Tech News

Italian farmer Claudio Grossi planted unknown seeds found in his attic and was surprised when a seven-eared stem emerged. The seeds turned out to be an ancient grain that may offer solutions to modern agricultural problems.

Memdoor, a lightweight coding and automation agent packaged as a single CLI binary, uses a team of five Qwen3.8-27B models to outperform Fable 5 on LiveCodeBench Hard. It can run locally or over SSH, optimize token usage, and automate CI and cron jobs with durable workflows.

A reader discussion highlights a bootstrapped SaaS run for 20 years by two brothers, with users praising its longevity and a practical MP3-to-text conversion tool. Commenters ask how AI and coding agents have affected revenue, while others suggest most of the service’s regular users are non-developers who are largely unaware of tools like Claude.

A historical look at early electric vehicles shows they once competed with steam- and gasoline-powered cars, charged via mercury-arc rectifiers. The piece explores how electric cars were marketed—including to women—before internal combustion dominance.

A parent and their 12-year-old son spent about two months working on a maker project they call the Altoids Project. They shared the final product in a video.

OpenAI is merging ChatGPT and Codex usage limits into a shared allowance, according to reader discussion. Commenters criticize the move as a cost-cutting measure that could frustrate paying subscribers, since agentic coding consumes far more tokens than typical chat and decoupled billing had been a reason to stay. Some warn users may switch providers or use ChatGPT less as a result.

A Brazilian court fined two lawyers for embedding a hidden prompt-injection command in a court filing. The maneuver was intended to manipulate the court's AI document review system.

The Project Suncatcher prototype satellite has reached its "Hello World" milestone, delivering the first-ever AI response from a data center-class TPU in orbit. The achievement marks a key step toward running AI compute in space.

A 2024 National Academies report attributes the 2020 collapse of the Arecibo telescope to zinc creep in cable spelter sockets, a failure mode never previously documented. The finding points to a newly recognized structural risk in similar cable-socket assemblies.

Oxford University’s Jan Rosenow notes that electricity currently accounts for only about 20% of the global energy story, with most energy still coming from less efficient sources. He argues that deeper electrification could cut total global energy use in half.

A new arXiv paper describes RAMBO, a technique for leaking secrets from air-gapped computers by encoding data into covert radio signals emitted from RAM. The method uses malware to modulate memory activity so a nearby receiver can recover stolen information without any network connection. It highlights continuing side-channel risks for isolated systems.

Researchers are exploring pilot-wave hydrodynamics, a framework in which quantum-like phenomena emerge in macroscopic fluid systems. The work highlights how walking droplets and related hydrodynamic setups can reproduce aspects of quantum behavior at observable scales.

A new open file format called oTAPE aims to standardize digital cassette recordings. Each .otape file holds two fixed-length sides as continuous recordings, plus the label, J-card, record tabs, and history.

After the EU AI Act’s transparency guidelines took effect, most major AI labs announced they will soon watermark their text output to comply. The move has sparked debate over whether watermarking will meaningfully affect the quality of AI-generated text.

A new piece argues that Edgar Allan Poe, rather than Mark Twain, Herman Melville, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, deserves recognition as the quintessential American writer. It makes the case for Poe’s enduring influence and distinctly American literary identity.

BBRouter has shared a Show HN project that simulates Ben Eater’s 8-bit computer on 3D breadboards using its breadboard editor and simulator. Users can open the project to explore the layout and run the simulated computer.

A 1580 map by an unnamed Ñudzahui painter, made for a Spanish king, shows how a community portrayed its history and land claims on its own terms. The map illustrates that data visualization is never neutral, since every map reflects choices, power, and perspective.

The article argues that JavaScript framework choices are often based on vibes, and that AI coding assistants add a new measurable cost: larger, more complex frameworks consume more context and tokens, making AI-assisted work slower and more expensive. It recommends weighing AI-readability and token efficiency alongside performance and developer experience.

The article presents a construction of a quine—a program that prints its own source code—using Kleene’s second recursion theorem. It frames the theorem as the theoretical basis for the self-referential program and organizes the explanation step by step.

A reader discussion around “Armenia Notes” challenges common categorizations of Armenians, noting that Europeans and fellow Soviets often do not regard them as “white.” It also argues that calling Armenians simply “Christian” oversimplifies their non-Chalcedonian tradition, which has been out of communion with Western and Eastern churches since 451 AD and differs sharply from Western—and even Russian Orthodox—understandings of Christianity.

A GitHub Gist demonstrates how to decode a kernel panic from a photo of a QR code, offering a quick way to extract crash diagnostics captured on-screen. The snippet is shared as code, notes, and a practical troubleshooting reference for kernel panic reports.

The piece surveys four decades of just-in-time work from 1960 to 2000, charting the history and evolution of JIT concepts. It offers a brief retrospective on the key developments that shaped JIT over that period.

A new project called HackerTube offers a YouTube-like experience built from videos recommended on Hacker News. Instead of relying on YouTube’s algorithm, it surfaces clips curated by the HN community. The tool is pitched as an alternative way to discover and watch recommended videos.

A user alleges that Anthropic flagged them for “training a competitor” and now blocks any activity involving RFT, SFT, or training larger models. The user says they never distilled Claude—using it only to submit jobs and analyze rollouts from an open-source model—and reports an Opus 5.5 downgrade as a result.

Cisco has given 27-year-old engineer Paddy unlimited AI tokens and told him to “go nuts” as part of an effort to rewrite legacy code. The company president reportedly calls him an “energizer bunny,” underscoring the unusual experiment.

Molly, a Signal fork, has gone three months without updates and is reportedly vulnerable to attacks. Users relying on it should be aware of the security risk and consider alternatives until patches are released.

Researchers claim they could take over any ChatGPT account by sending a malicious link that bypassed the platform’s sandbox and content security policy. The finding highlights serious account-security risks in AI chatbot integrations.

A new Rust library, cfsolve, claims to solve Cloudflare Turnstile and challenge pages through request-based reverse engineering without needing a headless browser. The project is hosted on GitHub under chris124567/cfsolve.

Scribd has disclosed a breach in which an unauthorized third party may have accessed user email addresses and limited payment details, including the last four digits of credit cards, card issuer, expiry date, and country. Commenters criticized the company for not notifying all affected customers at once and debated broader cybersecurity issues such as AI-assisted vulnerability discovery and access to security tools.

A self-deleting infostealer called VOLTA steals credentials, session data, and cryptocurrency wallets, then uses LLMs to profile victims and rank their most valuable assets. The malware’s LLM-driven prioritization could help attackers focus on the highest-value data or accounts more efficiently.