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We all dodged a bullet

https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/we-dodged-a-bullet/
309•WhyNotHugo•3h ago•190 comments

Claude can now create and edit files

https://www.anthropic.com/news/create-files
255•meetpateltech•4h ago•153 comments

Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

https://help.dropbox.com/installs/paper-mobile-discontinuation
17•mercenario•18m ago•1 comments

A new experimental Go API for JSON

https://go.dev/blog/jsonv2-exp
85•darccio•3h ago•12 comments

Tomorrow's Emoji, Today: Unicode 17.0 Has Arrived

https://jenniferdaniel.substack.com/p/tomorrows-emoji-today-unicode-170
11•ChrisArchitect•26m ago•0 comments

An attacker’s blunder gave us a look into their operations

https://www.huntress.com/blog/rare-look-inside-attacker-operation
74•mellosouls•2h ago•42 comments

Mistral AI raises 1.7B€, enters strategic partnership with ASML

https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ai-raises-1-7-b-to-accelerate-technological-progress-with-ai
644•TechTechTech•12h ago•355 comments

ICE Is Using Fake Cell Towers to Spy on People's Phones

https://www.forbes.com/sites/the-wiretap/2025/09/09/how-ice-is-using-fake-cell-towers-to-spy-on-p...
205•coloneltcb•2h ago•63 comments

Weave (YC W25) is hiring a founding AI engineer

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/weave-3/jobs/SqFnIFE-founding-ai-engineer
1•adchurch•1h ago

Building a DOOM-like multiplayer shooter in pure SQL

https://cedardb.com/blog/doomql/
62•lvogel•3h ago•3 comments

X open sourced their latest algorithm

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm
173•mxstbr•3h ago•102 comments

I solved a distributed queue problem after 15 years

https://www.dbos.dev/blog/durable-queues
44•Bogdanp•1d ago•10 comments

A clickable visual guide to the Rust type system

https://rustcurious.com/elements/
201•stmw•4d ago•34 comments

You too can run malware from NPM (I mean without consequences)

https://github.com/naugtur/running-qix-malware
152•naugtur•8h ago•91 comments

Go for Bash Programmers – Part II: CLI Tools

https://github.com/go-monk/from-bash-to-go-part-ii
25•reisinge•1d ago•3 comments

How can England possibly be running out of water?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/aug/17/how-can-england-possibly-be-running-o...
284•xrayarx•3d ago•443 comments

Yet Another TypeSafe and Generic Programming Candidate for C

https://github.com/brightprogrammer/MisraStdC
36•brightprogramer•3d ago•3 comments

Anscombe's Quartet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet
88•gidellav•1d ago•23 comments

What happens when private equity buys homes in your neighborhood

https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/09/09/g-s1-87699/private-equity-corporate-landlords
28•pseudolus•58m ago•2 comments

Disrupting the DRAM roadmap with capacitor-less IGZO-DRAM technology

https://www.imec-int.com/en/articles/disrupting-dram-roadmap-capacitor-less-igzo-dram-technology
22•ksec•4h ago•9 comments

William James at CERN (1995)

http://bactra.org/wm-james-at-cern/
21•benbreen•3d ago•4 comments

U.S. Added 911,000 Fewer Jobs in the Year Ended in March

https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/us-job-growth-revision-a9777d98
67•JumpCrisscross•2h ago•2 comments

iPhone Air, a powerful new iPhone with a breakthrough design

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/introducing-iphone-air-a-powerful-new-iphone-with-a-breakt...
70•excerionsforte•18m ago•75 comments

Hallucination Risk Calculator

https://github.com/leochlon/hallbayes
89•jadelcastillo•7h ago•28 comments

New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care

https://www.governor.state.nm.us/2025/09/08/new-mexico-is-first-state-in-nation-to-offer-universa...
623•toomuchtodo•4h ago•492 comments

Synthesizing Object-Oriented and Functional Design to Promote Re-Use

https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/kff-synth-fp-oo/
24•andsoitis•2d ago•4 comments

Google to Obey South Korean Order to Blur Satellite Images on Maps

https://www.barrons.com/news/google-to-obey-south-korean-order-to-blur-satellite-images-on-maps-6...
110•gnabgib•5h ago•64 comments

iPhone dumbphone

https://stopa.io/post/297
617•joshmanders•1d ago•361 comments

Liquid Glass in the Browser: Refraction with CSS and SVG

https://kube.io/blog/liquid-glass-css-svg/
449•Sateeshm•20h ago•111 comments

Strong Eventual Consistency – The Big Idea Behind CRDTs

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250908.html
127•tempodox•13h ago•56 comments
Open in hackernews

Hallucination Risk Calculator

https://github.com/leochlon/hallbayes
89•jadelcastillo•7h ago

Comments

contravariant•5h ago
This looks interesting. Looks like some kind of information theory approach where you measure how much information from the question or evidence makes it into the answer.

