Hacker News Morning Brief: 2026-05-16
This morning’s Hacker News brief moves from AI incentives and software supply-chain risk to retro hardware, browser controls, scientific preservation, and several unusually good history-and-science reads. The common thread is infrastructure: the quiet systems behind what people can build, preserve, trust, or no longer access.
AI & Tech Policy
I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
Summary: Mitchell Hashimoto argues that some organizations have become so captured by AI enthusiasm that ordinary technical and business conversations are no longer fully rational. The visible post is not an attack on using AI tools for coding; it is a warning about institutions outsourcing judgment to model outputs and social proof. Since the source is a short social post, the supported claim is narrow but pointed: AI adoption can become a decision-making pathology when companies treat it as authority rather than assistance.
HN Discussion: Commenters drew a line between AI-assisted work and blindly accepting screenshots or generated plans as reasoning. Several predicted a future market for “AI rescue” consulting when generated systems become too tangled for teams to debug, while others reported stable big-company workflows where AI has increased shipping speed without obvious incident growth.
California bill would require patches or refunds when online games shut down
Summary: Ars Technica reports that a California bill aimed at preserving long-term access to online games has cleared the Assembly appropriations committee. The proposal would require publishers to provide an independent-play patch or refunds when server shutdowns make purchased games unusable. It responds to the practical disappearance of server-dependent games and fits the wider “Stop Killing Games” campaign for durable access after official support ends.
HN Discussion: Readers debated whether open-sourcing server code or giving meaningful shutdown notice would be more workable than a refund mandate. Developers stressed moderation and operating costs, warning that compliance burdens could make online games riskier to launch, and several commenters predicted studios would move more titles into subscription-only structures.
Show HN: Burn, baby, burn (those tokens)
Summary: Burn Baby Burn is a satirical GitHub project about wasting AI tokens to look like a highly productive, “AI-native” engineer. The creator pitches it to startups that want to show investors a large AI budget and to employees competing on token leaderboards. The joke lands because it targets a real incentive failure: measuring AI adoption by spend or usage volume rather than by useful work.
HN Discussion: Commenters treated the project as a sharp parody of workplaces that turn model consumption into a performance signal. The thread contrasted teams trying to save tokens with organizations where people might deliberately burn more of them for evaluations, and “tokenmaxxing” became shorthand for rewarding visible AI usage over output quality.
Security & Privacy
’No way to prevent this,’ says only package manager where this regularly happens
Summary: Kevin Patel’s satirical post borrows The Onion’s “No Way To Prevent This” structure to mock recurring npm supply-chain compromises. It imagines developers treating package takeovers, crypto-miner injection, remote-code execution, and emergency cloud-key rotation as unavoidable natural disasters. The article’s target is the ecosystem norm of deep, loosely vetted dependency trees maintained by strangers, especially when safer defaults and slower adoption policies are possible.
HN Discussion: The most concrete mitigation discussed was release cooldowns: delaying adoption of brand-new npm or PyPI packages because many malicious releases are removed within hours. Readers also compared npm and Python with Go and Rust, questioned whether target size or registry design matters more, and argued for safer npm defaults on developer machines.
Building a UMatrix Replacement
Summary: Tavis Ormandy describes work on a replacement for uMatrix, Raymond Hill’s deprecated browser extension for controlling site permissions and subresource requests. uMatrix gave power users a compact matrix for deciding which third-party scripts, frames, videos, fonts, and other resources a site could load. The post explains why Chrome’s Manifest V2 phase-out makes the old uMatrix/uBlock Origin path fragile and points toward constrained APIs such as declarativeNetRequest and browser policies.
HN Discussion: Many commenters argued that the practical answer is to leave Chrome for Firefox or derivatives where uBlock Origin and similar extensions still work fully. Others shared temporary Chrome flags for keeping Manifest V2 alive and pointed to alternatives such as NoScript, Brave, Ungoogled Chromium, and nuMatrix.
London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time
Summary: Reclaim The Net reports that London’s Metropolitan Police authorized live facial-recognition cameras for people attending a political demonstration in Camden. The article describes it as the first UK protest use of the technology and says drones would also operate overhead. Its framing is civil-liberties focused: surveillance previously normalized in public space is now being applied directly to protest attendance.
