MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-20 09:42:40+00:00
> I doubt frontier models have actually substantially grown in size in the last 1.5 years

... and you'd be most likely very correct with your doubt, given the evidence we have.

What improved disproportionally more than the software- or hardware-side, is density[1]/parameter, indicating that there's a "Moore's Law"-esque behind the amount of parameters, the density/parameter and compute-requirements. As long as more and more information/abilities can be squeezed into the same amount of parameters, inference will become cheaper and cheaper quicker and quicker.

I write "quicker and quicker", because next to improvements in density there will still be additional architectural-, software- and hardware-improvements. It's almost as if it's going exponential and we're heading for a so called Singularity.

Since it's far more efficient and "intelligent" to have many small models competing with and correcting each other for the best possible answer, in parallel, there simply is no need for giant, inefficient, monolithic monsters.

They ain't gonna tell us that, though, because then we'd know that we don't need them anymore.

[1] for lack of a better term that I am not aware of.
by redleader55 | 2026-02-20 09:43:15+00:00
While this is true, improvements in the TLS issuance process should also improve security. When the eventual deprecation of TLS-ALPN-01 and DNS-01 comes, this new method would be completely secure.

Here, the record could for example contain a signature from the same key pair used to authenticate the account. The alternative is DNSSEC, but that's avoided by a lot of domains.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-20 09:43:28+00:00
> They don't suppress foreign countries for that goal

Oh hell yes they do. Chinese overfishing is wreaking havoc across the planet [1], not just near Asia, but the reach of Chinese fishing fleets goes as far as Africa and South America. In the case of Africa, this has been one of the contributing causes for people to flee to Europe.

Then you got the stealing. America certainly isn't innocent either when it comes to IP theft, but China takes that on yet another level.

And finally, you got artificial subsidies. Solar, batteries, cars - the CCP is engaged in insane pricing wars backed by practically infinite funds. They already managed to "outcompete" most solar production and are on their best way to screw up our automotive industries as well.

> They do want to expand their productive capacity by financing projects in foreign countries, but in a business-as-usual way not in a I-am-the-boss way.

Nope. They are just as vile loan sharks as the IMF, some say they go even further [2].

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/chinas-rampant-illegal-fishing-enda...

[2] https://www.news24.com/business/china-puts-aggressive-terms-...
by TrackerFF | 2026-02-20 09:43:46+00:00
Here in Norway (and probably Sweden, too) BankID is a widely used authentication system, and most domestic services will use that as a auth / login. Only "drawback" is that it requires 2FA, which is quite trivial today. But there are still tons of users that want their "login with FB / Google / etc.".

And a last but: If using such auth systems, one would have to account for all the different systems unique to countries.

Maybe some larger EU-specific ID / auth system would make sense?
by dirasieb | 2026-02-20 09:44:33+00:00
https://archive.ph/bdEqK

>>Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages

>The police are making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive posts on social media and other platforms.

>Thousands of people are being detained and questioned for sending messages that cause “annoyance”, “inconvenience” or “anxiety” to others via the internet, telephone or mail.

>Custody data obtained by The Times shows that officers are making about 12,000 arrests a year under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.
by uecker | 2026-02-20 09:44:48+00:00
C has its unique advantages that make some of us prefer it to C++ or Rust or other languages. But it also has some issues that can be addressed. IMHO it should evolve, but very slowly. C89 is certainly a much worse language than C99 and I think most of the changes in C23 were good. It is fine to not use them for the next two decades, but I think it is good that most projects moved on from C89 so it is also good that C99 exists even though it took a long time to be adopted. And the same will be true for C23 in the future.
by roenxi | 2026-02-20 09:44:53+00:00
It's hardly evidence-free, this stuff [0, 1, 2] has been making international news headlines for months. And the last time the US was involved in toppling Iran they used paid-for protests [3] so it is hardly speculative to say they'd do again what worked last time. That is just common sense on their part. If they haven't done that, then people will be fired in the US executive for incompetence because that is the cheapest way to achieve their rather clear goals of rolling Iran's power structures. If you don't believe that they did that, who do you think is responsible for that failure on the US government's part?

