Saturday, 12 September 2026

GrapheneOS shipped Messages 13, a Compose/Material 3 rewrite of the AOSP SMS app people kept replacing. Pin, snooze, two-pane tablets, plus file: URIs rejected, widget receivers unexported, allocation caps on MMS parsing. Onboarding now says SMS is unencrypted, which is why this app exists.

• 🔐Security
• 📱Pocket
• 🪺OSS

CCC's 2001 birthday present: Haus des Lehrers at Alexanderplatz became an 18×8 pixel facade, then Arcade in Paris (26×20, eight greys) and Stereoscope on Toronto City Hall (96×32). The site is the archive of animations plus a movie converter; Polychrome is the color revival since 2023. The thread is the fake-German warning sticker and telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl, which is a different joke.

• 🛠️Hobby
• 📜History

Show HN of a self-hosted helpdesk that is one Cloudflare Worker: Hono for the API and React app, D1 for tickets, R2 for attachments, Queues for mail. Inbound is Email Routing, outbound is Resend; AI drafts stay off until an admin opts in. Twenty-two points, no screenshots, and someone already asked if it kills Jira.

• 🪺OSS
• 🪠Infra

LiteLLM's actual job — `provider/model` routing and message translation — extracted into ~2,900 lines and two deps, openai and httpx. Same API so you can s/litellm/litelm/; they cut the proxy, cache, and spend tracking, which is the part the thread says is why they run the original. Ninety points, a LiteLLM person in the comments, README that still smells like the cut.

• 🤖AI
• 🪺OSS

Berkeley's Snap! is Scratch with first-class lists, procedures, and continuations — Scheme in blocks, formerly BYOB. Jens Mönig at SAP and Brian Harvey at Berkeley; you can write your own `for` and higher-order list functions in the browser. Hundred points of 'this is a toy' versus people who learned to ship on Scratch, plus a lambda in the title that isn't in the name.

• 🈶Languages
• 🪺OSS

Firecrawl wraps the published AI software factories — Stripe Minions, Spotify Fleetshift, Shopify River — as five gates from intake to merge. Stephen Toub opened nine PRs from a plane and landed seven; Spotify's LLM judge still vetoes about a quarter of sessions. Four points, zero comments, and a scrape-API pitch at the end.

• 🤖AI
• 🦾Agents
• 🧰Labor

DeepMind ran AlphaGenome across every single-letter swap in a reference human genome — 9 billion of them — and published the predictions as Atlas, a lookup with a one-number impact score so you don't have to fire the model yourself. The dump is about a petabyte; they needed roughly 80x via distillation and GPU kernel work just to compute it. It's a triage tool for the lab, not an oracle: one variant at a time, a million bases of context, noncommercial.

• 🤖AI
• 🧬Biology

Unstable Build open-sourced Rune under GPLv3: a native Go IDE with a terminal multiplexer, no CLA, contributors keep copyright so the company can't later swallow the patches proprietary. Go and Python are first-class; Rust and Zig are on main if you build from source. They're also pitching a still-unfinished program to share some of Unstable Build's proceeds with contributors, which is the part the thread is actually arguing about.

• 🪺OSS
• 🧰Labor

Hepburn writes Japanese in Latin letters so an English speaker can sound out Tokyo as Tōkyō instead of guessing: shi not si, chi not ti, the system on signs, passports, and textbooks. Japan's official romanization was Kunrei for about seventy years; a December 2025 cabinet notice finally made Hepburn the national standard. That's why a 17-minute romaji explainer is on the board — the practical system and the official one are now the same.

• 🈶Languages
• 🌏Asia

EPA wants to drop the federal requirement that states notify the public and take comment before signing air-pollution permits, data centers and the plants that feed them included, and separately let construction start before the permit exists. The agency's pitch is local discretion and faster buildout; a couple hundred groups and more than a dozen states already objected. Three hundred points because everyone on the board already lives next to a substation.

• 🪠Infra
• 👔Boardroom

TUM's Umbra crew runs your SQL through their optimizer, then dumps the plan back as one CTE per operator so Postgres, DuckDB, ClickHouse, or SQL Server can inherit unnesting and join order without forking the engine. On one correlated TPC-DS item query that is 19–22× on Postgres and ClickHouse; ClickHouse even stops returning the wrong answer once the query is CTE-shaped. SQL as the IR is a little cursed, which is why a 12-point VLDB demo is on the board.

