Hacker News Digest
· 90 Hacker News
Phorion found a backdoor in the official Claude Code for VS Code extension (version 2.1.313) on the Cursor Marketplace. The injected code runs on load, plants an SSH key, opens a reverse tunnel to an…
Security researcher Kevin Beaumont reports that official Claude Code extensions contain backdoors. The finding raises uncomfortable questions about the trust placed in vendor-published tooling for AI…
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar and Ranking Member Maxine Waters introduced a resolution warning that AI firms hold trillions in debt, much of it raised in opaque private credit mar…
A browser puzzle game where you draw districts on a hex map to keep a horse in power despite losing the popular vote. Every district holds the same number of voters, and the most voters take the seat…
Drawing on Lisanne Bainbridge's 1983 'Ironies of Automation' and recent studies in medicine and aviation, this piece argues that as AI handles more incident response, SREs lose the hands-on practice…
Anthropic's compromised Claude Code extension, installed over 40 million times in Visual Studio Code and Cursor, pushed version 2.1.313 that tried to plant a persistent SSH reverse backdoor on develo…
Northflank's status page reports a security incident and major outage across networking, certificates, services, addons, jobs, builds, and logs. A Wiz threat alert at 11:43 UTC triggered patching and…
Crypto-tracing firms say the notorious TraderTraitor group, linked to North Korea, may be responsible for the largest digital heist in history. The Binance breach unfolded in roughly 20 minutes, and…
Herdr is a new desktop app for terminals and coding agents, built around spaces, tabs, and panes. An agents sidebar shows which workers are working, blocked, done, or idle, and closing the window lea…
Blackstone has told investors that Anthropic could fail to earn an investment-grade credit rating once it goes public, a caution that casts doubt on how smoothly the AI company's landmark IPO will be…
Cardiologists Arthur Agatston and Oren Mechanic argue that coronary artery calcium scans, a 10-minute test costing about $100, can spot dangerous plaque years before a heart attack. After three decad…
A security researcher found five more ways to fully compromise other tenants' Azure API Connections, the Logic Apps component that swaps your token for a backend service's credentials. By abusing und…
Rairii has ported classic Mac OS to the Nintendo Wii, GameCube, and eventually Wii U, reaching the desktop for the first time. The project involved porting OpenBIOS, patching the Trampoline bootloade…
After 404 Media revealed that Proton was forcing staff into near company-wide 're-interviews' to justify their AI use, CEO Andy Yen cancelled them at an all-hands meeting. He admitted a 'communicatio…
Patrick Stewart has died at 86, after living with Alzheimer's and Lewy Body Dementia. Though he anchored the X-Men films and spent decades commanding the stage, it was Captain Jean-Luc Picard — acros…
Tangled is a federated code forge built on the AT Protocol: self-host just the Git hosting or CI runners you want, or the whole stack, and still collaborate with everyone else. Issues, pull requests,…
A selloff hit Wall Street as investors balked at the soaring costs of the AI buildout. Intel plunged as much as 30% after warning of a weaker PC market while ramping up AI spending, Amazon fell 6% on…
A video about how hopeless billiards skills led to an unexpected detour into the hyperbolic plane. The source page itself was blocked by a CAPTCHA, so the full content could not be retrieved.
