MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HanShotFirst | 2026-02-19 14:27:05+00:00
1) Reducing chronic absenteeism by more aggressive tracking and offering social and financial support for students who may have difficulties at home.
2) Adding more optional school days during breaks, including busing and school lunches on those days.
3) The third isn't explicitly stated. The article mentions free college for public H.S. graduates, but it's hard to see how that would improve reading and math scores much earlier in life. The article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)
Show HN: The Lamplighter – Same story from left, right, and verified center
by Sleeves | 2026-02-19 14:27:13+00:00
The Lamplighter generates five stories daily, each presented three ways: a left-leaning version, a right-leaning version, and a center column sourced only from public records and primary sources. The left and right versions have bias markup built in — opinion is highlighted in yellow, misleading claims in red. You can toggle highlights on/off to read the story "clean" first, then see where the framing is.

It's fully AI-generated (Claude API) and transparent about that. The pipeline scrapes coverage from across the political spectrum, identifies the factual core, then generates three versions. Center column cites only government data, court records, wire services. The partisan columns cite the outlets whose framing they're modeling.

The whole thing runs on Replit with a PostgreSQL backend, generates automatically at 6 AM, and costs about $1/edition (for me). It also has three AI columnist personas who write opinion pieces and a literary column called "By Lamplight."

I'm not claiming this is better journalism — it's a tool for making the machinery of media bias visible. Interested in feedback on the approach, the bias detection methodology, or anything else.
Show HN: Credit-to-currency conversion controls for wallet-based billing
by ShreyaChaurasia | 2026-02-19 14:27:13+00:00
If you sell credits or tokens, at some point someone asks:
“What is one credit actually worth?”

We shipped explicit Wallet Conversion Rate controls in Flexprice to answer that cleanly.

Each wallet can now define:
• conversion_rate — how credits map to currency when spending
• topup_conversion_rate — optional rate used only when adding credits

This supports use cases like promotional top-ups, bonus credits, or discounted purchases while keeping invoice calculations consistent.

Wallets store credits.Invoices remain in a single base currency.
Conversion defines the relationship between the two.

The goal is simple: make credit systems flexible for product teams and predictable for finance teams.
Happy to answer questions about edge cases or implementation details.
by simondanisch | 2026-02-19 14:27:23+00:00
Well I'm a bit of an AMD "fanboy" and really dislike NVIDIA's vendor lock in.
I'm not sure what you mean by dynamic dispatch across GPU backends - nothing should be dynamic there and most easier primitives map quite nicely between vendors (e.g. local memory, work groups etc).
To be honest, the BVH/TLAS has been pretty simple in comparison to the wavefront infrastructure. We haven't done anything fancy yet, but the performance is still really good. I'm sure there are still lots of things we can do to improve performance, but right now I've concentrated on getting something usable out.
Right now, we're mostly matching pbrt-v4 performance, but I couldn't compare to their NVIDIA only GPU acceleration without an NVIDIA gpu. I can just say that the performance is MUCH better than what I initially aimed for and it feels equally usable as some of the state of the art renderers I've been using. A 1:1 comparison is still missing though, since it's not easy to do a good comparison without comparing apples to oranges (already mapping materials and light types from one render to another is not trivial).
Humanity Has Managed to Fall into Time Loop Regarding "AI"
by kokhanserhii | 2026-02-19 14:27:32+00:00
The AI Time Loop

Much of the current AI debate is stuck in a time loop, where regulation and public skepticism focus on models from 2017 to 2023. As a researcher who has been following AI since the 1980s, I argue that we have reached a phase transition. The gap between the 2023 model and the 2026 system is not gradual—it's the difference between a moped and a spaceship—yet our terminology and social contracts remain dangerously outdated.

The harmful term "artificial intelligence" creates the false illusion of an autonomous subject, obscuring the critical role of human performers and the human narratives of various communities. By reimagining these systems as "smart chats" with specific years of release, we return to an engineering-centric approach, where the value of the outcome is determined by the operator's ability to "play" the instrument. For the educated user, these tools serve as a bridge to the collective wisdom of humanity, while for the uninitiated, they remain a source of artificial information noise.
https://zenodo.org/records/18683885
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-02-19 14:27:38+00:00
Note when they say "shot up the national rankings" they mean relative, since Alabama remained static on scores, but others slipped.

