🔥 Top 10 Hacker News Posts

2026-05-20

#1

Everything in C is undefined behavior

⭐ 212 💬 268 👤 lycopodiopsida

If he had been a programmer, Cardinal Richelieu would have said “Give me six lines written by the hand of the most expert C programmer in the world, and I will find enough in them to trigger undefined behavior”. Nobody can write correct C, or C++. And I say that as someone who’s written C and C++ on an almost daily basis for about 30 years.

#2

Learnings from 100K lines of Rust with AI (2025)

⭐ 22 💬 13 👤 pramodbiligiri

In the past few months, I’ve been stress-testing how far AI coding agents can take us when building real, production-grade distributed systems. The result: a Rust-based multi-Paxos consensus engine that not only implements all the features of Azure’s Replicated State Library (RSL) [1] — which underpins most major Azure services — but also modernizes it for today’s hardware. The entire project took me ~3 months,...

#3

Gemini 3.5 Flash

⭐ 811 💬 562 👤 spectraldrift

May 19, 2026 16 min read Gemini 3.5 is built to help you execute complex, agentic workflows. Generative AI is experimental [[duration]] minutes Today, we’re introducing Gemini 3.5, our latest family of models combining frontier intelligence with action. This represents a major leap forward in building more capable, intelligent agents.

#4

FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

⭐ 214 💬 53 👤 ChocMontePy

A searchable index of 21,350 articles from FiveThirtyEight, preserved by the Internet Archive after the site was shut down. Features include search by title and byline, browse by year (2008-2025), and browse by author — covering the full run from Nate Silver's original polling analysis through the site's closure.

#5

I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of

⭐ 801 💬 173 👤 andreww591

This is a virtual museum of operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM. A custom emulator-independent launcher is provided, and all OSes and emulators are pre-installed and pre-configured. The launcher includes a snapshot feature to quickly revert broken installations back to a working state.

#6

Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

⭐ 128 💬 57 👤 ranit

Nithin Coca (Credit: Getty Images) **A decision made 70 years ago to reforest vast swathes of Japan with just two kinds of tree has come back to haunt the country.** In February, videos showing what looked like waves of smoke blowing off an evergreen forest went viral in Japan. It wasn't smoke – it was pollen, and the videos were a warning to tens of millions of residents of the archipelago nation: prepare your masks and allergy medicine....

#7

Infomaniak transitions to a foundation model to protect user data privacy

⭐ 85 💬 19 👤 darktoto

**_Since 1994, Infomaniak has followed the same path: privacy, environmental responsibility, and local roots. Thirty-two years on, these commitments are no longer just promises. On 20 May 2026, our founder Boris Siegenthaler transferred the majority of Infomaniak’s voting rights to a Swiss public-interest foundation: the Infomaniak Foundation.

#8

Google changes its search box

⭐ 565 💬 749 👤 berkeleyjunk

May 19, 2026 We’re bringing our advanced model capabilities to Search with new AI features, enabling you to use agents just by asking a question. We’re also introducing a new, intelligent AI-powered Search box, marking its biggest upgrade in over 25 years. To make this possible, we’ve continued to reimagine what Search can do with AI.

#9

Show HN: Forge – Guardrails take an 8B model from 53% to 99% on agentic tasks

⭐ 508 💬 177 👤 zambelli

A reliability layer for self-hosted LLM tool-calling. Forge lifts an 8B local model to the top of its class on multi-step agentic workflows through guardrails (rescue parsing, retry nudges, step enforcement) and context management (VRAM-aware budgets, tiered compaction). The current top self-hosted config (Ministral-3 8B Instruct Q8) scores 86.5% across a 26-scenario eval suite — and 76% on the hardest tier.

#10

Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images

⭐ 293 💬 172 👤 janalsncm

A CLI and library for removing both visible and invisible AI watermarks from images. Strips SynthID, C2PA Content Credentials, EXIF/XMP "Made with AI" labels, and visible sparkle overlays from Gemini, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, and other AI models — all in one command.