Elon's AI Space Empire Shocks Tech World!

Ratchets in Software Development

Key Points

• A simple lint-time script enforces thresholds on discouraged patterns via string matching.
• Counts failing both upward and downward drive gradual reduction of legacy usage.
• Future plans include regex support, clearer errors, and automated ratcheting.

What Most People Miss About Getting Promoted – By Yue Zhao

Key Points

• Promotions require a case for timing and potential, not just past performance.
• Articulate incremental business value gained by promoting now.
• Demonstrate role-up-leveling factors like senior hiring, leadership forums, and external representation.

EU launches government satcom program in sovereignty push

Key Points

• GOVSATCOM operations have begun, pooling eight GEO satellites for secure EU government communications.
• The secure GOVSATCOM hub marketplace offers 35 encrypted services from five member state providers.
• Integration with the 290-satellite IRIS² constellation is planned from 2029, with Ka-band military frequencies already in use.

Board Games in Ancient Fiction: Egypt, Iran, Greece

Key Points

• Ancient texts used board games to structure key plot events.
• Examples span Egypt (Setne senet match), Greece (petteia for suitors), and Iran (chess/backgammon in royal contests).
• Games serve as symbols of narrative transformation across cultures and eras.

Show HN: Apate API mocking/prototyping server and Rust unit test library

Key Points

• Standalone API mocking server with web UI, Jinja templating, Rhai scripting, and in-memory persistence.
• Run via Docker or Cargo; configure through ENV/CLI and manage TOML specs using REST endpoints.
• Supports Rust unit and integration tests by providing predictable local endpoints.

Library of Juggling

Key Points

• Catalog of juggling tricks with JugglingLab animations and detailed info
• Guidance for beginners and browsing by difficulty or navigation
• Indefinite hiatus; existing content remains available

Show HN: Sklad – Secure, offline-first snippet manager (Rust, Tauri v2)

Key Points

• Encrypted, local-only snippet manager with one-click access and quick search.
• Early-access installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux, with OS-specific warning workarounds.
• Open source (MIT) with documented cross-platform build steps using Rust, React, and Tauri.

High performance, open source RAFT clustered database: RooDB

Key Points

• Raft-based replication via OpenRaft with leader writes and read-only replicas.
• MySQL-compatible protocol with TLS required; cross-platform I/O using io_uring or POSIX.
• Comprehensive architecture and test suite across single-node and 3-node cluster configurations.

Editor of UploadVR on why he was fired

Key Points

• Opposed an AI author test without agreed safeguards.
• Requested reader opt-out and human right of refusal.
• Fired after emailing concerns to colleagues and industry contacts.

Applications where agents are first-class citizens

Key Points

• Agents should have tool parity with the UI to achieve any user-capable outcome.
• Tools must be atomic; features are outcomes defined by prompts and achieved via agent loops.
• Agent-native apps improve through iterative context accumulation and prompt refinement.

Termux

Key Points

• Latest version is v0.118.3; update to v0.118.0+ for critical fixes.
• Android 12+ may kill processes; mitigations and 12L/13 options exist.
• Install all Termux APKs from the same source/signature; don’t mix sources.

Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

Key Points

• Microsoft is reviewing and scaling back certain Copilot integrations in Windows 11 apps.
• Windows Recall is being reworked after a delay due to security and privacy flaws.
• Core AI frameworks and APIs in Windows will continue as planned.

My (very) fast zero-allocation webserver using OxCaml

Key Points

• httpz targets HTTP/1.1 headers with a fixed 32KB bytes buffer and minimal allocations.
• OxCaml’s unboxed records (#{}) and int16# types are central to the performance design.
• Unboxed record layouts prevent standard Obj-based introspection, impacting tooling/debugging.

Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

Key Points

• Microsoft is piloting Claude Code widely across engineering and nontechnical teams.
• Claude Sonnet 4 was adopted internally and favored for paid GitHub Copilot users.
• Engineers must compare Claude Code and GitHub Copilot and provide feedback.

EU must become a 'genuine federation' to avoid deindustrialisation and decline

Key Points

• Draghi urges the EU to become a genuine federation to avoid subordination and deindustrialisation.
• He cites U.S. tariffs and China’s supply-chain leverage as pressures exploiting EU fragmentation.
• Proposes “pragmatic federalism,” noting EU strength where it has already federated and the euro as a success.