HN Discussion: Commenters connected the deployment to older UK tracking concerns around Oyster cards and the country’s dense CCTV network. Some focused on the specific rally organizer, while others argued that protest-surveillance safeguards should not depend on sympathy for a particular movement; prior facial-recognition pilots in Croydon also came up as context.
Tech Tools & Projects
Ploopy Bean: a trackpoint for every computer
Summary: Ploopy’s Bean Pointing Stick is a standalone TrackPoint-style mouse intended to add pointing-stick control to any setup. The device is 3D-printed, open source, fully assembled, and in preorder at 69.99 CAD. It includes four Omron D2LS-21 buttons, runs QMK, and supports VIA so users can customize it with the same tooling common in programmable keyboard communities.
HN Discussion: Commenters compared it with keyboard-integrated options such as Ultimate Hacking Keyboard modules and software mouse emulation in Kanata. The tradeoff was ergonomic: a standalone pointing stick is flexible, but some readers questioned whether it loses the main TrackPoint benefit of never moving hands away from the keyboard.
Additive Blending on the Nintendo 64
Summary: Dominic Szablewski explains why PlayStation effects such as explosions and plasma often looked brighter than comparable Nintendo 64 effects. The mechanism is additive blending, where a sprite’s color is added to the existing framebuffer so the result can only become brighter. The PlayStation GPU exposed simple clamped blend modes, while the N64’s more flexible pipeline made practical additive blending awkward because overflow handling was not as convenient.
HN Discussion: Some readers challenged the premise that PlayStation effects looked better, preferring Star Fox 64’s more restrained style. Technical replies focused on clamping and overflow artifacts, with comparisons to audio mixing where summed values must also be constrained to avoid distortion.
SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud
Summary: This post argues that much transaction-fraud detection still begins with SQL over ordinary logs rather than with exotic tooling. It presents reusable query shapes for benefit programs, credit cards, healthcare claims, e-commerce, and point-of-sale data. The first pattern is velocity: grouping recent transactions by account and time bucket to find unusually fast spending that may indicate card draining.
HN Discussion: Commenters pushed back on heuristics such as round-dollar transactions, noting that pricing and tax conventions differ by merchant and country. A larger theme was that fraud is probabilistic: SQL rules are useful signals, but they create false positives around online purchases, shared accounts, travel, and new-customer behavior when treated as final judgments.
I Bought a “Junk” PSP From Japan
Summary: Gardiner Bryant writes about buying a Japanese-market PSP listed as “junk” while revisiting first-party retro handheld hardware. The article treats the PSP as still-strong industrial design, praising its glossy futuristic slab shape and role in handheld history. The buying experiment is whether a cheap, caveat-labeled console from Japan can still be worth restoring or using compared with modern emulation handhelds.
HN Discussion: Readers shared proxy-buying experiences with Buyee and ZenMarket, including practical limits around shipping devices with batteries. A common theme was that Japanese sellers often understate condition, so “junk” can mean “old and no complaints accepted” rather than truly broken, though simple repair skills still help.
ESP-EEG is an affordable 8-channel biosensing board
Summary: The Autodidacts covers Cerelog’s ESP-EEG, an 8-channel biosensing board for hobbyist EEG, EMG, and ECG experiments. It uses Texas Instruments’ 24-bit ADS1299 analog-to-digital converter, the same core chip as the OpenBCI Cyton. The claimed advantage is cleaner signal through true closed-loop active bias at less than half the current cost of a Cyton-class setup, with software support through an OpenBCI GUI fork and Lab Streaming Layer.
HN Discussion: The thread linked back to an earlier Show HN for the same ESP32/ADS1299/OpenBCI GUI stack and caught some broken project links. Technical skepticism centered on channel count, with one commenter arguing that sub-32-channel EEG systems are mostly toys and that stacking boards creates hard clock-synchronization problems.
Show HN: Epiq – Distributed Git based issue tracker TUI
Summary: Epiq is a terminal-native issue tracker that stores project-management state in Git instead of a centralized SaaS service. Its vim-inspired ASCII interface supports keyboard navigation, filters, autocompletion, command history, and board movement from the TUI. The data model is local-first and event-sourced: changes become an immutable log, replay deterministically, and sync through Git worktrees and state branches.
