Top Hacker News Stories – Week 2025-W44

In week 44 of 2025, the top HN stories included the ongoing debate over Android's openness, with discussions garnering 2,691 points. A viral incident involved a YouTuber who attracted 10 million viewers by shimmying a lock, leading the lock company to sue him—a move widely criticized. Other prominent topics included the controversy surrounding AI-generated blog posts, which many found insulting, and the removal of obfuscation in Minecraft's Java Edition, signaling ongoing shifts in software transparency. Additionally, reports emerged that Israel pressured Google and Amazon to use a secret 'wink' to bypass legal orders, highlighting geopolitical tensions in tech.

#10

Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

832 pts, 536 comments

832 points · 536 comments · Add your take →

#11

Strange Attractors

790 pts, 78 comments

790 points · 78 comments · Add your take →

#12

EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

773 pts, 606 comments

773 points · 606 comments · Add your take →

#13

AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

727 pts, 491 comments

727 points · 491 comments · Add your take →

#14

China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

673 pts, 631 comments

673 points · 631 comments · Add your take →

#15

Attention lapses due to sleep deprivation due to flushing fluid from brain

614 pts, 291 comments

614 points · 291 comments · Add your take →

#16

Chat Control proposal fails again after public opposition

595 pts, 157 comments

595 points · 157 comments · Add your take →

#17

You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say

595 pts, 509 comments

595 points · 509 comments · Add your take →

#18

Denmark reportedly withdraws Chat Control proposal following controversy

575 pts, 235 comments

575 points · 235 comments · Add your take →

#19

Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres

557 pts, 401 comments

557 points · 401 comments · Add your take →

#20

Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?

521 pts, 108 comments

521 points · 108 comments · Add your take →

#21

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Top Hacker News Stories – Week 2025-W44

Keep Android Open

10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea

What we talk about when we talk about sideloading

It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts

Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders

Facts about throwing good parties

Free software scares normal people

Tell HN: Azure outage

Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

Strange Attractors

EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

Attention lapses due to sleep deprivation due to flushing fluid from brain

Chat Control proposal fails again after public opposition

You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say

Denmark reportedly withdraws Chat Control proposal following controversy

Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres

Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?

How I use every Claude Code feature

The AirPods Pro 3 flight problem

URLs are state containers

John Carmack on mutable variables

Tips for stroke-surviving software engineers

Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category

Visopsys: OS maintained by a single developer since 1997

How the cochlea computes (2024)

Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

Dithering – Part 1

uBlock Origin Lite in Apple App Store

Futurelock: A subtle risk in async Rust

Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?

Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)

Hard Rust requirements from May onward

Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again

Addiction Markets

SQLite concurrency and why you should care about it

US declines to join more than 70 countries in signing UN cybercrime treaty

Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands

Tongyi DeepResearch – open-source 30B MoE Model that rivals OpenAI DeepResearch

Notes by djb on using Fil-C

Tailscale Peer Relays

GHC now runs in the browser

Backpropagation is a leaky abstraction (2016)

SailfishOS: A Linux-based European alternative to dominant mobile OSes

Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop

Generative AI Image Editing Showdown

Zig's New Async I/O

Anti-cybercrime laws are being weaponized to repress journalism

The decline of deviance

Nvidia takes $1B stake in Nokia

HTTPS by default

We need a clearer framework for AI-assisted contributions to open source

A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

Pomelli

WebAssembly (WASM) arch support for the Linux kernel

Phone numbers for use in TV shows, films and creative works

AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

Fil-C: A memory-safe C implementation

Board: New game console recognizes physical pieces, with an open SDK

SPy: An interpreter and compiler for a fast statically typed variant of Python

S.A.R.C.A.S.M: Slightly Annoying Rubik's Cube Automatic Solving Machine

By the Power of Grayscale

Springs and bounces in native CSS

Hacking India's largest automaker: Tata Motors

Raspberry Pi Pico Bit-Bangs 100 Mbit/S Ethernet

Why don't you use dependent types?

The Internet runs on free and open source software and so does the DNS

AI scrapers request commented scripts

I made a heatmap diff viewer for code reviews

RISC-V takes first step toward international ISO/IEC standardization

Whole Earth Index

The Smol Training Playbook: The Secrets to Building World-Class LLMs

GLP-1 therapeutics: Their emerging role in alcohol and substance use disorders

My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4