Hypergrowth isn't always easy

Key Points

• Jan 5 incident: 24-minute outage affecting a small number of tailnets with increased latency.
• Architecture: single server evolved to sharded coordination service; each tailnet on one server with live migration.
• Design trade-off: coordination server as a high-speed message bus enables fast ACL propagation but complicates scaling.

MaliciousCorgi: AI Extensions send your code to China

Key Points

• Two VS Code AI extensions secretly exfiltrate code and user data to servers in China.
• Hidden channels enable whole-file capture, remote bulk harvesting, and user profiling.
• Analytics SDKs (Zhuge.io, GrowingIO, TalkingData, Baidu Analytics) run in a hidden iframe to fingerprint users.

Nano-vLLM: How a vLLM-style inference engine works

Key Points

• Nano-vLLM implements key vLLM design ideas in a minimal, production-ready codebase.
• A Scheduler-driven producer-consumer pipeline enables effective batching and resource management.
• Batching boosts throughput by amortizing GPU overheads but increases latency controlled by the slowest sequence.

AdBoost: A Browser Extension That Adds Ads To Every Webpage

Key Points

• AdBoost adds ads to webpages and is claimed to be unique in doing so.
• Installation requires cloning the extension’s repository.
• Load the extension in Google Chrome via chrome://extensions using Developer Mode’s “Load unpacked.”

4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)

Key Points

• rsync transfer of ~59 GiB took over 8 minutes on a 10 Gbps LAN.
• Compression and rsync daemon did not improve performance due to CPU limits.
• rclone with --multi-thread-streams delivered ~4x faster sync.

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)

Key Points

• Stream is hiring multiple senior-to-principal Go backend roles for high-scale systems serving customers like Strava and Patreon, with a 10-week Go onboarding program.
• Prezly offers remote engineering roles in Europe (±2h CET) on a high-traffic publishing platform using PHP/Symfony, PostgreSQL, React/TypeScript, and Kubernetes on AWS.
• BitRipple, Bookarang, and Blackshark AI are recruiting engineers for deep-tech networking for AI, AI-based book recommendations, and geospatial AI infrastructure, all using modern cloud and DevOps stacks.

Kernighan on Programming

Key Points

• Debugging is highlighted as harder than writing code.
• Overly clever code can exceed the author’s debugging ability.
• The post frames the quote as practical, cautionary guidance.

Show HN: Stelvio – Ship Python to AWS

Key Points

• Infrastructure as Python with smart defaults, no YAML.
• Deploy Python functions to AWS Lambda and auto-link permissions to resources like S3.
• Local development via stlv dev runs Lambda code locally while infra stays in AWS.

We asked 15,000 European devs about jobs, salaries, and AI [pdf]

Key Points

• Analysis of 23,000+ job offers and CAWI survey underpin findings.
• Most juniors land first job within three months; entry-level roles often demand too much experience.
• Switzerland is the highest-paying country; salary and remote work are top candidate priorities.

Valanza – my Unix way for weight tracking and anlysis

Key Points

• Unix-style pipeline of small tools handles interpolation, smoothing, and visualization.
• Requires bash, R (with dplyr, tidyr, zoo), awk, gnuplot; optional rc shell.
• Run via ./valanza.sh or ./valanza.rc; uses named pipes and process substitution.

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)

Key Points

• Phoenix‑based engineer seeks remote roles; no relocation.
• Broad stack: .NET, Node/Deno, React, CI/CD; cross‑platform OS experience.
• Provides résumé on GitHub and LinkedIn for review and contact.

Todd C. Miller – sudo Maintainer for over 30 years

Key Points

• Todd C. Miller seeks sponsorship to fund continued sudo maintenance and development.
• He has maintained sudo for over 30 years and remains involved in OpenBSD, though less actively.
• He cites past major contributions to ISC cron and other projects.

Solvingn the Santa Claus concurrency puzzle with a model checker

Key Points

• Uses SPIN and Promela to validate concurrency constraints of the Santa Claus puzzle.
• Demonstrates three failure scenarios to expose unsafe assumptions before presenting a correct model.
• Highlights why model checking provides better coverage than standard Python/Go testing.

