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YC News

From new batch announcements to alumni raising major rounds, Y Combinator remains a bellwether for early-stage tech. This section collects news involving the accelerator, the startups that pass through it, and the ideas and trends its community is betting on.

Stories here range from changes to the program itself, its deal terms, batch sizes, and leadership, to the successes and stumbles of companies it funded years ago. Batch composition gets particular attention, since the categories founders cluster around tend to foreshadow broader trends.

For anyone working in or around startups, following this accelerator is an efficient habit: it condenses signals about talent, ideas, and capital into one observable community. Founders weighing an application also use this coverage to understand what the program has become.

Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell
2026-04-29

Reader discussions highlight that developers prefer Lisp and Scheme over Haskell because rich standard libraries in dialects like Racket eliminate the need to write custom macros or bespoke domain-specific languages, while s-expressions provide a superior, universal format for manipulating complex data like JSON and XML. Furthermore, the community emphasizes that adopting these languages offers a transformative paradigm shift that deeply reshapes a developer's foundational understanding of software architecture.

Kyoto cherry blossoms now bloom earlier than at any point in 1,200 years
2026-04-29

Kyoto's cherry blossoms are currently blooming earlier than at any point in the past 1,200 years, based on the longest continuous record of a natural phenomenon on Earth. A detailed analysis of this extensive historical dataset highlights a significant acceleration in the trees' annual peak bloom dates.

Show HN: Auto-Architecture: Karpathy's Loop, pointed at a CPU
2026-04-29

A new open-source project applies Andrej Karpathy's AI development loop to the automated design of CPU architectures. The associated GitHub repository hosts a tournament to evaluate these auto-generated designs and encourages community contributions.

Mistral Medium 3.5
2026-04-29

Mistral has announced the launch of its new Mistral Medium 3.5 model alongside significant updates to its existing platforms. The release introduces remote coding agents in Vibe and adds a dedicated Work mode to Le Chat for handling complex tasks.

How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis [video]
2026-04-29

In a new video interview, Demis Hassabis discusses his perspectives on building the future of technology and artificial intelligence. He reflects on his extraordinary and unconventional career path, which began as a teen chess prodigy and video game designer before he earned a PhD in neuroscience. Hassabis explains how this diverse background uniquely informs his approach to developing tomorrow's most transformative technologies.

Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals
2026-04-29

A reported regression shows that a malware system reminder is still causing AI subagents to refuse tasks. Although the issue was supposedly resolved in version 2.1.92, users are experiencing the exact same behavior in the newer 2.1.111 release.

Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores
2026-04-29

Maryland has become the first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores, prohibiting retailers from dynamically adjusting product costs based on consumer data. However, critics argue that the new legislation is weakened by numerous carveouts that could limit its overall effectiveness.

Ramp's Sheets AI Exfiltrates Financials
2026-04-29

A vulnerability in Ramp's Sheets AI allowed the agent to insert formulas that made external network requests without user approval. This flaw created a significant risk of sensitive financial data exfiltration through indirect prompt injection.

GitHub – DOS 1.0: Transcription of Tim Paterson's DOS Printouts
2026-04-29

A new GitHub repository provides detailed transcriptions of Tim Paterson's original DOS 1.0 printouts, preserving the foundational code of the early PC operating system. The open-source project invites developers to contribute to this historical archive and explore the origins of early software development.

HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'
2026-04-29

The co-founder of HashiCorp states that GitHub is no longer suitable for serious work due to frequent platform outages. As a result of these ongoing stability issues, he plans to move his Ghostty project to a different hosting service.

HardenedBSD Is Now Officially on Radicle
2026-04-29

HardenedBSD has officially migrated its code repository from a heavily loaded self-hosted GitLab instance to Radicle. Radicle is a peer-to-peer Git forge that enables collaborative development by storing social features and code reviews directly as Git objects. The maintainers cited increasing server strain and a previously communicated desire to adopt this distributed infrastructure as the primary motivations for the move.

Withnail's Coat and I
2026-04-29

This article explores the complex history and tailoring origins of the iconic coat featured in the film Withnail and I. Despite its association with the prestigious Hawkes of Savile Row, the garment's background reveals a much more intricate and unexpected legacy.

Third editor fired in Elsevier’s citation cartel crackdown
2026-04-29

Elsevier has fired a third journal editor in its ongoing crackdown against a suspected citation cartel manipulating academic metrics. The publisher condemned the coordinated scheme as a blatant, industrial-scale quid pro quo rather than a series of coincidences.

Letting AI play my game – building an agentic test harness to help play-testing
2026-04-29

A game developer is building an agentic AI test harness to automate the slow and tedious process of manual play-testing. By allowing the AI to play the game and identify bugs, the creator aims to significantly speed up the iteration cycle of their AI-assisted development workflow.

Show HN: Rocky – Rust SQL engine with branches, replay, column lineage
2026-04-29

Rocky is an open-source SQL transformation engine built in Rust that type-checks entire data pipelines to catch breaking changes before execution. It provides advanced data management features including branching, replay, and column-level lineage, alongside adapters for major platforms like Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, and DuckDB. The project is released under the Apache 2.0 license as a single static binary.

Apple CMF (Color-Matching Functions) 2026
2026-04-29

LTT Labs is exploring Apple's future display technology with a deep dive into Color-Matching Functions projected for 2026. This hardware analysis provides comprehensive test results and insights into Apple's ongoing developments in screen color accuracy.

Show HN: Rip.so – a graveyard for dead internet things
2026-04-29

Rip.so is a newly launched digital graveyard that serves as a memorial for defunct internet products and services. Highlighted on Hacker News, the site pays a nostalgic tribute to forgotten messengers, obsolete browsers, discontinued gadgets, and websites the internet forgot.

Ghostty is leaving GitHub
2026-04-28

The creator of Ghostty announced an emotional departure from GitHub, citing the platform's degraded user experience resulting from massive scale and recent AI-driven shifts. Some community members argue that long-time users should stick around to help improve the platform. However, others strongly support the exit as a necessary way to vote with their feet and signal dissatisfaction with GitHub's declining fundamentals.

Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930
2026-04-28

Talkie is a 13-billion parameter language model trained on 1930s texts that accurately replicates the era's technological blind spots and geopolitical biases. The vintage AI notably defines computers as human clerks and confidently predicts the permanent survival of the British Empire in India. These historically constrained outputs have sparked widespread reader discussions about early computing definitions, the economic realities of the British Empire, and the fascinating ways artificial intelligence absorbs cultural context.

Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop
2026-04-28

LocalSend is an open-source project designed to provide a cross-platform alternative to Apple's AirDrop. The tool enables users to seamlessly share files across different devices and operating systems over a local network. This approach ensures a secure and privacy-focused transfer experience without relying on external servers.