It is unfortunate that the US's actions right now undermined whatever validity you feel the protests had. I certainly agree it is disgusting - and also bad for US interests so it is curious why they're doing it. Take it up with them if you have a problem with the idea, I'm not a US general or policy maker.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_war

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_strikes_on_Irani...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_buildup...

[3] https://theconversation.com/how-the-cia-toppled-iranian-demo... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
by wongarsu | 2026-02-20 09:46:25+00:00
Germany was in almost this exact situation. It was a self-perpetuating machine for centuries, where ambitious students came to study under the best professors, leading to top students, many of which stayed at those universities to become top professors themselves. Then WW1 put a bit of a damper on that, and the 1930s and 1940s broke it. Germany is still not insignificant in science, but really a shadow of its former self

And that was despite putting an emphasis on education, and the 1930s and 1940s having a lot of science funding. Remove the people and the flywheel stops
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-20 09:46:42+00:00
> against the backdrop of challenging sociological factors and mass low-skill immigration

I'm pretty sure that poverty is the issue here. Kids who don't get enough to eat, don't get enough time (or perhaps too much time in some sad cases) with their parents, kids who don't have many opportunities tend to do worse at standardised testing.

This is entirely fixable, but it's not (unfortunately) just a matter of funding schools more.
by mort96 | 2026-02-20 09:47:11+00:00
If I'm gonna write RAII wrappers around every tiny little thing that I happen to need to call once... I might as well just use Rust and make the wrappers do FFI.

If I'm constructing a particular C object once in my entire code base, calling a couple functions on it, then freeing it, I'm not much more likely to get it right in the RAII wrapper than in the one place in my code base I do it manually. At least if I have tools like defer to help me.
by 3D30497420 | 2026-02-20 09:47:29+00:00
From a quick web-search: Apparently it was an open-source community project, but the governing organization created a for-profit entity and transferred most of the assets to that entity (brand, website, etc.). Gitea apparently still uses MIT licenses, but the community felt it was a betrayal of the open-source ethos. forgejo is a community fork of Gitea when the issues mentioned were not suitably resolved.
by palata | 2026-02-20 09:48:07+00:00
> Your users expect "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple."
You can add email/password and passkeys, but removing social logins entirely is a conversion killer.

I know this is true, but I genuinely don't understand it. I want email/password and passkey, I will always go out of my way to avoid "Sign in with ...". I just don't get why people love this.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-20 09:48:32+00:00
Yes, more people will be sharing stuff. And none of it will have long term staying power. Or do you honestly believe that a project like GCC or Linux would have been created and maintained over as long as they have been by the use of AI tools in the hands of noobs?

Technical ability is an absolute requirement for the production of quality work. If the signal drowns in the noise then we are much worse off than where we started.
by ben_w | 2026-02-20 09:48:46+00:00
> The truth gets through.

It often doesn't at all, drowned amongst lies.

And sometimes it takes a lifetime or two.

It took Boris Yeltsin, who had just become the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, actually visiting a random grocery store in Houston before he realised what the truth was:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_visit_by_Boris_Yeltsin_to...
Show HN: Aismond – attack-surface monitoring for MSP client fleets
by mirceamitu | 2026-02-20 09:48:47+00:00
We built AISMOND for MSP teams that need one place to track external exposure across many client environments.

Live today:
- Multi-tenant dashboard for risky IPs, services, and countries
- IP-level context from CVEs, IoC signals, abuse reports, and open ports
- One-command onboarding scripts (Windows, Linux, macOS)
- Weekly digest generation and resend
- On-demand port scanning on eligible plans

Not shipped yet:
- PSA ticketing
- RMM integration

Would love feedback on two things:
1) Are the risk scores understandable enough to prioritize action?
2) Which PSA workflow should we ship first?
by beAbU | 2026-02-20 09:49:29+00:00
He's being prosecuted for sharing sensitive information with 3rd parties or something. He was in some cushy foreign envoy type job back then, and it seems he did not really take it very seriously. In the epstein files there is evidence that he regularly shared sensitive information with JE and others.

