Microsoft Strangles VeraCrypt Updates Overnight!

Ask HN: Learning resources for building AI agents?

Key Points

• The author has studied materials by Antonio Gulli and Sam Bhagwat on agent design and principles.
• They completed courses from LangGraph Academy and reviewed DataCamp content.
• They request community recommendations for the most useful courses, papers, and hands-on methods for building AI agents.

Sonnet 4.6 Elevated Rate of Errors

Key Points

• Elevated error rates impacted Claude Sonnet 4.6.
• Multiple Claude services and the API were affected.
• Issue identified, fixed, monitored, and declared resolved within hours.

An Arctic Road Trip Brings Vital Underground Networks into View

Key Points

• SPUN targets an Arctic fungal biodiversity hot spot predicted by a 2025 Nature-published machine-learning model.
• Mycorrhizal fungi act as active nutrient managers, exchanging resources with plants via vast underground networks.
• Fieldwork along Alaska’s Dalton Highway collects precise, GPS-tagged permafrost soil samples for validation.

We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under two

Key Points

• Build times dropped from 10+ minutes to under two after moving from Next.js to Vite + TanStack Router.
• Two-step migration (remove Next-specifics, then framework swap) enabled a zero-downtime cutover of 200+ routes.
• Nitro centralized server config (500+ redirects, headers, caching), and Next.js image optimization was replaced with Fastly at the edge.

Veracrypt Project Update

Key Points

• Microsoft terminated the developer account used for VeraCrypt’s Windows code signing.
• Windows updates are halted; Linux and macOS updates can continue.
• No warning, explanation, or apparent appeal process was provided.

Hobby CNC machining and resin casting (2015)

Key Points

• How to choose and maintain a hobby benchtop CNC mill and tooling
• Selecting CAD/CAM software with an accompanying 3D modeling tutorial
• Workshop-safe resin casting methods for durable rubbers and composites

Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)

Key Points

• Camera-only robot vacuum uses offboard inference on a laptop due to limited onboard compute.
• Behavior cloning with a simple CNN from teleoperated data, using five discrete actions.
• Observed navigation errors lead to plans for data augmentation and pretraining to improve generalization.

Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones

Key Points

• DuoBell is designed to be heard through ANC headphones to improve pedestrian awareness.
• Škoda and University of Salford will publish research underpinning the bell’s design.
• London data highlight the safety need: high ANC usage and rising cyclist–pedestrian incidents.

The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code

Key Points

• Cross-reference high-churn files with bug-related commits to find top-risk areas.
• Use git shortlog to assess ownership concentration and bus factor risks, mindful of squash-merge effects.
• Analyze monthly commit counts and revert/hotfix frequency to gauge momentum and operational stability.

Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

Key Points

• Filesystem + markdown + wikilinks function as a graph database; LLMs act as the query engine.
• An adapted PARA taxonomy structures notes; automation captures and links meeting artifacts.
• Drafting documents from accumulated context outperforms cold prompting and avoids RAG/vector stores.

I've Sold Out

Key Points

• The author joined Earendil and is bringing the pi coding agent.
• RoboVM’s sale to Xamarin led to closure and shutdown, but the community created MobiVM to continue support.
• libGDX’s OSS community and adoption history inform the author’s approach to balancing OSS and commercialization.

Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard

Key Points

• Volume-based methods are simple but discard important frequency content and require adaptive gain control.
• Switching to addressable WS2812 LEDs enables richer, per-pixel visualizations.
• Naïve FFT bin-to-LED mapping underutilizes LEDs due to uneven energy distribution on low-resolution strips.

Mario and Earendil

Key Points

• Mario Zechner joins Earendil.
• Zechner built Pi, a coding agent/library focused on quality and design.
• Earendil’s Lefos aims to enable more thoughtful, deliberate communication.

Explore union types in C# 15

Key Points

• C# 15 adds a union keyword for closed union types in .NET 11 Preview 2.
• Unions integrate with pattern matching, enforcing exhaustive switch handling.
• Nullability is enforced: nullable cases require a null arm; default union Value is null.

