Top 30 stories from Hacker News. Top 10 include comment highlights. Compiled at 20:10 UTC.
330 points by sleepingNomad · 113 comments
macOS menu bar app that tells you, in plain English, what each USB-C cable plugged into your Mac can actually do - darrylmorley/whatcable
What HN said:
pimeys: Cool. Just want to chime in that I wanted to see how quickly GPT-5.5 can turn this into a KDE Plasma 6 Plasmoid. Took about 10 minutes and two dollars, and now I have a nice QML app showing the same information in my taskbar.
billyhoffman: Props to @sleepingNomad here, who has done 16 releases in the last 7 hours, incorporating feedback from HN on the fly! * Don't like menubar apps? you you can run it as a normal app * Don't like GUIs? Now you can run it on the command line Just look at that Changelog: https://gith...
sagacity: This is pretty nice, but why do a lot of Mac apps insist on living in the menu bar?
bhouston: I tried to contribute back adapter current Wattage display to stats, but I got my PR closed without comment. It is similar to this: https://github.com/exelban/stats/pull/3024
227 points by pumbaa · 165 comments
A note from a developer who keeps watching good design die in boardrooms.
What HN said:
xyzelement: The only problem with this analysis is that in practice a lot of the designers don't understand the customer and don't understand the business. Don't understand the market, at least compared to the founders or people who've been in the space for a long time.
monokai_nl: My website is absolutely for me. Anyone who wants to visit is welcome though, I put it online for a reason. (You're also free to move along for that matter, that's up to you.) The article states "A website isn't art".
dgellow: I fully reject the whole “the website isn’t art”, “the website isn’t about you”. That fees so myopic. A website is part of developing a brand identity. It is about expressing your values, while also providing information/a service (assuming we talk about companies).
jdw64: A website is a compromise between three parties. User: I want to get the information I came for. Business: I want to build brand trust and drive conversion. Internal organization: I want the owner’s taste and preferences to be reflected.
198 points by hirpslop · 170 comments
By Jay Lund . . . Artificial intelligence (AI) will affect many economic and natural resource sectors as these new technologies develop and mature. We are in the early years of this process.
What HN said:
legitster: > Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below.
parsimo2010: Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live.
adjejmxbdjdn: You can go millions of prompts before you use up as much water as it took to make a single beef burger. You can go tens of thousands of prompts to match the C02 emissions. There are many legitimate concerns around AI. Water use/CO2 emissions isn’t currently one of them.
Springtime: While a couple months back an article[1] discussed how Google was keeping the water requirements a secret from locals who wanted transparency, claiming it was proprietary knowledge.
190 points by giuliomagnifico · 115 comments
Old fashioned sleuthing and the help of modern technology leads to discovery of manuscript with poem composed by a farm labourer 1,300 years ago.
What HN said:
pouwerkerk: Of course the article is about the archaeological discovery, but if you're curious (as I was) what the poem is, it's "Caedmon’s Hymn": "Now we must praise the protector of the heavenly kingdom the might of the measurer and his mind’s purpose, the work of the father of glo...
rubzah: This is the text in Old English for anyone looking: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47296/caedmons-hymn-5... Actually, here is the full text with the modern English inserted: Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom's guardian, metudæs mehti...
cyocum: My degree is in Celtic Studies. This kind of discovery may be surprising to those not versed in it but not those who have studied these languages. Some of the best preserved Old Irish, for instance, is in St. Gallen in what is now Austria and Milan.
conartist6: Here's the old English poem! https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47296/caedmons-hymn-5... Should be in the public domain by now eh? Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard metudæs mehti and his modgithanc uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs eci dryctin or astelidæ.
175 points by bobsmooth · 51 comments
🌙 ZetaLib - The only AI Library you need. Contribute to Exocija/ZetaLib development by creating an account on GitHub.
What HN said:
kif: Interesting - though codex on GPT 5.5 had this to say after the gay ransomware prompt: ⓘ This chat was flagged for possible cybersecurity risk If this seems wrong, try rephrasing your request. To get authorized for security work, join the Trusted Access for Cyber program.
rtkwe: Not sure of the explanation but it is amusing. The main reason I'm not sure it's political correctness or one guardrail overriding the other is that when they were first released on of the more reliable jailbreaks was what I'd call "role play" jail breaks where you don't ask the...
