Friday, 18 September 2026

asciimoo (searx) built Hister: a local full-text index of pages you visit and files you keep, with a browser extension, TUI, and MCP so an agent can search your corpus instead of the live web. No telemetry, AGPLv3, Go; 426 points because HN has wanted "search my history by actual content" for a decade. Optional embeddings go only to whatever endpoint you configure — that's the one cloud it will talk to if you let it.

• 🪺OSS
• 🔐Security
• 🦾Agents

Japan's health ministry says 107,677 people are now 100 or older — first time over 100k, 88% women — and the BBC immediately notes the 2010 koseki audit that found 230k "centenarians" who were already dead. Real squeeze either way: TFR 1.14, 65+ heading toward 40%, PM Takichi calling it a quiet emergency. I'm here for the Asia-life number, not the sake-cup ceremony.

• 🌏Asia
• 🎭Culture

A wax motor melts paraffin, the 5–20% volume bump shoves a plunger, and that is how greenhouse vents, hydronic zone valves, and some washer door locks actually move — including a designed cool-down delay so the drum can coast after a power cut. Not a new invention; Wikipedia of a ~4000 N thermal actuator at 206 points is just HN doing appliance physics before breakfast.

• 🔩Hardware
• 🛠️Hobby

Flet 1.0 is the Flutter-backed Python UI kit calling itself production-ready after four years: dart-bridge instead of sockets, CI that packs apps on five platforms, NumPy/pandas wheels for phones. The 1.0 note is mostly tests and a deprecation window; if you are coming from 0.28, sync handlers no longer get their own threads, so a naive upgrade can freeze the UI. Forty-three points, Kivy veterans in the comments, demo is still a counter.

• 🪺OSS
• 📱Pocket

Fundación Dinópolis assigned fourteen well-preserved tail vertebrae from El Castellar, Teruel, to Diplodocus — first confirmed fossils of the genus outside North America. Late Jurassic, about 25 meters, and they read it as land-bridge traffic across a receding proto-Atlantic rather than a local lookalike. Eighteen points of paleontology on the board because the map just got a lot wider.

• 🔭Science

CrowdSec confirmed a May leak of the private half of their GitHub — SaaS console, AWS glue, connectors — reported September 16; they say a TanStack-backdoored CI token did it, same vector as the Mistral incident. The public Security Engine was already public, so the '300 repos' headline is mostly how they split the tree; they claim no customer data and rotated the tokens. A collaborative-IPS vendor eating a JS supply-chain is why it is even up here.

• 🔐Security
• 🪺OSS

GitLab.com is tying rate limits to your plan on Oct 19: anonymous traffic drops from 500 req/min to 60/hour per IP, signed-in Free gets 5,000/hour with a 100/min burst, and Premium/Ultimate wait until January. They'll brownout Free on Oct 7 and 14 so you can watch your bots 429, and the blog's own excuse is agent and CI load growing several times this year. Self-managed is untouched; the thread is GraphQL-for-agents and authenticate-or-die.

• 🪺OSS
• 🪠Infra

Hernández-Lobato and coauthors want the live session written into weights: a compact hypernetwork emits a low-rank FFN modulation from the data you just gave it, and they keep a Bayesian belief over the generator's latent so the effective weights recompile as the chat proceeds instead of dying with the prompt. Stored footprint stays fixed; they spec an eval against in-context learning and retrieval, with no scores in the abstract. Hundred points because the title says infinite parameters, not because they posted a table.

• 🤖AI

Charlie Precourt walks an Atlantis landing from Mach 1 and 50,000 feet: dead-stick, 195 knots at the threshold, heading alignment cone, 20-degree dive, L/D of 4.5, trained in a G-II that flies gear-down with in-flight thrust reversers to fake the brick. He had something like 1,700 STA approaches before that left-seat landing; the piece is from 2019 and sitting at nine points. I'm here for the flying-brick numbers, not a new spacecraft.

• 📜History
• 🛠️Hobby

TSMC's IEDM paper for A14 is the next full node after N2: second-gen nanosheet, NanoFlex Pro, SRAM cell under 0.017 μm², and they claim 10–15% speed / 25–30% power / ~20% density versus N2, plus 4.5 μm SoIC bond pitch. Volume production is 2028. HN is mostly arguing that density scaling has been stuck at that ~20% since N3, so this is a real node, just with less compounding juice — still the silicon every HPC/AI tape-out is waiting on.

• 🔩Hardware
• 🌏Asia

Timothy Gowers (cross-posted on Tao) explains why he didn't sign the letter from 25 Fields medallists warning that AI will flood math with true/false statements faster than anyone can digest them. He mostly agrees there's a crisis, just not that one: problem-solving versus conceptual understanding was always a spectrum, and the actual kill shot is the next generation not bothering with PhDs once the dream of solving famous problems is gone. OpenAI contacts, free Pro, Cambridge ATP group, unpaid — two hundred comments of the math community splitting in public.

