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The article discusses the challenges and implications of age verification on the internet, particularly for online content and services that are restricted to adults. It explores the various methods and technologies used for age verification, as well as the privacy and security concerns associated with these approaches.

The article explores the advantages of adopting the Rust programming language, highlighting its focus on safety, concurrency, and performance, making it a suitable choice for systems programming and building secure and reliable software.

The article discusses how some Americans are disabling or destroying surveillance cameras installed by a company called Flock, citing concerns over privacy and government overreach. It highlights the growing tensions between technological advancements in surveillance and public resistance to perceived invasions of personal freedoms.

The article reports on a forensic investigation by Forensic Architecture into an incident in Tel Sultan, Gaza, where Israeli soldiers allegedly killed civilians and obstructed the Red Crescent and civil defense responders. The investigation examines the evidence and timeline of the events using audio-visual data and witness testimonies.

Pope Leo XIV urges priests to use their own brains, not artificial intelligence (AI), to write homilies, emphasizing the importance of personal reflection and original thought in preaching.

Elsevier, a major academic publisher, has decided to shut down its finance journal, Review of Financial Studies, after 35 years of operation. This decision reflects the changing landscape of academic publishing and the ongoing challenges facing specialized academic journals in the digital age.

A structured archive of CIA World Factbook data spanning 1990–2025. It currently includes: 36 editions 281 entities ~1.06M parsed fields full-text + boolean search country/year comparisons map/trend/ranking analysis views CSV/XLSX/PDF export The goal is to preserve long-horizon public-domain government data and make cross-year analysis practical. Live: https://cia-factbook-archive.fly.dev About/method details: https://cia-factbook-archive.fly.dev/about Data source is the CIA World Factbook (public domain). Not affiliated with the CIA or U.S. Government.

The article discusses Hetzner, a European hosting provider, announcing an increase in prices for their services due to rising energy and infrastructure costs. It provides details on the specific price changes and the company's rationale for the adjustments.

The article discusses Hetzner's price adjustment policy, which allows the company to adapt its prices to reflect changes in market conditions and infrastructure costs. This policy aims to ensure the sustainability of Hetzner's services and enable it to continue providing reliable and affordable solutions to its customers.

The article discusses the launch of Firefox 148, which includes a new AI kill switch feature and other enhancements. The AI kill switch allows users to quickly disable AI-powered features in the browser, providing more control over their browsing experience.

The article discusses a new blood test that can help diagnose Alzheimer's disease with greater accuracy. The test measures levels of specific proteins in the blood, providing a reliable and non-invasive way to identify the early stages of Alzheimer's.

The article discusses the process of getting the Broadcom brcmfmac wireless driver working with FreeBSD, including steps to install the necessary packages, configure the driver, and troubleshoot any issues that may arise.

The article discusses a breach at Persona, a Discord-backed identity verification startup co-founded by Peter Thiel. The breach exposed user data and raised concerns about the security practices of the company.

The article explores the creation of a simple dog-walking game, detailing the development process, design choices, and the lessons learned along the way. It provides insights into the technical aspects of game development, emphasizing the importance of iterative design and user feedback.

ASML, a leading semiconductor equipment maker, has unveiled an EUV light source advance that could yield up to 50% more chips by 2030. This innovation is expected to boost the production capacity and efficiency of the semiconductor industry.

"I Want to Wash My Car. The Car Wash Is 50 Meters Away. Should I Walk or Drive?" This question has been making the rounds as a simple AI logic test so I wanted to see how it holds up across a broad set of models. Ran 53 models (leading open-source, open-weight, proprietary) with no system prompt, forced choice between drive and walk, with a reasoning field.

On a single run, only 11 out of 53 got it right (42 said walk). But a single run doesn't prove much, so I reran every model 10 times. Same prompt, no cache, clean slate.

The results got worse. Of the 11 that passed the single run, only 5 could do it consistently. GPT-5 managed 7/10. GPT-5.1, GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4.5, every Llama and Mistral model scored 0/10 across all 10 runs.

People kept saying humans would fail this too, so I got a human baseline through Rapidata (10k people, same forced choice): 71.5% said drive. Most models perform below that.

All reasoning traces (ran via Opper, my startup), full model breakdown, human baseline data, and raw JSON files are in the writeup for anyone who wants to dig in or run their own analysis.

We returned to MIT last month to teach a revised version of Missing Semester, six years after the original debut (which has been extensively discussed on HN, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22226380 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34934216).

We’ve updated the course based on our personal experiences as well as major changes in the field (e.g., the proliferation of AI-powered developer tools) over the past several years. The 2026 course includes revised versions of four lectures from the previous course, and it adds five entirely new lectures:

- Development Environment and Tools

- Packaging and Shipping Code

- Agentic Coding

- Beyond the Code (soft skills)

- Code Quality

We’d love to hear any feedback from the HN community to improve the current or future iterations of the course. In particular, we’re curious to hear the community’s take on our inclusion of AI-related topics (e.g., dedicating an entire class to the topic of agentic coding; though we tried to counterbalance it with plenty of disclaimers, and a dedicated section on AI etiquette in Beyond the Code).

--Anish, Jon, and Jose

The article explores the concept of tackling large tasks one step at a time, using the construction of the Hoover Dam as an example. It highlights the benefits of breaking down complex projects into manageable pieces and the importance of consistent, incremental progress to achieve ambitious goals.

The article discusses the concept of 'code is cheap' in software development, emphasizing the importance of focusing on the overall system design and architecture rather than solely on writing code. It argues that the true cost of software lies in the long-term maintenance and evolution of the system, and that good design practices can significantly reduce these costs.

