Hacker NewsMonday, March 30

The White House released an official app that functions as a content portal for Trump administration news and policies. However, security analysis revealed concerning features: the app injects code to bypass cookie consent dialogs and paywalls on third-party websites, contains location tracking capabilities through OneSignal that can be activated with user permission, loads code from unsecured sources including personal GitHub pages, and sends user data to commercial services like Mailchimp and OneSignal rather than government servers.

A petition calls on European governments to stop signing contracts with Palantir, a US surveillance company accused of enabling conflicts and mass deportations. The petition demands transparency, investigation of existing contracts, and investment in European alternatives, warning that Palantir is quietly expanding across Europe's public systems using taxpayer money.

University of Michigan researchers found that nitrile and latex gloves worn by scientists studying microplastics contaminate lab equipment with stearate particles that chemically and visually resemble microplastics, leading to false positives and potential overestimation of pollution levels. The study recommends using cleanroom gloves instead and provides methods to distinguish true microplastics from glove contamination.

Discussion about CSS becoming increasingly powerful with new features like conditionals, math functions, and Turing completeness. Users debate whether CSS should merge with JavaScript and express concerns about CSS becoming a programming language rather than declarative styling.

A developer from the Road Rash 64 team shares technical details about building the accidentally open-world game on N64, including achieving 750k triangles/second and hardware challenges. Community members express gratitude for childhood memories and bond over the game's impact.

Debate over whether parking lot solar is more expensive than rooftop/field installations due to structural needs, with arguments about standardization, labor costs, transmission losses, and whether Korea's land constraints justify the approach despite higher infrastructure costs.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is humanity's most distant spacecraft at 15 billion miles from Earth, operating on just 69 kilobytes of memory and an 8-track tape recorder. Originally designed for a 5-year mission to study Jupiter and Saturn, it became the first human-made object to enter interstellar space in 2012 and continues transmitting unique scientific data back to Earth at 160 bits per second, despite being nearly 50 years old.

A Tennessee grandmother spent over five months in jail after AI facial recognition technology wrongly identified her as a suspect in North Dakota bank fraud cases. Angela Lipps, 50, had never been to North Dakota but was arrested and extradited based on flawed AI identification from Clearview AI. Police acknowledged errors in their investigation process and have since prohibited use of the AI system, but stopped short of apologizing. Lipps was released on Christmas Eve after bank records proved she was in Tennessee during the crimes.

CERN is using tiny custom AI models burned directly into silicon chips to filter the enormous data from the Large Hadron Collider in real-time. The LHC generates 40,000 exabytes yearly, but only 0.02% of collision events can be stored. These ultra-compact models make nanosecond decisions about which particle collisions are scientifically valuable.