Hey buddy,

Man, you wouldn't believe the stuff on Hacker News today, Thursday. Had to give you a quick buzz. Some wild things going on!

AI and Education Woes at Berkeley

First up, get this: failing grades are soaring in Berkeley's CS classes. Professors are saying it's because students are leaning too much on AI and their basic math skills are just tanking. One comment brought up a good point, asking if maybe the way we teach needs to change, since everyone in the industry is already "outsourcing their thinking" to AI anyway. Kinda makes you think, right?

VoidZero Joins Cloudflare

Then, big news in the tech world: VoidZero is officially joining Cloudflare. Sounds like an acqui-hire. What's interesting is one commenter pointed out there's "zero significant investor overlap" between the two companies, which is a bit unusual for these kinds of deals. Another guy said these usually don't work out, but sometimes they do, like Zulip with Dropbox. Hope this one's a success story!

US Dismantling Crucial Climate Tracking System

This one's a bit grim: the U.S. is apparently dismantling a system that tracks Atlantic currents. These currents are super important and apparently at risk of collapsing, which would be a huge deal for the climate. A lot of people in the comments were pointing fingers, saying it's probably politically motivated, tied to the "own the libs" mentality and helping out fossil fuel companies. Scary stuff.

SpaceX Blocked from Fast S&P Index Entry

Remember all the talk about big IPOs? Well, SpaceX and other mega IPOs are being denied fast entry into S&P's major indices. S&P is sticking to its guns on the rules. The original poster of the story was arguing that S&P's claim of being the "best single gauge of U.S. large-cap equities" is kind of bogus if it's excluding massive companies like SpaceX. And someone else mentioned there's this whole narrative out there about SpaceX being a "massively fraudulent piece of financial engineering." Wild.

AI Building Itself? Anthropic Thinks So

Anthropic, you know, the Claude AI guys, put out a piece on their progress toward "recursive self-improvement" for AI. Basically, AI building itself. Sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, right? One person had a practical take, saying if an AI makes an important claim, you should just "ask it to prove it." And get this, someone else did the math and figured out replacing a million software engineers with AI would need a whopping 380 gigawatts of constant power. That's insane!

Wind and Solar Outperform Gas Globally

Here's some good news for a change: wind and solar actually generated more power globally than natural gas did in April 2026. First time that's happened! Huge milestone for green energy. Someone in the comments was talking about how cheap solar installation is getting, even across borders in the EU. Pretty cool.

LLMs Trying to Hack My App

And finally, this guy did an experiment: he built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could