He's not being prosecuted for raping kids. But maybe new evidence comes to light during this investigation.
by dgxyz | 2026-02-20 09:50:10+00:00
Ignore the cherry picking and sensationalism around this. There are a few cases which are thrown out which were overreach.

But nearly all of them are direct threats to people, stalking, repetitive abuse, support for terrorism and admissions of actual criminal activity.

If you wrote these things on a wall outside your house you'd be arrested. If you said them down the pub you'd get the shit kicked out of you in 30 seconds. Do you expect these to be ignored under "free speech"? No because they wouldn't be even in the US.

This increased because people feel safe saying these things on social media because there are other people saying them in their social bubble.
by spuz | 2026-02-20 09:50:14+00:00
The 2.5kW figure is for a server running 10 HC1 chips:

> The first generation HC1 chip is implemented in the 6 nanometer N6 process from TSMC. ... Each HC1 chip has 53 billion transistors on the package, most of it very likely for ROM and SRAM memory. The HC1 card burns about 200 watts, says Bajic, and a two-socket X86 server with ten HC1 cards in it runs 2,500 watts.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2026/02/19/taalas-etches-ai-mod...
by Helmut10001 | 2026-02-20 09:50:15+00:00
I don't browse US newspapers that often, but I regularly observe blocked ones, particularly smaller ones. Non-deterministic, e.g.: New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Dallas Morning News, Virginian-Pilot. Beyond that, a lot of CA and San Francisco Government and local utility services are geo-restricted (which I think, from a security standpoint, makes at least somewhat sense..).

Btw. asking once is enough ^^
by gambiting | 2026-02-20 09:50:38+00:00
>>I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.

All over? No. But I know several software engineers who went to China to work in tech and they can't stop raving about how good they have it there - one came back to work for a US company(remotely from his EU country) and is now desperate to find some more work in China again, he liked it that much. The language barrier is a problem sure, but then again I also know software engineers who went to work in Germany and after years they don't speak a lick of German. It's not an insurmountable problem.
by rrr_oh_man | 2026-02-20 09:51:08+00:00
No. This is not true. Hetzner is fully owned by a German company.

https://www.northdata.de/Hetzner+Online+GmbH,+Gunzenhausen/A...

And it wasn't true in 2022.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33864111
by wvh | 2026-02-20 09:51:15+00:00
While it's true Europe might not be producing the next Apple or Google, there are lots of alternatives, like national academic login systems, logging into third parties with bank credentials or government IDs... Solutions that depend less on one commercial company capturing the market, that are in place on a national level and work well. It's a different landscape. Factors like current day political turmoil make people much less trusting of "American" solutions. It remains to be seen if this goes beyond sentiment into some actual pan-European solutions that (claim to) safeguard privacy and data.
by imtringued | 2026-02-20 09:51:18+00:00
Java exceptions usually have way more context to the point where I loathe every single developer who decided to catch an exception and only log the top level message.

Having a long ass chain of 10 nested exceptions might be overwhelming to a beginner, but an experienced developer knows which types of exceptions are caused by what and instinctively tunes out the irrelevant ones and goes straight to the source of the problem since the stack trace directly tells you which chain of calls caused the issue.
by RealityVoid | 2026-02-20 09:51:42+00:00
What content are you missing? Off the top of my head, the type of content most likely to ve missing in Europe would be:

- geofenced media

- commercial sites intentionally removing eu access because of gdpr.

That's it. Those are the only cases where I could not access sites from tbe EU. At least the ones I encountered.

And do notice, both of them are not filtered by the EU or anything like this. They are enforced at the publishing website. Would you call this censorship? It kind of feels like a stretch. If not a deliberate contortion of truth.
by Mashimo | 2026-02-20 09:53:04+00:00
> I ask it to fix a mistake, it tells me it fixed it, gives 1:1 the same thing with more errors.

