Hacker News on Wednesday, 20 May 2026

An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry(openai.com)

1339 points by tedsanders 5 months ago | 968 comments

OpenAI announcement that one of its models disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry, with links to the proof and companion remarks.

Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE(alqst.org)

1002 points by giuliomagnifico 5 months ago | 427 comments

ALQST article reporting that Meta has blocked human rights organizations' accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension(bleepingcomputer.com)

985 points by Timofeibu 5 months ago | 430 comments

BleepingComputer news article reporting that GitHub confirmed a breach of about 3,800 internal repositories via a malicious VSCode extension.

Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment(lesnumeriques.com)

886 points by healsdata 5 months ago | 700 comments

Les Numériques article (French) reporting that 130 million Europeans will move to a fully sovereign European payment system from 2026, reducing reliance on Visa and Mastercard.

Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier(qwen.ai)

651 points by kevinsimper 5 months ago | 257 comments

Qwen team blog post announcing Qwen3.7-Max, a large language model focused on long-horizon autonomous agent execution.

Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit(fire.org)

632 points by ceejayoz 5 months ago | 405 comments

FIRE news post announcing a $835,000 settlement for a Tennessee man jailed 37 days over a Trump meme, following a First Amendment lawsuit.

Flipper One Tech Specs(docs.flipper.net)

485 points by gregsadetsky 5 months ago | 161 comments

Flipper documentation page listing the technical specifications of the in-development Flipper One device, with an annotated hardware diagram.

Google Declaring War on the Web(tante.cc)

470 points by cdrnsf 5 months ago | 303 comments

A blog post on tante.cc (Smashing Frames) arguing that Google's recent moves amount to declaring war on the open web.

Everything in C is undefined behavior(blog.habets.se)

459 points by lycopodiopsida 5 months ago | 598 comments

Personal blog post arguing that nobody can write correct C or C++ because nearly all code triggers undefined behavior, and that the languages are outdated.

Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension(blog.railway.com)

431 points by 0xedb 5 months ago | 244 comments

Railway's incident report on its May 19, 2026 outage caused by the suspension of its Google Cloud Platform account.

Map of Metal(mapofmetal.com)

402 points by robin_reala 5 months ago | 147 comments

Map of Metal is an interactive site that charts the history and subgenres of heavy metal music, shown here on its splash screen with a link to buy prints.

Saying goodbye to asm.js(spidermonkey.dev)

397 points by eqrion 5 months ago | 150 comments

SpiderMonkey blog post announcing that asm.js optimizations are disabled by default as of Firefox 148, with plans to remove the code entirely.

Apparently Google hates us now(twitter.com)

392 points by zeitg3ist 5 months ago | 204 comments

X post from Pokémon Central saying its Italian Pokémon wiki has been almost entirely deindexed by Google, showing 541K pages not indexed versus 11 indexed.

Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers(github.com)

389 points by kageroumado 5 months ago | 94 comments

GitHub repository for Phosphene, an open-source video wallpaper engine for macOS Tahoe built by reverse engineering Apple's WallpaperExtensionKit.

SpaceX S-1(sec.gov)

360 points by cachecow 5 months ago | 279 comments

SpaceX's Form S-1 registration statement filed with the U.S. SEC on May 20, 2026, for its initial public offering.

FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive(fivethirtyeightindex.com)

347 points by ChocMontePy 5 months ago | 78 comments

A searchable index of 21,350 FiveThirtyEight.com articles preserved by the Internet Archive, listed by date, title, and byline.

Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame(bbc.com)

334 points by ranit 5 months ago | 151 comments

BBC Future article on how 1950s Japanese cedar and cypress planting programs led to widespread pollen allergies across Japan today.

My two-part desk setup (2025)(arslan.io)

326 points by James72689 5 months ago | 200 comments

Fatih Arslan's blog post describing how he split one long desk into a digital work side and an analog side for reading, writing, and LEGO with his kids.

DOS Zone(dos.zone)

321 points by rglover 5 months ago | 73 comments

DOS Zone is a website offering a large collection of classic DOS and retro PC games playable online in the browser, including on mobile and offline.

Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back(bbc.com)

319 points by tigerlily 5 months ago | 199 comments

BBC Future article by Thomas Germain on how people manipulate Google's AI search results and how Google is quietly countering it.