HN Discussion: Commenters liked Git as a distributed database but questioned the target audience. A TUI may fit developers, while product managers and designers may need a web UI; others compared Epiq with earlier Git-backed issue trackers and warned that collaboration and synchronization pitfalls have sunk similar projects before.
Erlang/OTP 29.0
Summary: Erlang/OTP 29.0 is a major release with new features, improvements, and some incompatibilities. It adds -unsafe attributes, compiler warnings for calls to known unsafe functions, and xref support for finding unsafe calls or undocumented functions. Security defaults also changed: SSH shell and exec services are disabled by default, SFTP is no longer automatically enabled, SSL prefers the post-quantum hybrid x25519mlkem768 group, and new modules support ANSI terminal output and documentation doctests.
HN Discussion: Readers welcomed the secure-by-default SSH and SFTP changes and called out io_ansi as useful for richer Erlang CLI applications. Others used the thread to explain OTP’s role in fault-tolerant systems, while operations-minded commenters urged upgrades because recent Erlang branches have carried critical and high-severity CVEs.
Feedr v0.8.0 – a TUI RSS reader, now read the full article from your terminal
Summary: Feedr is a Rust-based terminal RSS and Atom reader, and v0.8.0 adds full-article reading inside the terminal. The project is aimed at users who want feed management, browsing, and reading in a fast command-line interface rather than a browser or hosted reader. It fits a broader pattern of rebuilding personal information tools as local TUIs with keyboard-first workflows.
HN Discussion: Commenters split on whether the terminal is a good reading surface, especially for image-heavy feeds, web comics, YouTube channels, and fixed-width text. A practical request asked for client support for Miniflux or Tiny Tiny RSS, while older readers compared the experience to Usenet in text terminals.
Web & Infrastructure
A SQL-Inspired Query Language Designed for Event Sourcing (2025)
Summary: The post introduces EventQL, a SQL-inspired language for querying event-sourced systems, originally designed for EventSourcingDB by The Native Web. It argues that event streams are not ordinary tables: events are append-only, immutable, metadata-rich, and organized through hierarchical subjects such as users, books, or orders. EventQL tries to keep SQL familiarity while supporting event-specific filtering, aggregation, transformation, and index use.
HN Discussion: The small thread focused on integration and prior art rather than syntax. One commenter asked how the language would plug into reactive workflows, and another noted that a separate database project already uses the EventQL name, which could create confusion.
Academic & Research
Research on mildew contamination affecting the sound quality of analog tapes
Summary: This npj Heritage Science article studies how mildew contamination affects the sound quality of analog tape archives. The source is an open-access research paper published on 9 May 2026, with an early-access note that the manuscript is still unedited and subject to final publication changes. Its focus is preservation science: understanding the mechanism by which biological contamination damages or alters magnetic audio media in archival collections.
HN Discussion: The compact discussion contained no visible comments, so there were no supported HN themes to summarize. The article itself suggests a narrow discussion surface around tape preservation, mildew-driven degradation, and archival sound quality, but the brief should not imply methodology debate that was not present.
How to Write to SSDs [pdf]
Summary: This PVLDB PDF, titled “How to Write to SSDs,” is database and storage-systems research about how software should issue writes to solid-state drives. The title and venue point to write-path concerns such as write amplification, latency, throughput, and the interaction between storage engines and device behavior. Since the guard pack exposes no PDF text, the safest summary is the paper’s SSD-write focus and its relevance to database engines rather than any specific benchmark claim.
HN Discussion: Commenters compared SSD write optimization with SMR hard drives, especially whether large sequential writes help across both storage types. Others saw the work as the sort of systems research that can produce new database designs or more optimized PostgreSQL behavior, with one joke that downloading the PDF itself writes to an SSD.
Orthrus-Qwen3: up to 7.8×tokens/forward on Qwen3, identical output distribution
Summary: Orthrus is a GitHub project for fast, lossless LLM inference using dual-view diffusion decoding on Qwen3 models. Its headline claim is up to 7.8 times more tokens per forward pass while preserving the original autoregressive model’s output distribution. A co-author explains that a trainable diffusion attention module is injected into each layer of a frozen Transformer, shares the KV cache, proposes 32 tokens in parallel, and lets the autoregressive head verify the longest matching prefix.