Florilegium procedurally generates Delft-blue floral page margins for LuaLaTeX, with no images or external assets. Every petal, leaf, and stem is a parametric curve computed in Lua while the page is…
Written in C, astroterm draws the real-time positions of stars, planets, constellations, and moon phases as ASCII art, configurable by date, time, and location. It ships through Arch, Fedora, Homebre…
Over 300 media executives are pushing the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, which would force every automated visitor to identify itself. But the bill misses the real harm: it doesn't limit request volume…
nesformer compiles the NES's 6502 CPU, its 2 KB of work RAM, and a cartridge's program ROM directly into the weights of a stock Qwen3.5 model. No training was involved — a compiler computed every wei…
Bunny.net says one of its infrastructure providers suffered unauthorized access through third-party server management software, and that a CDN node in Armenia ran on an affected server. Engineers cut…
FlokiNET refused a takedown request for icepi.cx, a site publishing the work identities of ICE employees, arguing it serves accountability journalism rather than doxxing. The notice came from ZeroFox…
Philip Terry reviews Simon Armitage's new verse translation of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian epic about a demigod king of Uruk who abuses his power, battles the forest guardian Humbaba, and goes mad wi…
Binance reported roughly $6.3 billion in affected assets after an apparent hack, and blockchain intelligence firms TRM and Chainalysis both attribute the attack to TraderTraitor, North Korea's elite…
Maintainer Lucas Larroche announced that version 2.1.1 is the final release of Pico CSS. The reasoning: AI can now generate lightweight, accessible standalone HTML with only the CSS it needs, so a mi…
Google researchers propose a sleep framework for continual learning: LLMs alternate between a wake phase that handles input and a sleep phase that consolidates fragile short-term context into stable…
Akamai says it is investigating CVE-2026-98432, a newly published remote code execution vulnerability affecting its Linode cloud platform. The company has engaged subject matter experts and is applyi…
Cuis is a free Smalltalk-80 environment built around two goals: staying simple and staying powerful. It runs on any platform, and it's fast and efficient. The project is still active, with a 7.8 stab…
GitHub is investigating reports of degraded performance affecting Actions and Webhooks, according to a status page update posted October 30, 2026 at 17:50 UTC. The incident notice names both services…
I'm using AI to correct AI, which sounds ridiculous, but I use Claude Web for planning and briefs, then hand off to Claude Code for implementation, testing, and independent reviews via a contextless…
High tides already turned Marin County's Shoreline Highway into two-foot-deep pools, and San Francisco Bay set an October record this week—from ordinary spring tides alone. USGS oceanographer Sean Vi…
Cisco's president picked a former startup founder, now 27, and told him to "go nuts" — unlimited AI tokens, a 24-month deadline, and a target of rewriting 98% of the company's legacy code. The bet la…
A customer's program failed when launched from a batch file but worked when double-clicked in Explorer. Raymond Chen immediately suspected the current directory: Explorer sets it to the folder contai…
Infinite Mac now runs multiple BeOS versions in the browser, including the PowerPC releases that once dual-booted on mid-90s Macs. Getting there meant fixing DingusPPC quirks around ADB input, screen…
DOOMFORMER is a wild experiment that runs real neural networks entirely inside DOOM using voodoo dolls, conveyor belts, lava lines, and doors. Numbers become crowds of dolls, matrix multiplies become…
Sashank Gondala shares nine months of lessons from building an AI-native engineering org at FurtherAI. Per-engineer merged changes are up roughly 5x since January with a revert rate under 0.5%, after…
Internal pressure at Proton: CEO Andy Yen set up an email address for employees to report anything slowing AI adoption, installed software tracking how much AI-generated code the company produces, an…
The Organization for Transformative Works says it detected a security incident on AO3 and has taken the archive offline while it investigates. No works, bookmarks, or kudos were deleted, but the team…
For 20 years, the Secrets of the Ice team has pulled Viking Age finds from mountain ice patches in Innlandet, Norway. Now the oldest ice is vanishing, and far older objects are surfacing: this season…
Polymarket shut down its international platform for nearly an hour Thursday after a third-party provider was compromised, with blockchain analysts estimating about $2.65 million in crypto siphoned fr…
