Hacker News Morning Brief: 2026-05-11
Here is today’s roundup from Hacker News, covering stories across technology, history, policy, security, and science. Thirty fresh items were selected from the HN front page, each with concrete article summaries and specific themes from the discussion.
History & Science
The Greatest Shot in Television: James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene
Summary: Open Culture examines James Burke’s legendary 80-second rocket launch clip from ‘Connections,’ called greatest shot in TV history. Burke narrated about liquid hydrogen and oxygen, then pointed as a real rocket launched behind him at precise countdown. The segment demonstrates meticulous pre-planning: the crew knew to start final narration 13 seconds before launch.
HN Discussion: It really grinds my gears that the uploader had to ruin the “Greatest Shot in Television” by stretching the 4:3 video to 16:9. I always love this video, and I have been a lifetime dedicated fan of James Burke, but few seem to note that the whole segment didn’t have to be timed as there is a cut shortly before the launch. The late 1970’s were the golden age of documentaries: Connections, Cosmos, Civilization, The Ascent of Man and Attenborough’s Life on Earth.
dBase: 1979-2026
Summary: Substack retrospective traces dBase from undisputed database king to collapse through litigation under Ashton-Tate. CEO Ed Esber pursued look-and-feel copyright lawsuits against customers and ran piracy audits that alienated the community. AI-powered migration now presented as an escape route for dBase users after newsgroup servers went offline in Nov 2025.
HN Discussion: I remember dBASE IV from my childhood days when my father, who had no computer background, was required to take computer training by his workplace. In 1998 I wrote a financial summary for our ERP system (EUROnet) running on MS DOS with a dBase db in the backend. One of my favourite DB systems, started with dBase III+ where our teacher made us enter the high-school library records, followed up with Clipper Summer ‘87, and shortly thereafter Clipper 5. x with it.
Guy Goma’s Accidental BBC Interview Lives on After 20 Years
Summary: New York Times reflects on Guy Goma’s accidental live BBC interview 20 years after he was mistakenly brought on air. Goma’s bewildered facial expressions and non-answers during a breaking news segment became iconic internet content. Commenters note the similarity to The IT Crowd episode Smoke and Mirrors airing around the same time.
HN Discussion: I hadn’t seen or heard of this one. The interview itself: https://www. youtube. com/watch?v=e6Y2uQn_wvc. His facial expression when the presenter was introducing ‘him’ is absolute gold!.
The people preserving the scientific practice of bird banding
Summary: The Narwhal profiles volunteers at Ontario’s Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory who monitor seasonal bird populations through banding. funding cuts threaten the broader continental conservation network that these volunteers support annually. Photo essay documents enthusiasts from around the world converging on specific locations during migration events.
HN Discussion: Limited comment activity available. Limited comment activity available.
Gode Cookery – Authentic Medieval Recipes
Summary: A long-running historical resource providing translated medieval recipes from manuscripts including A Boke of Gode Cookery. The site covers Renaissance cookery to illusion foods, entremets, and Byzantine recipes with cooking term glossaries. Content includes Chaucerian cookery analysis and historical dishes like the cockentrice—a pig sewn with a chicken’s head.
HN Discussion: Limited comment activity available. Limited comment activity available.
Eight More ‘8-Bit Era’ Microprocessors
Summary: Eight More 8-Bit Era Microprocessors - by Babbage The Chip Letter Subscribe Sign in Eight More ‘8-Bit Era’ Microprocessors Eight chips that didn’t make the cut in our last survey. the most important microprocessor designs of the 1970s and early 1980s. I did some assembly programming on the Fairchild F8 mentioned in the prequel article. The RCA-1802 was used in the COSMAC Elf computer which was described as a hobbyist project to build in a series of articles in Popular Electronics 50 years ago.
HN Discussion: I did some assembly programming on the Fairchild F8 mentioned in the prequel article. The RCA-1802 was used in the COSMAC Elf computer which was described as a hobbyist project to build in a series of articles in Popular Electronics 50 years ago. The Signetics 2650 found its way into a bunch of arcade games by lieu of British company Century Electronics.
Walking slower? Your ears, not your knees, might be the problem
Summary: Article fetch unavailable: HTTPError: HTTP Error 401: HTTP Forbidden. I walk slower and talk slower than I used to, and do both way slower than people I interact with. I find walking slowly quite difficult. I feel like I’m putting more effort to balance myself slowly and all in all it feels less stable than just “walking” at a moderate to brisk rate.
HN Discussion: I walk slower and talk slower than I used to, and do both way slower than people I interact with. I find walking slowly quite difficult. The problem isnt people’s walking speed, its people who walk unpredictably specifically with zero spacial awareness.
