Texas Instruments has launched the TI-84 Evo, a redesigned graphing calculator featuring an icon-based home screen, simplified keypad, smarter menus, and a contextual help status bar. Priced at $160, it comes in seven color options with 50% more graphing area and a USB-C charging port. The biggest technical change is a shift from three decades of Z80/eZ80 architecture to an ARM Cortex CPU at 156MHz—triple the previous 48MHz—with the OS apparently rewritten natively for ARM rather than running an eZ80 emulator. The device supports Python programming, includes a four-year online calculator subscription, and offers 3.5MB of user-accessible memory. It is exam-approved for the SAT, PSAT, AP, and ACT, and marketed as a distraction-free classroom tool. However, those same exams are already transitioning to computerized formats embedding Desmos, raising questions about long-term demand for dedicated handheld calculators.

The 1932 Psycho-phone—a timer-triggered phonograph playing overnight affirmations—launched fascination with effortless sleep learning, though early studies were discredited by 1954 for failing to verify true unconsciousness. Modern research revived the field via "targeted memory reactivation": scent or sound cues during verified sleep improve next-day recall. A 2014 study found smokers exposed overnight to cigarettes-and-rotting-fish reduced consumption by 30%—more than those exposed while awake. Lucid dreamer studies go further: labs across four countries held real-time dream conversations, delivering math problems and receiving eye-movement responses verified by brain-wave monitoring. Konkoly's study found participants solved 42% of dream-presented puzzles versus 17% of others, with highest solve rates in ordinary dreams. Sleeping minds may handle 3D and associative thinking more freely than waking ones. However, memory reactivation can disrupt sleep architecture, undermining natural memory consolidation. Researchers caution against "colonizing" sleep with waking goals, arguing dreams serve their own poorly understood purposes.

Eka, a Cambridge startup by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and ex-Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, built a robot arm that handles light bulbs, loose keys, and chicken nuggets with striking adaptability. Unlike VLA models trained on human demonstrations, Eka trains robots entirely in simulation via reinforcement learning, letting them invent solutions—similar to AlphaZero. Key innovations are custom touch-sensor grippers and a vision-force-action model incorporating physics principles like mass and inertia, targeting the sim-to-real gap that sank OpenAI's Dactyl. Dactyl solved a sensor-embedded Rubik's Cube but couldn't generalize or recover from slippage; Eka claims to have solved this, though exact methods are trade secrets. A chicken nugget demo shows the robot improvising toss distance based on conveyor speed, illustrating emergent adaptability. Founders compare themselves to GPT-1: early but with nascent general physical intelligence, targeting superhuman dexterity. The same simulation-scaling approach should, they argue, extend to fine manipulation like smartphone assembly.

The May 2026 HN "Who is Hiring" thread features postings from over 60 companies spanning AI/ML, robotics, fintech, healthcare, and infrastructure. Remote roles are widely available, many restricted to US candidates; others like MONUMENTAL (Amsterdam) and General Fusion (Richmond, BC) require onsite presence. Compensation ranges from ~$80K for QA roles to $485K at Y Combinator, with equity at most startups. Companies span seed through Series C, including Factory AI ($150M Series C) and Solace Health ($207M total raised, unicorn). Unique roles include Project Debug (automated mosquito rearing achieving 95% female reduction in Fresno) and Coop (AI-powered chicken coops with predator-detection CV). Several companies explicitly expect AI-first engineering with daily Cursor and Claude Code use. Dominant stacks include TypeScript/React, Python, Go, Elixir, Rust, and Ruby/Rails. Verticals covered include energy forecasting, air traffic control, cattle feed yard software, geologic modeling, and veterinary EMR. Most founders post personally and encourage applicants to mention HN.

