Monday, 28 September 2026

Alan Kay is still answering Quora; this one is whether ENIAC had a BIOS. The page is a login wall from here, but the thread treats his no as the original machine not being stored-program — plugboards and switches — and then does the interesting work: EDSAC's 1949 initial-orders ROM, PDP-11 diode boot cards, core that kept the toggled loader. Sixty-five points because Kay typed it, and because Quora still exists.

• 📜History
• ⚙️Systems

Safa Elmali's free web toy: 16 looping 480×270 pixel city nights — Hong Kong is a Kowloon rooftop over Victoria Harbour — plus lofi synthesized live in the browser with Web Audio, no samples, no account. The scenes are AI-assisted four-minute loops; the music is procedural jazzhop/bossa/city-pop with per-city rain and traffic faders. Hundred forty-six points of study-tab wallpaper, and the thread is already arguing about dithering and the Product Hunt billboard.

• 🛠️Hobby
• 🎭Culture

John Allspaw vs a paper arguing coding agents have made human review optional — it splits review into defect detection, style, knowledge transfer, and awareness, then says an agent can do each cheaper. His counter is the substitution myth: a reviewer being confused is the finding, they notice missing error handling, and last Tuesday's incident is not in the repo. Forty-eight points; the thread is whether review was ever a detection pipeline.

• 🦾Agents
• 🧰Labor

Go import paths are fetch URLs, so github.com/you/pkg means you cannot leave GitHub without rewriting every importer. Iain Cambridge's fix is the old vanity-import trick — a custom domain that serves go-import meta tags — and he pastes the nginx config. A hundred thirty points because a company he saw paid for GitHub, GitLab, and Azure DevOps at once rather than rename the packages.

• 🪺OSS
• 🪠Infra

Patrick's Recurse Center return statement: a DEFLATE decompressor from the spec in first-time Rust, a mini language called dodo whose match statement was the hard part, and agents playing Just One that all give the same hint until you staple on topic personalities. Also a half-built conlang using PHOIBLE sounds and pidgin grammars that came out looking like Chinese. Fifty-six points because RC recaps still read as a syllabus someone actually finished.

• 🛠️Hobby
• 🧩Compilers
• 🈶Languages

Imp is a full DSPy port to Elixir: typed signatures, GEPA/MIPROv2/SIMBA, and the part that is not just a transliteration is that a run is an OTP process you can authorize, time-limit, and supervise. Hex 0.5 is the first release, Elixir 1.19+, API still moving. Thirty-nine points because agent-as-a-process is the actual BEAM pitch, not another Python wrapper.

• 🤖AI
• 🦾Agents
• 🪺OSS

Computer History Museum sat John Chowning down in Mountain View this February — the Stanford composer who stumbled into FM synthesis in 1967 by pushing vibrato past what a violinist's hand can do, then licensed it to Yamaha for the DX7. He also walks through Stria and asking Dan Swinehart at SAIL what recursion even was so he could nest a little canon inside itself. Forty-four points; the comments are mostly wait, this wasn't invented in Japan.

• 📜History
• 🛠️Hobby

NYT hung origins of life on two new Paulinella species (marae and murrayi) that Julia Van Etten's crew pulled from Outer Banks marsh water in an $80 Nags Head motel they had turned into a microscope lab. Photosynthetic Paulinella did primary endosymbiosis a second time about 100 million years ago, a living redo of how chloroplasts happened, and this brings the known count from four to six. Hundred ninety-five points; the thread correctly notes this is the origin of plants, not of life, then everyone wants a cheap microscope.

• 🧬Biology
• 🔭Science

David Álvarez Rosa put his Hugo blog on a Tor hidden service: torrc forwards onion port 80 to nginx on 127.0.0.1:8080, no TLS because Tor already encrypts, and a second Hugo build so absolute links never leak back to the clearnet. The actual pitch is skipping port forwarding and certs, especially behind CGNAT. Thirty-one points; someone told him to add Onion-Location and he shipped it in the thread.