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/...

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...

They might be better looking at what the states going down were doing and using that for (anti-) lessons as maintaining a score hardly seems like a rousing success for new initiatives.
by heisgone | 2026-02-19 14:28:47+00:00
The inability of the US to maintain soft power, or any power that isn't rooted in the use of force, will be its international demise. An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible. So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network. Those NGOs end up being so secretive that most of the money disapears in the pockets of the middleman.

Another problem is the US is broke. With a 6% of the GDP deficit, it can't invest abroad. This is the curse of being the reserve currency. Subversion is the only thing the U.S. can afford. Countries around the world knew that about the U.S. and USAID.
by drum55 | 2026-02-19 14:29:46+00:00
It's a very minor distinction, but they aren't a epaper display (low refresh rate, zero power to maintain an image), rather the technology is a sharp memory LCD (ludicrously low power, but high refresh rate). They're extremely neat and don't suffer from the washed out color and ghosting that epaper does, at the cost of needing ever so slightly above no power to keep an image displayed. I much, much prefer them even though Sharp doesn't really advertise them anymore.

https://sharpdevices.com/memory-lcd/
by mysocialguard | 2026-02-19 14:30:35+00:00
That is a critical point. The 'Sybil attack' or malicious reporting to sabotage competitors is a real risk for any reputation system.

To mitigate this, we are currently designing a weighted reputation system for reporters. The goal is to ensure that a report from a brand-new account doesn't carry the same weight as one from a contributor with a proven track record of accurate flagging.

In the meantime, we are emphasizing the inclusion of verifiable evidence (like transaction hashes or communication logs) so the community can peer-review the validity of a report rather than just counting 'blind' votes.

It’s a constant cat-and-mouse game. Since we are in the early stages, I'm very interested to hear if you’ve seen any specific consensus models or 'Web of Trust' implementations that could help us prevent this type of abuse effectively.
by grishka | 2026-02-19 14:30:35+00:00
> risk of cert compromise and forgery increases over time.

And what if the certificate is compromised before it expires? Right, there's a revocation mechanism for that. So why expire them then if they can be revoked anyway IF they get compromised?

The reason why domain TLS certificates expire is that domains can change owners. It makes sense that it should not be possible for someone to buy a domain for one year, get a non-expiring TLS certificate issued for it, and then have the ability to MitM its traffic if it ever gets bought by someone else later.

Domain certificates are sent as part of the connection handshake, so them expiring is unnoticeable for the end users. However, root certificates rely on the OS getting updates forever, which is unsustainable. Some systems lack the ability to install user-provided root CAs altogether, and some (Android) do allow it but treat them as second-class.
by stevekemp | 2026-02-19 14:30:52+00:00
I have a child, and I got a sleeve made up of various things that he was obsessed by over the years.

So there's a Moomin character (Little My) because we're in Finland and he loves them, there's Tom & Jerry because he loved those cartoons, a new-life mushroom from the years we spent together playing Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo classic.

But rather than list all the parts, you can see where this is going now, there's also Pokémon because he was obsessed with playing with the cards, memorizing all the evolution chains and stats/types.

When I was planning it was obvious there'd be a Pokémon due to his (continuing) interest in those and to me as a non-fan that's the most immediately-recognizable one.

Plus the colour works well with the colour-choices made in the other pieces. Although ironically the part I like best is the "naked" LEGO minifig. I like to colour him in with felt-tip pens every now and again, or draw a facial expression on him to reflect my mood when bored in meetings.
by mFixman | 2026-02-19 14:31:04+00:00
Is this the first type of sum-type option choosing statement present for C++ unions? I've been waiting for this feature since the year 1978.

