MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by slibhb | 2026-03-12 21:34:48+00:00
In my opinion, gut microbiome stuff is massively overhyped.

Here's a study that tried fecal transplants to treat mental illness (and found no effect): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41785480/

The pattern with this stuff is that, when a blinded study is carried out, there's usually no effect.
by layer8 | 2026-03-12 21:35:12+00:00
Some details/speculation from the original thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098186

“as modems got faster, supporting 16 modems on a single machine became impossible, and it was often cheaper to buy a new commodity desktop PC rather than a much more expensive machine with a 16-port serial card capable of handling the IO.”
by whack | 2026-03-12 21:35:58+00:00
> According to the court documents, the Fargo detective working the case then looked at Lipps' social media accounts and Tennessee driver's license photo. In his charging document, the detective wrote that Lipps appeared to be the suspect based on facial features, body type and hairstyle and color.

> Once they were in hand, Fargo police met with him and Lipps at the Cass County jail on Dec. 19. She had already been in jail for more than five months. It was the first time police interviewed her.

How is this the fault of AI? It flagged a possible match. A live human detective confirmed it. And the criminal justice system, for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, let this woman sit in jail for 5 months before doing even interviewing her or doing any due diligence.

There's a reason why we don't let AI autonomously jail people. Instead of scapegoating an AI bogeyman, maybe we should look instead at the professional human-in-the-loop who shirked all responsibility, and a criminal justice system that thinks it is okay to jail people for 5 months before even starting to assess their guilt.
by VorpalWay | 2026-03-12 21:36:18+00:00
Very interesting discussion. I hadn't realised that the final provenance model hadn't yet been decided for C and C++.

Angelic non-determinism seems difficult to use to determine if an optimisation is valid. If I understand this correctly, it is basically the as-if rule, but in this case applied to something that potentially needs global program analysis. Would that be an accurate understanding?

It sounds like both of these proposals will be strictly less able to optimize than strict provenance in rust to me. In particular, Rust allows applying a closure/lambda to map a pointer while keeping the provenance. That avoids exposing the provenance as you add and remove tag bits, which should at least in theory allow LLVM to optimise better. (But this keeps the value as a pointer, and having a dangling pointer that you don't access is fine in Rust, probably not in C?)

I'm not sure why I'm surprised actually, Rust can be a more sensible language in places thanks to hindsight. We see this in being able to use LLVM noalias (restrict basically) in more places thanks to the different aliasing model, while still not having the error prone TBAA of C and C++. And it doesn't need a model of memory consisting of typed objects (rather it is all just bytes and gets materialised into a value of a type on access).
by Atlas667 | 2026-03-12 21:36:29+00:00
Tangentially, this is also the reason why many forms of corruption can be done away with right now with modern technology.

Meaning that democratizing our existing political structures is a reality today and can be done effectively (think blockchain, think zero knowledge proofs).

On the other hand, the political struggle to actually enact this new democratic system will be THE defining struggle of our times.
by dangus | 2026-03-12 21:36:36+00:00
> For something to be deserved, it must be earned.

Eeeeeerrrr, wrong! This is garbage hypercapitalist/libertarian ideology.

Did you earn your public school education? Did you earn your use of the sidewalk or the public parks and playgrounds? Did you earn your library card? Did you earn your citizenship or right to vote? Did you earn the state benefits you get when you are born disabled? Did you earn your mother’s love?

No, these are what we call public services, unalienable rights, and/or unconditional humanity. We don’t revolve the entire world and our entire selves solely around profit because it’s not practical and it’s empty at its core.

Arguably we still do too much profit-based society stuff in the US where things like healthcare and higher education should be guaranteed entitlements that have no need to be earned. Many other countries see these aspects of society as non-negotiable communal benefits that all should enjoy.

In this hypothetical society with The Engineer, it’s likely that The Engineer would want or need to win over the minds of their society in some way to prevent their own demise and ensure they weren’t overthrown, enslaved, or even just thought of as an evil person.

