Meta Faces Ugly Surveillance Lawsuit!

IBM MCGA Gate Array Reverse Engineering

Key Points

• IBM’s MCGA chipset is implemented as two gate arrays: the 72X8300 memory controller and 72X8205 video formatter.
• Reverse engineering identified Seiko-based implementations of both chips and documented their gate-array structures and functions.
• The analysis uncovered undocumented MCGA features, including external genlock support and multiple test or reserved register behaviors.

SCC Technical Assistance Program

Key Points

• The article launches Sport Compact Car’s new Technical Assistance Program using a reader’s 2001 Sentra SE as the test case.
• Baseline testing shows the Sentra runs the quarter mile in 16.3 seconds at 84.0 mph before any changes.
• A no-cost swap to lighter 15-inch wheels improves weight and acceleration, cutting the quarter-mile time to 16.0 seconds.

OpenTTD 16.0-Beta1

Key Points

• OpenTTD 16.0-beta1 is now available for testing with new gameplay and interface features.
• Major additions include backward train driving, open-join multiplayer companies, and multiple map-generation improvements.
• The project also launched the OpenTTD 16 Title Game Competition and asks testers to report bugs via GitHub.

Building apps using TanStack Start

Key Points

• Lovable says new projects will use TanStack Start with SSR by default starting May 13.
• The platform shifts from a React + Vite SPA model with separate edge functions to a full-stack framework with integrated server functions.
• The new architecture uses Cloudflare Workers while keeping Supabase for core backend services.

Om Malik, Whose Blog Shaped How Silicon Valley Saw Itself, Dies at 59

Key Points

• Om Malik died at 59 in Palo Alto, according to an announcement on his website, Om.co.
• He founded Gigaom in 2001, and the site became a major Silicon Valley technology publication.
• The article says Malik was part of a broader shift in tech journalism toward influential individual bloggers.

Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

Key Points

• The article says many Windows 11-ineligible PCs can still run effectively with lightweight Linux.
• It recommends evaluating old hardware with free -h, lscpu, and lsblk before choosing a distro.
• It identifies moving from an HDD to an SSD as the most impactful upgrade for old systems.

Is America Becoming a Gerontocracy?

Key Points

• Young people in rich countries are described as facing severe housing affordability problems.
• The article links these problems to restrictions that make it hard to build housing near good jobs.
• A new book on gerontocracy is said to spot a real issue but offer bad solutions.

Decline in IQ linked to frequent or dependent use of cannabis use in youth

Key Points

• Seven cohort studies were included in a preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis of youth cannabis use and IQ change.
• Frequent or dependent cannabis use in youth was associated with a small but statistically significant IQ decline, equivalent to about 2 points on average.
• The article emphasizes adolescence as a potentially vulnerable developmental period and calls for longer follow-up research.

Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

Key Points

• The BBC’s most powerful transmitter was switched on near Droitwich in 1934.
• Its two 700ft steel masts carried long-wave broadcasts across Britain and into Europe.
• The transmitter served both wartime messaging and later cultural broadcasting, including Test Match Special.

Faster KNN search in Manticore: 2-pass HNSW, batched distances, and AVX-512

Key Points

• Manticore says it improved HNSW-based KNN search with 2-pass HNSW, batched distances, and AVX-512.
• The article reports up to 29% higher throughput at high k and over 20% gains under concurrent load.
• The optimization requires no API change, no index rebuild, and no new configuration.

Jest/Vitest interactive course (runs in the browser)

Key Points

• The course is free, interactive, browser-based, and requires no sign-up.
• It teaches Jest and Vitest fundamentals as preparation for React frontend testing and also supports Node.js use cases.
• The 19-lesson curriculum covers assertions, test structure, error handling, fake timers, lifecycle hooks, parameterized tests, and mocking.

Fintech Engineering Handbook

Key Points

• The handbook defines three fintech design principles: no invented data, no lost data, and no trust.
• It explains four methods for representing money and the tradeoffs between precision, speed, and complexity.
• It warns that JSON number serialization can reintroduce floating-point precision issues even if internal representations are safe.

