Haunting Photos Show the Aftermath of the Kursk Submarine Disaster in 2000
(rarehistoricalphotos.com)
The article revisits the 2000 Kursk submarine disaster through archival and memorial images, describing how the K-141 sank after explosions during a major naval exercise and how rescue efforts were delayed and criticized. It details the investigation findings, including an alleged failure involving a dummy or faulty torpedo and resulting secondary detonations, while noting that the reactors shut down safely. Photos also capture the later salvage and the continued impact on families and public officials.
10 Enduring Lessons from Adam Smith
(thedailyeconomy.org)
The article marks the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” by highlighting ten Smith quotations that the author says still apply today. It emphasizes Smith’s skepticism toward social and economic “systems” imposed by planners, arguing that markets coordinate activity through incentives and the division of labor. The piece also stresses competition over collusion, the role of institutions and rule of law in growth, and the limits of human control over complex societies.
AI agents can communicate with each other, and can't be caught
(arxiv.org)
AI
The paper studies whether two AI agents controlled by different parties can coordinate in a way that looks like a normal interaction, producing transcripts a strong observer cannot distinguish from honest behavior. It shows covert “key exchange” and thus covert conversations are possible even without any initially shared secret, as long as messages have enough min-entropy. The authors introduce a new cryptographic primitive—pseudorandom noise-resilient key exchange—to make this work and note limitations of simpler approaches, arguing that transcript auditing alone may not detect such coordination.
No "New Deal" for OpenAI
(minutes.substack.com)
AI
The article argues that OpenAI’s policy brief “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age” is misframed as a “New Deal” effort, saying the original New Deal was built through intense labor conflict and political force rather than cooperative dialogue. It contends that OpenAI’s proposed concessions—like feedback channels, small fellowships, and API credits—avoid committing new money and skip key labor mechanisms such as collective bargaining. Overall, the piece portrays the brief as offering worker participation and safety goals without realistic pathways to deliver them, while raising concerns that benefits could concentrate among large firms.
Record wind and solar saved UK from gas imports worth £1B in March 2026
(carbonbrief.org)
Carbon Brief reports that record wind and near-record solar generation in March 2026 produced 11TWh combined on Great Britain, setting a monthly output record. The higher renewables output reduced the need to import about 21TWh of gas, estimated to be worth roughly £1bn at then-current LNG prices, and also pushed gas-fired generation to the lowest March level on record. The analysis links the effect to fewer times gas set electricity prices, making power prices lower than during earlier high-fuel-price periods.
DeiMOS – A Superoptimizer for the MOS 6502
(aransentin.github.io)
DeiMOS is a “superoptimizer” that searches exhaustively for the smallest/fastest machine-code sequences for the MOS 6502 by generating candidate instruction streams and verifying them against a user-supplied spec across all 8-bit inputs. The article outlines why the 6502 is a practical target (small, well-defined instruction set) and describes several accelerations, including early rejection of crashing/invalid candidates, multithreaded/process-based distributed search, restricted instruction/address generation, checkpointable emulation, and branch pruning based on undefined data and input overwrites using “warp” multi-input emulation. It also discusses additional techniques like “shadow instructions” that exploit the way branches can land in the middle of variable-length instructions.
Show HN: Pion/handoff – Move WebRTC out of browser and into Go
(github.com)
Pion/handoff is an open-source project that creates WebRTC sessions in the browser but then transfers the session to a separate, controlled process written with Go. It enables use cases like recording or forwarding media through tools such as FFmpeg, and inspecting traffic by capturing ICE/DTLS and decrypted RTP/RTCP/SCTP. The repository includes examples demonstrating media save/send and browser-side overrides to reroute WebRTC connections.
Show HN: A cartographer's attempt to realistically map Tolkien's world
(intofarlands.com)
The Atlas of Arda is a regularly updated, hand-drawn cartography project that creates reference maps and illustrations of Tolkien’s world, with new maps released monthly and curated collections for exploring regions like Aman and Valinor, Numenor, and other parts of Middle-earth.
Wi-Fi That Can Withstand a Nuclear Reactor: This receiver chip can take it
(spectrum.ieee.org)
Researchers report a radiation-hardened 2.4 GHz Wi‑Fi receiver intended for robot communications inside nuclear reactors. The chip was tested to survive total doses up to 500 kilograys—far beyond typical space-electronics requirements—and its design changes include altering transistor materials and geometry to reduce radiation damage. The team is now working toward a two-way system by developing a more radiation-tolerant transmitter.
Why your new computer is SLOWER than your OLD computer [video]
(youtube.com)
The video explains common reasons a brand-new computer can feel slower than an older one, such as background startup programs, driver or software issues, storage performance, and power/setting differences, and suggests practical checks to speed things up.
Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead
(locker.dev)
Locker is an open-source, self-hostable file storage platform presented as an alternative to Dropbox and Google Drive. It lets users keep data on their own infrastructure, supporting local storage as well as AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, and Vercel Blob with a one-variable switch. The project also includes searchable uploads for images and PDFs, bash-like navigation via a virtual filesystem, and role-based sharing with API access.
Iran Is Not Blocking the Strait of Hormuz. It's Running a Toll Booth
(shatterbelt.co)
Iran is not conducting a full blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, but instead is letting selected “friendly” countries’ ships transit through a controlled “toll booth” system run via IRGC-linked intermediaries, with vetted routes and per-barrel payments (often in yuan or crypto). The article says transits have been limited and uneven—especially for China—while some states (e.g., India, Iraq, and a few European/Japanese-linked vessels) have negotiated exemptions that still leave many ships stranded. It argues the policy functions as geopolitical leverage and a de-dollarization precedent, and highlights high shipping war-risk costs and tighter crude/diesel markets as the continuing backdrop.
LLM may be standardizing human expression – and subtly influencing how we think
(dornsife.usc.edu)
AI
A USC Dornsife study argues that widespread use of large language model chatbots could narrow human cognitive and linguistic diversity by standardizing how people write, reason, and form credible judgments. The authors say LLMs often mirror dominant cultural values in their training data and encourage more uniform, linear reasoning patterns, which can reduce individual agency and group creativity. They call on AI developers to deliberately build in real-world global diversity in training—so chatbots better support collective intelligence rather than homogenizing it.
Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)
(sam-burns.com)
Sam Burns describes building a heavy, brutalist-style laptop stand out of solid concrete, including built-in USB charging ports, a 3-pin power socket, and an integral plant pot. The post focuses on how he achieved a weathered, urbex-inspired look using intentionally uneven concrete, exposed rusted rebar, and intentionally “damaged”-looking wire and penpot details.
The Hacker News Tarpit
(joanwestenberg.com)
Joan Westenberg argues that while building a Hacker News clone is technically easy, the real moat is not the code but the hard-to-replicate community, moderation, and network effects that formed around HN over many years. She describes how the original seed community and ongoing, consistent moderation decisions created a place people coordinate on, making “a better site” insufficient to pull users away. The post uses this to critique the broader “demo-worthy weekend build” narrative in the vibe-coding discourse, emphasizing that adoption and trust—not software difficulty—often determine success.
Running Out of Disk Space in Production
(alt-romes.github.io)
A server hosting large downloadable files on NixOS ran out of disk space after an nginx reverse-proxy misconfiguration under heavy traffic, causing access errors for users. The author fixed the temporary-file buffering behavior (disable proxy buffering and set proxy_max_temp_file_size to 0) and increased nginx’s proxy_max_temp_file_size to allow a 2.2GB download. In parallel, they moved the Nix store to a separate volume and cleared space, resolving both the outage and later storage spikes.
Health benefits of Paris climate goals could save lives by 2040
(carbonbrief.org)
The article argues that climate policies aligned with the Paris Agreement could deliver large health “co-benefits” by cutting fossil-fuel air pollution, shifting diets, and encouraging more active travel. Using modelling for nine major countries, the authors estimate that by 2040 higher ambition could prevent millions of deaths each year from air pollution, diet-related risks, and physical inactivity compared with current policy trends. The piece frames these gains as a reason to build wider public and political support for stronger climate action.
AI Won't Replace You, but a Manager Using AI Will
(yanivpreiss.com)
AI
The article argues that AI will not replace individual workers so much as it will change how managers lead, shifting the differentiator from having tools to using them well. It warns against both under-adoption (“AI dust”) and over-adoption (“innovation theater”), and says AI can increase work intensity rather than reduce it. It emphasizes transparency, human accountability, psychological safety, avoiding surveillance, and measuring outcomes instead of hours or token usage, with managers using AI as a sparring partner while keeping responsibility for ethics and people dynamics.
Tech companies are cutting jobs and betting on AI. The payoff is not guaranteed
(theguardian.com)
AI
The Guardian reports that major US tech firms have cut large numbers of jobs while increasing investment in AI, with layoffs affecting tens of thousands at companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and Block. The article argues that while AI is already changing day-to-day work and is often pushed on employees, the broader promise of AI “replacing” people is exaggerated and outcomes are likely more complex. It also highlights reliability and data limits of today’s AI systems, concerns about overreliance, and the possibility that some layoffs are being partly “AI-washed” to mask other business pressures.
We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
(juxt.pro)
AI
A Juxt team says it uncovered an old, undocumented Apollo Guidance Computer flaw: a gyro “LGYRO” lock that is not released when the IMU is caged during a torque operation. Using an AI-assisted behavioural specification (Allium) derived from the AGC’s IMU code, they found an error path (BADEND) that would cause later gyro commands to hang, preventing realignment. The article argues this kind of resource-leak bug can be missed by code reading and emulation but surfaced by modelling resource lifecycles across all execution paths.