HN ReaderReader

FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors
nytimes.com
Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer [pdf]
eprint.iacr.org
Tell HN: uBlock Origin on Chrome is finally gone
news.ycombinator.com
ask
OpenAI delays launch of open weights model
twitter.com
HDD Clicker generates HDD clicking sounds, based on HDD Led activity
serdashop.com

HDD Clicker generates HDD clicking sounds, based on HDD Led activity. It allows the nostalgic harddisk sound, while using modern SSD, CF or SD cards.

Faking a JPEG
ty-penguin.org.uk

Creating something that seems like a JPEG, very quickly

A software conference that advocates for quality
bettersoftwareconference.com

Software is getting worse, we are here to make it better.

'123456' password exposed chats for 64M McDonald's job applicants
bleepingcomputer.com

Cybersecurity researchers discovered a vulnerability in McHire, McDonald's chatbot job application platform, that exposed the chats of more than 64 million job applicants across the United States.

OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google
theverge.com

Hayden Field - Key researchers are joining Google DeepMind, too.

Air India Flight 171 Accident Preliminary Report [pdf]
aaib.gov.in
Preliminary report into Air India crash released
bbc.co.uk

In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why he "did the cut-off".

I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built since
medium.com

Mike Hall - I once worked with a UI designer who insisted it was impossible to create a product that was both within the Web Content Accessibility…

Introduction to Digital Filters
ccrma.stanford.edu
Belkin shows tech firms getting too comfortable with bricking customers' stuff
arstechnica.com

There’s no easy alternative, and IoT customers are paying the price.

ETH Zurich and EPFL to release a LLM developed on public infrastructure
ethz.ch

ETH Zurich and EPFL will release a large language model (LLM) developed on public infrastructure. Trained on the “Alps” supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), the new LLM marks a milestone in open-source AI and multilingual excellence.

Google nerfs Pixel 6a batteries following fire hazard
arstechnica.com

People don’t upgrade phones every year anymore—longevity matters.

Show HN: RULER – Easily apply RL to any agent
openpipe.ai
show
jank is C++
jank-lang.org

jank is Clojure. jank is C++. The combination is amazing.

Anthropic Is Bleeding Out
wheresyoured.at

Hello premium customers! Feel free to get in touch at ez@betteroffline.com if you're ever feeling chatty. And if you're not one yet, please subscribe and support my independent brain madness. Also, thank you to Kasey Kagawa for helping with the maths on this. Soundtrack: Killer Be Killed -

U.S. abandons hunt for signal of cosmic inflation
science.org
Pa. House passes 'click-to-cancel' subscription bills
pennlive.com

The proposed state laws are virtually identical to the Federal Trade Commission's “click-to-cancel” rules that were struck down by an appeals court this week.

In a First, Solar Was Europe's Biggest Source of Power Last Month
e360.yale.edu
Astronomers race to study interstellar interloper
science.org
Kimi K2
twitter.com
Lead pigment in turmeric is the culprit in a global poisoning mystery (2024)
npr.org

High levels of lead were found in a surprisingly large number of Bangladeshi kids in New York City — and in pregnant women in Bangladesh. Could there be a common cause?

Conspiracy theorists unaware their beliefs are on the fringe
news.cornell.edu

Overconfidence is a hallmark trait of people who believe in conspiracies, and they also significantly overestimate how much others agree with them, Cornell psychology researchers have found. 

Top DNS domains seen on the Quad9 recursive resolver array each day
github.com/Quad9DNS

Top 500 DNS domains seen on the Quad9 recursive resolver array each day - Quad9DNS/quad9-domains-top500

Show HN: Vibe Kanban – Kanban board to manage your AI coding agents
github.com/BloopAI
show

Contribute to BloopAI/vibe-kanban development by creating an account on GitHub.

I'm done with social media – Or: why I have a blog now
carolinecrampton.com

Or: why I have a blog now.

Walking every street in New York City
imjustwalkin.com

Matt Green - Walking every block of NYC

Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac mini's storage for half the price
jeffgeerling.com
We're light-years away from true artificial intelligence, says martha wells
scientificamerican.com

Clara Moskowitz - Today’s large language models are hardly related to the kinds of machine intelligence we see in science fiction, according to Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot Diaries series

Some arguments against a land value tax (2024)
lesswrong.com

To many people, the land value tax (LVT) has earned the reputation of being the "perfect tax." In theory, it achieves a rare trifecta: generating gov…

Overtourism in Japan, and how it hurts small businesses
craigmod.com
AI agent benchmarks are broken
ddkang.substack.com

Daniel Kang - Benchmarks are foundational to evaluating the strengths and limitations of AI systems, guiding both research and industry development.