Beer CSS – Build material design in record time

Key Points

• Beer CSS is presented as a semantic HTML-based way to build Material Design interfaces quickly.
• The article shows both CDN and npm installation paths for Beer CSS and material-dynamic-colors.
• It documents extensive support for HTML elements and utility classes for layout, spacing, sizing, and component states.

The US Army Issued Ocarinas to Soldiers in World War II

Key Points

• The US Army selected plastic ocarinas for soldiers because they were portable, durable, inexpensive, and easy to learn.
• The article says the ocarina’s design and C-major tuning made it practical for beginners and compatible with common sheet music.
• One of the Army-selected wartime ocarinas was an Alto C model manufactured by Gretsch.

Cultures of Making and Relating

Key Points

• The article presents five programming cultures from Tomáš Petříček’s book and explains their core perspectives.
• It groups these cultures into software-making and software-relating categories.
• It argues that similar cultural patterns appear in manufacturing, craftsmanship, and scientific research.

Nox Metals (YC S25) Is Hiring SWE

Key Points

• Nox Metals says it closed a $13 million seed round and is hiring software engineers in Detroit.
• The role covers full-stack factory software, quoting, inventory, ecommerce, and hardware integration.
• The company says it aims to cut metal supply lead times from days to seconds using software and automation.

OpenRA

Key Points

• OpenRA playtest-20260222 introduces random map generators for Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn, and Dune 2000.
• Dune 2000 receives visual, balance, and campaign-difficulty updates, including Starport bulk purchase support.
• Tiberian Dawn HD is now feature-complete, with remastered asset selection options and progress toward future core integration.

If You Can't Hold It, You Don't Own It

Key Points

• The article says most digital 'purchases' are licenses, not ownership of transferable property.
• It cites court cases and lawsuits showing that resale and ownership rights for digital media are limited and legally contested.
• It highlights removals by Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Sony as examples of how digital access can disappear after release or purchase.

Task Failed Successfully: Saturating NIC and Disk Bandwidth

Key Points

• A simplified NVMe-to-RDMA demo failed to saturate a 400 Gb/s NIC despite apparent hardware headroom.
• The system bottleneck appeared at I/O depth 16, where throughput reached only about half of line rate and CPU usage hit 100%.
• Perf profiling showed most CPU time concentrated in io_submit_sqes and related direct-I/O page-handling overhead.

Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

Key Points

• California will ban streaming ads that are louder than accompanying content starting July 1 under SB 576.
• The law brings streaming closer to the ad-volume limits already applied to broadcast, cable, and satellite TV under the CALM Act.
• Industry groups say technical factors such as server-side ad insertion, encoding differences, and varied devices complicate compliance.

How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?

Key Points

• The Standard Model is commonly presented as containing 17 elementary particles.
• Particles in the Standard Model are described as excitations of quantum fields.
• Alternative counting methods can produce larger totals, including a noninteger result.

How H-E-B Became Texas' Most Beloved Brand (2024)

Key Points

• During the 2021 Texas freeze, an H-E-B store in Leander let customers leave with groceries after a power outage.
• The article says H-E-B confirmed the incident on Twitter but did not widely promote it.
• H-E-B’s strong Texas reputation is tied to both community support and popular store-brand products.

Asian AI startups launch Mythos-like models

Key Points

• 360 launched Tulongfeng and Yitianzhen as cybersecurity-focused AI tools amid U.S. restrictions on Anthropic models.
• Sakana AI launched Fugu, an orchestration-oriented model for agents aimed at Japanese organizations seeking reduced export-control exposure.
• The article highlights how export controls are influencing AI competition, access strategies, and regional positioning in Asia.

Post-Mythos Cybersecurity: Keep calm and carry on

Key Points

• Project Glasswing restricted early Mythos access and was used to support claims of strong cyber capability through benchmark and vulnerability findings.
• The article says Mythos’ benchmark lead over prior models appears incremental, with GPT-5.4 and Opus 4.6 described as relatively close on comparable tests.
• Anthropic’s own process for finding a BSD vulnerability reportedly required about 1,000 runs and roughly $20,000, highlighting the cost of AI-assisted bug hunting at scale.

