HN Top 10 — May 12, 2026
Today’s Top 10 on Hacker News
1. Learning Software Architecture
⭐ 75 💬 2 👤 surprisetalk 🔗 Discuss on HN
In reply to a researcher asking about learning software design skills, Alexey Kulakov (matklad) shares practical advice drawn from his experience in a bioinformatics lab early in his career. He observes that “software design” is best learned through hands-on practice — reading code, writing code, and gradually building intuition about structure and organization. The post contrasts “scientific code” written by domain experts with production software engineering, offering actionable tips for transitioning between the two.
2. Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise
⭐ 875 💬 355 👤 varunsharma07 🔗 Discuss on HN
No npm tokens were stolen and the npm publish workflow itself was not compromised. The malicious versions were detected publicly within 20 minutes by an external researcher ashishkurmi working for stepsecurity. All affected versions have been deprecated; npm security has been engaged to pull tarballs from the registry.
3. Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
⭐ 214 💬 66 👤 adunk 🔗 Discuss on HN
A curated collection of historical screenshots from early desktop operating systems, featuring screen captures from VisiCorp Visi On (1983), GEM for the IBM PC, and other classic interfaces from the 1980s and 1990s. Each image is documented with system specifications, resolution details, and historical context, preserving a visual record of how graphical user interfaces evolved in the decades before modern operating systems.
4. Toxicity on Social Media – The Noisy Room
⭐ 45 💬 12 👤 skm 🔗 Discuss on HN
In December of 2025, Stanford researchers analyzed 2.2 billion social media posts looking for a pattern. They wanted to know what percentage of users posted severely toxic content. Not rudeness, not sarcasm, but speech that was so hateful that 90% of the world would flag it as being problematic.1 With this data in hand, they then asked thousands of people to answer a simple question: Take a guess.
5. They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker
⭐ 271 💬 91 👤 tokenburner 🔗 Discuss on HN
A fork of uBlock Origin Lite that replaces blocked ads with white tiles displaying slogans from John Carpenter’s 1988 sci-fi film They Live: “OBEY”, “CONSUME”, “WATCH TV”, “SLEEP”, “SUBMIT”, “CONFORM”, “STAY ASLEEP”, “BUY”, “WORK”, “NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT”, and “DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY”. Each blocked ad gets a randomly selected phrase, turning invisible ad removal into a visible commentary on consumer culture. Available as a browser extension for Chrome, Brave, Edge, and Chromium-based browsers.
6. If AI writes your code, why use Python?
⭐ 531 💬 575 👤 indigodaddy 🔗 Discuss on HN
The author argues that for the last decade, “fast-to-ship” dominated language selection, making Python the default choice for many projects. But with AI writing the code, execution speed matters more than developer velocity. The post questions whether Python remains the optimal choice when AI tools handle the “fast-to-ship” advantage, suggesting languages with better runtime performance may become more attractive when developer productivity is no longer the bottleneck.
7. Rtwatch: Watch videos with friends using WebRTC
⭐ 33 💬 2 👤 nateb2022 🔗 Discuss on HN
A Go-based WebRTC application that lets groups watch videos in real-time with perfect synchronization. All playback state (pausing, seeking) is managed on the backend via Pion WebRTC and GStreamer — only the current audio/video frame is sent to viewers. This architecture prevents anyone from fast-forwarding independently or downloading/caching the full video for future use. Deployable via Docker with host networking support.
8. UCLA discovers first stroke rehabilitation drug to repair brain damage (2025)
⭐ 352 💬 69 👤 bookofjoe 🔗 Discuss on HN
UCLA researchers identified that stroke-induced brain damage affects parvalbumin neurons, which regulate brain rhythm function. They developed DDL-920, a drug that produced significant recovery in movement control in mice — effectively reproducing the therapeutic effects of physical stroke rehabilitation. This represents the first pharmacological approach to replicate exercise-based stroke recovery, opening a potential new avenue for patients unable to participate in traditional physical therapy.
9. Claude Platform on AWS
⭐ 151 💬 68 👤 matrixhelix 🔗 Discuss on HN
Anthropic announces Claude Platform on AWS, enabling customers to deploy Claude agents at scale with managed infrastructure. Features include Claude Managed Agents, code execution capabilities, skills framework, and advisor strategy tools. Claude remains available on Amazon Bedrock as an alternative option, where AWS serves as the data processor, giving enterprises flexible deployment choices for AI workloads.
10. Extremely Low Frequencies
⭐ 86 💬 4 👤 pinewurst 🔗 Discuss on HN
A newsletter edition exploring extremely low frequency (ELF) communication — the technology that allows signals to penetrate deep underwater and through the Earth’s crust. The concept is straightforward: a sufficiently sealed vessel could submerge and resurface while maintaining communication. The article examines the engineering challenges that make ELF practical implementation difficult, covering propagation physics, antenna requirements, and historical military applications of ultra-low frequency radio transmission.