The best Hacker News stories from All from the past day
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Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer
Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
How will OpenAI compete?
Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model
Banned in California
Google API keys weren't secrets, but then Gemini changed the rules
Layoffs at Block
<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/26/block-laying-off-about-4000-employees-nearly-half-of-its-workforce.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/26/block-laying-off-about-4000-...</a><p><a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/block-plans-to-lay-off-nearly-half-its-staff-in-deliberate-and-bold-embrace-of-ai-81e99247" rel="nofollow">https://www.marketwatch.com/story/block-plans-to-lay-off-nea...</a>
Layoffs at Block
<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/26/block-laying-off-about-4000-employees-nearly-half-of-its-workforce.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/26/block-laying-off-about-4000-...</a><p><a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/block-plans-to-lay-off-nearly-half-its-staff-in-deliberate-and-bold-embrace-of-ai-81e99247" rel="nofollow">https://www.marketwatch.com/story/block-plans-to-lay-off-nea...</a>
Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
Pi – A minimal terminal coding harness
Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]
Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution
OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine
Related ongoing thread: <i>Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136036">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136036</a> - Feb 2026 (282 comments)
“Car Wash” test with 53 models
"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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements
Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
I'm helping my dog vibe code games
FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics