MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-23 15:53:17+00:00
More than that, compare it to modern cloud CPUs. EPYC 9845 gets 153000 but that's with 160 cores / 320 threads. Per core it's under 1000 and 4 cores would be 3825 when the 11-year-old i7 is 8000.

Because those big systems are optimized for power efficiency. That Epyc is ~2.4W/core compared to ~16W/core for that old i7. It has a lower base clock and is Zen5c. If we cut the 8-core Ryzen 9850X3D's score in half, four Ryzen cores from the same generation but with a higher base clock and six times the L3 cache per core would be 20942. But it's also back up to 15W/core. The Epyc still has better performance per watt.

The newer cores are more efficient and faster per clock. That doesn't mean they're unconditionally faster independent of all other variables.
Show HN: SpecterQA – AI personas test your web app, no scripts needed
by synctek | 2026-02-23 15:53:39+00:00
SpecterQA is an open-source CLI for behavioral testing. Instead of writing test scripts with selectors, you define personas (YAML) and journeys (goals). The engine launches a real browser via Playwright, screenshots the page, sends it to Claude's vision model, and the AI decides what to click/type/scroll. Loop until done or stuck.

The idea: test scripts break when markup changes. Vision-based tests break when the UX actually breaks.

Personas have attributes like technical comfort, patience, and role that shape navigation behavior. A "frustrated non-technical admin" navigates differently than a "power user developer."

pip install specterqa
specterqa init
specterqa run -p demo

Cost: ~$0.30-$3.00/run depending on journey length. Built-in budget caps. Requires Anthropic API key.

Previously called GhostQA — we rebranded after discovering ghostqa.com exists as an AI testing company. Clean break, no confusion.

GitHub: https://github.com/SyncTek-LLC/specterqa

MIT license. Alpha (v0.3.0). Feedback welcome.
by AdamN | 2026-02-23 15:53:44+00:00
That's the ethos of the entire tiny home movement. Large houses consume a lot of time and mental energy just to maintain them and to walk from one side to the other. I noticed it a lot moving from a 3 story 2,500 sq ft home in Seattle to a similarly sized apartment in Berlin that's all on one floor. My kids do miss sliding down the stairs though.
by data_ders | 2026-02-23 15:53:54+00:00
I'm as big a SQL stan as the next person and I'm also very skeptical anytime anyone says that SQL needs to be replaced.

At the same time, it's challenging that SQL cannot be iteratively improved and experimented upon.

IMHO, PRQL is a reasonable approach to extending SQL without replacing SQL.

But what I'd love to see is projects like Google's zeta-sql [1] and Substrait [2] get more traction. It would provide a more stable, standardized foundation upon which SQL could be improved, which would make the case for "SQL forever" even more strong.

I've blogged about this before [3].

[1]: https://github.com/google/googlesql
[2]: https://substrait.io/
[3]: https://roundup.getdbt.com/p/problem-exists-between-database...
by idoubtit | 2026-02-23 15:54:02+00:00
0AD's web site is rather bad at describing the game, but Beyond All Reason is even worse. I rarely play, so I had never heard about it. Both focus on details, forgetting the main points.

After reading BAR's homepage and the FAQ, I still have no idea what to expect. It could be a purely online game with ads and in-game buys, through a central proprietary server. It could also have a single player campaign.
by intended | 2026-02-23 15:54:07+00:00
The vibe has shifted quite a bit among the general populace, not just in tech.

The short version is that voters want government to bring tech to heel.

From what I see, people are tired of tech, social media, and enshittified apps. AI hype, talk of the singularity, and fears about job loss have pushed things well past grim.

Recent social media bans indicate how far voter tolerance for control and regulation has shifted.

This is problematic because government is also looking for reasons to do so. Partly because big tech is simply dominant, and partly because governments are trending toward authoritarianism.

The solution would have been research that helped create targeted and effective policy. Unfortunately, tech (especially social media) is naturally hostile to research that may paint its work as unhealthy or harmful.