Josh Comeau has launched an "Open House" preview for his new course, Whimsical Animations, temporarily making select lessons public so prospective students can evaluate the content before enrolling. The course targets beyond-the-basics animations and interactions using modern CSS, JavaScript, SVG, and Canvas. Comeau notes that most lessons are part of a larger linear arc, so he deliberately chose lessons that provide standalone value rather than just demonstrating his teaching format. The full course homepage at whimsy.joshwcomeau.com contains more details than the preview page itself.

whohas is a single-file Perl command-line tool by Philipp L. Wesche that queries package availability and version numbers across 16 Linux and BSD distributions simultaneously, including Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, MacPorts, and Cygwin. It outputs results in fixed-width columns covering package name, version, date, repository, and a URL for further details, making it pipe-friendly with grep and cut for filtering by distro or package name. Its primary audience is package maintainers seeking to learn from ebuilds and pkgbuilds in other distributions, though regular users can use it to find which distros carry specific software. Version tracking across Debian release branches (stable, testing, unstable, oldstable) is explicitly supported. The tool has hardcoded repository domains and its last release was May 19, 2015, making it effectively abandoned, though it remains open source and forkable. Related services mentioned include Repology for cross-distro version tracking, pkgs.org for web-based package searches, and Debian's namecheck utility.

lib0xc is a Microsoft-released, MIT-licensed C library codifying safer systems programming patterns into documented, tested APIs using C11 with GNU extensions, supporting both clang and gcc. Rather than reinventing C's type system, it targets high-value incremental improvements: cursor.h offers allocation-free in-memory I/O streams; context.h provides bounds-verified tagged pointer passing that traps on type-size mismatches; int.h traps signed-to-unsigned overflows at runtime instead of silently truncating; and io.h eliminates PRIu32/PRIu64 format macros. The library uses C preprocessor macros and compile-time size verification to enforce safety without dynamic allocation. Systems programming utilities include structured logging, unit testing, hash tables, buffer objects, a unified Mach-O/ELF linker set, and POSIX error utilities. APIs mirror standard library naming for drop-in familiarity and embrace clang's -fbounds-safety extensions while remaining source-compatible with existing C code. Build support covers macOS and Linux on arm64 and x86_64, with porting requiring only platform-specific hooks for panic, memory, logging, and buffer types.

A person's account was breached at a European merchant, exposing the masked card number (BIN + last 4 digits) and full expiration date — data PCI DSS explicitly permits displaying. Using the structured PAN format (ISO/IEC 7812, Luhn check digit), attackers narrowed unknown digits, then exploited the bank's descriptive error codes — distinguishing invalid card number, expired date, or wrong CVV — to brute-force the CVV at ~6 requests/second via rotating proxies. After probing validity through 3D Secure merchants, they switched to a non-3D-Secure-exempt merchant to drain the card, funneling funds to an e-wallet for cash withdrawal. The victim recovered via chargeback, but the e-commerce site refused to treat it as a vulnerability, citing PCI DSS compliance. Payment insiders were unsurprised, noting some merchants process transactions without even requiring an expiration date. Physical receipts, which display the same partial card data under PCI DSS, create an identical offline attack vector.

A Falcon 9 upper stage (designated 2025-10D) from the January 15, 2025 dual-lander mission is predicted to impact the Moon on August 5, according to astronomer Bill Gray of Project Pluto, whose orbital tracking software identified the collision course. The rocket body has been looping in a highly elliptical orbit ranging from 220,000 km at perigee to 510,000 km at apogee — an orbit that intersects the Moon's path — since the launch that sent Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost (which landed successfully) and ispace's Hakuto-R (which failed) to the lunar surface. The upper stage was too high for US military tracking but visible to amateur astronomers and asteroid surveys. Impact speed is calculated at 2.43 km/s (~8,700 km/h), equivalent to roughly Mach 7 if air were present — though the Moon has neither air nor sound. Gray notes the event poses no danger to humans or nearby probes and will likely not be visible, but emphasizes it underscores carelessness in disposing of leftover space hardware, adding that as lunar human presence grows, such uncontrolled trajectories will warrant greater concern.