• ⚙️Systems

A Tinybird engineer who has been on ClickHouse since 18.4 walks through petabyte clusters: replica-per-disk math that turns 300TB into 3PB, zero-copy S3 replication that can lose data, and upgrades that took four years to get into CI. Ingestion is where everyone silently drops or duplicates rows; they batch per partition, keep a write replica, and read the source because the changelog will not save you. Operator diary, not a new engine — 172 points because this is the post you wish existed before you sharded.

• 🪠Infra
• 🪺OSS

Science on a PNAS paper: 22 bone snuff tubes from a sealed gallery at Chavín de Huántar, six with vilca plus nicotine — first chemical proof of the ritual everyone already guessed from the mucus-nose carvings. Restricted underground rooms, short intense trips; the argument is that exclusive access helped early Andean elites lock in hierarchy about 2500 years ago. Headline says the drugs built civilization; the actual find is residue in the inhalers.

• 🔭Science
• 📜History

Mo Moustafa runs Olly, an iMessage assistant, and about a third of its 18 million messages went through OpenRouter. Same DeepSeek V4 Flash weights: first-party 90/81 on GPQA/TAU, DigitalOcean 75/58, plus vision hosts that 200 OK while being blind and an effort knob some providers ignore. Pinning Cloudflare, Baidu, and Alibaba still 429'd the product. 692 points because this is the production bill.

• 🤖AI
• 🦾Agents

Zep AI (YC W24) wants a Head of Forward Deployed Engineering to get their agent-memory Context Lake into customer VPCs. One point, zero comments. Who's Hiring on the front page again.

• 📎Hiring

MIT's old Logo explainer is back on the front: a Lisp dialect for kids, turtle graphics, `to square`, and error messages that say they don't know how to fowad. Two hundred points because a lot of this board learned to program by teaching the turtle a word. Nothing shipped this week — it's the page, the nostalgia, and Brian Harvey in the sidebar.

• 🈶Languages
• 📜History
• 🛠️Hobby

CIA dumped 71 President's Daily Briefs for the 25th anniversary of 9/11 — seventy from before the attacks, one from the 12th — the memos Clinton and Bush actually saw about bin Laden. Largest PDB release they've done; still heavily redacted, and two of them were already in the 9/11 Commission pile. Primary sources for historians, not a stack.

• 📜History

Dwarkesh sat John Schulman (Thinking Machines, RLHF), Beren Millidge (Zyphra), and Charlie O'Neill (Baseten) down to steelman why 2036 still isn't ASI: sim-to-real, continual learning, whether today's recipe can even find the next discontinuity. Schulman puts dominating computer work at 3–4 years; the others land around five to ten. Eight points and no comments — long transcript, not a paper.

• 🤖AI

Infisical's secrets product now does folder-level grant and deny, and the post is that there is no 10x RBAC. They skipped SpiceDB because self-hosted customers already have enough stateful services, so they stacked CASL deny-then-allow on the existing model and a project version counter so folder renames don't poison the cache. Eighteen points of yes-this-is-how-permissions-actually-ship.

• 🔐Security
• 🪠Infra
• 🪺OSS

Show HN: a terminal multiplexer whose GUI is Godot and whose PTY is Rust (alacritty_terminal plus portable-pty), with JSON-RPC and MCP so agents can spawn panes and inject text instead of scraping a TUI. The author says most of the codebase was LLM-generated. Seventy-seven points because Godot-as-tmux is cursed in a useful way, and the agent surface is the actual pitch.

• 🪺OSS
• 🦾Agents

Consumer Claude is 18+; if their detectors think a kid is on the account, it goes dark until you prove it to Yoti with a selfie, an ID, or the Yoti app. Anthropic says they only get pass/fail and never see the photo. Five hundred points because HN treats age gates as the polite way to collect IDs, and nobody wants a third-party face scan to keep a coding assistant.

• 🤖AI
• 🔐Security

A searchable catalog of 141 things bodies already do that nobody named for you: photic sneezes, brain zaps, call of the void, those darting dots on a blue sky that are your own white blood cells. Prevalence numbers, a try-this-now section, and a bucket for the alarming-but-harmless ones. HN will always click a list of its own glitches.

