top 50% hacker news stories for 2025-12-18

Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access

https://dl.acm.org/openaccess

8 months ago

We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack

https://gist.github.com/hackermondev/5e2cdc32849405fff6b46957747a2d28

8 months ago

History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms

8 months ago

Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/

8 months ago

Mistral OCR 3

https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr-3

8 months ago

Classical statues were not painted horribly

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/were-classical-statues-painted-horribly/

8 months ago

1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/15-tb-vram-on-mac-studio-rdma-over-thunderbolt-5

8 months ago

Please just try HTMX

http://pleasejusttryhtmx.com/

8 months ago

GPT-5.2-Codex

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-2-codex/

8 months ago

Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115740500373677782

8 months ago

Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/17/are-apple-gift-cards-safe-to-redeem

8 months ago

Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307973

8 months ago

How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/12/18/tech/china-west-ai-chips/

8 months ago

Adobe Photoshop 1.0 Source Code (1990)

https://computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code/

8 months ago

Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/creating-apps-like-signal-or-whatsapp-could-be-hostile-activity-claims-uk-watchdog

8 months ago

Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time

https://joannabregan.substack.com/p/toys-with-the-highest-play-time-and

8 months ago

After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

https://e360.yale.edu/features/iran-water-drought-dams-qanats

8 months ago

Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/deliberate-internet-shutdowns.html

8 months ago

Skills for organizations, partners, the ecosystem

https://claude.com/blog/organization-skills-and-directory

8 months ago

How getting richer made teenagers less free

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/how-getting-richer-made-teenagers

8 months ago

Slowness is a virtue

https://blog.jakobschwichtenberg.com/p/slowness-is-a-virtue

8 months ago

Show HN: TinyPDF – 3kb pdf library (70x smaller than jsPDF)

https://github.com/Lulzx/tinypdf

8 months ago

FunctionGemma 270M Model

https://blog.google/technology/developers/functiongemma/

8 months ago

Germany: Amazon is not allowed to force customers to watch ads on Prime Video

https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2025-12/amazon-urteil-video-kunden-werbung

8 months ago

'Ghost jobs' are on the rise – and so are calls to ban them

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyzvpp8g3vo

8 months ago

Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025

https://zerotrickpony.com/articles/browser-bugs/

8 months ago

AI helps ship faster but it produces 1.7× more bugs

https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/state-of-ai-vs-human-code-generation-report

8 months ago

Great ideas in theoretical computer science

https://www.cs251.com/

8 months ago

Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/05/vizio_gpl_source_code_ruling/

8 months ago

Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates

https://www.jack.bio/blog/licenseplate

8 months ago

How to hack Discord, Vercel and more with one easy trick

https://kibty.town/blog/mintlify/

8 months ago

Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Lesson 1

https://www.egyptianhieroglyphs.net/egyptian-hieroglyphs/lesson-1/

8 months ago

The Scottish Highlands, the Appalachians, Atlas are the same mountain range

https://vividmaps.com/central-pangean-mountains/

8 months ago

The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-rise-of-sql

8 months ago

T5Gemma 2: The next generation of encoder-decoder models

https://blog.google/technology/developers/t5gemma-2/

8 months ago

Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

https://www.garbagecollected.dev/p/valve-the-reverse-apple

8 months ago

Most parked domains now serving malicious content

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/12/most-parked-domains-now-serving-malicious-content/

8 months ago

AI vending machine was tricked into giving away everything

https://kottke.org/25/12/this-ai-vending-machine-was-tricked-into-giving-away-everything

8 months ago

The port I couldn't ship

https://ammil.industries/the-port-i-couldnt-ship/

8 months ago

What is an elliptic curve? (2019)

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/02/21/what-is-an-elliptic-curve/

8 months ago

Two kinds of vibe coding

https://davidbau.com/archives/2025/12/16/vibe_coding.html

8 months ago

GitHub Actions for self-hosted runners price increase postponed

https://pricetimeline.com/news/189

8 months ago

RCE via ND6 Router Advertisements in FreeBSD

https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-25:12.rtsold.asc

8 months ago

We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-machine-agent-b7e84e34

8 months ago

Spain fines Airbnb €65M: Why the government is cracking down on illegal rentals

https://www.euronews.com/travel/2025/12/15/spain-fines-airbnb-65-million-why-the-government-is-cracking-down-on-illegal-rentals

8 months ago

Executorch: On-device AI across mobile, embedded and edge for PyTorch

https://github.com/pytorch/executorch

8 months ago

Virtualizing Nvidia HGX B200 GPUs with Open Source

https://www.ubicloud.com/blog/virtualizing-nvidia-hgx-b200-gpus-with-open-source

8 months ago

It's all about momentum

https://combo.cc/posts/its-all-about-momentum-innit/

8 months ago

A faster path to container images in Bazel

https://www.tweag.io/blog/2025-12-18-rules_img/

8 months ago

A school locked down after AI flagged a gun. It was a clarinet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/12/17/ai-gun-school-detection/

8 months ago

Systemd v259

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/releases/tag/v259

8 months ago

The First Photographs of Snowflakes Discover the Groundbreaking Microphotography (2017)

https://www.openculture.com/2017/12/the-first-photographs-of-snowflakes.html

8 months ago

The most banned books in U.S. schools

https://pen.org/top-52-banned-books-since-2021/

8 months ago

Ask HN: How do I bridge the gap between PhD and SWE experiences?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315658

8 months ago

Ask HN: Who here is not working on web apps/server code?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46316562

8 months ago