Hacker News on Thursday, 17 April 2025

Gemini 2.5 Flash(developers.googleblog.com)

990 points by meetpateltech 1 year ago | 531 comments

Google for Developers blog post announcing Gemini 2.5 Flash and explaining how developers can start building with it via Google AI Studio.

Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules(nytimes.com)

786 points by IdealeZahlen 1 year ago | 417 comments

New York Times article reporting a federal judge ruled Google illegally monopolized online advertising technology.

Which year: guess which year each photo was taken(whichyr.com)

635 points by trymas 1 year ago | 189 comments

WhichYear is a daily browser game where players view historical photos and guess the year each was taken, from 1850 to 2025.

An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system(maknee.github.io)

586 points by sebg 1 year ago | 98 comments

Blog post introducing DeepSeek's 3FS (Fire-Flyer File System), explaining distributed file systems and how 3FS operates, first in a series.

Potatoes in the Mail(facts.usps.com)

490 points by mooreds 1 year ago | 244 comments

A USPS Postal Facts page explaining that potatoes can be mailed without a box by writing addresses directly on the spud and paying postage.

TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale(afterbabel.com)

474 points by cwwc 1 year ago | 471 comments

An After Babel Substack essay arguing that TikTok causes widespread harm to children and teens.

“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System(skyatnightmagazine.com)

338 points by fuidani 1 year ago | 265 comments

BBC Sky at Night Magazine news article on astronomers detecting possible biosignature dimethyl sulfide on exoplanet K2-18b, called the most promising signs yet of alien life.

Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'(bbc.com)

292 points by 1659447091 1 year ago | 363 comments

I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs(cantgetmuchhigher.com)

286 points by jnord 1 year ago | 135 comments

First baby born in UK to woman with transplanted womb(bbc.com)

283 points by gmays 1 year ago | 288 comments

Everyone knows your location, Part 2: try it yourself and share the results(timsh.org)

270 points by mtlynch 1 year ago | 63 comments

HDR‑Infused Emoji(sharpletters.net)

254 points by tabletcorry 1 year ago | 138 comments

What do I think about Lua after shipping a project with 60k lines of code?(blog.luden.io)

201 points by JSLegendDev 1 year ago | 108 comments

Milwaukee M18 Battery Reverse Engineering(quagmirerepair.com)

198 points by jakogut 1 year ago | 91 comments

Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution in Erlang/OTP SSH(nvd.nist.gov)

183 points by kimi 1 year ago | 48 comments

This 'College Protester' Isn't Real. It's an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops(wired.com)

172 points by colinprince 1 year ago | 152 comments

Passing planes and other whoosh sounds(windytan.com)

171 points by zdw 1 year ago | 44 comments

Crows can recognize geometric regularity(phys.org)

163 points by wglb 1 year ago | 70 comments

Encryption Is Not a Crime(privacyguides.org)

152 points by freddyym 1 year ago | 110 comments

ChatGPT now performs well at GeoGuesser(flausch.social)

144 points by dredmorbius 1 year ago | 128 comments

Oda Ujiharu: Why the ‘weakest Samurai warlord’ is admired(tokyoweekender.com)

144 points by cdplayer96 1 year ago | 56 comments

Show HN: AgentAPI – HTTP API for Claude Code, Goose, Aider, and Codex(github.com)

141 points by hugodutka 1 year ago | 13 comments

Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture(theconversation.com)

136 points by PaulHoule 1 year ago | 65 comments

AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu(dwarkesh.com)

131 points by Philpax 1 year ago | 260 comments

Cutting down Rust compile times from 30 to 2 minutes with one thousand crates(feldera.com)

109 points by Qadriq 1 year ago | 63 comments

Advanced Shell Scripting with Bash (2006) [pdf](uniforumchicago.org)

105 points by transpute 1 year ago | 70 comments

A 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics(technologyreview.com)

101 points by danso 1 year ago | 49 comments

Stainless steel strengthened: Twisting creates submicron 'anti-crash wall'(techxplore.com)