Suspicious Discontinuities

Key Points

• The article says ACA subsidy cutoffs can create incentives to reduce income rather than earn more.
• It identifies TANF, Medicaid, and CHIP as additional examples of harmful threshold effects in U.S. policy.
• It compares policy cliffs with queue management in computing and highlights random early drop as a smoothing mechanism.

Underarm Bowling Incident of 1981

Key Points

• Greg Chappell instructed Trevor Chappell to bowl the final ball underarm when New Zealand needed six to tie.
• The underarm delivery was legal at the time but widely condemned as against the spirit of cricket.
• The backlash contributed to later changes in international cricket laws banning such a tactic.

Zuckerberg's Increasingly Bizarre War on Whistleblowers

Key Points

• The article recounts Belarusian flash-mob protests and the state’s forceful response under Alexander Lukashenka.
• Doctorow says arrests for innocuous acts like eating ice cream, smiling, and clapping exposed the regime’s repressive character.
• The Belarus example is used to argue that Zuckerberg’s response to whistleblowers may amplify the criticism he is trying to suppress.

Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

Key Points

• Exploitarium consolidates public exploit PoCs and vulnerability writeups from multiple software targets into one GitHub repository.
• The archive includes both preserved standalone repositories and direct entries added in June 2026.
• A documented Git-based verification process reportedly found zero mismatches across 12 repos and 96 tracked entries.

Like a Bouncer at a Bookstore: Texas' App Store Accountability Act

Key Points

• The challenged Texas law requires universal age verification in app stores and parental approval for minors’ app downloads and certain app changes.
• A district court blocked the law, but the Fifth Circuit stayed that block and is continuing to review the case.
• The amicus brief argues the law harms privacy and speech access and proposes voluntary age signaling as an alternative.

Researchers have developed pixels that can emit and analyse light together

Key Points

• ETH Zurich researchers developed a pixel that can both emit and analyze light.
• The device uses light-wave interference, nanostructured surfaces, surface plasmon polaritons, and Fourier analysis.
• The technology could support future camera-display systems that combine sensing and image generation.

One man, two kernels, and a lot of RISC-V

Key Points

• Yuri Zaporozhets is developing multiple low-level computing projects, including QSOE, a RISC-V PC, and an FPGA-based mini-mainframe.
• The GateMate Personal Computer combines retro IBM PC-style design with a 25 MHz RISC-V core, VGA text output, and a custom OS called GMDOS.
• The GateMate System/359 is a mainframe-inspired FPGA project that references IBM System/360 but is not binary-compatible with IBM architectures.

Doctors suspected man had brain cancer. He had worms

Key Points

• A Spanish patient thought to have metastatic brain cancer was ultimately found to have tapeworm larvae in his brain.
• CT imaging suggested multiple lesions and swelling, but MRI revealed scolexes that identified neurocysticercosis.
• Doctors speculated the infection may have come from past local exposure despite no travel history and Spain not being an endemic area.

Supabase (YC S20) Is Hiring for Multigres

Key Points

• Supabase is hiring for a distributed database engineering role centered on Multigres, its open-source system for scaling Postgres horizontally.
• The role covers sharding, query routing, consensus, replication, materialization, and connection pooling infrastructure.
• Supabase highlights a fully remote global team, employee benefits, and company scale including 280+ team members and $500 million raised.

Why Windows 95 Was Tech's Last True Revolution

Key Points

• Microsoft's Windows 95 launch combined a $300 million-plus campaign with broad public attention and midnight retail sales.
• The article says critics argued that Windows 95's low advertised upgrade price often masked the need for expensive hardware upgrades.
• It credits Windows 95's Start Menu, taskbar, desktop model, Recycle Bin, and 32-bit improvements with making PCs easier for mainstream users.

AI Is Designing Radio Chips That Humans Couldn't Even Imagine

Key Points

• Princeton researchers are using AI to automate RFIC design, a field long dependent on expert manual work.
• The article says AI-designed RF chip prototypes have achieved strong performance while cutting design time dramatically.
• Future progress in AI-driven chip design will require large shared datasets and open design ecosystems.

Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other

Key Points

• Town Square is a real-time website feature that shows live visitors as stick figures and supports messaging.
• The tool is intentionally ephemeral, with no accounts, profiles, follower counts, or permanent chat history.
• The project has been open sourced and can be self-hosted or used through a public server, with future plans for cross-site linking.