MegaTrain: Full Precision Training of 100B+ Parameter LLMs on a Single GPU

Key Points

• Memory‑centric design streams layer weights/gradients from host to GPU, minimizing device state.
• Pipelined double‑buffering and stateless layer templates sustain throughput and reduce metadata overhead.
• Demonstrated up to 120B full‑precision training on H200 and 1.84× throughput vs DeepSpeed ZeRO‑3 for 14B models.

US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

Key Points

• Bend, Oregon, terminated its Flock Safety contract; dozens of cities have suspended or deactivated Flock deployments in 2026.
• UW study reports Washington agencies shared Flock data with ICE, including backdoor access.
• Ring canceled a planned integration with Flock after public backlash; Flock is expanding into autonomous drone response.

They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

Key Points

• Aliens conclude humans are entirely “meat,” including their brains.
• Human communication includes machine-mediated radio and acoustic speech/singing.
• Despite official contact protocols, one alien urges erasing records to avoid engagement.

The Harvard Library Passport

Key Points

• Harvard offers a library “passport” to collect stamps at service desks across locations.
• Cabot Science Library opened in 1973 and was renovated in 2017; it includes video recording equipment.
• Countway Library is adjacent to Harvard’s medical, public health, and dental schools and features surgery-themed art.

LLM plays an 8-bit Commander X16 game using structured "smart senses"

Key Points

• Emulator runs PvP-AI at ~8.6 fps; hardware drops to ~4 fps due to a VERA line-drawing issue.
• LLM “smart senses,” turn-based mode, and persistent notes enable effective AI gameplay.
• Downloads and documentation are available on Google Drive and GitHub; integration uses ChatGPT API (gpt-4o) via PHP.

Show HN: I pipe free sports streams into Jellyfin – no ads, just HLS

Key Points

• Proxy injects required headers and rewrites m3u8 so all segments go through it.
• Scripts automate m3u8 URL extraction, header detection, and playlist generation.
• Systemd timers and Docker guidance support continuous, containerized operation.

Ask HN: Any Interesting Niche Hobbies?

Key Points

• The poster is seeking novel, less crowded hobbies to contribute to.
• They have a background in OpenAI Gym, early GPT-3 era exploration, and active involvement with Prusa 3D printers.
• Consistent, activity-based meetups are recommended for building friendships and community ties.

Show HN: We fingerprinted 178 AI models' writing styles and similarity clusters

Key Points

• 178 models fingerprinted across 32 style dimensions; 12 clone pairs (>90% similarity) reported.
• Many cross-provider pairs show >75% similarity despite large price differences (up to ~185x).
• New metrics introduced: provider distinctiveness, family cohesion, discriminating dimensions, uniqueness, and consistency.

US fired 1k JASSM cruise missiles in 37 days. Lockheed makes 396 per year

Key Points

• ~425 serviceable JASSM‑ERs remain after firing 1,000+ from a prewar inventory of 2,300.
• Stocks were moved from the Pacific to CENTCOM and RAF Fairford; INDOPACOM has limited reserves.
• Shift to JDAM/Paveway on Day 6 reflects stand‑off missile depletion and tanker constraints.

Show HN: Go-Bt: Minimalist Behavior Trees for Go

Key Points

• Stateless nodes with runtime state in BTContext[T] that embeds context.Context
• Cooperative multitasking via node return codes: Success, Running, Failure
• Injected clock enables fast, deterministic tests for time-based nodes

Teardown of unreleased LG Rollable shows why rollable phones aren't a thing

Key Points

• Prototype expanded display by ~40% via motorized roll-out mechanism.
• Two motors, track drives, and locking teeth stabilized the flexible OLED panel.
• Complex, costly engineering contributed to the rollable’s cancellation.

