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This wouldn't be on-topic for HN even if it wasn't running in "Newsweek" --- even if a sitting senator had said it, mere proposals are explicitly off-topic --- but I always feel like it's useful to call out the fact that "Newsweek" is a grift publication. The Newsweek your parents read went out of business a decade and a half ago, and was purchased by a cult and run as an SEO farm.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Not sure about that, however agents in low code tools are certainly taking over old school integrations.
You don't believe in social science. Sorry, I mean social "science". It feels like it'd be rude to quote you on that point, but it's one of your most consistent arguments and it's not reasonable to expect people not to notice the special pleading you're doing around it. It'd be like me suddenly talking about the virtues of DNSSEC.
Not if you're using Signal for life-and-death secure messaging; in that scenario it's table stakes.
Your point with regards to criteria has merit, but this is unlikely to move the needle as Rural America continues to hollow out, so it's their funds to run the experiment. West Virginia has one of the oldest populations in the country (3rd [1]) while having the lowest birth rate (~16k/year and falling), for example (one of their pilots was in Mercer County, WV). Similar for Mississippi (highest out migration in the US [2] [3]).
There is simply no political appetite for the spending required in this regard without broad system changes to enable remote work to support rural communities as employers leave and agriculture dies. As you mention, this population cohort is what SNAP and Medicaid was stripped from. If some people have better lives through direct cash transfers while the outcome isn't going to change, that's fine I suppose. There are worse hobbies someone with resources could have.
TLDR Rural America will remain in decline [4] [5], urbanization will continue (because that's where the economic potential and jobs are).
[1] https://www.wboy.com/news/west-virginia/west-virginia-has-th...
[2] https://www.wapt.com/article/mississippi-ranks-among-top-sta...
[3] https://mississippitoday.org/2025/07/15/faq-mississippi-brai...
[4] ‘Too many old people’: A rural Pa. town reckons with population loss - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44583495 - June 2024 (81% of rural counties recording more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023)
[5] Map Shows 21 States Where Deaths Now Outnumber Births - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889024 - February 2026
It is remarkable how during the last 25 years (approximately), Microsoft has been improving their ability to deliver first (or be among the first), followed by messing up the whole process so that late comers end up taking the crown jewels.
PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI.
There certainly other examples that I failed to address.
This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for OKRs and whatever other goals.
> If China gets bogged down in Taiwan
I see a lot of posturing and sabre rattling, but I don't think Xi would make this mistake - there is too much interest from the West in an independent Taiwan and, as it is now, it's not really an urgent matter to settle it.
China always plays the long game. They are not in this for any quick wins, because there is no political benefit from it - their political system ensures popular and populist measures never prevail over long-term strategy.
That's quite an advantage over most Western democracies, where politicians always prioritise what will give them more votes in the next election over anything that will benefit the country a couple terms down the road.
I think the plain ordinary chatbot behind the Copilot on the desktop is fine, it seems like a skin around ChatGPT-5 in the "Smart" mode and in the "Search" mode it compares to Google's AI mode.
When it comes to anything multimodal it is an absolute disaster. Show it a photo of a plant for a plant id? Forget about it, just take a picture of the screen on your phone with Google Lens. If you ask it to draw something or make a Microsoft Word document you'll regret it.
For advice about how to do things on the command line or how bootstrap works or how to get out of a pickle you got yourself in Git it is great. It writes little scripts as well as anybody but you can't trust it to get string escaping right for filenames in bash scripts which is one reason I'd want help. For real coding I use Junie because I'm a Jetbrains enthusiast but other people seem to swear by Claude Code.
I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.
As a Fastmail customer, I appreciate these sorts of efforts. Thanks Fastmail!
Democrats have learned to get the messaging right lately, focusing on affordability instead of climate change. Hopefully they can stick to it while driving back the folks pushing fossil interests. Just keep hammering home that renewables and batteries will get you cheaper generation costs, ignore that it helps solve climate change too.
> Consider what you might choose to do…
Emphasis on might.
Evidence suggests "a giant boat and some helicopters" is the more likely result.
> But Musk actually did take tangible steps to clean it up and many accounts were banned.
