simonwillisonblog VS hn-search

Simon Willison has pointed out several examples of prompt injection attacks and why it may never be a solved problem:

I want more people to have link blogs.

I have one in the sidebar of https://simonwillison.net/ which I've been running since November 2003. You can search through all 6,836 links here: https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark

I can post things to it with a bookmarklet. It has an Atom feed.

It's such a low-friction way of publishing. A lot of https://daringfireball.net works like this too. I also like https://waxy.org/ and https://kottke.org/ for this.

I'd love to see more of these.

My approach is to publish to my own blog at https://simonwillison.net and then copy and paste content from that into a Substack newsletter at https://simonw.substack.com a few times a month.

It's been working really well.

Substack don't have an API, but they do support copy and paste - so I built myself a tool that assembles my blog content into rich text I can copy and paste straight into the Substack editor.

I wrote about how that works here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/4/substack-observable/

Hah, yeah securing something like WordPress can be a challenge, especially if you're running a bunch of plugins.

My blog is a pretty straight-forward Django setup without many other dependencies, so it's a lot less of an attack surface: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog

That specific prompt is just an example and it's pretty bad, it was the shortest and simplest prompt I could come up with that would be easily understood.

You can set response content-types (text, html, json, etc...). If you use json it will get pretty good results because I have some is some logic to attempt to pick out json or json5 objects from the text output. I dont yet have logic to support json arrays, but I'm hoping to add that soon.

But still client side validation is needed for applications with untrusted input. I dont attempt to solve prompt injection. I saw a lot of interesting posts on this topic from this blog https://simonwillison.net/. I need to find sometime to read more about it.

Try this one instead, it should be better

I've started to consider "commit to writing about it" as the price I have to pay for giving into the lure of another project. It's one of the main reasons I publish so much content on https://simonwillison.net/ and https://til.simonwillison.net

A project with a published write-up unlocks so much more value than one which you complete without giving others a chance of understanding what you built.

I've maintained internal blogs (sometimes just a Slack channel or Confluence area) at previous employers for this purpose too.

I think you are asking specifically about practical LLM engineering and not the underlying science.

Honestly this is all moving so fast you can do well by reading the news, following a few reddits/substacks, and skimming the prompt engineering papers as they come out every week (!).

https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer provides an early manifesto for this nascent layer of the stack.

Zvi writes a good roundup (though he is concerned mostly with alignment so skip if you don’t like that angle): https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-18-the-great-debate-debates

Simon W has some good writeups too: https://simonwillison.net/

I strongly recommend playing with the OpenAI APIs and working with langchain in a Colab notebook to get a feel for how these all fit together. Also, the tools here are incredibly simple and easy to understand (very new) so looking at, say, https://github.com/minimaxir/simpleaichat/tree/main/simpleai... or https://github.com/smol-ai/developer and digging in to the prompts, what goes in system vs assistant roles, how you gourde the LLM, etc.

Simon Willison's Weblog

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

If it's not [flagged], there's no flagging and hence also no flagging ring. baybal2 has been banned on and off for years now https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The submitted title was "Gary Killdall, creator of CP/M, wrote Pixar's original 3D renderer".

Submitters: If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

(From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.")

Vision therapy for myopia helps some people, but not everyone, likely due to genetic and neuroplasticity differences, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Nevertheless, many of the principles are useful for children whose eyes and brains are still developing.

I'm a huge Tesla skeptic, but Tesla and Musk are lightning rods for tabloid-style garbage that doesn't belong on HN, so it doesn't surprise me that we often see negative Tesla content flagged to death. Meanwhile we also see plenty of content that hits the front page and stays there [0].

Do you have examples of professional, interesting Tesla content that got flagged?

[0] More than half of the past year's most popular Tesla articles were negative: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...

It's April 23rd, 2024, and I am still looking for a good, reliable, honest and simple search engine.

All I want to do is search.

No AI.

No ads.

No shopping.

Please don't "Answer my question." I enjoy doing my own original research, thanks.

I'm entirely willing - wanting even - to pay for it.

Currently Kagi has my $, but I'm saddened and frustrated that they're not even focused on Search, they're focused on AI[1] and t-shirts.

Amazingly, in 2024, there is still a market opportunity for a good search engine.

It can't really just be me, can it?

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22kagi%22+%22ai%22

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

For historical purposes

Most likely because there have been oodles of low-quality stories on these topics. We turned the flags off on this one since it maybe rises above the noise (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... for past explanations on how we approach that).

Hey HN,

I'm sure you've seen the monthly "Ask HN: What Are You Working On?" headlines on [Hacker News](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

Honestly, it's my favorite topic because it's packed with insights about what other hackers are up to.

I wondered what it would be like if instead of just a headline, there was a whole website where hackers could post daily updates, and where we could follow the hackers we're interested in for their latest updates. And so, this web site was born.

I hope it gets used frequently so we can all benefit from it together. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Let me know what you think!

I don't know what one thing you're referring to, but it's a core principle of HN to try to avoid repetition, and especially the repetition+indignation combo, which is the commonest and most tedious thing on the internet.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...