Things I learned from 5 years at Vercel
leerob.com

Here are some of the lessons I learned and how I grew as a leader and manager, as well as a bunch of behind-the-scenes photos.

Repaste Your MacBook
christianselig.com

Christian Selig -  My favorite memory of my M1 Pro MacBook Pro was the whole sensation of “holy crap, you never hear the fans in this thing”, which was very novel in 2021. Four years later, this MacBook Pro is still a delight. It’s the longest I’ve ever owned a laptop, and while I’d love to pick up the new M4 goodness, this dang thing still seems to just shrug at basically anything I throw at it. Video editing, code compiling, CAD mo

'Click-to-cancel' rule is blocked
apnews.com

A rule which would have required businesses to make it easy for consumers to cancel unwanted subscriptions has been blocked by a court days before it was set to go into effect.

At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
nytimes.com
Recovering from AI addiction
internetaddictsanonymous.org

Welcome to Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous! We’re glad you’ve found us, and we hope our community can be as helpful to you as it has been for us. ITAA is a Twelve-Step fellowship of individuals who support each other in recovering from internet and technology addiction. This includes social media addiction, phone addiction, video addiction, television … Continue reading Recovering from AI Addiction

Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface
patternproject.substack.com

Axle Davids - How an Apple legend approached the world’s most powerful psychedelic as a user-experience problem to be solved.

FP8 is ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cutlass" in it
twitter.com
At Amazon's biggest data center, everything is supersized for AI
nytimes.com
Slack's 57MB 404 page
a.slack.com
Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries? (NBER)
nber.org
Apple vs the Law
formularsumo.co.uk

James Heppell - Apple & Google at the DMA compliance workshops, June 2025

GenAI Processors: Build powerful and flexible Gemini applications
developers.googleblog.com
OpenFront: Realtime Risk-like multiplayer game in the browser
openfront.io
An almost catastrophic OpenZFS bug and the humans that made it
despairlabs.com

A couple of weeks ago I fixed a nasty bug in this function in OpenZFS:

The day someone created 184 billion Bitcoin (2020)
decrypt.co

Decrypt / Robert Stevens - There are only 21 million Bitcoin in existence—but one day, 184 billion Bitcoin were conjured into being, by someone who remains anonymous to this day.

Australia is introducing age checks for search engines like Google
abc.net.au

Just as Australians are adjusting to the idea of having their ages checked for social media, age assurance rules are being applied to search engines and many other corners of the internet.

The Lumina Probiotic May Cause Blindness in the Same Way as Methanol
substack.com

Substack - I think we may have hit Scott Alexander's <1% scenario.

LLM Inference Handbook
bentoml.com

A practical handbook for engineers building, optimizing, scaling and operating LLM inference systems in production.

Nerve pain drug gabapentin linked to increased dementia, cognitive impairment
medicalxpress.com

Receiving six or more prescriptions of the drug gabapentin for low back pain is associated with significantly increased risks of developing dementia and mild cognitive impairment (MCI)—29% and 85%, respectively—finds a large medical records study published online in the journal Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine.

'Autofocus' specs promise sharp vision, near or far
bbc.com

Start-up firms and researchers are working on lenses that can change their focus.

Psilocybin treatment extends cellular lifespan, improves survival of aged mice
nature.com
1 in 3 US teens have prediabetes, new CDC data show
abcnews.go.com

ABC News - The CDC data means an estimated 8.4 million young people -- or 32.7% of the U.S. adolescent population -- had prediabetes in 2023, the most recent data available.

Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"
simonwillison.net

Simon Willison - If you ask the new Grok 4 for opinions on controversial questions, it will sometimes run a search to find out Elon Musk’s stance before providing you with an answer. …

Reverse Engineering the Firmware Loader for an X-Rite Spectrophotometer
adam.zeloof.xyz

I recently came across a couple of X-Rite/Pantone RM200 spectrophotometers on eBay for cheap. No power-on test, no cable, and no packaging, but for $20 each I had to buy them. The devices — t…

AI coding tools can reduce productivity
secondthoughts.ai

Steve Newman - Study Shows That Even Experienced Developers Dramatically Overestimate Gains

Turkey bans Grok over Erdoğan insults
politico.eu

X’s chatbot under fire in Poland, too, over insulting comments targeted at Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

An open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt GenAI in education
openletter.earth
Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels
github.com/fosrl
show

Tunneled Reverse Proxy Server with Identity and Access Control and Dashboard UI - fosrl/pangolin

The FBI Is Using Polygraphs to Test Officials' Loyalty
nytimes.com
US to Stop Producing Pennies in 2026
axios.com
Final report on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 in-flight exit door plug separation
ntsb.gov
U.S. will review social media for foreign student visa applications
npr.org

The U.S. State Department said it is restarting the process for foreigners applying for student visas but all applicants will now be required to unlock their social media accounts for review.