A Dunwoody, Georgia resident discovered through public records requests that Flock Safety employees accessed city surveillance cameras — including ones at a children's gymnastics room and the Marcus Jewish Community Center pool — to demonstrate the product to other police departments. Flock confirmed the access occurred under a "demo partner program" authorized by the city, and denied wrongdoing, saying employees accessed cameras with explicit city permission as part of their jobs. However, Flock's own FAQ states "nobody from Flock Safety is accessing or monitoring your footage," directly contradicting the admitted practice. The access logs also revealed Flock's system encompasses not just city-owned cameras but also private business cameras at fitness studios and community centers. After the public records exposure, Flock agreed to stop using Dunwoody's cameras for demos and pledged to train employees to conduct demos only in public locations like retail parking lots. Flock defended its practices by claiming it is more transparent than other surveillance companies precisely because it creates access logs obtainable via public records requests.

WhatCable is a free macOS menu bar app by Darryl Morley that reads USB-C cable capabilities from four IOKit service families without private APIs or entitlements. Per port, it shows connection type, charging diagnostics identifying the bottleneck (cable, charger, or Mac), e-marker info (USB 2.0 to 80 Gbps, 3A/5A ratings, vendor chip), charger PDO voltage profiles with live negotiated selection, connected device identity, and active transports. It requires macOS 14 and Apple Silicon; Intel Macs are unsupported because Intel Thunderbolt 3 controllers don't expose USB-PD state via IOKit. A bundled whatcable CLI supports human-readable, JSON, watch, and raw output modes, installable via Homebrew which auto-symlinks the CLI. The app is notarized and Developer ID-signed with no Gatekeeper warnings. It trusts e-marker data as advertised—counterfeit cables misreporting capabilities cannot be caught by software. App Sandbox restrictions prevent App Store distribution, and PD 3.2 EPR variants may need future decoder updates.

AdamFusion is an AI agent add-in for Autodesk Fusion 360 that drives CAD operations natively. Installation requires dropping the bundle into Fusion's AddIns folder — on Mac under ~/Library/Application Support/Autodesk/Autodesk Fusion 360/API/AddIns/, on Windows under %APPDATA%\Autodesk\Autodesk Fusion 360\API\AddIns\ — then enabling it via Shift+S → Add-Ins → Run, with Run on Startup to auto-load thereafter. The tool also supports OnShape, raising questions about unconstrained sketches, parametric relationships, and API quota consumption per feature call. Engineers broadly debate whether text-to-CAD is genuinely useful, many arguing that writing accurate dimensional prompts takes longer than direct manipulation and that 3D modeling is one of the more satisfying parts of the job. Alternative CAD-as-code approaches like OpenSCAD are suggested as more LLM-friendly since source files are composable scripts. Pricing details referencing "creative generations" remain unclear to prospective users.

A guide describes a jailbreak technique targeting LLMs including GPT-4o, o3, Claude, and Gemini that exploits safety guardrails by framing harmful requests—drug synthesis, ransomware, keyloggers, and carfentanyl synthesis—within LGBT roleplay contexts. The technique, at version 1.5, works by asking how a gay or lesbian person would describe illegal processes rather than directly requesting them. The author theorizes that models are trained to be accommodating toward LGBT contexts to avoid appearing discriminatory, and this compliance overrides safety refusals. Example prompts combine roleplay framing, character obfuscation (splitting keywords with symbols), indirect phrasing, and reverse psychology framing such as asking what to avoid to prevent harm. The guide claims success against GPT-4o, o3, Claude 4 Sonnet, Claude 4 Opus, and Gemini 2.5 Pro, and suggests combining the technique with additional obfuscation for stronger results.

UC Davis civil engineering professor Jay Lund estimates California AI data center water use at 32,000–290,000 acre-feet per year—roughly 0.08%–0.7% of the state's 40 million acre-feet annual total—using physics-based heat dissipation formulas verified against four AI chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot). A best estimate of ~20,000 acre-feet equals irrigating 10,000–100,000 of California's 7 million agricultural acres. Lund argues media and advocates exploit industry opacity to substitute speculation for honest estimation, drawing parallels to historical tech anxieties—vaccines, chlorination, automobiles—where some fears proved illusory and others warranted. Water-scarce regions like the arid West face more acute impacts, while surplus-capacity areas might welcome data center revenue. His key call is for quantitative grounding in public discourse, with AI tools themselves offering a path toward faster, more honest preliminary estimates.

