MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by like_any_other | 2026-03-13 17:01:50+00:00
The study [1] doesn't look at state-level averages, but uses school-district-level funding and demographics data.

> there are public schools in Boston and NYC that have endowments larger than the total budgets of a dozen other schools combined

Table 1 from the study also includes funding standard deviation data (the "SD" column). The highest one is $765, meaning that 99% of schools are within 3x that amount around the mean. There may be outliers like you say, but they are statistically irrelevant.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...
by vaylian | 2026-03-13 17:02:14+00:00
It implies that the user has access to the technical infrastructure that supports age verification. Sucks to be you, if you can't afford a recent Apple or Android device to run the AgeVerification app.

There is also the problem of mission creep. Once the infrastructure is in place, to control access to age-restricted content, other services might become out of reach. In particular, anonymous usage of online forums might no longer be possible.
by verdverm | 2026-03-13 17:02:42+00:00
> We need fine grained permissions per-task or per-tool in addition to sandboxing. For example: "this request should only ever read my gmail and never write, delete, or move emails".

We already have: IAM, WIF, Macaroons, Service Accounts

Ask you resident SecOps and DevOps teams what your company already has available
by idop | 2026-03-13 17:03:07+00:00
> the revealed preference is that people would rather fill their own gas tank

MOST people, not ALL. Smaller markets can still be profitable and useful markets. Most people prefer to pay less and cook their own food, but some people prefer to pay more and have lunch delivered to them. That market is doing quite well despite the fact that pretty much everybody can just stick something in the microwave. There are endless more examples.

> doing a somewhat meaningful job

Who decides what's "meaningful" and what isn't?

> The reason that much of this isn't automated has nothing to do with ensuring that jobs exist, but rather that the cost of automation is higher than the cost of labour.

SOME of the times, you're right, but not ALL of the times. People (most often via unions) aren't resisting automation because they're excited about moving to a "more meaningful job" or because they hate progress. They're resisting because in modern society they MUST have a job, and if they spent the past two decades working as cashiers in supermarkets, their ability to find "more meaningful jobs" at this stage in their lives is extremely limited, and chances are they're gonna have to take a pay cut. Progress cannot come with higher unemployment and poverty rates. If that means low income, less meaningful jobs remain, so be it.
by craftkiller | 2026-03-13 17:03:08+00:00
> I installed KDE, and then installed Sway and Sway overwrote the notification theming for KDE.

That sounds like you are using the nixpkgs modules to install the desktop environments (programs.sway.enable) rather than only installing the packages (environment.systemPackages = [pkgs.sway];). Both are valid, but there is a key difference:

The packages themselves cannot cause such conflicts because each package is just a separate folder under /nix/store. Nixpkgs modules both install the package _and_ configure additional settings which means that modules can interact with each other and possibly cause conflicts.

You can see it in the source for nixpkgs. This config block is applied whenever programs.sway.enable is true: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/0590cd39f728e129122770...

It installs the sway package here: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/0590cd39f728e129122770...

But it also edits other settings like adding sway to the display manager session packages list: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/0590cd39f728e129122770...

What surprises/confuses me is: sway doesn't have notifications. You have to install your own (personally I use mako). So I'm wondering if this was a much greater change like system-wide gtk/qt theming, or did you also set up a notification daemon for sway and perhaps it was the module for _that_ which altered your KDE notifications.

(Just to be clear: I believe you that your notifications looked different, I'm just wondering about the mechanism through which they were altered.)

Personally, I don't like surprises so for 90+% of my config, I only install the packages (environment.systemPackages) rather than using the modules (programs.sway.enable) but that does mean I am essentially re-inventing the module for each package inside my own config which is a lot more work and requires a lot more nix proficiency.
by madrox | 2026-03-13 17:03:12+00:00
Not the author, but did a LOT of research on this during my time at Disney while working on Disney+ prior to its launch.