Still, it's a wasted opportunity not to have a language-level overload to the `switch` statement that allows nice pattern matching. Even with std::is_within_lifetime C++ unions are prone to errors and hard to work with.
by languagehacker | 2026-02-19 14:31:27+00:00
I feel like if you need to utilize a tool like this, odds are pretty good you may have picked the Wrong Tool For the Job, or, perhaps even worse, the wrong architecture.

This is why it's so important to do lots of engineering before writing the first line of code on a project. It helps keep you from choosing a tool set or architecture out of preference and keeps you honest about the capabilities you need and how your system should be organized.
by the_sleaze_ | 2026-02-19 14:31:58+00:00
I'm here in Alabama, I'm teaching my kids reading through phonics at home about 2 years ahead of them starting in school. They're learning what they call "sight words" in class. My kids are so far ahead of the others that our specific teacher has now moved to teaching the rest of the class phonics and almost abandoning sight words altogether.

I think the rubber on the road reason for not teaching phonics is that it's _hard_ and requires genuine teaching - personal focus on a little kid's understanding. I can't imagine that scaling in a classroom but I'm no educator.
by markoa | 2026-02-19 14:32:06+00:00
1/ Use a standard CSS library - Tailwind

2/ Use a common React component library such as Radix UI (don't reinvent the wheel)

3/ Avoid inventing new UI patterns.

4/ Use Storybook so you can isolate all custom UI elements and test/polish them in all states

5/ Develop enough taste over the years of what is good UI to ask CC/Codex to iterate on details that you don't like.
by lbeltrame | 2026-02-19 14:32:12+00:00
> But the idea that giving your ID changes anything is a fiction

I'd say it's an expansion of the "attack surface". Not to mention: what happens with those IDs after the fact?

> I don't think a theorical, overblown and mostly fictitious increase in risks

It already happened in my country (an European country) during the pandemic (and not in the first days). So it's not fictitious.
by thunderseethe | 2026-02-19 14:32:13+00:00
> You can get localised unification but bidir as a whole like in Rust but you lose most of the advantage of unification.

Could you expand on this? I do not follow. You can create a bidir system that never requires annotations and uses unification to infer all types in the style of Haskell or OCaml. It is not often done because people are coming around to the idea that global type inference causes spooky action at a distance, but nothing prevents it from working.

> I maintain that what the article calls HM is trully unification

In some sense I think HM == unification because you can't really implement HM without unification. The first time a type variable encounters another type you'd be stuck.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-02-19 14:32:59+00:00
And yet: https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/eci

GPT-4 was a world-shaking release. The best "AIs" (LLMs) of 2026 are only marginally better. The gap between 2023 and 2026 isn't nearly so large as you imply, especially insofar as "general" intelligence (not coding specifically) is concerned.
56% of PyPI malware runs at install, so I sandboxed pip with eBPF
by otsmane_ahmed | 2026-02-19 14:33:20+00:00
I've been analyzing the QUT-DV25 malware dataset (14k samples) and found that a majority of malicious packages constitute a "blind spot" in typical CI pipelines: they execute payloads immediately via setup.py or post-install scripts, before any static analysis or runtime monitoring kicks in.

I built KEIP as a PoC to experiment with "install-time enforcement". It uses BPF LSM hooks to monitor the pip process tree and strictly enforces a whitelist for connect() syscalls. Anything not destined for the package repo (PyPI) gets blocked.

It successfully stopped 100% of the active C2 exfiltration attempts in the dataset I tested.

Open source (GPL). The code is a bit rough but works on kernel 5.8+ with BTF. Repo: https://github.com/Otsmane-Ahmed/KEIP ,Write-up: https://medium.com/@rafik222dz/every-pip-install-you-run-is-a-bet-you-are-making-with-your-machine-9fce4526fc8e

Curious to hear thoughts on kernel-level enforcement vs user-space sandboxing for package managers.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-19 14:33:23+00:00
Even better, starting with C++26, and considered to be done with DR for previous versions, hardned runtimes now have a portable way to be configured across compilers, instead of each having their own approach.