Hey HN! Lev and Justin here, authors of PgDog (https://pgdog.dev/), a connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder for PostgreSQL. If you build apps with a lot of traffic, you know the first thing to break is the database. We are solving this with a network proxy that works without requiring application code changes or database migrations.

Our post from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099187

The most important update: we are in production. Sharding is used a lot, with direct-to-shard queries (one shard per query) working pretty much all the time. Cross-shard (or multi-database) queries are still a work in progress, but we are making headway.

Aggregate functions like count(), min(), max(), avg(), stddev() and variance() are working, without refactoring the app. PgDog calculates the aggregate in-transit, while transparently rewriting queries to fetch any missing info. For example, multi-database average calculation requires a total count of rows to calculate the original sum. PgDog will add count() to the query, if it’s not there already, and remove it from the rows sent to the app.

Sorting and grouping works, including DISTINCT, if the columns(s) are referenced in the result. Over 10 data types are supported, like, timestamp(tz), all integers, varchar, etc.

Cross-shard writes, including schema changes (CREATE/DROP/ALTER), are now atomic and synchronized between all shards with two-phase commit. PgDog keeps track of the transaction state internally and will rollback the transaction if the first phase fails. You don’t need to monkeypatch your ORM to use this: PgDog will intercept the COMMIT statement and execute PREPARE TRANSACTION and COMMIT PREPARED instead.

Omnisharded tables, a.k.a replicated or mirrored (identical on all shards), support atomic reads and writes. That’s important because most databases can’t be completely sharded and will have some common data on all databases that has to be kept in-sync.

Multi-tuple inserts, e.g., INSERT INTO table_x VALUES ($1, $2), ($3, $4), are split by our query rewriter and distributed to their respective shards automatically. They are used by ORMs like Prisma, Sequelize, and others, so those now work without code changes too.

Sharding keys can be mutated. PgDog will intercept and rewrite the update statement into 3 queries, SELECT, INSERT, and DELETE, moving the row between shards. If you’re using Citus (for everyone else, Citus is a Postgres extension for sharding databases), this might be worth a look.

If you’re like us and prefer integers to UUIDs for your primary keys, we built a cross-shard unique sequence, directly inside PgDog. It uses the system clock (and a couple other inputs), can be called like a Postgres function, and will automatically inject values into queries, so ORMs like ActiveRecord will continue to work out of the box. It’s monotonically increasing, just like a real Postgres sequence, and can generate up to 4 million numbers per second with a range of 69.73 years, so no need to migrate to UUIDv7 just yet.

    INSERT INTO my_table (id, created_at) VALUES (pgdog.unique_id(), now());

Sharding hardly works without a good load balancer. PgDog can monitor replicas and move write traffic to a promoted primary during a failover. This works with managed Postgres, like RDS (incl. Aurora), Azure Pg, GCP Cloud SQL, etc., because it just polls each instance with “SELECT pg_is_in_recovery()”. Primary election is not supported yet, so if you’re self-hosting with Patroni, you should keep it around for now, but you don’t need to run HAProxy in front of the DBs anymore.

The load balancer is getting pretty smart and can handle edge cases like SELECT FOR UPDATE and CTEs with INSERT/UPDATE statements, but if you still prefer to handle your read/write separation in code, you can do that too with manual routing. This works by giving PgDog a hint at runtime: a connection parameter (-c pgdog.role=primary), SET statement, or a query comment. If you have multiple connection pools in your app, you can replace them with just one connection to PgDog instead. For multi-threaded Python/Ruby/Go apps, this helps by reducing memory usage, I/O and context switching overhead.

Speaking of connection pooling, PgDog can automatically rollback unfinished transactions and drain and re-sync partially sent queries, all in an effort to preserve connections to the database. If you’ve seen Postgres go to 100% CPU because of a connection storm caused by an application crash, this might be for you. Draining connections works by receiving and discarding rows from abandoned queries and sending the Sync message via the Postgres wire protocol, which clears the query context and returns the connection to a normal state.

PgDog is open source and welcomes contributions and feedback in any form. As always, all features are configurable and can be turned off/on, so should you choose to give it a try, you can do so at your own pace. Our docs (https://docs.pgdog.dev) should help too.

Thanks for reading and happy hacking!

Anthropic has released Steerling, an 8-billion parameter language model, aimed at providing a more aligned and truthful AI assistant that can engage in open-ended dialogue and assist with a variety of tasks while adhering to Anthropic's principles of ethical AI development.

The article explores the concept of persona-based security, which leverages user behavior and context to enhance access control and authentication. It discusses the advantages of this approach, such as improved user experience and reduced friction, as well as the technical implementation and practical considerations for organizations adopting persona-based security.

The article discusses the concept of a 'simple web we own', emphasizing the importance of individuals taking control of their online presence and creating their own personal websites rather than relying solely on social media platforms. It encourages readers to reclaim the internet and assert their digital independence.

The article discusses the introduction of the 'setHTML' method in Firefox 148, which provides stronger cross-site scripting (XSS) protection compared to the traditional 'innerHTML' approach. This change aims to improve the security of web applications by limiting the potential for XSS vulnerabilities.

The article discusses the availability of Wolfram technology as a foundation tool for large language model (LLM) systems, highlighting its potential to enhance the capabilities and performance of these AI systems.

The article discusses the process of porting a motherboard to the open-source BIOS firmware, Coreboot. It covers the technical challenges, the benefits of using Coreboot, and the author's experience in undertaking this project.