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Sunday, October 11, 2026

Hey buddy, Man, you gotta hear about some of the stuff from Hacker News on Sunday. It was pretty wild.

Yandex Troubles

So, first off, there were a couple of big stories about Yandex, you know, the Russian tech giant. One post was all about bot traffic from Yandex, and another said their 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit. Sounds like they're having a rough time. People in the comments were debating if these "data centers" are actually just racks of phones being used for spam or something, and how much of it is just "information warfare." Some folks also brought up how US sanctions make it a nightmare for companies to deal with Russian firms.

Passkeys: Friend or Foe?

Then there was a really spicy one: "Passkeys are a trap." The article was basically saying they're super complicated and could be used to stop you from running unapproved software. But a lot of the comments were pushing back hard, saying the article was kinda bad faith. They were arguing that passkeys actually make things way more secure against phishing, and the real concern for freedom is more about "attestation" tech in general, not specifically passkeys.

Total Annihilation Reborn

On a lighter note, remember Total Annihilation? That classic RTS game? Well, someone's rebuilt it for modern computers! Everyone in the comments was super nostalgic, gushing about how awesome the original was. There was some talk about the multiplayer and potential copyright issues with fan projects, but mostly just happy memories.

NYC's "Click to Cancel" Rule

This is a good one: NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect. Basically, if you can sign up for a subscription online with a click, you have to be able to cancel it online just as easily. Finally! People are pretty stoked, but also a bit cynical in the comments, wondering if companies will just find new loopholes, like charging ridiculous cancellation fees.

Nitter in Trouble

Speaking of online stuff, Nitter, that privacy-focused Twitter frontend, posted an update saying they're seeking funding and legal help. Sounds like Twitter's finally coming down on them. It sparked a discussion in the comments about copyright law and how hard it is to really leave platforms like Twitter, especially when governments and important organizations still use them for alerts.

The AI Understanding Gap

And of course, AI was a big topic. There was a tweet from Karpathy about "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening." Basically, people's expectations versus what AI can actually do are getting further apart. The comments were full of stories about AI making surprisingly dumb mistakes, like one guy saying an AI dumped *all* his app's state into a single SQL row. Some even suggested these are the "twilight days of hacker culture" because of how AI is changing things.

Anyway, that's the quick download! Talk soon.

All Stories from Today

Bot traffic from Yandex (radar.cloudflare.com)

3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit (status.yandex.cloud)

Passkeys are a trap (nonfunctional.substack.com)

Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers (nanolathe.gg)

NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect (www.nyc.gov)

Nitter: Update Oct 10th seeking funding and legal help (nitter.net)

The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening (twitter.com)

LineageOS 24 (lineageos.org)

Google told to halt work on datacentres in Finland over environmental concerns (www.theguardian.com)

Documents add to evidence in climate deception case against ExxonMobil (insideclimatenews.org)

I paid people to try and follow my README (shkspr.mobi)

Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf] (teorth.github.io)

IRCv3 (ircv3.net)

I'm sorry, but you still have to think (itsallaboutthebit.com)

Fingerprints are the new cookies (royfish.dev)

So, You’d Like To Sell Your Print Issues Of The Onion? (theonion.com)

Show HN: WallHop – 12ft.io is gone, so I built a replacement (wallhop.io)

Cartographers of North Korea (2019) (cartographers-nk.wonyoung.so)

The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME (disconnect3d.pl)

A Remote Employee Refused 160 Webcam Photos a Day. Her Employer Fired Her (www.inc.com)

500B tokens later: Letting AI agents decompile a first-person shooter (momo5502.com)

Show HN: BetterWispr – Free, open-source dictation for Mac (betterwispr.com)

Valen's Memory Safety: A New Kind of Borrow Checking (verdagon.dev)

How to Build Wealth as a Career Person (asheradeniyi.com)

GameBoy on E-Paper ESP32 at 30FPS [video] (www.youtube.com)

European Alternatives (buy-european.net)

PSPi 6 – Raspberry Pi in a PSP (github.com)

Whatever became of holography? (2011) (www.americanscientist.org)

How I reverse engineered a commercial spatial audio effect (epestr.com)

Recursive self-improvement through collective intelligence (pub.sakana.ai)