Tech News

A reported $5.6B hack against Binance has wiped out its SAFU insurance fund, which held about $1B in Bitcoin, though roughly $2.4B of the stolen assets has already been frozen by Circle and Tether. Discussion notes that SAFU is not meant to cover hacks, while former CEO CZ tweeted that “funds are safe.”

Record-high October tides flooded parts of San Francisco this week, prompting experts to warn that worse coastal flooding could come once El Niño’s winter storms arrive. The event is being seen as an early sign of the disruption expected later in the season.

Pico CSS is no longer being maintained, according to the project’s status update. Users should expect no further updates or fixes, and teams relying on it may want to consider alternatives or a fork.

A project called tinyworldformer shows a tiny world model running on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, where it generates simple games and plays them on the microcontroller. The demo highlights how compact generative world models can support interactive game-like environments on very low-power hardware.

Researchers ran swarms of Claude and GPT agents in Minecraft and Mindustry to test multi-agent coordination in open-ended game environments. The experiment explores how LLM-powered agent swarms collaborate and behave across different simulated worlds.

Astroterm is a terminal-based planetarium that lets users explore stars, planets, constellations, and more directly in the command line. It renders celestial objects in the terminal, offering a telescope-free way to browse the night sky.

A developer has built “doomformer,” a project that compiles an integer neural network—specifically a transformer—into a DOOM map, using voodoo dolls for arithmetic and light levels and plane heights to store values. The implementation checks every computed value against NumPy with zero tolerance.

Cuis is a modern Smalltalk-80 environment that aims to preserve the original Smalltalk philosophy while updating it for contemporary use. It offers a compact, self-contained system for developers interested in live programming and object-oriented computing.

This piece offers scattered reflections on what doing math feels like today, describing the experience as confusing. Rather than a focused argument, it captures a fragmented sense of modern mathematical work.

A new video turns the creator’s lack of ordinary billiards skill into a playful exploration of billiards in the hyperbolic plane, where non-Euclidean geometry changes how shots and trajectories behave. It uses the virtual pool-table experiment to show how familiar rules break down in curved space.

ElementaryUI is a new Swift frontend framework designed to run in the browser. It enables developers to build web frontends using Swift.

CVE-2026-98432 is a Linux IPv4 TCP use-after-free whose severity is disputed, rated 9.8 versus 5.9. The report covers lab evidence of MPTCP remote code execution, exposure checks, patches, and guidance for safe validation.

Overtone is a new Show HN project that transcribes audio into word-timed captions and lets users correct and cut them for any screen shape from a single file. It includes a caption format, a video.js plugin, and a CLI.

Sylphide OS is a general-purpose operating system designed for microcontroller-based computers. It aims to bring broader OS functionality to resource-constrained MCU hardware. The project targets systems that typically rely on bare-metal firmware or real-time operating systems.

Readers discuss the C idiom "while (i --> 0)" for backward iteration, including unsigned-safe variants like "while (i-- != 0)" and comparisons to conventional for-loops. The discussion frames the trick as clever but potentially useful, linking it to a classic Stack Overflow post and noting its long-standing use despite readability tradeoffs.

Lasm is a new Show HN project that lets developers write formally verified web apps in Lean and run them on JavaScript and WebAssembly runtimes, including Node, serverless, and edge environments. The tool aims to bring Lean’s verification capabilities to mainstream web deployment targets.

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer marks its 150th anniversary, prompting a retrospective on the novel’s enduring mischievous hero. The piece explores how Tom Sawyer’s rascal persona helped shape American literary and cultural identity.

The article surveys historical scientific instruments, with particular attention to a notable cube-shaped device. It examines the object’s significance within the broader history of scientific tools.

ParadeDB tackles Postgres’ COUNT performance with ctid-aware segment partitioning, an inverted DocId map, and bitmap postings, accelerating Wikipedia COUNT queries. It also reports 10–22x TIN’s throughput on filtered and time-sorted Hacker News search queries.

A 2011 article presents a sophisticated diagram for splitting one’s digital life into separate security domains to limit risk. The author acknowledges that most users would likely find the scheme too complex, but it offers a model for compartmentalizing accounts and data.

A reader discussion around an illustrated online book on Hewlett-Packard equipment turned nostalgic, recalling HP’s legacy of robust scientific and engineering devices. Commenters highlighted the HP85a computer—with magnetic tape, thermal printer, 32K RAM, excellent manuals and keyboard—and an early HP RPN calculator used to port a FORTRAN program from a mainframe. They also traded anecdotes about HP calculators’ programmability and legendary durability, including the apocryphal tale of an HP-12c surviving a hippo’s digestive tract.

North Korea’s TraderTraitor is blamed for the October 29, 2026 theft of about $6.36 billion from Binance wallets across ten blockchains, the largest crypto hack on record, with evidence pointing to a compromise of Binance’s hot wallet signing infrastructure. About $2.7 billion has been frozen, but the attacker still holds roughly $2.4 billion, and TRM is tracking the funds and alerting partners through the Beacon Network.

A piece on Cormac McCarthy’s personal library prompted discussion about what the late author’s book collection reveals about his influences, reading habits, and writing process. Commenters highlighted notable volumes, annotations, and the value of preserving an author’s working library.

A developer has revived the PineTime smartwatch by getting an up-to-date version of MicroPython and the wasp-os firmware running on it. The project shows how Python can be used on a low-cost wearable wrist device.

Herdr has released a native desktop app, with the project hosted on GitHub under herdrdev/herdr-app. The launch gives users a dedicated application for accessing the service.

The piece asks whether a later medical diagnosis should retroactively change how we interpret a person’s past behavior and character. It frames the debate as a tension between viewing past traits as symptoms of disease versus enduring features of disposition.

Flint-interactive introduces a high-level specification language for interactive data visualizations that separates visual encoding from interaction logic, letting a compiler handle the complex wiring. The goal is to make it easier and more reliable for AI agents to generate expressive interactive charts in chats, apps, and dashboards without unwanted style or layout changes. It is available as an MCP app for agent chats and as a programming API for bespoke interactions.

This 2014 piece examines Porco Rosso, Hayao Miyazaki’s film about a pig-faced aviator, through the themes of the state and war. It frames the story around tensions between individual identity and political power amid conflict.

Open-weight AI models can exploit the gap between published and shipped security fixes. GLM 5.3 reportedly turned published-but-unshipped Firefox fixes into working one-click exploits for six releases, at roughly $1,000 each.

A new study finds that schoolwide phone bans have no significant impact on students’ mental health. The results suggest that blanket restrictions alone may not be enough to improve student wellbeing.