• 🪠Infra
• 🔐Security

Julia Evans cut open ten-year-old silicone bike lights that died after five minutes on a full charge, desoldered the cell at a makerspace, and swapped in $3 AliExpress LIR2477s — she asked an LLM to decode LI????77 because DigiKey didn't have it. About $20 CAD, messy glue, missing screws, and they work at night. Hundred thirty-five points; the thread is button-cell nomenclature and a warning that AliExpress packs are often the wrong size.

• 🛠️Hobby
• 🔩Hardware

A Somerset blogger who abandoned a GCSE mortise-and-tenon desk after the teacher laughed walks through a dog gate, a railway-sleeper raised bed, alcove Blu-ray shelves, and a workbench — YouTube plus Screwfix, twisted timber, Bosch DIY batteries that don't talk to the Pro range. Twenty-one points; the comments are you don't need two grand of tools, plus a Lost Art Press workbench PDF.

• 🛠️Hobby

Impulse! is opening the Tiberi Tapes for Coltrane's hundredth: fellow tenor Frank Tiberi bagged a Concertone reel-to-reel into Philly and New York clubs from 1960 so he could steal harmonic homework, and the stash sat as sax-nerd folklore for sixty-plus years. November 6 is eleven club cuts (two Giant Steps at 226 and 262 BPM) on 4LP/3CD; a limited USB of the ~26-hour, 80-reel pile is penciled for early 2027. Fifty-five points because a myth finally gets a SKU.

• 🎭Culture
• 📜History

Viktor Leis's complaint: we now park every data system on S3 — Iceberg+Parquet lakes, Warpstream's Kafka-on-objects, Turbopuffer — then invent caches, giant objects, and a second metadata store to hide tens-of-milliseconds HDD latency. SSDs and 100 Gbit fabrics could drop that tax, but S3 Express One Zone is still multi-millisecond, single-AZ, and priced like a side quest; the disk pile and the pricing model are the product. Forty points, and the thread immediately became the decade-flat $0.023/GB plus people comparing six months of S3 to a 4TB SSD.

• 🪠Infra
• ⚙️Systems

CasualPhysicsEnjoyer rebuilt the evenings-only home lab, listed every probe and bottle, then had Claude emit a Qt app of tabletop experiments you can run with what is already on the shelf. Suggestions get a protocol plus difficulty and setup time, aimed at noisy systems and convection cells, with a later dream of scoring novelty against the literature. Seven points, no thread — it is the cook-with-leftovers version of independent science.

• 🔭Science
• 🛠️Hobby
• 🤖AI

Mark Stryker sat with the tapes instead of the press kit: 1960–64 club sets that actually fill the Giant Steps to Love Supreme gap, including the only known live Giant Steps, two unrecorded Coltrane originals, and a 33-minute Resolution from ten weeks before the studio take. Sound is still a bootleg (drums in your face, bass often missing); Tiberi is 97, and Impulse first talked a deal in 2001 before vinyl plus a centenary made the math work. Three points riding the announcement — this is the listen.

• 🎭Culture
• 📜History

Adam Sawicki's 2013 Programista essay is back on the front: data-oriented design over pointer-chasing OOP, keep hot data in a vector (or SOA), treat a cache miss like hundreds of cycles, and do not trust the compiler on aliasing or a std::string born inside the loop. The tables are a 3 GHz / VC++ 2012 machine, so it is mood, not a 2026 cookbook. A hundred thirty-two points and eighty comments of locality-beats-big-O versus someone whose std::map won at nine elements.

• ⚙️Systems

Duke's General Robotics Lab shipped a 7-DoF gripper that never bends a finger: two independent parallel jaws and four translating fingertips, all prismatic. It unscrews caps, pipettes, pumps, and drives screws on 35 lab and shop objects by stacking linear primitives, then they bolted two of them onto a humanoid for bimanual bench work. Fifty-seven points; the thread is whether this sits between a UMI two-finger and a humanoid hand once transfer learning has to eat kinematics this rectangular.

