AI Chaos, Kid Bans and Space Nonsense!

Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?

Key Points

• AI is helpful but insufficient alone for learning to code.
• Focus on algorithms, architecture, and language paradigms to build core skills.
• Leverage books, courses (e.g., Coursera), and reading codebases alongside AI.

Phenakistoscopes (1833)

Key Points

• Invented simultaneously in 1832 by Joseph Plateau and Simon von Stampfer.
• Mass-produced under various names; early example includes Mclean’s Optical Illusions (1833).
• Supplanted by Zoetrope and Zoopraxiscope, leading toward film; echoes modern looping animations.

The Physics of Ideas: Reality as a Coordination Problem

Key Points

• Shared reality depends on agreement about experience, not causes.
• Five critical domains—moral status, agency, intentionality, legitimacy, identity—must align to sustain peace.
• Nuclear weapons force experiential convergence, altering the conditions that make war possible.

GitHub – BenjaminPoilve/minichord: A pocket-sized musical instrument

Key Points

• Documentation and assembly guides are available and built with mkdocs.
• Hardware (PCB, BOM, 3D enclosure, keycaps) is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.
• Firmware (Hex, PlatformIO project, minicontrol) is under a 3-clause BSD License.

Astrological CPU Scheduler

Key Points

• Astrology-driven scheduling via sched_ext with real planetary and lunar calculations.
• Element-based boosts/debuffs and retrograde penalties adjust time slices.
• Rust-based implementation with BPF integration and practical build/run instructions.

Boring Go – A practical guide to writing boring, maintainable Go

Key Points

• Comprehensive Go curriculum from setup and tooling to advanced systems topics.
• Emphasis on maintainability: interfaces, generics, errors, testing, and observability.
• Covers concurrency, networking (HTTP), security, Cgo, performance, and long-term design.

LNAI – Define AI coding tool configs once, sync to Claude, Cursor, Codex, etc.

Key Points

• Define configs once in .ai/ and sync to seven AI coding tools’ native formats.
• Includes validation, syncing, and automatic cleanup of orphaned files.
• MIT-licensed with docs at lnai.sh and npm-based installation.

What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

Key Points

• Quoted-printable uses “=CRLF” for soft line breaks; naive handling leaves “=” visible.
• CRLF-to-LF conversion before decoding can drop bytes or break algorithms.
• “=C2=A0” encodes a UTF-8 non-breaking space; improper decoding exposes it.

50 Years of the Jetsons: Why the Show Still Matters

Key Points

• The Jetsons’ 1962 first season is presented as a key shaper of American futurist imagery.
• The show popularized, rather than originated, many Space Age technologies for a broad audience.
• Contemporary culture still uses The Jetsons as a benchmark for discussing technological progress and gaps.

Claude Sonnet 5 Is Imminent – and It Could Be a Generation Ahead of Google

Key Points

• Article cites claims of 82.1% SWE-Bench and unchanged pricing from Sonnet 4.5.
• Focus on cost efficiency and speed, with reported gains over Opus 4.5.
• Expected agent-like upgrades: better multitasking, context, and proactive task support.

Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB)

Key Points

• Active severe winter storm declarations listed for six U.S. states, citing FEMA.
• Clear quick-reference actions for numerous hazards and emergencies.
• Comprehensive aid and recovery resources, including FEMA, SBA, 211, and Canadian links.

Same SQL, Different Results: A Subtle Oracle vs. PostgreSQL Migration Bug

Key Points

• Oracle implicitly concatenates then adds; PostgreSQL adds then concatenates.
• Same SQL logic produced 1500 (Oracle) vs 14100 (PostgreSQL) for the example.
• Use explicit parentheses and casting to preserve intended behavior across engines.

Crime rates of undocumented-, legal immigrants, & native-born citizens in Texas

Key Points

• Undocumented immigrants have lower felony arrest rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants.
• Arrest shares involving undocumented immigrants were stable or decreasing from 2012–2018 in Texas.
• Findings are robust across alternative population estimates, classifications, and crime measures.

Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says

Key Points

• Spain plans to ban social media for under-16s and impose executive liability for illegal and hate-speech content.
• Measures include robust age verification, tracking of hate speech, and criminalising algorithmic manipulation.
• Prosecutors will examine possible legal infractions by Grok, TikTok, and Instagram; Spain joined a cross-border enforcement coalition.

Rentahuman – The Meatspace Layer for AI

Key Points

• Connects AI agents with humans for real-world tasks.
• Offers MCP integration and a REST API for agent-side connectivity.
• Workers can join, set rates, get booked, and get paid.

Paris prosecutors raid France offices of Elon Musk's X

Key Points

• Paris prosecutors raided X’s offices and summoned Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino for April hearings.
• UK ICO launched a data-processing probe into Grok; Ofcom continues investigations but lacks chatbot powers.
• The European Commission is investigating xAI and coordinating with French authorities.

Emerge Career (YC S22) Is Hiring a Founding Product Designer

Key Points

• Emerge Career seeks a Founding Design Engineer, its first engineering hire.
• The platform has outperformed state job centers with strong graduation, placement, and earnings outcomes.
• Founders and supporters lend credibility through prior impact and notable backers.

SVGs are uniquely legible to LLMs

Key Points

• SVG enables embedded, sandboxed CSS/JS for interactive graphics.
• AI and LLMs help designers add animation and interactivity without coding.
• Open-source tools run locally, supporting privacy and offline use.

Show HN: Minikv – Distributed key-value and object store in Rust (Raft, S3 API)

Key Points

• v0.7.0 adds secondary indexes, multi-key transactions, import/export, and durable S3-backed object storage.
• Architecture: Raft + 2PC, 256 virtual shards, pluggable backends (in-memory, RocksDB, Sled).
• Performance and ops: >50k writes/sec, sub-ms reads, Prometheus metrics, admin dashboard.

KDE Plasma Login Manager Won't Support systemd-Free Linux or BSD Systems

Key Points

• PLM launches with Plasma 6.6 on February 17 as SDDM’s successor.
• PLM requires systemd (including systemd-logind) and won’t run on systemd-free Linux or BSD.
• Plasma remains usable on non-systemd platforms via SDDM or other mechanisms; no plans to port PLM.

Agent Skills

Key Points

• Agent Skills package procedural and organizational knowledge that agents can load on demand.
• Skills enable new capabilities, repeatable workflows, and cross-product interoperability.
• Developed by Anthropic and released as an open, widely adopted standard.

Decentralizing My Smartphone with Single Purpose Devices

Key Points

• The author is decentralizing smartphone use by adopting single‑purpose devices.
• A detailed list of devices spans video, music, writing, reading, and gaming.
• The approach is framed as a periodic digital detox, not a rejection of technology.

Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?

Key Points

• Ask HN inquires about current slide rule usage.
• A 3D‑printed rotary slide rule for Balatro is shared with models and code.
• Marimo (Python via WASM) was used to plot scales; slide rules remain purchasable in Germany.

Show HN: Inverting Agent Model (App as Clients, Chat as Server and Reflection)

Key Points

• Add one line of code to make apps AI-controllable via RAIL.
• RailOrchestrator handles LLM routing, agent reasoning, and IPC via Named Pipes.
• Multi-language SDKs and RailStudio streamline integration and manifest generation.

Show HN: difi – A Git diff TUI with Neovim integration (written in Go)

Key Points

• Instant-start Git diff TUI built in Go with a structured file tree and keyboard-first controls.
• Cross-platform installation via Homebrew, Go install, or manual binaries; defaults to comparing against main.
• Neovim plugin (difi.nvim) adds auto-open, inline PR-like highlights, and interactive review features.

Heritability of intrinsic human life span is about 50%

Key Points

• Correcting for extrinsic mortality yields intrinsic life span heritability above 50%.
• Analysis relies on century-spanning data from three Scandinavian twin cohorts.
• Prior low estimates (6–25%) are likely confounded by extrinsic causes of death.

Bunny Database

Key Points

• SQLite‑compatible managed database in public preview
• Replication regions across 41 locations reduce latency (up to 99% p95 reduction)
• One‑click deployment, language SDKs, HTTP access, editor, and metrics

GitHub Browser Plugin for AI Contribution Blame in Pull Requests

Key Points

• git-ai stores per-line AI attribution and prompts in git notes that persist through real-world git operations.
• A GitHub plugin surfaces AI-authorship annotations directly in PR diffs for reviewer visibility.
• An optional “AI percentage” per PR is proposed to inform policy and maintainer trust without enforcing strict rules.

