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Curated cybersecurity and tech news — AI-summarized, source attributed.

open-sourcetech-culture

Why Ruby's Date Class Has Constants Named ITALY, ENGLAND, and JULIAN

Ruby's Date class exposes oddly-named constants like Date::ITALY (2299161), Date::ENGLAND, Date::GREGORIAN, and Date::JULIAN. They turn out to be Julian Day num

via Hacker News ·
tech-cultureopen-source

16 bytes of x86 that draw Sierpinski rain and play it as sound

A demoscene release at Outline 2026 packs an infinite Sierpinski fractal generator and a PC speaker synthesizer into 16 bytes of real-mode DOS assembly. The rou

via Hacker News ·
open-sourcedevops

Awesome-CUDA-Books: A Curated Reading List for GPU Programmers

A GitHub repository maintained by alternbits collects what its author claims is the most comprehensive public bibliography of CUDA programming books, organized

via Hacker News ·
aiopen-source

GenCAD turns images into editable parametric CAD programs, not just meshes

GenCAD is an image-conditional generative model that produces parametric CAD command sequences from a single rendering, yielding editable engineering models rat

via Hacker News ·
tech-culture

High-Entropy Alloys: Mixing Five-Plus Elements for Extreme Materials

High-entropy alloys (HEAs) break from the traditional metallurgy model of one or two dominant elements plus minor additions. Instead, they combine five or more

via Hacker News ·
tech-culture

How the Hindenburg Ran a Smoking Room Inside a Hydrogen Airship

The Hindenburg, despite carrying seven million cubic feet of hydrogen, had a dedicated smoking lounge on B Deck. Engineers isolated it behind a double-door airl

via Hacker News ·
open-sourcedevops

Jank gains a Clojure-aware custom IR to close the gap with the JVM

Jank, a native Clojure dialect compiled through LLVM, has shipped its own intermediate representation tailored to Clojure semantics. Until now, the project lean

via Hacker News ·
open-sourcedevops

Mercurial at 20: Why the VCS Git Fans Wrote Off Is Still Shipping

A FOSDEM 2026 talk takes on the widespread assumption that Mercurial died when Git won the distributed version control wars in the 2010s. The reality is messier

via Hacker News ·
open-sourcetech-culture

Prolog's Coding Horrors: Why Impure Constructs Break Logic Programs

A Prolog advocate catalogs the language features that quietly sabotage programs written in it. The core sin is reaching for impure, non-monotonic constructs lik

via Hacker News ·
tech-cultureopen-source

Searchable archive collects 333 hours of astronaut Q&A footage

A new web project, Ask an Astronaut, aggregates 333 hours of question-and-answer footage with astronauts into a single searchable archive hosted at issinrealtim

via Hacker News ·
aidevops

Semble: CPU-only code search MCP server cuts agent token use by 98%

Semble is an open-source code search library aimed at coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. Instead of having an agent grep for keywords and read e

via Hacker News ·
tech-culturepolicy

Tesla quietly abandons Solar Roof after hitting 0.3% of its weekly install target

Nearly a decade after Elon Musk unveiled the Solar Roof in 2016 with a goal of 1,000 installs per week by end of 2019, Tesla has deployed only around 3,000 syst

via Hacker News ·