Middle-aged man trading cards go viral in rural Japan town
tokyoweekender.com — News & Opinion Entertainment MIDDLE-AGED, 1
Show HN: Lux – A luxurious package manager for Lua
mrcjkb.dev — It’s time Lua got the ecosystem it deserves! LUX, 2
Show HN: Browser MCP – Automate your browser using Cursor, Claude, VS Code
browsermcp.io — If you want to automate actions on a website, like repeatedly fill out a form, you normally can't do it with AI apps like Cursor or Claude because they don't have access to a web browser. With Browser MCP, you can connect AI apps to your browser so they can automate tasks on your behalf. BROWSER, 3
20 years of Git
gitbutler.com — Twenty years ago, Git was born. How did this unlikely "information manager" take over the world? GIT, 4
Beyond Quacking: Deep Integration of Language Models and RAG into DuckDB
arxiv.org — arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. BEYOND, 5
What Was Quartz?
zachseward.com — "It's impossible to kill a media brand," Jim Spanfeller told me on my first day working for him, as we sat in his corner office. He had just bought the business news organization, Quartz, that I had spent the past decade building and, most recently, trying desperately to save from oblivion. So I was inclined to believe him. WHAT, 6
Fifty Years of Open Source Software Supply Chain Security
acm.org — In March 1972, the United States Air Force started a review of a Honeywell Multics system to understand whether it could be used in secure environments. The report was issued in mid-1974 and concluded that Multics, while not secure, was better than its peers and might be a reasonable starting point for a secure system.23 The report raised the potential of adding a backdoor (it was called a "trap door") to an innocent system call. When passed a specific, very unlikely input, the system call allowed reading or writing an arbitrary word of kernel memory. That tiny change would completely undermine the security of the system, and the report investigated the mechanics of how such a change might be made and hidden. FIFTY, 7
Scaffold Level Editor
littlepolygon.com — On the latest Nightshift Galaxy weekly dev stream I demonstrated the specialized level editting tool I’m building inside the Unreal Level Editor that I’m calling Scaffold. SCAFFOLD, 8
Hasochism: The pleasure and pain of dependently typed Haskell programming [pdf] (2013)
strath.ac.uk — HASOCHISM, 9
PiDP-1, or the rebirth of an old machine
hackaday.io — In other words, we increased the number of PDP-1s ever produced by 10% in two days :-) PIDP-1, 10
Decoding the 90s: Cryptography in Early Software Development (2023)
botanica.software — Reversing the first stage - 4 bytes to 4 printable characters DECODING, 11
A Supermarket Bag and a Truckload of FOMO
julik.nl — The day was nearing to a close. The sun has already set, but that Friday evening in Amsterdam was still warm. Unusually warm, in fact, for those late days in March – as if spring decided to bless my piligrimage, for that piligrimage was not jovial. SUPERMARKET, 12
Show HN: Minimal MCP server in Go showcasing project architecture
news.ycombinator.com — I'm relatively new to Go, but recently got interested in how MCP servers work. I started thinking about what the architecture of such a project might look like, and decided to build a minimalist version as an experiment. MINIMAL, 13
The Troll Hole Adventure
bluerenga.blog — When Kenneth Lochner was hired by Dartmouth away from Montana State College as a programmer in 1964, he had been working in computers for four years. Lochner in particular had been teaching FORTRAN and had been having a miserable time, not due to FORTRAN itself, but due to student experiences in using punch cards: TROLL, 14
Rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia
wordpress.com — On many Unix-based operating systems, rsync is a command line tool for transferring and synchronizing files on a computer, either between storage attached directly to the computer or between another computer located elsewhere on a network. The rsync command line tool has long been included on macOS, but Apple has provided the last version of rsync 2.x (rsync 2.6.9, released in November 2006) and did not update rsync past that even though rsync 3.x was released. Why not? It has to do with the version of the GNU General Public License (GPL) open source license that rsync 2.x and 3.x were released under, with rsync 2.x being released under the GPLv2 license and rsync 3.x being released under the GPLv3 license. Without going in-depth into the background legal issues, the reason for not providi... RSYNC, 15