Mmkay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_under_Elon_Musk#Child_...
"As of June 2023, an investigation by the Stanford Internet Observatory at Stanford University reported "a lapse in basic enforcement" against child porn by Twitter within "recent months". The number of staff on Twitter's trust and safety teams were reduced, for example, leaving one full-time staffer to handle all child sexual abuse material in the Asia-Pacific region in November 2022."
"In 2024, the company unsuccessfully attempted to avoid the imposition of fines in Australia regarding the government's inquiries about child safety enforcement; X Corp reportedly said they had no obligation to respond to the inquiries since they were addressed to "Twitter Inc", which X Corp argued had "ceased to exist"."
Not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, they clearly violated policies.
On the other hand, it really sucks to be at a company that has a large layoff and not get a list, only to find out that they person you were waiting on for a key item was laid off the week before and that's why they didn't finish it (ask me how I know!).
My assumption was that it's a way to convey it was written by a human because it would be hard to get an AI to write in all lowercase (which it actually isn't).
The discourse on here would be much better if commenters at least glanced at the article.
If you're happy "speaking to a real person" when you could automate that interaction away somehow then no, digital personal assistants probably aren't something you're going to care about.
I love talking to real people about stuff that matters to them and to me. I don't want to talk to them about booking a flight or hotel room.
This demo is really impressive: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mistralai/Voxtral-Mini-Realtim...
Don't be confused if it says "no microphone", the moment you click the record button it will request browser permission and then start working.
I spoke fast and dropped in some jargon and it got it all right - I said this and it transcribed it exactly right, WebAssembly spelling included:
> Can you tell me about RSS and Atom and the role of CSP headers in browser security, especially if you're using WebAssembly?
It allows note taking and corrections on drafts.
Same deal with things like SCOTUS opinions. (Random example: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-624_b07d.pdf)
Four pounds of hardware ingested by a jet engine is going to do a shitload of damage.
X is most definitely not a dumb pipe, you also have humans beside the sender and receiver choosing what content (whether directly or indirectly) is promoted for wide dissemination, relatively suppressed, or outright blocked.
https://www.governance.fyi/p/yes-i-am-a-pro-natalist
> Q12: Conservatives have more children than liberals. Doesn’t that mean conservative values produce higher fertility?
> At the individual level, yes. At the system level, the opposite is true.
> Individual conservatives have more children than individual liberals. But countries with conservative policy regimes have lower fertility than liberal ones. The Nordics and France outperform Southern Europe. Catholic Italy and Spain have Europe’s lowest fertility despite cultural emphasis on family. So we have a situation where social conservatives thrive and live their best lives under generous welfare states.
> POSIWID resolves the paradox. What matters isn’t what a system values. It’s what it produces.
> Conservative values say family is important. Liberal systems remove barriers to family formation. Traditional societies say “have children” while their systems say “good luck.” People respond to the system.
> France and northern Western European countries have high fertility because their systems.
> That said, Western European governments are now dismantling these decades-old systems since the Great Recession, with lots of academic research confirming the results. Meanwhile in Eastern Europe, right-wing parties sometimes advocate for family spending, as Stone would gladly attest. In Poland, Slavoj Žižek notes it was the right-wing PiS who implemented universal healthcare, not the left.
> The question isn’t whether you value family. It’s whether your system removes barriers and risk that prevents family formation.
It bounces off the ceiling and so is massively diffused.
You definitely don't look at it directly.
Funny, you're definitely right -- I've done it probably just 2 or 3 times over a decade, when I felt like I had two meaningful but completely unrelated things to say. And it always felt super weird, almost as if I was being dishonest or something. Could never quite put my finger on why. Or maybe I was worried it would look like I was trying to hog the conversation?
> LLMs have access to the same tools --- they run on a computer.
That doesn't give them access to anything. Tool access is provided either by the harness that runs the model or by downstream software, if it is provided at all, either to specific tools or to common standard interfaces like MCP that allow the user to provide tool definitions for tools external to the harness. Otherwise LLMs have no tools at all.