Tech firms are burned by exposés, user apathy, and a desire to keep getting paid.

The lack of open research and access to data blocks the creation of knowledge and empirical evidence, which are the cornerstones of nuanced, narrowly tailored policy.

The only things left on the table are blunt instruments, such as age verification.
by Marsymars | 2026-02-23 15:54:07+00:00
Sure, but we're generally talking here about companies that don't operate only in the US. :)

e.g. the CRTC has regulations around a la carte offerings since the past decade: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/television/program/alacarte.htm

> TV service providers must offer channels both individually and in packages of up to 10 channels.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-23 15:54:19+00:00
My brother, literally not one of your claims is true. I'm not sure where you have gotten the idea that such lies are the truth, but you really should reconsider your position. You seem to be very angry at the church (based on you posting this sort of thing all up and down the thread), but believing outright false ideas about the church isn't going to fix anything.
by akersten | 2026-02-23 15:54:28+00:00
> and still there's no mechanism for privacy friendly approval for adults apart from sending over the whole ID. Of course this is a huge failure of governments but probably also of W3C

I consider it a huge success of the Internet architects that we were able to create a protocol and online culture resilient for over 3 decades to this legacy meatspace nonsense.

> That being said, this is a 1 bit information, adult in current legislation yes/no.

If that's all it would take to satisfy legislatures forever, and the implementation was left up to the browser (`return 1`) I'd be all for it. Unfortunately the political interests here want way more than that.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-23 15:54:29+00:00
As TFA says, they are running the algorithm multiple times and they check that the results match, to guard against transient errors caused by radiation.

The permanent errors caused by radiation must be identified by periodic self tests. When the permanent damage is in a redundant structure, e.g. as mentioned in TFA when they find some memory bits that are permanently damaged, they must avoid using what is damaged.

Eventually radiation will destroy something that is essential, but until then the Snapdragon CPU should be usable.
by armchairhacker | 2026-02-23 15:54:42+00:00
> what would stop anyone from merely hosting porn in Romania or some country that didn't care about US age-verification laws

A government could implement the equivalent of China's great firewall. Even if it doesn't stop everyone, it would stop most people. The main problem I suspect is that it would be widely unpopular in the US or Europe, because (especially younger) people have become addicted to porn and brainrot, and these governments are still democracies.
by thesz | 2026-02-23 15:54:48+00:00
SQL is not a pipeline, it is a graph.

Imagine three joins of three queries A,B and C, where first join J1 joins A and B, second join J2 joins A and C and third join J3 joins J1 and J2. Note that I said "queries," not "tables" - these A, B and C can be complex things one would not want or be able to compute more than once. Forget about compute, A, B and C can be quite complex to even write down and the user may really do not want to repeat itself. Look at TPC-DS, there are subqueries in the "with" sections that are quite complex.

This is why pipeline replacements for SQL are more or less futile efforts. They simplify simple part and avoid touching complex one.

I think that something like Verse [1] is more or less way to go. Not the Verse itself, but functional logic programming as an idea, where you can have first class data producers and effect system to specify transactions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Engine#Verse
by tzs | 2026-02-23 15:54:53+00:00
1. Automotive LiDAR is down to $350 in China already. BYD is starting to put LiDAR in even entry level cars. (It's been in their mid and high end cars for a while).

2+3. BYD collects extensive training data from customers, much like Tesla does. They will have no trouble with training.
by delusional | 2026-02-23 15:54:53+00:00
How does this solve the problem at all? You're just making more problems. Now you have to deal with a black market of "unlocked" phones. You're having to deal with kids sharing unlocked phone. Would police have to wal around trying to buy unlocked phones to catch people selling them to minors? What about selling phones on the internet, would they check ID now?

SOME parents give their children access to their ID. That is NOT the same as ALL parents, and therefore is not a reason not to give those parents a helping hand.