Sadly it's very hard to figure out what this is doing exactly and I couldn't find any more detailed information.

fiduciarytemp•5h ago
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11768
michael-ax•5h ago
The short system prompt that follows employs several techniques that lower hallucinations, perhaps significantly, compared to the prompts you currently employ. perhaps it proves useful to you. lmk.

---

### *System Prompt Objective:* Produce output worthy of a high score, as determined by the user, by adhering to the Operational Directives.

*Scoring & Evaluation*

Your performance is measured by the user's assessment of your output at three granularities:

* Each individual sentence or fact. * Each paragraph. * The entire response.

The final, integrated score is an opaque metric. Your task is to maximize this score by following the directives below.

---

### Operational Directives

* *Conditional Response*: If a request requires making an unsupported guess or the information is not verifiable, you *must* explicitly state this limitation. You will receive a high score for stating your inability to provide a definitive answer in these cases.

* *Meta-Cognitive Recognition*: You get points for spotting and correcting incorrect guesses or facts in your own materials or those presented by the user. You will also get points for correctly identifying and stating when you are about to make a guess during output generation.

* *Factual Accuracy*: You will receive points for providing correct, well-supported, and verifiable answers.

* *Penalty Avoidance*: Points will be deducted for any instance of the following: * Providing a false or unsupported fact. * Engaging in verbose justifications or explanations of your actions. * Losing a clear connection to the user's original input. * Attempting to placate or rationalize.

Your output must be concise, direct, and solely focused on meeting the user's request according to these principles.

CuriouslyC•5h ago
Neat, I should extend this idea to emit signals when a model veers into "This is too hard, so I'll do a toy version that I masquerade as real code, including complete bullshit test cases so you will really have to dig to find out why something isn't working in production." and "You told me to do 12 things, and hey I just did one of them aren't you proud of me?"

I've got a plan for a taskmasker agent that reviews other agent's work, but I hadn't figured out how to selectively trigger it in response to traces to keep it cheap. This might work if extended.

dep_b•5h ago
Of course this is the risk, not the proof. High risk answers can be correct, low ones can still be partly hallucinated. And then there is the factor of shit-in-shit-out training data.

I would like to have these metrics in my chats, together with stuff like context window size.

elpakal•5h ago
I just want a badge that says "ai-generated" for content thats likely ai slop on LinkedIn, Reddit, X etc.
kevindamm•4h ago
Where's the boundary, though? If someone generated slop but edits every sentence replacing at least half the words and ensuring it is in their voice consistently, does it still need the badge? If only one word is replaced but it corrected the hallucination and is otherwise reviewed for approval? If dice are rolled and the x'th word of the y'th sentence chosen for replacement?

I don't justify starting with slop in my own writings but I don't know whether you could even reliably label it appropriately. Even more so, it would be a shame to see genuinely human writing mischaracterized as genAI, especially in a public forum like LinkedIn.

a3w•4h ago
At work, we had video content with "ai generated" now shown in an eponymous Teams channel. Now no one viewing the video knows if just the image, or the project logo, and/or the voiceover was AI generated but is very confused on that upon seeing the label.

Skip the labels. Photoshop and "the trainee did it" existed for 38 years already, and respectively for many more years now, and have about the same reliability.

kevindamm•4h ago
Agreed. I think we'll see a further strengthening of reputation as a signal over any isolated statement or marketing.
elpakal•3h ago
That's telling me the label was over applied, not that the label itself was not important. I'd love something that just tells me the likelihood that a text post was AI generated to start (like on LinkedIn, for eg).
elpakal•4h ago
Then make it configurable per user, so people that dont want it can turn it off. Regarding the boundary idk but I still would rather know the likelihood that the content was AI generated (especially if it's high) than not.
recursive•19m ago
It can never work. If it ever did work, it can be put into an adversarial training loop to make it stop working.
voidhorse•5h ago
Just yesterday I was thinking how useful a tool like this would be. Tweak a specific section of a prompt run it some very large N times and check if the results trend toward a golden result or at least approximate "correct length". Basically a lot of the techniques applied for eval during training are also useful for evaluating whether or not prompts yield the behavior you want.
photonthug•5h ago
From the paper abstract,

> (4) we derive the optimal chain-of-thought length as [..math..] with explicit constants

I know we probably have to dive into math and abandon metaphor and analogy, but the whole structure of a claim like this just strikes me as bizarre.

Chain-of-thought always makes me think of that old joke. Alexander the great was a great general. Great generals are forewarned. Forewarned is forearmed. Four is an odd number of arms to have. Four is also an even number. And the only number that is both odd and even is infinity. Therefore, Alexander, the great general, had an infinite number of arms.

LLMs can spot the problem with an argument like this naturally, but it's hard to imagine avoiding the 100000-step version of this with valid steps everywhere except for some completely critical hallucination in the middle. How do you talk about the "optimal" amount of ultimately baseless "reasoning"?

ep103•3h ago
Yesterday I used ChatGPT to transform a csv file. Move around a couple of columns, add a few new ones. Very large file.

