Man, you won't believe some of the stuff that popped up on Hacker News today, Thursday, January 22, 2026. Had to tell you about a few highlights. Grab a coffee or something, this is quick.

Crazy Security Policy from Curl

First up, there was this wild article titled "We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports" from the Curl project. Can you believe that? It's their security policy, basically saying if you send them a garbage bug report, they'll public shaming you. Some people in the comments were like, "Been there, built walls," totally relating to getting swamped with bad reports. But others were saying, hey, maybe kindness is better than being so harsh. Also, a few pointed out how some academic papers are just "pretend-play" and not real research, which makes you wonder about the quality of some reports out there.

Giant Pixel Art NYC Map

Then, this really cool "Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC" popped up. It's exactly what it sounds like – a huge, detailed pixel art map of New York City that someone made. People were freaking out in the comments, saying they loved zooming in and finding their old apartments or favorite restaurants. The creator even used some kind of AI agentic coding to put it together, which is pretty wild. There was a bit of a discussion about how AI editing tools are getting super advanced, so it's not just "dragging boxes around" anymore.

AI Hallucinations in Research Papers

Speaking of AI, there was a big one about GPTZero finding 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers. So, this AI tool apparently caught a bunch of made-up stuff in scientific papers that were accepted into a big AI conference! People in the comments were debating if using an LLM to write is plagiarism and how many folks in real life don't even get how AI works. Someone else said, "Skepticism is not the same thing as irrational rejection," meaning it's fair to question AI's reliability.

Europe's Green Energy Milestone

On a more positive note, "In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels" was a big headline. Sounds like Europe hit a major milestone, with renewable energy sources producing more power than fossil fuels. Comments mentioned how Australia also had unexpected success with home solar installations, even with some government opposition. There was a good point about aiming for diversity in energy sources rather than just ditching one for the other entirely.

New Open-Source Voice AI: Qwen3-TTS

Another AI story was "Qwen3-TTS family is now open sourced: Voice design, clone, and generation". This is a new open-source AI that can design, clone, and generate voices. Super cool, but also a bit scary, right? People were talking about whether you can really tell the difference between an AI voice and a real one, especially over low-bandwidth connections. Some comments brought up older tech like Yamaha Vocaloid and how artists are already struggling with how their work is used.

Banned by Claude for a .md file?

This one was pretty wild: "I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?" This guy got banned from the Claude AI platform for literally just trying to create a markdown file named 'Claude.md'. Seriously? The comments were full of people saying companies deserve bad PR if they ban you without a clear reason. Someone even mentioned GDPR, saying if you're in the EU, you have rights against automated decisions. Apparently, others got banned for simple things too, like asking for sci-fi book recommendations. Talk about opaque policies!

Internet Voting Insecurity

And finally, a really important one: "Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections" from Princeton. It's a strong argument against online voting because it's just too easy to mess with. The comments had a big debate about how you verify votes with paper ballots versus online systems. Some argued that with paper, you know what you put down before it's anonymized, but online, it's harder to trust. It’s a messy topic, especially with all the talk about election security these days.

Anyway, that's the gist of it for today. Talk soon!