top 50% hacker news stories for 2026-05-20

An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-conjecture/

2 months ago

1429 upvotes – 1053 comments

Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Arabia and the UAE

https://www.alqst.org/ar/posts/1190

2 months ago

1079 upvotes – 469 comments

GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/github-confirms-breach-of-3-800-repos-via-malicious-vscode-extension/

2 months ago

1054 upvotes – 460 comments

Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

https://www.lesnumeriques.com/banque-en-ligne/adieu-visa-et-mastercard-130-millions-d-europeens-basculent-vers-un-paiement-100-souverain-des-2026-n250918.html

2 months ago

958 upvotes – 776 comments

Victory: Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins $835,000 settlement

https://www.fire.org/news/victory-tennessee-man-jailed-37-days-trump-meme-wins-835000-settlement-after-first-amendment

2 months ago

768 upvotes – 513 comments

Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier

https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.7

2 months ago

720 upvotes – 290 comments

Google Declaring War on the Web

https://tante.cc/2026/05/20/on-google-declaring-war-on-the-web/

2 months ago

636 upvotes – 443 comments

GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to their internal repositories

https://twitter.com/github/status/2056884788179726685

2 months ago

634 upvotes – 339 comments

Railway Blocked by Google Cloud

https://status.railway.com/?date=20260519

2 months ago

559 upvotes – 357 comments

Flipper One Tech Specs

https://docs.flipper.net/one/general/tech-specs

2 months ago

523 upvotes – 177 comments

Apparently Google hates us now

https://twitter.com/pokemoncentral/status/2057123807404638250

2 months ago

507 upvotes – 253 comments

Everything in C is undefined behavior

https://blog.habets.se/2026/05/Everything-in-C-is-undefined-behavior.html

2 months ago

505 upvotes – 715 comments

SpaceX S-1

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026036936/spaceexplorationtechnologi.htm

2 months ago

456 upvotes – 377 comments

Railway GCP Account Suspension Incident Report

https://blog.railway.com/p/incident-report-may-19-2026-gcp-account-outage

2 months ago

456 upvotes – 265 comments

Map of Metal

https://mapofmetal.com/

2 months ago

448 upvotes – 189 comments

I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers

https://github.com/kageroumado/phosphene

2 months ago

★ 686SwiftMIT
427 upvotes – 106 comments

Saying Goodbye to Asm.js

https://spidermonkey.dev/blog/2026/05/20/saying-goodbye-to-asmjs.html

2 months ago

409 upvotes – 158 comments

Declining America

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/05/19/Declining-America

2 months ago

384 upvotes – 175 comments

Ben Welsh made an index of all FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

https://fivethirtyeightindex.com/

2 months ago

380 upvotes – 88 comments

College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/college-students-drown-out-ai-praising-commencement-speeches-with-boos-deal-with-it-one-speaker-fires-back-as-students-heckle-positive-pitches-for-ais-role

2 months ago

379 upvotes – 386 comments

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

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260515-the-1950s-blunder-which-causes-mass-hay-fever-in-japan

2 months ago

364 upvotes – 166 comments

My two-part desk setup

https://arslan.io/2025/11/18/my-two-part-desk-setup/

2 months ago

356 upvotes – 223 comments

DOS Zone

https://dos.zone/

2 months ago

355 upvotes – 81 comments

Google's AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260519-google-tackles-attempts-to-hack-its-ai-results

2 months ago

339 upvotes – 215 comments

Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

https://xcancel.com/nottombrown/status/2057194829986300375

2 months ago

306 upvotes – 351 comments

The Letter S, by Donald Knuth [pdf]

https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1980-knuth.pdf

2 months ago

303 upvotes – 54 comments

Anna's Archive Hit with $19.5M Default Judgment and Global Domain Takedown Order

https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-hit-with-19-5m-default-judgment-and-global-domain-takedown-order/

2 months ago

280 upvotes – 232 comments

A Wayland Compositor in Minecraft

https://modrinth.com/mod/waylandcraft

2 months ago

268 upvotes – 82 comments

GitHub Compromised

https://twitter.com/i/status/2056949168208552080

2 months ago

262 upvotes – 6 comments

Colorado Amended SB051 (Age Verification Bill) to Exclude Open Source Projects

https://legiscan.com/CO/bill/SB051/2026

2 months ago

226 upvotes – 79 comments

Sp.h is the standard library that C deserves

https://spader.zone/sp/

2 months ago

225 upvotes – 211 comments

Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing

https://www.science.org/content/article/not-alive-not-dead-disembodied-human-brains-used-drug-testing

2 months ago

223 upvotes – 201 comments

None of Starbucks' 'Widely Recyclable' Cups Ended Up at a Recycling Facility

https://www.beyondplastics.org/press-releases/starbucks-cups-recyclable-report

2 months ago

213 upvotes – 154 comments

OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-is-preparing-to-file-for-an-ipo-very-soon-0ec95af5