In the 1980s we also downloaded software from TV
newslttrs.com — Explore with me two fascinating techniques for encoding software in analogue TV signals 1980S, 16
Glamorous Toolkit
gtoolkit.com — Each problem about your system is special. And each problem can be explained through contextual development experiences. Glamorous Toolkit enables you to build such experiences out of micro tools. Thousands of them ... per system. It's called Moldable Development. GLAMOROUS, 17
Show HN: Uncurl.dev – Convert curl commands to a shareable, executable UI
news.ycombinator.com — Hey HN, UNCURL.DEV, 18
A startup doesn't need to be a unicorn
substack.com — I’m new to Substack—this is my first post. STARTUP, 19
Circling the Good
nybooks.com — Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, and Moral Progress CIRCLING, 20
Benchmarking LLM social skills with an elimination game
github.com — A multi-player tournament benchmark that tests LLMs in social reasoning, strategy, and deception. Players engage in public and private conversations, form alliances, and vote to eliminate each other BENCHMARKING, 21
W.G. Sebald and the Politics of Melancholy
newrepublic.com — W.G. Sebald’s premature death from a heart attack, in December 2001, at 57—months after the publication of his novel Austerlitz propelled him to the height of his literary fame—has left his readers wanting more, and ever since, his publishers have increasingly delved deeper into his oeuvre for posthumous releases. Six full-length books have already appeared in English since his death, and now, 23 years after his death, we have the seventh—and perhaps last: Silent Catastrophes: Essays. W.G, 22
Mass grave of Roman soldiers found under Vienna sports field
gizmodo.com — Sometime between the mid-first century and early second century CE, Roman legionaries clashed with Germanic fighters near the Danube River in a furious battle. Almost two thousand years later, gruesome evidence of the bloody event has come to light. MASS, 23
Deterministic simulation testing for async Rust
s2.dev — DETERMINISTIC, 24
Why Catullus continues to seduce us
newyorker.com — Was it something to do with blow jobs? Incredulous, I looked again at page 82 of my Latin textbook, then over to the entry in the dictionary; then once more at 82. From the bottom of the page, the word I’d been puzzling over all day seemed to be leering back at me. Until that moment, “Two Centuries of Roman Poetry” had struck me as harmless enough: a collection of excerpts from the major Latin poets, pitched to the reading level of an intermediate college Latin student—which is what I happened to be that evening in the early autumn of 1979, when I learned what the word really meant and it dawned on me that there might be more to Roman verse than philosophical musing, pastoral idylls, and heroic derring-do. WHY, 25
DeepMind program finds diamonds in Minecraft without being taught
nature.com — You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar DEEPMIND, 26
We asked camera companies why their RAW formats are all different and confusing
theverge.com — A universal open-source format exists, but only a handful of cameras use it. ASKED, 27
The Mathematics of Crochet
wordpress.com — I remember thinking at school when will I ever in my “real life” use maths. Well much to my utter surprise I’ve come to the stark realisation that there is a link between mathematics and crochet. Yes its true… In fact, crochet patterns have an underlying mathematical structure — the pattern created by the regular presence or omission of stitches is the very essence of this art form. The similarities to Base2 math, with its series of 0s and 1s, are obvious. That is to say, a present stitch is like a “1”, and a missing stitch is like a “0”. Crochet has been used to illustrate shapes in hyperbolic space that are difficult to reproduce using other media or are difficult to understand when viewed two-dimensionally. MATHEMATICS, 28
Charging electric vehicles 5x faster in subfreezing temps
umich.edu — Study: Enabling 6C fast charging of Li-ion batteries at sub-zero temperature via interface engineering and 3D architectures (DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2025.101881) CHARGING, 29
A Multiwavelength Look at Proxima Centauri's Flares
centauri-dreams.org — by Paul Gilster | Apr 1, 2025 | Exoplanetary Science | 4 comments MULTIWAVELENGTH, 30
Foundry (YC F24) Is Hiring ycombinator.com
Great Question (YC W21) Is Hiring Applied AI Engineers ycombinator.com
Thunder Compute (YC S24) is hiring a GPU systems engineer ycombinator.com