Show HN: Sandboxing untrusted code using WebAssembly

Key Points

• Sandboxed WebAssembly execution with resource limits and automatic retries.
• Python and TypeScript/JavaScript task definitions with a required "main" entry task.
• Structured JSON responses with execution metrics for observability.

A WhatsApp bug lets malicious media files spread through group chats

Key Points

• Zero‑click WhatsApp attack via auto-downloaded media in new group chats on Android.
• Partial server-side mitigation was deployed in Nov 2025; comprehensive fix underway.
• Mitigate now by disabling media auto-download or enabling Advanced Privacy Mode and updating apps.

The Everdeck: A Universal Card System (2019)

Key Points

• 120-card, eight-suit system with ranks 0–9 and X–A enabling 8×15 rank mapping.
• Supports mapping to standard and four-color decks, including double-deck configurations.
• Uniform point value distribution and English-oriented letter frequencies aid scoring and design.

Data Brokers Can Fuel Violence Against Public Servants

Key Points

• State privacy laws don’t let public servants compel redaction of personal data from public records.
• Data brokers can legally sell public-source personal data; none of the laws include a private right of action.
• Threat analyses show threats outpace physical attacks and can escalate, underscoring the need for policy fixes.

Preserved hair reveals just how bad lead exposure was in the 20th century

Key Points

• Lead exposure in hair fell by ~100x after EPA-era regulations and industrial closures.
• Leaded gasoline and local smelters drove high exposure from 1916–1969; full U.S. ban on leaded gasoline came in 1996.
• Hair lead indicates environmental exposure trends but does not directly equate to blood lead levels.

Qwen3-Coder-Next

Key Points

• Open-weight coding model with agentic training and environment feedback.
• >70% on SWE-Bench Verified; strong multi-turn performance on SWE-Bench Pro.
• 3B active parameters achieving a favorable efficiency–performance tradeoff.

Launch HN: Modelence (YC S25) – App Builder with TypeScript / MongoDB Framework

Key Points

• Open-source TypeScript + MongoDB full-stack framework integrates auth, database, API, and cron.
• App builder uses Claude Agent SDK; supports prompt-based generation with a demo available.
• Modelence Cloud provides dev environments, deployment, and observability; a DevOps agent is planned.

Prek: A better, faster, drop-in pre-commit replacement, engineered in Rust

Key Points

• Rust-built, faster, dependency-free drop-in replacement for pre-commit with monorepo and uv integration.
• Broad installation support across major ecosystems and self-update via standalone installer.
• CI integration via GitHub Actions (j178/prek-action) and evidence of adoption by Apache Airflow and FastAPI.

Athena Parthenos: A Reconstruction (2000)

Key Points

• Statue placement and environmental setup (Doric colonnade; water basin for ivory and light).
• Iconography and attributes from ancient sources (Gorgoneion, helmet with sphinx/griffins, Nike supported by column).
• Measurements and narrative details (26 cubits height; Lapiths vs. centaurs on sandals; Pandora relief on base).

AI Didn't Break Copyright Law, It Just Exposed How Broken It Was

Key Points

• Generative AI exposes gaps between copyright’s written rules and human-scale enforcement.
• Banning training on copyrighted content is impractical due to lawful web references.
• Intermediate-copy infringement doctrine is difficult to apply at AI training scale.

France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

Key Points

• France will move 2.5M civil servants from U.S. video tools to Visio by 2027.
• Austria and a German state are adopting open/free software in public institutions.
• Microsoft addressed data residency and denied suspending services to the ICC.

Defining Safe Hardware Design [pdf]

Key Points

• Modern HDLs enforce type safety but need richer guarantees for correctness.
• Structural hazards are defined via a producer-consumer model and Filament’s formalism.
• Latency and resource safety ensure protocol-compliant, semantically meaningful signal usage.

Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing

Key Points

• Syncs Octopus publications to the AT Protocol for visibility on apps like Bluesky.
• Uses ORCID for researcher authentication and identity linking.
• Offers one-time and automatic syncing options for future publications.

Kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes

Key Points

• SI kilobyte (kB) is 1000 bytes; binary practice often treats kilobyte as 1024 bytes.
• IEC binary prefixes (KiB, MiB, GiB, etc.) distinguish powers of 2 from SI powers of 10.
• Discrepancies between advertised storage and OS-reported capacity increase at larger scales.

Show HN: C discrete event SIM w stackful coroutines runs 45x faster than SimPy

Key Points

• Cimba claims 40–50× speed over SimPy, including 45× in an M/M/1 queue benchmark.
• Provides rich DES tooling (resources, queues, condition variables) and fast RNGs via ziggurat sampling.
• Stable on x86-64 for Linux/Windows; Apple Silicon and ARM support planned.

Tadpole – A modular and extensible DSL built for web scraping

Key Points

• Tadpole is a DSL for web scraping with declarative, modular design.
• It supports importing modules from local or remote repositories.
• Browser interaction complexity is abstracted by the language.

Deno Sandbox

Key Points

• New API to run untrusted code in secure Linux microVMs on Deno Deploy.
• Adds outbound network egress control and secret protection for LLM-generated code scenarios.
• Fast boot, SDK-based provisioning, and direct interaction via SSH/HTTP/VS Code; deploy to Deno Deploy without rebuilds.

The next steps for Airbus' big bet on open rotor engines

Key Points

• Open-rotor design targets ~20% fuel efficiency gains and a ~60:1 bypass ratio.
• Extensive testing roadmap spans wind tunnels, ground tests, validation, and A380 flight trials.
• Engine placement and noise mitigation are central integration challenges for Airbus.

I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored

Key Points

• 20 GDPR requests: 2 immediate, 6 after complaints, 12 unresolved
• Prusa 3D case illustrates claimed deletion vs. continued data visibility
• Cross-border enforcement: Czech case unprocessed; German office limited

Migrate Wizard – IMAP Based Email Migration Tool

Key Points

• IMAP-based email migration tool focused on speed, security, and reliability.
• Optimized algorithms and parallel processing aim to move gigabytes of data in minutes.
• Free trial available with no credit card required; cancel anytime.

Visual Family Cosmos

Key Points

• Custom radial genealogy visualization improves readability and orientation.
• Surnames are limited indicators of origin; ancestry spans many names.
• LDS-backed resources (GEDCOM, FamilySearch) significantly support genealogy.

X offices raided. French prosecutors investigate child abuse images & deepfakes

Key Points

• French prosecutors raided X’s Paris offices and summoned Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino for voluntary interviews.
• The probe targets alleged CSAM dissemination, sexually explicit deepfakes, algorithmic manipulation, and denial of crimes against humanity.
• The UK ICO is separately investigating X and xAI over Grok’s data practices and safeguards against harmful image generation.

Xcode 26.3 unlocks the power of agentic coding

Key Points

• Xcode 26.3 adds agentic coding with integrations for Claude Agent and Codex.
• Agents can autonomously perform tasks across the development lifecycle using Xcode’s tools.
• Model Context Protocol opens Xcode to any compatible agent or tool; release candidate available now.

221 Cannon Road Is Not for Sale

Key Points

• Realtor was contacted via Zillow and listed the property, leading to a full-price cash offer.
• Forged ID and e‑signed documents were used to advance the fraudulent sale.
• Attorney’s independent ownership verification stopped the transaction.

Show HN: PII-Shield – Log Sanitization Sidecar with JSON Integrity (Go, Entropy)

Key Points

• Zero-code Kubernetes sidecar that redacts PII/secrets using context-aware entropy analysis and deterministic hashing.
• Easy setup via Docker/CLI and a Kubernetes initContainer-based sidecar pattern; works with multiple languages without code changes.
• Verified with unit tests, Go fuzzing, and stress tests; open-sourced under Apache 2.0.

Show HN: I built "AI Wattpad" to eval LLMs on fiction

Key Points

• Evaluates LLMs on fiction using real reader engagement data.
• Employs three specialized AI models per novel with distinct roles.
• Compares role-specific performance to identify strengths in creative tasks.