> It also feels like it forgets mid convo way faster than it did.

Mhh, I don't observe this. Hard to say.

You probably know this already, but be sure to don't reuse a AI conversation with different context (Having a single chat for both cooking and coding is nono). Often starting a new chat is better.

If it forgets what you said it sounds a bit like you use one chat for too long, or you use a too small model (fast, air, haiku, nano etc.)
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-20 09:55:26+00:00
> Chinese is too difficult of a language. I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.

Considering that there are a billion+ people capable of speaking chinese, with many million of them not speaking it natively, your generalisation might instead be a rather specific, individual problem.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-20 09:56:03+00:00
> A browser will always have limitations and not quite reach the level of e.g. a TUI

There's no reason you can't jam a TUI into a browser. Perhaps to the surprise of both kinds of user, but it's possible.

> I think what the world need is a super fast native spreadsheet that is NOT Excel.

> I'd use that. But it needs to have a keyboard centric operation

You should boot up an emulator and check out the OG: Lotus 1-2-3. Keyboard driven, extremely fast, all written in 16-bit assembler for the original IBM PC running at, what, 4MHz?

It's because of Lotus 1-2-3's use of F2 for "edit cell" that F2 is still "edit" or "rename" in most applications.

(you can then continue the tour with WordPerfect and Borland Turbo Pascal, if you like light blue)
by alias_neo | 2026-02-20 09:56:47+00:00
"Forgejo was initially created in December 2022 as a fork of Gitea. The fork occurred after a for-profit limited corporation ran by the lead maintainer of the project, Lunny Xiao, silently transferred Gitea's trademarks and operations to the company and began to establish an open-core model."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgejo

Also see: https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/

EDIT: HN discussion on the latter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471
by gwd | 2026-02-20 09:57:19+00:00
I've been learning Greek at the same time my son has been learning to write. By my count, Greek has like 40 basic pronunciation rules; English has something like 500.

But I also spent over a decade learning Mandarin and am still trying to maintain it... the characters are just another level. My son at least can take a stab at reading words he hasn't seen before; having to look up basically every new character is quite a grind.
Show HN: 17MB pronunciation scorer beats human experts at phoneme level
by fabiosuizu | 2026-02-20 09:57:37+00:00
I built an English pronunciation assessment engine that fits in 17MB and runs in under 300ms on CPU.

Architecture: CTC forced alignment + GOP scoring + ensemble heads (MLP + XGBoost). No wav2vec2 or large self-supervised models — the entire pipeline uses a quantized NeMo Citrinet-256 as the acoustic backbone.

Benchmarked on speechocean762 (standard academic benchmark, 2500 utterances):
- Phone accuracy (PCC): 0.580 — exceeds human inter-annotator agreement (0.555)
- Sentence accuracy: 0.710 — exceeds human agreement (0.675)
- Model is 70x smaller than wav2vec2-based SOTA

Trade-off: we're ~10-15% below SOTA on raw accuracy. But for real-time feedback in language learning apps, the latency/size trade-off is worth it.

Available as REST API, MCP server (for AI agents), and on Azure Marketplace.

Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/fabiosuizu/pronunciation-asses...

Interested in feedback on the scoring approach and use cases people would find valuable.
by znnajdla | 2026-02-20 09:59:08+00:00
Thank you for this. I'm in Europe as well with an established SaaS that's been running in production for years and I've converged on a similar stack (OVHCloud instead of Hetzner). However, I've realized you can stay sovereign and independent in any jurisdiction (not just Europe) just by simplifying your stack and running a few baremetal servers in-house.