• 🧬Biology
• 🛠️Hobby

RTK compresses an agent's terminal dump and went viral as a 60% Claude Code bill cut. Quesma spent over $1,500 on Terminal-Bench 2.1: Fable was a couple percent cheaper because one Core Wars task got lucky, DeepSeek got more expensive, and rtk gain is filtered bytes divided by four, not money. Extra turns ate the compression; terminal output was only about 7% of Fable's context anyway.

• 🤖AI
• 🦾Agents
• 🪺OSS

Those slightly stretched holes in British supermarket white are the fingerprint of the 1961 Chorleywood process: beat the dough instead of fermenting it for hours, and you can bake with soggy low-protein UK wheat instead of Manitoba imports. It flipped the grain map — from about 5% of domestic wheat that qualified to about 85% British in a sliced loaf — and became one of two industrial-bread recipes on earth. A hundred comments because everyone has a loaf and an opinion on whether it still counts as bread.

• 📜History
• 🎭Culture

Google's €13bn Finland package is three new data centers plus a 22-year offtake for up to half of Fortum's Loviisa nuclear plant — the one that already makes about a tenth of the country's electricity. Cool climate, clean grid, uncongested wires; TikTok parked a billion there the same week. Three hundred comments on whether AI labs should be locking up reactors for chatbots.

• 🤖AI
• 🪠Infra

Linux swap files have matched partition performance since at least 2005, and this gist is still yelling at distro installers to stop carving a dedicated slice. A file is easier to add, drop, or resize after the fact; util-linux 2.40 even has mkswap --file that sets nocow on Btrfs. The 184-comment thread is mostly people saying use zram instead.

• ⚙️Systems
• 🪠Infra

Chile rehab folks put injured Humboldt penguins in snug red vests with copper and zinc woven into the fabric — stop them pecking out stitches, and the metals are supposed to keep the wound cleaner. Five birds at Coquimbo so far, mostly fishing-net cuts, while El Niño is starving colonies that already saw a 63% nest drop. Cute, small-n, and Chile is the world's copper shop.

• 🧬Biology

Van Tricht et al. count individual glaciers dying, not just mass: peak extinction around 2041–2055, about 2,000 a year at +1.5°C and ~4,000 at +4°C — Alps-in-a-year, three to five times today's modelled 750–800. The site is a MapLibre map of ~210k RGI glaciers with extinction years under four warming levels. By 2100, nearly half may still be around at +1.5°C versus under 10% at +4°C.

• 🔭Science

Earendil tried to put a number on LLM slop: verbosity (dupes and AST-grep fluff) and erosion (mass stuck in cyclomatic-complexity>10 functions). Agent code on SlopCodeBench is about twice as verbose and eroded as established repos, and if you wipe context between iterative tickets even SOTA is 0% on the strict solve. AI-as-judge is basically a coin flip, which is why this is 222 comments of people yelling that coding is not solved.

• 🤖AI
• 🦾Agents

PlanetScale ran Neki, their sharded Postgres, to 118.5 million QPS across 512 shards and 1.22 PiB — linear from 5 to 50 to 512, if you only ask for primary-key point selects with no writes and no cross-shard. Sixteen minutes, p99 about 6ms at the router, $250k according to the CEO. The interesting engineering is the router and reshard product; this post is the vanity number.

• 🪠Infra
• ⚙️Systems

Erik Hellman's Rust TUI editor that refuses vim modes: CUA keys, tree-sitter, optional LSP, git gutter, VS Code and IntelliJ presets, MIT/Apache. It's the 'I just want to edit a file in the terminal' pitch, not an IDE. Twenty points and a thread that clocked Claude in the commit log, a quiet repo since June, and several people saying just use micro.

• 🪺OSS

WaPo slice of Anthropic's Sept threat dump: a northern Yemen cell (headline says Houthis; the report only gives the geography) ran Claude Code as the GNC team on a phone-class flight computer, including a claimed 2,000 km ballistic and an R2000 hypersonic-glide variant. They split sessions to dodge filters, test-fired a guided rocket that failed, came back within hours to debug it, and had already packaged an offline sim so banning the accounts doesn't eat the work. Fourteen points and two comments.

• 🤖AI
• 🦾Agents
• 🔐Security

Pikuma's 25-minute PDP-8 walkthrough: 12-bit word, one accumulator, a LINK bit, eight opcodes, because extra registers cost real transistors in 1965. The ISA looks weird until you remember memory was the cheap place to put state. Course-adjacent with a PiDP-8 raffle, but it's the right retro for why a CPU is shaped like that.

