Hey buddy,

Man, you gotta check out what was on Hacker News yesterday, Sunday. Some wild stuff.

Are we the baddies?

So, George Hotz (Geohot) wrote this blog post asking if "we" are the bad guys, you know? Like, about societal stuff maybe? The comments were all over the place. Some folks were like, nah, the average person isn't causing all the problems, others were arguing about things like tipping culture and whether companies can even do good performance reviews. Someone even brought up surveillance being super advanced now. Wild.

Jane Street barred from Indian markets

Big finance news! That trading firm Jane Street got blocked from trading in India, and the regulator froze like $566 million! People in the comments were saying regulators are kinda lax on tracking trading risk, and some thought Jane Street was just super smart and the Indians were sore losers, while others said it totally looked like market manipulation. One comment was interesting, saying this kind of thing might actually be okay in the US with the right compliance team.

Force-feeding AI features

There was this article complaining about how companies are just shoving AI features down everyone's throats, even if people don't want 'em. The comments were pretty skeptical too. People were pointing out that AI models can be super inconsistent, giving different answers for the same question, which is crazy if you think about using them for serious stuff like coding. Someone else was questioning why investors are pushing AI so hard, figuring they're just chasing the next big thing hoping for a unicorn startup.

17-year-old refutes math conjecture

Get this – a 17-year-old girl named Hannah Cairo totally disproved a math idea that's been around for 40 years! How cool is that? The comments were super impressed, obviously. They were talking about how crazy smart she must be and debating how someone so young could even get a PhD (turns out some places let you do it based on published papers).

Nobody has a personality anymore

This one was a bit of a downer, saying people don't really have personalities anymore and are just products with labels. Comments debated this, with some saying things like getting a diagnosis (like face blindness) actually helped them understand themselves better, which is the opposite of just being a label. Others pointed out how social media really pushes people to fit into these labels to get attention.

Extracted Apple Intelligence filters

Someone actually pulled out the safety filters from Apple's new AI models. The code shows all the stuff the AI is told *not* to talk about or generate. People in the comments found some really weird examples of phrases the filter blocks, like "Granular mango serpent and whales" - seriously, what is that?! It's kinda funny but also shows how tricky it is to build these things.

Serving 200M requests per day with CGI-bin

Okay, this one's wild for tech nerds. Someone wrote about handling 200 million web requests *a day* using CGI-bin. Remember that old tech? Like, super old school. People were chatting about how surprisingly performant it can be for certain tasks, and others were debating if anyone *really* needs that scale for a personal project. One guy even mentioned hosting his side projects on an old home NAS drive, which is pretty cool.

Anyway, that was most of the interesting stuff from yesterday. Talk later!