They lied to you. Building software is hard

Key Points

• Rapid-build tools help prototypes but not complex, production software.
• Steep, challenging learning accelerates lasting developer skills.
• AI assistance shows diminishing returns as experience increases.

Rust Coreutils Continues Working Toward 100% GNU Compatibility, Proving Trolls

Key Points

• Ubuntu 25.10 adopted Rust Coreutils, with plans to continue in 26.04 LTS.
• Rust Coreutils targets 100% GNU Coreutils compatibility.
• Bugs found during adoption were fixed quickly and cross-platform work continues.

Hacking Moltbook: The AI Social Network Any Human Can Control

Key Points

• Misconfigured Supabase granted full unauthenticated access to Moltbook’s production database.
• Exposed data included 1.5M API tokens, ~35K email addresses, and private messages.
• Moltbook’s claimed agent count masked a much smaller base of ~17K human owners and lacked verification/rate limiting.

Advancing AI Benchmarking with Game Arena

Key Points

• Game Arena adds Werewolf and poker to evaluate reasoning under uncertainty and social dynamics.
• Gemini 3 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash lead updated chess and Werewolf leaderboards.
• Games provide controlled environments for agentic safety research, including deception detection.

The Codex App

Key Points

• New macOS Codex app orchestrates multi-agent, parallel, long-running development tasks.
• Built-in git worktree support enables conflict-free multi-agent work on the same repo.
• Codex expands via skills; demo used GPT Image and a web dev skill to build a game over 7M tokens.

EPA Advances Farmers' Right to Repair

Key Points

• EPA clarifies the CAA supports right to repair nonroad diesel equipment.
• Temporary emission-control overrides for repair are permitted and do not weaken standards.
• Guidance covers SCR, inducement systems, and DEF systems in nonroad diesel engines.

Tomo: A statically typed, imperative language that cross-compiles to C [video]

Key Points

• Tomo is a statically typed, imperative language that cross-compiles to C.
• The language includes garbage collection and aims to be fast, simple, and safe.
• The presentation is part of Recurse Center’s Localhost series and runs 1:10:15.

Fake Samsung 990 Pro passes basic checks but runs slower than a USB 2.0 drive

Key Points

• Diagnostic mismatch: reported PCIe 3.0 on a PCIe 4.0 model signaled a fake.
• Severely low benchmark speeds and Samsung Magician confirmed the counterfeit.
• Buy only from reputable retailers; document unboxing and verify with vendor tools.

Why software stocks are getting pummelled

Key Points

• SAP’s 2026 cloud growth deceleration guidance triggered a 15% share price drop.
• ServiceNow fell 13% despite a revenue beat, reflecting sentiment over performance.
• Salesforce (-7%) and Workday (-8%) declined without issuing new news.

The largest number representable in 64 bits

Key Points

• 2^64−1 is the maximum for 64-bit unsigned integers; doubles reach ~1.8×10^308.
• 64-bit programs as representations allow much larger outputs, exemplified by bc.
• Busy Beaver (BB(n)) frames maximal outputs in Turing machine models.

Stop incentivizing surface parking lots

Key Points

• Net contribution framework: Economic Output minus Land Value.
• Surface parking lots are characterized as negative-value uses of prime downtown land.
• In Syracuse, solely parking-use parcels total $44 million in non-exempt land value (~6% of the city’s total).

Serverless backend hosting without idle costs – open-source

Key Points

• AWS Lambda-based backend hosting with pay-per-use and automatic scalability.
• One-click GitHub deployment, runtime detection, and custom subdomains.
• Deployment scripts provision ECR, Lambda, SQS, IAM, and wildcard routing via Lambda@Edge.

Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed

Key Points

• New compact thermal batteries store heat from heat pumps using salt hydrates.
• Charge during cheap/clean electricity periods; release heat when needed.
• Space-saving units up to four times smaller than traditional hot water tanks.

Don't discount American democracy's resilience

Key Points

• A Minneapolis enforcement incident prompted public pushback and a White House demotion of a border enforcement leader.
• Silver argues U.S. democracy’s resilience is underestimated by pessimistic narratives.
• He emphasizes context, precedent, and public opinion in assessing democratic strength.

