OpenAI Faces Statehouse Heat!

Shepherd's Dog: A Game by the Most Dangerous AI Model

Key Points

• Van Gilst tested a new Anthropic AI model by asking it to build *Shepherd's Dog* in one shot.
• He reports the run took 45 minutes, cost more than €20 in tokens, and produced a 2,319-line standalone HTML file.
• The article links to a video, a playable version, and earlier attempts with previous AI models.

Automating Myself Out of Development

Key Points

• The author moved from single-session AI coding to parallelized, more automated development using Claude Code.
• Worktrees, markdown context files, plugins, and sub-agents were used to structure brainstorming, planning, implementation, testing, and review.
• Increased automation introduced practical limits, especially context-switch fatigue and continued manual review requirements.

Leaving Mozilla

Key Points

• A former Mozilla employee says they left after 15+ years because the work environment had become unsustainable for them.
• The article argues Firefox is a niche browser with a self-selecting user base that leadership has not understood.
• The author says Mozilla’s open-source transparency and repeated attempts to chase DAU shaped leadership failures.

The Alchemist of Flesh: The Man Who Turned Humans into Stone(2025)

Key Points

• Girolamo Segato is presented as having a secret method to preserve human tissue in a stone-like form.
• The article places his death in Florence in February 1836, when the secret reportedly died with him.
• The visible excerpt frames the story as historically documented but does not fully detail the method due to incomplete text.

Israeli firm BlackCore suspected of meddling in New York and Scotland votes

Key Points

• Viginum linked suspected BlackCore interference to France, Scotland, New York City, Angola and Togo.
• French officials asked Israel for explanations and help identifying who may have commissioned the alleged operation.
• A Viginum report said BlackCore-linked accounts targeted John Swinney, while the SNP reported bot-like activity during elections.

Show HN: Skill for your agent to visualize your gbrain and Obsidian

Key Points

• brain-map generates a self-contained HTML knowledge map from Markdown notes, including Obsidian and gbrain sources.
• The project includes a no-setup demo with 992 fictional notes and interactive graph, timeline, filtering, and inspection features.
• Optional Python dependencies improve graph layout performance, but the tool can also run with standard library Python only.

Using the Epson Perfection V39 II Scanner on Ubuntu

Key Points

• The guide covers Epson Perfection V39 II setup on Ubuntu.
• It requires installing qtbase5-dev and the Epson Scan2 driver.
• The steps were tested on Ubuntu 26.04.

Ask HN: What Are You Working On?

Key Points

• A hobbyist analog computer was built from modular PCB boards that plug into a breadboard.
• An ESP32 and LCD display are used to visualize analog voltages and values instead of traditional meters or oscilloscopes.
• The creator is preparing kits and videos for a planned July rollout and demonstrated the system with a Lotka-Volterra simulation.

Fudgetown, USA (2024)

Key Points

• Mackinac Island is presented as the original North American resort town to make fudge a defining tourist attraction.
• The island’s sweets history predates fudge and includes Odawa maple sugar trade linked to the Great Lakes.
• Tourism growth in the late 19th century created the conditions for fudge to become a signature Mackinac product.

Show HN: Paca – Lightweight Jira alternative for human-AI collaboration

Key Points

• Paca is an open-source, self-hosted project management platform built for human-AI teamwork in Scrum.
• AI agents are described as first-class teammates that can join sprints, manage tasks, and help write specs and design docs.
• The platform emphasizes configuration and WebAssembly-based plugins for extensibility, and v0.4.0 adds project-level in-app AI chat.

The Fable 5 Jailbreak Shows Why AI Guardrails Alone Are Not Enough

Key Points

• The article says full AI workflows, not just prompt guardrails, define the real security boundary.
• It identifies decomposition of harmful goals into benign-looking subtasks as the key reported jailbreak technique.
• It argues that multi-agent and long-context AI systems require system-level red teaming beyond refusal-rate testing.

A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

Key Points

• UC San Diego and Google are developing a datacenter made from 2,000 retired Pixel smartphones.
• The project aims to lower computing emissions by reusing smartphone motherboards instead of manufacturing new hardware.
• Phones are converted for server use with Linux and Kubernetes, and 25 to 50 phones can match a modern server according to cited benchmarks.

