MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by karmakaze | 2026-02-20 22:55:42+00:00
I asked (an AI) what's on the index:

> The index effectively shifts weight toward "secular safety" and cyclical sectors that are less directly impacted by AI spending cycles. Major holdings in the SPXXAI index include leaders from the following sectors:

Financials: Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), and Visa (V).
Healthcare: Eli Lilly (LLY), UnitedHealth Group (UNH), and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ).
Consumer Staples: Walmart (WMT), Procter & Gamble (PG), and Costco (COST).
Energy & Materials: Exxon Mobil (XOM), Chevron (CVX), and Linde (LIN).
Utilities & Real Estate: Companies like NextEra Energy (NEE) and American Tower (AMT).

Very boring stuff.
by maxglute | 2026-02-20 22:55:52+00:00
Interesting study/methodologies... the plagiarism stats seem shockingly low for 2010s PRC... ~7% baseline plagiarism rate and once you stack on civil service, promotion multipliers and works out to 10% in bureaucracy. 1/10 bad apple ratio seems pretty efficient in terms of bureaucracy. That said 1/10 of PRC's ~80m public sector employees is a lot of apples, incidentally CCDI cumulative prosecution is reaching like 6m+ / 8%, which maps nicely to 10% corruption floor.

Note the ~7% baseline is derived from Ministry of Education CNKI anti plagiarism machine doing 100% detection/prosecution on past thesis, same level analysis in western institutions and plagiarism rates is like 15-30%. Typical western academic misconduct is ~1% of student body but precludes most plagiarism cases aren't elevated to misconduct for various reasons. But TLDR there seems to be much larger shadow misconduct mirage / plagiarism problem outside of PRC... and PRC was somehow never that corrupt to begin with, or at least explains how fast Xi anticorruption drive managed to crush most of the socially visible / jarring ones within a few years.
by skeletal88 | 2026-02-20 22:56:46+00:00
This has nothing to do with tariffs and everything to do with us companies hsving an unfair advantage or justnot following EU regulations. Or musk trying to interfere in our politics and supporting extreme right wing parties. Also us government having access to our cloud data, etc.
All our advertising money goes to the US to google/fb, because everyone is using them, not because they are inherently better at anything, for example.
by throwaway0123_5 | 2026-02-20 22:56:46+00:00
> because other individuals, organizations and nation states are not going to stop, and not going to leverage their AI if they get ahead of us.

I don't think that it is likely AT ALL, but it is probably only necessary for China and the US to agree to stop, not all organizations and nation states. It is at least possible given leadership in both countries that see AI as an existential threat.

The hardware needed to run and train SOTA AI can only be made by a very small handful of companies in a small handful of countries that either the US or China have significant influence over. Making AI R&D illegal would stop 99% of it overnight, most of the researchers are in it for money rather than some ideological commitment and there are plenty of other well-paid jobs they could take. Doing local inference in secret with existing models and GPUs would be possible, but training new SOTA models probably wouldn't be.
by hparadiz | 2026-02-20 22:56:54+00:00
I think we're going in that direction. The typical reader here I think can't see the forest for the trees. We're all in meat space. They call it real life. Most jobs aren't on the internet and ultimately deal with the physical. It doesn't matter what tech we have when there's boxes to move and shelves to stock. If AI empowers a small business owner to do things that were previously completely outside their budget I can only imagine that will increase opportunity.
by mcv | 2026-02-20 22:57:14+00:00
I think people getting arrested for social media posts is specifically a UK thing. That and Russia are the only European countries where I've heard of that happening.

In most European countries, you'd have to go pretty far to get in legal trouble for social media posts. It's not impossible, but that's also true in the US. There are and have always been limits to speech. Everywhere. Also in the US (and not just under Trump, although he'd definitely increasing government censorship).

* Threats

* Blackmail

* Libel/slander

These are all restricted by law, because they hurt, silence or coerce people. Hate speech does the exact same thing. It's ridiculous to call hate speech protected free speech, while threats and blackmail are not.