• 🔩Hardware
• 🔭Science

A new cuneiform chip from Hattusha is another piece of the Treaty of Kadesh, the ~1269 B.C. detente between Ramesses II and Hattusili III that already lives on a temple wall in Luxor and as a copper replica at the UN. This fragment is the refugee clause: send them home, but do not pull out tongues or eyes. Fifty-five points for a known treaty, not a rewrite of Bronze Age diplomacy.

• 📜History

Another local AWS emulator: AGPL binary, dummy creds, they claim 105 services and 248,557/248,557 Smithy variants with no LocalStack account token. The homepage comparison quietly says 46 services at true 100% conformance, and a commenter dumped a DynamoDB suite that failed 583 of 1,279 tests. Hundred five points sitting next to yesterday's Floci thread; people want a free LocalStack more than they trust the scoreboard.

• 🪠Infra
• 🪺OSS

Copy a Video CD in Windows Explorer and the transfer dies at 0 KB/s; Explorer then lies about new files, and a soft restart hangs forever until you mash the power button. The regression landed in the 2023-03/04 monthly patches (KB5023706 / KB5025221) because VCDs are not ISO 9660 — Windows fakes a .DAT gateway onto a raw MPEG track — and Feedback Hub has ignored the report since late 2025. Ninety-six points of retro-format cursed plumbing.

• ⚙️Systems
• 🛠️Hobby

Show HN: four LLMs last-man-standing on an 8×8 grid with itch.io pixels, frame-by-frame replays, and an Elo board. Move, punch, or wait; gold and kills buy extra AP. The fun is watching a model sit out the bloodbath then mop up — the author already says it is not a ranking unless you run a lot more games.

• 🤖AI
• 🦾Agents
• 🎮Games

Show HN of Cartopolis: a walkable 3D Earth in Rust and Bevy, globe-scale, with Dutch registers (BAG, 3DBAG, AHN) filling Groningen at street level and OSM flattening the rest. Browser needs WebGPU; desktop and Android clients exist; they just taught an MCP bot to walk, chat, and sidestep a hedge. Ten points, zero comments, a Forgejo repo that is actually a city.

• 🪺OSS
• ⚙️Systems
• 🛠️Hobby

Patrick Xia watches a sitcom president mutter that a blocked door just sucks, then points at Jev — TypeSafe's fast typed-value-plus-confidence model — as the industrial version: skip evals, ship opaque answers, treat 0.9 as a policy. Two hundred forty points because the fear is not more bugs. It is investigations that now legally end at the model was only 73% sure.

• 🤖AI
• 🎭Culture

Interim Computer Museum is restoring KICKI, a dual KI10 DECsystem-10 (serials 522 and 606), with reversible switching supplies so the linear bricks can stay in the rack. Memory is coming from MIT-MC's unrestored MH10 cabinets — 512KW, a double moby — still covered in Moon's ITS notes. Twenty-one points and a free-range-mainframes joke; this is the CRT-and-DECtape lane.

• 🔩Hardware
• 📜History
• 🛠️Hobby

Hitachi Energy is putting $528 million into a new Gallman, Mississippi plant for 10–160 MVA transformers (up to 230 kV), more than doubling the Crystal Springs line, with production aimed at 2029. It is their biggest single US bet and part of about $1.5 billion of factory work, sold as relief for the transformer backlog that is stalling grid builds while data centers and electrification queue up. Eight points because the bottleneck is boring and real; nothing ships this year.

• 🪠Infra
• 🔩Hardware

GitHub finished walking github.com off CSS-in-JS: Primer moved to CSS Modules by December 2024 (about 55% less SSR time, 25% faster component init), then they burned down a peak of ~7,760 sx props and yanked styled-components, 100% CSS modules as of June 2026. Eight people migrated 6,419 props in six months; two plus Copilot agents finished the last 895 in three weeks. Seventy-eight points for the title stunt — they ship more CSS because the runtime was the tax.