Exceptions should not be handled – they should be aggregated

Key Points

• The article argues for simple, exceptionless behavioral norms in human-centered systems.
• It says this approach maximizes objective rationality in social and organizational settings.
• Exceptions are described as controlled through aggregation into structural gaps rather than direct handling.

The state of building user interfaces in Rust

Key Points

• Rust is presented as capable of GUI development, but cross-platform needs complicate the use of native APIs.
• The article says there is still no clearly mature, easy-to-use, fully Rust-native GUI solution with broad consensus.
• The page serves as both a status overview and a curated index of Rust GUI projects, tools, and recent ecosystem updates.

Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages

Key Points

• The number of affected AUR packages rose from over 400 to at least 1,579 during the incident.
• Arch Linux developers said they removed all malicious commits they were aware of.
• The published list of affected packages was described as incomplete, so the total may have been higher.

Thoughts on AI and Jobs

Key Points

• The article questions whether jobs should be defended as inherently valuable social institutions.
• It argues that current AI can already perform much repetitive salaried and knowledge work.
• The author expects AI to reduce reliance on jobs even without achieving AGI.

Show HN: 2 Weeks of Hallucinate – The Photo Gallery

Key Points

• The page showcases Hallucinate through a timestamped image gallery and a "JOIN THE RAVE" link.
• Gallery items include visible like counts and are ordered from newest to oldest.
• Thumbnail images are served from hallucinate.site API endpoints in WebP format.

The Riemann Hypothesis – interactive explanation

Key Points

• The site explains the Riemann Hypothesis through five interactive, self-contained levels.
• It uses visual and hands-on demonstrations to connect the zeta function’s zeros with prime-number behavior.
• The experience runs in the browser without an account or installation and includes optional deeper material.

An Interview with Intel's Kira Boyko: Xeon 6's Product Director

Key Points

• Intel’s Kira Boyko says Xeon 6+ launched at Computex 2026.
• She explains that product directors define product goals, target segments, KPIs, and guide execution through delivery.
• Xeon 6+ SKU planning is based on customer needs, application requirements, and demand/utilization considerations.

Labor Is a Market Distortion, we need VAT and UBI

Key Points

• The article argues labor supply is structurally distorted because people must work to live.
• It says automation has weakened the case for labor being the only route to income and consumption.
• The proposed policy response is a combined VAT and UBI system rather than either tool alone.

Woman Gets on Route 66. Then She Starts Hearing Music Coming from Her Tires

Key Points

• Springfield’s new Route 66 musical road plays “America the Beautiful” at 30 mph.
• The installation uses 2,309 thermoplastic strips across 855 feet to create a 19.45-second song.
• A Facebook reel showing the road drew more than 4.4 million views and helped popularize the feature.

Sam Bankman-Fried loses bid to appeal against fraud conviction in FTX case

Key Points

• An appeals court refused to overturn Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud conviction and 25-year prison sentence.
• The case centers on prosecutors’ allegation that $8bn in FTX customer funds was misused.
• Former deputies testified that customer money was used to cover losses at Alameda Research.

Introduction to the experience of rendering Arabic typography&its technical debt

Key Points

• A support ticket about unjustified Arabic text led to a broader investigation into Arabic rendering limitations on the web.
• The article ties together PDF shaping failures, obsolete Unicode encodings, and browser typography behavior as parts of the same technical debt.
• Standard CSS justification does not reproduce the elongation-based justification used in the approved Arabic design.

Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire

Key Points

• The map covers about 250,000 Roman inscriptions containing personal names.
• An AI pipeline extracts structured person data such as names, status, and gender from each inscription.
• Users can explore, search, filter, and export the historical data, while the project discloses an 80–85% extraction accuracy rate.

Every Frame Perfect

Key Points

• The article applies Wayland’s “every frame is perfect” principle to UI design.
• It identifies loading glitches, layout shifts, and contradictory states as examples of imperfect frames.
• It uses examples from Safari, Photos, YouTube, and Preview to show how flawed intermediate animation states reduce interface clarity.