Show HN: Explore the Silk Roads through an interactive map

Key Points

• Interactive map explores Silk Roads routes, goods, and outposts.
• Legend clarifies coverage: orange complete, black in progress, small dot unvisited.
• Hand-drawn silk scroll map based on eight years and 30,000 miles is available for purchase.

F-35 Got Hit

Key Points

• Incident: IR-guided Iranian missile hit an F-35; jet landed safely, pilot stable; investigation ongoing.
• Threat vector: Reported “Majid” missile uses passive IR guidance, bypassing radar-focused stealth.
• Countermeasures: F-35 lacks DIRCM; flares are less effective against imaging IR seekers.

Microsoft Abruptly Terminates VeraCrypt Account, Halting Windows Updates

Key Points

• Microsoft terminated VeraCrypt’s Windows code-signing account, halting Windows updates.
• Linux and macOS updates continue, but most VeraCrypt users are on Windows.
• Developer Mounir Idrassi reports no prior warnings from Microsoft and says he’s out of options.

The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess

Key Points

• LLMs predict likely token continuations and are trained once at high cost, then used cheaply for inference.
• Most LLMs lack continuous learning and intrinsic memory; chat context is maintained via histories or summaries.
• The essay emphasizes risks and confabulation tendencies in LLM outputs rather than offering a balanced overview.

I Ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

Key Points

• Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) was ported to run natively on the Nintendo Wii.
• Feasibility was validated by CPU lineage and QEMU tests with reduced RAM.
• A public bootloader repo (wiiMac) and hardware support plan enable reproducibility.

Show HN: I built a navigation app that displays weather along the route

Key Points

• Displays weather along a planned route
• Allows adjusting departure times for stops
• Supports planning dwell times to see how conditions change

Muse Spark: Scaling Towards Personal Superintelligence

Key Points

• Muse Spark launches as a multimodal reasoning model with tool-use and visual chain-of-thought.
• Contemplating mode delivers parallel multi-agent reasoning with reported benchmark gains.
• Access is via meta.ai and the Meta AI app, with a private API preview for select users.

Show HN: BAREmail ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi

Key Points

• PWA Gmail client with tiny app shell and JSON-only network use for low-bandwidth scenarios
• Offline-first design with cached UI, outbox queue, and background sync
• Guided Google Cloud/OAuth setup with CLI and manual alternatives

A Digital Compute-in-Memory Architecture for NFA Evaluation

Key Points

• Introduces a 22 nm FD-SOI digital CIM accelerator for arbitrary NFA evaluation.
• Delivers 2822 MB/s peak throughput and 406 MB/s at 1.27 fJ/B/transition minimum-energy point.
• Uses a CIM Bloom filter to gate activity, enabling opportunistic symbol skipping for higher efficiency.

Show HN: TUI-use: Let AI agents control interactive terminal programs

Key Points

• Enables AI agents to control interactive terminal programs via PTY and keystrokes.
• Provides clean text snapshots with highlights using a headless xterm rendering pipeline.
• Offers broad use cases (REPLs, scaffolding tools, DB CLIs, SSH, TUIs) and npm-based installation.

Understanding the Kalman Filter with a Simple Radar Example

Key Points

• Three learning paths: overview, free tutorial, and comprehensive book with advanced topics and code.
• Radar-based example demonstrates the need for prediction and a dynamic model in tracking.
• Hands-on, example-driven approach with failure cases and corrections to build practical understanding.

Understanding Traceroute

Key Points

• Traceroute uses TTL expiry and ICMP Time Exceeded messages to reveal each hop.
• The Rust example sends UDP probes to port 33434 and listens on a raw ICMP socket.
• The process stops when the destination (e.g., 8.8.8.8) responds or TTL limit is reached.

One item purchased, Ten emails

Key Points

• A single online purchase triggered a 10-message email sequence from confirmation to feedback.
• The author cites optimization practices and Goodhart’s Law as drivers of excessive email flows.
• A SimpleLogin alias is used as a practical workaround to block post-purchase emails.

Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN much easier to read

Key Points

• Inline replies, unread tracking, and hover previews streamline HN interactions.
• Following feed with local caching and per-user refresh keeps updates fast and focused.
• Installable on Chrome, Firefox, or via GitHub releases with transparent development practices.

I've been waiting over a month for Anthropic support to respond

Key Points

• Unexpected Extra Usage charges totaling ~$180 appeared despite minimal recorded activity.
• Session logs (Claude Code) did not align with the billed usage during March 3–5.
• Automated support via Fin AI Agent directed to a refund flow that excludes Extra Usage charges.

Science confirms torpedo [baseball] bat works as well as regular bat

Key Points

• Torpedo and traditional wood bats show nearly identical COR-based hitting power.
• Torpedo bat’s sweet spot is ~0.5 inches closer to the hands than a standard bat.
• Findings to be presented at the International Sports Engineering Association conference (June 1–4, Pullman).

How Costco Won in Japan

Key Points

• Okinawa opening underscored strong demand with hours-long lines.
• Japan is Costco’s largest market outside North America (37 warehouses, ~6M members).
• Costco adapted its model and used local partnerships to overcome Asian market challenges.

USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers

Key Points

• User-space USB drivers can replace kernel drivers for many tasks and are approachable for developers.
• Identify and target devices using VID/PID; verify details with lsusb and lsusb -t on Linux.
• An Android phone in bootloader mode provides a simple, well-documented example device for experimentation.

Expanding Swift's IDE Support

Key Points

• Swift’s official VS Code extension is live on the Eclipse Foundation’s Open VSX Registry.
• Editors like Cursor, VSCodium, AWS’s Kiro, and Google’s Antigravity can now install Swift directly.
• The extension supports SwiftPM projects with features like code completion, debugging, tests, and DocC across macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Show HN: Skrun – Deploy any agent skill as an API

Key Points

• Turn SKILL.md-defined skills into APIs via POST /run with typed I/O and structured outputs.
• Multi-model support with fallback (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral, Groq) and stateful runs.
• Local runtime in v0.1, with cloud deployment planned via a RuntimeAdapter interface.

Pgit: I Imported the Linux Kernel into PostgreSQL

Key Points

• Imported 1.43M Linux kernel commits into PostgreSQL-backed pgit in ~2 hours.
• Environment: Hetzner server (AMD EPYC 7401P, 512 GB RAM, RAID 0 SSDs), Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
• pg-xpatch delta compression and 350 GB cache enabled in-memory decoded repo and efficient querying.

The AI Great Leap Forward

Key Points

• Top-down AI mandates risk producing polished but unreliable systems without proper evaluation.
• Low-code workflows and chained LLM calls hide complexity and lack monitoring and drift controls.
• In-house AI replacements for mature SaaS may lack critical operational infrastructure and become tech debt.

Who is Satoshi nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator

Key Points

• NYT’s John Carreyrou spent a year investigating Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity.
• The HBO documentary’s suspect is deemed unconvincing by the author; attention shifts to Adam Back.
• Back’s denial and a 1996 email are presented as part of the evidentiary trail, without a final conclusion.

What Does ⍋⍋ Even Mean?

Key Points

• ⍋⍋ yields the Rank vector of items; ⍒ introduces ReverseRank via ⌽⍋.
• Leading ⍋/⍒ chooses ascending/descending; trailing ⍋/⍒ chooses Rank/ReverseRank.
• Rank + ReverseRank is constant for distinct items; ties break this property.

John Deere to Pay $99M in Monumental Right-to-Repair Settlement

Key Points

• $99M proposed settlement with funds for those who paid authorized dealers since January 2018
• 26%–53% expected recovery of overcharge damages for eligible plaintiffs
• Deere to provide digital diagnostic and repair tools for 10 years; judge’s approval pending

Show HN: Is Hormuz Open Yet?

Key Points

• Ship positions are cached, not live.
• Data comes from public sources with no accuracy guarantees.
• The project is a non-serious, exploratory side project.

