Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 (1960)

337 points | 245 comments

Beautifully shows how most predictions that extrapolate from past data are too simplistic. We're approaching peak global population and almost all industrialized nations are more worried about population decline than overpopulation these days. Which is why I'm not worried about superintelligence or data centers in space. — dnlgrmm

Elevated errors on claude.ai, Claude Code, and platform.claude.com

443 points | 356 comments

Depending on what your job is, this is either the adult equivalent of a snow day or some of the greatest stress in a long time.

I have experienced, half a decade ago during some more frequent but less lengthy O365 errors that there are some higher ups who get when this is not something you can fix and some you very much can't. Wishing strength to any "but it's our mail" and "but we bought the Claude" meetings that happen today. — Topfi

Microsoft Outlook/365 still down after 12 hours

322 points | 227 comments

Microsoft is unable to run a reliable hosted email service, given infinite resources. What people don't realise is that the former is in part a consequence of the latter. Without a forcing function, complexity multiplies, silent fragility accumulates, end-to-end understanding dwindles. There is no incentive to simplify. — nickdothutton

IceWM

326 points | 181 comments

I'm mildly bemused at the other comments treating this as a blast from the past. I use icewm today as a super low resource DE for a headless remote desktop system, with a major benefit being that it's all in one with no configuration needed; one unit includes panel, app menu, and window manager that work out of the box. — yjftsjthsd-h

Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang

493 points | 351 comments

> "We are all humans and can make mistakes. Jensen did so many good things and he needs a second chance,” wrote another.

I think if it was one affair, this would hold. It is allegedly 3 and counting, and includes a likely spy from a rival nation, and likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws.

You can think he is amazing at many parts of this job, but at this point it is less of a mistake, and more a pattern of behavior that he knew was hugely risky and decided to cover up.

This is a terrible time for Nvidia employees. But the solution is not to invite the cause of the terrible time back in. — soundworlds

Edge0-145B: Frontier AI Capabilities on Your Own Computer

321 points | 96 comments

This just a quantized version of 3.8 next flash on strata that’s branded? — _boffin_

Reverse engineering my Coway air purifier to ditch the cloud

420 points | 121 comments

I'm a simple man. I see people freeing their devices from proprietary clouds and reclaiming ownership, I upvote. — Zopieux

Chinese frontier AI models carry the fingerprint of export-controlled GPUs

342 points | 144 comments

Chinese AI companies are free to use any Nvidia GPU they want as long as the GPU is not physically located within China. It is entirely consistent with US export controls for Chinese AI companies to remotely use GPUs located in Singapore or Malaysia.

“In facilities across the region, Megaspeed rents Nvidia chips to Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba, an arrangement that does not violate current US export control regulations.” See [1].

[1] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/beyond-the-spy-sc... — flowerlad

Former Nvidia CEO Huang had a relationship with a second employee, sources say

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/11/12/jensen-...

413 points | 446 comments

I find it interesting that people can jump to their judgement assuming "sources" are true. Do you really trust everything they say? — chj

Dwarf planet candidate appears which takes roughly 280 years to orbit our sun

320 points | 131 comments

If anyone is interested, here is its orbit, my old day job was to compute orbits for asteroids and comets.

(This uses wasm, meant for a desktop, and will download the asteroid catalog of about 65mb, you have been warned)

https://dahlend.github.io/ketev/#t=2009-07-01.717&sel=2026%2...

This is a big boy. — ddahlen

Gemini 4 Hydrogen and Orchestrator

286 points | 64 comments

This is essentially what Anthropic does with the advisor mode and what GitHub does with their multi-model pipeline using the HydraFusion model, which is just a large set of different models with different qualities used in a pipeline to produce an answer.

