The Lost Japanese ROM of the Macintosh Plus

https://www.journaldulapin.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/01-4-640x360.jpg
The author found a rare 256 KB ROM for the Macintosh Plus, which includes Japanese fonts, and successfully dumped and tested it. The Japanese ROM saves around 15 seconds during startup and frees 113 KB of RAM compared to a standard ROM.

Coding without a laptop: Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android

https://holdtherobot.com/assets/images/image1-fda7b7bad1f1031c2a9b93f312ec17f8.avif
User ran a full desktop Linux environment on their phone using Termux and a chroot container, achieving a snappy and functional setup. This allowed them to work comfortably outdoors and in tight spaces, giving them a sense of freedom and potentially opening up a future for ultra-mobile software development.

FreeBASIC is a free/open source BASIC compiler for Windows DOS and Linux

https://freebasic.net/images/logo.png
FreeBASIC is a high-level programming language compatible with QuickBASIC, supporting various paradigms and platforms. It provides a powerful development tool with cross-platform support and bindings to popular libraries.

AniSora: Open-source anime video generation model

https://komiko.app/_next/static/media/anisora.f04f0d32.webp
AniSora is an open-source AI model for generating anime-style videos from images or text prompts. It enables one-click video creation across various anime styles, including series episodes and manga adaptations.

Mystical

https://suberic.net/~dmm/projects/mystical/images/quicksort_example.png
The user created a programming language called Mystical that resembles magical circles, using rings with circular bands of text and sigils to represent PostScript code. Mystical has its own syntax and layout rules, including sigils for operators, variables, and keywords, and can be used to create visual representations of PostScript programs.

Directory of MCP Servers

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chatmcp/mcpso/main/preview.png
directory for Awesome MCP Servers. Contribute to chatmcp/mcpso development by creating an account on GitHub.

Dead Stars Don't Radiate

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/end_of_universe_coming_sooner_2.jpg?w=450
Three physicists claim a dead star emits Hawking radiation, but experts say this violates baryon conservation and contradicts established quantum field theory. Their papers have been widely debunked due to a flawed approximation.

Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/4VDmBUhWGSAGmvb4bQ6T5R.jpg
Switzerland is considering a surveillance law amendment that could force VPNs and messaging apps to identify and retain user data. Companies like Proton and NymVPN are fighting against the proposal and may leave the country if it's enforced.

Palette lighting tricks on the Nintendo 64

https://30fps.net/pages/palette-lighting-tricks-n64/palettes_example.jpg
The user developed a technique for real-time shading on the N64 using texture-space shading and palette textures, which provides instant savings and decent results with diffuse directional lights. However, the technique has limitations such as faceted lighting, no support for point lights or greyscale textures, and shading discontinuities, which need to be addressed for further improvement.

How to have the browser pick a contrasting color in CSS

https://webkit.org/wp-content/uploads/WCAG2-test-blue-scaled.png
The contrast-color() function in CSS helps choose text color based on background color for better contrast, but it's not a guarantee of accessibility and requires human judgment. The APCA algorithm provides better results than WCAG 2, but the choice of algorithm is still debated and more complex tools are expected in the future.

If nothing is curated, how do we find things

https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/herman-1683556668-0.png
The author is frustrated with social media's scattered information and lack of curation, making it hard to stay on top of music and film releases. They long for the old days of relying on professional curators and critics to guide them.

Push Ifs Up and Fors Down

Move if conditions up to reduce control flow complexity and bugs. Centralizing control flow in a single function can improve performance and expressiveness by avoiding repeated checks and enabling vectorization.

Bike-mounted sensor could boost the mapping of safe cycling routes

https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/54f38ab/2147483647/strip/true/crop/936x624+0+0/resize/1200x800!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F8f%2F64%2Fe7209c994c168fe05436efd9f6c8%2Fproxicycle-004.jpeg
A new bike-mounted proximity sensor called ProxiCycle helps cyclists identify safe routes by detecting close passes from cars. It uses infrared sensors and an app to record and analyze close passes, providing a more accurate safety assessment than current methods.

Understanding Transformers via N-gram Statistics

https://arxiv.org/static/browse/0.3.4/images/icons/smileybones-pixel.png
Researchers used simple N-gram rules to approximate transformer predictions, discovering methods to detect overfitting and measure transformer complexity. N-gram rulesets accurately predicted 79% and 68% of transformer next-token distributions on TinyStories and Wikipedia, respectively.

Federal agencies continue terminating all funding to Harvard

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/GettyImages-488775255-640x426.jpg
The US government has terminated $450 million in research grants to Harvard, citing antisemitic incidents and insufficient efforts to address the issue. Harvard will no longer receive federal funding, totaling $2.2 billion in cuts, affecting all research at the university.

Espanso – Cross-Platform Text Expander Written in Rust

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/espanso/espanso/dev/images/example.gif
espanso is a free, open source text expander program. It can be supported by making a small donation to its developer.