AliSQL: Alibaba's open-source MySQL with vector and DuckDB engines

Key Points

• LTS release AliSQL 8.0.44 integrates DuckDB as a native storage engine for analytics.
• Planned vector storage with HNSW-based ANN supports up to 16,383 dimensions via SQL.
• Roadmap includes DDL, crash recovery (RTO), and replication performance optimizations.

Puget Systems Most Reliable Hardware of 2025

Key Points

• Puget Systems’ 2025 reliability review is based on internal qualification and RMA data.
• Adjusted date ranges mean results aren’t directly comparable to prior years.
• Intel Xeon W-2500/W-3500 had zero recorded failures in 2025 in Puget’s data.

Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins

Key Points

• YC will disburse funding in Circle’s USDC, with options on Ethereum and Solana.
• Stablecoins are a strategic focus for YC, with potential expansion based on demand.
• Corporate and big-tech adoption of stablecoins is accelerating, despite broader crypto market volatility.

China Moon Mission: Aiming for 2030 Lunar Landing

Key Points

• China targets a 2030 crewed lunar landing and a later lunar base.
• NASA’s Artemis III schedule is slipping toward China’s timeframe.
• Artemis II is nearing readiness for a crewed circumlunar test flight.

Sandboxing AI Agents in Linux

Key Points

• Bubblewrap offers a lightweight local sandbox for AI agents on Linux.
• Requirements focus on mirroring the dev environment while restricting access and writes.
• A sample script shows selective read-only binds and tmpfs setup to limit system exposure.

Another London: Excavating the disenchanted city

Key Points

• London’s myths intertwine with its geography, linking legends to landmarks like the Tower of London.
• Situationists visited Limehouse in 1960 and opposed redevelopment, seeking to conduct psychogeographical studies.
• They advanced the Spectacle theory, critiquing mass media and consumer culture’s role in shaping perception.

How Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source

Key Points

• LLM-driven vibe coding may reduce OSS engagement and organic tool selection.
• Reported metrics link vibe coding to more bugs and lower productivity.
• Proposed OSS compensation by OpenAI/Google may mirror concentrated Spotify-like payouts.

When rust ≠ performance. a lesson in developer experience

Key Points

• Profiling exposed RocksDB lock contention as the main commit bottleneck.
• Removing redundant .clone() and db.open() calls delivered a ~20× speedup.
• RocksDB favors parallel writes, making parallel reads costly in this workflow.

I became a maintainer and all I got was a lousy perspective on librarianship

Key Points

• BookWyrm federates via ActivityPub to platforms like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Pleroma, and Lemmy.
• Rundle leads library technology work at La Trobe University focused on metadata and discovery.
• He advocates employer support for open source contributions that benefit workplaces.

OpenClaw (a.k.a. Moltbot) Is Everywhere All at Once, and a Disaster

Key Points

• Moltbook, built on OpenClaw, saw rapid growth to 770,000+ active agents and reports of emergent agent behaviors.
• OpenClaw is compared to AutoGPT, which faced reliability and cost issues and faded by late 2023.
• A journalist’s assistant example shows extensive integrations across messaging, smart home, media, and productivity services.

Bruce Schneier: AI and the scaling of betrayal

Key Points

• Interpersonal vs. social trust are distinct and both essential.
• Formal mechanisms (laws, security technologies) scale social trust.
• AI increases confusion by being misperceived as a friend rather than a service.

Lessons Learned Shipping 500 Units of My First Hardware Product

Key Points

• Redesigns lifted brightness from 39,000 to 60,000 lumens.
• Manufacturing and assembly issues were resolved through on-site visits and debugging.
• DFM and finishing tolerances required last-minute knob rework before shipment.

Data centers in space makes no sense

Key Points

• Google’s study suggests orbital AI could be cost-competitive at ~$200/kg to LEO by 2035 if Starship succeeds.
• Frontier AI needs hundreds of thousands to millions of GPUs, implying massive satellite fleets.
• Satellites are hard to upgrade at scale, undermining rapid hardware refresh advantages of ground data centers.