Screen time can damage under-twos' development, landmark study suggests

Key Points

• A UK-led review says regular intentional screen time should be avoided for children under two.
• The article says the review found potential harms across bonding, language, sleep, play and health, but did not establish causality for specific developmental conditions.
• Researchers are calling for revised government guidance and a “baby screen-time risk assessment” for early family support.

A History of Menus Is a Menu of History

Key Points

• The article examines early American menus as historical documents.
• It highlights the New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection of menus from 1880 to 1920.
• Frank E. Buttolph spent decades assembling the archive as a record of culinary and social history.

The Card That Made the Apple II Serious

Key Points

• The Videx VideoTerm became the dominant 80-column card for the Apple II and Apple II+ before the Apple IIe integrated that capability.
• A2FPGA recreates Apple II and Videx video digitally by reading memory directly and outputting HDMI instead of using composite video.
• The article centers on the MC6845/HD6845SP controller architecture as the technical foundation of the VideoTerm design.

"No, I swear I wrote this."

Key Points

• Revise launched full-history replays for documents written in its editor.
• The replay feature lets others watch a document’s creation and revisions step by step.
• The company positions the feature as a response to AI-era uncertainty over who wrote a document.

Ships keep moving through Hormuz despite strike

Key Points

• The IMO paused its Hormuz evacuation plan after Ever Lovely was struck on the southern route.
• Traffic through both Hormuz lanes continued despite the attack and the plan’s suspension.
• The IMO says 115 vessels and about 2,500 seafarers exited the Gulf before the framework was halted.

IP Crawl: living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet

Key Points

• IP Crawl is described as a living atlas of publicly accessible webcams on the internet.
• The platform lets users browse and filter discovered webcam feeds.
• Users can watch the listed webcam feeds live through the service.

Running a software jam in a world of slop

Key Points

• The article says AI-driven low-effort projects have made software hackathons harder to judge well.
• Hack Club funds participant prizes at $8.5 per hour and uses Hackatime to track coding activity.
• The author is experimenting with a jam-based model to reduce poor incentives and encourage higher-quality software projects.

The eerie interface of man and machine (Life Magazine, October 1967)

Key Points

• The post republishes a 1967 *Life Magazine* feature explaining computers to general readers.
• The featured excerpt asks whether machines could learn and think like the human brain.
• The article says both hardware scale and limited understanding of brain wiring made brain simulation impractical.

A Farmer Arrested for Going 5 Seconds over His Time Limit at Data Center Meeting

Key Points

• The article says a Claremore resident was arrested after exceeding a three-minute public-comment limit at a meeting on a proposed data center project.
• Bodycam footage of the arrest was reportedly obtained after the quoted public-records cost dropped from $1,750 to $120.
• Project Mustang is described as a large Beale Infrastructure data center proposal that has prompted local concerns about utilities, land use, incentives, and public input.

Show HN: Adrafinil – keep a lid-closed Mac awake only while agents work

Key Points

• Adrafinil keeps a Mac awake only during active AI agent sessions, including with the lid closed.
• Its architecture separates privileged sleep control from unprivileged policy logic and uses macOS power-management tools to manage sleep states.
• The app includes integrations for nine agent tools plus safeguards such as thermal cutoff, idle release, and clean uninstall.

Paradise Revisited: What Darwin Saw in the Galápagos

Key Points

• The article links giant tortoise biology to the Galápagos’ isolated volcanic environment and lack of predators.
• It highlights tension between heavy tourism and conservation in an archipelago visited by more than 300,000 people annually.
• It contrasts Darwin-era treatment of wildlife with modern Ecuadorian protections and visitor restrictions.

'Careless People' author claims Meta surveilled her for 12mos to enforce silence

Key Points

• Wynn-Williams is seeking to overturn Meta’s arbitration order and severance agreement tied to her post-employment speech.
• Meta says her book violated a prior agreement, while she says the restrictions were imposed under duress.
• The lawsuit alleges Meta monitored her public appearances for over a year and enforced an emergency gag order.

