HN ReaderReader

AI is bringing old nuclear plants out of retirement
wbur.org

The White House has promised to quadruple nuclear power by 2050. 

We built another object storage
fractalbits.com

High-performance object storage exists, but the economics make it unusable at scale. FractalBits breaks out of the high-performance trap.

Germany's train service is one of Europe's worst. How did it get so bad?
npr.org

You won't arrive on time and may not even get a seat. Your booking might get lost. Things have gotten so dire that a foreigner has been brought in to shake things up.

YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same
cnbc.com
Computer Animator and Amiga fanatic Dick Van Dyke turns 100
news.ycombinator.com
ask
Doxers posing as cops are tricking big tech firms into sharing people's data
wired.com

David Gilbert - A spoofed email address and an easily faked document is all it takes for major tech companies to hand over your most personal information.

Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
hey.paris

Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison - Here’s how Apple “Permanently” locked my Apple ID. I am writing this as a desperate measure. After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer, authoring technical books on Apple’s own programming languages (Objective-C and Swift), and spending tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of dollars on devices, apps, conferences, and services, I have been locked out of my personal and professional digital life with no explanation a

Poor Johnny still won't encrypt
bfswa.substack.com

JP Aumasson - The state of email encryption

Google removes Sci-Hub domains from U.S. search results due to dated court order
torrentfreak.com
The Coming Need for Formal Specification
benjamincongdon.me

The potential of formal verification for reasoning about systems.

Oliver sacks put himself into his case studies. What was the cost?
newyorker.com

Ellsworth Toohey - Oliver Sacks admitted in journals that he gave patients "powers which they do not have." Some details were invented.

A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life (2022)
woodrush.github.io

Lisp in Life is a Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway’s Game of Life.

1300 Still Images from the Animated Films of Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli (2023)
ghibli.jp

Shinichi Takai - 「君たちはどう生きるか」の場面写真を提供致します。 現在、劇場公開中の「君たちはどう生きるか」の場面写真 14枚を、本日から提供いたします。 これまでの分と同様に、常識の範囲でご自由にお使いください。 君たちはどう生きるか14枚 2023.08.04 提供開始 2020.12.18 提供開

The Checkerboard
99percentinvisible.org

In 2019, hunters Brad Cape and Phil Yeomans were scouting for elk in southeast Wyoming when they came across a rocky peak that seemed perfect for elk hunting, a suspicion only heightened by its name: Elk Mountain. But finding a way onto Elk Mountain would turn out to be extremely difficult, and whether Brad and

Think Tanker Altered Ukraine War Map Before Big Polymarket Payout
responsiblestatecraft.org

The Institute for the Study of War disavowed the edit, removed the employee, but is staying quiet, raising questions about the credibility of ISW and prediction gambling

Pope criticizes US bid to 'break apart' US-Europe alliance
apnews.com

Pope Leo XIV is insisting that Europe must have a role in any Ukraine peace deal. And he is criticizing what he says is the Trump administration’s effort to “break apart” the long-standing U.S.

OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI
simonwillison.net

Simon Willison - One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic’s new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just …

50 years of proof assistants
lawrencecpaulson.github.io
Wine 11.0 RC2 – Run Windows Applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and macOS
gitlab.winehq.org

The Wine development release 11.0-rc2 is now available. This is the first release candidate for the upcoming Wine 11.0. It marks the beginning of the yearly...

Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig
github.com/ringtailsoftware
show

Minimalist, dependency-free virtual machine sandbox for microcontrollers and other resource-constrained devices. Single C file, no dynamic memory allocations, asynchronous design, pure C99 - ringta...

Capsudo: Rethinking sudo with object capabilities
ariadne.space

I hate sudo with a passion. It represents everything I find offensive about the modern Unix security model: like su, it must be a SUID binary to work it is monolithic: everything sudo does runs as root, there is no privilege separation it uses a non-declarative and non-hierarchical configuration format leading to forests of complex access-control policies and user errors due to lack of concision it supports plugins

GNU Unifont
unifoundry.com
Tesla US sales drop to nearly 4-year low in November
reuters.com
macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt
developer.apple.com

Update your apps to use new features, and test your apps against API changes.

Security issues with electronic invoices
invoice.secvuln.info

Information about security issues like XXE and other problems with electronic invoices based on EU standards.

New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books
reactormag.com

Molly Templeton - The new feature, called Ask this Book, is already drawing controversy and unanswered questions.

Rats Play DOOM
ratsplaydoom.com
When did the job market get so rude?
theatlantic.com

Franklin Schneider - Employer ghosting is on the rise. Now candidates are punching back.

The Average Founder Ages 6 Months Each Year
tomtunguz.com

Tomasz Tunguz - Statistical analysis reveals evolving trends in founder ages across the startup ecosystem, with implications for investment patterns & ecosystem dynamics.

The true story of the Windows 3.1 'Hot Dog Stand' color scheme
pcgamer.com

Setting the record straight, 33 years later.