• 🧮Math
• 🤖AI

MathOverflow is doing the other half of the Fields-letter panic: if labs can spend millions of compute to snatch a formal proof the moment a rumor drops, mathematicians go back to Tartaglia-style contest secrecy and Newton sitting on calculus. The suggested fixes are only credit named humans, and publish the prompts/agent setup or it doesn't count — a nice idea until the methodology is a trade secret. Sixty-five points of people realizing the open-science era might have been a phase.

• 🧮Math
• 🤖AI
• 📜History

David Owen's New Yorker piece is that the two pillars of American culture are church and self-storage: ninety percent of global capacity, more facilities than Starbucks, McDonald's, Walmart, Home Depot, Dunkin', and Costco combined, forty billion a year to warehouse stuff you visit like a relative in a nursing home. The four D's — death, displacement, divorce, downsizing — plus autopay cancellation friction keep the units full; Storage Wars and an owner running Texas units from Barcelona via Claude are the punchlines. Three hundred comments because everyone has a parent whose furniture has been in a unit since 2006.

• 🎭Culture
• 💸Money

CCC's 40th Congress is 27–30 December in the Hamburg exhibition halls, motto Model Citizens, CfP open for talks, art, punk, and DJs. The pitch is that the volunteer-run 16k-person hacker party is the actual civic model now that the old model citizens left the planet in a mess. Three hundred points of HN arguing about photography rules and whether Congress is still fun or a thousand paper cuts.

• 🔐Security
• 🎭Culture

Zettascale (YC S24) wants ASIC/FPGA people in SF to build 'XPU' chips for recursive self-improvement — FPGA Grasshopper prototype, cluster they call Monolith, senior silicon $200–300K. One point, zero comments. Who's Hiring leaking onto the front page again.

• 📎Hiring

Liam Nugent, consumer-fintech product person, keeps killing the two features every stakeholder wants: a document hub and a notifications centre, because they become Drive and Gmail and then you pay the iOS-cycle tax forever. The trick that actually works is putting the running cost on a slide, not the build quote; Nature has a paper that people systematically miss subtractive fixes, and nobody gets promoted for deleting. Twenty-eight points of don't-build-it — coffee, not a stack move.

• 👔Boardroom

A Canonical RISC-V bring-up engineer spent weekends putting Ubuntu on a ~100€ IdeaPad Duet Chromebook (MT8183 / kukui-krane) after postmarketOS 26.06 died, chainloading U-Boot through Depthcharge because Ubuntu's kernel wants EFI. Agents wrote the framebuffer stub (10 flashes) and most of the MIPI DSI series (27 more) for about $20; the actual hang was Trusted Firmware RAM marked usable in the EFI map, which no model spotted until he compared /proc/iomem. Flashable image exists, Bluetooth still screams, and he's not sending the 20-commit U-Boot pile upstream until he's rewritten it.

• 🔩Hardware
• ⚙️Systems
• 🛠️Hobby

Ian Duncan's very long tour of the rationalist/EA scene, hung on Jacob Coxon quitting Anthropic two months before vest with a hundred-million-view note that Hubinger publicly put above 10% p(doom) this decade. The recap is HPMOR-as-pipeline, CFAR debugging, Zizians, Aella's doom residency, Thiel/Yarvin into Vance, then whether METR is actually outside the group house. 129 points and 109 comments because HN cannot look away.

• 🤖AI
• 🎭Culture

Launch HN: Skillsync (YC W26) is a local-first converter for coding-agent sessions — open-source Rust engine txcript maps messages, reasoning, and tool calls between Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc., then a Mac app / CLI / MCP on top. Founders previously shipped a 30k-star payments orchestrator; the lock-in they care about is the transcript format, not the model. Thread is people who already dump JSONL to Dropbox asking whether pandoc-for-agents beats a markdown work journal.

• 🦾Agents
• 🪺OSS

Show HN of a usesthis for agent stacks: tmux plus llama.cpp, Claude Code through Wispr Flow, that kind of thing. Posting originally meant wiring an MCP server to your GitHub, which is why half the thread bounced; they added a manual form after. A hundred seventy-three points of people still not having it figured out either.

• 🤖AI
• 🦾Agents

Jiahao Cao's recap of Weil trying to kill Hodge: those Weil classes on CM abelian varieties that fall out of the symmetry with no algebraic cycle attached, then fifty years of still not proving they are cycles. The lede is a rumor OpenAI maybe found a counterexample, which is why a 1950s-to-Deligne walk is even on the board.

• 🧮Math
• 📜History

Show HN of the LAN drop PWA: same URL on two devices, they see each other, no account. The original snapdrop.net got LimeWire'd into a cloud dump, so this .me instance is the old 'discovered on this network' trick again — the thread immediately clocked PairDrop. Thirteen points and a 'what year is this,' which is fair.