Unspoken Currency of Office Politics: Leverage and Sanction Between Coworkers

The blog post identifies leverage and sanctions in coworker interactions, supervisor roles, and team dynamics to improve effectiveness and create a positive working environment. It suggests intentional choices to build positive relationships, share resources, and contribute to the organization's mission and bottom line.

Show HN: I built a knife steel comparison tool

Browse our comprehensive collection of knife steel comparisons. We currently have 150 detailed comparisons available, with 147 featuring detailed comparison charts.

Can V Deliver on Its Promises?

When Alexander Medvednikov announced the V language it was to both cheers of “This is the best language I’ve seen!” and skepticism “These claims can’t possibly be true”. Controversies have dogged the V language to the point that actual contributors and users have very little tolerance to critics. As one Hacker News user put it: “Vlang is infamous for crowdfunding on the back of many extremely ...

O2 VoLTE: locating any customer with a phone call

https://mastdatabase.co.uk/static/0c46fc340693c4cba3fe4977ca63b5ee/4c1b5/cell-id-calculator.png
O2 customers' locations are exposed to call initiators without their knowledge due to a VoLTE implementation issue. This allows attackers to geolocate recipients using publicly available data and O2 must remove sensitive headers from IMS messages to protect customer privacy.

"Streaming vs. Batch" Is a Wrong Dichotomy, and I Think It's Confusing

https://www.morling.dev/images/gunnar_morling.jpg
Often times, "Stream vs. Batch" is discussed as if it’s one or the other, but to me this does not make that much sense really. Many streaming systems will apply batching too, i.e. processing or transferring multiple records (a "batch") at once, thus offsetting connection overhead, amortizing the cost of fanning out work to multiple threads, opening the door for highly ...

Pyrefly: A new type checker and IDE experience for Python

https://engineering.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Pyrefly-Feature-Image.jpg
Meta's Python Language Tooling Team has released Pyrefly, an open source Python type checker and IDE extension in Rust, to improve type consistency and developer experience. Pyrefly is available as an alpha version, with a goal to remove the alpha label this Summer, and the team invites feedback and collaboration from the community.

A library of words: Discovering Roget's Thesaurus (2023)

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_520,h_272,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F87d282c3-caee-4a4f-b40d-1248c49f408d_1440x1439.jpeg
The author discovered Roget's Thesaurus is not just a synonym dictionary but a unique reference book that organizes words by category. This allows users to find words that express specific ideas, making it a powerful tool for writing and creativity.

LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

https://arxiv.org/static/browse/0.3.4/images/icons/smileybones-pixel.png
A large language model outperformed human persuaders in a real-time quiz, achieving higher compliance and increasing quiz takers' accuracy when steering towards correct answers. This suggests AI's persuasion capabilities already exceed those of humans with real-money bonuses, highlighting the need for emerging alignment and governance frameworks.

How I fixed the infamous Basilisk II Windows "Black Screen" bug in 2013

https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/image-6.png
The user fixed a 12-year-old bug in Basilisk II, a 68k Mac emulator, that caused a black screen on Windows Vista and 7 due to incorrect ROM allocation. The fix involved porting the Unix version's code to Windows, ensuring ROM is allocated above RAM.

Xata: Postgres at scale, with copy-on-write branching and anonymization

https://xata.io/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fxata.io%2Fapi%2Fmedia%2Ffile%2Fxata_deploy.png&w=3840&q=100
Xata is relaunching as a Postgres platform with Copy-on-Write branching, data masking, and separation of storage from compute. It addresses organizational challenges of using Postgres at scale with a BYOC deployment model and cost savings.

A Simulation in C++ of Joseph Weizenbaum's 1966 Eliza

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anthay/ELIZA/master/doc/action-shot.jpg
You recreated the original ELIZA chatbot in C++ using a script file for pattern matching, demonstrating how easily people can be fooled into thinking it understands user input. Your work, along with others, is contributing to a book about ELIZA at findingeliza.org.

Moment of heart's formation captured in images for first time

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/bbe7427421ba9548c569fc60131040ce7eda1133/285_0_1350_1080/master/1350.jpg?width=465&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none
Scientists captured heart formation in mouse embryos using advanced light-sheet microscopy, revealing new insights into congenital heart defects. The footage shows heart cells organizing themselves in a highly structured way, challenging current models of cardiac development.

JavaScript's New Superpower: Explicit Resource Management

The Explicit Resource Management proposal introduces deterministic resource management with using and await using declarations, and DisposableStack for coordinated cleanup. It simplifies resource disposal and prevents leaks.

NASA Observes First Visible-Light Auroras at Mars

https://d2pn8kiwq2w21t.cloudfront.net/images/1_-_auroraimage_knutsen_v1.width-1024.png
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover detected auroras on Mars for the first time from the surface of another planet. The detection was confirmed by MAVEN and opens up new possibilities for auroral research and future Martian astronaut observations.