Grok 4
simonwillison.net

Simon Willison - Released last night, Grok 4 is now available via both API and a paid subscription for end-users. Key characteristics: image and text input, text output. 256,000 context length (twice that …

Working with the UK Government to Protect Children Online
bsky.social

Part of Bluesky’s mission to create a more open and decentralized social web is helping users feel safe and in control of their experience. We always try to balance safety with privacy, and free expression with civility.

Show HN: Cactus – Ollama for Smartphones
github.com/cactus-compute
show

Cross-platform framework for deploying LLM/VLM/TTS models locally on smartphones. - cactus-compute/cactus

eBPF: Connecting with Container Runtimes
h0x0er.github.io
Belkin ending support for older Wemo products
belkin.com

Wemo Support Ending – What You Need to Know

Millions of Cars Exposed to Remote Hacking via PerfektBlue Attack
securityweek.com

Eduard Kovacs - PCA Cyber Security has discovered critical vulnerabilities in the BlueSDK Bluetooth stack that could have allowed remote code execution on car systems.

EU rules ask tech giants to publicly track how, when AI models go off the rails
arstechnica.com

EU rules ask tech giants to publicly track how and when AI models go off the rails.

Orwell Diaries 1938-1942
orwelldiaries.wordpress.com

George Orwell's domestic and political diary entries, posted 70 years to the day after they were written

US utilities plot big rise in electricity rates as data centre demand booms
ft.com

Customers face higher bills to upgrade infrastructure needed to power AI systems

Retail cyber attacks: NCA arrest four for attacks on M&S, Co-op and Harrods
nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk
Launch HN: Leaping (YC W25) – Self-Improving Voice AI
news.ycombinator.com
launch
Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet
browseros.com
show

BrowserOS - BrowserOS is an open-source agentic browser that runs AI agents locally. Your privacy-first alternative to Perplexity Comet.

Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity
metr.org
Seven Engineers Suspended After $2.3M Bridge Includes 90-Degree Turn
vice.com

Ashley Fike - Ever had to make a 90-degree turn on a bridge? In India, seven engineers just got suspended for designing exactly that...

Graphical Linear Algebra
graphicallinearalgebra.net
What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)
dynamicland.org
Red Hat Technical Writing Style Guide
stylepedia.net
Executed Chinese prisoners likely used in UK exhibition (2021)
theartnewspaper.com

Cadavers on display in 'Real Bodies' show were provided by Dalian-based firm known to have acquired corpses from police

Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland's coast is a breakthrough
apnews.com

Submerged in about 40 meters of water off Scotland’s coast, a turbine has been spinning for more than six years to harness the power of ocean tides and generate electricity.

Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI [video]
youtube.com
Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language
flix.dev
Could a Paper Plane Thrown from the ISS Survive the Flight?
sciencealert.com

Universe Today - Sometimes there are profound questions in life that must be answered, like "What is the meaning of existence?", "Are we alone in the universe?" or "What happens if you throw a paper airplane from the International Space Station?" Luckily, that third one has finally been answered, because of course someone would eventually.

AI is turning Apple into a "loser"
axios.com
Diffsitter – A Tree-sitter based AST difftool to get meaningful semantic diffs
github.com/afnanenayet

A tree-sitter based AST difftool to get meaningful semantic diffs - afnanenayet/diffsitter

FOKS: Federated Open Key Service
foks.pub
Is Gemini 2.5 good at bounding boxes?
simedw.com

Simon Edwardsson - Can Gemini 2.5 replace CNN for object detection?

At last, a use case for AI agents with sky-high ROI: Stealing crypto
theregister.com

: Boffins outsmart smart contracts with evil automation

Magic .env files built for sharing: Human-first, AI-friendly
varlock.dev
How to prove false statements: Practical attacks on Fiat-Shamir
quantamagazine.org

An attack on a fundamental proof technique reveals a glaring security issue for blockchains and other digital encryption schemes.

Optimizing a Math Expression Parser in Rust
rpallas.xyz

Ricardo Pallas - Optimizing a math expression parser for speed and memory.

Show HN: Typeform was too expensive so I built my own forms
ikiform.com
show

Preet Suthar - Create beautiful, interactive forms with Ikiform - An open-source alternative to Typeform and Google Forms. Build surveys, collect responses, and analyze data effortlessly.

Kite News
kite.kagi.com
Matt Trout has died
shadowcat.co.uk

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