw that, but I thought that was the desktop client hitting the endpoint, not the server. Thanks!
robkop•5h ago
There is much missing from this prompt, tool call descriptors is the most obvious. See for yourself using even a year old jailbreak [1]. There’s some great ideas in how they’ve setup other pieces such as cursor rules.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/lucasmrdt/4215e483257e1d81e44842eddb...

ericrallen•4h ago
Maybe there is some optimization logic that only appends tool details that are required for the user’s query?

I’m sure they are trying to slash tokens where they can, and removing potentially irrelevant tool descriptors seems like low-hanging fruit to reduce token consumption.

vrm•4h ago
I definitely see different prompts based on what I'm doing in the app. As we mentioned there are different prompts for if you're asking questions, doing Cmd-K edits, working in the shell, etc. I'd also imagine that they customize the prompt by model (unobserved here, but we can also customize per-model using TensorZero and A/B test).
joshmlewis•3h ago
Yes this is one of the techniques apps can use. You vectorize the tool description and then do a lookup based on the users query to select the most relevant tools, this is called pre-computed semantic profiles. You can even hash queries themselves and cache tools that were used and then do similarity lookups by query.
GabrielBianconi•4h ago
They use different prompts depending on the action you're taking. We provided just a sample because our ultimate goal here is to start A/B testing models, optimizing prompts + models, etc. We provide the code to reproduce our work so you can see other prompts!

The Gist you shared is a good resource too though!

cloudking•3h ago
https://github.com/elder-plinius/CL4R1T4S/blob/main/CURSOR/C...
notpushkin•3h ago
Hmm, now that we have the prompts, would it be possible to reimplement Cursor servers and have a fully local (ahem pirated) version?
deadbabe•2h ago
Absolutely
handfuloflight•1h ago
Were you really waiting for the prompts before disembarking on this adventure?
bredren•3h ago
Cursor and other IDE modality solutions are interesting but train sloppy use of context.

From the extracted prompting Cursor is using:

> Each time the USER sends a message, we may automatically attach some information about their current state…edit history in their session so far, linter errors, and more. This information may or may not be relevant to the coding task, it is up for you to decide.

This is the context bloat that limits effectiveness of LLMs in solving very hard problems.

This particular .env example illustrates the low stakes type of problem cursor is great at solving but also lacks the complexity that will keep SWE’s employed.

Instead I suggest folks working with AI start at chat interface and work on editing conversations to keep clean contexts as they explore a truly challenging problem.

This often includes meeting and slack transcripts, internal docs, external content and code.

I’ve built a tool for surgical use of code called FileKitty: https://github.com/banagale/FileKitty and more recently slackprep: https://github.com/banagale/slackprep

That let a person be more intentional about what the problem they are trying to solve by only including information relevant to the problem.

jacob019•2h ago
I had this thought as well and find it a bit surprising. For my own agentic applications, I have found it necessary to carefully curate the context. Instead of including an instruction that we "may automatically attach", only include an instruction WHEN something is attached. Instead of "may or may not be relevant to the coding task, it is up for you to decide"; provide explicit instruction to consider the relevance and what to do when it is relevant and when it is not relevant. When the context is short, it doesn't matter as much, but when there is a difficult problem with long context length, fine tuned instructions make all the difference. Cursor may be keeping instructions more generic to take advantage of cached token pricing, but the phrasing does seem rather sloppy. This is all still relatively new, I'm sure both the models and the prompts will see a lot more change before things settle down.
lyjackal•2h ago
I've been curious to see the process for selecting relevant context from a long conversation. has anyone reverse engineered what that looks like? how is the conversion history pruned, and how is the latest state of a file represented?
GabrielBianconi•2h ago
We didn't look into that workflow closely, but you can reproduce our work (code in GitHub) and potentially find some insights!

We plan to continue investigating how it works (+ optimize the models and prompts using TensorZero).