Many of my examples above like public libraries came about because gilded age titans didn’t want to die with the reputation of robber barons. Instead, they did something anti-profit and created institutions like libraries and museums to boost the reputation of their name.

It’s the same reason why your local university has family names on its buildings. The wealthiest people in society often want to leave a positive legacy where the alternative without philanthropy and, essentially, wealth redistribution, is that they are seen as horrible people or not remembered at all.
Show HN: Turkish Sieve Engine – Full Prime Statistics Up to 10^14 and V2 Preview
by bilgisoft | 2026-03-12 21:36:48+00:00
Hi HN,
I’m announcing a major update for the Turkish Sieve Engine (TSE). We have just published comprehensive and deterministic distribution statistics across the entire 10^14 range.

What we've achieved:Full Spectrum Stats: We didn't just stop at twin and cousin primes. We’ve now published detailed enumeration data for General Primes up to 100 trillion.

High-Scale Verification: These tables provide a bit-perfect reference for researchers, confirming the accuracy of our modular-arithmetic-free N/6 bit methodology.

Correction of Historical Records: Our engine continues to verify and correct legacy datasets, including the well-known discrepancies in Dr. Thomas Nicely’s tables.

Tera-Scale Performance: Measured a peak throughput of 1.13 Trillion candidates/sec on an RTX 5090.

Coming Soon: Version 2.0.0 (The General Prime Update)The current version (V1.0.0) is specialized for twin/cousin detection. We are now in the final optimization stages of Version 2.0.0, which will:Integrated General Prime Engine: Full, high-speed support for general prime detection and enumeration within a single, unified interface.

Standalone Executable: Like V1, the new version will be released as a pre-built standalone .exe, ensuring that researchers can run tera-scale experiments without needing to manage complex CUDA/C++ environments.
Hardware-Level Optimizations: Advanced memory management for the upcoming "General Prime" module to maintain our signature efficiency.The updated statistics are live in our repository. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the scalability of N/6 bit structures for general prime enumeration!

GitHub: https://github.com/bilgisofttr/turkishsieve

Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18038661
by pocksuppet | 2026-03-12 21:37:07+00:00
It's usually not a coincidence that several people or groups of people faced with similar environments perform similar actions. All the hikers ran away screaming around the same time, because they all saw the bear attack.

This Illinois law seems to be based on the California one, which is the completely unintrusive one with no mass surveillance or anything like that. It says every operating system must have a parental controls feature, to be enabled or disabled by the device owner, and every app must respect it.

In addition, unlike the California one, the Illinois one specifies certain specific things that must be parentally controlled, such as financial transactions, and addictive feeds. All of it can be overridden by the device owner without providing ID or anything. It also clearly specifies the penalty for a violation: it's to be treated as consumer fraud/unfair trading practices.
by api | 2026-03-12 21:37:10+00:00
It's not an AI error. It's a human error in mis-using AI in this way. Saying it's an AI error is like saying a hole in your drywall is a hammer error.

Unfortunately we'll probably see a trend of people using AI and then blaming AI for cases where they mis-used AI in roles it's not good for or failed to review or monitor the AI.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-03-12 21:37:18+00:00
I like the idea of using the IR, where it shows a greater degree of contrast, to act as a "contrast mask" on the visible light image.

I'm thinking of the beautiful cloud detail in the one IR shot where the visible light photo had lost all of that. Seems like some compositing (sort of like HDR) you could try to pull in the best of both worlds.
by mdelmundo | 2026-03-12 21:37:24+00:00
Great question.
In our experiments the full process (discovery → validation) took on the order of hours rather than weeks, but the key part was filtering and validating results.

For false positives we use a specialized CAI agent called the "retester" agent. Its job is to automatically re-run and validate candidate exploits to confirm whether a vulnerability is actually reproducible.

So the workflow becomes: AI discovery → exploit generation → automated retesting → human review.

That reduces the manual time required to get from "potential issue" to confirmed vulnerability quite significantly compared to traditional robotics security research workflows.