College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos(tomshardware.com)

278 points by iancmceachern 5 months ago | 256 comments

Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200(twitter.com)

262 points by aurareturn 5 months ago | 300 comments

The Letter S, by Donald Knuth (1980) [pdf](gwern.net)

255 points by bambax 5 months ago | 49 comments

A Wayland Compositor in Minecraft(modrinth.com)

250 points by Jotalea 5 months ago | 59 comments

GitHub Compromised(twitter.com)

247 points by claaams 5 months ago | 89 comments

Colorado Amended SB051 (Age Verification Bill) to Exclude Open Source Projects(legiscan.com)

202 points by ki4jgt 5 months ago | 64 comments

sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library(spader.zone)

201 points by dboon 5 months ago | 183 comments

Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI(techcrunch.com)

195 points by wapasta 5 months ago | 143 comments

Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling(beyondplastics.org)

182 points by theanonymousone 5 months ago | 133 comments

Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)(usni.org)

181 points by thnaks 5 months ago | 100 comments

Anna's Archive Hit with $19.5M Default Judgment and Global Domain Takedown Order(torrentfreak.com)

176 points by iamnothere 5 months ago | 138 comments

Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing(science.org)

157 points by Timofeibu 5 months ago | 130 comments

SBCL: the ultimate assembly code breadboard (2014)(pvk.ca)

152 points by yacin 5 months ago | 8 comments

Learnings from 100K lines of Rust with AI (2025)(zfhuang99.github.io)

151 points by pramodbiligiri 5 months ago | 164 comments

Infomaniak transitions to a foundation model to protect user data privacy(news.infomaniak.com)

147 points by darktoto 5 months ago | 40 comments

Why is Inkwell stuck in review(manton.org)

142 points by speckx 5 months ago | 46 comments

OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon(wsj.com)

139 points by louiereederson 5 months ago | 295 comments

Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success(pacifichorticulture.org)

129 points by mooreds 5 months ago | 34 comments

Wi-Wi is wireless time sync at 1 nanosecond(jeffgeerling.com)

128 points by Brajeshwar 5 months ago | 32 comments

Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?

122 points by srameshc 5 months ago | 68 comments

Formal Verification Gates for AI Coding Loops(reubenbrooks.dev)

115 points by pyrex41 5 months ago | 27 comments

The quadratic sandwich(fedemagnani.github.io)

113 points by cpp_frog 5 months ago | 11 comments

Node.js 26.0.0 (Now with Temporal)(nodejs.org)

113 points by aarestad 5 months ago | 36 comments

Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)(horses.extension.org)

106 points by thunderbong 5 months ago | 40 comments

Starship's Twelfth Flight Test(spacex.com)

99 points by pantalaimon 5 months ago | 88 comments

Silk: Open-source cooperative fiber scheduler(github.com)

98 points by animetyan 5 months ago | 15 comments

The first British person in space(bbc.com)

96 points by xoxxala 5 months ago | 48 comments

Neutron scattering explains why gluten-free pasta falls apart (2025)(phys.org)

89 points by layer8 5 months ago | 33 comments

Comparing an LZ4 Decompressor on Four Legacy CPUs(bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com)

87 points by tosh 5 months ago | 6 comments

America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen(danieltan.weblog.lol)

78 points by danieltanfh95 5 months ago | 38 comments

Swap tables, flash-friendly swap, swap_ops, and more(lwn.net)

77 points by mkesper 5 months ago | 2 comments

New map reveals lost roads of the Roman Empire(scientificamerican.com)

77 points by sohkamyung 5 months ago | 10 comments

Stable Audio 3(arxiv.org)

76 points by guardienaveugle 5 months ago | 16 comments

Testing distributed systems with AI agents(github.com)

73 points by shenli3514 5 months ago | 10 comments

India's hottest district shuts at 10 am as mercury breaches 48 C mark(hindustantimes.com)

72 points by rustoo 5 months ago | 53 comments

After Town Bans Flock, Councilmember Crashes Out, Proposes Internet, Phone Ban(404media.co)

70 points by cdrnsf 5 months ago | 51 comments

Ex-Apple engineer says Apple deliberately slows older phones via updates(macobserver.com)

70 points by neya 5 months ago | 26 comments

ArcBrush – Node-based 2D image editor(arcbrush.com)

66 points by NatKarmios 5 months ago | 18 comments

Show HN: CPU-only transcription for YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram videos(github.com)

66 points by mrkn1 5 months ago | 23 comments

Everyone Against Us (2023)(chicagomag.com)

62 points by NaOH 5 months ago | 15 comments