A far worse attack on free speech is banning or restricting criticism of the government. That is the primary reason for free speech protections, and yet that's the very thing that the current US government is attacking on an unprecedented scale. See for example recent attacks on Jimmy Kimmel and Steven Colbert. That's something that would be unimaginable in many European countries.
by FloorEgg | 2026-02-20 22:57:45+00:00
Hmm. I'll think more about this.

It makes sense to me that a culture that values collectivistic cohesion would shy away from paradigm shifting ideas (disruption). I also see the correlation between disruptive ideas driven by principled critical thinking over conventional thinking.

I guess on some level my assumption is that they are adjacent. Those embedded in a collectivistic culture can think critically but can run into walls within a sandbox of convention. This is how they can be great at iterative improvement and engineering but struggle with paradigm shifting ideas.

I think you have a point, but there's definitely some nuance here I'm still untangling.
by joezydeco | 2026-02-20 22:58:16+00:00
Monsanto has said publicly that if they lose the Durnell appeal at the Supreme Court they will take Roundup off the market in the USA, leaving generic Chinese suppliers to own the market. Farmers aren't going to stop using glyphosate no matter what social media says.

Trump has been doing a number of actions to keep China from getting their hands in the global trade chaos left by his own administration. Taking Maduro out of Venezuela was another one. IMO that's where this EO came from. Nothing to do with healthy Americans at all.

I feel bad for the Instagram moms that thought they were influencing economic and foreign policy here, but Trump got their vote and that transaction is over.
Show HN: FPGA prime finder – discovered a 1,123-digit Proth prime
by sickthecat | 2026-02-20 22:58:32+00:00
I built a Proth prime tester on a Zybo Z7-20 FPGA ($200 board) and found a new 1,123-digit prime: 2079 * 2^3718 + 1.

Proth primes are numbers of the form k * 2^n + 1. They have a neat property: Proth's theorem gives you a deterministic proof of primality, not just a probabilistic test. If you can find an integer a where a^((p-1)/2) = -1 mod p, the number is proven prime. No "probably" about it.

The interesting part is the hardware. The core is a 4096-bit Montgomery CIOS multiplier running on a Zynq-7020. It uses 28 DSP48E1 slices and runs at 74 MHz, doing one full modular multiply in ~8,514 clock cycles. The host PC runs an algebraic sieve (eliminates ~92% of candidates using discrete logarithms mod small primes), precomputes the Montgomery constants, then ships each candidate to the FPGA over UART at 115200 baud.

PrimeGrid has exhaustively searched all k < 1200 up to n > 3,000,000. Everything above k = 1200 is wide open. I picked k = 2079 because my sieve showed it had the most surviving candidates at high n. Nobody had ever tested it before.

The prime also divides 5 Generalized Fermat Numbers, which was an unexpected bonus.

12 hardware bugs found along the way. Highlights: Vivado 2019.1 silently prunes register bits when a muxed datapath has sources of different widths. The Montgomery CIOS algorithm produces results in [0, 2p) not [0, p), and without normalizing after every multiply, the error compounds across thousands of squarings. Non-blocking assignments in Verilog mean your "combinational" readout is actually one cycle stale.

All RTL (Verilog), Python scripts, and build files are open source.

Verify it yourself:
p = 2079 * (1 << 3718) + 1
print(pow(5, (p-1)//2, p) == p - 1) # True

https://github.com/0xdeadbeefnetwork/Optimus_Prime
by conception | 2026-02-20 22:58:32+00:00
My current AI test. There was a BBS I was on in the 90s and there was this door game I hadn't seen anywhere else. I simply describe the BBS, where it was popular, its name, the year it was around, and the BBS game and a description of it mechanics, etc.

OpenAI and Google's Deep Research produce a very long, 100% made up report. If I question the AI on the report, they both admit they just made it up.

Claude just returns, "I couldn't find anything on the BBS or the game."
by refulgentis | 2026-02-20 22:58:55+00:00
It is a placebo, it is an aesthetic thing, not an actual change that makes things better on eyes. This was always well known. It didn't matter 5 years ago, 10 years ago, when OS added it. Easier to let it go than argue But with HDR, it matters enormously people are well educated on this. (source: color scientist, built Google's color space)

> What is the authors problem lol? It feels a lot better on eyeballs to use warm light things. Why does he care?