Across the three consumer robots we tested, the system identified 38 validated vulnerabilities.
by jfengel | 2026-03-12 21:37:54+00:00
Practically all of them, at least in recent years. Somebody attends the ceremony:

https://improbable.com/ig/winners/

It was more like the Golden Raspberries in the early years. Every prize in the first ceremony was really an insult (Dan Quayle for demonstrating the need for education, Edward Teller for peace, Erich von Daniken for literature, etc.)

But it drifted towards their current goal of "making people laugh and then making them think". It's not an insult; it's recognition that the work sounds absurd at first but is actually cool and they're proud of it.

By 2000 most of these were awards for real science now nearly everybody shows up (or sends a representative).
by pycoclaw | 2026-03-12 21:38:18+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the creator of pycoClaw.

I wanted to run OpenClaw-class, platform-agnostic, autonomous agents on MicroPython hardware, but standard tools couldn't handle the scale of the task.

pycoClaw is the result, which bridges the gap between high-level AI reasoning and bare-metal execution.

The Stack:

- PFC Agent (~26k LOC): A full-featured agent that uses an LLM to 'self-program' its own local MicroPython scripts. Once a task is solved, it runs locally without requiring the LLM.

- ScriptoStudio IDE: A PWA https://scriptostudio.com designed for the iteration speed required by autonomous agents. Since it’s a PWA, it brings a full dev environment (including a real single-step debugger) to any platform, including iPadOS.

- ScriptoHub ( https://scriptohub.ai ): A repository for "Skills" and extensions. Since the agent can generate and execute code, I built a curated hub with automated malware checking to ensure the community can safely share and deploy hardware logic.

- IANA Protocol: To make the IDE fast and reliable, I registered a new WebSocket subprotocol (registry: https://www.iana.org/assignments/websocket/websocket.xhtml ). It’s designed for high-frequency state sync and you can read the spec here: https://jetpax.github.io/webrepl/webrepl_binary_protocol_rfc...

- Custom C Extensions: ~17,900 lines custom modules for MicroPython memory/ fast-path speed optimization

Stats: 10k LOC platform, 26k LOC PFC agent, and ~18k LOC of custom C extensions to optimize MicroPython’s memory and fast-path execution on the ESP32.

Quick Start: You can flash the runtime to an ESP32S3 or P4 in one click via WebSerial at https://pycoclaw.com. Note that all flashing and serial communication happens entirely client-side in your browser.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the 'self-programming' model or the system architecture!
by adrian_b | 2026-03-12 21:38:19+00:00
Other primitive types also do this, but this is not clearly visible from high-level programming languages, because most HLLs have only incomplete support for the CPU hardware.

If you do a (signed) integer operation, the hardware does not fit the result in a register of the size expected in a HLL, but the result has some bits elsewhere, typically in a "flags" register.

So the result of an integer arithmetic operation has an extra bit, usually named as the "overflow" bit. That bit is used to encode a not-a-number value, i.e. if the overflow bit is set, the result of the operation is an integer NaN.

For correct results, one should check whether the result is a NaN, which is called checking for integer overflow (unlike for FP, the integer execution units do not distinguish between true overflow and undefined operations, i.e. there are no distinct encodings for infinity and for NaN). After checking that the result is not a NaN, the extra bit can be stripped from the result.

If you serialize an integer number for sending it elsewhere, that implicitly assumes that wherever your number was produced, someone has tested for overflow, i.e. that the value is not a NaN, so the extra bit was correctly stripped from the value. If nobody has tested, your serialized value can be bogus, the same as when serializing a FP NaN and not checking later that it is a NaN, before using one of the 6 relational operators intended for total orders, which may be wrong for partial orders.
by qingcharles | 2026-03-12 21:38:23+00:00
The issue is that the algorithm is only half the story. The implementation (e.g. bytecode) is the other.

I've been trying to find ways to make the original graphics renderer of the CGA version of Elite faster as there have been dozens of little optimizations found over the decades since it was written.

I was buoyed by a video of Super Mario 64/Zelda optimizations where it was pointed out that sometimes an approx calculation of a trig value can be quicker than a table lookup depending on the architecture.