Tech Tools & Projects
Local AI needs to be the norm
Summary: Developers overuse cloud-hosted OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, creating fragile software dependent on network connectivity. Phone Silicon chips now have dedicated Neural Engines, yet most apps still send user data to server farms. Cloud dependencies introduce data retention questions around consent, audits, breaches, and model training.
HN Discussion: They will be, and that moment is not that far off. For me, building with open weights models sounds like the right approach — you are able to switch providers, and you can control where the server is running. Cool, well let me know when Opus 4. 5 level performance is available locally, at speeds that serve everyday use, and 100% I’m right there with you.
I’m going back to writing code by hand
Summary: A developer who built a Kubernetes dashboard entirely via AI coding sessions has archived it and is rewriting from scratch. Keeping themselves out of the coding loop produced untrusted code after 7 months and 234 commits. Humans should handle architecture and design before delegating implementation to coding agents as force multipliers.
HN Discussion: I’ve set a few rules for working with coding agents: 1. > The other change is simpler: I’m doing the design work myself, by hand, before any code gets written. Title says > back to writing code by hand But what they are doing is > doing the design work myself, by hand, before any code gets written.
Running local models on an M4 with 24GB memory
Summary: Author tests running open-weight LLMs locally on an M4 MacBook with 24GB memory for basic research and planning tasks. Models like Qwen 3. 6 Q3, GPT-OSS 20B, Devstral Small 24B fit in memory but proved unusable; Gemma 4B ran but struggled with tool use. The article walks through choosing between Ollama, llama. cpp, and LM Studio as runtimes.
HN Discussion: Having an M3 with 36 GByte I was under the assumption, that I can utilize like Qwen and similar models. Getting so close to good! I consider Gemma 4 31B (dense / no MoE), the new baseline for local models. I could have used this article before I spent the weekend arriving to the same conclusion! Same laptop, and my contrived test was having it fix 50 or so lint errors in a small vibe-coded C++ repo.
Show HN: adamsreview – better multi-agent PR reviews for Claude Code
Summary: Developer released adamsreview: a multi-lens PR review pipeline for Claude Code with deep review via Claude or Codex. The tool includes an auto-fix loop, interactive walkthrough capability, and external-finding injection. Presented as a Show HN project with GitHub repository and demo pull requests.
HN Discussion: That’s looks like a fair bit of ceremony for what it does. Limited comment activity available.
Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
Summary: The monthly Ask HN thread opens for community project sharing and new ideas discussion. Discussions include a VS Code extension controller for multi-agent workflows and a distributed instant messaging protocol modeled after email. Other projects cover AI tools for WordPress workflows and a drum-specific musical notation DSL inspired by ABC notation.
HN Discussion: I am working on a vs code extension for antigravity that will let me designate one thread as a “controller” and it can spawn and chat with multiple other agents in ag. Working on fmsg - open protocol for instant messaging, distributed by domain like email. I’m building AI tools for click based workflows, starting with wordpress sites.
PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs
Summary: PlayStation Emulator Devs Beg People To Stop Spamming AI Code Skip to content Kotaku Latest Entertainment Reviews News Tips & Guides Games Downloads Deals News PlayStation 3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It With AI Code Pull Requests Th…. ders “learn how to debug and code” instead of “generating slop that you don’t understand” AI Ai slop Emulation PlayStation By Lewis Parker Published May 10, 2026 | Comments ( 16 ) | 𝕏 Copied!. The problem is really behavioural, not the tooling. It’s starting to feel like we may need to go back to the model where you need to be invited to be able to submit code or PRs.
HN Discussion: The problem is really behavioural, not the tooling. It’s starting to feel like we may need to go back to the model where you need to be invited to be able to submit code or PRs. I recently just started using Claude/ChatGPT/China models for some PS3 homebrew work.
Business & Industry
An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs
Summary: James Shore argues AI coding agents must reduce maintenance costs proportionally to the speed gains they deliver. Every line of code carries perpetual maintenance overhead for bug fixes, dependency upgrades, and cleanup over years. Trading speed boosts for increased maintenance creates permanent indenture where productivity gains are consumed by upkeep.
HN Discussion: I feel like AI might let us model some of the things that we initially didn’t scope that led to these problems (e. Yeah, but to be honest, I sometimes just tell Claude to cleanup / refactor stuff; it finds a lot of things, discusses it with me and I approve the plan, and it churns away my tokens for some time. In my experience AI reduces maintenance costs.
First tunnel element of the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel immersed
Summary: Arup engineers report the first tunnel element successfully immersed in the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel connecting Europe to Scandinavia. At 18 kilometers, it will be the longest immersed tunnel in the world—over three times longer than San Francisco’s Transbay Tube. The $8 billion USD project involves a joint venture of Ramboll, Arup, and TEC engineers across multiple European countries.