I don't like seeing this. Been here 16 years and a flippant "whats his problem" "lol" and "why does he care" is 90th percentile disrespectful. It's not about what you're arguing, its just such a fundamental violation of what I perceive as the core tenent, "come with curiosity". I think you are, just, expressing it poorly.
by originalvichy | 2026-02-20 22:58:59+00:00
You are correct. My country does not have the similar separation of powers the US has. I do not understand why Americans have a hard time realizing this: the President and other elected officials work for YOU. They literally run for office to get the position, and they get voted in. Why would someone let an elected official enrich themselves and their friends with your money? Why would the legislative branch allow that?

A populace with a functioning representative democracy deserves its leaders.
by dekhn | 2026-02-20 22:59:04+00:00
I find often that conversations between lawyers and engineers are just two very different minded people talking past each other. I'm an engineer, and once I spent more time understanding lawyers, what they do, and how they do it, my ability to get them to do something increased tremendously. It's like programming in an extremely quirky programming language running on a very broken system that requires a ton of money to stay up.
by taolson | 2026-02-20 22:59:22+00:00
Don't know if my language is considered Lil' enough for this, but it's a pure, lazy functional language based upon Miranda (progenitor language to Haskell) that compiles to x86-64 asm. ~6700 SLOC for the (self-hosted!) compiler, and ~3300 SLOC additional for the extensive library of functional data structures and functions.

https://github.com/taolson/Admiran
by TZubiri | 2026-02-20 22:59:32+00:00
Coming from someone with an almost ascetic dependency discipline, I look at some meta-dependencies as an outsider (dependabot, pnpm/yarn, poetry/venv/pipenv, snap/flatpak), a solution to too many dependencies that is yet another dependency, it feels like trying to get out of a hole by digging.

I think that for FOSS the F as in Gratis is always going to be the root cause of security conflicts, if developers are not paid, security is always going to be a problem, you are trying to get something out of nothing otherwise, the accounting equation will not balance, exploiting someone else is precisely the act that leaves you open to exploitation (only according to Nash Game Theory).

My advice is, if it ever comes the point where you need to install dependencies to control your growing dependency graph? consider deleting some dependencies instead.
by indiestack | 2026-02-20 23:00:45+00:00
The SQLite-per-customer pattern mentioned in the database subthread is underrated. I've been running a FastAPI app with a single SQLite database (WAL mode + FTS5) and the operational simplicity is genuinely life-changing compared to managing Postgres.

The key insight: for read-heavy workloads on a single machine, SQLite eliminates the network hop entirely. Response times drop to sub-15ms for full-text search queries. The tradeoff is write concurrency, but if your write volume is low (mine is ~20/day), it's a non-issue.

The one thing I'd add to the article: the biggest infrastructure regret I see is premature complexity. Running Postgres + Redis + a message queue when your app gets 100 requests/day is solving problems you don't have while creating problems you do (operational overhead, debugging distributed state, config drift between environments).
by mcv | 2026-02-20 23:00:53+00:00
Will it also bypass content bans in the US? Or should Europe create its own freedom.eu for that?

I'm sure I don't have to point out the irony of the current censorship-happy government in the US pretending to be a champion of free speech in other countries. I mean, there are plenty of countries with far worse censorship of course, but for the US to attack the EU specifically on this, is pure propaganda.
by 19sblanco | 2026-02-20 23:01:18+00:00
Ya I have fiddled with the setup for over a year now, just testing things out with my personal notes, getting things as perfect as I could. The installation program is relatively new as you've pointed out.

But please, if you're interested, check out these notes. You appear to be someone with lots of attention to detail and can probably help me get them even better :)
by staticassertion | 2026-02-20 23:01:20+00:00
TBH I Think that DoS needs to stop being considered a vulnerability. It's an availability concern, and availability, despite being a part of CIA, is really more of a principle for security rather than the domain of security. In practice, availability is far better categorized as an operational or engineering concern than a security concern and it does far, far more harm to categorize DoS as a security conern than it does to help.