Based on that I had conversations with LLMs over what fast trig algorithms there are, but for 8088 you are cooked most of the time on implementing them at speed.
by asdefghyk | 2026-03-12 21:38:33+00:00
FROM
https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/1593729387106512896?sort_re...

Top comment about this photo is ( and the poster)
Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder
@ScottApogee
BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.
by calebjosue | 2026-03-12 21:38:37+00:00
Location: Atoyac de Álvarez, Guerrero. México.
Remote: Caleb Josue Ruiz Torres
Willing to relocate: Yes, maybe in the future.
Technologies: Java, SQL, JavaScript, Scala
Résumé/CV: https://www.calebjosue.com/documents/CalebRuiz__CV__Mid2025__Edited.pdf
Email: calebjosue-dev@outlook.com
by blagie | 2026-03-12 21:38:46+00:00
Nope.

https://abovethelaw.com/2016/02/criminally-yours-indicting-a...

You can be arrested, indicted, and held in jail on pretrial, and there is literally no recourse. There are many other ways jail can happen without due process. Where I live:

* Civil contempt. Absolutely immunity. No due process. Record is about 16 years. Having a bad day? Judge can toss you in jail.

* "Dangerous." Half a year. No due process. He-said she-said.

* "Insane." Psychiatric hold. Three days. Due process on paper, not in practice. Police in my town can and do use this if they don't like you.

Absolutely no recourse. You come out with a gap in income, employment, and, if you missed rent/mortgage, no home. Landlords will simply throw your stuff away too.

You're also basically damned if things do move forward, since from jail, you have no access to evidence, to internet (for legal research), and no reasonable way to recruit a lawyer (and, for most people, pay for one).

Can happen to anyone. Less common if you're rich and can afford a good lawyer, but far from uncommon.
by krapp | 2026-03-12 21:38:48+00:00
One solution would be to maintain an account on a platform like Mastodon and link to your blog from there. For some reason this has its own acronym (https://indieweb.org/POSSE). This is what I do, along with using my blog as a backup for my Mastodon account (because it's a very small account and I have to delete content every couple of weeks) and using Mastodon for comments.

Unfortunately I don't think there's anything to be done about discovery on the mainstream web, everything was ruined by SEO before even SEO got ruined by AI. Not being discoverable there is probably better than not.
by theLiminator | 2026-03-12 21:39:12+00:00
Yeah, of course they need to held accountable, and we need to vote in people who will do so. What I'm suggesting is an alignment of incentives that will ensure that police will try to do their best to not be negligent.

Of course there's a balance that has to be struck so that police are empowered enough to act. So perhaps something like settlements against the police being 30% borne by the police pension fund and 70% by taxpayers is sufficient. I think this will also make police very enthusiastic about bodycams and holding each other accountable.
by idle_zealot | 2026-03-12 21:39:13+00:00
> It is an AI error, but also an error on the part of the cops, the prosecutors, the judge, and the county sheriff

Yes, it's critical to remember that multiple parties can be at fault. In a case like this, it is true that

a) law enforcement misused a tool and demonstrated extreme negligence

b) the judiciary didn't catch this, which suggests systemic negligence there too when it comes to their oversight responsibilities

c) the company selling/providing this AI tool should have known it was likely to be misused and is responsible for damages caused by such predictable usage

We cannot have a just world until our laws and norms result in loss of jobs and legitimacy as punishment for this sort of normalized failure, from all three parties. Immunity is a failed experiment.
by 1-more | 2026-03-12 21:39:22+00:00
maybe it's that multiple bit patterns can be NaN and these are two different ones? In IEEE-754, a number with all the exponent bits set to 1 is +/-infinity if the fraction bits are all zero, otherwise it's NaN. So these could be values where the fractions differ. Can you see what the actual bits it's setting are?
by jajuuka | 2026-03-12 21:39:43+00:00
I disagree. When she announced her candidacy she largely had the election in her pocket. Had she run the same campaign for longer her support would have just been even lower. The only reason Biden stepped down was because the ruling class in the DNC made the call. The party voters were very vocally against him the whole way.