This is, effectively, no different than a carousel of algorithm-recommended content. However, UX studies have found users reluctant to watch something recommended to them. It requires making an affirmative decision on time investment. Most people have the experience of a friend recommending a movie or book and still being reluctant to dive in.

The problem is very similar to dating apps, if you think about it. This is why Tinder's innovation on "swipe left/right" took off the way it did. In UX terms it's better to drop users into something and make the cognitive effort be choosing to get out of it rather than choosing to get into it. It's a big part of why TikTok works.

The reason this isn't more common in video apps has more to do with UX norms at this point. Another important thing I learned about streaming at Disney was that no one really cares how innovative the browsing experience is. They just want to watch Frozen. They're used to carousels now, and they're easy to program. This, I think, speaks more to your sensibilities.
by koshergweilo | 2026-03-13 17:03:37+00:00
> This isn't age verification at the point of accessing restricted content. This is a persistent age-broadcasting service baked into the operating system itself, queryable by every installed application.

You're not missing anything. It's just an AI generated summary of the original GitHub link https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings

I found the original article much easier to read anyways
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-03-13 17:04:36+00:00
They probably don't care. It's probably a mostly BS number. But they probably have to have it and have it at least look like they're trying to be serious about generating it in order to qualify for preferential treatment on some sort of permitting or write off some class of investment in a slightly better way at tax time or something.

I'm not sure if this is better or worse than them doing it because they believe in it.
by maxcr | 2026-03-13 17:04:45+00:00
Thanks! The hash chain is stored in Cloudflare D1 (edge SQLite). Each registration entry includes the previous entry's hash, so the chain is tamper-evident. You can walk it from genesis and verify every link via the public API (/v1/chain).

It's centralized storage with cryptographic integrity, not decentralized consensus. The tradeoff was deliberate: we wanted verifiable ordering and tamper-evidence without the overhead of a blockchain. Any client can independently validate the chain by re-hashing from entry 0.

Longer term, the chain data could be mirrored or anchored to a decentralized store (IPFS, Arweave, or even periodic Bitcoin/Ethereum anchoring) for stronger guarantees. But for now, the priority was getting the identity + reputation primitives right.
by txprog | 2026-03-13 17:04:53+00:00
Author here. I didn't set out to build this. Started with Cubbi as a opinionated Docker-based wrapper for CLI agents, but the network restrictions and not having my own tooling kept fighting. Then found Fence which was already doing the hard kernel work really well. What pushed me to go further was network control: tools that ignore HTTP_PROXY env vars bypass proxy-based filtering entirely. The transparent TUN approach captures everything regardless (but not yet on macos).

The dashboard is just the start. The real goal is full conversation observability including tool calls, a semantic firewall that understands what the agent is actually trying to do rather than just which domain it's hitting, and credential replacement on the fly before anything leaves the machine. The hard part is that sitting as a transparent proxy makes this significantly more complex, and I don't want to touch any agent internals or require integrating a third party SDK.

Happy to answer questions and curious how others are thinking about the visibility vs isolation tradeoff.
by ALEX_athlete | 2026-03-13 17:04:54+00:00
I'm building a sports fan engagement game in alpha. Users collect athlete cards, earn rewards, participate in faction events. Standard early-stage SaaS — maybe a dozen test users, all of whom I know personally.
I applied to remove my AWS SES account from sandbox. The emails I need to send:

Account verification
Password resets
Game event notifications
Reward milestones

Here's what I had in place before applying:

Domain verified with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured
Every sender address individually verified
SNS-based bounce and complaint handling implemented
Hard bounce suppression synced to SES account-level suppression list
Opt-in only recipients — no purchased or scraped lists
Unsubscribe handling on all non-transactional sends

The rejection came back with this:

"We reviewed this information, but we are still unable to grant your request. We made this decision because we believe that your use case would impact the deliverability of our service and would affect your reputation as a sender."