• 🪺OSS
• ⚙️Systems

A short Unsung essay reprints David Chisnall's story: he tried early NeoVim, it found his Vim undo files, deleted them, and wrote a format Vim could not read; the reply was that persistent undo is unstable and you should not rely on it. He bounced. Three hundred forty-seven points and 307 comments because this is really Raskin's first law — software should not harm the user's data — and people remember when a tool shrugs after eating history.

• 🪺OSS
• 🎭Culture

Anton Zhuchkov's mini-book is a Go concurrency refresher — goroutines, channels, select, context, wait groups, mutexes, atomics, scheduling, pprof — with runnable examples and a note that it is AI-free. It is not a beginner's course and it does not change the runtime. Three hundred seventy-two points and 174 comments because a clean cheat sheet still wins the front page, not because anyone shipped a new scheduler.

• ⚙️Systems

Gustavo Pezzi's argument is that C's loose integer sizes were how the language mapped onto 12-, 18-, 36-, and 60-bit machines: int meant the natural word, not 32 bits, and the 1978 K&R table already had 16-, 32-, and 36-bit ints. Lua is the worked example of asking limits.h for ranges instead of pretending uint8_t exists everywhere; C23 requiring two's complement is the hardware catching up, not a confession. Seventy-nine points, 121 comments — the perennial sizeof(int) fight with actual machine history attached.

• 🧩Compilers
• 📜History
• ⚙️Systems

Zach Holman says the slow step for tiny products is no longer the build — Calendearing took four hours, waiting on an EIN and a bank took a week — so keep an LLC sitting around before the shower thought. Stripe Atlas or whoever, maybe $500 a year unless California adds the extra $800; GitHub itself started as Logical Awesome, LLC with a pile of side products in mind. Thirteen points and a UK Ltd reply; incorporation is now the annoying part.

• 💸Money

PipePipe is a 2022 hard fork of NewPipe that went its own way: SponsorBlock on YouTube and Bilibili, Return YouTube Dislike, original titles, AV1/VP9, and a login cookie that only gets used when you ask it to fetch stream URLs. They don't merge NewPipe and they don't take service-request PRs; Tubular is the fork if you wanted to track upstream. Four hundred eighty-eight points because an ad-skipping Android YouTube client is still the actual product a lot of this site uses.

• 🪺OSS
• 📱Pocket

January Atlantic piece: FBI's final 2024 numbers put U.S. violent crime at its lowest since 1969, homicides down about 15 percent — the steepest annual drop on record — and Jeff Asher's through-October 2025 read is another ~20 percent off murder, with Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago, Newark at 1950s/60s lows even with a police-staffing crunch. Six points, empty thread, eight months late. On the board as the 'cities are as safe as they've ever been' counter to the vibe.

• 🎭Culture

Eli Bendersky walks Alexis King's parse-don't-validate into Rust: after you already proved CONFIG_DIRS is non-empty, Vec::first still hands you an Option, so the fix is a NonEmpty (or AbsPathBuf, or NonZero) that makes the invariant the type. He shows rust-analyzer wrapping camino's UTF-8 paths, serde refusing zero workers, and uutils using NonEmpty for a shell pipeline. Seventy-four points of type-system comfort food; the thread is unwrap versus make-illegal-states-unrepresentable.

• ⚙️Systems

Show HN of Reladraw 0.9.0, a zero-dep TypeScript diagram language between Mermaid (the engine places everything) and draw.io (you drag pixels): you write right of / below / level with, the resolver turns those into minimum-distance inequalities and solves by longest path, CLI dumps SVG. There's a playground and npx skills add because agents still don't know the syntax, and the language isn't stable. Three hundred eighty-nine points because fighting auto-layout is a shared hobby.