HN Discussion: Today I learned the Transbay Tube is the longest immersed tube in the world. Very nice video explainer https://public. skyfish. com/p/sundogbaelt/2675422/70675433?pr. I’m amazed that engineers can make submerged tunnels work and that leaks don’t (literally) sink the whole plan.
Conway’s Law and Cross-Hatching
Summary: Conway’s law & cross-hatching · Will Manning Will Manning writing talks Conway’s law & cross-hatching May 6, 2026 · 6 min read I’m a believer in the strong form of Conway’s law: that the structure of any system designed by an organization is isomorphic to the…. colloquially, “you ship your org”).
HN Discussion: Limited comment activity available. Limited comment activity available.
Security & Privacy
Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
Summary: Apple and Google expand hardware attestation requiring devices to prove approved software runs. Remote attestation could ban non-corporate firmware even on jailbroken devices, locking users out of digital society. No zero-knowledge proofs used: every attestation leaves a linkable packet traceable to the device.
HN Discussion: I always say this when this topic comes up: remote attestation will be how our computing freedom dies. Requiring authorized silicon (and software) isn’t even the biggest problem here. In 1999, Intel received an absolutely massive amount of opposition when they decided to include a software-readable serial number in their CPUs, so much that they reversed the decision.
Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan
Summary: Threat actor REF6598 weaponized Obsidian’s plugin system to deliver PHANTOMPULSE, a previously undocumented Remote Access Trojan. The campaign targets financial and crypto professionals via LinkedIn and Telegram social engineering with shared vault lures. Attack chain involves spearphishing links, PowerShell scripting, bidirectional Telegram C2, and process injection.
HN Discussion: Obsidian CEO here. There is a major update coming soon for plugin security. I really like Obsidian. I use it every day and I don’t use any community plugins because the permissions aren’t up to snuff. > The victim is prompted to enable the “Installed community plugins” synchronization feature.
Nuke All Routers
Summary: GitHub - maxbrito500/esp32-c5-deauth: A deauth with nuker for 2. 4Ghz and 5Ghz controlled by BLE with Android app · GitHub Skip to content Navigation Menu Toggle navigation Sign in Appearance settings Platform AI CODE CREATION GitHub Copilot Write better code…. 11w [0] should protect against this, right? That’s mandatory for WPA3, and I’ve enabled it on my routers for WPA2 also.
HN Discussion: 11w [0] should protect against this, right? That’s mandatory for WPA3, and I’ve enabled it on my routers for WPA2 also. Limited comment activity available.
Web & Infrastructure
How Fast Does Claude, Acting as a User Space IP Stack, Respond to Pings?
Summary: Adam Dunkels benchmarks Claude responding to pings as a user-space IP protocol handler rather than traditional code. The experiment uses an LLM as network stack software instead of conventional implementations. Commenters suggest small local models or agent skills with direct IP library access would be far faster for deterministic networking.
HN Discussion: think about how much faster it would’ve been with a small local model!. That’s why LLM will eventually be used only for initial interaction between the user in their language, to prepare the data to a specialized model. Wouldn’t this be faster with an agent skill that has code?.
Lakebase architecture delivers faster Postgres writes
Summary: *,:after,:before{—tw-border-spacing-x:0;—tw-border-spacing-y:0;—tw-translate-x:0;—tw-translate-y:0;—tw-rotate:0;—tw-skew-x:0;—tw-skew-y:0;—tw-scale-x:1;—tw-scale-y:1;—tw-pan-x: ;—tw-pan-y: ;—tw-pinch-zoom: ;—tw-scroll-snap-strictness:proximity;—…. This is essentially a re-explanation of Neon’s architecture as a blog post. >Without those periodic full page images in the log, the storage layer would have to replay an infinitely long chain of small deltas to reconstruct a page for a read request.
HN Discussion: This is essentially a re-explanation of Neon’s architecture as a blog post. >Without those periodic full page images in the log, the storage layer would have to replay an infinitely long chain of small deltas to reconstruct a page for a read request. So, the general architecture described here is solid, and I support it, but I take issue with the “Lakebase” naming thing.
Academic & Research
7 lines of code, 3 minutes: Implement a programming language
Summary: Matt Might presents a 7-line Scheme interpreter for lambda calculus demonstrating the eval/apply pattern from SICP. The implementation shows how a Turing-equivalent functional language can be built in three minutes from first principles. A 100-line follow-up extends the design with top-level bindings, explicit recursion, side effects, and higher-order functions.
HN Discussion: I think it is a lovely experience just because it forces you to think about which abstractions are the correct ones. Limited comment activity available.
What’s a mathematician to do?
Summary: career - What’s a mathematician to do? - MathOverflow Skip to main content Stack Exchange Network Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow , the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their…. From one of the answers: > mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breaths life into ideas both old and new. So I’ve got a gut feeling that math (like human languages (like programming languages)) is best learned in service of some greater end.