HN Discussion: The thread was small but technical, centering on why the idea had not appeared earlier and how it relates to tree-style speculative decoding tricks. The key tradeoff discussed implicitly was architectural complexity in exchange for faster inference without changing sampled outputs.
High dimensional geometry is transforming the MRI industry (2017) [pdf]
Summary: This 2017 AMS presentation argues that high-dimensional geometry and related mathematics helped transform MRI, with compressed sensing and subsampled reconstruction as central examples. The presentation is not just a technical MRI talk; it is also a case for the economic value of federally funded mathematics research. Comment context highlights the claim that relatively small annual math-research budgets can influence workflows used across millions of scans and major healthcare spending.
HN Discussion: Readers focused on the funding argument, treating the paper as evidence that basic math can produce outsized public returns. Others connected it to current high-dimensional fMRI research, compressed-sensing reconstruction posts, and alternative MRI strategies that optimize information gain rather than directly producing fixed contrast images.
Business & Industry
The Zulip Foundation
Summary: Zulip announced that Kandra Labs is being donated to a new independent nonprofit, the Zulip Foundation. Founder Tim Abbott is stepping back from full-time Zulip leadership to join Anthropic, along with three senior team members. The foundation will steward the open-source team-chat project, whose topic-based threading model is designed for many parallel conversations without the chaos of flat chat, and the post argues nonprofit ownership improves trust and fundraising options.
HN Discussion: Commenters focused on whether nonprofit stewardship protects users from ads, data-selling, and other commercial pressure. Some worried about continuity and optics because senior people are leaving for Anthropic, while users from open-source and research communities praised Zulip as better than Discord for serious discussion and later information retrieval.
ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
Summary: The source post says ABC News has taken FiveThirtyEight articles offline and redirects them to ABC’s politics page. It frames the move as a needless erasure of thousands of pages of analysis, visualization, and explanatory journalism. The claim is about archival availability rather than a new product decision: work that was previously reachable at FiveThirtyEight URLs is no longer directly accessible there.
HN Discussion: Readers criticized ABC’s brand stewardship, including Nate Silver’s reported attempt to buy back the FiveThirtyEight IP. Many mourned specific interactive explainers and visualizations on gun deaths, p-hacking, and the gut microbiome, while business-minded comments noted that FiveThirtyEight may have been much less profitable outside presidential election years.
Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they ‘drive into standing water’
Summary: CNBC reports that Waymo updated or recalled 3,800 robotaxis after a glitch allowed some vehicles to drive into standing water. The safety problem is distinguishing wet pavement from deeper water, a situation that can confuse humans as well as autonomous systems. The story is about fleet remediation through software or operational changes, not thousands of cars physically stuck in water.
HN Discussion: Commenters debated whether robotaxis need dedicated water sensors or can infer depth from machine vision, vehicle slowdown, and steering corrections. Several highlighted the fleet-learning promise of self-driving cars: once one failure mode is found, a fix can be deployed broadly to the current and future fleet.
History & Science
The bird eye was pushed to an evolutionary extreme
Summary: Quanta reports on research into how bird retinas support unusually strong visual performance without the dense blood-vessel supply seen in many vertebrate eyes. The retina is one of the body’s most energy-hungry tissues, so the avian pattern creates a biological puzzle: how to meet that demand while keeping the light path clear. The article frames bird-eye evolution as an extreme tradeoff favoring sharp, unobstructed vision despite metabolic cost.
HN Discussion: Readers focused on the tradeoff between retinal energy demand and the optical benefit of keeping blood vessels out of the visual field. Some connected the finding to vision dimming during faintness or high exertion, while another thread speculated that theropod predator ancestry may have favored unusually vision-oriented eyes.
The main thing about P2P meth is that there’s so much of it (2021)
Summary: Dynomight revisits claims that newer P2P-route methamphetamine is chemically different from older ephedrine-route meth in a way that explains worse social outcomes. The essay starts from Sam Quinones’ argument that the meth market shifted around 2017 and that P2P meth became associated with more severe mental-health and homelessness effects. Its own framing emphasizes scale and supply: the key change may be the amount of meth available, not necessarily a different molecule.
