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The article discusses the implementation of congestion pricing in New York City, which aims to reduce traffic and air pollution by charging a fee for vehicles entering the city's central business district. The policy is expected to have significant environmental and public health benefits, though its effects on low-income residents are still being evaluated.

(Original is https://www.theinformation.com/articles/deepseek-using-banne... but hardwalled)

The article reveals that Israel used Palantir Technologies, a data analytics firm, to monitor and surveil its citizens, including through the use of a secret surveillance program. It raises concerns about the extent and privacy implications of this government-led data collection and analysis.

Sword Health, a digital physical therapy provider, announces the launch of Mindeval, a cognitive assessment and training platform that aims to help individuals improve their cognitive function and overall well-being.

The article discusses Valve's ongoing efforts to have the HDMI Forum unblock HDMI 2.1 support for Linux systems. Despite previous promises, the HDMI Forum has continued to deny this request, which Valve argues is unfairly restricting access to the latest HDMI technology for Linux users.

The article discusses the key changes in Microsoft's Outlook email client, including a redesigned user interface, improved calendar features, and enhanced security and privacy options. It highlights how the updated Outlook aims to enhance productivity and user experience.

Qualcomm has acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a RISC-V CPU design company, to deepen its expertise in RISC-V technology and expand its product portfolio with RISC-V-based solutions.

The article discusses the debate around whether the current stock market conditions constitute a 'bubble'. It analyzes various factors such as valuation metrics, investor sentiment, and market fundamentals to examine the potential risks and opportunities in the current environment.

The article reviews the Kindle Scribe, Amazon's latest e-reader that features a large 10.2-inch display and a stylus for note-taking and annotation. It highlights the device's potential as a digital notebook and its ability to seamlessly integrate with Kindle's existing ecosystem of books and content.

The article discusses the potential impacts of higher taxes on economic growth, exploring the complex relationship between taxation and investment, innovation, and overall economic performance. It examines differing perspectives on the role of taxation in promoting or hindering long-term prosperity.

Hi HN, we're Aakash and Shuangling of InspectMind (https://www.inspectmind.ai/), an AI “plan checker” that finds issues in construction drawings, details, and specs.

Construction drawings quietly go out with lots of errors: dimension conflicts, co-ordination gaps, material mismatches, missing details and more. These errors turn into delays and hundreds of thousands of dollars of rework during construction. InspectMind reviews the full drawing set of a construction project in minutes. It cross-checks architecture, engineering, and specifications to catch issues that cause rework before building begins.

Here’s a video with some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvn1FyHRlLQ.

Before this, I (Aakash) built an engineering firm that worked on ~10,000 buildings across the US. One thing that always frustrated us: a lot of design coordination issues don’t show up until construction starts. By then, the cost of a mistake can be 10–100x higher, and everyone is scrambling to fix problems that could have been caught earlier.

We tried everything including checklists, overlay reviews, peer checks but scrolling through 500–2000 PDF sheets and remembering how every detail connects to every other sheet is a brittle process. City reviewers and GC pre-con teams try to catch issues too, yet they still sneak through.

We thought: if models can parse code and generate working software, maybe they can also help reason about the built environment on paper. So we built something we wished we had!

You upload drawings and specs (PDFs). The system breaks them into disciplines and detail hierarchies, parses geometry and text, and looks for inconsistencies: - Dimensions that don’t reconcile across sheets; - Clearances blocked by mechanical/architectural elements; - Fire/safety details missing or mismatched; - Spec requirements that never made it into drawings; - Callouts referencing details that don’t exist.

The output is a list of potential issues with sheet refs and locations for a human to review. We don’t expect automation to replace design judgment, just to help ACE professionals not miss the obvious stuff. Current AIs are good at obvious stuff, plus can process data at quantities way beyond what humans can accurately do, so this is a good application for them.

Construction drawings aren't standardized and every firm names things differently. Earlier “automated checking” tools relied heavily on manually-written rules per customer, and break when naming conventions change. Instead, we’re using multimodal models for OCR + vector geometry, callout graphs across the entire set, constraint-based spatial checks, and retrieval-augmented code interpretation. No more hard-coded rules!

We’re processing residential, commercial, and industrial projects today. Latency ranges from minutes to a few hours depending on sheet count. There’s no onboarding required, simply upload PDFs. There are still lots of edge cases (PDF extraction weirdness, inconsistent layering, industry jargon), so we’re learning a lot from failures, maybe more than successes. But the tech is already delivering results that couldn’t be done with previous tools.