GLP-1 drugs led to weight loss and reversed depression-like behavior in mice

Key Points

• GLP-1 drugs were reported to reverse depression-like behavior as well as cause weight loss in mice.
• The antidepressant-like effect depended on gut microbes and was absent in germ-free mice.
• Lactobacillus delbrueckii and its endocannabinoid production were identified as central to the proposed mechanism.

Should European housing politics be Americanized?

Key Points

• The article argues Europe’s housing shortages are worse than America’s and that European debate underemphasizes zoning and land-use restrictions.
• It presents American YIMBYism as a major movement built around supply-side explanations for housing scarcity.
• It cites Katharina Knoll’s research to argue that most long-run house price increases are linked to regulatory restrictions on construction.

How do you keep Web MIDI from crashing a 1983 synthesizer?

Key Points

• Vintage synthesizers can be overwhelmed by browser-sent MIDI data because their CPUs and buffers are extremely limited.
• Safe Web MIDI communication requires custom software throttling because standard MIDI provides no hardware flow control.
• Supporting multiple vintage synths requires device-specific SysEx parsing and must also account for browser security restrictions.

Michigan spent $1.8B and only created 602 jobs

Key Points

• A report says eight major Michigan subsidy deals promised 20,595 jobs but had produced 602 so far.
• Of $2.7 billion in incentives offered to those projects, $1.8 billion had already been spent.
• Major examples include automotive, EV, and battery projects involving Ford, General Motors, Stellantis/Fiat Chrysler, and LG Energy Solution.

Enhancing X11 Application Security with LXC

Key Points

• The guide uses LXC to isolate X11 applications from the host system for added security.
• It explains unprivileged container setup with detailed UID/GID mapping and supporting subuid/subgid configuration.
• It demonstrates creating a Debian-based container, installing applications like Firefox, and preparing a non-root user for X11 use.

Remembering the life and artwork of Ron Spears

Key Points

• Ron Spears, a Magic: The Gathering artist with over 100 credited works, has died.
• He began with Veiled Sentry in 1998 and also served as Magic art director at Wizards of the Coast from 1998 to 2001.
• His work continued into recent releases, including 2022 bounce land art, Modern Horizons 3 in 2024, and Lorwyn Eclipsed this year.

Choosing a Public DNS Resolver

Key Points

• The guide uses hard filters like DNSSEC, IPv6, jurisdiction, and operator type to help users choose a resolver.
• It compares 29 global public DNS resolvers across addresses, filtering, encrypted transport support, and privacy policies.
• The article emphasizes differences in logging, ECS usage, resolver ownership model, and legal jurisdiction.

Codeberg Is Down

Key Points

• Codeberg said all services were down and unreachable during the incident.
• The outage appeared to be caused by loss of power affecting multiple servers.
• Codeberg said network equipment was also impacted and recovery depended on the datacenter operator.

America's Large Homebuilders Shift the Cost of Shoddy Construction to Buyers

Key Points

• Hunterbrook says over 60 homeowners in 16 states reported major defects in homes built by D.R. Horton and Lennar.
• Featured cases describe sewage backup, water intrusion, mold, improper installation, and prolonged unresolved repairs.
• The report alleges builders used tactics that left homeowners struggling to obtain accountability and remediation.

Regular expressions that work "everywhere"

Key Points

• The article examines regex portability across sed, awk, grep, and Emacs.
• It identifies awk as a practical baseline for shared regex features among GNU text-processing tools.
• It lists a cross-tool subset of regex syntax that the author says works across their preferred environments, with caveats.

Set Up Your Own DoH Service

Key Points

• The article compares private and public DoH deployment, emphasizing abuse and logging risks for public resolvers.
• It presents self-hosting benefits such as caching, custom logging policies, domain blocking, and bypassing DNS censorship.
• It details a setup using Alpine Linux, Unbound DNS, TLS certificates, firewall controls, and configuration testing.

Show HN: Kiso, an open-source publishing engine for Open Knowledge Format

Key Points

• Kiso converts Open Knowledge Format bundles into static websites for humans and AI agents.
• The build output includes Markdown, HTML, llms.txt, and sitemap.xml files.
• Kiso can be integrated into GitHub CI to automate publishing to GitHub Pages or other static hosts.