US bans differential privacy in Census data

Key Points

• The Commerce Department banned “noise infusion” in Census Bureau and BEA statistical products.
• The article says the order effectively targets differential privacy, which the Census Bureau adopted for the 2020 Census.
• The piece explains how disclosure avoidance methods trade off privacy protection and statistical utility.

RTX 5080 and RTX 3090 Setup: 80 Tok/s on Qwen 3.6 27B Q8

Key Points

• The build combines an RTX 5080 and RTX 3090 for local LLM inference and targets roughly 80 tok/s on Qwen 3.6 27B Q8.
• The author used an Asus Prime X570-Pro and a PCIe 4 riser to physically and electrically support both GPUs.
• The article highlights BIOS and Nvidia driver configuration steps needed to make a mixed-model dual-GPU Linux setup work.

Treating pancreatic tumours may have revealed cancer's master switch

Key Points

• Daraxonrasib reportedly increased median survival in pancreatic cancer from 6.7 months to 13.2 months.
• The results were presented at a late-May oncology conference in Chicago and drew a spontaneous standing ovation.
• The article says the drug could become the first of a new class of cancer treatments.

Orthodox C++

Key Points

• The article defines Orthodox C++ as a minimal, C-like subset of C++ intended to avoid modern C++ complexity.
• It recommends avoiding exceptions, RTTI, streams, wrapper headers, some STL usage, excessive metaprogramming, and modules.
• It argues that a narrower C++ subset improves readability, portability to older compilers, and interoperability with other projects.

Appreciating Exif

Key Points

• Exif is optional metadata used to store camera and image information, including orientation.
• In JPEG, Exif is usually stored in an APP1 segment and begins with the `Exif\0\0` signature.
• The orientation tag is `0x0112`, typically found in IFD0 within a TIFF-based Exif structure.

What about OpenCL and CUDA C++ alternatives?

Key Points

• The article presents OpenCL as a major portable GPU compute effort that achieved adoption but not AI dominance.
• It attributes OpenCL’s limitations partly to committee governance and competitive dynamics among hardware vendors.
• Apple is described as having moved away from OpenCL to Metal after concluding the standard evolved too slowly.

AI Coding at Home Without Going Broke

Key Points

• Self-hosting cuts token costs but requires expensive hardware and may not pay off for most home users.
• Renting open source models via API is presented as the most flexible and cost-effective default choice.
• A hybrid workflow using frontier subscriptions for planning and cheaper APIs for implementation is the article’s recommended approach.

The adder at the heart of Intel's 8087 floating-point chip

Key Points

• The 8087’s floating-point performance depended on a 69-bit adder at the center of its execution unit.
• The chip’s die layout separates bus interface, microcode control, and datapath functions, with the adder in the fraction datapath.
• The adder improves speed by using 4-bit blocks and a Manchester carry chain based on generate, propagate, and delete logic.

GLM 5.2 Is Out

Key Points

• Zhipu launched GLM-5.2 and made it available to GLM Coding Plan users immediately.
• The model is described as supporting strong coding performance, a usable 1M context window, and long-horizon tasks.
• API, chatbot access, and an MIT-licensed open-source release are scheduled for next week.

Trophic memory, deer, and a unique scientific object

Key Points

• The article describes deer antlers as a rare example of large-scale regeneration in adult mammals.
• It reports the Bubeniks' finding that antler injuries can influence branching patterns in future years, a phenomenon called trophic memory.
• The author later inherited and preserved a long-term antler collection from George A. Bubenik, and the specimens were CT-scanned.

Show HN: Verso – A $14.99 Mac word processor with no subscription

Key Points

• Verso is a native Mac word processor with a $14.99 one-time price and 7-day free trial.
• The app emphasizes no subscription, no cloud, no account, offline use, and no tracking.
• It supports direct .docx workflows, Markdown round-trip editing, Track Changes, comments, and syntax highlighting.

