Tony Hoare has died
The article pays tribute to Tony Hoare, a pioneering computer scientist who made significant contributions to the field of programming languages, algorithms, and the theory of computation. It highlights Hoare's influential work, including the development of Quicksort and Communicating Sequential Processes, and his lasting impact on the computer science community.
Intel Demos Chip to Compute with Encrypted Data
The article discusses Intel's work on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a cryptographic technique that allows data to be processed while it remains encrypted. This could enable cloud-based computation on sensitive data without compromising security and privacy.
Rebasing in Magit
The article discusses the Magit tool for managing Git repositories in Emacs. It explains the concept of rebasing and how to use Magit's interactive rebase feature to rewrite the commit history of a Git repository.
I put my whole life into a single database
Launch HN: Didit (YC W26) – Stripe for Identity Verification
Hi HN, I’m Alberto. I co-founded Didit (https://didit.me) with my identical twin brother Alejandro. We are building a unified identity layer—a single integration that handles KYC, AML, biometrics, authentication, and fraud prevention globally. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTdcg7JCc4M&t=7s.
Being identical twins, we’ve spent our whole lives dealing with identity confusion, so it is a bit of irony that we ended up building a company to solve it for the internet.
Growing up in Barcelona, we spent years working on products where identity issues were a massive pain. We eventually realized that for most engineering teams, "global identity" is a fiction—in reality it is a fragmented mess. You end up stitching together one provider for US driver's licenses, another for NFC chip extraction in Europe, a third for AML screening, a fourth for government database validation in Brazil, a fifth for liveness detection on low-end Android devices, and yet another for biometric authentication and age estimation. Orchestrating these into a cohesive flow while adapting to localized regulations like GDPR or CCPA is a nightmare that makes no sense for most teams to be working on.
When we looked at the existing "enterprise" solutions, we were baffled. Most require a three-week sales cycle just to see a single page of documentation. Pricing is hidden behind "Contact Us" buttons, and the products themselves are often bloated legacy systems with high latency and abysmal accuracy.
We also noticed a recurring pattern: these tools are frequently optimized only for the latest iOS hardware, performing poorly on the mid-range or older Android devices that make up a huge percentage of the market. This results in a "leaky" funnel where legitimate users drop off due to technical friction and fraud goes undetected because data points are spread across disparate systems. Also, these systems are expensive, often requiring massive annual commits that price out early-stage startups.
We wanted to build a system that is accessible to everyone—a tool that works like Stripe for identity, where you can get a sandbox key in thirty seconds and start running real verifications with world-class UX and transparent pricing.
To solve this, we took the "delusional" path of full vertical integration. Rather than just wrapping existing APIs, we built our own ID verification and biometric AI models—from classification and fraud detection to OCR models for almost every language. This vertical integration is fundamental to how we handle user data. Because we own the entire stack, we control the flow of sensitive information from end-to-end. Your users' data doesn't get bounced around through a chain of third-party black boxes or regional middle-men. This allows us to provide a level of security and privacy that is impossible when you are just an orchestration layer for other people's APIs.
We believe that identity verification is one of the most critical problems on the internet, and must be solved correctly and ethically. Many people are rightfully skeptical, especially given recent news about projects that have turned identity into a tool for mass data collection or surveillance. We don’t do anything of the sort, but we also don’t want to be coerced in the future, so we facilitate data minimization on the customer side. Instead of a business asking for a full ID scan, we allow them to simply verify a specific attribute—like "is this person over 18?"—without ever seeing the document itself. Our goal is to move the industry away from data hoarding and toward zero knowledge, or at least minimal knowledge, verification.
The result of our all-in-one approach is a platform that increases onboarding rates while lowering identity costs. We’ve focused on building a high-confidence automated loop that reduces the need for manual review by up to 90%, catching sophisticated deepfakes and spoofing attempts that standard vision models miss. Our SDK is optimized for low bandwidth connections, ensuring it works on spotty 3G networks where legacy providers usually fail.
We are fully live, and you can jump into the dashboard at https://business.didit.me to see the workflow orchestration immediately. Our pricing is transparent and success-based; we don’t believe in hiding costs behind a sales call.
We’re here all day to answer any question—whether it’s about how we handle NFC verification, our approach to deepfake detection, the general ethics behind biometric data retention, or how we think about the future of identity. We’d love your brutal HN feedback on our APIs, platform, and integration flow!
Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions
The article discusses the recent changes to the Linux kernel's memory management system, with a focus on the new 'memleak' tracing feature that helps identify and fix kernel memory leaks. It also covers other improvements in areas like memory caching and page reclamation.
Meta acquires Moltbook
https://web.archive.org/web/20260310154640/https://www.axios..., https://archive.ph/igqsh
https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-acquires-ai-agent-soci...
Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
The article discusses the growing concerns around child safety on social media and the internet, highlighting the potential use of AI-based surveillance and content moderation tools to monitor and restrict access for minors. It explores the challenges and ethical considerations surrounding these emerging technologies in the digital age.
Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems
Show HN: How I Topped the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard on Two Gaming GPUs
The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to "The Office" (2009)
The article explores the 'Gervais Principle', a framework for understanding office dynamics and power structures, based on the TV series 'The Office'. It examines how different types of employees - the sociopaths, the clueless, and the losers - interact and thrive (or not) within the corporate environment.
Sending Jabber/XMPP Messages via HTTP
The article discusses the feasibility of XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) communication over HTTP, highlighting the benefits and challenges of this approach, such as improved connectivity and security, as well as potential compatibility issues with existing XMPP infrastructure.
Yann LeCun's AI startup raises $1B in Europe's largest ever seed round
The article explores the growing trend of 'quiet quitting,' where employees do the minimum required of their job and avoid going above and beyond. This shift in work culture is driven by factors like burnout, dissatisfaction with long hours, and a desire for a better work-life balance.
PgAdmin 4 9.13 with AI Assistant Panel
The article provides an overview of the Query Tool in pgAdmin 4, a popular PostgreSQL administration and development platform. It covers the key features and functionality of the Query Tool, including executing SQL queries, viewing query results, and managing database connections.
How many options fit into a boolean?
The article explores the concept of a boolean data type, which can represent two possible values, and the surprising number of options that can be represented using a series of boolean values.
Show HN: DD Photos – open-source photo album site generator (Go and SvelteKit)
I was frustrated with photo sharing sites. Apple's iCloud shared albums take 20+ seconds to load, and everything else comes with ads, cumbersome UIs, or social media distractions. I just want to share photos with friends and family: fast, mobile-friendly, distraction-free.
So I built DD Photos. You export photos from whatever you already use (Lightroom, Apple Photos, etc.) into folders, run `photogen` (a Go CLI) to resize them to WebP and generate JSON indexes, then deploy the SvelteKit static site anywhere that serves files. Apache, S3, whatever. No server-side code, no database.
Built over several weeks with heavy use of Claude Code, which I found genuinely useful for this kind of full-stack project spanning Go, SvelteKit/TypeScript, Apache config, Docker, and Playwright tests. Happy to discuss that experience too.
Live example: https://photos.donohoe.info Repo: https://github.com/dougdonohoe/ddphotos
A New Version of Our Oracle Solaris Environment for Developers
Oracle has announced a new version of its Solaris environment for developers, offering improved performance, security, and container support to help developers build and deploy applications more efficiently.
Practical Guide to Bare Metal C++
The article discusses the concept of abstract classes in C++, which define common interfaces and behaviors for derived concrete classes. It explores the role of pure virtual functions in creating abstract base classes and the flexibility they provide in object-oriented programming.
Caxlsx: Ruby gem for xlsx generation with charts, images, schema validation
Caxlsx is a Ruby library that provides an easy-to-use interface for generating Excel spreadsheets. It allows developers to create, format, and manipulate spreadsheets programmatically, without requiring knowledge of the complex Excel XML format.
LoGeR – 3D reconstruction from extremely long videos (DeepMind, UC Berkeley)
Two Years of Emacs Solo
This article chronicles the author's two-year journey of using Emacs as their sole text editor, highlighting the benefits they've experienced, such as increased productivity, customizability, and a deeper understanding of their computing environment.
RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard
The article discusses the rise of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic and explores the challenges and benefits of this shift, including increased flexibility, work-life balance, and the need for effective communication and collaboration tools.
TCXO Failure Analysis
The article discusses the failure analysis of a temperature-compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO), which is a critical component in many electronic devices. It outlines the investigation process, the root cause of the failure, and the corrective actions taken to address the issue.
Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS
The article explores the history and development of Lotus 1-2-3, a pioneering spreadsheet software that played a significant role in the early personal computer era. It delves into the software's impact on the industry and its lasting influence on modern spreadsheet applications.
No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
The article debunks the claim that it costs Anthropic $5,000 per user to provide access to the Claude AI, explaining that the actual costs are significantly lower and that the company's pricing is based on various factors, not a fixed per-user cost.
Building a Procedural Hex Map with Wave Function Collapse
The article explores a novel approach to procedurally generating complex hexagonal maps using the Wave Function Collapse algorithm. It demonstrates how this technique can be used to create visually appealing and varied landscapes for game development and other applications.
Traffic from Russia to Cloudflare is 60% down from last year
Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
The article outlines the contribution guidelines for the Redox operating system project, covering topics such as reporting issues, submitting patches, and code of conduct expectations for contributors.
Optimizing Top K in Postgres
The article discusses techniques for optimizing Top-K queries, which are used to retrieve the top K elements from a set based on a certain criteria. It explores methods like early stopping, approximation, and parallelization to improve the performance of such queries and make them more efficient.
JSLinux Now Supports x86_64
JSLinux is a web-based virtual machine that allows users to run various Linux distributions directly in their web browser, providing an interactive and portable computing experience.