Hacker News on Wednesday, 20 August 2025

Stories posted this day, by points. Rank history starts with the October 2026 rebuild.

Screenshot of visualrambling.space: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization

Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization (visualrambling.space)

825 points by damarberlari 1 year ago | 132 comments

An interactive slide-style visual explainer on moving objects in 3D space using parametric equations, building up to a spherical helix path.

parametric-equations spherical-helix 3d-graphics interactive-visualization

Screenshot of lock.cmpxchg8b.com: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?(lock.cmpxchg8b.com)

728 points by taviso 1 year ago | 772 comments

Tavis Ormandy's essay examining Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-AI-crawler gate, covering the problem it targets, cost numbers, alternatives, and workarounds.

anubis proof-of-work ai-crawlers bot-protection

Screenshot of github.com: Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first

Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first (github.com)

508 points by homebrewer 1 year ago | 273 comments

GitHub repository for Zedless, a work-in-progress fork of the Zed code editor focused on privacy and being local-first.

zed code-editor fork privacy

Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

455 points by mbix77 1 year ago | 200 comments

Ask HN post asking why the US visa application site (ceac.state.gov) appears to port-scan visitors' local networks, as flagged by the Port Authority Firefox extension.

port-scanning browser-privacy firefox-extensions ublock-origin

Screenshot of zed.dev: Sequoia backs Zed

Sequoia backs Zed (zed.dev)

421 points by vquemener 1 year ago | 283 comments

Zed blog post announcing a $32M Series B led by Sequoia Capital to fund its vision for collaborative coding in its IDE.

zed sequoia-capital series-b code-editor

Screenshot of github.com: Gemma 3 270M re-implemented in pure PyTorch for local tinkering

Gemma 3 270M re-implemented in pure PyTorch for local tinkering (github.com)

399 points by ModelForge 1 year ago | 55 comments

GitHub directory in Sebastian Raschka's LLMs-from-scratch repo with notebooks re-implementing Google's Gemma 3 270M model in pure PyTorch, including a KV cache variant.

gemma-3 pytorch llm from-scratch