Engineering &
Security Wire
Curated from Hacker News, Lobsters, Krebs on Security, and other top sources. Updated every 6 hours.
Tariffs Raised Consumers' Prices, but the Refunds Go Only to Businesses
Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/us/politics/companies-consumers-tariff-refunds.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47893060 Points: 19 # Comments: 7
FIRESTARTER Backdoor Hit Federal Cisco Firepower Device, Survives Security Patches
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has revealed that an unnamed federal civilian agency's Cisco Firepower device running Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software was compromised in September 2025 with malware called FIRESTARTER. FIRESTARTER, per CISA and the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), is assessed to be a backdoor designed for remote access and
Multiple things can be true at the same time
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Tesla (TSLA) discloses $2B AI hardware company acquisition buried
Article URL: https://electrek.co/2026/04/23/tesla-tsla-quietly-discloses-2-billion-ai-hardware-acquisition-10q/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47892765 Points: 40 # Comments: 21
Redesigning the Recurse Center application to inspire curious programmers
Article URL: https://www.recurse.com/blog/192-redesigning-the-recurse-center-application Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47892660 Points: 16 # Comments: 1
Which one is more important: more parameters or more computation? (2021)
18 points, 1 comments on Hacker News
SDL Now Supports DOS
Article URL: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/15377 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47892291 Points: 108 # Comments: 40
Diatec, known for its mechanical keyboard brand FILCO, has ceased operations
Article URL: https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20260424-filco-diatec/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47892236 Points: 14 # Comments: 3
Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/google-plans-to-invest-up-to-40-billion-in-anthropic Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47892074 Points: 281 # Comments: 340
I Cancelled Claude: Token Issues, Declining Quality, and Poor Support
Article URL: https://nickyreinert.de/en/2026/2026-04-24-claude-critics/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47892019 Points: 421 # Comments: 228
Refuse to let your doctor record you
Article URL: https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/why-you-should-refuse-to-let-your-doctor-record/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47891872 Points: 90 # Comments: 103
I'm done making desktop applications (2009)
Article URL: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-web-apps/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47891801 Points: 93 # Comments: 81
Norway Set to Become Latest Country to Ban Social Media for Under 16s
Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/norway-wants-kids-to-be-kids-with-social-media-ban-for-under-16s Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47891019 Points: 293 # Comments: 270
Different Language Models Learn Similar Number Representations
Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20817 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47890873 Points: 63 # Comments: 25
Show HN: Browser Harness – Gives LLM freedom to complete any browser task
Hey HN, We got tired of browser frameworks restricting the LLM, so we removed the framework and gave the LLM maximum freedom to do whatever it's trained on. We gave the harness the ability to self correct and add new tools if the LLM wants (is pre-trained on) that. Our Browser Use library is tens of thousands of lines of deterministic heuristics wrapping Chrome (CDP websocket). Element extractors, click helpers, target managemenet (SUPER painful), watchdogs (crash handling, file downloads, alerts), cross origin iframes (if you want to click on an element you have to switch the target first, very anoying), etc. Watchdogs specifically are extremely painful but required. If Chrome triggers for example a native file popup the agent is just completely stuck. So the two solutions are to: 1. code those heuristics and edge cases away 1 by 1 and prevent them 2. give LLM a tool to handle the edge case As you can imagine - there are crazy amounts of heuristics like this so you eventually end up w
Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
Article URL: https://kevinlynagh.com/newsletter/2026_04_overthinking/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47890799 Points: 236 # Comments: 57
NASA Employees Duped in Chinese Phishing Scheme Targeting U.S. Defense Software
The Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has revealed how a Chinese national posed as a U.S. researcher as part of a spear-phishing campaign to obtain sensitive information from the space agency, as well as from government entities, universities, and private companies, in violation of export control laws. "For years, NASA employees
Machine Learning Reveals Unknown Transient Phenomena in Historic Images
Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18799 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47890456 Points: 33 # Comments: 25
The operating cost of adult and gambling startups
4 points, 0 comments on Hacker News
Aspartame is not that bad?
4 points, 0 comments on Hacker News
Bridging the AI Agent Authority Gap: Continuous Observability as the Decision Engine
The AI Agent Authority Gap - From Ungoverned to Delegation As discussed in our previous article, AI agents are exposing a structural gap in enterprise security, but the problem is often framed too narrowly. The issue is not simply that agents are new actors. It is that agents are delegated actors. They do not emerge with independent authority. They are triggered, invoked, provisioned, or
26 FakeWallet Apps Found on Apple App Store Targeting Crypto Seed Phrases
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a set of malicious apps on the Apple App Store that impersonate popular cryptocurrency wallets in an attempt to steal recovery phrases and private keys since at least fall 2025. "Once launched, these apps redirect users to browser pages designed to look similar to the App Store and distribute trojanized versions of legitimate wallets," Kaspersky
UK Biobank leak: Health details of 500 000 people are offered for sale
Article URL: https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj.s781 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47888557 Points: 70 # Comments: 22
Hear your agent suffer through your code
Article URL: https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47888465 Points: 29 # Comments: 7
How to be anti-social – a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences
Article URL: https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mk4xkaxobc2p Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47888372 Points: 54 # Comments: 43
The Tribe Has to Outlive the Model
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nowhere: an entire website encoded in a URL
Article URL: https://hostednowhere.com/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47888337 Points: 51 # Comments: 36
Hire based on the conversation about code, not the code itself
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i found an old telephone and made it control spotify
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Mounting tar archives as a filesystem in WebAssembly
Article URL: https://jeroen.github.io/notes/webassembly-tar/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47888124 Points: 22 # Comments: 2
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