PwC Report: AI Making Medical Bills Higher

Key Points

• PwC says AI is a notable new contributor to healthcare cost growth, with total costs potentially rising 9% in 2027.
• The article links AI note-taking tools to more detailed documentation that can justify higher-paying billing codes without changing care.
• Blue Cross Blue Shield estimated coding intensity added $22 million to maternity spending at the hospitals studied over three years.

GameBoy Workboy

Key Points

• Workboy was an unreleased Game Boy productivity accessory with a keyboard and organizer software.
• Its cartridge ROM appeared in the September 2020 lot check leaks, enabling later analysis.
• The article explains a version mismatch in the software, where 5.74 in code is replaced to display 8.87 on the title screen.

Tessera – a consent-gated tunnel that's blind to your traffic

Key Points

• Tessera provides temporary, host-approved remote access to local services using short codes and terminal confirmation.
• The architecture uses a coordinator, agent, and CLI, with outbound agent connections and append-only audit logging.
• The project is pre-1.0 and explicitly warns against production or sensitive use without an independent security review.

Running DOS on Behringers DDX3216 with a DIY x86-Bios from Scratch

Key Points

• The DDX3216 uses an AMD Elan SC300 386-class SoC and other PC-like hardware, making DOS boot experiments plausible.
• Attempts to obtain an existing SC300-compatible BIOS from PC Engines and Phoenix were unsuccessful.
• The author began building a BIOS from scratch, focusing on the x86 reset vector at 0xFFF0 and early real-mode startup.

The MilkV Jupiter 2/SpacemiT K3 (RISC-V vector compute)

Key Points

• The MilkV Jupiter 2 is a 16-core RISC-V SBC based on SpacemiT’s K3 and includes 32GB RAM, 128GB UFS, and 10 GbE connectivity.
• The K3 uses two different core clusters: 8 A100 cores with vector and AI-related features, and 8 X100 cores at higher clock speed.
• The article says vendor AI claims are higher than observed results, with practical testing topping out around an effective 3B model size.

Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity

Key Points

• Exxon’s reincorporation is cited as evidence of Texas’s growing corporate influence.
• The article argues Texas is becoming a new center of gravity for American business.
• Policymakers in other states are portrayed as losing ground to Texas’s rising appeal.

Codex for open source

Key Points

• OpenAI is offering a program to support open-source maintainers with Codex-related tools and credits.
• Benefits include six months of ChatGPT Pro, API credits, and possible conditional access to Codex Security.
• Selection is based on project usage, ecosystem importance, and evidence of active maintenance.

What Happens to an Economy When It's Too Hot to Work?

Key Points

• India is depicted as a case study in how rising heat can hurt labor productivity and economic growth.
• Kanpur’s leather industry is shown operating under extreme temperatures of 46C (115F).
• Workers face severe heat stress both outdoors and inside factories, even with large fans in use.

C47/R47 Calculators

Key Points

• C47 is a community-maintained calculator project built for SwissMicros DM42/DM42n hardware.
• The project combines open-source code, integrated documentation, and community contribution through GitLab.
• Software and docs are openly licensed, but some bezel and key graphics remain under separate copyright protection.

Pyodide 314.0: Python packages can now publish WebAssembly wheels to PyPI

Key Points

• PEP 783 enables Pyodide-compatible WebAssembly wheels to be published directly to PyPI.
• Pyodide now uses Python-version-based releases, with 314.x aligned to Python 3.14.
• Previously unbundled standard library modules like ssl and sqlite3 are being restored to the default distribution.

Resurrecting a Soaked, corroded, and damaged Commodore SX‑64 (2025)

Key Points

• A Commodore SX-64 bought at VCFSW 2025 in Dallas looked acceptable outside but had extreme internal corrosion.
• Seized screws and a rotted chassis forced a mechanical teardown that included drilling out fasteners.
• Some parts were cleaned and preserved, while others—including the drive motor and chassis—required replacement.

Derbyshire Police officer accused of using AI to 'create evidence'

Key Points

• Derbyshire Police is investigating an officer accused of using AI to create evidential material in several cases.
• The officer has been removed from frontline duties, and no arrests have been made.
• The Crown Prosecution Service is working with police on any potentially affected cases.