Benn Jordan’s flock camera jammer will send you to jail in Florida now [video]
youtube.com
Home Depot GitHub token exposed for a year, granted access to internal systems
techcrunch.com

Zack Whittaker - A security researcher tried to alert Home Depot to the security lapse exposing its back-end GitHub source code repos and other internal cloud systems, but was ignored.

Amazon pulls AI-powered Fallout recap after getting key story details wrong
ign.com

Amazon has pulled its AI-powered Fallout Season 1 recap after fans noticed it made significant errors ahead of the launch of Season 2.

Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union
rockpapershotgun.com

165 workers at Doom studio id Software have voted to unionise under the Communication Workers of America (CWA).

Google releases its new Google Sans Flex font as open source
omgubuntu.co.uk

Joey Sneddon - A font's a font – unless you're into typography! Google Sans Flex font is a new open source font made for screens. It looks great set as Ubuntu's system font.

Nuclear energy key to decarbonising Europe, says EESC
eesc.europa.eu
Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price
finance.yahoo.com

Investors are wary of Oracle's reliance on OpenAI.

Japan law opening phone app stores to go into effect
www3.nhk.or.jp

A new Japanese law is going into effect that could loosen the dominance of tech giants over smartphone services. It aims to bring users greater choice for app stores and more.

Async DNS
flak.tedunangst.com
America's betting craze has spread to its news networks
newyorker.com

Danny Funt - CNN and CNBC have partnered with Kalshi, a prediction market, encouraging their viewers to wager on current events in real time.

Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars
pluralistic.net
Senator endorses discredited book that claims chemical treats autism, cancer
propublica.org

Megan O’Matz - Wisconsin's Ron Johnson has a history of spreading vaccine misinformation. Now he's giving credence to assertions about the therapeutic powers of chlorine dioxide, a disinfectant and deodorizer. “It is all lunacy," one expert said.

Using secondary school maths to demystify AI
raspberrypi.org

Jane Waite - Educators can show in secondary school maths that AI systems don’t think, making maths more interesting while teaching core concepts of AI.

String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof
quantamagazine.org

Years ago, an audacious Fields medalist outlined a sweeping program that, he claimed, could be used to resolve a major problem in algebraic geometry. Other mathematicians had their doubts. Now he says he has a proof.

Epic celebrates "the end of the Apple Tax" after court win in iOS payments case
arstechnica.com

But Sweeney warns iOS devs are still afraid of “totally illegal” retaliation by Apple.

Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices by 50% for DIY Laptops
phoronix.com
Cut off by their banks and from Alexa, sanctioned ICC staffers remain resolute
apnews.com

International Criminal Court judges and prosecutors are trying to live and work under the same financial and travel restrictions brought against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Osama bin Laden.

Berlin Approves New Expansion of Police Surveillance Powers
reclaimthenet.org
CM0 – A new Raspberry Pi you can't buy
jeffgeerling.com
Super-Emitter of the Most Damaging Greenhouse Gas Found in Germany
industrydecarbonization.com

Hanno Böck - Through atmospheric measurements, scientists have identified a chemical factory operated by Solvay in Southern Germany as the source of massive amounts of Sulfur Hexafluoride (SF₆) emissions. Being 24,000 times as bad as CO₂, SF₆ is the most potent known greenhouse gas.

BpfJailer: eBPF Mandatory Access Control [pdf]
lpc.events
SQLite JSON at full index speed using generated columns
dbpro.app

Jay Freeman - One of the coolest patterns in SQLite—store raw JSON documents, create virtual generated columns using json_extract, add indexes, and query JSON at full B-tree index speed.

Fedora: Open-source repository for long-term digital preservation
fedorarepository.org
Why isn't online age verification just like showing your ID in person?
eff.org

Lisa Femia - This blog also appears in our Age Verification Resource Hub: our one-stop shop for users seeking to understand what age-gating laws actually do, what’s at stake, how to protect yourself, and why EFF opposes all forms of age verification mandates. Head to EFF.org/Age to explore our resources and...

Show HN: Epstein's emails reconstructed in a message-style UI (OCR and LLMs)
github.com/Toon-nooT
show

Contribute to Toon-nooT/epsteins-phone-reconstructed development by creating an account on GitHub.

Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
arstechnica.com

Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options.

The Tor Project is switching to Rust
itsfoss.com

Arti, the Rust rewrite of Tor, brings circuit isolation and onion service improvements in its 1.8.0 release.

US threatens new ICC sanctions unless court pledges not to prosecute Trump
reuters.com
Koralm Railway
infrastruktur.oebb.at

A fast and safe service between Styria and Carinthia: That’s the Koralm Railway. It’s part of the new Southern Line in Austria and one of the most important infrastructure projects in Europe.

