Hacker News on Monday, 23 February 2026

The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection(spectrum.ieee.org)

1623 points by oldnetguy 8 months ago | 1225 comments

IEEE Spectrum opinion piece arguing that online age verification requirements undermine data protection and privacy for all users.

Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI(ladybird.org)

1226 points by adius 8 months ago | 680 comments

Ladybird browser project blog post announcing it will rewrite parts of the browser in Rust instead of C++, after previously exploring Swift, with AI assistance.

Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras(techcrunch.com)

577 points by mikece 8 months ago | 390 comments

TechCrunch article reporting that people across the US are destroying Flock Safety license plate surveillance cameras.

Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel(chrisbrunet.com)

534 points by qsi 8 months ago | 95 comments

Substack post by Chris Brunet reporting that Elsevier retracted 9 economics papers and removed 7 editors over a finance journal citation cartel.

Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies(ewtnnews.com)

488 points by josephcsible 8 months ago | 392 comments

EWTN News article reporting that Pope Leo XIV urged priests to write homilies themselves rather than relying on AI; the page showed a Vercel browser verification checkpoint.

Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf](gwern.net)

456 points by gurjeet 8 months ago | 278 comments

A 1984 academic paper by M. A. (Ken) Clements giving a biographical account of Terence Tao's mathematical precociousness as a young child and its educational implications.

Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran(nytimes.com)

448 points by boplicity 8 months ago | 198 comments

New York Times article reporting that Binance fired employees who discovered $1.7 billion in crypto had been sent to Iran; the page loaded as a captcha check.

Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%(docs.hetzner.com)

430 points by williausrohr 8 months ago | 580 comments

Hetzner documentation page announcing price adjustments for cloud and other products, taking effect 1 April 2026 for new and existing orders.

The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026(missing.csail.mit.edu)

409 points by anishathalye 8 months ago | 118 comments

Homepage of MIT's Missing Semester course (IAP 2026), teaching CS students practical tools like the shell, editors, version control, and agentic coding.

FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me(vladimir.varank.in)

387 points by varankinv 8 months ago | 311 comments

Blog post describing how the author used AI coding tools to build a FreeBSD Wi-Fi driver for the Broadcom BCM4350 chip in a 2016 MacBook Pro.

Hetzner (European hosting provider) to increase prices by up to 38%(old.reddit.com)

372 points by doener 8 months ago | 317 comments

Reddit thread in r/BuyFromEU about Hetzner raising hosting prices by up to 38%; the captured page is a Reddit network-policy block screen.

Magical Mushroom – Europe's first industrial-scale mycelium packaging producer(magicalmushroom.com)

358 points by microflash 8 months ago | 120 comments

Homepage of Magical Mushroom Company, a European producer of mycelium-based packaging made at industrial scale.

“Car Wash” test with 53 models(opper.ai)

340 points by felix089 8 months ago | 403 comments

Opper blog post testing 53 AI models on the 'car wash 50 meters away, walk or drive?' logic question, with repeated runs and a human baseline.

The First Fully General Computer Action Model(si.inc)

312 points by nee1r 8 months ago | 75 comments

ASML unveils EUV light source advance that could yield 50% more chips by 2030(reuters.com)

309 points by pieterr 8 months ago | 85 comments

Writing code is cheap now(simonwillison.net)

307 points by swolpers 8 months ago | 375 comments

Show HN: PgDog – Scale Postgres without changing the app(github.com)

305 points by levkk 8 months ago | 54 comments

A simple web we own(rsdoiel.github.io)

290 points by speckx 8 months ago | 208 comments

I baked a pie every day for a year(theguardian.com)

286 points by NaOH 8 months ago | 185 comments

Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems(writings.stephenwolfram.com)

286 points by surprisetalk 8 months ago | 156 comments

I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270(dork.dev)

283 points by todsacerdoti 8 months ago | 59 comments

The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)(sabrinas.space)

220 points by montenegrohugo 8 months ago | 101 comments

The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler(oxc.rs)

218 points by modinfo 8 months ago | 107 comments

AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says(gizmodo.com)

212 points by cdrnsf 8 months ago | 202 comments

Flock cameras gifted by Horowitz Foundation, avoiding public oversight(thenevadaindependent.com)

205 points by rurp 8 months ago | 72 comments

UNIX99, a UNIX-like OS for the TI-99/4A (2025)(forums.atariage.com)

199 points by marcodiego 8 months ago | 63 comments

What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust(smallcultfollowing.com)