No specifics. No indication of what triggered the concern. No path to appeal. Just a form letter.
The circular logic here is genuinely frustrating — I can't demonstrate healthy sending behaviour because they won't allow me to send. I can't build a reputation as a sender because I'm not allowed to send. The infrastructure is in place. The compliance is in place. There are no recipients to harm.
I've been building on AWS for this project — EC2, RDS, S3, the works. Switching email providers mid-build is annoying but clearly I need to.
A few honest questions for the community:

Has anyone successfully appealed an SES sandbox rejection? Is there a non-automated path to a human reviewer?
Is there specific language in sandbox removal requests that triggers automatic rejection? "Announcements" and "broadcasts" are the only things I can think of that might have flagged it.
For early-stage founders — Postmark, Resend, or Sendgrid? I need reliable transactional delivery and a straightforward onboarding process that doesn't assume I'm a spammer.
Is this a known issue with SES specifically, or have others hit similar walls with other AWS services during early-stage builds?

Happy to share more details about the setup if useful. Mostly posting because the lack of any actionable feedback from AWS makes it impossible to self-correct, and I suspect I'm not the only founder who's hit this wall.
by nunobrito | 2026-03-13 17:04:58+00:00
Kindly read point number 2 slowly.

There are two definitions: a) Personal Data and b) Emergency Situations

What is an emergency situation and how can a car determine it is one? These are "smart" cars which aren't nowadays smart enough to process all your data locally, so that data is sent to servers elsewhere which process if either points a) or b) apply.

It is your choice to believe that voice data is ever deleted once acquired by governments and entities thirsty to benefit from that information.

For security experts this is just another "I told you so" within a few years.
by peyton | 2026-03-13 17:05:00+00:00
Any webconferencing app on iOS probably fires up the TrueDepth camera to power background replacement and could conceivably do that, albeit not so responsively. Recommend heading to your provider and opting out of share-or-sell if you can.

Also keep in mind keystroke dynamics can probably do that too and has been a topic of study in one form or another since the nineteenth century vis-a-vis telegraph operators.
by caconym_ | 2026-03-13 17:05:08+00:00
> I'm not sure if anyone in HN has any useful advice in this regard.

Self host. It's still possible to buy computer hardware and install FOSS replacements for most/all of the services you need, and plumb it all through to your mobile devices using wireguard/tailscale. If you're behind a CGNAT you can proxy it through a cheap VPS that won't fuck you on bandwidth costs. Thanks to Proxmox, I probably have better uptime on my services than e.g. Github these days.

When it becomes impossible to get open PC hardware, I don't know. I like to think I will just stop using the internet for anything besides the bare minimum NPC type activities that are required to engage with the institutions of society.
by ryhanshannon | 2026-03-13 17:05:35+00:00
I like the overall idea and presentation. In trying it out, I hit the token cap before my trial task was able to complete and show me the end result. I'm sure your free-tier token costs are non-trivial but it was definitely a bummer that I couldn't even see one initial run's output to decide if I wanted to pay.

I decided to gamble the one month fee to let it continue, but the payment defaulting to annual was jarring. I can see it lets you advertise a lower price but that only made me more tempted to leave altogether when I saw the price go up on the final screen.
by pessimizer | 2026-03-13 17:05:54+00:00
> The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification.

You have consumer activist brain. Next you're going to suggest that we complain to the manager or start our own government and compete in the marketplace.

> The only thing that talks is money

No, the only thing that is talking is money. Money wants this. You're busy pretending like you're going to do a boycott; they're going to boycott you.

Complain about the internet? They'll just blacklist you from it. Complain about the phone? Well now you can't use one; try smoke signals. Complain about the landlord? They'll settle the case, kick you out on the street, and blacklist you among all private equity landlords and the management companies that service small landlords. You'll just go to a small landlord that doesn't use one of the management companies? Well they won't have access to a bunch of vendors that have exclusive contracts with and share ownership with the management companies; now they can't make any money and have to sell to private equity.