Pricing is pay-as-you-go: we give an instant online quote per project after you upload the project drawings. It’s hard to do regular SaaS pricing since one project may be a home remodel and another may be a highrise. We’re open to feedback on that too, we’re still figuring it out.

If you work with drawings as an architect, engineer, MEP, GC preconstruction, real estate developer, plan reviewer we’d love a chance to run a sample set and hear what breaks, what’s useful, and what’s missing!

We’ll be here all day to go into technical details about geometry parsing, clustering failures, code reasoning attempts or real-world construction stories about how things go wrong. Thanks for reading! We’re happy to answer anything and look forward to your comments!

The article argues that big tech companies have become the new Soviets, wielding immense power and influence over society, and posing a threat to individual freedom and democracy. It suggests that these companies have created a dystopian reality where they control the flow of information and shape public discourse.

We're releasing early efforts on coding agent governance with Cupcake [1] - an open-source policy enforcement layer with native integrations. You write rules in policy-as-code (OPA/Rego), and Cupcake integrates them into the agent runtime via Hooks.

See it in action (Desktop only): https://cupcake-policy-studio.vercel.app/example-policies/se...

Help us build: https://github.com/eqtylab/cupcake

We are EQTY Lab, our mission is verifiable AI (identity, provenance, and governance). With the rise of capable agents like Claude Code, it became immediately clear that those deploying these agents need the ability to conduct their own alignment and safety controls. We can’t rely solely on the frontier labs.

This is why we created the feature request for Hooks in Claude Code [2], and pivoted away from filesystem and OS-level monitoring once those hooks were implemented. Hooks provide the critical points we need:

* Evaluation: Checking agent intent and actions.

* Prevention: Stopping unsafe or unwanted actions.

* Modification: Adjusting the agent's output before execution.

Policy-as-Code with OPA/Rego - While many agent security papers suggest similar policy architectures using invented DSLs, Cupcake is fundamentally built on Open Policy Agent (OPA) and its policy language, Rego [3].

We chose Rego because it is:

* Industry-Robust: Widely adopted across enterprise DevSecOps and cloud-native environments.

* Purpose-Built: Offers unique, mature advantages for defining, managing, and enforcing policy as code.

* Enterprise-Oriented: This makes Cupcake compatible with existing enterprise governance frameworks.

Cupcake is released under the Apache-2.0 license. We will formalize a path to v1.0.0 in Q1 of 2026. This is an early preview version. The goal with Cupcake is not suppression, but to ensure an agent is able to drive fast without crashing. To collaborate, or join forces: ramos at eqtylab dot io.

[1] https://github.com/eqtylab/cupcake

[2] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/712

[3] https://www.openpolicyagent.org/

I'm the founder of AhaSend. We've built a transactional email service specifically for developers, with a Pay-As-You-Go pricing model ($0.50 per 1,000 emails) and up to 70% volume discount for platform partners.

While there are many ESPs out there, we focused heavily on the Developer Experience to solve the pain of building and testing email flows:

* The CLI: Heavily inspired by the Stripe CLI, we built a tool that lets you develop and debug locally. You can listen to webhooks, trigger events, manage your domains, and send / list / debug messages directly from your terminal.

* True Sandbox: We offer a full-lifecycle sandbox where emails go through the entire pipeline (processing, signing, etc.) without ever leaving our servers. Rhis also triggers all the webhook events (delivered, clicked, etc.) so you can test your app's logic without spamming real inboxes.

* Granular Security: We support fine-grained API scopes (e.g., reporting-only keys, or keys scoped strictly to sending from specific domains, etc), so you don't have to store "root" API keys in your application.

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

The article discusses a new proposal by the Trump administration to require foreign tourists and immigrants to the US to disclose their social media history, in an effort to enhance security screening and vetting processes.

A Palestinian activist claims that Hamas hid tons of baby formula intended for Palestinian children, in order to deliberately damage Israel by causing starvation among the population.

The article reveals that Israel used Palantir Technologies, a data analytics firm, to monitor and surveil its citizens, including through the use of a secret surveillance program. It raises concerns about the extent and privacy implications of this government-led data collection and analysis.

The article discusses a startup's effort to obtain the Twitter trademark from Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) corporation, highlighting the legal complexities and potential implications of the trademark dispute.

The article discusses the upcoming challenges in EU-US data transfers, as the EU's highest court is expected to rule on the legality of existing data transfer mechanisms. It highlights the need for businesses to prepare for potential disruptions in cross-border data flows and the possibility of new regulations being introduced.

The article reports that a recent update to the popular Notepad software included malware, potentially compromising user systems. The article warns users to be cautious when installing software updates and to verify the source and authenticity of updates before applying them.