165 points by zdw 8 months ago | 209 comments

Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love(hackernews.love)

158 points by ohong 8 months ago | 107 comments

Samsung Upcycle Promise(xda-developers.com)

157 points by 1970-01-01 8 months ago | 93 comments

Show HN: Sowbot – Open-hardware agricultural robot (ROS2, RTK GPS)(sowbot.co.uk)

151 points by Sabrees 8 months ago | 41 comments

You are not supposed to install OpenClaw on your personal computer(twitter.com)

150 points by bundie 8 months ago | 124 comments

Museum of Plugs and Sockets(plugsocketmuseum.nl)

145 points by ohjeez 8 months ago | 79 comments

Show HN: AI Timeline – 171 LLMs from Transformer (2017) to GPT-5.3 (2026)(llm-timeline.com)

144 points by ai_bot 8 months ago | 52 comments

femtolisp: A lightweight, robust, scheme-like Lisp implementation(github.com)

132 points by tosh 8 months ago | 15 comments

Crawling a billion web pages in just over 24 hours, in 2025(andrewkchan.dev)

129 points by pseudolus 8 months ago | 42 comments

Show HN: Babyshark – Wireshark made easy (terminal UI for PCAPs)(github.com)

127 points by eigen-vector 8 months ago | 43 comments

Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries(linguabase.org)

114 points by gligierko 8 months ago | 217 comments

The Physics and Economics of Moving 44 Tonnes at 56mph(mikeayles.com)

104 points by mikeayles 8 months ago | 92 comments

VTT Test Donut Lab Battery Reaches 80% Charge in Under 10 Minutes [pdf](pub-fee113bb711e441db5c353d2d31abbb3.r2.dev)

99 points by sagyam 8 months ago | 75 comments

An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published(openculture.com)

95 points by vinhnx 8 months ago | 19 comments

Decided to fly to the US to buy some hard drives(old.reddit.com)

90 points by HelloUsername 8 months ago | 47 comments

Understanding the Go Runtime: The Memory Allocator(internals-for-interns.com)

81 points by valyala 8 months ago | 12 comments

The Wolfram S Combinator Challenge(combinatorprize.org)

80 points by paraschopra 8 months ago | 22 comments

SETI@home: Data Acquisition and Front-End Processing (2025)(iopscience.iop.org)

78 points by tosh 8 months ago | 18 comments

Stop Killing Games update says EU petition advances(videocardz.com)

77 points by LorenDB 8 months ago | 28 comments

The challenges of porting Shufflepuck Cafe to the 8 bits Apple II(colino.net)

71 points by homarp 8 months ago | 14 comments

Facebook's Fascination with My Robots.txt(blog.nytsoi.net)

68 points by Ndymium 8 months ago | 37 comments

C99 implementation of new O(m log^(2/3) n) shortest path algorithm(github.com)

66 points by danalec 8 months ago | 13 comments

Julia: Performance Tips(docs.julialang.org)

65 points by tosh 8 months ago | 53 comments

Large study finds link between cannabis use in teens and psychosis later(text.npr.org)

62 points by BostonFern 8 months ago | 54 comments

Pinterest is drowning in a sea of AI slop and auto-moderation(404media.co)

62 points by trinsic2 8 months ago | 45 comments

Genetic underpinnings of chills from art and music(journals.plos.org)

59 points by coloneltcb 8 months ago | 27 comments

AIs can generate near-verbatim copies of novels from training data(arstechnica.com)

58 points by oldnetguy 8 months ago | 52 comments

Anthropic announces proof of distillation at scale by MiniMax, DeepSeek,Moonshot(twitter.com)

56 points by Jimmc414 8 months ago | 50 comments

What I learned designing a barebones UI engine(madebymohammed.com)

56 points by teleforce 8 months ago | 28 comments

A lithium-ion breakthrough that could boost range and lower costs(techradar.com)

54 points by thelastgallon 8 months ago | 28 comments

The Origins of Agar(asimov.press)

52 points by surprisetalk 8 months ago | 10 comments

IBM Plunges After Anthropic's Latest Update Takes on COBOL(zerohedge.com)

52 points by gradus_ad 8 months ago | 39 comments

Confusables.txt and NFKC disagree on 31 characters(paultendo.github.io)

51 points by pimterry 8 months ago | 34 comments

How close are we to a vision for 2010?(shkspr.mobi)

51 points by ColinWright 8 months ago | 28 comments