First things first
AI is spreading everywhere, from coding and image models to chips, security research, and workflows that cost a small fortune. The pace is wild.
But the bigger story may be where progress meets real-world limits: voters rejecting data centers, hackers probing critical systems, and cities making scrappy safety fixes permanent. Meanwhile, old code and old games are getting surprisingly fresh, unexpected second lives, with the stakes rising for people and places alike.
The top 6
Layer3 Intel detected 236 residential-proxy exits across six IP addresses on the White House network over 26 days, with independent services confirming the addresses. The activity’s evening pattern may point to an infected device, but the data does not identify a device or user; vulnerable proxy software could expose internal systems.
Voters in more than 30 localities across nine states approved measures to restrict or block data centers, including a citywide ban in Edgewater, Florida. The backlash adds pressure on AI infrastructure investors and has pushed politicians to promise tougher regulation.
North Korean hackers used a fake job interview to trick a Binance software engineer into installing malware on a work computer before a $6.3 billion cryptocurrency heist. Binance said the attack combined several techniques and was not a single breach or simple phishing incident.
AI users are invited to share which subscriptions, models, coding tools, and agent platforms they currently use. The questions aim to capture how AI workflows and tool choices have changed over the past year.
AMD forecasts about $17 billion in Q4 revenue, which would surpass Intel’s projection for the first time, driven by booming data center and AI chip sales. Client and gaming revenue faces double-digit declines heading into 2027.
Moonshot AI has released Kimi K3.1 Pro model weights on Hugging Face. The model supports image and text input and can be run with Transformers, vLLM, or SGLang.
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Quote of the day
As you think, so shall you become.
Bruce Lee
Also big today
OpenAI researchers used AI-assisted security analysis to identify local privilege-escalation vulnerabilities in Linux. The findings point to flaws that could let a local user gain root access, and the team reported them for remediation.
Guerrilla bike lanes installed by San Francisco activists after fatal hit-and-run crashes prompted the city to make the protected route permanent. Sturdy traffic posts helped turn the unauthorized safety upgrade into official infrastructure.
OpenAI introduced Images 2.6, a new image-generation offering. The available information does not describe its features or capabilities.
Go 1.27 makes the new `encoding/json/v2` and `encoding/json/jsontext` packages stable and generally available. They address long-standing problems in Go’s original JSON API while retaining flexible support for encoding and decoding Go types.
Rotherham’s high street has lost shoppers to nearby retail parks, leaving a dwindling mix of vape, nail and charity shops. Residents say reviving town centres will require a new purpose beyond traditional retail and creative ways to bring people back.
Ricursive Intelligence released Ripple-65B Preview, an open-weight model trained on 12 trillion tokens that it says leads U.S. open-weight models on agentic coding benchmarks. The company says it trained the model for $32 million and made it available through Hugging Face and several AI platforms.
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How many tickles does it take to make an octopus laugh?
Ten tickles.
Worth a look
LED lights attract far fewer flying insects than incandescent bulbs because they emit little or no ultraviolet light, which insects use to navigate. With fewer insects gathering around the lights, predators such as geckos also have less reason to visit.
SpaceX has published a page titled “Starfall.” The available information does not identify what Starfall is or what it does.
Conductor is joining Meta and plans to unveil a new product early next year. Conductor Cloud becomes read-only on Nov. 13 and shuts down Nov. 20, while the local app will receive model updates and critical fixes until early 2027.
Tencent Hy4 is presented on a Tencent AI research page. The provided content contains no details about the project beyond its title and a number.
Anthropic’s FlashProve system uses zkSNARKs to prove that an AI response came from a specified model while keeping its weights hidden. It generates proofs for a 400-billion-parameter model at about 110 tokens per second on one H100 GPU, though proof generation takes 70-95 times the GPU time of ordinary inference.
Pierre Computer announced it is being acquired by OpenAI. A commenter asked whether code.storage will continue operating.
Song of the day
Deep cuts
Lemmings CSS Animation is an interactive playground where walkers traverse text, buttons, borders, and platforms. Add, drag, or flick walkers, and resize the page to send them flying as its layout shifts.
BYD’s Brazil market share rose to 9.7% in October from 4.2% a year earlier, as registrations more than doubled. Its Bahia plant has assembled over 150,000 vehicles, and BYD is expanding local production as it targets market leadership by 2030.
Plastic-free coffee machines are emerging as a new status symbol. The page’s content was unavailable due to an access error.
After 11 years of reverse engineering, Danielrh built a way to play DOS Wing Commander cooperatively online, with each player flying a separate ship. The project identifies game state in DOS memory and lets network data control a second player’s wingman.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan says he spends $100,000 to $200,000 annually on AI tokens for agents that handle coding, research, and personal tasks. He says his agents access his email, files, and notes, and YC is using one to overhaul its operations.
Qualcomm’s Cloud AI 100 Ultra is an AI accelerator card rated at 150 watts. It has 128GB of memory and 548GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Today's best Hacker News stories, summarized and screenshotted, one email a day.