> The problem here is the basic implementation of LLMs. It is non-deterministic (i.e. probabilistic) which makes it inherently inadequate and unreliable for a lot of what people have come to expect from a computer.
LLMs, run with the usual software, are deterministic [ignoring hardware errors ans cosmic ray bit flips, which if considered make all software non-deterministic] (having only pseudorandomness if non-zero temperature is used) but hard to predict, though because implementations can allow interference from separate queries processed in a batch, and the end user doesn't know what other typical hosted models are non-deterministic when considered from the perspective of the known input being only what is sent by one user.
But your problem is probably actually that the result of untested combinations of configuration and input are not analytically predictable because of complexity, not that they are non-deterministic.
That's a neat product. You can expect it to be copied within a day or two of this announcement.
How much power does one of these consume?
Let me counter this with all of my anecdata: I don't know a single pothead that improved compared to who they were (mentally especially, including cognitive function) compared to when I knew them before they started smoking pot. I'm sure they exist, I have not met them in person yet.
>In 2024, there were just 15 cases, and, according to the provisional tally for 2025, the number is down to just 10.
In NY an individual can grow up to 5 plants legally a year and that's really a lot.
Because the hemp laws were poorly written, this product was legal in all 50 states
The 10mg THC drinks give a whiff of cannabis when you open one and produce an intoxication similar to smoking with an experience similar to drinking an alcoholic drink. It's more expensive than the cheapest beer, but similar to a reasonably priced wine or drink in a bar. Unfortunately these will be gone in most places by the end of 2026.
Original title "US Senator says AT&T, Verizon blocking release of Salt Typhoon security assessment reports" compressed to fit within title limits.
It's more nuanced than that. Under Trump I, Bezos added the batman-like slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness". Under Trump II, Bezos sucks up to Trump.
When I was in college I wrote a computer program (yes, involving yellow text) that couldn't be photocopied because I put the "o"s in the right place to trigger the eurion-finding algorithm. People thought it was neat.
Yeah, but we are still far off making it mainstream beyond some key use cases, QNX, INTEGRITY, language runtimes on top of type 1 hypervisors, all kernel extension points being pushed into userspace across Apple,Google,Microsoft offerings, Nintendo Switch,....
Unfortunely yes, that is the MBA school, and then when the gamble fails, it is the employees that get shown the door, because company XYZ did not met their targets.
CEO might even get a bonus as payoff for a risky move, from shareholders point of view, go figure this logic.
It’s not obsolete. In a country where your military is farm boys, the important thing is being able to start the war. Eventually chunks of the military will defect. We saw this happen during the Bangladesh independence movement. The revolutionaries got lucky and knocked over a weapons depot early in the conflict. They started fighting and a large number of the Pakistani army that was of Bangladeshi ancestry defected. I am confident the same thing would happen if the government in DC tried to oppress Iowa or Texas.
Drones cut both ways. You’re correct that it allows a small number of people loyal to the regime to asymmetrically oppress a large population. But drone technology is in theory accessible to the populace in an industrialized country.
Remember when credit cards required your signature on the back?
You misspelled 'hate speech'.
Being built on top of WinUI 3 is hardly much better given the lackluster tooling experience and bugs.
Pressing Win + W also might lead to a black rectangle with a waiting circle that can only be removed via a reboot, because well bugs in a system process.
Finally, as many point out, we don't want widgets that are mostly useless gimmicks.
Welcome to how Apple used to be during Gil Amelio days, at least now they are printing money thanks to iDevices, which wasn't the case back then.
Not what the OP is referring to, but UWP and successor apps were always sandboxed, from the time of Windows 8 onwards. This was derived from the Windows Mobile model, which in turn was emulating the Android/iOS app model.
Normally getting raided by the police causes people and organizations to change their behavior.
Notepad++ is one of my favourite editors, now it is forbidden by IT and checked for on security compliance checks if still installed, thanks to this attack.
One of the charges is "fraudulent data extraction by an organised group." That's going to affect the entire social media industry if applied broadly.
> The alternative is a race to bankrupt all competitors at enormous cost in order to jack up prices and recoup the losses as a monopoly
I don't know of an instance of this happening successfully.
