HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

LiamPowell

1,616 karma · joined February 5, 2023

submissionscomments
LiamPowell··on C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality
It's useful to have all your tools automatically apply metadata in a standard way instead of having to keep track of it manually. Most cameras already add metadata that says what camera and lens were used, but you lose that as soon as you import it into Photoshop and export as a jpeg.
LiamPowell··on C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality
> However I question the value-add when e.g. the BBC website is already authenticated by nature of being served over HTTPS, and anyone who redistributes BBC content can and should link back to the source.

The value would be in images reposted to social media where the website an show a badge that says it came from a certain source.

LiamPowell··on C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality
I always got the impression that C2PA is a way to say "this photo came from the BBC (for example) and they've only signed it because they've verified the supplied edit chain". It's always been obvious that one could point a camera at a screen, I don't think anyone involved with C2PA has claimed otherwise.

It seems like there's a big disconnect between what C2PA says it's for and what certain journalists think it's for.

LiamPowell··on Kobo can run apps now
You don't need to jailbreak it. Swipe from the top and press the big button labelled "dark mode".
LiamPowell··on Emacs 31.1 will release on 8/24
LLMs are particularly strong for this because it really doesn't matter if the code is a hacked together mess. Most user configs are already like that anyway.
LiamPowell··on Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview
Latex rendering, inline images, inline browser showing what it's clicking on, being able to view a spreadsheet and then select a region to reference in the conversation, clickable links when it references a specific line number with mouse-over previews, interactive inline visualisations.

There's probably more I don't remember too. In my opinion TUI apps are just silly. You don't get any of the advantages of it being just plain text because it's all wrapped in funny Unicode characters and at the same time the GUI capabilities are hamstrung by being text on a grid.

LiamPowell··on I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them
Testing in that way will only tell you if the two devices work with the given cable. It won't tell you what sort of margins you have. Not all devices are made equal.

A device isn't even necessarily better if it works with one cable when another doesn't, it might just happen to have a slightly lower impedance on its internal traces that happens to better match an out of spec cable, or any other one of a number of parameters.

LiamPowell··on I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them
At a minimum, if plugging it in to a device and measuring waveforms is good enough for your application, you need an oscilloscope with 10 GHz bandwidth or so (don't quote me on that, I don't remember the max speed used by USB). Scopes at that level require a whole lot of R&D and very expensive components so they're really not something you'd want to buy to check your own cables.

If you're talking about reading the e-marker then you can just plug it in to a device and use an app. Google will help you find one for your platform.

LiamPowell··on We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars
I also agree it's stupid when google puts UI over the webpage, but at least in that case they're not going out of their way to do it over an existing alternative.

For anyone not aware of how bad google is getting about this: Did you know that "sign in with Google" panel that appears in the top right corner of websites is actually part of Chrome rather than the website?

LiamPowell··on We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars
> Firefox likes to draw the websites underneat the scrollbar.

This was a choice that they actively made. It's not hard by default, they just chose to do something stupid because they think it looks pretty.

LiamPowell··on Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search
Artists will at least show up further down the list usually. With songs it often just will not show the song at all when the title is an exact match, it will instead fill the entire results list with "lyric matches" that I'm sure don't have matches at all as they're often in different languages to the search query.
LiamPowell··on LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
The "gotcha" here, if you want to call it that, is that the picking the next token based on probabilities (either in training or in the sampler) is not an argument that LLMs are inherently flawed, especially when one reduces a LLM to "it just picks a token based on a probability" as you could apply that same description to a human.
LiamPowell··on LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
The natural next argument that I see a lot is "well it's still all probabilistic", which is technically true. However, don't the atoms that make up the cells that make up a human move around and interact based on probabilities?

Saying a LLM is all just based on probabilities is pretty meaningless, even if it is true, since everything else is just based on probabilities too. What matters is the massive amount of machinery that generates those probabilities. Anything from rolling a dice to an accurate model of an entire human, or even a model of the entire universe, is all "just probabilities".

LiamPowell··on GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance
Sure, but it doesn't really fit there as a joke, it looks like it's just meant to be part of what they were trying to say.
LiamPowell··on GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance
> Honestly? That's not just valuable—it's essential.

I'm curious if you wrote this or had a LLM write it.

I'm genuinely curious to be clear as I don't see why anyone would bother to go through a LLM to write such a short reply. Have we reached the point where Claudeisms that are this obnoxious have become part of regular speech?