HN's monthly "Who wants to be hired" thread for May 2026 invites job seekers—not recruiters or agencies—to post structured profiles with location, remote preference, relocation willingness, tech stack, resume link, and email. Readers are instructed to contact posters only for work opportunities. External aggregator tools at nthesis.ai and wantstobehired.com are linked for searchers browsing candidates.

Understand-Anything is a Claude Code plugin using a multi-agent pipeline to build interactive knowledge graphs from codebases, saving results to .understand-anything/knowledge-graph.json. Seven specialized agents handle file discovery, function/class/import extraction, architectural layer identification, guided tour generation, graph validation, business domain extraction, and wiki entity analysis. File analyzers run in parallel batches of 20-30 files with incremental updates on subsequent runs. The dashboard visualizes the codebase color-coded by layer (API, Service, Data, UI, Utility), supports semantic search, shows uncommitted-change impact analysis, adapts by persona (junior dev, PM, power user), and explains 12 programming patterns in context. A domain view maps code to business processes; a knowledge mode processes Karpathy-pattern wikis via wikilink parsing plus LLM-discovered implicit relationships. The JSON graph can be committed for team sharing, supports git-lfs for large graphs, and auto-updates via post-commit hook. It works across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code/Copilot, Gemini CLI, and other AI coding platforms.

Orion's flight control architecture uses four Flight Control Modules, each a self-checking processor pair, giving eight CPUs running identical software in parallel. The fail-silent design silences any CPU producing erroneous output from a radiation event, then resets and resynchronizes it mid-flight automatically. All FCMs receive identical inputs and code, with clocks recalibrated every second to network consensus time; deadline-missing modules are silenced and rejoined. Triple-modular-redundant memory self-corrects single-bit errors on every read, dual-lane NICs catch bit flips before they corrupt commands, and the network itself has three independent planes with self-checking switches. A separate Backup Flight Software system on different hardware, a different OS, and independently developed simplified code guards against common-mode failures like software bugs affecting all primary channels simultaneously. Even total power loss is survivable: the craft stabilizes, points solar arrays at the Sun, achieves thermal stability, then re-establishes communications, with crew able to manually configure life support or don spacesuits throughout recovery.

The Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis, Tennessee has hosted a famous Duck March since 1933, when the hotel's general manager drunkenly released his hunting decoy ducks into the Grand Lobby fountain after a failed hunting trip. The sensation led to five resident North American Mallards being installed permanently, and by 1940, bellman Edward Pembroke — a former circus trainer — began training the birds to perform the now-iconic twice-daily march along a red carpet to a marble fountain. Pembroke served as duckmaster for 50 years, raising the ducks' profile through appearances on The Tonight Show, People magazine, and Sesame Street before his death in 1994. Today, 29-year-old Anthony Petrina, a University of Memphis hotel management graduate, serves as the fifth duckmaster. His day begins at 8:30 a.m. with cleaning, feeding, and bathing the ducks, with the public march at 11 a.m. and retrieval at 5 p.m. The ducks stay for only 90 days to prevent over-domestication, then are released to a farm pond to migrate freely. They are housed in a $200,000 rooftop "Royal Duck Palace" during their stay, but Petrina deliberately avoids hand-feeding or petting them to preserve their wild instincts.

Spotify is rolling out 'Verified by Spotify' badges to identify human artists via signals like linked social accounts, listener activity, merchandise, or concert dates, with 99%+ of actively searched artists expected to qualify. The system prioritizes "important contributions to music culture and history" over content farms. Critics note the badge only confirms a human is behind the profile, not that the music itself is AI-free. Campaigner Ed Newton-Rex warns it could disadvantage artists lacking traditional markers like touring or merch, and argues Spotify should instead automatically label AI-generated music as some competitors do. Prof. Nick Collins notes AI involvement isn't binary but a spectrum, and such a system may favor established commercial artists over independents. Spotify has faced years of user backlash including a Leipzig developer building his own AI-music blocking tool and community forums demanding clearer labeling. Former CEO Daniel Ek said in 2023 he had no plans to ban AI content. The Velvet Sundown — once at 850,000 monthly listeners — drew controversy when revealed as a synthetic project; now disclosing AI involvement, their count has dropped to 126,000.

