HN Top 10 — May 20, 2026
Today’s Top 10 on Hacker News
1. Everything in C is undefined behavior
⭐ 212 💬 268 👤 lycopodiopsida 🔗 Discuss on HN
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 🔗 Discuss on HN
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 🔗 Discuss on HN
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 🔗 Discuss on HN
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 🔗 Discuss on HN
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 🔗 Discuss on HN
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 🔗 Discuss on HN
**_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 🔗 Discuss on HN
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 🔗 Discuss on HN
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 🔗 Discuss on HN
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.