You've been fooled into thinking that being victimized is a moral failure of the victim. The perpetrators taught you that. They taught you that the only appropriate action is to beg and threaten to leave, and they shut down customer service and monopolized the market. But, again, the worst thing they trained you to do is to blame the victim.
by eduction | 2026-03-13 17:06:09+00:00
Probably because your assumption is wrong - they host a live shell and documentation search.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260220092649/https://pandas.py...

https://web.archive.org/web/20260225185816/https://pandas.py...

(I don't know anything about pandas, incidentaly, I just did some basic research before posting.)
by alephnerd | 2026-03-13 17:06:40+00:00
Nope.

OVH Groupe is a separate VPS (and an extremely large one) based in France and Poland. They are backed by Xavier Niels (one of the powers behind Macron's throne) [edit: this is WRONG, confused with Scaleway and Klaba's past affiliation with 42].

Hetzner is a smaller VPS and colo in Germany, but provides a better experience for hobbyists.

HN idealist types will probably like Hetzner more than OVH Groupe's more enterprise oriented experience, but a number of government and industry critical apps in France are actually hosted on OVH.

In Germany, the bigger providers are either whitelabeling AWS (eg. Deustche Telekom) or implementing a chimera of GCP, Azure, and existing colos (eg. Schwarz's STACKIT).

I personally think the French approach to tech sovereignity is a much more realistic approach than the German method - French industries, financiers, and government agencies are actually aligned with building their own ecosystem, such as the effort put into LaSuite plus actually putting effort to host in OVH and Scaleway, and the fact that people like Xavier Niel actually exist, whereas the German equivalent would move to London or the US. Even French-turned-American tech companies like Datadog have tried to maintain a presence in France, but I haven't seen a similar thing in Germany.
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-03-13 17:07:47+00:00
> and I can't imagine what I would have done without them.

You're falling into the trap of saying I could've only been happy if I did X. But humans aren't like that - even garbagemen find happiness in their work. The brain adapts to baseline no matter the field.

The second trap you're falling into is saying look how abundant things are compared to 1892. We have every statistic proven and locked down that abundance does not equal happiness.
by Selkirk | 2026-03-13 17:07:58+00:00
Multi vitamin use has been studied A LOT with respect to all cause mortality, where it consistently has no statistical effect (or a slightly negative effect). So, to me, "biological aging" seems a way to hack for effects to advertise. Does the average consumer understand that reduced "biological aging" does NOT mean you will live longer? Because if it did, they would be saying THAT. Centrum (study sponsor) is already creating advertising based on this study.
Notes from the trough of sorrow: why we killed our own product
by timshell | 2026-03-13 17:08:29+00:00
In December 2024, Roundtable was a survey fraud detection company. Our product Alias analyzed typing patterns in open-ended text fields to catch bots and AI-generated responses. It worked and market research firms used it to flag the 30%+ of survey responses that are now AI-generated.

Twelve months later, we open-sourced it and built something else.

---

Matt and I spent five years at Princeton studying how humans and machines process information differently. We've published in Science, PNAS, and Nature Human Behaviour on computational models of cognition. The thing we kept coming back to: humans overshoot mouse targets, slow down on the Stroop task, type with irregular timing. Language production is a cognitive process, not a copy-paste operation. AI agents don't produce these signals. And scaling AI doesn't close the gap. It widens it.

Alias captured a narrow slice of this: typing patterns in text fields on surveys. Proof of Human captures the full surface: keystrokes, mouse movement, scroll behavior, click patterns, and invisible cognitive challenges. It works on any webpage, not just surveys.

We couldn't get there by iterating on Alias. We had to replace it.

---

We deprecated Alias January 1, 2026, open-sourced the code (Apache 2.0 on GitHub), and gave customers nine months to migrate. It wasn't clean. We combined the product migration with a price increase, which meant customers had to adopt a new product and pay more for it at the same time. In retrospect, we should have migrated everyone at beta pricing and repriced after they'd seen the value.

---

Proof of Human is live and production-grade. In our benchmarks (750 bot sessions, 5 systems, methodology at research.roundtable.ai/bot-benchmarking), we hit 87% detection vs 69% for reCAPTCHA v3 and 33% for Cloudflare Turnstile. Unlike hardware-based proof-of-personhood approaches, we work through passive behavioral observation. No PII, no friction, one line of JavaScript.