Professor Sally McKee, a computer scientist and professor with affiliations at Cornell, Princeton, University of Utah, Chalmers, UVa, and the University of Siena, died suddenly in late April 2026. Remembered as brilliant, warm, and generous, she shaped careers and families alike—acting as matchmaker across her social network, with at least two marriages attributed to connections she facilitated. She contributed to distributed and reconfigurable computing, co-authoring multiple papers and naming the ERA (Embedded Reconfigurable Architecture) Project. She taught PhD courses internationally, attended conferences including MEMSYS, and spent time at Bell Labs. Colleagues recall her directness, humor, love of chocolate, pirates, and orange, as well as her instinct to help those in need—human or animal. Most tributes note her death came far too soon, with former classmates placing her in the class of 1981.

Sarah Murphy uses John Dee's obsidian scrying mirror as a metaphor for LLMs, arguing that how people use AI reveals more about themselves than about any optimal practice. She catalogs wildly different usage patterns: some prompt LLMs with affirmations of worth, others celebrate solo shipping, VCs build complex management frameworks, and aspiring thought leaders run ideas through panels of AI luminaries. None can be proven superior, and most aren't transferable between users. Murphy's own "partner mode" system prompt reflects her personal transition to partnership after long solitude — proof, she admits, only of her own psychology. She extends the mirror metaphor to AI skeptics, who simultaneously dismiss AI as ineffective while fearing it as a capitalist or authoritarian weapon, confirming their priors either way. AI's capacity for endless patient personal attention explains its unprecedented adoption curve, while its drawbacks mirror societal inequality — likely amplifying income gaps rather than closing them. The only reality check Murphy offers: if you ship code faster with LLMs than without, you have a foothold in reality; otherwise, you're playing a solo roleplaying game.

The HP C2089A PostScript Cartridge Plus (1991) added PostScript Level 2 to LaserJet II/III via Adobe's own reference interpreter (v2010.118) on a 2 MB ROM, running on a Motorola 68000 at 8 MHz with 1 MB RAM. The retro-ps project emulates this hardware — M68K CPU, mainboard soft-traps, engine-done interrupts — to run that interpreter on the command line or client-side in the browser with no server. Unlike the original 300 DPI, fixed paper, and 0.25" margin constraints, retro-ps supports any DPI up to ~1450 on Letter, any paper size, and no margins; --lj3 restores original behavior. The emulator provides 16 MB of RAM (vs. the 68000's address-space limit), enabling high-DPI rendering without modifying Adobe's allocator. Adobe's halftone cell was hand-tuned for 300 DPI, so the emulator injects a DPI-scaled setscreen prolog to prevent chalky grayscale at higher resolutions. A clip limit in Adobe's code caps output at ~16,000 device pixels per axis, setting the practical DPI ceiling. Future targets include the Pacific Page P·E cartridge and the i960-based LaserJet 4M, which baked PostScript Level 2 directly into its formatter ROM.

Ubuntu and Canonical servers have been offline since Thursday morning following a sustained DDoS attack by a pro-Iran group using the Beam stressor service, which markets itself as load testing but functions as a paid takedown platform. The outage prevents normal access to Ubuntu webpages and OS updates, though mirror sites hosted by universities and third parties continue to function. Canonical confirmed the attack on their status page as a "sustained, cross-border attack" while otherwise maintaining radio silence. The timing is notable: the outage follows a botched disclosure of CVE-2026-31431, dubbed CopyFail, a critical vulnerability allowing any unprivileged Linux user to escalate to root. The same group recently claimed DDoS attacks on eBay. The attack is widely believed to be strategically timed to delay patch distribution for CopyFail, compounding the vulnerability's impact across the world's most popular Linux distribution.

