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.

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.

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.

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.

The piece explains that a program can fail when launched from a batch file because it inherits a different working directory or environment than when double-clicked. It recommends mimicking Explorer’s launch behavior more accurately, such as setting the correct working directory or using the appropriate start command, to reproduce and fix the issue.

Northflank has disclosed a security breach, with its status page listed as the source of information. Details on the scope and impact of the incident remain unclear.

The piece argues that dismantling the open web will not stop malicious bots, and that policymakers should not treat anonymity as inherently wrong. It urges targeted action against bad actors rather than broad restrictions on anonymity and open internet principles.

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.

The Infinite Mac: BeOS piece revisits BeOS’s distinctive UI and legacy, with readers recommending Haiku as its modern FOSS successor and noting how AI could help revive apps for bygone OSes. Discussion also debates whether Apple should have bought Be instead of NeXT, with former Be employees cited saying NeXT was technically stronger and that getting Jobs back mattered more than BeOS itself.

Astrophysicist Shep Doeleman explains that capturing the first image of a black hole required a telescope effectively the size of Earth. He describes how the feat was achieved and why the next goal is to create a movie of a black hole.

Linode has published a customer security advisory on its status page about a security incident tracked as CVE-2026-98432. The provided notice gives no further details about the incident or its impact.

Artificial Analysis v5 highlights the benchmarker’s dilemma: AI benchmarks are increasingly influential but struggle to capture what really matters. The piece reviews the benchmarking industry and argues that current evaluations leave important gaps unmeasured.