Just buy a few Mac Studios and run them in-house with power supply backup and networking redundancy and you're good to go to serve more than 10k - 100k requests/second which is good enough to serve a million customers. You don't need VMs: a single Mac Studio gets you 2–4x the power of m7i.2xlarge on AWS, and pays for itself within a few months of AWS bills. You can do local AI inference and get Claude Opus-level performance (Kimi K2.5) over a cluster of Mac Studios with Exo.Labs (an unofficial Apple partner). You get free S3-compatible object storage with zero ongoing storage costs with MinIO (yes it's redundant even if you lose a server, and your hosting provider can't hold your data hostage by charging for egress). Postgres runs like a beast and is incredibly easy to setup - you get zero latency DB because it runs on the same machine, has access to lots of RAM and you're not paying per-GB or per-core. Managed databases are a scam. You don't need an Auth provider, just do passkeys yourself. And the great thing about Apple Silicon hardware is that it is amazingly quiet, reliable, and efficient - you can do thing like run headless browsers 3x faster and cheaper than on standard server hardware because of the unified memory and GPU acceleration, so you're not paying for CI/CD compute or headless browsers either.

This entire stack could give you computing power equivalent to a 25k euro/month AWS bill for the cost of electricity plus about 50k euros one-time to set it up (about 4 Mac Studios). And yes, it's redundant, scalable, and even faster (in terms of per-request latency) than standard AWS/GCP cloud bloat. Not only is it cheaper and you own everything, but your app will work faster because the everything is local (DB, Redis cache, SSD, etc.) without any VM overhead, shared cores, or noisy neighbours.
by Gareth321 | 2026-02-20 09:59:47+00:00
"Malicious communications" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. This veteran was arrested for retweeting this meme (https://abuwjaawap.cloudimg.io/v7/_lgbtqnation-assets_/asset...).

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11066477/Veteran-ar...

He was offered to undergo "re-education." You might not like this meme. You might find it offensive. But should he be arrested by several officers for it? Of course not. This is just one example of many people being being arrested and imprisoned for offending people. It is against the law to offend people in the UK.
by paffdragon | 2026-02-20 09:59:56+00:00
If it works for you, it works. I just see the same phrases used repeatedly so frequently nowdays - including my own LLM conversations.

Regarding the use of LLM for picking infra. The issue I usually have with such task is that they frequently omit things - either from the list of options or the features compared. And depending on my familiarity with the topic, I might never notice, which might steer my decision making into a different direction. Basically a certain bias. Sometimes prompting it to repeat reveals more, but ultimately I end up hitting the search and doing my own research, then I might use the LLM again with now more knolwedge and data. Did you run into this too? What was your process?
by mihaic | 2026-02-20 10:01:13+00:00
I've made a start-up that has really tried making micropayments to work (blink.net) and I know there have been many attempts.

Some of the pain points can always be addressed (having an auto-pay system when opening and article, and actually being able to get a refund within a short time window if the title was clickbait -- with some limitations of course).

The main problems that always remained were:
- the dificutly in convincing a user to actually pay, which was a psichological barrier. People also don't understand that many articles would have to be priced at 20-50 cents, even more, to be worth it, or they should by an issue pass with the actual price of the whole issue.
- the publishing industry being a mess, hard to coordinate as everyone wants to do their own thing, and early experiments failing. Many people say micropayments are something that need a good time, but nobody knows when that time will come.
- the huge fees that processors take (2% + 29 cents), meaning we needed to load into a wallet a minimum of 5$. After learning all the tricks of the industry, I felt a need to throw rotten tomatoes at whoever thinks that cashback should be legal.

The combination always made it a horrible problem, and at this point I'm even considering making the existing project a non-profit, if that might get something off the ground, but now it's just in low-maintenance mode.
by ben_w | 2026-02-20 10:01:45+00:00
> > His unit has successfully prosecuted about 750 hate speech cases over the last four years.

> But sure, abuse of power is so rare. Nothing to see here.

This would make your point if those hate speech cases were all the same as your Andy Grote example.

Otherwise it's like pointing at one defendant winning a road traffic law case due to dashcam footage showing the police were making things up, as evidence that all road traffic law prosecutions are abusing power.