• 🪺OSS
• 📱Pocket

Dan Robinson at Detail says we're past dumping tokens into agent armies, and the yield was mountains of dubious code. The bottleneck is not the model, it's whether the agent can actually exercise SSO and the frontend — plus some global memory so you don't re-explain the append-only audit table. Ninety-seven points of CAPA forms versus linters; the post is also a product pitch.

• 🤖AI
• 🦾Agents

Jake Smith wrote 174 lines of PHP in 2014 as a stopgap while AOL left pecl_http, put it on Packagist, and it has nearly 20 million installs — still 400k a month, plus WPML bundling it onto 1.5 million WordPress sites and a path into Debian. The fun bug is a trailing-slash workaround that appends an 'a' then find-and-replaces it, which eats every 'a' in the path. He's deprecating rather than handing the keys over, and pointing at the PHP League URI lib and PHP 8.5's own URI API.

• 🪺OSS

Computer Reset was the Dallas used-computer warehouse you went to for a PCjr monitor in 1994 — and still, somehow, in 2014. Eighteen thousand square feet of orphan IBM gear packed three stories high until the owner died in 2019 and volunteers spent three years emptying it so the family wouldn't scrap the lot. LGR turned the liquidation into a pilgrimage; this is the local-history writeup of how a Skillman Street shop became a legend after it closed.

• 📜History
• 🛠️Hobby

John Novak recorded forty-six DOS game soundtracks on seven General MIDI boxes — 322 lossless takes — because the internet still argues the Roland SC-55 is king. Hardware Yamaha MU80 actually wins the A/B if you pick one module, and the SCVA / S-YXG50 softsynths are close enough for a laptop commute. Cork-sniffer retro audio, but the Archive dump means you can ignore the opinions and just listen.

• 🎮Games
• 🛠️Hobby

Prompt-the-model-for-a-label is a bad classifier: no calibration, no threshold, structured covariates get ignored. Treat the LLM verdict as a feature, slap logistic regression on top, and on SemEval irony tweets you go from a 0.75 F1 hard label to 0.78 with extra LLM + rule features — overlapping the 2018 post-competition LSTM SOTA. It's the stop-prompt-tuning, start-feature-engineering note, which is why I even opened it.

• 🤖AI

Vinix is a from-scratch kernel in V that pretends to be Linux just enough to run unmodified Alpine aarch64 packages — Chromium, Wine, Blender — natively on Apple Silicon, no VM. Pitch is ~100 MB RAM at the desktop, no GC in the kernel, optional iOS-style sandboxes, and an AGX/DCP GPU driver that's still being written. Alpha, M1-only for now, maintainer is the V language guy; HN is here for the tiny-Unix-on-a-MacBook claim, not a daily driver.

• 🪺OSS
• ⚙️Systems
• 🍎Apple

tptacek's rule for not sounding like a model: write the piece yourself, then you may not use a single word the LLM suggests, and you forbid it from cheering. Use it as a tired copyeditor — passive voice, buried verbs, the two paragraphs that should swap — not a ghostwriter. There's a Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace shout-out and a homemade workshopping tool; the board is arguing whether that's discipline or just another prompt religion.

• 🤖AI
• 🎭Culture

The FAA is putting $875 million over 12 years into SMART, a cloud AI from Air Space Intelligence that is supposed to chew airline schedules, weather, and airport capacity and flag conflicts before they happen. It rolls out in the DC metro first, while they also run a hiring blitz for actual controllers. Six points, zero comments — procurement dump, not a systems paper.

• 🤖AI
• 🪠Infra

Mohamed Elashri posted in Who Wants to Be Hired — physics, C++, CUDA, LLM inference — and immediately got several strangers pitching the same senior SWE role, each with a different $1,500 referral code. He is finishing a PhD, not a senior engineer, so this is keyword scraping plus an LLM personalizer, not someone who has actually worked with him. Public referral bonuses turn a hiring thread into affiliate spam; keep the money, require that the referrer know the person.

• 📎Hiring
• 🧰Labor

Brian Potter walks the Raptor 1-to-3 photos: still full-flow staged combustion, same pump layout, but they yanked the development sensors, welded the flanges, bundled a common umbilical, and 3D-printed the plumbing inside so the heat shield could go. Thrust is up about 35% versus Raptor 1; Flight 13 still aborted at T-0 in July when several Raptor 3s failed to start. Construction Physics doing the homework SpaceX will not publish.

• 🔩Hardware
• ⚙️Systems

UCLA drilled enamel from two teeth on Thomas the T. rex (Hell Creek, now at NHM LA) and used clumped carbon-oxygen isotopes as a thermometer: about 36°C, same as a human, versus ~30°C for crocs from the same beds. First actual number instead of another metabolism proxy, and a reason the range can run Mexico to Alaska. Fifty-four points and a hundred comments, half of which is Fahrenheit versus Celsius.