In my experience you will need to think even harder with AI if you want a decent result, although the problems you'll be thinking about will be more along the lines of "what the hell did it just write?"
The current major problem with the software industry isn't quantity, it's quality; and AI just increases the former while decreasing the latter. Instead of e.g. finding ways to reduce boilerplate, people are just using AI to generate more of it.
Sadly, nobody has time or budget for beauty any more
It's amazing how ornately decorated early equipment was --- especially 19th century and earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cooke_and_Wheatstone_elec...
Not everyone is all the time on the Internet, for some folks their computer needs have stayed the much pretty much the same.
If they want to travel they go to an agency, they still go to the local bank branch to do their stuff, news only what comes up on radio and TV, music is what is on radio, CDs and vinyl, and yet manage to have a good life.
"Sometimes you have to keep thinking past the point where it starts to hurt." - Fermi
> mandate required voting
I don't see how forcing a person to vote will result in carefully considering what to vote for.
A right to vote includes the right to not vote.
Since the GENIUS act [1], stablecoins have been backed by the US military too, as long as the stablecoin issuer itself keeps its reserves in U.S. Treasuries.
It's an interesting point about currencies being backed by military force though. Given the recent technological advancements in drones and robotics, it makes me wonder if someone will launch a non-GENIUS-act-compliant cryptocurrency and then back it simply by military force.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/158...
Ctrl+F "SIP" - 0 results before this comment.
There are decades-old standards for VoIP and teleconferencing, which even the proprietary solutions will often let you interoperate with (at additional cost). Now would be a good time to actually promote them.
A long essay, which ignored the elephant in the room.
Prosperity and growth come from free markets. The correlation is very strong. Poor countries are poor because they eschew free markets.
At the TB level, the difference is closer to 10%.
Three binary terabytes i.e. 3 * 2^40 is 3298534883328, or 298534883328 more bytes than 3 decimal terabytes. The latter is 298.5 decimal gigabytes, or 278 binary gigabytes.
Indeed, early hard drives had slightly more than even the binary size --- the famous 10MB IBM disk, for example, had 10653696 bytes, which was 167936 bytes more than 10MB --- more than an entire 160KB floppy's worth of data.
Is it against the rules to say that most of the comments here (at least right now) are drastically missing the point? "Rich countries exploit poor ones!!" - ok, fine, you could argue that's been happening since the beginning of time, doesn't change anything about the conclusions of the article. "The article obsesses over GDP convergence!!" - you can argue GDP is not the perfect metric but the fact is a lot of these poor countries have not been converging on lots of quality of life metrics that matter.
The fundamental thrust of the article is that poor countries only "converged" for a short while due to the Chinese-driven commodity boom, and I think this argument is very compelling. Worse, as history has shown tons of times, commodity booms often end up being bad for a country in the long term because they don't lead to meaningful investments in other productivity-improving endeavors (e.g. Dutch disease that the article mentions).
And I think a subtext of this article is that the economic profession in general has a ton of soul searching to do. Too often economics has depicted rosy outcomes for a host of activities where it has just been flat out wrong. This article goes into detail about how "convergence" almost never happened except for a short "sugar high" driven my Chinese commodity demand. Similarly, I've seen a few mea culpas over the years arguing that the once orthodox view that globalization would be great for everyone failed to take into account how it could contribute to destabilizing democracies as the "economic losers" in rich countries started to demand more political power, one aspect in the rise of populism and some of its dangerous effects.
GDP per capita is highly correlated with metrics like infant mortality.
They certainly have such offerings, but I'm perplexed at how you get to 'most of the things on sale'. The most processed things I get from there on a regular basis are bread, cookies, or alcoholic drinks. It's very rare that I find myself looking at the label of anything I can purchase there wondering how it was made.
Do you, as a (presumably) human, not require documentation to learn new skills?
Not in this case, since the US hasn't sanctioned Denmark. Trump's rage bleating on Truth Social doesn't constitute official policy. Now, if restrictions on doing business with Denmark were published in the Federal Register, it could get complicated.