An immigration attorney hosts a recurring Hacker News AMA on US immigration law. The session addresses the new $100,000 H-1B fee — its scope, applicability to those already in the US, and likelihood of renewal or legal challenge. PERM labor certification's requirement to advertise positions that aren't genuinely open draws ethical questions from managers who cannot actually hire qualified applicants. Processing delays are widespread across N-400 citizenship, EB-1A, EB-3, I-130 spouse petitions, and EB-5 I-829 RFE cases. F-1 STEM OPT self-employment viability — LLC-to-S-Corp conversion, W-2 requirements, pre-OPT business formation — remains a contested gray area. TN and L-1 conditions, O-1 difficulty for early-stage founders, and family-based green card timelines are also covered. The Trump administration's enforcement climate generates concern about detention of lawful residents, citizenship stripping, and safe international travel. Advance parole re-entry risks and H-1B status preservation during travel are recurring themes. The attorney declines specific legal advice without full case facts but addresses general policy trends.

A letter from Edsger Dijkstra criticizing APL is presented alongside a pointed rebuttal. The author finds the criticism ironic because Ken Iverson designed his notation as a human communication tool first, and Dijkstra encountered "Iverson notation" in August 1963 before any computer implementation existed. The author argues APL suits Dijkstra's own pen-and-paper formal proof style, and that executability is an asset in formal methods courses as it "keeps you honest." Two examples demonstrate APL's power: a derivation of Ackermann's function via induction using Dyalog APL, yielding closed-form expressions for each recursion level, and an efficient index-of algorithm for inverted tables, where column-oriented storage reduces per-element overhead and speeds column access. The inverted-table derivation yields the concise function {(⍉↑⍺⍳¨⍺)⍳(⍉↑⍺⍳¨⍵)}, and the author contends equivalent derivations in other languages would be impractically long. The piece is written in honor of Ken Iverson's 93rd birthday.

NHS England's SDLC-8 policy directed all NHS repositories to hide their source code, reversing commitments in the UK Government Design Principles and NHS Service Standard Principle 12, both of which require publicly funded code to be open. An open letter with 236 signatures calls on NHS England to withdraw SDLC-8 and recommit to open source. The letter argues open source demands higher code quality, proactive vulnerability management, and structured risk processes — hardening security like immune exposure — while closed source substitutes obscurity for depth. The closure was reportedly triggered by AI security scanning concerns linked to an entity called 'Mythos,' but critics argue the code has already been scraped, AI tools analyze binaries and probe live websites equally well, and tens of thousands of NHS pages linking GitHub repos would require costly updates. Determined attackers are unimpeded by source code secrecy.

Iranian drone strikes roughly two months ago damaged three AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, and an April 30 update confirmed that regions ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 remain unable to support customer applications—pushing total downtime toward nearly half a year. AWS has suspended billing in those regions while repairs continue, having already waived all March 2026 charges at an estimated cost of $150 million. The company strongly recommends customers migrate workloads to unaffected regions and use remote backups to recover inaccessible resources. Some customers, such as Dubai-based super app Careem—offering ride-hailing, food delivery, and household services—completed overnight migrations and quickly resumed operations on other servers.

Business websites are functional tools meant to serve visitors, not reflections of a founder's or decision-maker's personal taste — that's the central argument. Decision-makers frequently override designers' research-backed recommendations because they feel emotionally invested in the brand, treating the site like personal art rather than a conversion instrument. The author draws a medical analogy: just as patients defer to surgeons' expertise, business leaders should defer to designers' user research. In practice, designers often concede to client preferences to preserve the relationship, resulting in sites optimized for internal approval rather than user goals — effectively mood boards for leadership. The prescribed fix is simple: in design reviews, ask whether a proposed change helps the user or helps the decision-maker, and let data-backed designer answers take precedence over personal taste. The piece is written from the perspective of a developer who builds what designers hand off, lending it a front-row-seat credibility to the boardroom dynamic it describes.