What I don't understand is how they all make it work with caching in general. Looking at how the advisor mode in claude work you seem to only be billed the output tokens and cache hit on the whole session when it calls out to the advisor, making it super cheap compared to running the more expensive model for the entire session. — vegardx

Rust 1.100

390 points | 163 comments

Woohoo, that's a release! My personal favorites:

- Stabilize never type

- Stabilize custom allocators

- Introduced minimum publish age configurations, also known as dependency cooldowns. When the relevant config is set, the resolver ignores versions published more recently than that, unless they are already in Cargo.lock. (RFC 3923) docs #17335

- cargo-install: now uses the existing lockfile in the .crate tarball by default. --locked in cargo install becomes a no-op. #17388 — nirinor

Rust 1.100

308 points | 9 comments

Better link: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/11/12/Rust-1.100.0/

The blog post summarized the most important changes. — iknowstuff

Service degradation on Microsoft 365

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-11-13/microsoft-outage-affe...

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1xuje83/microsoft...

https://downdetector.com/status/microsoft-365/

468 points | 438 comments

Copied this from my post in the other thread:

The Status page is not working well, but I managed to subscribe to their RSS feed and it has been sending out updates periodically. I'll post some of them here.

9:02 PM UTC: We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses. Additionally, our review of recent changes has identified a small number of configuration updates that we're investigating as potential contributors to the issue.

Previous status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.

8:52 PM UTC: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.

Previous Status: While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them. We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.

7:52 PM UTC: We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.

7:30 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.

7:16 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.

6:59 PM UTC: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure. — beowulfey

For the past 5 minutes all of our Microsoft Cloud connections are down. Anyone else? The Status page won't even load.

401 points | 1 comments

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50471731. — tomhow

Gemini 4 Hydrogen

452 points | 292 comments

This was rolled out RIGHT away, as when I just went to use Gemini, seeing 3.8 Flash be replaced with "4 Hydrogen" was less hype and more a thought along the line of "What [on Earth] is Gemini Hydrogen???", then me going here to figure it out.

This model naming scheme works for separate products, but using elements, molecules, etc. for products you're supposed to compare with each other... Not very helpful.

If anything, my intuition would say that Hydrogen is more powerful than Argon... I don't know. Not liking this naming scheme trend. — wds

Show HN: My $300 embroidery machine needed a subscription, so I built my own app

309 points | 129 comments

I'm going to assume Claude did the heavy lifting here (because it's Q4 2026 and the odds are in my favor), so if I'm right: this is one of the best examples of the way LLMs can empower users to not only scratch all the itches, but demonstrate to anyone who stumbles by just how satisfying it can be to do so themselves.

Your app represents a future that I, an old, actually love. When I see projects like this, I don't think about ongoing support or if the project will be abandoned. I think, "Woah, I hadn't thought of that. Now I'm going to try it. Because why wouldn't I try to get all the value I can out of my $20/month Claude subscription?"

Even though I've been a developer for 30+ years (and a nerd for longer), I've never felt so motivated by the potential of a technology to make an individual's life richer. Thanks for sharing it.

And if you wrote it by hand, my hat's off to you for sharing that, too. — spdustin

Nintendo Takes Down Emulators and Firmware in Massive GitHub DMCA Sweep

303 points | 234 comments

Reminder to all that barring access to internal docs, use of internal software/firmware components and information obtained through nefarious means, emulation is 100% legal pretty much everywhere in the world.

Edit: of course there's the gray area of scrapers, game downloaders etc... but those are not emulators. — dormento

I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices

344 points | 127 comments

For the last five months or so, opus and fable have both been able to do this task as a soneshot prompt. An inference engine is almost pure compute and to a first approximation the only operation your hardware needs to support to do llm inference is multiplication [the rest of an inference engine is "some trig"].

So to get any model working on $OLD_HARDWARE, the hardest part of the task is now sourcing the hardware itself and giving the agent ssh access -- a modern agent will be able to source a compiler, write the implementation, optimize it, test in qemu (or any other simulator) and push it onto the device.

Example prompt: "write an inference engine for qwen3 0.6b in pure assembly that runs on this device. Write a script to attach the weights to the resulting binary. Prefix is supplied as a stream of u32 token IDs on stdin. The engine streams u32 token IDs on stdout." — Farmadupe2

Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO immediately

373 points | 35 comments

duplicate of this maybe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50467087 — dbalatero

NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition

https://www.reuters.com/live/nvidia-live-board-meets-fate-ce...

1590 points | 1660 comments

I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration. This was put in place for national security reasons. Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.

