Surveillance vendors caught abusing access to telcos to track people's locations

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Citizen Lab exposed two surveillance campaigns using "ghost" companies to exploit phone network vulnerabilities. The campaigns targeted individuals worldwide, using SS7 and Diameter flaws to geolocate phones.

Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite

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Honker is a SQLite extension and language bindings that add durable pub/sub, task queue, and event streams to SQLite without client polling or a daemon/broker, allowing atomic business writes and side-effect enqueues. It achieves single-digit millisecond reaction time and supports various languages including Python, Node, Rust, Go, Ruby, Bun, and Elixir.

I am building a cloud

The author is building exe.dev, a cloud platform that addresses the limitations of current cloud services, allowing users to run VMs on their own resources and manage them easily. The goal is to create a cloud that is more flexible and user-friendly, with local NVMe storage, global regions, and a simple, intuitive interface.

Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

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A spammer used AI to post three fake comments on a blog, each pretending to be a reply to the others, with a suspicious link in the middle one. The comments were spaced 3 minutes apart and came from the same IP address in the Philippines.

Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

Ursa Ag, a small Canadian manufacturer, is selling tractors with remanufactured 1990s diesel engines and no electronics for half the price of comparable machines. The company's simple, mechanical design is appealing to farmers who want to avoid modern complexity and high costs.

Your hex editor should color-code bytes

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The user discusses the benefits of using color in hex dumps to make it easier to notice patterns and details in the data. They propose a custom hex editor called hexapoda and suggest that more tools should include color-coded bytes.

Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones

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Apple fixed a bug that allowed deleted messages to be retained on iPhones due to notifications being stored in the device's database. This issue was exploited by the FBI using forensic tools, raising concerns among privacy activists about authorities accessing deleted data.

Writing a C Compiler, in Zig

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This is a series of articles I wrote while writing paella, following Nora Sandler's Writing a C Compiler. It was both an exercise to learn Zig and a way to waste time instead of looking for work, as I am currently "between jobs". I did not edit them as I collect them here outside of fixing some broken links.

Jiga (YC W21) Is Hiring

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Jiga streamlines product sourcing by connecting engineers with vetted manufacturers and automating administrative tasks. This saves time and reduces costs, allowing engineers to focus on actual work.

We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

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A Firefox-based browser vulnerability allows websites to derive a unique identifier from IndexedDB database ordering, linking activity across origins. Mozilla has fixed the issue in Firefox 150 and ESR 140.10.0.

5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens

A programmer designed a 5x6 pixel font for low-resolution displays, allowing for compact layouts and easy programming. The font takes up 350 bytes of memory and is suitable for 8-bit microcontrollers.

Isopods of the world

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Isopod Site aims to improve isopod identification through basic anatomy understanding. Selective breeding is used in the hobby to boost unique traits in new lineages.

The Onion to Take over InfoWars

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Work with the Garage Door Up

Creative people sharing their process can create invested followings and avoid pitching problems. This type of communication is like having a physical business sign, showing "I am here, working."

A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory

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I agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Scientific American and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy. We leverage third party services to both verify and deliver email. By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. Imagine you and I are playing a simple game of chance. We each throw $50 ...

Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image

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Arch Linux now has a reproducible Docker image under the "repro" tag, but pacman is not usable out of the box due to stripped pacman keys. Users must regenerate the pacman keyring before installing packages.

A True Life Hack: What Physical 'Life Force' Turns Biology's Wheels?

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A single-celled bacterium is stuck in tar-like water due to its size, but it can move using its flagellar motor, a powerful electric motor that rotates at several hundred revolutions per second. The motor is powered by the proton motive force, a driving force that powers processes in cells, and can switch directions to propel the bacterium forward or cause it to tumble.

Our newsroom AI policy

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Ars Technica uses generative AI tools in its workflow, but only with human oversight and standards. The site's editorial text is written by humans, and AI output is never treated as an authoritative source.

Email could have been X.400 times better

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Email's early history involved a complex system called X.400, which had features like recall and encryption, but was difficult to use and implement. SMTP, a simpler protocol, eventually became the standard for email, outliving X.400 due to its ease of use and rapid iteration.

Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary

https://nrehiew.github.io/blog/minimal_editing/images/overediting.png
Researchers investigated the "Over-Editing" problem where AI models rewrite code unnecessarily, making it harder for humans to review and understand. They found that reinforcement learning can improve the editing behavior of AI models, making them more faithful and minimal, without degrading their general coding ability.

Show HN: Built a daily game where you sort historical events chronologically

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Sort 6 historical events intochronological order. April 23, 2026Puzzle #9Created by Damian [email protected]

Highlights from Git 2.54

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Git 2.54 introduces new features including the experimental 'git history' command for rewriting commit history and a new way to define hooks in configuration files. Other notable changes include improved usability in 'git add -p' and 'git log -L', as well as enhancements to 'git blame' and 'git backfill'.

Website streamed live directly from a model

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A generative visual internet

An amateur historian's favorite books about the Silk Road

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A retired medical doctor shares their passion for researching the Maritime Silk Route and its significance in Indian Ocean trade, drawing from various books and experiences. Their book, Sri Lanka, Serendib, and the Silk Road of the Sea, fills a gap in knowledge about Sri Lanka's role in this trade since ancient times.

Technical, cognitive, and intent debt

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The concept of Cognitive Debt, introduced by Margaret-Anne Storey, highlights three layers of system health: Technical debt in code, Cognitive debt in people, and Intent debt in artifacts. As LLMs become more prevalent, experts like Ajey Gore and David Cassel discuss the need for verification and reorganization around judging the output of LLMs rather than solely focusing on writing code.

Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game

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The user discussed three book-length projects about classic video games: TEMPEST vs TEMPEST, IRIDIS ALPHA THEORY, and psychedelia syndrome, which delve into the mechanics and source code of the games. The books are free to download and offer in-depth analysis of the games.

Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

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Parallel agents in Zed

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Zed now allows parallel agent orchestration with a new Threads Sidebar for control and monitoring. The Threads Sidebar offers instant access to common operations and helps developers stay organized with multiple projects and agents.

Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

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Qwen3.6-27B is a 27-billion-parameter multimodal model that surpasses previous-generation models on major coding benchmarks. It is natively multimodal, supports both vision-language thinking and non-thinking modes, and is available for self-hosting and through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio API.

Books are not too expensive

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Book prices have increased over time, but when adjusted for inflation, they are actually lower than expected. Publishers face high costs and low profit margins, making it difficult to cut prices without harming authors and the publishing industry.