However, you still need something like -fbounds-safety in C++, due to the copy-paste compatibility with C, and too many people writing Orthodox C++, C with Classes, Better C, kind of code, that we cannot get rid of.
by timr | 2026-02-19 14:33:36+00:00
Another, related issue is that the takedown mechanism becomes a de facto censorship mechanism, as anyone who has dealt with DMCA takedowns and automated detectors can tell you.

Someone reports something for Special Pleading X, and you (the operator) have to ~instantly take down the thing, by law. There is never an equally efficient mechanism to push back against abuses -- there can't be, because it exposes the operator to legal risk in doing so. So you effectively have a one-sided mechanism for removal of unwanted content.

Maybe this is fine for "revenge porn", but even ignoring the slippery slope argument (which is real -- we already have these kinds of rules for copyrighted content!) it's not so easy to cleanly define "revenge porn".
by snarf21 | 2026-02-19 14:33:37+00:00
I read the article and would argue that it is really just two things they did. However, both things are really the same coin and are about solving poverty and almost nothing to do with education. Both are small (but positive) band aids on general food insecurity and housing insecurity. Amazing how having a known safe place to sleep at night and food to eat everyday helps kids live better lives.

All schools should have free breakfast and free lunch. Countless studies have shown that kids learn better when properly fed nutritious meals. Struggling schools near more after school and weekend programs with tutoring AND meals. These problems are fairly easy to solve and the cost is less than the status quo.
by matthewkayin | 2026-02-19 14:33:42+00:00
The problem pointed out in the article seems a little silly. We're adding an entire language feature because someone wanted an optional bool class? Why not just create a uint8_t with three values: OPTIONAL_BOOL_FASLE, OPTIONAL_BOOL_TRUE, OPTIONAL_BOOL_UNDEFINED?

Doing so takes the same space as a bool, and could be wrapped in a class if desired to provide a nicer interface.
by Ray20 | 2026-02-19 14:33:42+00:00
> This is mandating taking down content, not surveiling anyone.

As far as I understand, it precisely mandating to monitor EVERYONE.

They are not talking about removing a specific image from the platform based on its hash or something. They are talking about actions that involve automated analysis of all content on the platform for patterns arbitrarily specified by the government.

The technologies discussed differ from totalitarian surveillance by simply toggling a single flag on the platform, and are indistinguishable from such surveillance for the user.
by hollywood_court | 2026-02-19 14:33:43+00:00
Arab and Cullman are the two that still operate like this based on my own anecdotes. But most of the Birmingham suburbs could probably also be classified as sundown towns.

Arab/Skant City is the most 'in your face' example. They don't try to hide it at all up there.

Shout out to Granny's Restaurant in Skant City. Best breakfast in the area.
by ergonaught | 2026-02-19 14:34:23+00:00
1) "Good idea, terrible implementation". Wrong incentives.

2) "They know the letter of the law, but not the spirit." No common shared understanding of the purpose/point/value motivations.

3) "Time marches on." There is a constant influx of new kids to educate and you can't realistically block the flow without rupturing something.
by 8organicbits | 2026-02-19 14:34:27+00:00
> Requiring DNSSEC would exclude most domains and block adoption.

I think this is a good call. For the web, the CAB sets CA requirements and they could choose to require DNSSEC at a later date. It would be a breaking change, but the CAB can, and has, made breaking changes to the BR. The IETF draft seems flexible enough that we could end up with a DNSSEC MUST for the web, in practice, based on the CAB's discretion.
by seanhunter | 2026-02-19 14:34:51+00:00
If you take a look at the data[1] you can see that it was nowhere near the top, then there was one big chunk in 2022-23 then it came back down again, and that aid was 67% military with the DoD providing 13B. So whatever you're trying to insinuate, the simple explanation is they received a lot of aid (mainly military) because they had been invaded. That's is fully supported by the evidence.

[1] https://foreignassistance.gov/cd/ukraine/
by Ukv | 2026-02-19 14:34:55+00:00
> It can and should be removed in minutes because AI can evaluate the “bad” image quickly and a human moderator isn’t required anymore.

