HN Top 10 — May 21, 2026
Today’s Top 10 on Hacker News
1. Google officially announces that ads will be included in AI Mode search results
⭐ 60 💬 34 👤 sofumel 🔗 Discuss on HN
May 20, 2026 Built with Gemini, we’re testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot to help brands connect with consumers. General summary Google is integrating Gemini into Search to provide conversational, AI-driven ad experiences that offer product guidance and transparent explanations. You can now use new formats like Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers, and AI-powered Shopping ads to connect with…
2. Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK
⭐ 39 💬 29 👤 shideneyu 🔗 Discuss on HN
Universal Rust multiplexer for the agentic era: detachable, scriptable, and inspectable, with a tmux-compatible CLI, daemon-backed SDK, and native Ratatui integration. Current release v0.2.0 implements all 90 tmux-compatible commands. Built for running long-lived agents over SSH without losing terminals, while still being able to inspect, script, and orchestrate everything around them.
3. An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
⭐ 1202 💬 877 👤 tedsanders 🔗 Discuss on HN
For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have studied a deceptively simple question: if you place $n$ points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance $1$ apart? This is the planar unit distance problem, first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. It is one of the best-known questions in combinatorial geometry, easy to state and remarkably difficult to resolve.
4. GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension
⭐ 870 💬 362 👤 Timofeibu 🔗 Discuss on HN
GitHub has confirmed that approximately 3,800 repositories were compromised through a malicious Visual Studio Code extension. The extension was used to steal code and secrets from developers’ projects. This incident highlights the ongoing supply chain risks in the VSCode extension ecosystem and the potential for malware distribution through trusted package marketplaces.
5. Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple’s video wallpapers
⭐ 302 💬 68 👤 kageroumado 🔗 Discuss on HN
Phosphene is a menu bar app + wallpaper extension that plays your own video files as the macOS desktop and lock-screen wallpaper. It plugs into the system’s native wallpaper picker via Apple’s private WallpaperExtensionKit framework — the same one Apple’s built-in Aerials use. Supports gapless looping, multi-display per-Space selections, and power-aware playback. Built in Swift for macOS 26 (Tahoe).
6. Haskell Foundation 2026 Update
⭐ 125 💬 36 👤 azhenley 🔗 Discuss on HN
The Haskell Foundation has been at the center of a flurry of changes, all of which I’d like to share with the community today. First, José, our executive director for the past few years, has decided to step away from his role in June 2026. José has been the longest-serving executive director at the Haskell Foundation, spending his time interacting with and supporting the community in many ways, often away from public view.
7. Vivaldi 8.0
⭐ 156 💬 75 👤 OuterVale 🔗 Discuss on HN
That excitement comes from a genuine belief that the people who use Vivaldi deserve a browser that takes them seriously. We respect your time, your privacy, your preferences, your intelligence. Every release we ship is another expression of that belief.
8. New features in GCC 16: Improved error messages and SARIF output
⭐ 94 💬 16 👤 siteshwar 🔗 Discuss on HN
I work at Red Hat on the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). GCC 16 is about to be released, so I’m sharing some of the new features I worked on this year. Some changes are visible to users, while others improve the system more subtly.
9. The Letter S, by Donald Knuth (1980) [pdf]
⭐ 189 💬 24 👤 bambax 🔗 Discuss on HN
Number of Pages: 9 114 The Letter S Donald E. Knuth FONT language I have recently been developing. (A complete description of M~’TAFONT, which is a com-puter system and language intended to aid in the design of letter shapes, appears in [3, part 3].
10. Flipper One Tech Specs
⭐ 393 💬 135 👤 gregsadetsky 🔗 Discuss on HN
This page describes the full technical specifications of the Flipper One. Since the device is under active development, specifications may change. Size and weight ⚠️ Final weight is pending — value below is a placeholder.