Iran War Cost Tracker
For Comparison Post-9/11 Wars: $8,000,000,000,000 over 20 years (~$300,000,000/day avg.) 3 aircraft lost to friendly fire (Feb 28): $270,000,000 — equiv. to 3,375 teacher salaries for a year Iraq War avg. oil price: ~$72/bbl (approx. $100+ in 2026 dollars) Iran-Iraq War (1980–88): $622,000,000,000 total (est. 9 years of Iran’s GDP) U.S. national debt interest: $1,000,000,000,000 […]
Intel’s make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
Intel this week formally introduced its Xeon 6+ processors codenamed ’Clearwater Forest’ that pack up to 288 energy-efficient Darkmont cores and are the first data center CPUs made on the company’s 18A fabrication process (1.8nm-class). Intel aims its Xeon 6+ ’Clearwater Forest’ processors primarily for telecom, cloud, and edge AI workloads as they feature Advanced […]
Fire the CEO, Introducing the AxO’s
“A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better.” – Jack Dorsey, announcing 4,000 layoffs at Block, February 2026 Everyone agrees: AI is coming for the developers. The $200,000-a-year engineers writing CRUD apps and maintaining CI pipelines. The line workers of the knowledge economy. Trim them. Automate them. […]
Why payment fees matter more than you think
One of the small advantages of riding in the front seat of a Cuenca taxi, apart from the superior view of traffic misdemeanors and roadside drama, is that the dashboard functions as an unexpectedly reliable indicator of financial evolution. Permits, guardian saints, and, increasingly, a tidy arrangement of QR payment stickers: Deuna, JEP, Jardín Azuayo. […]
Pass-Through of Tariffs: Evidence from European Wine Imports
When AI Writes the Software, Who Verifies It?
AI Is Rewriting the World’s Software Code Metal recently raised $125 million to rewrite defense industry code using AI. Google and Microsoft both report that 25–30% of their new code is AI-generated. AWS used AI to modernize 40 million lines of COBOL for Toyota. Microsoft’s CTO predicts that 95% of all code will be AI-generated […]
The Longing (1999)
What Is the Web For? We know telephones are for talking with people, televisions are for watching programs, and highways are for driving. So what’s the Web for? We don’t know. Yet we put it on magazine covers, found businesses stoking it, spend billions on an infrastructure for it. We want it to be important […]
My first science video in 3 years (Pysics Girl)
Launch HN: Cekura (YC F24) – Testing and monitoring for voice and chat AI agents
Hey HN – we’re Tarush, Sidhant, and Shashij from Cekura (https://www.cekura.ai). We’ve been running voice agent simulation for 1.5 years, and recently extended the same infrastructure to chat. Teams use Cekura to simulate real user conversations, stress-test prompts and LLM behavior, and catch regressions before they hit production. The core problem: you can’t manually QA […]
I’m reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
Identity verification and age verification is an increasinly common policy conversation at the moment, in numerous countries. Often, this is in combination with proposals to ban children from varying concepts of “social media”, which generally means that everyone would have to prove that they were not a child. I have yet to see a well-considered […]