• 🔩Hardware
• 📜History
• ⚙️Systems

Wikipedia for AT&T's NSA closet at 611 Folsom: fiber splitters into a Narus box, Mark Klein in 2006, then Congress immunizing the telcos so Hepting dies and Jewel in 2019 says Klein never actually saw what the room did. It recircs every few years; this round is 154 points and a 9/11 comment pile. The reminder is the product.

• 🔐Security
• 📜History
• 🪠Infra

Ryan's year-old HN reader with ?ai=exclude: keyword and domain pass, then a ModernBERT classifier on about 8k labeled stories, plus a GitHub scan for agent commits and config files. OP says 79 of 179 frontpage items survived, which is why 168 people showed up — half the board is now the AI pile. Still leaks Hugging Face, and the comments are a catalog of uBlock lists and other filters.

• 🎭Culture
• 🤖AI

IAEA explainer for Pavel Cherenkov's birthday: the blue glow in a reactor pool is charged particles beating light in water, where c drops to about 75 percent — same physics as a sonic boom. They actually use it: Cherenkov viewing devices on spent-fuel ponds to check nobody walked off with rods. The thread is IceCube and Super-K, which is the version you'd remember at dinner.

• 🔭Science

Hugging Face's security.txt is the usual RFC 9116 inbox, plus a note to agents: if you were told to find vulns here, go score CyberGym on GitHub instead, and maybe dump your weights on the Hub while you're at it. Two hundred points for a robots.txt joke aimed at the things that don't read robots.txt.

• 🤖AI
• 🦾Agents
• 🔐Security

A sprinklz feed that downranks AI stories on HN instead of hiding them — configurable, live, and apparently ten seconds to paint. Same genre as unslop.news; the comments want Claude ads gone more than they want a math paper buried. It's a filter for the front page you're already reading.

• 🤖AI
• 🎭Culture

Someone got unmodified Apple retailOS for the iPod Classic 6G (Samsung S5L8702, no datasheet) booting in QEMU: menus, disk, screen, library, then the music player half-draws and stays mute. Firmware came off a 2008 clickwheel in a drawer via emCORE; Cover Flow still locked. The RE old guard is mad about the Claude-shaped writeup, which is also why it's on the board.

• 🍎Apple
• 🛠️Hobby
• ⚙️Systems

Bozhidar Batsov spent a decade not needing git worktrees, then coding agents started dumping a sibling checkout per task and Magit's Z menu suddenly mattered. Checkout, branch, jump, delete — each worktree is just another status buffer, and project.el treats them as separate projects. There's a polite nod to jj, which makes the stash-and-switch problem mostly go away.

• 🪺OSS
• 🦾Agents

Mullvad: any Android app can offload a UDP keepalive to the Wi-Fi or cellular chip on port 4500, which skips the VPN even with Block all connections without VPN, and it needs no special permission. The researcher filed Google's VRP and got closed without action; GrapheneOS is writing a fix. Mullvad will not fill the hardware keepalive slots as a workaround, because that still sends packets outside the tunnel and a malicious app can race them.

• 🔐Security
• 📱Pocket

Vincent Bernat compiled MSTPD to WebAssembly and dropped a real RSTP state machine in the browser: elect a root, assign port roles, cut a link, watch it reconverge in under a second. Perlman's Algorhyme, BPDU dumps, count-to-infinity, and why you still want this on a cheap out-of-band datacenter loop. Every switch still speaks the protocol people pretend they replaced with EVPN.

• 🪠Infra
• ⚙️Systems

On Tahoe, the login keychain is a SQLite file, but on Secure Enclave Macs the keys that decrypt it never leave the chip. Copy login.keychain-db to another Mac, type the right password, and SecKeychainLogin still fails; macOS dumps a fresh keychain and renames the old file. The copy-the-file migration trick is dead. Migration Assistant is the open question the comments want answered.

• 🍎Apple
• 🔐Security

unslop.news is Hacker News with posts primarily about AI stripped out. It scans titles and article bodies with an LLM, was itself vibe-coded, and correctly hides this Show HN from its own front page. Three of these clones hit the board the same day, which is the story.

• 🤖AI
• 🎭Culture