Even just informing children that they're entering an adult space has some value, and if they then have to go ask their parents to borrow their wallet, that's good enough for me.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-23 15:55:11+00:00
> Time for an AI tax on the hyperscalers.

Like the purchase price + increased cost? The thing is that these parties are sitting on billions and billions of investor money, they don't care that hardware is 400x as expensive. Which companies like nvidia have capitalized on a few years ago, they were already able to price their hardware at a 400% markup compared to pre-crypto times, and shift their focus from consumer graphics chips to datacenter compute chips, causing their revenue to go up 6x (if my interpretation of [0] is correct)

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/revenu...
by bilbo0s | 2026-02-23 15:55:23+00:00
I think we should be careful of writing off this sea change as simple professional influence campaigns. That kind of thinking is just what got Trump to the Whitehouse, and is currently getting the immigrants rounded up.

Things that didn't seem likely to have broad support previously, now are seen as acceptable. In the 90's no one could envision rounding up immigrants. No one could envision uploading an ID card to use ICQ. No one could envision the concept of DE-naturalization or getting rid of birthright citizenship.

Today, in the US for instance, there are entire new generations of people alive. And many, many people who were alive in the 90's are gone. Well these new people very much can envision these things. And they seem to have stocked the Supreme Court to make all these kinds of things a reality.

All because the rest of us keep dismissing all of this as just harmless extreme positions that no one in society really supports. We have to start fighting things like this with more than, "It's not real."
by anon_shill | 2026-02-23 15:55:24+00:00
From the second paragraph:

> And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely.

This is not true and made me immediately stop reading. If a social media app uses a third party vendor to do facial/ID age estimation, the vendor can (and in many cases does) only send an estimated age range back to the caller. Some of the more privacy invasive KYC vendors like Persona persist and optionally pass back entire government IDs, but there are other age verifiers (k-ID, PRIVO, among others) who don't. Regulators are happy with apps using these less invasive ones and making a best effort based on an estimated age, and that doesn't require storing any additional PII. We really need to deconflate age verification from KYC to have productive conversations about this stuff. You can do one thing without doing the other.
by zer00eyz | 2026-02-23 15:56:02+00:00
> Tons of data also showing higher suicide rates

Here is the data:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm

and the more recent data:

https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/

I was a child of the 90's, where the numbers were higher, where we had peak PMRC.

> depression rates

Have these changed? Or have we changed the criteria for what qualifies as "depression"? We keep changing how we collect data, and then dont renormalized when that collection skews the stats. This is another case of it, honestly.

> eating disorders

Any sort of accurate data collection here is a recent development:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7575017/

> never ending cat and mouse game with my kids (especially my son)

Having lived this with my own, I get it. Kids are gonna be kids, and they are going to break the rules and push limits. When I think back to the things I did as a kid at their age, they are candidly doing MUCH better than I, or my peer group was. Drug use, Drinking, ( https://usafacts.org/articles/is-teen-drug-and-alcohol-use-d... ) teen pregnancy are all down ( https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45184 )
by qsort | 2026-02-23 15:56:04+00:00
The doubling cube works well in Backgammon because it is a rare example of a popular game with randomness, without hidden information (every information set contains exactly one node of the decision tree, if you want to get extremely technical,) and, critically, with "different endings" (normal win, gammon, backgammon.) Doubling decisions are especially interesting because while they're always objective (it could never be the case that perfect players disagree on the correct move, that requires nontrivial information sets,) it could be the case that:

- it's correct for a player to double and for the other to accept;

- it's correct for a player to double and for the other not to accept;

- the position is "too good to double," because the equity from the probability of a double or triple game exceeds the advantage you'd get from a double;

- all of the above being influenced by the match score, e.g. if I'm 3 points away from winning and you're 5 points away from winning, I could make different decisions than if it were the opposite.

Chess has none of them, the doubling cube would be exclusively a psychological power play, something like "it's theoretically drawn but I don't think you can defend it," which is not a great game dynamic.