Show HN: Tired of logic in useEffect, I built a class-based React state manager

Key Points

• Snapstate moves app logic into TypeScript classes, keeping React components focused on rendering.
• Compared with Redux, Zustand, and MobX, Snapstate emphasizes explicit updates and class-based stores.
• The article critiques hook-heavy patterns (useEffect/useMemo) for embedding business logic in the render layer.

Exposing and Understanding Scrolling Transfer Functions (2012) [pdf]

Key Points

• Proprietary scrolling transfer functions are opaque, impeding understanding and replication.
• A new framework identifies key device and movement factors for scroll control.
• A method is introduced to analyze and expose proprietary transfer functions in commercial systems.

Automatic registration for US Military draft to begin in December

Key Points

• Automatic Selective Service registration for men is proposed and under regulatory review.
• The change was mandated in December 2025 via the FY2026 defense policy law.
• Failure to register carries significant legal and benefits-related penalties.

What Does It Mean to "Write Like You Talk"?

Key Points

• Graham advocates revising prose to sound conversational and reduce unnecessary complexity.
• Orwell warns against pretentious diction and notes speech can be pretentious too.
• Studies show matched oral narratives often include more subordination than written ones.

LittleSnitch for Linux

Key Points

• Local web UI with PWA support and rich connections view for monitoring and blocking.
• Blocklists in specific formats are auto-updated; macOS .lsrules are incompatible.
• eBPF-based architecture with daemon; advanced config supports auth/TLS and default policy control.

Six (and a half) intuitions for KL divergence

Key Points

• KL measures expected extra surprise when using Q instead of true P.
• Minimizing D_KL(P‖Q) over Q yields the MLE for P.
• KL can be viewed as a Bregman divergence induced by entropy.

Little Snitch for Linux – Because Nothing Else Came Close

Key Points

• Built a Little Snitch–style Linux tool using eBPF and Rust with a web UI for remote monitoring.
• Ubuntu exhibited fewer background connections than macOS but still sends telemetry and updates.
• Firefox made ad and telemetry connections by default; settings reduce but don’t fully eliminate them.

Trump administration orders dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service

Key Points

• HQ relocation from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah.
• Closure of all ten regional offices and elimination of 50+ research facilities.
• Replacement of regional oversight with 15 state-based political appointees.

Building a JavaScript runtime in one month

Key Points

• Ant is a ~2 MB JavaScript runtime built in about a month for embeddability in C.
• It uses NaN-boxing (IEEE 754) to store all JS values in a single 64-bit slot.
• Garbage collection proved to be the primary challenge, causing instability and performance issues.

The Importance of Being Idle

Key Points

• Public sentiment on AI skews pessimistic: 64% expect fewer jobs; 17% expect benefits.
• Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy argues machines should free people for leisure.
• Industrial-era context and Lafargue’s activism in France frame current future-of-work debates.

Show HN: A (marginally) useful x86-64 ELF executable in 301 bytes

Key Points

• 298-byte ELF utility for x86‑64 Linux that reads battery data from sysfs.
• Outputs Wh or Ah depending on availability of energy_* or charge_* files.
• Install via a base64/xz one‑liner; supports only x86‑64 Linux and ignores extra batteries.

App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off

Key Points

• AI coding tools are fueling a year-over-year jump in new App Store apps.
• Apple is enforcing rules against apps that generate interpreted code altering purpose.
• Apple claims 90% of app reviews complete within 48 hours, averaging 1.5 days.

Map Gesture Controls - Control maps with your hands

Key Points

• Runs fully in-browser via MediaPipe WASM; no backend or WebSocket required
• Maps hand gestures to OpenLayers map interactions (pan, zoom, rotate)
• Provides configurable overlay and tuning plus a fully typed TypeScript API

Open Source Security at Astral

Key Points

• Astral forbids high-risk GitHub Actions triggers across its org.
• Least-privilege triggers and CI-based processes are preferred.
• Job summaries/logs substitute for PR comments that need elevated permissions.