HN Discussion: Comments examined synthesis chemistry, including ephedrine reduction, multi-step P2P routes, and whether contaminants could worsen harm. Other readers widened the topic to prohibition economics, fentanyl-market parallels, addiction-treatment limits, neurodegeneration, and the difference between evidence about synthesis route and evidence about behavioral outcomes.
Naturally Occurring Quasicrystals
Summary: John Carlos Baez surveys the tiny set of quasicrystals known to have formed outside laboratories. Quasicrystals have ordered but non-repeating structures, analogous to Penrose tilings, and appear in nature only under exotic conditions. The Khatyrka meteorite yielded the first three natural examples and is unusual for containing metallic aluminum, likely from an ultra-high-velocity asteroid collision; other examples involve lightning near a downed power cable and material from the Trinity atomic test site.
HN Discussion: Readers shared visualizations and references, including an HD recreation of the article’s animation and Paul Steinhardt’s book about the hunt for natural quasicrystals. The thread also branched into exotic materials from nuclear explosions and other strange natural ordered structures, such as paracrystalline viruses.
England Runestones
Summary: The Wikipedia entry catalogs runestones associated with England, mostly organized by Scandinavian regions such as Uppland, Södermanland, Västmanland, Småland, Västergötland, and Scania. Its structure is an inventory of individual inscriptions by catalog identifier rather than a single narrative article. The subject is material evidence for Viking Age travel, commemoration, and contact between Scandinavia and England, with related examples also listed outside Sweden.
HN Discussion: The visible discussion was sparse, but one commenter used the stones to think about Viking economic and cultural history. That comment asked why the Viking Age expanded so suddenly and later receded, shifting attention from inscriptions themselves to the structural conditions behind Scandinavian voyages.
The nuclear-physics infrastructure behind PET scans
Summary: Los Alamos National Laboratory traces how nuclear science developed for fission work also enabled biomedical isotope production and modern medical imaging. The article explains isotopes as atoms with the same proton count but different neutron counts, giving them different masses or radiation emissions while often preserving chemical behavior. Those properties make stable and radioactive isotopes useful as tracers and probes in living systems, connecting Manhattan Project-era infrastructure to PET scans.
HN Discussion: The small thread focused on a chemistry nuance: isotopes do not always behave exactly the same chemically. One commenter noted that the approximation works well for heavy atoms but is less true for hydrogen, where added neutrons can noticeably change chemical behavior.
Microscale Thermite Reaction
Summary: Harvard’s Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations describes a safer microscale version of the thermite reaction for teaching chemistry. Two rusty iron balls, one wrapped in aluminum foil, are struck together so the collision supplies activation energy. The reaction reduces iron oxide with aluminum to produce aluminum oxide, iron, and heat, but the setup limits it to sparks and light rather than a large thermite burn.
HN Discussion: Commenters mixed curiosity with safety awareness, joking about aluminum powder for rust removal while explicitly saying not to try it. One practical question asked whether the foil-covered ball also needs to be rusty, and several readers shared childhood memories of less controlled thermite experiments.
The day the Pintupi Nine entered the modern world (2014)
Summary: The BBC recounts the 1984 encounter with the Pintupi Nine, an Aboriginal family living a traditional nomadic life in Western Australia’s Gibson Desert. The article says they had been unaware of European arrival in Australia and unfamiliar with cars or clothing when they entered wider Australian society. It focuses especially on Yukultji, the youngest member, as a living link to lifeways around Lake Mackay and the desert country between the Gibson and Great Sandy deserts.
HN Discussion: The visible discussion centered on documentary memory rather than argument over the article. One commenter recalled Malcolm Douglas visiting Pintupi people and searching for someone who returned to desert nomadism, with details about old watering holes and cached millstones for grinding seeds into bread.
Other
NYT and Vaping: How to Lie by Saying Only True Things (2022)
Summary: Gwern’s 2022 essay critiques New York Times vaping coverage as an example of misleading readers without relying on explicit falsehoods. The mechanism is selective truth: accurate claims can still distort when important context is omitted, emphasized oddly, or arranged to create a false impression. The topic sits between public-health communication, media incentives, and risk comparison around vaping and nicotine policy.
HN Discussion: Commenters largely treated the essay as a strong close reading, with one joking that Gwern posts leave little to nitpick. Others broadened the point to public-health credibility and to the general rhetorical pattern of using true but selectively framed statements to support a preferred policy or funding outcome.