Hacker News on Sunday, 17 May 2026

Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools(blog.mozilla.org)

737 points by WithinReason 5 months ago | 318 comments

Mozilla Open Policy & Advocacy blog post urging UK regulators not to undermine VPNs, arguing they are essential privacy and security tools.

I don't think AI will make your processes go faster(frederickvanbrabant.com)

621 points by TheEdonian 5 months ago | 418 comments

Blog post by Frederick Vanbrabant arguing that AI is unlikely to make business processes faster.

Security researcher says Microsoft built a Bitlocker backdoor, releases exploit(techspot.com)

523 points by nolok 5 months ago | 223 comments

TechSpot news article about a researcher's claim that Microsoft built a BitLocker backdoor, with a released YellowKey exploit that bypasses encryption via USB and WinRE.

GenCAD(gencad.github.io)

418 points by dagenix 5 months ago | 115 comments

Project page for GenCAD, an MIT research model that generates CAD designs from images using transformer-based contrastive representations and diffusion priors.

I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation(github.com)

416 points by tech4bot 5 months ago | 211 comments

GitHub repository with packages, Mali drivers, overlays, and tools for running Debian Linux on an inexpensive Rockchip RK3562 Android tablet.

Show HN: Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep(github.com)

415 points by Bibabomas 5 months ago | 137 comments

GitHub repository for Semble, an open-source CPU-based code search tool and MCP server for AI coding agents combining static embeddings with BM25.

Native all the way, until you need text(justsitandgrin.im)

395 points by dive 5 months ago | 265 comments

A blog post by a longtime macOS/iOS developer arguing that native SwiftUI text handling, such as selectable Markdown chat, is immature compared to web-based stacks.

At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025(stateofsurveillance.org)

389 points by rolph 5 months ago | 284 comments

State of Surveillance news article reporting that Americans in several states are destroying Flock surveillance cameras amid backlash over the network's ties to ICE.

AI is a technology not a product(daringfireball.net)

385 points by ch_sm 5 months ago | 170 comments

John Gruber's Daring Fireball essay arguing that AI is an enabling technology rather than a product, responding to Steven Levy's Wired piece on Apple's next CEO.

AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise(thestateofbrand.com)

340 points by mooreds 5 months ago | 347 comments

An opinion article from The State of Brand arguing that AI labs are losing money on enterprise subscriptions on purpose, making those subscriptions a future cost risk for companies.

Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter(williamangel.net)

299 points by datadrivenangel 5 months ago | 255 comments

Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels(electrek.co)

286 points by celsoazevedo 5 months ago | 294 comments

I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert(medium.com)

269 points by vi_sextus_vi 5 months ago | 105 comments

WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency(nytimes.com)

243 points by zzzeek 5 months ago | 152 comments

Two EA-18 fighter jets collide at Mountain Home airshow, pilots ejected safely(idahonews.com)

229 points by ChrisArchitect 5 months ago | 233 comments

Hosting a website on an 8-bit microcontroller(maurycyz.com)

227 points by zdw 5 months ago | 19 comments

CUDA Books(github.com)

215 points by dariubs 5 months ago | 54 comments

Polypad(polypad.amplify.com)

197 points by ivank 5 months ago | 23 comments

Photo GIMP – A Patch for GIMP 3 for Photoshop Users(github.com)

178 points by SockThief 5 months ago | 150 comments

WriteUp: 16 Bytes of x86 that turn Matrix rain into sound(hellmood.111mb.de)

175 points by HellMood 5 months ago | 31 comments

Prolog Coding Horror(metalevel.at)

174 points by RohanAdwankar 5 months ago | 67 comments

Meta deletes popular 1M follower account after Kuwaiti request(twitter.com)

158 points by bhouston 5 months ago | 87 comments

VoIP brings back old-fashioned pay phones to rural Vermont (2025)(spectrum.ieee.org)

153 points by bookofjoe 5 months ago | 48 comments

Intro to TLA+ for the LLM Era: Prompt Your Way to Victory(emptysqua.re)

126 points by zdw 5 months ago | 27 comments

Growing Neural Cellular Automata(distill.pub)

123 points by pulkitsh1234 5 months ago | 12 comments

EU weighs restricting use of US cloud platforms to process sensitive gov data(osnews.com)