Training LLMs for Honesty via Confessions
arxiv.org

Large language models (LLMs) can be dishonest when reporting on their actions and beliefs -- for example, they may overstate their confidence in factual claims or cover up evidence of covert actions. Such dishonesty may arise due to the effects of reinforcement learning (RL), where challenges with reward shaping can result in a training process that inadvertently incentivizes the model to lie or misrepresent its acti

Building small Docker images faster
sgt.hootr.club
Young journalists expose Russian-linked vessels off the Dutch and German coast
digitaldigging.org

Henk van Ess - Young journalists expose Russian-linked vessels circling off the Dutch and German coast

Guarding My Git Forge Against AI Scrapers
vulpinecitrus.info

lymkwi (lux) - A summary of the techniques in place to protect my git forge

Smartphone without a battery (2022)
yaky.dev
The tiniest yet real telescope I've built
lucassifoni.info

Lucas Sifoni - 76/300 Pocket Dobson: a tiny yet real telescope that comes with you everywhere

Freeing a Xiaomi humidifier from the cloud
0l.de

Thoughts, stories and ideas about of a code poet, bit juggler & logic wizard.

Cadmium Zinc Telluride: The wonder material powering a medical 'revolution'
bbc.com

Just a handful of companies can make cadmium zinc telluride, a material with powerful properties.

The Boot Order of the Raspberry Pi Is Unusual
patrickmccanna.net
Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why
journal.james-zhan.com

A month after I started my first Bear blog at , my blog was entirely de-indexed by Google for no apparent reason: I have since migrated to (you ar...

CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat
isaaa.org

Researchers have successfully used CRISPR gene editing technology to create a fungi strain that is highly efficient, more nutritious, and significantly more sustainable than its natural counterpart. The fungus Fusarium venenatum already stands out for its meat-like flavor and texture, leading to its approval for food use in several countries. This breakthrough, published in the journal Trends in Biotechnology, addres

Ask HN: What are you buying your kids for Christmas?
news.ycombinator.com
ask
Stoolap: High-performance embedded SQL database in pure Rust
github.com/stoolap

A Modern Embedded SQL Database written in Rust. Contribute to stoolap/stoolap development by creating an account on GitHub.

Laying out the 404 Media zine
tedium.co

Lessons on laying out the 404 Media zine using a relatively weird setup—on Linux, using Affinity, with the help of the Windows translation layer WINE.

Nokia N900 Necromancy
yaky.dev
Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence
whitehouse.gov

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered: Section 1.  Purpose. 

TerraUSD creator Do Kwon sentenced to 15 years over $40B crypto collapse
reuters.com
Powder and stone, or, why medieval rulers loved castles
1517.substack.com

areoform - And how gunpowder and castles led to modern states and centralized taxation. Part I.

Show HN: Gotui – a modern Go terminal dashboard library
github.com/metaspartan
show

Golang terminal dashboard library, advanced modern fork of termui, GOTUI? - metaspartan/gotui

Denial of service and source code exposure in React Server Components
react.dev

The library for web and native user interfaces

Something Ominous Is Happening in the AI Economy
theatlantic.com

Rogé Karma - The last time so much wealth was tied up in such obscure overlapping arrangements was just before the 2008 financial crisis.

Opinion: US Authorities Have Far-Reaching Access to European Cloud Data
heise.de

Stefan Krempl - An analysis for the Ministry of the Interior highlights the reach of US laws. According to it, data stored in the EU is also not secure.

UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16
alecmuffett.com

This is deranged, each nation’s boomers and reactionaries attempting to outdo the others: “Action to prohibit the provision of VPN services to children in the United Kingdom” … th…

Bad Opsec Considered Harmful
buttondown.com

Bad Opsec Considered Harmful I recently became aware of a GitHub repository collecting “Bad OPSEC” cases—instances where people were caught due to mistakes...

Deno 2.6
deno.com

This release includes `dx` for running package binaries, more granular permissions, source phase imports, faster type checking with `tsgo`, native source maps, `deno audit`, and much more.

My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)
jeffhuang.com
What Is the Nicest Thing a Stranger Has Ever Done for You?
louplummer.lol

One of the things I do when I'm feeling blue is to make a mental list of the nice things people have done for me over the years, including perfect strangers.

An SVG is all you need
jon.recoil.org
Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4k employees
twitter.com
Pop_OS 24.04 LTS with COSMIC desktop environment
blog.system76.com

An important message on Pop!_OS, Linux, and one downright fantastic community.

We built a resource hub to fight back against age verification
eff.org

Molly Buckley - Age verification laws are proliferating fast across the United States and around the world, creating a dangerous and confusing tangle of rules about what we’re all allowed to see and do online. That's why today, we're launching EFF.org/Age, a one-stop shop for users seeking to understand what these laws actually do, what’s at stake, why EFF opposes all forms of age verification, how to protect yourself, and how to jo

Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1
libroot.org
Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free
riviantrackr.com
GPT-5.2
openai.com
Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
larr.net
GPT-5.2
openai.com
Litestream VFS
fly.io

Query your SQLite database any time, anywhere

Show HN: Sim – Apache-2.0 n8n alternative
github.com/simstudioai
show

Open-source platform to build and deploy AI agent workflows. - simstudioai/sim

Days since last GitHub incident
github-incidents.pages.dev
Things I want to say to my boss
ithoughtaboutthatalot.com

A new anonymous essay published every day in December in the countdown to Christmas.

A Developer Accidentally Found CSAM in AI Data. Google Banned Him for It
404media.co

Mark Russo reported the dataset to all the right organizations, but still couldn't get into his accounts for months.

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