And since launching, we've had four Hacker News front-page posts, new customers outside the survey vertical, and inbound from fintech and enterprise companies that would never have looked at a survey fraud tool. We also wrote a research essay showing that AI capability and humanness are diverging, meaning our detection surface grows as AI improves.

---

When you're two founders with limited resources, you can't maintain two products. We picked the bigger market and asked our earliest customers to absorb the cost of that decision. The pivot was right. The execution was imperfect. We'll get better at the execution.

If you're dealing with bot or AI fraud problems e.g. surveys, fintech, account creation, anything user-facing, we'd love to talk. And if you've been through a similar product kill, I'm curious how you handled the customer transition.
by zbentley | 2026-03-13 17:08:30+00:00
AWS has a privileged position compared to other deprecation struggles in the industry, though. They can price the v2 version aggressively/at a loss to incentivize migration without major bottom line impact.

And sure, v1 is forever, but between getting to the point where new accounts can’t use it without a special request (or grandfathered in sweetheart rates, though that might be a PR disaster) and incentivizing migration off for existing users could absolutely get s3v1 to the point where it could be staffed for maintenance mode rather than staffed as a flagship feature.

It’d take years, but is totally possible. Amazon knows this. If they’re not doing it, it’s because the costs don’t make sense for them.
by mchusma | 2026-03-13 17:08:41+00:00
Having tried this a bit I do really like the single api call for all of it.

I also appreciate transparent pricing but I am not 100% sure the sense of scale of costs. It could be helpful to give some ballparks on things for each of the plans. I'm not sure exactly what i could get out of a plan. My guess, trying hard to figure it out, was if i had about 1,000 pages of new/updated content per month, I would pay $295/month for unlimited queries on top of it. Is that roughly correct?
by withinboredom | 2026-03-13 17:08:46+00:00
Here’s a much better write up than I’m willing to do: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/rubbing-control-theory/

There are also multiple issues about this on GitHub.

And an open issue that is basically been ignored. golang/go#51071

Like I said. Go won’t fix this because they’ve optimized for throughput at the expense of everything else, which means higher tail latencies. They’d have to give up throughput for lower latency.
by palla89 | 2026-03-13 17:09:05+00:00
I loved every word of this article, I went back in time and felt again with my Pentium III 500 Mhz trying to hack everything out, like changing the splash screen of Windows 98 SE while loading just to feel I did it!

These things were the ones that led me to this passion and that today, with LLMs and almost only business applications to develop for the sake of living, feel like the magic is finally fading.

God I miss the old times! (I'm 36 yo but I feel like 70 in this specific moment!)
by kace91 | 2026-03-13 17:09:10+00:00
Yeah, honestly not even counting. The only reason I even consider moving is that I dislike Tahoe and I know eventually I won’t be able to stall the update; hardware wise it doesn’t even cross my mind.

I have a current gen MacBook Pro for work configured with stupid amounts of ram and I feel no difference in terms of fluidity at all.
by jrmg | 2026-03-13 17:09:29+00:00
Is there a reliable guide somewhere to setting up local AI for coding (please don’t say ‘just Google it’ - that just results in a morass of AI slop/SEO pages with out of date, non-self-consistent, incorrect or impossible instructions).

I’d like to be able to use a local model (which one?) to power Copilot in vscode, and run coding agent(s) (not general purpose OpenClaw-like agents) on my M2 MacBook. I know it’ll be slow.

I suspect this is actually fairly easy to set up - if you know how.
by GMoromisato | 2026-03-13 17:09:48+00:00
Agreed--we're already seeing some of that, and I fully support minimizing kids' exposure to that.

I probably should have been explicit that I don't think technology has no downsides--it most certainly does. It's just, IMHO, the benefits outweigh the risks. And, over time, we figure out how to ameliorate the downsides.