Tech News

We just released a collection of popular songs with music sheets that show a letter on each note, which makes playing much easier when you're just starting out. Play any song with the built-in player, or switch to piano view and follow the falling notes. You can also create your own music sheets with our Music Letter Notes app. Enjoy!

AlphaProof Code agents generated over three million lines of machine-checked Lean proofs to verify Signal’s core cryptographic protections down to the machine-instruction level. The effort aims to provide formal assurance for critical cryptographic code.

Gemini 4 Carbon is now available to developers, enterprises, scientists, and consumers. The release expands access to the new model across both professional and consumer use cases.

Two Amazon engineers replaced Claude Sonnet 4.6 with the Strands Decider decision model in one of the company’s largest internal ticketing systems. The swap is reportedly saving Amazon millions of dollars.

Blender 5.3 has been released, adding Gaussian splat support alongside DLSS denoising, light dispersion, EEVEE fisheye, Outliner sorting, and ripple video editing. The update brings a broad mix of rendering, workflow, and video-editing improvements.

Fable 5.2 reportedly generated a complete, multi-level game in a single attempt, bringing a user’s nephew’s dream game to life. The result suggests LLMs can now produce full playable games that are genuinely fun.

Verisign has retracted its plan to terminate 22,000 existing third-level .name domains and email redirects after a long, expensive battle. Existing domains and redirects will remain indefinitely, though new third-level registrations will be closed. The reversal follows criticism that the original plan would have harmed consumers and broken trust in domain registrations.

Palantir has hired former Democratic Sen. Jon Tester as it faces scrutiny in the new Congress. Tester said perception is reality in Washington and that Palantir has a good story it needs to tell. The move drew criticism in reader discussion as an example of the political revolving door.

A curious archive can be created with a single GNU tar invocation but extracts in eight distinct ways depending on which tool is used. The demonstration highlights how tar format quirks and implementation differences can produce wildly different results from the same file.

A new report warns consumers against buying current AR glasses, citing a frustrating user experience dominated by pop-up notifications and ads. It argues these constant interruptions make the devices impractical for everyday use.

A home automation veteran argues that smart home devices should work without internet access, with a core rule that nothing in the house should depend on a vendor’s server. After ten years of experience, they share the rest of their rules and both of their talks slide by slide.

Ableton Live 13 is coming with new experimental sound design tools, precision mixing effects, and workflow improvements. The update aims to help producers bring their ideas into focus more easily.

A report titled “Your TV can see through walls” sparks discussion about how everyday devices can be used for surveillance, from fiber-optic cables that pick up sound-induced light changes to WiFi/LTE sensing and sensitive security-camera microphones that can reveal activity inside a home. Commenters note this extends a long history of side-channel snooping such as CRT emissions and Van Eck phreaking, and warn that phones and connected gadgets already make location and activity tracking hard to avoid.

A new Show HN project called HolyArrs offers a 15 MB self-hosted app that combines TV shows, movies, and music in one media server interface. It aims to deliver a Netflix- and Spotify-like experience for personal media libraries.

CoreWeave’s bond yield has climbed above 16%, highlighting rising stress in AI debt markets as investors grow concerned about a potential data center slowdown. The steep yields reflect broader worries about AI-related credit risk and what may come next for heavily indebted infrastructure players.

Expo has introduced Exact, a new cross-platform UI framework. The project is hosted on GitHub, where developers can contribute to its development.

Queens Public Library is responding to a ransomware incident that has suspended e-borrowing and left much of its online access unavailable. Discussants questioned why attackers would target a public library with limited funds, but noted that ransomware operations are often automated and indiscriminate, encrypting first and negotiating later. The attack underscores how opportunistic cybercrime can disrupt even modestly resourced public institutions.

A new Show HN project offers an isometric pixel-art map of Valencia, Spain, painted block by block. Users can zoom from the Micalet tower to the beach in a SimCity-style view.

A new piece profiles the “sad wives of AI,” women married to men whose obsession with artificial intelligence strains their relationships. It frames the phenomenon with dark humor, asking readers if they’re married to an AI-obsessed man and offering mock sympathy.

Checking for whitespace seems trivial, but Unicode’s many whitespace characters make correct detection surprisingly tricky. The piece explores those edge cases and shows how perfect hashing can enable a fast, reliable check.

A new Show HN project brings 35 playable Ghanaian street games to the browser, including Four Corners, Laski, One Pole, penalties, and neighborhood favorites like Pilolo and Pampanaa. The collection offers a digital way to explore and play these traditional games.

The piece corrects inaccurate estimates of how many people work from home and offers a clearer picture of remote-work prevalence. It also explains why earlier figures were misleading.

Kyle Chayka argues that AI chatbots like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT are replacing Google Search, signaling the decline of traditional digital search. The piece examines how this shift could reshape how people find information and interact with the web.

Tailscale's DNS IPv6 addressing reportedly spells out "Tailscale," and reader discussion highlights the company's pun-filled, randomly generated tailnet names in the format tail-scale.ts.net. The word lists include easter eggs like "fable" for tail (tale) and "universe" for scale, with some words appearing in both lists so names like koi-koi.ts.net are possible. Commenters also riff on readable IPv6 and using .local/mDNS names for homelab devices.

Despite its alarming "FORMAT C:" title, FakeDOS is a new macOS screen saver that recreates a pixel-perfect DOS experience with boot sequences, crashes, modem dialing, and convincing fake errors. It’s free to download for macOS 13 and later.

A discussion around the article argues that unauthenticated TLS cannot be called secure and that serious attackers are mostly man-in-the-middle attackers who trick victims into diverting their own traffic, such as via DNS injection. It also debates private-key checks, noting that the eMudhra incident—where key entropy was reduced to the final byte—shows weak keys can be found with trivial brute force while the CA ecosystem largely relies on trust rather than detecting such incompetence.

The .NET 11 runtime introduces a range of new features, detailed in a new overview. The piece explains the runtime changes and what they mean for developers building .NET applications.

An experiment adding extra fans beneath a laptop’s air intakes failed to improve cooling. Despite the intuitive setup, the added airflow did not deliver the expected thermal benefits. The result suggests that simply forcing more air into existing intakes isn’t an effective laptop cooling fix.

M John Harrison has become the first science fiction author to win the Booker Prize, taking the £50,000 award for his postapocalyptic novel The End of Everything. The 81-year-old’s win marks a historic first for the genre.

Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman and acclaimed narrative nonfiction works including The Perfectionists, Knowing What We Know, and Krakatoa, has died. Readers remembered him as a gifted writer who could humanize subjects without romanticizing them, praised his self-narrated audiobooks, and mourned that there would be no more books from him.