2 months ago

205 upvotes – 407 comments

Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)

https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/december/missile-genius-america-lost-and-china-gained

2 months ago

197 upvotes – 124 comments

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

https://zfhuang99.github.io/rust/claude%20code/codex/contracts/spec-driven%20development/2025/12/01/rust-with-ai.html

2 months ago

190 upvotes – 205 comments

Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48210590

2 months ago

180 upvotes – 105 comments

Infomaniak transitions to a foundation model to protect user data privacy

https://news.infomaniak.com/en/infomaniak-foundation-sovereign-cloud/

2 months ago

176 upvotes – 48 comments

SBCL: The Assembly Code Breadboard (2014)

https://pvk.ca/Blog/2014/03/15/sbcl-the-ultimate-assembly-code-breadboard/

2 months ago

161 upvotes – 11 comments

Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success

https://pacifichorticulture.org/articles/mycorrhizal-fungi-natures-key-to-plant-survival-and-success/

2 months ago

153 upvotes – 48 comments

Why is Inkwell stuck in review

https://www.manton.org/2026/05/19/why-is-inkwell-stuck-in.html

2 months ago

153 upvotes – 49 comments

Node.js 26.0.0 (Now with Temporal)

https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v26.0.0

2 months ago

151 upvotes – 61 comments

The Quadratic Sandwich

https://fedemagnani.github.io/math/2026/04/08/the-quadratic-sandwich.html

2 months ago

146 upvotes – 15 comments

Wi-Wi Is Wireless Time Sync at 1 Nanosecond

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/wi-wi-is-wireless-time-sync-less-than-5ns/

2 months ago

145 upvotes – 41 comments

Formal Verification Gates for AI Coding Loops

https://reubenbrooks.dev/blog/structural-backpressure-beats-smarter-agents/

2 months ago

144 upvotes – 34 comments

Silk: Open-source cooperative fiber scheduler

https://github.com/ClickHouse/silk

2 months ago

★ 189C++
123 upvotes – 21 comments

Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof

https://horses.extension.org/blood-pumping-mechanism-of-the-hoof/

2 months ago

120 upvotes – 46 comments

Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-12

2 months ago

120 upvotes – 108 comments

After Town Bans Flock, Councilmember Crashes Out, Proposes Internet, Phone Ban

https://www.404media.co/after-town-bans-flock-councilmember-crashes-out-proposes-internet-and-phone-ban/

2 months ago

120 upvotes – 109 comments

India's hottest district shuts at 10 am as mercury breaches 48 C mark

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/indias-hottest-district-banda-shuts-at-10-am-as-mercury-breaches-48-degrees-celsius-mark-101779240653594.html

2 months ago

118 upvotes – 112 comments

Cloudflare CEO on how he chooses which employees to replace with AI

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-i-choose-which-cloudflare-employees-to-replace-with-ai-40a197e5

2 months ago

117 upvotes – 46 comments

New map reveals lost roads of the Roman Empire

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-high-resolution-map-transforms-what-we-know-about-roman-roads-and-the-roman-empire/

2 months ago

115 upvotes – 13 comments

The surprising story behind the first British person in space

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260518-helen-sharman-the-story-behind-the-first-british-person-in-space

2 months ago

107 upvotes – 59 comments

Neutron scattering explains why gluten-free pasta falls apart (2025)

https://phys.org/news/2025-09-science-spaghetti-neutron-gluten-free.html

2 months ago

103 upvotes – 45 comments

Hormuz closure could trigger 'agrifood shock', price crisis within a year

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hormuz-closure-could-trigger-agrifood-shock-price-crisis-within-year-fao-warns-2026-05-20/

2 months ago

102 upvotes – 32 comments

ArcBrush – Node-based 2D image editor

https://arcbrush.com/

2 months ago

99 upvotes – 26 comments

Stable Audio 3

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17991

2 months ago

99 upvotes – 18 comments

I Don't Vibe Code

https://jacobharr.is/personal/i-dont-vibe-code

2 months ago

98 upvotes – 112 comments

Show HN: CPU-only transcription for YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram videos

https://github.com/kouhxp/yapsnap

2 months ago

★ 240PythonApache-2.0
97 upvotes – 49 comments

Testing distributed systems with AI agents

https://github.com/shenli/distributed-system-testing

2 months ago

★ 206MIT
96 upvotes – 23 comments

Comparing an LZ4 Decompressor on Four Legacy CPUs

https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/05/09/comparing-an-lz4-decompressor-on-four-legacy-cpus/

2 months ago

95 upvotes – 7 comments

America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

https://danieltan.weblog.lol/2026/05/americas-greatest-strategic-blunder-the-imprisonment-of-qian-xuesen

2 months ago

94 upvotes – 56 comments

Ex-Apple engineer says Apple deliberately slows older phones via updates

https://www.macobserver.com/news/ex-apple-software-engineer-claims-apple-deliberately-slows-down-old-iphone-models/

2 months ago

90 upvotes – 70 comments
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