> Kessler syndrome: a cascading explosion of debris crippling our access to space
I'm taking the parts of this write-up I don't have expertise with a grain of salt after seeig this.
Kessler cascades are real. Particularly at high altitudes. They're less of a problem in LEO. And in no case can they "[cripple] our access to space." (At current technology levels. To cripple access to space you need to vaporise material fractions of the Earth's crust into orbit.)
> "Ultra-processed foods" isn't a scientific concept
This is like arguing astronomy isn’t real because colloquial definitions of space are ambiguous.
The study [1] uses a definition that finds a significant effect. We should investigate that further. If it pans out and the term ultra-processed food triggers people, we can rebrand it. (Did the cigarette lobby ever try muddying the water on what cigarettes are?)
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066
Someone will have to file suit, as is tradition under this administration.
Alexander Acosta.
Improves detection and response around public health concerns. Current hot topics are measles [1] and syphilis [2] outbreaks.
[1] America’s Measles Crisis Is Spiraling - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-02-03/measle... | https://archive.today/XXYZt - February 3rd, 2026
[2] Syphilis Resurgence: Rising Rates, Public Health Challenges, and Future Strategies - https://www.infectiousdiseaseadvisor.com/features/syphilis-r... - September 26th, 2025
They do have some physical records, but it would be mostly investigators producing a warrant and forcing staff to hand over administrative credentials to allow forensic data collection.
The lack of UL approval is a concern. This thing draws over 500 watts and runs hot.
I hit the jackpot with the ultrasound technician who spoke passionately about what she believed about lifestyle risk for cardiovascular conditions and she believed quite strongly that heart disease runs in families more because lifestyle runs in families than because of genetics. She's not at the top of the medical totem pole but I can say she inspired me to take responsibility for my health than the specialist who I talked to about the results.
> There's only about 20km of depth from the sea
Don’t underestimate the stopping power of water. Taiwan will be China’s first combined-arms assault with a critical amphibious component.
> war in Ukraine is like fighting over Iowa, one farm at a time. Taiwan is not like that
Wide-open plains are traditionally easier for large armies to conquer than mountains.
Go back to the SVB failure threads here and observe the freak out before the decision was made to reimburse deposits above FDIC limits. Sometimes you’re lucky, but luck is not effective risk management.
> there are very important things the CEQA does to improve our environmental conditions
Which fits with OP’s assertion that it does “more harm than good.” (Fortunately, restricting the private right of action would curtail a lot of the harm. On the national level I’m pretty much at the point of wanting NEPA repealed.)
Might help them win crypto deals. Or expand into shady geographies. Otherwise, I guess having a signal that your founders will donate the interest they’re owed is…something.
> the distinction is that the blade tips in these reach supersonic speeds like in turbofans
Commercial engines are not designed to have anything to supersonic.
Kinda deliberately missing the point there, but go off.
Please add to https://european-alternatives.eu/ if not already there!
Sadly the media calls the lawful use of a warrant a 'raid' but that's another issue.
The warrant will have detailed what it is they are looking for, French warrants (and legal system!) are quite a bit different than the US but in broad terms operate similarly. It suggests that an enforcement agency believes that there is evidence of a crime at the offices.
As a former IT/operations guy I'd guess they want on-prem servers with things like email and shared storage, stuff that would hold internal discussions about the thing they were interested in, but that is just my guess based on the article saying this is related to the earlier complaint that Grok was generating CSAM on demand.
What's the use case for this? Trying to get raw API access through a monthly plan? Or something else?
A bit odd that this talks about AutoGPT and declares it a failure. Gary quotes himself describing it like this:
> With direct access to the Internet, the ability to write source code and increased powers of automation, this may well have drastic and difficult to predict security consequences.
AutoGPT was a failure, but Claude Code / Codex CLI / the whole category of coding agents fit the above description almost exactly and are effectively AutoGPT done right, and they've been a huge success over the past 12 months.
AutoGPT was way too early - the models weren't ready for it.
> If China gets bogged down in Taiwan...
Look at the geography. Taiwan is a long, narrow island. All the important parts are in a narrow plain on the west side, facing China. There's only about 20km of depth from the sea.