94 points by wglb 1 year ago | 38 comments

OpenAI looked at buying Cursor creator before turning to Windsurf(cnbc.com)

92 points by mfiguiere 1 year ago | 71 comments

BitNet b1.58 2B4T Technical Report(arxiv.org)

91 points by galeos 1 year ago | 28 comments

Scientists find strongest evidence yet of life on an alien planet(reuters.com)

91 points by prossercj 1 year ago | 18 comments

Development on Apple Silicon with UTM(rkiselenko.dev)

90 points by todsacerdoti 1 year ago | 55 comments

SQLite transactions and virtual tables(misfra.me)

90 points by preetamjinka 1 year ago | 9 comments

The Halting Problem is a terrible example of NP-Harder(buttondown.com)

87 points by BerislavLopac 1 year ago | 92 comments

Differentiable Programming from Scratch(thenumb.at)

84 points by sksxihve 1 year ago | 15 comments

A cute proof that makes e natural(poshenloh.com)

84 points by georgecmu 1 year ago | 27 comments

Shell-secrets – GPG-encrypted environment variables(github.com)

78 points by mgarciaisaia 1 year ago | 35 comments

The Size of Packets(potaroo.net)

77 points by todsacerdoti 1 year ago | 34 comments

The Atari 1200XL fiasco(goto10retro.com)

76 points by rbanffy 1 year ago | 70 comments

Toothpaste widely contaminated with lead and other metals, US research finds(theguardian.com)

73 points by c420 1 year ago | 55 comments

Zack: A Simple Backtesting Engine in Zig(github.com)

73 points by sksxihve 1 year ago | 6 comments

US Government threatens Harvard with foreign student ban(bbc.com)

72 points by intunderflow 1 year ago | 47 comments

The Animals That Exist Between Life and Death(nautil.us)

72 points by dnetesn 1 year ago | 33 comments

Building an AI That Watches Rugby(nickjones.tech)

71 points by reddavis 1 year ago | 37 comments

Recursive LLM prompts(github.com)

68 points by vlan121 1 year ago | 12 comments

U.S.-born man from Georgia held for ICE under Florida's new anti-immigration law(georgiarecorder.com)

68 points by pavel_lishin 1 year ago | 13 comments

On Jane Jacobs (2017)(salmagundi.skidmore.edu)

67 points by herbertl 1 year ago | 42 comments

Manga Guide To Databases (2004) [pdf](oberstar.eu.org)

65 points by mastermedo 1 year ago | 6 comments

CN Tower, Behind the Scenes (2014)(site.roadwolf.ca)

58 points by ianpenney 1 year ago | 10 comments

As 'Bot' Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond(voiceofsandiego.org)

57 points by jhunter1016 1 year ago | 71 comments

Olympic Gold Medalist Dominates the 100M at Her Kid's Sports Day Event(kottke.org)

53 points by oatsandsugar 1 year ago | 38 comments

Consistent Hash Ring(gallery.selfboot.cn)

48 points by jcartw 1 year ago | 19 comments

Memory Size Matters to PostgreSQL(pgdba.org)

48 points by PaulHoule 1 year ago | 8 comments

X-Ray Defence(lichess.org)

48 points by fzliu 1 year ago | 5 comments

Micro Wheeled legged Robot(github.com)

46 points by nill0 1 year ago | 6 comments

mIRC: Internet Relay Chat Client(mirc.com)

45 points by futurecat 1 year ago | 44 comments

Top OpenAI Catastrophic Risk Official Steps Down Abruptly(garrisonlovely.substack.com)

42 points by FinnLobsien 1 year ago | 22 comments

Show HN: HN Watercooler – listen to HN threads as an audio conversation(onetake-ai.github.io)

37 points by sebastiennight 1 year ago | 48 comments

I Cannot Be Technical(fightforthehuman.com)

35 points by mooreds 1 year ago | 33 comments

N-Params vs. Single Param(carlos-menezes.com)

35 points by carlos-menezes 1 year ago | 31 comments