LiamPowell··on Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers
I suspected as much, and that brings us to the second issue where if we use a cohort of judges then the model that likes it's own code the most still wins.
LiamPowell··on Show HN: QUALITY.md – open format/specification, agent skill, and CLI
Here's the question I ask about every project that claims to make a LLMs output so much better: If it works so well then why would the model provider not just put it in the system prompt? Or in the case of interactive skills, why would Claude Code/Codex not make it a core part of the product?

On top of that, if your magic markdown file really does work then where's the evidence showing that? These projects never include even basic benchmarks. At best they're entirely vibe based, however more often they're completely untested. Give us a proper benchmark, even a single prompt and it's output with and without your skill in use would be better than every other project out there.

LiamPowell··on Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers
This is not actually what the reviewer prompt says, or perhaps it is, I don't know since they don't make it public. I'm just pointing out how it seems like a bad idea to ask a LLM to make a subjective judgement on things like "taste". If the SOTA LLM witting the code could not produce tasteful code then why would a different LLM be able to judge the "taste" of that code?

Which LLM should we even use to judge taste? Is it giving an unfair advantage to Model X if we use Model X as the judge? Maybe we should use multiple models as the judge, but now the model that's best at recognising and praising its own code has an advantage. The whole thing is just an unsolvable problem when a LLM is the judge.

LiamPowell··on Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers
> You are a senior SWE-Bench reviewer, make no mistakes.

I don't know what a better approach would look like while still remaining feasible, however this approach of telling a LLM to make a subjective judgement seems fundamentally flawed.

LiamPowell··on Polymarket has flooded social media with deceptive videos by paid creators
I'm not sure about Kalshi, however on most sports betting sites you actually are betting against the house. The betting sites all have in-house models (or piggyback off other sites) that are much better at predicting odds than the general public. If someone is making money then the sites just place limits on that account so they're not losing money.
LiamPowell··on Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers
Most ad blockers do already use MV3, uBlock Origin is the only one still using V2 as far as I know.

There are some drawbacks to V3, however none prevent creating an effective ad blocker, as demonstrated by the fact that many exist. Though saying that doesn't make for nearly as effective clickbait...

LiamPowell··on Notepad++ Zero-Click RCE via Path Traversal (CVE-2026-52884)
OP, I assume your comment[1] is getting flagged because of the obvious LLM usage. No one wants to interact with a comment that's not written by a human.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473753

LiamPowell··on Claude Fable 5
That don't fall back to Opus if their classifier thinks you might be working on anything that might be a competitor's product. It silently injects instructions into the prompt to sabotage your work. Read the policy above, it's insane to me that they're publicly admitting to this.
LiamPowell··on Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
The assumptions are so much worse than that:

> Methodology & assumptions: No caching

This is absolutely absurd. Claude code is of course using the cache (and this can be verified by looking at the traffic). It would be an incredibly stupid design to resend the whole input without a cache for every input, every tool use, etc..

LiamPowell··on Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe
> especially with all the stuff that SpaceX has put into orbit in recent years

I've heard this repeated a lot but I've never seen anyone do the maths. StarLink satellites are all in very low orbits, so intuitively it seems like most debris from a collision would just end up deorbiting.

LiamPowell··on Expanding Project Glasswing
Maybe, but they certainly used it for marketing too. At the time they contacted a bunch of publications and gave them access but told them they could only share snippets of the output [1]. The only reason to set restrictions like that is marketing.

[1]: https://youtu.be/TfVYxnhuEdU?t=102

Transcript of the timestamped part:

> Now, OpenAI's terms of service don't let me give you the full list. I have to curate them, and show you a sample. Those are the terms and conditions I agreed to.

LiamPowell··on Expanding Project Glasswing
They did it for 2 and 3, however it looks like they didn't for 4 and 5.

GPT-2: https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-genera...

GPT-3: https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence-ai/...

LiamPowell··on Expanding Project Glasswing
OpenAI has been pulling this marketing trick for years. Remember how GPT-3 was too dangerous to release? It's also probably bad PR if script kiddies have access to GPT model with no guardrails even if it doesn't enable any significant attacks.
LiamPowell··on Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra
I don't think I've ever seen LLM output as bad as this output. They sometimes write like that, but not every second sentence.
LiamPowell··on Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra
What's this nonsensical video on the product page that allegedly shows an "all new thermal system"? https://videos.ctfassets.net/jy9s7k22hbg4/44R1LH71xb8uO4c9dD...
← PreviousPage 2 of 11Next →