In general, transplanting the doubling mechanic without a similarly rich context doesn't tend to work well.
by boerseth | 2026-02-23 15:57:11+00:00
Does each service really need to collect this data from the user directly? They could instead have the user authorise them by e.g. OAuth2 to access their age with one of the de-facto online-identity-providers. I would be surprised if they didn't implement an API for this sometime soon, cause it would place them as the source of truth and give them unique access to that bit of user data. Seems like a chance and position they wouldn't want to lose.
by observationist | 2026-02-23 15:57:17+00:00
It's inauthentic at best. The four horsemen of the infocaplypse are drugs, pedos, terrorists, and money laundering - they trot out the same old tired "protect the children!" arguments every year, and every year it's never, ever about protecting children, it's about increasing control of speech and stamping out politics, ideology, and culture they disapprove of. For a recent example, check out the UK's once thriving small forum culture, the innumerable hobby websites, collections of esoteric trivia, small sites that simply could not bear the onerous requirements imposed by the tinpot tyrants and bureaucrats and the OSA.

It's never fucking safety, or protecting children, or preventing fraud, or preventing terrorism, or preventing drugs or money laundering or gang activities. It's always, 100% of the time, inevitably, without exception, a tool used by petty bureaucrats and power hungry politicians to exert power and control over the citizens they are supposed to represent.

They might use it on a couple of token examples for propaganda purposes, but if you look throughout the world where laws like this are implemented, authoritarian countries and western "democracies" alike, these laws are used to control locals. It's almost refreshingly straightforward and honest when a country just does the authoritarian things, instead of doing all the weaselly mental gymnastics to justify their power grabs.

People who support this are ignorant or ideologically aligned with authoritarianism. There's no middle ground; anonymity and privacy are liberty and freedom. If you can't have the former you won't have the latter.
by mysports | 2026-02-23 15:57:20+00:00
My three boys are sports-obsessed and every morning was a fight over screens to check scores. I built a system that pulls NBA scores, box scores, standings, stat leaders, and European soccer results overnight, generates a personalized PDF for each kid based on their teams, and emails it to me at 6am. I print them out and leave them on the kitchen table.
Stack: Python, ESPN/NBA APIs, API-Football, ReportLab for PDF generation, Supabase for signups, Cloudflare Pages for the site. The core NBA data doesn't need API keys (ESPN's endpoints are open), but I use an API-Football key for soccer goal scorers.
Happy to answer questions about the build or the APIs.
by lvca | 2026-02-23 15:57:21+00:00
Congrats to the SurrealDB team! Shipping 3.0 is a serious milestone.

This is also a broader validation moment for the multi-model database space. In a market historically dominated by specialized, single-purpose systems (a separate DB for graphs, another for documents, another for search), it's meaningful that multiple independent projects — SurrealDB, ArcadeDB, and others — are converging on the same thesis: one database, many models. That kind of convergence signals the idea has real legs, not just as an engineering curiosity but as something the market is starting to demand.

If you're evaluating options in this space, worth also looking at ArcadeDB (https://arcadedb.com, Apache 2.0). It covers the same models — graph, document, key/value, time-series, full-text search, vector embeddings — but differs in a few practical ways:

- Query language: ArcadeDB speaks SQL, Cypher (OpenCypher-compliant with TCK testing), Gremlin, GraphQL, and MongoDB QL out of the box, so existing tooling tends to work without migration. The 26.2.1 release also added the Neo4j Bolt wire protocol, so standard Neo4j drivers connect directly.

- TimeSeries model is coming next week already compatible with the time series landscape, highly optimized

- License: Apache 2.0 with an explicit commitment to never change it. SurrealDB 3.0 ships under BSL 1.1, which converts to Apache 2.0 in 2030

- Runtime: Java 21, embeddable as a library or client-server, runs on Linux/macOS/Windows (x86_64 and ARM64).