Rust-like compiler pipeline to resolve Matlab language semantics

Key Points

• The article argues that MATLAB execution is dominated by semantic resolution, not just syntax parsing.
• RunMat is a Rust-based runtime and compiler built to preserve MATLAB-family language semantics used in real engineering code.
• RunMat uses a staged pipeline from source through multiple intermediate representations to bytecode and runtime/providers.

Human Routers of Machine Words

Key Points

• The article rejects the idea that human ideas can be cleanly separated from AI-produced writing.
• It argues that writing is the observable form through which ideas are tested, clarified, and judged.
• A quote from Josef Weizenbaum is used to support the claim that composition exposes gaps in understanding.

Ancient genome duplications laid the foundations of complex brains

Key Points

• Ancient whole-genome duplications are linked to the emergence of diverse vertebrate brain cell types.
• Cross-species single-cell analysis traced major brain cell families to duplication events in early vertebrate ancestors.
• Duplicated genes retained from those events continued influencing brain cell evolution over hundreds of millions of years.

State Attorneys General Are Investigating OpenAI

Key Points

• A coalition of state attorneys general has opened an investigation into OpenAI.
• The inquiry includes OpenAI’s handling of user data, safety of minors and advertising practices.
• OpenAI said it takes the concerns raised by the states seriously.

ReactOS (FOSS "Windows") achieves 3D-accelerated Half-Life on real hardware

Key Points

• ReactOS has reportedly run the Windows version of *Half-Life* in-game on real hardware.
• The project has been in development for 28 years and focuses on Windows binary compatibility.
• The reported test system used a Dell OptiPlex with an Intel Core i5-2400 and NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS graphics.

FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language

Key Points

• Free Oberon is a Pascal-style, cross-platform IDE for the Oberon programming language.
• The article gives detailed installation steps for Linux distributions and a simpler archive-based setup for Windows.
• The environment supports compiling and running single-module and multi-module Oberon programs with built-in error location reporting.

4 things to know about the new sunscreen ingredient the FDA approved

Key Points

• Bemotrizinol is the first new chemical UV filter approved by the FDA for U.S. sunscreens in nearly 30 years.
• The ingredient is described as broad-spectrum and photostable, offering protection against both UVA and UVB rays.
• The article says bemotrizinol has extensive safety data and took about 20 years and significant investment to gain U.S. approval.

A whale necropolis has been found

Key Points

• A newly described whale-fall graveyard was found in the southeastern Indian Ocean.
• The site extends along the Diamantina fracture zone.
• Unlike previously known marine fossil graveyards, this one is still actively forming.

FDA OKs first new sunscreen ingredient in more than 25 years

Key Points

• The FDA approved bemotrizinol, the first new U.S. sunscreen ingredient in over 25 years.
• Bemotrizinol provides both UVA and UVB protection and may avoid the white cast associated with mineral sunscreens.
• The approval came through a streamlined review process created in 2020, after the ingredient had been used in Europe since 1999.

'Tell Him He's a Piece of Shit': Meta's New AI Unit Is a Total Mess

Key Points

• Meta’s Applied AI unit is reportedly experiencing low morale and employee dissatisfaction after a March restructuring.
• Employees told WIRED that assigned AI-related evaluation tasks feel menial compared with previous software engineering work.
• The article links these tensions to Meta’s wider AI restructuring, layoffs, and a disputed employee-monitoring program for AI training data.

10th Gen Honda Civic Updates Are Signed with AOSP Test Keys

Key Points

• The article says Honda Civic headunit updates can be accepted if signed with the public AOSP test key.
• Physical access to the car’s front USB port is described as sufficient to install arbitrary code on the headunit.
• The author released `ota-builder` and `apk-rebuilder` to automate update creation and reverse-engineering workflows.

Python 3.14 garbage collection rigamarole

Key Points

• Python 3.14.0 introduced incremental cycle garbage collection, and Python 3.14.5 reverted it after memory-pressure reports.
• The article compares CPython 3.14.4 and 3.14.5 because users cannot switch GC modes within a single Python release.
• A large part of the article explains Python memory management through reference counting using `sys.getrefcount()` examples.

