WorldGen – Text to Immersive 3D Worlds
The article explores Meta's research on 3D world generation using generative AI, aiming to create more realistic and diverse virtual environments for applications like gaming, architecture, and entertainment.
The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
The article discusses how web browsers can be used to uniquely identify users through techniques known as 'browser fingerprinting.' It explains the various methods employed, the potential privacy implications, and measures users can take to mitigate against such tracking.
We Induced Smells With Ultrasound
The article explores the fascinating world of the olfactory system, examining how our sense of smell works, the importance of smell in our daily lives, and the latest research on the link between smell and memory, emotion, and cognition.
Show HN: Forty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delay
This started as a reaction to a conversational trope. Despite being a tranquil place, even conversations at my yoga studio often start with, "Can you believe what's going on right now?" with that angry/scared undertone.
I'm a news avoider, so I usually feel some smug self-satisfaction in those instances, but I wondered if there was a way to satisfy the urge to doomscroll without the anxiety.
My hypothesis: Apply a 40-year latency buffer. You get the intellectual stimulation of "Big Events" without the fog of war, because you know the world didn't end.
40 years creates a mirror between the Reagan Era and today. The parallels include celebrity populism, Cold War tensions (Soviets vs. Russia), and inflation economics.
The system ingests raw newspaper scans and uses a multi-step LLM pipeline to generate the daily edition:
OCR & Ingestion: Converts raw pixels to text.
Scoring: Grades events on metrics like Dramatic Irony and Name Recognition to surface stories that are interesting with hindsight. For example, a dry business blurb about Steve Jobs leaving Apple scores highly because the future context creates a narrative arc.
Objective Fact Extraction: Extracts a list of discrete, verifiable facts from the raw text.
Generation: Uses those extracted facts as the ground truth to write new headlines and story summaries.
I expected a zen experience. Instead, I got an entertaining docudrama. Historical events are surprisingly compelling when serialized over weeks.
For example, on Oct 7, 1985, Palestinian hijackers took over the cruise ship Achille Lauro. Reading this on a delay in 2025, the story unfolded over weeks: first they threw an American in a wheelchair overboard, then US fighter jets forced the escape plane to land, leading to a military standoff between US Navy SEALs and the Italian Air Force. Unbelievably, the US backed down, but the later diplomatic fallout led the Italian Prime Minister to resign.
It hits the dopamine receptors of the news cycle, but with the comfort of a known outcome.
Stack: React, Node.js (Caskada for the LLM pipeline orchestration), Gemini for OCR/Scoring.
Link: https://forty.news (No signup required, it's only if you want the stories emailed to you daily/weekly)
How to Spot a Counterfeit Lithium-Ion Battery
The article explores the growing problem of counterfeit lithium-ion batteries, which pose serious safety risks and economic challenges. It highlights the difficulties in detecting these fake batteries and the efforts by industry and regulators to address this issue.
TIL: `satisfies` is my favorite TypeScript keyword
The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy
The article explores the third part of Mozilla's Cycle, discussing the company's commitment to transparency, collaboration, and continuous improvement in its software development process. It highlights Mozilla's efforts to foster a healthy open-source community and maintain the principles of the open web.
$1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux
This article chronicles the author's journey in resolving persistent audio issues on their Linux system, exploring various troubleshooting steps and configurations to achieve a stable and functional sound setup.
A Reverse Engineer's Anatomy of the macOS Boot Chain and Security Architecture
The article provides an in-depth analysis of the security architecture of the macOS boot chain, revealing the various layers of protection and the role of hardware-based security features in ensuring the integrity and authenticity of the boot process.
Pixel Art Tips for Programmers
This article provides 5 tips for programmers to create effective pixel art, including using a limited color palette, focusing on shapes and silhouettes, considering lighting and shadows, using dithering techniques, and practicing regularly to improve skills.
Show HN: Build the habit of writing meaningful commit messages
Too often I find myself being lazy with commit messages. But I don't want AI to write them for me... only i truly know why i wrote the code i did.
So why don't i get AI to help me get that into words from my head?
That's what i built: smartcommit asks you questions about your changes, then helps you articulate what you already know into a proper commit message. Captures the what, how, and why.
Built this after repeatedly being confused 6 months in a project as to why i made the change i had made...
Would love feedback!
NTSB report: Decryption of images from the Titan submersible camera [pdf]
The article provides a detailed factual report on an underwater camera used during an investigation, including technical specifications, functionality, and analysis of the recorded footage. It presents the findings and conclusions of the specialist's examination of the camera and its role in the overall investigation.
Windows ARM64 Internals: Deconstructing Pointer Authentication
The article explores the internals of Windows on ARM64 architecture, focusing on the implementation of pointer authentication, a security feature that helps mitigate control-flow hijacking attacks by verifying the integrity of function pointers. It provides a detailed technical analysis of how pointer authentication works in the Windows ARM64 environment.
Tektronix equipment has been used in many movies and shows
The article explores the prominent use of Tektronix oscilloscopes in various movies and television shows, highlighting their iconic status and frequent appearance in scientific, technological, and dramatic settings across different eras of popular media.