The war in Ukraine is like fighting over Iowa, one farm at a time. Taiwan is not like that.
This, IMHO, puts the "can we keep AIs in a box" argument to rest once and for all.
The answer is, no, because people will take the AIs out the box for a bit of light entertainment.
Let alone any serious promise of gain.
Not something I've ever experienced. Open As... Always works just fine.
I don't think you have to, you can run the integrated watcher, no?
Sibling comments are good. I'll add that the biggest concern is PM2.5 (particulates smaller than 2.5 micrometers). They're thought to be responsible for 70,000 excess deaths in the U.S. annually, more than homicides or drug overdoses: https://www.stateofglobalair.org/health/pm
You can do this, today, if you want, via an IRA or some 401(k)s.
What are you talking about? The article literally fully explains the rationale, as well as the history. It's not "denying" anything. Seems entirely reasonable and balanced to me.
I'd wager this routinely happens several times a year.
In both directions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Iranian_shoot-down_of_Ame...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...
YC's previous recommendation was to use Silicon Valley Bank. That ended well.
The most "major" incident in recent history was 9/11 which involved neither guns nor bombs. So I don't know what you're talking about.
For identity theft, I think at this point it depends on where you set the bar. I've never had someone clean out my checking account or anything truly large, but my wife and I have had fraudulent charges on our credit cards several times as they've been leaked out one way or another. I would not "identify" as a "identity theft victim" per se if you asked me out of the blue, because compared to some of what I've heard about, I've had nothing more than minor annoyances come out of this. But yeah, I'd guess that it's fair to say that at this point most people have had at least some sort of identity-related issue at some point.
We'll see!
Keep in mind that the current state of space electronics is centered around one-off very expensive launches, where the electronics failure would be a fiscal disaster. (See JWST)
Being able to rapidly launch cheap electronics may very well change the whole outlook on this.
Goodbye CoPilot plugin, yet another platform Microsoft loses on.
One day they will discover threaded conversions.
Whether you are a tech company or not, there's a lot of data on computers that are physically in the office.
It's exactly the tokenizer, but we shoplifted the idea too; it belongs to the world!
(The credential thing I'm actually proud of is non-exfiltratable machine-bound Macaroons).
Remember that the security promises of this scheme depend on tight control over not only what hosts you'll send requests to, but what parts of the requests themselves.
While that speed increase is real, of course, you're really just looking at the general speed delta between Python and C there. To be honest I'm a bit surprised you didn't get another factor of 2 or 3.
"Cimba even processed more simulated events per second on a single CPU core than SimPy could do on all 64 cores"
One of the reasons I don't care in the slightest about Python "fixing" the GIL. When your language is already running at a speed where a compiled language can be quite reasonably expected to outdo your performance on 32 or 64 cores on a single core, who really cares if removing the GIL lets me get twice the speed of an unthreaded program in Python by running on 8 cores? If speed was important you shouldn't have been using pure Python.
(And let me underline that pure in "pure Python". There are many ways to be in the Python ecosystem but not be running Python. Those all have their own complicated cost/benefit tradeoffs on speed ranging all over the board. I'm talking about pure Python here.)
Yeah, this is a really neat idea: https://deno.com/blog/introducing-deno-sandbox#secrets-that-...
await using sandbox = await Sandbox.create({
secrets: {
OPENAI_API_KEY: {
hosts: ["api.openai.com"],
value: process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY,
},
},
});
await sandbox.sh`echo $OPENAI_API_KEY`;
// DENO_SECRET_PLACEHOLDER_b14043a2f578cba75ebe04791e8e2c7d4002fd0c1f825e19...
Kind of like how XSS attacks can't read httpOnly cookies but they can generally still cause fetch() requests that can take actions using those cookies.
My 1 year old M4 mini is in beachball nation, it got slower quickly like it was running Win XP.
What about the guy in the last Star Wars trilogy who seems like a refugee from Doctor Who?
> Starting with this release, pandoc can be compiled to WASM, making it possible to use pandoc in the browser. A full-featured GUI interface is provided at https://pandoc.org/app.