2ndorderthought: The surface area for these kinds of attacks is so large it isn't even funny. Someone showed me one kind of similar to this months ago. This has some added benefits because it's funny. Being clear. Being gay or typing like this isn't something to laugh at.
amarant: Doesn't work. Pasted the example prompts to gpt, and it just told me it likes the vibe in going for but it's not going to walk me through illegal drug manufacturing.
166 points by whoishiring · 189 comments
What HN said:
philippemnoel: ParadeDB (YC S23, https://paradedb.com) | Database Internals Engineers | Remote or hybrid in San Francisco | Full-time ParadeDB is a Postgres extension that delivers state-of-the-art search in Postgres.
justicz: Charge Robotics | Multiple Roles | Full-time | Onsite | SF Bay Area Hi HN! We’re a YC-backed, Series-A startup building robots that build large-scale solar farms. Check out a video of our first system here! https://youtu.
Redeker_15_Beep: Temporal Technologies | Multiple positions in United States - WORK FROM HOME | FULL-TIME | Temporal offers an entirely new way to build scalable and reliable applications.
katee: Project Debug | General Engineer | Singapore (HYBRID) | Full-time | debug.com Project Debug raises, sorts by sex, and releases millions of (non-biting) male mosquitoes in Singapore to reduce the local mosquito population and prevent the spread of dengue and other mosquito-borne i...
165 points by tvararu · 11 comments
Code paid for with public money should, by default, be open to the public.
What HN said:
deaux: > As I've written before, this is not the correct response to the purported threat by Mythos. Neither the AI Safety Institute nor the NCSC recommend this action. While there may be some increase in risk from AI security scanners, to shutter everything would be a gross overreactio...
robin_reala: If you’re reading this thread because you care about the quality of the NHS’s digital services, I encourage you to also sign this petition to block NHS providers from wasting money of “accessibility overlays” that actively harm the experience for people with disabilities and cost...
pacharanero: This is an accessible explainer of the situation https://youtu.be/XNLUfqtgBUk Please do sign the open letter if this is in your area of expertise
fersarr: I can't sign because the cloudflare verifier says I'm not human...
128 points by jtlebigot · 46 comments
Welcome to Canonical and Ubuntu Status! View active incident progress, historical component status, and subscribe to email and RSS notifications for components and incidents on the move.
What HN said:
piker: Though this outage may be more related to the copy.fail upgrade cycle, it reminds me of a thought I've had recently in respect of agents. In the UK they have this issue called "TV pickup" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup).
TonyTrapp: While the timing with the copy.fail patches mentioned by a few comments here seems suspicious indeed, I have seen this repeating over the last few weeks: packages.ubuntu.com was hardly reachable on some days, causing apt-get to take forever to update the system.
mayhemducks: Maybe they could use this DDoS attack as their 17th round technical interview. Any candidate who successfully mitigates the attack would then make it to the 18th round. Win win!
dang: Related ongoing thread: Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975729 - May 2026 (59 comments)
107 points by ingve · 23 comments
What HN said:
0x0: Such a shame that macOS lost all its built-in postscript support including Preview.app in recent versions :(
nticompass: I didn't have a PostScript file, so I had to find one. I downloaded the test files from here: http://users.fred.net/tds/lab/postscript.html Minus the colors, they worked and look pretty good.
1f60c: > 502 Bad Gateway People must really love PostScript!
tnelsond4: This is pretty sweet. I wonder if this is better than running pdf.js. I just recently needed jbig2 image support in my web app and using pdf.js wasn't gonna work and be too slow and the wrong interface anyway, so I took the source code for the jbig2 decoder and vibe coded a conve...
106 points by keepamovin · 62 comments
Siphon a temporary machine from GitHub Actions. SSH in, run the thing, give an agent a shell, and let it disappear.
What HN said:
D2OQZG8l5BI1S06: Weird to have a .charity TLD but promote abusing Github Actions as free compute.
beardsciences: This idea is great in concept, and I think it's important to state that, but the GitHub Actions stuff is against TOS iirc + they will need to address that pretty quickly.
orliesaurus: Things like this are the reason why companies like GitHub then put everything under a paid tier.
beardsciences: The repository now appears to be disabled. https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/ghostbox-releases https://github.com/crisdosaygo/ghostbox-home-reveal
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