China reaches energy milestone by "breeding" uranium from thorium
https://archive.is/DQpXM
https://www.stdaily.com/web/English/2025-11/17/content_43298...
Germany to classify date rape drugs as weapons to ensure justice for survivors
Germany plans to classify date rape drugs as weapons, aiming to ensure justice for survivors and strengthen penalties for perpetrators. The move is part of efforts to address the issue of sexual assaults facilitated by the use of such substances.
Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study
A recent study found that children who get their first smartphone before age 13 are more likely to experience worse mental health outcomes, such as increased anxiety, depression, and decreased life satisfaction, compared to those who receive a smartphone later.
Agent design is still hard
The article discusses the challenges in building artificial agents, such as the difficulty in capturing the complexity of human behavior and decision-making, the need for better understanding of human cognition, and the limitations of current AI techniques in replicating the adaptability and versatility of human intelligence.
Depot (YC W23) Is Hiring a Staff Infrastructure Engineer
Depot, a Y Combinator company, is seeking a Staff Infrastructure Engineer to join their team. The role involves designing, building, and scaling Depot's cloud infrastructure to support the company's growth.
The realities of being a pop star
The article explores the realities of being a pop star, including the intensive work, public scrutiny, mental health challenges, and the importance of maintaining a genuine connection with fans despite the pressures of the industry.
Gwern's "Stem Humor" Directory
The article explores the role of humor in mathematics, discussing how mathematicians have long used humor as a tool for conveying complex ideas, fostering collaboration, and maintaining morale in the face of challenging work.
Digital echoes: open bus behavior on the compact Macintosh
The article discusses the author's experience with the Compact Mac OpenBus, a hardware and software solution that allows users to use older Macintosh computers as modern workstations. It highlights the project's progress, technical details, and the author's personal insights on the challenges and benefits of reviving legacy hardware.
Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege
Meta (Facebook) allegedly buried evidence about the harms of its social media platforms, according to US court filings. The filings claim that Meta was aware of the negative impacts of its products but failed to address them.
Show HN: I built a wizard to turn ideas into AI coding agent-ready specs
I created vibescaffold.dev. It is a wizard-style AI tool that will guide you from idea → vision → tech spec → implementation plan. It will generate all the documents necessary for AI coding agents to understand & iteratively execute on your vision.
How it works: - Step 1: Define your product vision and MVP - Step 2: AI helps create technical architecture and data models - Step 3: Generate a staged development plan - Step 4: Create an AGENTS.md for automated workflows
I've used AI coding tools for awhile. Before this workflow (and now, this tool), I kept getting "close but not quite" results from AI coding tools. I learned that the more context & guidance I gave these tools up front, the better results I got.
The other thing I have found with most tools that attempt to improve on "vibe coding" is that they add abstraction. To me, this just adds to the problem. AI coding agents are valuable, but they are error-prone - you need to be an active participation in their work. This workflow is designed to provide a scaffolding for these AI agents, while minimizing additional abstraction.
Would love feedback on the workflow - especially curious if others find the upfront planning helpful or constraining.
Data General History by Foster
Show HN: A tool to safely migrate GitHub Actions workflows to Ubuntu-slim runner
Hi HN!
I’ve been running GitHub Actions workflows for a while, and when GitHub announced the new ubuntu-slim runners as a cheaper alternative to ubuntu-latest, I wanted to migrate—but figuring out which workflows are safe to switch turned out to be surprisingly tedious.
You need to check for Docker usage, services, containers, step failures due to missing packages, and whether jobs rely on tools not available in the slim image.
So I built gh-slimify, a GitHub CLI extension that automates all of this. It scans your repository, detects which jobs can be migrated, flags incompatible patterns, identifies missing commands, and can update only the safe workflows with a single command.
gh extension install fchimpan/gh-slimify gh slimfy # Analyze workflows gh slimfy fix # Update only jobs that are safe to migrate
It’s open source (MIT). As a bonus: the README also includes an AI agent prompt that reproduces the same workflow-migration analysis—useful if you want to integrate the logic into an LLM agent or experiment with automated refactoring.
I’d love feedback—especially on edge cases, false positives/negatives, or patterns it should detect better.
How to see the dead
The article explores the scientific and ethical implications of a revolutionary technology that allows people to see and interact with deceased loved ones as holograms. It delves into the potential benefits and controversies surrounding this groundbreaking innovation.
TiDAR: Think in Diffusion, Talk in Autoregression
The Connectivity Standards Alliance Announces Zigbee 4.0 and Suzi
The Connectivity Standards Alliance announced the release of Zigbee 4.0 and SUZI, empowering the next generation of secure and interoperable IoT devices. Zigbee 4.0 provides enhanced security and interoperability, while SUZI enables seamless integration and management of IoT devices across platforms.
Moss Survives 9 Months in Space Vacuum
Researchers found that fragments of the moss Bryum argenteum were able to survive in the vacuum of space for over 9 months, demonstrating the remarkable resilience of certain organisms to the harsh conditions of space.