The Redistribution of Housing Wealth Caused by Rent Control [pdf]

Key Points

• The paper studies St. Paul’s 2021 rent control law using parcel-level data from the following nine months.
• It finds upper-income renters gained more than lower-income renters, while small and large landlords experienced similar losses.
• The study reports significant declines in owner-occupants’ housing wealth and frames the results within a broader national expansion of rent control laws.

Apt Encounters of the Third Kind

Key Points

• Reverse engineering revealed a modified NFS client identifier used as a covert signal.
• A memory dump of NFS-Ganesha exposed an injected malicious `libfsalvfs.so` and patched function routing.
• The malware added covert data exfiltration and command-and-control features through NFS read behavior and fake control files.

Building a serial and VGA "everything console"

Key Points

• A used IBM 7316-TF3 rack console is being repurposed into a portable serial and VGA console.
• The built-in IBM USB Travel Keyboard with UltraNav exposes a compatibility challenge because it is a combo USB device.
• The chosen Tattler Solutions terminal emulator supports USB power, 115200 bps, and VT100, but not the IBM keyboard’s USB implementation.

The Field Guide to CSS Grid Lanes

Key Points

• Grid Lanes enables masonry-style and adaptive grid layouts natively in the browser without JavaScript.
• The article explains responsive track sizing with CSS features such as `min-content`, `max-content`, and `minmax()`.
• It introduces `flow-tolerance` and stresses authoring HTML in logical sequence to preserve accessible navigation order.

Weave: Merging based on language structure and not lines

Key Points

• Weave performs Git merges using code structure instead of only line overlap.
• The example shows standard Git failing on edits to different functions in the same file.
• With Weave configured, the same merge completes with zero conflicts.

Quadratic funding democratizes allocation by rewarding projects w/ broad support

Key Points

• Quadratic funding distributes matches based on number of supporters, not just total donation size.
• Public and privacy-focused crypto donations are verified through on-chain checks or view keys.
• Flagged donations still reach projects but do not count toward matching funds.

Software Architecture Guide

Key Points

• Software architecture is described as the important internal design elements that shape a system’s ability to evolve.
• Ralph Johnson’s view influenced the article, especially the idea that architecture is about shared understanding and “the important stuff.”
• Poor architecture leads to cruft, slower feature delivery, and more defects, while high internal quality speeds development.

Free SQL→ER diagram tool, runs in the browser, nothing uploaded

Key Points

• The tool converts SQL schema definitions into interactive ER diagrams entirely in the browser.
• It supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and SQL Server DDL, including common constraints.
• No installation, account, or server upload is required; diagrams can be exported or shared via URL.

Pac-Man, but You're the Ghost

Key Points

• The game lets players control a ghost in a Pac-Man-inspired maze chase.
• Pac-Man is AI-controlled and must be caught before he clears the maze.
• Power pellets temporarily reverse the chase, forcing the player-controlled ghost to flee.

Tribblix: the retro illumos distribution

Key Points

• A SPARC m34 ISO for Tribblix was released on April 21, 2026.
• Tribblix has completely removed support for 32-bit hardware.
• The x86 version is described as solid, while the SPARC version still has limited testing and patchy hardware support.

Making Claude a Chemist

Key Points

• Anthropic is testing Claude’s chemistry capabilities, beginning with NMR spectrum interpretation.
• The article argues that chemistry requires constant translation between multiple molecular representations.
• Anthropic says recent multimodal AI advances may make practical chemistry assistance more feasible despite persistent data challenges.

The Neat Little Vehicles That Run a Cemetery

Key Points

• Forest Lawn uses custom-built vehicles to excavate burial sites, move caskets, transport service equipment, and maintain cemetery grounds.
• The article provides detailed technical specifications for the dirt hauler, casket loader, custom flatbed, and John Deere mower.
• The cemetery’s bespoke support machines date back to the 1950s and have been refurbished, while the park also maintains a fleet of classic hearses.