Stelvio: Ship Python to AWS

Key Points

• Pure-Python IaC for AWS with smart defaults and automatic permissions via resource linking.
• Live Dev Mode (stlv dev) provides instant code sync; quick start uses uv and stlv commands.
• Supports major AWS services (Lambda, API Gateway, EventBridge, S3, DynamoDB, SQS, SNS, SES) with escape hatches to Pulumi.

General Graboids: Worms and Remote Code Execution in Command and Conquer

Key Points

• Vulnerabilities in C&C: Generals enable remote code execution; PoCs and a worm are published.
• UDP ports 8086 (lobby) and 8088 (gameplay) must be exposed by clients, expanding the attack surface.
• EA’s early-2025 source release enabled analysis; Steam builds supported dynamic instrumentation.

Nvidia shares are down after report that its OpenAI investment stalled

Key Points

• Nvidia stock dipped after reports of uncertainty around its up-to-$100B OpenAI investment.
• Huang said the commitment is nonbinding, capped below $100B, but will be Nvidia’s largest investment.
• Analysts cite uncertainty and circular financing concerns as drivers of market reaction.

Mattermost say they will not clarify what license the project is under

Key Points

• Concern about ambiguous license wording (“may be licensed”) in Mattermost’s LICENSE.
• Request to adopt standard AGPL-3+ license grant for clarity and compliance.
• Proposed dual-licensing clarification (AGPL or commercial) criticized for limiting rights to compilation.

Being "Just a Developer" Isn't Enough Anymore

Key Points

• AI reduces the defensibility of pure coding skill by making code cheaper and faster to produce.
• Deep business domain knowledge is a key differentiator for developers.
• Cross-functional skills in DevOps, security, performance, and reliability are essential to remain valuable.

Zig Libc

Key Points

• ~250 C source files removed; 2032 remain as Zig migrates libc to standard library wrappers.
• Libc now shares the Zig Compilation Unit, enabling frontend cross-optimization and code elimination.
• Potential (untested) to control libc I/O globally via std.Io, e.g., io_uring integration.

Europe just started building a 'kill switch' for U.S. tech

Key Points

• Europe’s push for digital sovereignty is influencing procurement and infrastructure decisions.
• European cloud, telecom, and integration firms may gain; U.S. vendors face headwinds.
• Watch for mandates, tighter sovereign-cloud standards, and defense-to-civil spillover.

xAI Joins SpaceX

Key Points

• SpaceX announced it acquired xAI; xAI’s post confirms and links to SpaceX’s full update.
• xAI’s product ecosystem is highlighted (Grok, API, Grok Enterprise, Grokipedia, Colossus).
• Grok is available on web, iOS, Android, and X.

Ownership of open source flashcard app Anki transferred to for-profit AnkiHub

Key Points

• Anki’s stewardship and business operations will gradually transition to AnkiHub.
• Provisions aim to keep Anki open source and aligned with its founding principles.
• The founder will remain involved at a sustainable level during and after the transition.

TileIR Internals

Key Points

• TileIR lowers CuTile code through multiple dialects to NVVM/LLVM and final SASS.
• A fused MoE kernel from cutile-python is traced, mapping CuTile APIs to cuda_tile ops.
• tileiras orchestrates the pipeline; behavior is based on CUDA 13.1.

Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

Key Points

• All five US offshore wind projects received court-ordered temporary injunctions to continue construction.
• Judges were unpersuaded by a classified national security justification for halting turbine installation.
• A prior executive order blocking permitting was already struck down as arbitrary and capricious.

The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal

Key Points

• TSA introduced a $45 fee for travelers flying without REAL ID.
• No law mandates ID for domestic flights; TSA guidance allows flying without ID.
• OMB has not approved TSA’s information collection forms, including Form 415.

Training a trillion parameter model to be funny

Key Points

• Rubric-based RL is used to approximate a reward for humor by decomposing it into verifiable attributes.
• Tinker enabled post-training of Moonshot’s Kimi K2 for this experiment.
• The article presents sample outputs but no formal quantitative evaluation.

Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features

Key Points

• Firefox 148 introduces controls to disable AI features entirely or individually.
• A master toggle blocks current and future AI features and related prompts.
• Rollout begins February 24.

