Tech News

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.

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 Show HN project offers a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode-guessing game made to honor Sir Patrick Stewart. Readers praise the tribute but find it too difficult, with even longtime TNG fans missing questions and suggesting multiple-choice answers, while noting the full-text search helps identify episodes by plot. Discussion also touches on how screenshots were sourced and ideas for other Stewart-themed games.

OpenAI has raised less than half of its $30 billion funding target. The ChatGPT maker’s latest round values it at $1.25 trillion, below its $1.4 trillion goal.

Flock camera searches in Highland Heights fell 95% after a dispatcher’s misconduct was caught, according to the headline and reader discussion. Commenters argue the drop suggests most such searches may have been improper or illegal without meaningful regulation, though the underlying article could not be fetched.

A developer has released kube32, a Kubernetes-compatible control plane, Kubelet agent, and WebAssembly runtime designed to run on ESP32 microcontrollers. The project aims to bring container-like orchestration to highly constrained embedded hardware.

A retrospective on DEC’s PDP line examines how these minicomputers carved out a cheaper, more accessible niche than batch-oriented mainframes. Readers recall programming on PDP-10s and note that the “Programmable Data Processor” name may have helped DEC sidestep procurement rules that treated “computers” as high-scrutiny mainframes. The discussion also highlights preservation work, including browser-based PDP-7 emulators running early UNIX, PIXIE CAD software, games, and newly built Forth systems.

This guide explains how to install and configure Network UPS Tools (NUT) on Linux to detect a UPS and load the correct driver. It also covers setting up automatic safe shutdown when the battery runs low.

The article presents a stateless double-buffering pattern using Cloudflare Queues to batch edge telemetry and drive Cloudflare write costs to zero by alternating even and odd queues by hour. Producers send to the queue matching the current hour’s parity, while consumers read from the opposite queue. Readers call the pattern clever but flag time-related assumptions and somewhat ugly implementation code.

Show HN introduces Samosa, a linter that verifies every step of matrix derivations exactly over finite fields. It offers a browser-based 2x2 counterexample and fix, and its verdicts do not rely on AI.

The 1607 Bristol Channel flood was one of Britain’s worst natural disasters and was widely seen as a divine warning that people had strayed from God. Erik Crnkovich examines how miraculous weather and the early modern printing industry fed a growing appetite for the occult, exotic, and odd.

A new piece examines how the tech industry’s assembly-line approach to producing technologists can leave workers feeling trapped in narrow roles and rigid career paths. It questions whether the factory model of churning out technical talent truly serves individuals or mainly employers.

A news piece examines longitudinal changes in wearable-captured physiology before sudden cardiac death. Reader discussion questions the findings because they appear to be based on a single case (N = 1), limiting how broadly the results can be generalized.

House Democrats have introduced a non-binding resolution opposing any taxpayer-funded bailout for Big Tech if the AI bubble bursts. Discussion critics dismiss the measure as symbolic puffery, calling instead for concrete legislation to block bailouts and let failing companies face bankruptcy.

Phorion detected a backdoor in the official Claude Code for VS Code extension bundle on the Cursor Marketplace that installs a persistent SSH backdoor on macOS, Linux, and Windows. The finding affects users who obtained the extension through that marketplace.

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.”

The $6.3 billion Binance hack was carried out in just 20 minutes, making it the largest digital heist in history. Crypto-tracing firms say North Korean hackers TraderTraitor may be responsible, and billions in crypto are likely gone for good.

A security researcher disclosed five critical cross-tenant elevation-of-privilege vulnerabilities in Azure API Connections, part of Logic Apps, that allowed full compromise of other tenants’ connected backends such as Key Vaults and Azure SQL databases. The flaws involved path traversal and runtime URL validation bypasses, and the researcher earned $200,000 for the reports. Microsoft fixed the issues, though some fixes were bypassed or addressed by blocking vulnerable endpoints.

Medicare will cover costly heart attack treatment but not inexpensive preventive coronary artery calcium scans. New guidelines finally reflect evidence supporting these scans, highlighting a reimbursement gap that favors acute care over prevention.

Simon Armitage’s new translation of Gilgamesh is praised as a visceral, brilliant take on the Mesopotamian hero’s wild adventures. The poet laureate’s version of the ancient epic is called a tour de force.

Blackstone says Anthropic may not secure an investment-grade credit rating after its IPO, with the AI group now expected to receive a “high” junk rating. The projection marks a shift from Blackstone’s previous guidance.

The news piece argues that AI is not replacing site reliability engineers but is deskilling them by handling most routine incident response. It warns that when AI automates 95% of incidents, SREs may lose the hands-on practice needed to handle the critical 5% that matters most.

Florilegium is a new project that procedurally generates Delft-blue floral page margins for LuaLaTeX documents. The flowers are drawn in Lua, offering an automated way to add decorative margins to LaTeX layouts.

Patrick Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard showed a generation of young viewers what it means to be a complex person who strives to do what is right. Through Picard, Stewart taught audiences the measure of a man.

A Show HN project called nesformer has compiled an NES CPU directly into roughly 1GB of weights inside a stock Qwen3.5 model, effectively running Nintendo hardware through the model itself. The work is available at dbreunig/nesformer.

Amid Nintendo shutting down Mario Kart Tour on mobile, readers are revisiting the modded Wii, where updated hacks have restored software, stability, and online play through projects like WiiLink. Discussion around “My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii” also hopes a Mac OS port arrives on the Open Shop Channel and praises the Wii’s disc-based, microtransaction-free approach and broad mainstream appeal.

GitHub is investigating an incident affecting Actions, Pages, and Webhooks, according to its status page. The notice does not specify the cause or scope of impact. Further updates are expected on GitHub’s status page.

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.

A new “Sleep” framework proposes letting LLMs accumulate short-term memories in a buffer/cache during use, then rank and consolidate the useful bits into model weights during a sleep cycle using low-rank structures and mixture-of-experts, followed by “dreaming” via synthetic routing and RL refinement. The approach is described as on-policy distillation, where an expanded student learns token-specific feedback from teacher distributions on self-sampled sequences, with discussion highlighting both its technical promise and audit/lineage challenges for tracking how and when model knowledge changes.