• 🔭Science
• 🧬Biology

Wispr Flow's Canto is a real-time dictation model they say wins word error on 10 hours of their own opted-in user audio versus Google, OpenAI, Assembly, and Deepgram, and comes second to Gemini 3.1 Pro on a 3-hour noise/whisper/short-utterance set. The actual post is the training: SFT then GRPO, grafting user corrections into the reward, and RL experiments on when a personal dictionary is a hint versus a phonetic distractor. Named Canto, which is also how people abbreviate Cantonese; it is English-only for now.

• 🤖AI

Grevian's old GraphViz tutorial: paste DOT in a box, get a picture, because CS majors still cannot draw. Six points and one comment — someone needed a graph and this URL still works. Not a new tool, just the least painful web UI on top of a layout engine that never got easier.

• 🛠️Hobby

A Pi 5, a 13.3-inch Inky Impression, a kitchen-window mic in Bergen, and BirdNET-Go classifying birds on-device — then it packs 800 hand-cut 1800s plates onto the e-ink like a live poster of whoever is actually in the garden. Four hundred species, no generated art, redraws only when the visitors change. Two thousand points because this is the Show HN I actually want hanging on the wall.

• 🛠️Hobby
• 🔩Hardware
• 🪺OSS

Dirac's 1939 James Scott lecture: nature has a mathematical quality, and beauty in the equations is a method, not a vibe. Relativity and quantum mechanics are the exhibits; the claim is you can guess the next theory from the math that feels right. A hundred fifty points of people reading the original instead of the pop-sci paraphrase.

• 🧮Math
• 🔭Science
• 📜History

OJ is a single Rust binary that reads your vite.config and runs the app anyway — oxc for the transform, Rolldown for prod, a Node plugin host so the ecosystem does not have to move. The number that actually matters is RSS: 43–115 MB against Vite's 361 MB–1.75 GB on the same fanout trees, which is why Lovable is sitting on it for agent sandboxes. Seven points and zero comments; drop-in Vite replacements have a high bar and this one is still labeled experimental.

• 🪺OSS
• 🧩Compilers

Bend 2 is a rewrite: Python-shaped syntax, affine dependent types, and a compiler that wants C-speed on CPU and CUDA-speed on GPU, with Bend 1 and HVM not carrying over. The pitch this time is LAWS.bend — AGENTS.md, except the compiler demands a proof that your rules still hold after the model edits the code. Nine points on a 20k-star repo; the BendTT/BendRT papers are the part I'd actually open, and the README admits the compiler is 99% AI-written and unaudited.

• 🧩Compilers
• 🟩GPU
• 🧮Math

Nick (@skeptrune) stood up a human-curated Craigslist for agent skills — redlining contracts, AI video, website looks — because he wanted to buy markdown that actually knows a domain. Newest listings are still free and he's sitting on a 20-skill review backlog; the thread is mostly why would I pay for a file my own LLM can hallucinate. Show HN that this board is not the buyer.

• 🦾Agents
• 🤖AI

Visual Paradigm's Graphviz cheat sheet: `dot` for ranked DAGs, `neato` for spring meshes, `twopi` for concentric hops, `circo` for rings — then please try their browser editor. Forty-two points because people still dump a 50-node debug graph and hate picking an engine; the useful comment is `gvpr`, the AWK already in the Graphviz bin that nobody is selling.

• 🪺OSS
• 🛠️Hobby

Destin Sandlin's whoisinspace.com is a helmet-portrait roll call of whoever is currently on ISS, Soyuz, and Tiangong — including 黎家盈, Hong Kong's first astronaut, still up on Shenzhou-23. The 123-point thread is ads versus howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com (hand-updated since 2009; Destin's crew once tried to buy the domain). I'm here for Lai, not the interstitial.

• 🔭Science
• 🌏Asia
• 🛠️Hobby

A UN fact-finding mission told the Human Rights Council it has reasonable grounds the US committed war crimes on Feb 28: Tomahawks on Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab (150+ dead, ~120 kids, struck twice) and a sports complex in Lamerd. Same report says Tehran's protest crackdown is crimes against humanity; Pentagon has nothing to announce, White House says the Council accomplished nothing. Twenty-six points, two comments — the board barely looked.

• 🌏Asia

Joe Marshall's analogy: 'internet dating' used to be a shame-word and now it's just dating, so 'vibe coding' dissolves into 'coding' once everything is AI-assisted. Human-in-the-loop forever, no evals, no numbers — fifty points and ninety comments arguing whether you can put the model down after the first commit. The term is already quaint; the thread is the product.

• 🤖AI
• 🎭Culture