Not saying one is better for all use cases — both are interesting takes on the multi-model problem. If BSL or SurrealQL lock-in are considerations for your team, ArcadeDB is in the same conversation.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of ArcadeDB and of OrientDB (now part of SAP - one of the DBMS SurrealDB was inspired by)
by AStrangeMorrow | 2026-02-23 15:57:26+00:00
I disagree quite a bit. For me the medium, the technique, the process is all part of the art. Yet I still think the end result also matters. Coming up with create ways to produce art matters.

And I am confused about the “doing it any other way”? I don’t really see other ways to achieve the same result. Say painting and photography will both produce end results that are quite different. The skills are very different. The end material is also quite different. The same way stained glass is quite different from painting
by jp1016 | 2026-02-23 15:57:32+00:00
The byte-for-byte identical output requirement is the smartest part of this whole thing. You basically get to run the old and new pipelines side by side and diff them, which means any bug in the translation is immediately caught. Way too many rewrites fail because people try to "improve" things during the port and end up chasing phantom bugs that might be in the old code, the new code, or just behavioral differences.

Also worth noting that "translated from C++" Rust is totally fine as a starting point. You can incrementally make it more idiomatic later once the C++ side is retired. The Rust compiler will still catch whole classes of memory bugs even if the code reads a bit weird. That's the whole point.
by MS90 | 2026-02-23 15:57:38+00:00
I've noticed that there seems to be big inconsistencies from location to location, at least around me. One Best Buy never has anything on the shelves, doesn't have much of their higher-end stuff at all, and constantly looks like they just got robbed.

But 15 minutes away there's another Best Buy that has a dedicated PC hardware section that almost reminds me of going to Fry's back in the day. I was flabbergasted the first time I walked in there, I almost thought I'd been mistaken and entered a different store.
by appsoftware | 2026-02-23 15:58:50+00:00
Actually I disagree. I've killed projects because I've run out of time for them and didn't like them costing me £50 a month. If I'd been able to keep them going at £10 a month, I might have kept them going until I could get back to them. Sometimes startups fail just because the owners get distracted by life, and the project just needs more time.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-23 15:58:58+00:00
> but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone?

Google doesn't do retail other than Chromecast and Pixel phones, and that is already annoying to them as it is because it involves something Google is notoriously bad at - actual customer support.

Starting up a car brand is orders of magnitude worse.

For one, people actually need to trust your brand to survive for at least five to ten years - cars are an investment, and a car that I can't trust to get safety-relevant spare parts (brake rotors, brake pads, axle bearings) all of a sudden is essentially an oversized paperweight. For a company such as Google, this alone (remember Killed By Google) is a huge obstacle to overcome.

And then, you need a nationwide network of spare parts, dealerships, repair shops and technicians that can fix the issues that people will get alone because the wide masses abuse cars in ways you might not even dare think about while testing, or because other people run into your cars and so your cars need repairs.

Even Tesla, and they've been at it for the better part of two decades, still struggles with that. Their shitty spare parts logistics actually drive up not just insurance prices for their own customers, but for everyone - hit a Tesla with your Dodge and be at fault, and now your insurance has to pay out for months of a rental car because Tesla can't be arsed to provide the body shop the Tesla ends up at with spare parts in any reasonable time.

Established car brands however have all of that ironed out for many, many decades now. American, Asian, European, doesn't matter. And the spare parts don't even have to be made for cars: ask your local Volkswagen dealer to order a few pieces of "199 398 500 A" and one piece of "199 398 500 B" and you'll probably have a lead time of less than a day, at least in Germany - for the uninitiated: that part number belongs to the famous sausage, the second one to the accompanying curry ketchup, with more sausages being sold each year than actual cars.

And established car brands also bring something to the table: their own experiences with integrating smart technology. Yes, particularly German carmakers are notoriously bad in that regard, but for example Mercedes Benz was the first car brand in the world to get a certified Level 3 system on the road [1] and are now working on a Level 4 certification [2]. That kind of experience in navigating bureaucracy, integration and testing cannot be paid for in money.

[1] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren...

[2] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren...