Tech News

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is said to have had a relationship with an executive who reports to him, according to a report discussed online. Commenters speculated the situation could be broader, citing claims about security detaining someone filming and offering an NDA, while also noting that reports have not described sexual details and may involve only dating or kissing. The allegations remain unconfirmed.

Readers discuss a build for a CNC plasma cutter with high-frequency start, weighing plasma cutting’s speed against precision issues such as kerf, taper, slag, lead-ins, and warping. Some compare it with desktop wire EDM projects and waterjet cutting, while others suggest abrasive tumbling to smooth plasma-cut edges.

The feature examines the creative and technical effort behind making the Iron Giant live, including the tools and workflows used to bring the character to screen. It also covers the production of a music video and rounds up other news.

Scientists have long debated whether self-replicating, mutable RNA molecules sparked the origin of life, but new questions suggest that RNA’s ability to copy and evolve may not have been sufficient on its own. The RNA-world hypothesis remains influential, yet researchers are reconsidering what additional conditions early life would have needed.

AI agents analyzed public lidar data overnight and identified a Maya site beneath the jungle. Archaeologists had already mapped the site, but it had not yet been added to Mexico’s official register.

AWS has released its own AWS Emulator, a local emulator for the AWS APIs. The project is available on GitHub under aws/aws-emulator, giving developers a way to simulate AWS services locally.

Google SWE used 48 AI agents to analyze NASA lidar data overnight, uncovering an unmapped Maya site with a pyramid hidden beneath the jungle. Mexico’s INAH responded within 72 hours.

Nvidia is reportedly preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang, according to a news report. The move follows an internal company investigation into an affair with a Chinese woman who is alleged to be a spy.

United Airlines has banned AI agents from booking flights on behalf of travelers, citing security risks and possible violations of federal rules. The policy targets automated tools that make reservations for passengers.

A new browser-based sand simulator delivers hyper-realistic sand physics using WebGL2 and JavaScript. It supports touch controls and device motion on phones and tablets, letting users play directly in their browser.

.NET 11 has been released, bringing C# 15, faster developer tools, and improvements to the runtime and libraries. The update also adds new capabilities for building web, mobile, desktop, and AI applications.

A group of Emacs users and developers is pushing for an LLM-free version of Emacs, vowing to continue it even if GNU adopts a different policy and urging GNU to reject LLM-generated contributions. The debate around the effort highlights broader concerns about AI dependency, software freedom, and whether coding agents make programming more accessible or undermine understanding.

Apple’s Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Until then, users can still search discussions and ask questions about Apple products in the community.

Jane Street’s systems team recounted a false smoke alarm at its only NYC datacenter that left the facility without cooling and threatened to set off the sprinklers. Engineers raced to pull every power cord before the fire-suppression system activated, narrowly avoiding a major outage or water damage.

Using voltage fault injection, the author bypassed restrictions on an Nvidia CMP 170HX mining card to unlock hardware features and effectively unleash A100-class capabilities. The writeup details how voltage glitching was used to access functionality that the card normally keeps disabled.

MIT CSAIL’s recent “Sparks of Weight-Space Programming” paper showed that GPT-6 Astra could identify which game a small network had been trained on directly from its raw weights. The new piece asks whether a linear program can perform comparable weight-space programming, probing whether such capabilities require large models or can be replicated with simpler linear methods.

A UC Irvine software engineering seminar on October 30, 2026 will examine AI, activity, and outcomes in software engineering. Video, slides, and a script from the talk are available.

AWS Emulator, launched today and written and tested entirely by agents, provides a local copy of more than 200 AWS services for testing. Swami Sivasubramanian recounts an early high-fidelity simulation effort and explores how engineers’ work changes when agents write the code.

A new Show HN project recreates Papers, Please as a game where players decide which YC startups to fund. Players inspect financials and question records before choosing which founders get the money.

Americans overwhelmingly oppose the AI data center buildout, but their retirement accounts are helping fund it anyway. The piece examines how retirement savings are channeling money into the AI boom despite public opposition.

Google has introduced the Gemini Decisions API, offering fast, calibrated multimodal decisions for Google apps. The API can evaluate 1,000 questions in a single pass, supporting high-volume decision-making tasks.

Despite productivity gains that mean a 1973 forty-hour week’s output now takes about sixteen hours, Americans still work long hours. An hour of U.S. business labor now produces roughly two and a half times what it did in 1973. The piece examines why these gains have not translated into shorter workweeks.

Amstrad’s choice of 3-inch floppy drives was likely driven by cost savings—especially reusing common 5.25-inch controllers and drivers—rather than the long-rumored bankruptcy-auction or scrapheap explanations. Readers recall the disks as robust and reliable, though expensive and lower-capacity than 3.5-inch media. The format also appeared in Sinclair/Amstrad machines and a few niche systems, but 3.5-inch drives soon became the standard.

GitHub Actions workflow lockfiles aim to make action dependencies immutable, but discussion notes they currently cover only normal action calls—not reusable workflows, Docker-based uses clauses, or composite actions themselves—and can weaken transitive pinning by removing hashes. Commenters welcomed the long-awaited feature as an improvement over manual SHA pinning while warning that fully locked setups can still run mutable or compromised code unless lockfiles are verified in CI. Some argued GitHub should enforce immutable tags or handle immutability at the platform level.

Nvidia is reportedly preparing to fire CEO Jensen Huang, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The development was reported as a just-in news item, with no further details provided in the brief.

Discussion around the Utah Teapot highlights its status as a foundational computer-graphics model, from its real-world Melitta origins to its use in OpenGL and game engines. Commenters also note the original teapot’s availability and museum ownership, question the 3D model’s proportions, and joke about a pelican-on-a-bike becoming the next graphics mascot.

The U.S. is imposing new rules on ordering synthetic DNA to deter bioterrorism, with the policy apparently affecting government-funded researchers and suppliers. Commenters question how much supply-side restrictions will help, noting that DNA manipulation is not especially difficult and determined actors may find workarounds. Some also speculate about whether restrictions relate to hidden AI biotech capabilities, but the discussion offers no clear evidence.

Huawei has released MACaQ, an internally developed, model-agnostic quantizer aimed at local inference and beyond. It supports GGUF and can quantize and run text, image, video, and audio models across llama.cpp, vLLM, Diffusers, and PyTorch.

TimeNet is an open-source data infrastructure project for temporal foundation models. It lets users download and explore time-series datasets through a single standardized format.

A 2019 paper found that 93% of paint splatters qualify as valid Perl programs, thanks to the language’s famously permissive syntax. It frames this as an answer to whether paint can be smeared on a wall without producing valid Perl and includes a gallery of the accidental programs.