Show HN: Decomp Academy – Learn to decompile GameCube games into matching C

Key Points

• Decomp Academy teaches users to decompile GameCube game code into matching C.
• The platform uses real *Star Fox Adventures* functions as learning material.
• User-written C is graded live against output from the original 2001 compiler.

AMD Strix Halo RDMA Cluster Setup Guide

Key Points

• The guide shows how to build a two-node Strix Halo RDMA cluster on Fedora 43 for distributed vLLM inference.
• It uses Intel E810 RoCE v2 networking, Ray orchestration, and RCCL communication to support tensor parallelism across nodes.
• The article reports RDMA latency around 5 microseconds versus roughly 70–100 microseconds without RDMA and details the required hardware and host configuration.

Space Shuttle Endeavour's 20-story vertical display

Key Points

• Endeavour is being assembled into a 20-story vertical launch configuration in a process the center says is unprecedented outside NASA.
• The shuttle has been off display since December 31, 2023 and will return when the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center opens.
• The completed exhibit will be the world’s only authentic full space shuttle stack on display, and admission will remain free.

Response to AI slop is from Robin Williams

Key Points

• The article uses Robin Williams’ monologue from *Good Will Hunting* to discuss AI-generated content.
• It argues that the film scene contrasts factual knowledge with lived experience.
• The writer compares Will’s information-rich intelligence to ChatGPT’s fluent but non-experiential output.

Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep

Key Points

• Marfa Public Radio says it runs continuously except during lightning-related interruptions.
• The station’s fall membership drive includes a sleep podcast built from readings of internal operational documents.
• The article connects the podcast concept to a donation appeal supporting continued station operations.

How a YouTube video accidentally proved Libya's sand cat does exist

Key Points

• A 2017 video upload provided the first material evidence of sand cats in Libya.
• An eight-year collaboration documented the species at 13 sites across the Libyan Sahara.
• Wadi Armet emerged as a key concentration area amid difficult and under-resourced research conditions.

Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo. That Should Terrify You

Key Points

• Polestar was denied U.S. authorization under the Connected Vehicle Rule for model year 2027 and later vehicles.
• Volvo, also owned by Geely, had previously received authorization, and the article says the reason for the different outcome is unclear.
• The article links the decision to broader trade, tariff, and competitive pressures affecting global automakers and EV makers.

WAL-RUS: a Rust Rewrite of WAL-G for PostgreSQL Backups

Key Points

• ClickHouse Cloud built WAL-RUS as a Rust-based alternative to WAL-G for PostgreSQL backups and WAL archival.
• The article says the primary motivation was improving memory predictability in resource-constrained environments.
• WAL-RUS is designed to keep WAL-G compatibility while using bounded concurrency and streaming optimizations to reduce memory overhead.

Ford hired AI and sacked humans. It backfired badly

Key Points

• Ford rehired more than 350 veteran engineers after AI-based quality systems failed to meet expectations.
• Executives said AI lacked the judgment needed for complex quality-control issues, and human specialists were brought back to find failure points.
• Ford says it will keep using AI, but only alongside human expertise; its latest J.D. Power ranking showed improved new-vehicle quality.

Ancient Tablets Show Markets Worked 4k Years Before Economists Explained Them

Key Points

• A Kanesh tablet records a twelve-partner trading company with formal capital and profit-sharing terms nearly 4,000 years ago.
• More than 20,000 business tablets from Kanesh document long-distance trade, lending, lawsuits, taxes, and enforcement.
• A 2019 economics study found that Kanesh trade patterns fit a modern gravity model and resembled contemporary trade behavior.

Wayfinder Router: deterministic routing of queries between local and hosted LLM

Key Points

• Wayfinder routes prompts between local and cloud LLMs using offline structural scoring and no model call.
• The article positions it against model-based routers by emphasizing deterministic behavior, self-hosting, and calibration on user traffic.
• It acknowledges weaknesses on semantically hard prompts and keeps lexical cues disabled by default due to limited generalization in testing.

The Shape of the System - Engineering for Bounded Cognition

Key Points

• The article links software engineering difficulty to the small capacity of human working memory.
• It uses psychology experiments on attention and recall to explain why people miss important signals.
• It argues that many failures blamed on human error are actually problems in system and interface design.