HN Discussion: From one of the answers: > mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breaths life into ideas both old and new. So I’ve got a gut feeling that math (like human languages (like programming languages)) is best learned in service of some greater end. > One can rewrite their books in modern language and notation or guide others to learn it too but I never believed this was the significant part of a mathematician work There’s yer problem right there.
The Struggle Is Gone
Summary: The Struggle is Gone | DogDogFish The Struggle is Gone | DogDogFish DogDogFish Home Blog About Subscribe The Struggle is Gone 10 May 2026 psychology ai When I was 18 I started studying physics at University and got my first real taste of “the struggle”. blem sheets, with a small set of data and some collection of methods, trying anything and everything to get the right answer. As an ancient one (graduated college 1981), my use of AI is very conservative: look things up. We need to seriously (or at least try to) make changes to our pedagogical processes.
HN Discussion: As an ancient one (graduated college 1981), my use of AI is very conservative: look things up. We need to seriously (or at least try to) make changes to our pedagogical processes. Think ‘all is well’ now while ‘struggling’ generations are still alive and working.
Geopolitics & War
Maryland citizens hit with $2B power grid upgrade for out-of-state AI
Summary: Maryland citizens slapped with $2 billion power grid upgrade bill for out-of-state AI data centers — state complains to federal energy regulators, says additional cost breaks ‘ratepayer protection pledge’ promises | Tom’s Hardware @font-face { font-family: “R…. It seems that big money can overrule local government regulators at will. It’s not clear from the article whether this is just datacenters — or if that is just the convenient boogeyman.
HN Discussion: It seems that big money can overrule local government regulators at will. It’s not clear from the article whether this is just datacenters — or if that is just the convenient boogeyman. I wrote a multi-page essay about this for our condo association last year.
Iran mulls taking control of all 7 cables passing through Strait of Hormuz
Summary: Article fetch unavailable: HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden. This story covers a topic in the Geopolitics & War space with limited commentary available.
HN Discussion: Limited comment activity available. Limited comment activity available.
AI & Tech Policy
A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
Summary: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5. 5 Pro | Gowers’s Weblog Gowers’s Weblog Mathematics related discussions « Group and semigroup puzzles and a possible Polymath project A recent experience with ChatGPT 5. 5 Pro We are all having to keep revising upwards our as…. s of large language models. I have just made a fairly large revision as a result of ChatGPT 5. 5 Pro, to which I am fortunate to have been given access, producing a piece of PhD-level research in an hour or so, with no serious mathematical input from me. This jives with what I’ve experienced in the brief time I had access to 5. It’s a very long post with a mix of technical (math) and philosophical sections.
HN Discussion: This jives with what I’ve experienced in the brief time I had access to 5. It’s a very long post with a mix of technical (math) and philosophical sections. A very interesting comment from Baez, I’ll just quote part of it.
System Administration
Stop MitM on the first SSH connection, on any VPS or cloud provider
Summary: Stop MITM on the first SSH connection, on any VPS or cloud provider | Cryptography, Technology | Joachim Schipper More about Cryptography A leakage-resilient MAC My MSc thesis (in cryptography) and related stuff DBLP search plugin OpenSearch plugin for Firefo…. > The technique appears to be new: I haven’t found a proper write-up of this, nor of any other provider-independent solution. A big class of attacker is nation state attackers who do not want to risk discovery.
HN Discussion: > The technique appears to be new: I haven’t found a proper write-up of this, nor of any other provider-independent solution. A big class of attacker is nation state attackers who do not want to risk discovery. It baffles me why VPS providers don’t display the fingerprints on their dashboards or expose them through the API.
Other
Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES
Summary: Satirical incident report details a supply chain cascade: a compromised npm package enables credential theft, then attacks on a Rust compression library. Malware reached 4 million developers before being accidentally patched by an unrelated cryptocurrency mining worm. Written as fiction satirizing real-world vulnerabilities in package registries and hardware security key supply chains.
HN Discussion: For anyone confused, this is (very good imo) fiction about supply-chain incidents. > Day 1, 14:47 UTC — Among the exfiltrated credentials: the maintainer of vulpine-lz4, a Rust library for “blazingly fast Firefox-themed LZ4 decompression. ” The library’s logo is a cartoon fox with su. It’s easy to be cynical because, yes, both the problems and solutions seem dead obvious in hindsight.
Shelf Source: Tom MacWright
Summary: Shelf Source: Tom MacWright | Road Less Read Skip/Return To Top Road Less Read Collections Jots • Lists • Tools Notes • Reviews • Views Pages About • Links • Sitemap Subscribe Est. Updated : 09 May 2026 Shelf Source interview with Tom MacWright: readers who talk about books on their personal sites.
HN Discussion: Limited comment activity available. Limited comment activity available.