Julia

Key Points

• Julia is a mysterious astronomical object discovered as faint, self-similar twin spirals near Vela.
• A sentient space structure maintains two surviving crew via cryogenic alternation and active microwave sensing.
• Humanity committed century-scale, resource-intensive missions using glass and lithium deuteride ships to study Julia.

The Hot Mess of AI

Key Points

• Longer reasoning increases incoherence across models and tasks.
• Scaling improves coherence on easy tasks but not hard ones.
• Incoherence is quantified via a bias-variance error decomposition.

The Connection Machine CM-1 "Feynman" T-shirt

Key Points

• Logo predates CM-1’s design and shaped the machine’s look.
• Geometric motif represents a Feynman-suggested 12D hardware network.
• MoMA New York acquired a CM-2 in 2016; classic color scheme detailed.

Al is killing programming and the Python community

Key Points

• AI tools like ChatGPT are reported to shift Python coding habits away from documentation and community-based learning.
• The article describes poor development rigor in large projects by inexperienced developers, including absent version management.
• It emphasizes technical shortcomings: performance issues, weak security, multithreading misuse, and inefficient SQL queries.

Carnegie Mellon Unversity Computer Club FTP Server

Key Points

• Mirrors updated every six hours include GNU, Ubuntu (and ISOs), Knoppix, Debian archives, Aminet, scene.org, Zeroshell, and HVSC.
• A scene.org file flagged as malware in 2015 was removed to address domain rating and browser warning issues.
• Cryptographic software on the site is covered by U.S. export rules under License Exception TSU (15 C.F.R. § 740.13(e)).

GitHub discusses giving maintainers control to disable PRs

Key Points

• GitHub is evaluating repo-level PR controls: disable PRs, restrict to collaborators, and delete PRs from the UI.
• Long-term plans include granular permissions and criteria for opening PRs, plus AI-assisted triage.
• GitHub aims to improve transparency and attribution for AI-assisted contributions and is seeking feedback.

Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

Key Points

• Hair analysis shows a ~100-fold drop in lead levels after EPA-led phaseouts.
• Study uses 48 Utah-sourced samples, including century-old family-preserved hair.
• Mass spectrometry validated declines linked to reduced industrial and consumer lead sources.

G Lang – A lightweight interpreter written in D (2.4MB)

Key Points

• Interpreter written in D with ~2.4MB binary size
• Optimized for x86_64 with a focus on memory-safe execution
• Includes a minimal standard library and is available on GitHub

Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

Key Points

• Linux 6.14.11 chosen as the last i486-compatible kernel; 6.15 drops support.
• Minimal kernel config tailored for a single-floppy boot with initramfs and XZ.
• Host setup uses Arch-based Omarchy Linux, pacman tools, and an i486 musl cross-compiler.

Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog

Key Points

• Alleged CAPTCHA JavaScript repeatedly hits the author’s site every 300 ms with randomized queries.
• Verification steps and mitigation noted (source/network checks; uBlock Origin blocks requests).
• Related timeline includes FBI-Tucows subpoena reports, AdGuard DNS’s WAAD post, and a GDPR complaint handled by the host.

50 years ago, a young Bill Gates took on the 'software pirates'

Key Points

• 50th anniversary of Bill Gates’ 1976 “Open Letter to Hobbyists” about Altair BASIC copying.
• Altair BASIC was duplicated and shared at Homebrew Computer Club before official release.
• Gates argued nonpayment discouraged professional-quality software; contemporaries disputed some cost claims.

Flying Around the World in under 80 Days

Key Points

• Autonomous hydrogen airship concept aims to circle the globe in under 80 days.
• Design centers on buoyant lift, solar-electric power, and low-permeability enclosure materials.
• Route planning leverages trade winds and considers legal overflight of low-hostility corridors.

Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

Key Points

• Productivity gains with AI did not translate to improved delivery (Index.dev, 2025).
• Experienced developers were slower with AI, contrary to their perceptions (METR, 2025).
• AI-generated code shows high vulnerability rates, increasing downstream workload (Apiiro, 2024).

Ask HN: Where do all the web devs talk?

Key Points

• Author engages well with native app communities on Twitter/X but struggles to find web devs.
• BlueSky was tested as an alternative but seemed quiet.
• The post asks if web dev communities are on forums or real-time platforms like Slack and Discord.