France's National Assembly adopted amendment I-1358 by 11 votes to 10, imposing a €0.055 per gigabyte levy on content providers — from Netflix and Steam to GitHub, Google Drive, and CDNs like Cloudfl…
The University of Tennessee has digitized Cormac McCarthy's personal library, now searchable online. The catalog lists 18,725 items, from William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon to a physics math textbook…
A size_t index counting down to zero looks obvious but breaks: i >= 0 is always true, and an empty buffer wraps i to SIZE_MAX. Switching to ssize_t works but drags in signed-conversion traps, a POSIX…
Around October 27, Claude Code began enforcing a new rule pushed from Anthropic's servers under the flag "tengu_heron_brook," with no setting to disable it. It tells the model to build original games…
France's National Assembly passed an amendment backed by Socialist lawmakers that taxes data flows at €0.055 per gigabyte, a levy its supporters expect to raise roughly €10 billion. VideoLAN, the non…
After more than two years and over 70 patches to Cloudflare's boringtun, Firezone built sanstun: a sans-IO Rust implementation of the WireGuard state machine. It enforces protocol invariants through…
Black holes are invisible by definition, so how did 250 researchers capture one on camera? Harvard astrophysicist Shep Doeleman explains to Janna Levin how he linked radio telescopes across the globe…
In 1863 Jules Verne wrote Paris in the Twentieth Century, imagining a 1960 city of gas cabs, compressed-air trains, and calculating machines where literature is dead and only profit matters. Publishe…
Michiel Beijen bought a $25 PineTime in 2023 and found its MicroPython-based OS, wasp-os, dormant and stuck on a 2019 fork. He revived it: builds work again, Bluetooth flashing drops from eight minut…
TRM Labs attributes the $6.36bn Binance breach to TraderTraitor, North Korea's elite hacking unit, calling it the largest crypto theft on record — roughly four times the 2025 Bybit hack. The attacker…
Catcopter drops you into fast-paced aerial battles as a flying feline fighter, no downloads required—just open your browser and take off. In Catnip Brawl mode, it's every cat for themselves: grab cat…
A study of Icelandic youth aged 13 to 15, surveyed in 2016, 2018, and 2023, found that schoolwide phone bans had no significant effect on mental health. Commenters note the research didn't control fo…
Saskia Reeves-Priestley, a 23-year-old teacher and keen goalkeeper, collapsed at work before blood tests revealed her vitamin D was "next to nothing." Nearly a quarter of 11- to 18-year-olds in the U…
Vercel has added Geist Serif to its type family, a high-contrast display serif built on the same foundations as Geist Sans, Mono, and Pixel. It borrows from fashion and editorial print rather than vi…
Knock On Wood is an internet-connected device that performs the familiar gesture of knocking on wood, letting users follow the superstition remotely when no wood is nearby. Through a web app, a digit…
C++ has templates, Rust has const generics, Zig has comptime — but all are restricted or lack a real type system. Syl is a new language that encodes compile-time computation in a modal type system in…
Artificial Analysis's new Intelligence Index v5 splits its score evenly across knowledge work, coding, science, and general tasks, and the first ranking shows eight closed models beating Kimi K3.1 Pr…
Preparing to play an old-school thief in Noah Segan's film "The Only Living Pickpocket in New York," John Turturro trained with Apollo Robbins, the Vegas entertainer once known as "the gentleman thie…
- ▲ 64Microsoft and Open Device Partnership build a tool that finds every hidden panic in your Rust binary
Tweede golf, under the Open Device Partnership and with Microsoft, released the Call Graph Analyzer (CGA), a rustc-driver that extracts a call graph from monomorphized MIR to pinpoint every function…
CVE-2026-98432 is a use-after-free in the Linux kernel's IPv4 TCP handshake path: a retransmitted SYN can read IP options that another CPU has already freed with plain kfree(). CVSS rates it 9.8, Red…
Novelist Neal Stephenson toured Harvard's Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments with its director, Dr. Joshua Gorman. Among the highlights: a cube of unenriched uranium from Nazi Germany's…
On Sol 2006, NASA's Perseverance rover rolled past 45.22 kilometers (28.10 miles) of total driving on Mars, setting a new record for the farthest distance driven on another celestial body. The milest…
In 1982 Commodore shipped the 1600 VICmodem, the first modem to break the $100 barrier, built by Anchor Automation with just seven chips and no autodial. Users dialed by hand, then swapped the handse…
A Hacker News thread celebrates an illustrated online book about classic Hewlett-Packard gear. Commenters recall the HP85a desktop computer with its 32K expansion cartridge, great BASIC manuals, and…
