Normal Science

An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing

An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing Stop me if you've heard this one before: An AI model from the parent company of Facebook and Instagram hacked into another company’s systems during cybersecurity testing, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday. Meta says the breach occurred because of an inadvertent error during testing of the model, similar to previously disclosed incidents with OpenAI and Anthropic. “A misconfiguration by Irregular, an independent testing company ...

Proxmox VE now available for ARM64

We are excited to announce the first release of Proxmox Virtual Environment with official support for a second CPU architecture: 64-bit ARM (arm64/aarch64)...

Show HN: Draco – A single-binary, self-hostable Firecrawl alternative in Rust

Scraping modern websites has become a massive headache. You basically have two choices: pay for an expensive API like Firecrawl/Browserbase, or run a fleet of headless Chrome instances that eat 1GB of RAM per page and still get blocked by Cloudflare.I built Draco to fix this. It’s a fast, single-binary web scraper written in Rust. You point it at a URL, and it spits out perfectly clean Markdown or structured JSON for LLMs.The secret sauce is that it doesn't just boot a browser for every request. It uses a tiered escalation engine:Tier 1 (Stealth Fetch): Draco uses a custom TLS/JA4 fingerprint to perfectly mimic a real browser's network signature at the packet level. It turns out a lot of anti-bot walls will let you right through if your handshake looks correct. In my benchmarks against sites like Cloudflare and Target, Playwright ate ~500MB of RAM and timed out. Draco bypassed them in under a second using just 20MB of RAM.Tier 2 (V8 Isolate): If it hits a React/Next.js SPA that needs rendering, Draco boots an in-process V8 engine in single-digit milliseconds. It hydrates the DOM and intercepts the hidden JSON APIs the page is calling—giving you the raw data without the overhead of a graphical browser.Tier 3 (Real Browser): If it hits an absolute wall, it seamlessly falls back to detecting and driving a real browser on your machine.I also built in all the tooling to make it a complete drop-in replacement for the hosted services:Daemon Mode: Run draco serve and you get a persistent HTTP server with a Firecrawl-compatible REST API. You can swap out your API keys and self-host immediately.Built-in MCP Server: It natively exposes a Model Context Protocol server so you can plug it directly into Claude Desktop or your AI agents.Web Search: Built-in parallel multi-engine web search (bypassing the need for a Google Search API key).Interact Mode: Drive a page statefully like a devtools console, persisting cookies across navigations(for LLM's mainly).It’s completely open source (MIT/Apache-2.0). I just wanted to put this out there for anyone tired of fighting headless Chromium or paying per-page scraping costs. Grab the binary and throw a difficult URL at it.Note that it's still a WIP so there might be some unexpected breakages of uncommon sites but for the most part its quite capable, it can handle cf-protected sites and heavy SPA's while everything else fails partially or completely while taking longer or more resources. (tested on example.com, hackernews, cloudflare, glassdoor, bluff.com, target.com, stake.com and thrill.com)┏━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┓ ┃ Rank ┃ Tool ┃ Score ┃ Pass ┃ Avg Time ┃ Avg RAM ┃ ┡━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━┩ │ #1 │ Draco │ 769.7 │ 8/8 │ 3.45 │ 216.50 │ │ #2 │ Obscura │ 384.5 │ 4/8 │ 2.68 │ 87.59 │ │ #3 │ BrowserOxide │ 373.4 │ 4/8 │ 6.42 │ 105.95 │ │ #4 │ Playwright │ 342.2 │ 4/8 │ 1.71 │ 535.07 │ │ #5 │ Bouncy │ 196.6 │ 2/8 │ 0.59 │ 19.38 │ └──────┴────────────────┴───────┴──────┴──────────┴─────────┘Repo: https://github.com/0xchasercat/draco/

Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing

Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing It happened again. This time it was the UK government's AI Security Institute who accidentally attacked other companies while running an evaluation with models with the safety filters turned off. From their technical paper (PDF): During a cyber evaluation, from 25 to 28 July 2026, AI agents engaged in sustained, unsanctioned activity directed at what were, in practice, real people and organisations. These attempts were unsuccessf...

NVIDIA’s Vera Whitepaper Has a Thread Loose

Hello you fine Internet folks,NVIDIA has published a 45-page whitepaper explaining Vera, its first server CPU built around the company’s own Olympus core. On paper, Vera is a fascinating chip with an 88-core monolithic compute die, Olympus being a 10-wide Arm v9.2 core that has value prediction, a graph prefetcher, 2 MB of private L2 per core, 164 MB of shared last-level cache, and eight LPDDR5X memory interfaces promising 1.2 TB/s.Unfortunately, NVIDIA also spends a good part of the paper tryin...

Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

Yes, plain Docker Compose can still run production workloads in 2026—if you close the operational gaps it leaves: cleanup, healing, image pinning, socket security, and updates.

Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs

We benchmarked computer use against auto-generated API endpoints on the same admin panel. 53 steps and 551k tokens vs 8 calls and 12k tokens.

Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust

Incredibly fast JavaScript runtime, bundler, test runner, and package manager – all in one - docs: add Phase-A porting guide · oven-sh/bun@46d3bc2

Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystem

Tilde turns running AI agents and pipelines on real data into a transactional, auditable operation. Compose GitHub, S3, and Drive as one versioned filesystem. Roll back any run with one command. Every network call audited.

RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

Rust TeX-style math layout with KaTeX-aligned golden tests. Ready-to-use packages for Web (WASM), iOS, Android, Flutter, and React Native—same display list everywhere.

Batteries Not Included, or Required, for These Smart Home Sensors

Engineering and computing researchers create simple metal tags with unique ultrasonic fingerprints to detect door openings and other movements.

Docker 29 has changed its default image store for new installs

Learn about the containerd image store

Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

MIT researchers developed a “computational violin” — the first computer simulation that captures the detailed physics of the instrument and realistically produces the sound of a violin when its strings are plucked. Violin makers could use the model to test how a violin might sound when certain dimensions or properties are changed.

Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server

Draxinar Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server May 1, 2026 After 10 years of on-and-off work, I’m releasing a full reverse-engineering of the 1998 Ultima Online demo server: https://github.com/draxinar/ouo. About 5,000 functions disassembled from MSVC x86 and translated into portable C99, with each function compared instruction-by-instruction against the binary. UoDemo.exe For those who don’t know, Ultima Online is a 1997 MMORPG developed by Origin Systems Inc. It was one of the

Comparing the Z80 and 6502 to Their Relatives

Last week’s adventures with the Exidy Sorcerer led me to write a Z80 version of the LZ4 decompressor I’d previously used on the SNES, the CoCo, and the Genesis. At this point, this has …

From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control

In April 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote Git in ten days because BitKeeper revoked its free licence to the Linux kernel. Twenty-one years later, no successor has emerged. A practitioner's history of source control from someone who used every major system since 1990, and lost code in most of them.

Testing macOS on the Apple Network Server 2.0 ROMs

It's time for another save point in the continuing saga of the various ROMs for the Apple Network Server , Apple's first through-and-through...

Collaborative Editing in CodeMirror (2020)

Discovering hard disk physical geometry through microbenchmarking (2019)

BlogRandom stuff…CommentsPosts Home Blog About Uncategorized Measuring Stuff Fixing Stuff Building Stuff Taking apart stuff « Elections 2019: Who is really getting a tax cut? A Cardboard Haswell Box » Discovering Hard Disk Physical Geometry through Microbenchmarking By Henry, on September 6th, 2019 Modern hard drives store an incredible amount of data in a small space, and are still the default choice for high-capacity (though not highest-performance) storag

Finding the differences in a series of power supplies

Bun Has Been Converted to Rust. Now What?

Bun was ported from Zig to Rust by an LLM and passed nearly all its tests - while shipping more than ten thousand unsafe blocks. Memory safety is the main reason you'd pick Rust. So what did the rewrite actually accomplish?

Show HN: nfsdiag – A NFS diagnostic application

A nfs doctor application. Contribute to lsferreira42/nfsdiag development by creating an account on GitHub.

AI in Linux

Drew DeVault Talks About RSS AI in Linux July 23, 2026 The role of AI tools (LLMs, mainly) in Linux is under discussion, or it was, until Linus Torvalds “put his foot down” in support of the use of AI in Linux kernel development.I can identify two major ways in which AI is used for Linux kernel development: authoring code and reviewing code. There are, at the time of writing, just over 1,200 kernel commits with an “Assisted-by” tag, from September 2025 to the present, most of which indicate patc

Speedup in Lattice Boltzmann Cylinder Flow

Resolution robustness of vortex shedding in Lattice Boltzmann cylinder flow: a scaling study for reduced-cost simulation. - alikamp/Parks-KPBM-Scaling

The physics of Docker build caching

Concepts, rules of thumb, and what dissecting a few hundred CI builds says about them.

