HackerNews Digest

Virginia enacted S.B. 388 on April 13 2026, amending the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act to forbid the sale of geolocation data. Under the VCDPA, “sale” is narrowly defined as the exchange of personal data for monetary consideration by a controller to a third party. The prohibition becomes effective July 1 2026. Virginia’s approach mirrors Maryland and Oregon, which use broader “sale” definitions that include monetary or other valuable consideration. Several other states—California, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Washington—have introduced comparable bans. The legislative trend follows heightened regulatory scrutiny, notably the California Attorney General’s March 2025 investigation of the location‑data industry and a 2024 FTC settlement that barred a data broker from selling geolocation data.

Switzerland offers symmetric, dedicated fiber connections up to 25 Gbit/s because its telecom infrastructure is built once as a neutral, shared asset and provided to all providers on a Layer‑1 “open‑access” basis. The 2008 standard required four‑strand point‑to‑point fiber to each premises, allowing any ISP to connect via the unique OTO identifier without additional digging. This model creates genuine competition on price, speed, and service while avoiding the waste of parallel trenches (over‑build) or territorial monopolies. In the United States, incumbents own exclusive fiber ducts; most neighborhoods have a single provider and use point‑to‑multiple‑point (P2MP) architectures that share bandwidth among many homes, limiting effective speeds. Germany similarly permits multiple operators to lay separate cables, leading to costly redundant infrastructure and limited duct‑sharing enforcement. Swisscom’s 2020 shift to P2MP was blocked by the competition authority (COMCO), which fined the firm €18 million and upheld the requirement for point‑to‑point access. The article concludes with policy proposals: mandate open‑access duct and dark‑fiber sharing at cost‑based rates, enforce point‑to‑point deployment, adopt a national multi‑fiber standard, empower competition regulators, and enable municipal fiber projects.

The article references a March interview with Rivian’s chief software officer, Wassym Bensaid, during which host Nilay Patel asked about CarPlay support. Bensaid argued that full‑screen mirroring solutions “take over every single pixel” and do not align with Rivian’s user‑interaction vision. The author points out that Apple’s CarPlay Ultra already allows OEM UI elements to coexist with CarPlay, citing a Volvo XC90 where CarPlay occupies the upper portion of the display while Volvo’s native UI remains visible. The author emphasizes that CarPlay is optional and additive—drivers can choose to use it for apps not natively supported in Rivian’s system (e.g., Overcast). He asserts that CarPlay support is “table‑stakes” for his purchase decision, urging Rivian to add CarPlay rather than view it as mandatory, noting that upcoming iOS 27 features will improve navigation integration. The piece concludes with a personal pledge to buy only Rivian models that include CarPlay.

The crustc repo provides a full translation of Rust 1.98.0‑nightly’s compiler into C (≈46 M lines). The generated C can be built with GCC and GNU make, given a matching LLVM shared library (e.g., libLLVM.so.22.1‑rust‑1.98.0‑nightly). After compilation, the resulting rustc binary reports the correct version and can compile the core, alloc, and std libraries, demonstrating a self‑hosted Rust compiler written entirely in C. The project showcases cilly, a Rust library and compiler backend that emits portable C code, adapts to the target C compiler’s capabilities via “witness” programs, and queries type layouts, alignments, and character encodings. cilly supports arbitrary targets (including obscure hardware lacking LLVM/GCC) and can operate over network connections to remote C compilers. Building requires a recent GCC (13.3) and the appropriate LLVM libs; a typical make ‑j20 run finishes in ~1 min, though optimization flags often cause failures. The standard library must be built separately, and the toolchain is still experimental and not yet released for public use.

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The page is a Mastodon post entry titled “Ingo Blechschmidt: ‘So. For the past few days I’ve been deep in a fun…’”. The only visible content consists of a notice that the Mastodon web application requires JavaScript to function, with a suggestion to enable it or use a native client. Below the notice, the page lists an “Images and Visual Content” section that contains a single placeholder labeled “Image 1” with the alt text “Mastodon”. No additional text, commentary, or substantive material from the original post is provided in the scraped excerpt.

The essay argues that reality is densely detailed, and overlooking these details leads to intellectual stagnation. Using basement‑stair construction as a case study, it shows how seemingly simple tasks decompose into numerous subtasks—accurate angle cuts, material warping, screw placement, and tool constraints—each requiring precise attention. It extends this observation to physics, noting that boiling water is not a single temperature event; surface nucleation, vessel material, and superheating demonstrate hidden complexity. The author contends that as challenges become harder, critical details become less visible yet more decisive (e.g., wood warp affecting cuts, superheating affecting industrial processes, thrust modulation for reusable rockets). Misrecognition of these details can cause prolonged conflict or failure, as illustrated by a personal disagreement over stair‑cutting methods. Overcoming such “stuck” thinking requires deliberately seeking unnoticed details in everyday observations, conversations, and work, thereby expanding intuitive models and preventing blind reliance on apparent facts.

- On April 22 2020, Zachtronics announced that the previously sold‑out physical deluxe edition of **EXAPUNKS** is now available as a print‑on‑demand zine set through Lulu. Each issue costs $7 plus shipping; both issues must be ordered to obtain the complete set. - On July 16 2018, the site introduced **Axiom VirtualNetwork+**, a custom puzzle creation tool for EXAPUNKS. The tool uses JavaScript‑based API functions that let designers define hosts, files, registers, goals, and puzzle logic, enabling the creation of user‑generated “virtual networks.”

On June 4 2026 the U.S. Secretary of Commerce issued Directive DAO 216‑26, which limits confidentiality protection for Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Bureau publications to “coarsening” (rounding, aggregation, ranges) and, only as a last resort, “suppression.” It explicitly bans “noise infusion” methods—including input‑noise addition, swapping, and differential privacy—that have been used since the 1990s for Census, Quarterly Workforce Indicators, OnTheMap, and other granular data products. The authors argue that coarsening alone cannot ensure privacy: a constructed County Business Patterns example shows how intersecting coarse statistics can be combined algebraically to recover exact business‑level employee counts, a breach prohibited by the Census Act. Noise‑infusion techniques prevent such reconstruction. The directive bypassed required administrative procedures, reflects political rather than scientific judgment, and threatens both data utility and respondent confidentiality, potentially reducing response rates and degrading essential economic and demographic statistics. The authors call for the scientific community to oppose the order, lobby legislators, and archive threatened methodological documentation.

PeerTube is a free, decentralized, federated video platform built on ActivityPub and WebRTC P2P technology. It enables users to upload, stream, and embed videos, with optional live‑streaming support. Content is discoverable across the “video fediverse,” allowing follows via Fediverse services (Mastodon, Pleroma) or RSS without needing an account on the host instance. Administrators can customize the UI, disable tracking, and manage instance‑level policies. Instances share load through peer‑to‑peer streaming and can cache each other’s videos, improving reach for smaller servers. The project provides extensive documentation: production installation guides, hardware requirements, community packages (YunoHost, Docker), CLI tools, REST and ActivityPub APIs, and architectural blueprints. Contributions are welcomed (bug reports, translations, documentation). PeerTube is licensed under GNU AGPL v3 (or later) and CC BY‑SA 4.0, with source code available on GitHub.