It's just a silly historical artifact that we treat DoS as special, imo.
by indiestack | 2026-02-20 23:01:25+00:00
The exoskeleton framing is useful but incomplete. In my experience, AI coding assistants are most valuable not when they write code, but when they search for existing solutions before writing code.

The real waste isn't developers typing slowly — it's developers spending a week building an auth system that already exists as a well-maintained library, or reimplementing invoicing logic that someone else has already debugged through 200 edge cases.

The gap right now is structured discovery. AI assistants are great at generating code but terrible at knowing what already exists. There's no equivalent of "have you checked if someone already solved this?" built into the workflow. That's where the actual leverage is — preventing unnecessary work, not just accelerating it.
by indiestack | 2026-02-20 23:02:06+00:00
The govulncheck approach (tracing actual code paths to verify vulnerable functions are called) should be the default for every ecosystem, not just Go.

The fundamental problem with Dependabot is that it treats dependency management as a security problem when it's actually a maintenance problem. A vulnerability in a function you never call is not a security issue — it's noise. But Dependabot can't distinguish the two because it operates at the version level, not the call graph level.

For Python projects I've found pip-audit with the --desc flag more useful than Dependabot. It's still version-based, but at least it doesn't create PRs that break your CI at 3am. The real solution is better static analysis that understands reachability, but until that exists for every ecosystem, turning off the noisy tools and doing manual quarterly audits might actually be more secure in practice — because you'll actually read the results instead of auto-merging them.
by n_u | 2026-02-20 23:02:16+00:00
> The security research community has been dealing with this pattern for decades: find a vulnerability, report it responsibly, get threatened with legal action. It's so common it has a name - the chilling effect.

Governments and companies talk a big game about how important cybersecurity is. I'd like to see some legislation to prevent companies and governments [1] behaving with unwarranted hostility to security researchers who are helping them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814614
by erhserhdfd | 2026-02-20 23:02:28+00:00
GDP records market transactions. So in your scenario, purchasing the chicken, the chicken feed, the chicken coop, etc would all be measured. The time spent raising the chicken (assuming you did not pay someone to do it), would not be captured.

However, I think part of your criticism is a moralistic and health based argument that raising a chicken is intrinsically better and healthier that Doordashing fast food. When a consumer chooses a $60 delivered meal over a $45 home-cooked alternative, that reveals a preference for whatever they value, such as convenience, time saved, taste, service quality, etc. GDP doesn’t evaluate whether that preference is “good”; it only records the transaction value that arises from it.

So I agree GDP is not a perfect measure, but it's far from useless.
by fakedang | 2026-02-20 23:02:33+00:00
Seems like his successor does not have much of a plan either.

> In another internal email addressing staff, the new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma gave some hints as to how the future of Xbox will look.

She outlined three commitments: "First, great games." "Second, the return of Xbox." and "Third, future of play." She went on to say that the company will continue to invest in its franchises and studios, keep Xbox spreading across platforms to reduce barriers, while also inventing "business models and new ways to play."
by indiestack | 2026-02-20 23:02:47+00:00
The unit test approach from the contractor in the thread is gold: "find a recently closed issue and try to write a unit test for it." This forces you to understand the test infrastructure, the module boundaries, and the actual behavior — not just the code structure.

I'd add one more technique that's worked well for me: trace a single request from HTTP endpoint to database and back. In a FastAPI app, that means starting at the route handler, following the dependency injection chain, seeing how the ORM/query layer works, and understanding the response serialization. You touch every layer of the stack by following one real path instead of trying to understand the whole codebase at once.

Visualizers are nice for the "big picture" but they rarely help you understand why the code works the way it does. The why is in the git history and the closed issues, not in a dependency graph.
by harry8 | 2026-02-20 23:03:14+00:00
When people want to make the case that Silicon Valley is evil, corrupt, awful and opposed to the welfare of people so should be obliterated with prejudice: example 1 will be PayPal.

The poster child for “there Is not nearly enough regulation”

I don’t agree with that so I’ve got to work out why paypal is such a total disgrace.
by hparadiz | 2026-02-20 23:04:00+00:00
I used to sometimes get stuck on a problem for weeks and then get a budget pulled or get put on another project. Sometimes those issues never did get solved. Or have to tell someone sorry I don't have capacity to solve a problem for you. Now a lot of that anxiety has been replaced with a more can do attitude. Like wouldn't being able to pull off results create more opportunity?
by ouhamouch | 2026-02-20 23:04:16+00:00
from the Ars article:

---
US publishers have been fighting web services designed to bypass paywalls. In July, the News/Media Alliance said it secured the takedown of paywall-bypass website 12ft.io. “Following the News/Media Alliance’s efforts, the webhost promptly locked 12ft.io on Monday, July 14th,” the group said. (Ars Technica owner Condé Nast is a member of the alliance.)
---
by zmmmmm | 2026-02-20 23:04:50+00:00
It's interesting to me that there seems to be an implicit line being drawn around what's acceptable and what's not between video and audio.

If there's a camera in an AI device (like Meta Ray Ban glasses) then there's a light when it's on, and they are going out of their way to engineer it to be tamper resistant.

But audio - this seems to be on the other side of the line. Passively listening ambient audio is being treated as something that doesn't need active consent, flashing lights or other privacy preserving measures. And it's true, it's fundamentally different, because I have to make a proactive choice to speak, but I can't avoid being visible. So you can construct a logical argument for it.

I'm curious how this will really go down as these become pervasively available. Microphones are pretty easy to embed almost invisibly into wearables. A lot of them already have them. They don't use a lot of power, it won't be too hard to just have them always on. If we settle on this as the line, what's it going to mean that everything you say, everywhere will be presumed recorded? Is that OK?
by pixl97 | 2026-02-20 23:04:54+00:00
>The rest of us needn't give a shit if we can hold you accountable for your software's consequences, AI or no.

See this is the fun thing about liability, we tend to attempt to limit scenarios were people can cause near unlimited damage when they have very limited assets in the first place. Hence why things like asymmetric warfare is so expensive to attempt to prevent.

But hey, have fun going after some teenager with 3 dollars to their name after they cause a billion dollars in damages.
by dalenw | 2026-02-20 23:05:07+00:00
I think so. The last few months have shown us that it isn't necessarily the models themselves that provide good results, but the tooling / harness around it. Codex, Opus, GLM 5, Kimi 2.5, etc. all each have their quirks. Use a harness like opencode and give the model the right amount of context, they'll all perform well and you'll get a correct answer every time.

So in my opinion, in a scenario like this where the token output is near instant but you're running a lower tier model, good tooling can overcome the differences between a frontier cloud model.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-20 23:05:41+00:00
>It really bothers me that something like 10% of US GDP is just the amount we over-pay for healthcare compared to peer states. It's basically a privatized tax that buys us nothing (or, to stave off pedantry, certainly nothing remotely worth 10% of our GDP) but we count it as something good.

<screeches about "muh jerbs">

-every medical licensing racket organization

>I worry sometimes about just how much of our GDP is actually fake productivity like that

Way more than anyone wants to admit.
by pharos92 | 2026-02-20 23:05:42+00:00
Yes. Local government has long failed to focus on its core mandate of base infrastructure, instead opting for vanity and ego projects like stadiums and convention centers.

Wellington in particular has had a string of divisive mayors. Simply google the previous Mayor "Tory Whanau" for a never-ending list of controversy, incompetence and failure.

Previous socialist central government attempted to strip assets off the regional bodies and centralize them under a common scheme. Would have been successful, however a lot of race-based ideology was peripherally injected into the process which gave asset management an unaccountable and ultimately undemocratic race-based overlay which basically killed the idea (central govt were voted out).

Central Government also has a fairly miserable history of asset management before privatisation. It's a multi-decade process of slow erosion and precendent.

The intrusion of government and intrusion of identity politics seems to be the core issue. Failure to provide core services, failure to be competent but the conversation is almost always re-directed towards "racism" and identity as the root attributes. We had no trouble producing high quality functional and well managed assets before the arrival of modern identity politics. Bait and switch IMO.