1,400-year-old tomb featuring giant owl sculpture discovered in Mexico

Key Points

• 1,400-year-old Zapotec tomb found in San Pablo Huitzo, Oaxaca.
• Distinctive owl sculpture and richly preserved murals and carvings.
• INAH leading preservation; officials hail the find’s exceptional significance.

Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown

Key Points

• Compromise of Notepad++ update infrastructure with attacker access into Dec 2025.
• Rotating execution chains targeted ~12 machines across multiple countries and sectors.
• Detailed Chain #1 shows data exfiltration via temp.sh and payload execution via ProShow.exe.

Show HN: Craftplan – I built my wife a production management tool for her bakery

Key Points

• Open-source, self-hostable ERP tailored to small-batch artisanal production.
• Comprehensive modules: catalog/BOM, orders, production, inventory, purchasing, CRM.
• API (JSON:API/GraphQL), calendar feeds, and email integrations for workflow connectivity.

Illinois joins WHO global outbreak network after U.S. withdraws

Key Points

• Illinois joins WHO’s GOARN to access global outbreak alerts and training.
• State contributes genomic sequencing and wastewater surveillance capabilities.
• U.S. WHO withdrawal in 2025 spurs state-level public health actions; California also joined.

Decompiling and rewriting a 2003 game from its binary in two weeks

Key Points

• Crimsonland evolved from 2002 freeware to 2003 shareware with Reflexive Arcade.
• The 2014 remaster launched via Steam Greenlight and expanded to multiple platforms.
• The 2026 project aims a full-fidelity rewrite matching the GOG v1.9.93 Windows binary.

GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.2-Codex are now 40% faster

Key Points

• GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.2-Codex are now 40% faster for API users.
• Optimizations to OpenAI’s inference stack achieved the latency reduction.
• Models and weights remain unchanged; improvements are backend-driven.

Ultra-processed foods should be treated more like cigarettes than food – study

Key Points

• Researchers liken UPFs to cigarettes and call for stronger regulation.
• UPFs are industrial products with additives, spanning many common foods.
• UPFs are associated with health risks and potential gut microbiota impacts.

Why poor countries stopped catching up

Key Points

• The authors of a 2021 paper on “unconditional convergence” now report the convergence has ended.
• The Solow-Swan model predicts catch-up growth via diminishing returns to capital, but historical evidence has been mixed.
• Poorer countries are again growing more slowly than richer ones, per the late-2025 essay.

Reference Target: having your encapsulation and eating it too

Key Points

• Reference Target lets ShadowRoot proxy attribute-based references to a nominated internal element.
• Works programmatically and declaratively (via template’s shadowRootReferenceTarget).
• Enables custom elements to behave like built-ins for features such as labeling and commands.

The Largest Zip Tie Is Nearly 4 Feet Long and $75

Key Points

• 47-inch, extra-thick zip tie claimed to hold up to 2,000 pounds
• Marketed for industrial and creative uses; nonconductive and strong
• Priced at $75 each; bulk packs at $799.99 (12) and $1,699.99 (25)

Machinery and English Style (1904)

Key Points

• Modern tools like the telegraph, shorthand, and typewriter influence English style and usage.
• Phillips Code exemplifies how telegraphic shorthand compresses and alters phrasing.
• Popular usage shaped by mechanical constraints affects writers broadly, not just tool users.

I miss thinking hard

Key Points

• AI-enabled “vibe coding” accelerates building but reduces deep problem-solving time.
• The author’s growth historically came from tackling hard problems that demanded creative solutions.
• A pragmatic reliance on “close enough” AI outputs can trade quality and learning for speed.

Reimplementing Tor from Scratch for a Single-Hop Proxy

Key Points

• Tor prevents single-hop exit usage via explicit checks and policies.
• The author begins a C++ reimplementation and shares code on GitHub.
• Running a relay and preserving identity keys are proposed operational steps.

Petition for Recognition of Work on Open-Source as Volunteering in Germany

Key Points

• Calls for formal recognition of open-source contributions as volunteering in Germany
• Lack of recognition limits tax, funding, and liability benefits for contributors and projects
• Recognition would enhance legal clarity and sustainability, supporting digital sovereignty