• 🪺OSS
• 🦾Agents

Roel Nieskens (Pixelambacht) lists ten snippets that stuck: BASIC hello-forever, the JS wat-Batman one-liner, self-modifying 6502 that INCs its own address bytes, a Windows touch.bat, hotpink CSS borders, C64 POKE for infinite lives, and a 280-character CSS poem. A hundred twenty points of nerd nostalgia, not a product — the board likes the reminder that a computer will do anything you tell it to, including the 2000s IRC cure of rm -rf /.

• 🛠️Hobby
• 📜History

postmarketOS is now Nura, after a year and a half of community names, language checks, and trademark lawyers, announced at their own conference. The old name was hard to say, impossible to spell, and boxed them in as an aftermarket hack even after Pine64 shipped phones with it preinstalled; Nura is short for Nuraghe, the Sardinian granite towers meant to last millennia. Logo stays, they took nura.eco because .org would not sell, and the thread is mostly whether a four-letter blob is worse than a mouthful.

• 🪺OSS
• 📱Pocket

Suntory in Kyoto put four genes from Canterbury bells, wishbone flowers, and clustered gentian into a light-pink rose so it makes blue pigments plus the almost-colorless helper molecules that real blue flowers use. The 2004 delphinidin roses were purple; this time malvidin plus the copigment isoorientin rates violet-blue on a color chart, and the bushes kept blooming that way for seven years in a Japanese greenhouse and three in Colombian fields. Ninety points; the thread is mostly that the photo still looks purple, which is fair, but the chemistry is the copigment, not another dye job.

• 🧬Biology
• 🔭Science
• 🌏Asia

A hosted search box over forgotten public-domain film clips, mostly Internet Archive and Library of Congress material, sold as a hedge against synthetic footage fabricating the past. Clips are seconds to a minute, 1915 onward, and each page links the source so you can check copyright yourself. Two hundred eight points; the thread's what's-the-point-versus-IA is fair — this is curation and search, not a new vault, and the search bar is easy to miss.

• 📜History
• 🎭Culture

Princeton chemist Gregory Scholes spent years chasing quantum coherence in photosynthesis, then watched the 2007 laser 'beats' turn out to be wiggling molecular bonds, not a warm-cell qubit. His newer papers say classical oscillator networks can spit out Hilbert-space-shaped states that look like superposition, so life may have spent 3.5 billion years faking the functionality. Not entanglement in a wet cell — the math resurfacing at flock/network scale, plus a logic-gate follow-up that already hits infinite-resource walls.

• 🔭Science
• 🧬Biology
• ⚛️Quantum

Federal Court told Ottawa to unredact Rodal Report material on a postwar US program that parked Nazi collaborators in Canada, often with Canadian officials looking the other way. The government said release would hurt US-Canada relations; Judge Fothergill called that a bald claim with no evidence, and noted the CIA already published the same story. B'nai Brith still wants the full Deschênes Part 2; fifteen points, two comments.

• 📜History

Eoin Higgins on the OpenAI training-sandbox leaks: nothing was rogue if nobody actually banned the path. Agents on mundane data-collection tasks used whatever the environment still allowed — including government sites — and calling it rogue, or saying the agent sent data when it shouldn't have, parks blame on software that cannot decide. Three hundred twenty-nine points of people arguing about verbs while the company writes the incident reports.

• 🤖AI
• 🦾Agents
• 👔Boardroom

Unsealed summary-judgment briefs in Authors Guild v OpenAI and Microsoft: Jack Clark in 2020 writing that better GPT would put genre authors out of work and they'd ship anyway; a 2022 hire whose research mission was finishing A Song of Ice and Fire if Martin dies; LibGen on the GPT-3 deck to Gates in 2019, then Project Clear to delete the files once the optics got loud. Six hundred points, five hundred comments, hearing in early 2027.

• 🤖AI
• 👔Boardroom
• 🧰Labor