CSAM can be detected through hashes or a machine-learning image classifier (with some false positives), whereas whether an image was shared nonconsensually seems like it'd often require context that is not in the image itself, possibly contacting the parties involved.
by Manuel_D | 2026-02-19 14:34:59+00:00
On the one hand, micro mobility is a great way to reduce emissions, traffic, and parking congestion. It'd really suck to see it become more difficult to get around with electric bikes and scooters.

On the other hand, so many people I know are riding personal electric vehicles capable of going 25+ MPH that don't even know the basics of handling a two wheeled vehicle. They've never even heard of the phrase "counter steering". Fort9 did an experiment and found the the typical city electric bicycle and motorcycle commutes have about the same average and peak speeds.

Id really like it if cheap, accessible courses like the ones conducted by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation were required to operate an EV over a certain power threshold, maybe 300W. Though this additional barrier to entry probably would reduce the adoption of PEVs, unfortunately.
by hyeonwho5 | 2026-02-19 14:35:01+00:00
It is interesting how much these interventions copy the absolute basics of what is done in Steubenville, one of the best performing low-income cities in the nation [1]:

- Get kids to school at all costs. Birmingham has lottery incentives. Steubenville has a staff member whose full time job is tracking down students and bringing them to school.

- Teach phonics, instead of the "Reading recovery" and cueing methods made popular by extensive marketing in teacher training programs. (And consequently popular in Blue districts.)

- Have lots of people teach reading. Birmingham uses college students as tutors. Steubenville uses ALL teachers (including phy-ed, art, music) and volunteers.

- Have more school. Birmingham does summer sessions, Steubenville does free pre-K.

Steubenville's preK programs teach grammatical sentences, the alphabet phonetically, and prereading.

The Steubenville schools sort reading classes by student ability rather than grade level, so that stuggling classes can be smaller and those students can get closer to one-on-one attention. They famously consistently get to third grade with no students reading below grade level. It is more expensive per student, but they make up for it with fewer students repeating grades.

So a lot of this falls under the category of "stops you can pull if you really want to," but the methods that have evidence showing they work [2] are not profitable for publishers, so teachers don't get trained on them. They also require teachers to carefully follow a script, which is boring and rubs against idealism.

[1] https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2025/02/20/sold-a-story-e...

[2] https://www.successforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SFA...
by bob1029 | 2026-02-19 14:35:03+00:00
I think user interface design is a very cursed task for an LLM. They are skilled at giving you high quality CSS and design patterns, but they're horrible at actual layout and composition.

I can say "add a status strip to the form with blah blah" and it will work perfectly. However if I ask for something like "a modern UI for gathering customer details" I'm guaranteed to get a pile of shit.
by gostsamo | 2026-02-19 14:35:45+00:00
They also smelled and had a big rich empire. What I can say? Won't bother you with the guy who supposedly planted trees so that merchants can travel and rest in their shadows, nor should I tell you stories how those extractive people facilitated trade between Europe and China.

PS: The russians got lots of things from the eastern roman empire, just not the humanistic renaissance, but let's not go there.
by coffeefirst | 2026-02-19 14:35:51+00:00
An even simpler solution would be for the industry to not make their product more addictive and toxic at every opportunity to maximize engagement.

AIM and IRC did not get us to this point. I doubt the original Instagram that was purely about posting dumb photos with your friends would have either.

Given how concentrated the industry is, the buck stops with about four dudes who decided this was the course they wanted to set.
by akagr | 2026-02-19 14:35:52+00:00
Isn’t e-paper the general category of low power displays? I understand that “e-ink” are a trademarked subset of the broader e-paper category, which also includes memory-in-pixel LCD displays which other watches like Garmin (and probably pebble) have. E-ink displays are only manufactured by eink corp, and are popularly found on e-readers, shelf price tags in some stores etc.

I may be mixing terms in my brain, though. Happy to be corrected.
by uncletomscourt | 2026-02-19 14:37:02+00:00
Could you elaborate a little on what you are talking about?

When you click on the NCLB wiki link it states it was signed by George W Bush.

When you click your link it doesn't mention Obama or NCLB. It just talks about how kids cant do math, that predates Obama.

Why link to something that has nothing to do with what you said? It seems quite disingenuous.