Tech News

A recent post claiming Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen is misleading. The experiments involving reading raw weights and those that fix Qwen rely on completely different techniques, so they do not support the implied connection.

A fun experiment back-ports 30 years of chess engine improvements to run on a 1996 Pentium Pro, testing whether modern techniques on period hardware could have defeated Kasparov in 1996. It explores what might have been possible if researchers had today’s engine knowledge at the time.

A new Show HN project called Hacker Times presents Hacker News in a New York Times-inspired newspaper format. It refreshes every hour and features independent headlines linked to original sources.

OpenAI has built Pando, a Git-compatible backend designed to handle the development scale made possible by its Codex coding tools. The system aims to overcome Git’s scaling limits as AI-assisted coding increases repository activity and development throughput.

Intel’s stock slide deepened Monday, with weakness spreading to memory and storage chip stocks as a broader $3.5 trillion semiconductor rout intensified. Most of Wall Street otherwise moved past last week’s tech sell-off.

A 35-year-old man with Down syndrome loves movies, works two jobs, and hopes to meet the right person. The piece explores how he navigates being told he is “different” because of his condition.

A new effort is working to shrink NixOS’s RAM footprint and reduce its memory requirements to as low as 512 MB. The goal is to make the OS viable on lower-resource systems by minimizing resource usage.

A discussion of “Resisting Cognitive Surrender” warns that relying on LLM-generated code and content can erode human understanding, turn review into rubber-stamping, and degrade codebases over time. Commenters support scaffolding and review workflows but argue that unchecked adoption risks persistent dependence and lost cognitive competence, making continued investment in human capability and control essential.

WorkOS says a security incident was isolated to its internal go-to-market systems and that no customer platform data was accessed. The CEO said the attack involved ARTEX, an autonomous AI agent framework used for offensive security operations, and that the incident has been contained with independent experts investigating. Customers seeking more details can contact WorkOS’s security team.

Revolut has moved roughly 2,000 engineers onto self-hosted GLM for coding, making Claude Code and Codex exceptions rather than defaults. According to AI ops lead David Abitbol, the setup uses 56 Nvidia B200s at a blended 30 cents per million tokens—about a tenth of what Revolut previously paid Anthropic and OpenAI.

Cloudflare is currently experiencing multiple active incidents, according to its real-time status page. The page provides live updates and incident history across Cloudflare services, network locations, and scheduled maintenance.

An Ask HN post seeking a contact with a Cleveland-area ham radio club drew helpful replies from local amateur radio operators, including a suggestion to reach out to Case Western Reserve University’s W8EDU club. Commenters also offered to connect the poster with nearby radio enthusiasts and briefly discussed how the post reached HN’s front page.

A new reference release offers curated V100 SXM2 pin maps, two- and four-GPU NVLink connection plans, and connector-only KiCad resources. It aims to support development of an open-source carrier board for V100 SXM2 GPUs.

SLAC researchers have directly observed a distinctive property in an altermagnetic candidate material, providing key evidence for altermagnetism as a new magnetic phase. The finding marks the first direct proof of this magnetic behavior and could open new directions for magnetic materials research.

A new uBlock Origin filter is designed to block autoplay videos on TechCrunch. The blog explains how users can use the filter to stop videos from playing automatically while browsing the site.

A CC1101 radio module connected to an FT232H board with six jumper wires and driven by a Python script turns a laptop into a 433 MHz scanner. The setup offers spectrum sweeps and a listen mode that decodes fixed-code remotes, with no microcontroller or soldering required and receive-only operation.

In an interview, Tantivy creator and Quickwit co-founder Paul Masurel discusses building a search engine in Rust, following Lucene’s competitive happy path, and maintaining open-source software. He also shares lessons learned from the project’s development.

The piece discusses efficient algorithms and the Exponential Time Hypothesis, arguing that current debates often lose the plot by misusing or overextending complexity-theoretic assumptions. It calls for clearer reasoning about what ETH does and does not imply for practical algorithm design.

The piece explores why Art Nouveau, despite its striking aesthetic and landmarks like the Sagrada Família, never became the dominant style of the modern built world. It examines the economic, technological, and cultural forces that pushed architecture toward standardization and mass production instead.

A Show HN project called ReBirth 338 in Browser lets users run the original ReBirth RB-338 Windows release directly in a web browser. It uses Wine and WebAssembly to bring the classic software synth to modern browsers without a native installation.

Vathography is an art practice that transforms photographs into creative artworks using estimated depth maps. Created by Karim Joseph Nassar, it shows how computational depth estimation can become a medium for artistic expression.

Toit has released v2.0.0 after more than four years of alpha development. The milestone marks the platform’s move out of alpha and into its 2.0 release.

A new arXiv paper examines open-source 5G RAN platforms through a dual lens of performance and capabilities. It aims to compare platform performance with feature support, offering perspective on trade-offs for open-source 5G radio access networks.

Charles Tandy, the businessman who turned a leather craft store into a nationwide chain and then repeated the feat with Radio Shack, died November 4, 1978, at age 60. He was the mastermind behind Radio Shack’s expansion.

PsiQuantum has unveiled Optical Circuit Switching technology built on its low-loss silicon photonics platform. The company says the approach can help address major scaling challenges facing AI infrastructure.

ERICI has launched as a non-commercial initiative focused on RISC-V Industrial Computers for factory-floor use. It offers a tested reference stack for partitioned RVA23 systems, aiming to support industrial computing adoption.

DiscImageStudio is a GitHub project that lets users burn visible artwork onto CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs. Developers can contribute to its development by creating a GitHub account.

Rustable is a new open-source, native database client written in Rust. The project is highlighted on Show HN as a Rust-built alternative for database management.

The piece outlines ten harness patterns for applying AI testing to real repositories, emphasizing how AI testing differs from traditional software testing. It highlights golden sets, RAG and agent evaluation, and monitoring as key practices for building reliable production AI systems.

NVIDIA has open-sourced Auto Ontology, a Python framework for building semantic, graph-based reasoning layers over data. It supports deterministic query generation, improved context retrieval, and more explainable AI for LLM and agent workflows.