114 points by abdelhousni 5 months ago | 50 comments

Anyone on the Internet Can Ring Your Doorbell(abgeo.dev)

105 points by jrdres 5 months ago | 71 comments

The occasional ECONNRESET(movq.de)

104 points by zdw 5 months ago | 23 comments

Trials on veterans suggest ibogaine could provide a new treatment for PTSD(bbc.com)

101 points by bushwart 5 months ago | 112 comments

The History of ThinkPad: From IBM’s Bento Box to Lenovo’s AI Workstations(jdhodges.com)

94 points by zdw 5 months ago | 45 comments

Playing Atari ST Music on the Amiga with Zero CPU(arnaud-carre.github.io)

88 points by z303 5 months ago | 32 comments

Canada’s Bill C-22 would weaken protections on private messages(opencivics-labs.github.io)

86 points by laurex 5 months ago | 20 comments

The lasting influence of Netscape Time(thehistoryoftheweb.com)

84 points by zdw 5 months ago | 24 comments

Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning [pdf](arxiv.org)

78 points by teleforce 5 months ago | 20 comments

Design posters showcasing your country's electrical grid(github.com)

72 points by lyoncy 5 months ago | 18 comments

Porting my 3D points renderer on a ZX Spectrum 48K(github.com)

71 points by ttsiodras 5 months ago | 9 comments

Mistral's CEO: Europe has 2 years to stop becoming America's AI 'vassal state'(businessinsider.com)

69 points by LelouBil 5 months ago | 85 comments

When can the C++ compiler devirtualize a call?(quuxplusone.github.io)

69 points by lionkor 5 months ago | 51 comments

In 1979 engineer Hugh Padgham discovered "gated reverb" – by accident(producelikeapro.com)

68 points by bookofjoe 5 months ago | 23 comments

Coding on Paper(wickstrom.tech)

64 points by owickstrom 5 months ago | 18 comments

Designing an FPGA Calculator from Scratch(baltazarstudios.com)

58 points by zdw 5 months ago | 5 comments

Nim-Presto – REST API Framework for Nim Language (2024)(github.com)

54 points by TheWiggles 5 months ago | 10 comments

XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone(xslang.org)

53 points by yacin 5 months ago | 34 comments

An AI Hate Wave Is Here(axios.com)

51 points by karakoram 5 months ago | 35 comments

Grafana Labs internal source code accessed(twitter.com)

51 points by jschorr 5 months ago | 15 comments

Autoregressive next token prediction and KV Cache in transformers(medium.com)

49 points by coarchitect 5 months ago | 0 comments

Fabricked: Misconfiguring Infinity Fabric to Break AMD SEV-SNP(xca-attacks.github.io)

46 points by negura 5 months ago | 21 comments

Ksharp – k version 3 Language Interpreter in C#(github.com)

46 points by tosh 5 months ago | 12 comments

KV Cache Is Becoming the Memory Hierarchy of Inference(touchdown-labs.com)

41 points by matt_d 5 months ago | 5 comments

Tool mapping 90 companies in the photonics and CPO supply chain(leonardo-boquillon.com)

40 points by lboquillon 5 months ago | 3 comments

Don’t Outsource the Learning(addyosmani.com)

40 points by korecodes 5 months ago | 23 comments

Scientists “bottle the sun” with a liquid battery that stores solar energy(sciencedaily.com)

40 points by ndr42 5 months ago | 28 comments

Energy return in running shoes explained (2025)(runrepeat.com)

39 points by jstrieb 5 months ago | 38 comments

Agentic Trading with Safe Guardrails(github.com)

37 points by jgan0978 5 months ago | 17 comments

Handling the great code forge fragmentation(alexselimov.com)

37 points by mooreds 5 months ago | 22 comments

Ten Signs of Fascism. America has all of them(rutgerbregman.substack.com)

32 points by fredski42 5 months ago | 7 comments

The AI water issue is fake(blog.andymasley.com)

31 points by shepherdjerred 5 months ago | 13 comments

Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments(imaginaryinstruments.org)

31 points by bookofjoe 5 months ago | 5 comments

Smartmedia Card Spec Opened, available free (2000)(edn.com)

26 points by brudgers 5 months ago | 14 comments

Nostalgic Kits Central (2024)(nostalgickitscentral.com)

26 points by cf100clunk 5 months ago | 12 comments