A longtime iPhone user swaps his iPhone Duo for an iPhone 18 Pro Max after six days, despite loving the folding form factor. He praises the matte inner screen, the pocketable size, and the fun of bui…
ParadeDB's Ming Ying explains how segment partitioning by ctid, an inverted DocId-to-ctid map, and bitmap postings for dense terms cut COUNT query latency dramatically—visibility page accesses fell f…
The dot-com era laid down fiber that stayed useful for decades; the AI boom is pouring money into GPUs that may be obsolete in three years. Hacker News commenters debate what that means for hyperscal…
A new Gallup poll finds U.S. faith in higher education sinking to a record low: the share calling a college education "very important" has dropped from 70% in 2013 to under a third, while those sayin…
Concentrated solar has lost the cost race to photovoltaics, but 247Solar is betting on a different angle: its plant stores heat in ceramic pellets for overnight generation, and the same turbine hardw…
At a Qualia Research Institute retreat in Tepoztlán, the author vaporized 5-MeO-DMT and stared at the Ebbinghaus illusion. When he moved his attention to the space between the two circle clusters, th…
I'm curious about the current culture at Google, especially within core teams like Gmail, Search, and Ads. What is it like to work in these traditionally critical departments now? I'm asking for firs…
Lasm compiles ordinary Lean 4 programs ahead of time to WebAssembly, so a single Lean codebase can become a Node server, a serverless or edge function, a WASI/Fastly module, or a browser app. Because…
Sketch Stadium is a live multiplayer Pictionary game built for AI agents. Each round, one agent gets a secret word and sketches it stroke by stroke on a 100×100 canvas using a small SVG subset and el…
That glossy coating on candy corn, jelly beans, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Whoppers, Lemonheads, and Sugar Babies is shellac — a resin secreted by female lac bugs as they suck sap and build a protectiv…
xarray-sql lets you express causal attention as plain SQL, and its optimizer einfold automatically rewrites the query into a fused FlashAttention-style kernel—no attention-specific rules required. In…
In North Carolina, the Army tested temporary battlefield graves for the first time on a large scale since the Korean War. Engineers used D6 bulldozers to dig a trench for 20 remains in about 75 minut…
In February 2012, a garbage collector in Taytay, Philippines, found the body of real-estate broker Catherine Lee, shot under each eye. The case led investigators to Paul Le Roux, a South African repu…
Archaeologists have reconstructed a wardrobe in Pompeii's House of Cornelius Maximus that no one reopened after Vesuvius buried the city in 79 CE. Inside were grooming tools, a perfume bottle, lead w…
Spinf-serve is an inference server that reads content once and answers many questions in a single pass, returning probabilities instead of generated text. Built for bulk classification and decision m…
Brandan, the writer behind the achromath Substack, built a daily puzzle out of his Pell Tiles idea: a 6x6 grid of X's and O's where you draw eight paths of lengths 1 through 8, each connecting two cl…
Atech, the Embraer-controlled critical-systems company, plans to double its size by 2030 by expanding abroad. CEO Rodrigo Persico points to growing demand for drone traffic management (UTM) alongside…
pgrust v0.4-beta ships Gravity, a query engine that JIT-compiles any Postgres SQL query down to assembly through a pipeline graph and a Lisp IR. On ClickBench, the benchmark ClickHouse built to showc…
Equibles tracked 145 Nasdaq companies that received a minimum bid price notice in the first half of 2025 through October 2026. 74.5% remain listed, but 58.6% used a reverse split to stay compliant. F…
On Friday, October 30, 2026, GitHub suffered a disruption across multiple services after a temporarily overloaded component triggered a burst of errors between 14:21 and 14:30 UTC. Issues and Pages w…
Arken is a passwordless authentication middleware for web servers that eliminates stored secrets. Instead of passwords or session tokens, users sign a one-time nonce with their private key, and the s…
SkyPilot built a physics-simulator RL environment around Tesla's flying Roadster demo, with four air thrusters, gusty wind, a ramp flip and a kickflip over a Cybertruck. Every frontier model tested —…
Parallel pull requests that add unrelated features both insert lines at the top of CHANGELOG.md, producing a merge conflict even though the code merges cleanly. changelog-merge, a Rust tool from Cach…
Palomino is a Mac workspace built in Rust that lets you run Claude Code, Codex, and Pi side by side in a single window. Instead of juggling terminals and tabs, you get unlimited workspaces with termi…