I'm a bit confused why you think republicans would toss aside a winning candidate. The party is laser focused on winning. That seems to be sadly a major difference. The DNC seems overly concerned being as milquetoast as possible and to simply assume a moral high ground.
by puppycodes | 2026-03-12 21:39:50+00:00
Aside from the fact that legislating how operating systems can be designed is an extremely bad idea, I don't understand how you can create state laws for ubiquitus or open source software that aren't an absolute joke.

If only politicians were liable for the results of their laws before introducing them.

What an incredible waste of taxpayer time and money.

We need a good derogatory name for these "think of the children" law makers.
by themafia | 2026-03-12 21:39:52+00:00
> How is this the fault of AI?

It could be the fault of the company that's selling this service. They often make wildly inaccurate claims about the utility and accuracy of their systems. [0]

> There's a reason why we don't let AI autonomously jail people.

Yes we do. [1]

> and a criminal justice system that thinks it is okay to jail people for 5 months before even starting to assess their guilt.

Her guilt was assessed. That's why she had no bail. It assessed it incorrectly, but the error is more complicated than your reaction implies.

[0]: https://thisisreno.com/2026/03/lawsuit-reno-police-ai-polici...

[1]: https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
by kbolino | 2026-03-12 21:39:58+00:00
Python chose, quite some time ago, not to follow C's lead on division:
PEP 238 – Changing the Division Operator (2001) [1]

The rationale is basically that newcomers to Python should see the results that they would expect from grade school mathematics, not the results that an experienced programmer would expect from knowing C. While the PEP above doesn't touch on division by zero, it does point toward the objective being a cohesive, layman-friendly numeric system.

[1]: https://peps.python.org/pep-0238/
by DerArzt | 2026-03-12 21:40:02+00:00
> here's hoping that someday headphones without pressure (e.g. active/passive noise cancelling) will make a comeback, too

What do you mean? There are tons of wired headphones that don't do noise cancelling at multiple price points.

I can still pick up a new pair of headphones that I started using 10 years ago (AudioTechnica m50x if you want the recommendation).
by SmirkingRevenge | 2026-03-12 21:40:16+00:00
D's need to figure out effective ways to counter the Republican bad actors, but no strategy is ever going to be enough, with a full blown authoritarian party in a 2 party system and massive propaganda ecosystem absolutely dominates the media and has thoroughly cooked millions of brains.

There's just no way to overcome all that every time, at the candidate level.

The right-wing propaganda machine, from Fox to Nick Fuentes to Joe Rogan - even to Twitter - has to be effectively dismantled or countered.
by iFire | 2026-03-12 21:40:18+00:00
https://github.com/replikativ/stratum is apache2.0 license FOSS!

> Stratum is a columnar analytics engine that combines the performance of fused SIMD execution with the semantics of immutable data

What are your thoughts for investing in a columnar based database rather than a hybrid one?

I'm in the game development space.
by sam_chenard | 2026-03-12 21:40:18+00:00
on the prompt injection via email problem — model choice helps but it's not the right layer to defend. you want to scan at ingestion, before the content ever hits context.

we built LobsterMail (lobstermail.ai) specifically for this. we're an email security team behind (palisade.email) and have been really obsessed with this problem for the last 6 months.

every inbound email gets scanned for 6 injection categories (boundary manipulation, role hijacking, data exfiltration attempts, obfuscated payloads, etc.) before it reaches the agent. the SDK exposes `email.isInjectionRisk` and `safeBodyForLLM()` which wraps untrusted content in boundary markers with a metadata header. the agent can make an informed decision rather than blindly consuming whatever lands in its inbox.

it's also agent-native — the agent self-provisions its own `@lobstermail.ai` address, no oauth app needed, no borrowing the user's gmail. big respect for agentmail too but give a shot to lobstermail if youre interested!
by acherion | 2026-03-12 21:40:33+00:00
I think it's because the LLM asked for permission, was given a "no", and implemented it anyway. The LLM's "justifications" (if you were to consider an LLM having rational thought like a human being, which I don't, hence the quotes) are in plain text to see.

I found the justifications here interesting, at least.