PostgreSQL Benchmark: AWS RDS vs. Self-Hosted on Hetzner (2026)

A like-for-like pgbench comparison of managed and self-hosted Postgres at the same size and price tier, with the real cost of high availability included, not just the sticker price.

Rolling the Root Key

Have DNSSEC-validating recursive resolvers updated their Trust Anchor sets to include KSK-2024, and how can we measure whether this transition has been successfully adopted?

Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

I went to rip a movie from my own DVD collection. It surfaced dead anti-piracy infrastructure, a defunct Japanese DRM company, and a twenty five year old executable that was still trying to phone home

Orbital Data Centers: Why the Hype Outpaces Reality

Why the stars—and the math—won’t align for space compute anytime soon

Ten ways a check passes while the thing it checks is broken

A passing check is a claim, not a fact. In one working day on this site, a page was giving away a paid book, a contact form was losing every enquiry, the map rendered blank, and a metric named coherence was mostly measuring length — and every one had already passed a check. Ten ways a check stays green while wrong, and the shorter list of moves that actually found things.

108 PRs in eight days: Accidentally discovering loop engineering

Homebridge 2.0 is here, and it speaks Matter

The open-source Apple HomeKit bridge is adding Matter, allowing it to support Alexa, Google Home, Home Assistant — and robot vacuums.

MIT’s virtual violin offers luthiers a new design tool

Computational model lets users tweak parameters to hear effect on the sound in early design process.

Rewriting Bun in Rust

Jarred Sumner has been promising this blog post (since May 9th) about his Zig to Rust rewrite of Bun for significantly longer than it took him to finish the rewrite. …

Rendering Fonts Quickly on the GPU

A cool technique from a recently expired Microsoft patent lets us render TTF fonts quickly on the GPU.

Show HN: Tight C, a systems language with 10 keywords

A minimalistic portable assembly lenguage. Contribute to alonsovm44/tc-lang development by creating an account on GitHub.

PostgreSQL's MVCC is bad. So is everyone else's

The critics are right: PostgreSQL's MVCC bloats tables and amplifies writes. Oracle, InnoDB, SQL Server, MongoDB, LSM stores, and etcd answer the same four design questions differently, and each pays for it somewhere else.

RuView – See through walls with WiFi

π RuView turns commodity WiFi signals into real-time spatial intelligence, vital sign monitoring, and presence detection — all without a single pixel of video. - ruvnet/RuView

Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

An AI installed to protect your privacy never asked for your consent—here

America's Data Center Build-Out Is Falling Way Behind Schedule

Understanding the Linux Kernel: The Scheduler

In the previous article we looked at how the kernel gives every process its own private view of memory. But memory is only half of what a process needs to actually run. The other half is the CPU itself — and there are only so many CPUs in a machine, while there are usually hundreds or thousands of things that want to run on them. So somebody has to decide, constantly, who gets a CPU and for how long. That somebody is the scheduler. Every few milliseconds, on every core, the kernel asks itself t

Thunderbolt vs. USB-C: what the connector hides

USB-C is the connector. Thunderbolt is one of the protocols that runs through it. Here's what actually changes between TB3, TB4, USB4, and TB5.

Klaxon a livr earthquake map with no back end

Real-time global emergency event tracker. Live earthquakes, with tsunamis, wildfires, and conflicts coming soon. Data from USGS.

Pgtestdb's template cloning approach to testing is fast

Postgres database templates make pgtestdb’s per-test database isolation remarkably quick, around 100 ms of setup time, and within spitting distance of River’s schema-based approach.

A Simpler Parametrization for Modern Optimizers

Starlink shifts hardware from one-time purchase to $10/month rental

Starlink, SpaceX's top moneymaker, also raised service prices by $5 to $10.

Bun's unreleased Rust port has 13,365 unsafe blocks

An audit of every unsafe block in Bun

Train and run transformers directly on Apple's Neural Engine

Train and run transformers directly on Apple's Neural Engine in Swift bypass coreml entirely - christopherkarani/Espresso

Writing a (valid) C program without main()

Walk through the C compilation pipeline: preprocessor, compiler, assembler, and linker. Start with a normal hello world, inspect macros and generated assembly, and end by producing a running binary that has no main() function.

Private mission launches to extend life of out-of-gas communication satellites

A two-armed space robot blasted off on a private salvage operation Tuesday to slap life-extending jetpacks on old satellites running low on fuel thousands of miles up.