From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong — duplessitous

Anthropic IPO

617 points | 625 comments

It strikes me that if their models were good enough for recursive self improvement, then the VCs would have pushed to delay IPO until such time that they had clear market dominance.

For some reason they need the $100B today at the cost of dilution, rather than additional private rounds and/or using cashflow+profits to continue the advancement. — maerF0x0

Why writing correct software is hard and why math (alone) won’t help us (2016)

353 points | 166 comments

I believe there's a hard distinction between abstract, mathematical correctness in software and functioning in the real world. Any software that's processing inputs and provides complex workflows to humans has to necessarily deal with the endless vagaries of reality.

That's not to say there isn't value in formal correctness, but the important part is identifying when it's useful and when its more trouble than its worth... — turbobutton

Humble Bundle just killed most of their security through vibecoding

286 points | 168 comments

Weird that they lay all this at the feet of vibecoding. I've asked for authentication systems several times and they've tended to come with pretty good feature-sets. Perhaps it's because I know what I'm asking for.

Edit: I've just tried to log in and it's failed through both Google and email. Whatever they've done, they haven't tested it well. — oliwarner

Critical RCE Vulnerability in Apache HTTP Server

334 points | 172 comments

Patch looks like https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/5ed39287660daacd1233c... — jamesy0ung

93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)

383 points | 50 comments

SIGBOVIK papers are almost always a delight

EDIT: From their 2026 publication

>Permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for personal use is granted; permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for classroom use is also granted, but seems ill-advised — snitty

Nvidia is preparing to oust Jensen Huang

391 points | 594 comments

It's really interesting to me how unaggressive Jensen has been vs. his peers about tighting up control over his company (even during the recent years when he had huge leverage):

- His board setup is ... odd. He isn't Chairman of the Board (a role over 50% of Fortune 100 CEOs apparently hold). He seems to be responsible for Nvidia having a wierdly more egalitarian structure (all directors including him, are equal, with a designated lead independent director)

- His compensation (~$35M, primarily stock) is ... not up there with other tech CEOs

- He doesn't seem to have ever pushed for super-voting rights (he only has like ~3.5% of the company), but I guess that's hard to change once you IPO

I kinda wonder if this ends with him taking a month off, spending 12-18 months transitioning to a successor and ending as the chairman of the board or some such. He really does seem vital to the company (and thus the stock price). — rao-v

Lock Your GitHub Actions

318 points | 62 comments

The advice here is really great (as I'd expect from Hugo), but as the maintainer of zizmor I want to note some caveats with the current iteration of workflow lockfiles:

- They only lock normal action calls. If your workflows invoke other reusable workflows, you need to keep those hash-pinned manually for now.

- Composite actions are not themselves locked. Instead, they get locked transitively through their callsites i.e. the workflows that call them. This makes any individual caller that uses lockfiles safe, but it also makes the current `gh actions-lock` default unsafe (since it removes hash-pins from the composite action itself, meaning that any external caller that invokes the action loses their transitive pinning).

- Other forms of `uses:` clauses, like Docker images, are also not currently locked via the lockfile. And the same for forms of interior mutability (like an action running `npx ...` under the hood, although the latter is fully outside of GitHub's control to prevent. But these mean that you can't assume that a fully locked Actions setup is in fact 100% immutable.

I hope they address these gaps soon, because it's otherwise an excellent (and long-awaited) feature. — woodruffw

Jensen Huang said to have had relationship with executive who reports to him

352 points | 425 comments

https://archive.is/9fQ6Y — thebeardisred

United Airlines bans AI agents from booking flights on behalf of travelers

325 points | 307 comments

How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?

At this point it feels like I have an adversarial relationship with many merchants I use online. I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible. I don’t want to take part in your giant human behavior optimization problem. You have a product and I have money why does it have to be more complicated than that?

Realistically though I know that’s not happening. I will continue to access online merchants in the way I prefer and will do my best to avoid detection or blocking. At least so far Claude is happy to play along but I suspect I will need to seek out an obliterated agent in the not to distant future. (Once the corporate capture of the frontier cloud AI models is complete.) — doctoboggan