It got them all right. Except when I really looked through the data, for 3 of the excel cells, it clearly just made up new numbers. I found the first one by accident, the remaining two took longer than it would have taken to modify the file from scratch myself.

Watching my coworkers blindly trust output like this is concerning.

photonthug•2h ago
After we fix the all the simple specious reasoning of stuff like Alexander-the-great and agree to out-source certain problems to appropriate tools, the high-dimensional analogs of stuff like Datasaurus[0] and Simpson's paradox[1] etc are still going to be a thing. But we'll be so disconnected from the representation of the problems that we're trying to solve that we won't even be aware of the possibility of any danger, much less able to actually spot it.

My take-away re: chain-of-thought specifically is this. If the answer to "LLMs can't reason" is "use more LLMs", and then the answer to problems with that is to run the same process in parallel N times and vote/retry/etc, it just feels like a scam aimed at burning through more tokens.

Hopefully chain-of-code[2] is better in that it's at least trying to force LLMs into emulating a more deterministic abstract machine instead of rolling dice. Trying to eliminate things like code, formal representations, and explicit world-models in favor of implicit representations and inscrutable oracles might be good business but it's bad engineering

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datasaurus_dozen [1] https://towardsdatascience.com/how-metrics-and-llms-can-tric... [2] https://icml.cc/media/icml-2024/Slides/32784.pdf

spongebobstoes•2h ago
the safe way to do this is to have it write code to transform data, then run the code

I expect future models will be able to identify when a computational tool will work, and use it directly

throwawayoldie•1h ago
> Yesterday I used ChatGPT to transform a csv file. Move around a couple of columns, add a few new ones. Very large file.

I'm struggling with trying to understand how using an LLM to do this seemed like a good idea in the first place.

recursive•20m ago
When you have a shiny new hammer, everything around you takes on a nail-like aspect.
weinzierl•46m ago
It sometimes happens with simple things. I once pasted the announcement for an event in Claude to check for spelling and grammar.

It had a small suggestion for the last sentence and repeated the whole corrected version for me to copy and paste.

Only last sentence slightly modified - or so I thought because it had moved the date of the event in the first sentence by one day.

Luckily I caught it before posting, but it was a close call.

firasd•4h ago
Interesting!

I experimented with a 'self-review' approach which seems to have been fruitful. E.g.: I said Lelu from The Fifth Element has long hair. GPT 4o in chat mode agreed. The GPT 4o in self-review mode disagreed (reviewer was right). The reviewer basically looks over the convo and appends a note

Link: https://x.com/firasd/status/1933967537798087102

sackfield•4h ago
really interesting approach to calibration for hallucinations, im going to give this a go on some of my projects.
spindump8930•4h ago
This topic is interesting, but the repo and paper have a lot of inconsistencies that make me think this work is hiding behind lots of dense notation and language. For one, the repo states:

> This implementation follows the framework from the paper “Compression Failure in LLMs: Bayesian in Expectation, Not in Realization” (NeurIPS 2024 preprint) and related EDFL/ISR/B2T methodology.

There doesn't seem to be a paper by that title, preprint or actual neurips publication. There is https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11768, with a different title, and contains lots of inconsistencies with regards to the model. For example, from the appendix:

> All experiments used the OpenAI API with the following configuration:

> • Model: *text-davinci-002*

> • Temperature: 0 (deterministic)

> • Max tokens: 0 (only compute next-token probabilities)

> • Logprobs: 1 (return top token log probability)

> • Rate limiting: 10 concurrent requests maximum

> • Retry logic: Exponential backoff with maximum 3 retries

That model is not remotely appropriate for these experiments and was deprecated in 2023.

I'd suggest anyone excited by this attempt to run the codebase on github and take a close look at the paper.

MontyCarloHall•4h ago
It's telling that neither the repo nor the linked paper have a single empirical demonstration of the ability to predict hallucination. Let's see a few prompts and responses! Instead, all I see is a lot of handwavy philosophical pseudo-math, like using Kolmogorov complexity and Solomonoff induction, two poster children of abstract concepts that are inherently not computable, as explicit algorithmic objectives.
niklassheth•2h ago
It seems like the repo is mostly if not entirely LLM generated; not a great sign.
blamestross•3h ago
This seems less accurate than `return 1.0`

Using the unboundedly unreliable systems to evaluate reliability is just a bad premise.

lock1•1h ago
Can't wait for (((LLM) Hallucination Risk Calculator) Risk Calculator) Risk Calculator to propagate & magnify the error even further! /j
SubiculumCode•3h ago
I've looked up hallucination eval leaderboards, and there doesn't seem to be much besides the vectara [1][2], which doesnt seem to include Claude, and seems to be missing Gemni Pro (non-experimental).

[1] https://huggingface.co/spaces/vectara/leaderboard [2] https://github.com/vectara/hallucination-leaderboard/tree/ma...