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Heart, head, life, fate

Shapin reviews Alison Bashford’s Decoding the Hand, tracing how hands have been read as signs of character and fate from ancient physiognomy and phrenology to 19th–20th‑century chirology and palmistry. The piece surveys the social, religious, and legal contest over palm-reading, including bans and the rise of professional chirologists who framed it as science. It shows how later biology—genetics, imaging, fingerprints—moved explanations inward, yet hand-reading persists in modern culture, even via AI, as a continuous history of surface-reading and self-knowledge.

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Show HN: Crust – A CLI framework for TypeScript and Bun

Crust is a TypeScript-first, Bun-native CLI framework with composable modules. It provides core, plugins, styling, prompts, validation, store, skills, and create tooling under @crustjs/* packages, enabling command parsing, routing, and extensibility for CLI apps. Getting started with bun create crust my-cli. The project is beta-quality until v1.0, with breaking changes between minor releases. Latest release: 0.0.22 (Mar 15, 2026). MIT license.

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'The Secret Agent': Exploring a Vibrant, yet Violent Brazil (2025)

The Secret Agent, Brazil's entry for Best International Feature, is a political thriller set in 1977 Recife during Carnival. Cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova, AFC, shot on Arri Alexa 35 with vintage Panavision anamorphic lenses to contrast bright, saturated colors with dark subject matter. She shot nearly 360 degrees, emphasizing texture and halation, and graded to avoid a red cast. Opening gas-station sequence and a Carnival moment outside São Luiz cinema were lit with 12K lights and SkyPanels. The film probes Brazil's contradictions—joyful culture shadowed by violence and disparity—through close collaboration with director Kleber Mendonça Filho.

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Toward automated verification of unreviewed AI-generated code

Peter Lavigne experiments with production-use of unreviewed AI-generated code by shifting from line-by-line review to verifications enforced by constraints. He generated a FizzBuzz solution and iteratively enforced: (1) property-based tests to constrain behavior, (2) mutation testing to ensure only correct behavior remains, (3) no side effects, (4) type-checking and linting for Python. He argues maintainability/readability may be less relevant when treating output as compiled code. A Python repo fizzbuzz-without-human-review demonstrates these checks. He discusses related work and suggests a middle ground between formal verification and human review.

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Show HN: Antfly: Distributed, Multimodal Search and Memory and Graphs in Go

Antfly is a distributed search engine built on etcd Raft that combines full-text BM25, dense vectors, and graph traversal over multimodal data (text, images, audio, video). It auto-generates embeddings, chunks, and graph edges and includes built-in RAG agents for retrieval-augmented generation with streaming and multi-turn chat. Key features: hybrid search, graph indexes, multimodal search (CLIP/CLAP), reranking, aggregations, ACID shard-level transactions, TTL, and S3 storage. It supports pluggable models (Ollama, OpenAI, Bedrock, Google) or local Termite, with admin/tools like MCP server, Kubernetes operator, authentication, and backups. Core license ELv2; SDKs/components are Apache 2.0.

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Spice Data (YC S19) Is Hiring a Product Specialist

Spice Data is hiring a Product Specialist (New Grad) in San Francisco, $80k-$100k salary, 0.1%-0.5% equity, on-site, full-time. Role: clean and map data, QA between pipeline and customer data, coordinate third-party data-collection contractors. About you: comfortable with Excel and basic data analysis; detail-oriented, organized, proactive, clear communicator; technical background a plus but not required. Benefits: lunch, unlimited PTO, 401k, health/dental/vision. Interview: four-stage process, ending onsite. Spice Data is YC-backed, profitable, focused on restaurant data; founded 2019 by Richard Kreger and Cameron Cairns; small SF team.

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Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

RE//verse 2026 unveiled Bliss, a voltage-glitch hack that finally breaks Microsoft’s 'unhackable' Xbox One. Two precise voltage glitches skip the ARM Cortex memory-protection setup and then hit a Memcpy during header read, jumping to attacker-controlled data. It's a hardware boot-ROM attack, unpatchable and a complete console compromise, enabling loading of unsigned code at all levels (Hypervisor and OS) and access to the security processor to decrypt games/firmware. Implications include new firmware access for archivists, potential emulation breakthroughs, and a path to Bliss-like mod chips.

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Perlsky Is a Perl 5 Implementation of an at Protocol Personal Data Server

Perlsky is a Perl 5 implementation of an AT Protocol Personal Data Server (PDS) by Tangled Labs. It provides accounts/auth (createAccount, sessions, invites, did:web/did:plc, OAuth with PAR/PKCE/private_key_jwt/DPoP), repo and blob storage and dedup, CAR/DAG-CBOR/CID/MST, full com.atproto.sync (firehose, getRepo, importRepo), AppView proxying to Bluesky, moderation with takedowns and persisted labels, crawler discovery, and Prometheus metrics. It includes a suite of tests comparing to official PDS, browser smoke tests, and interop fixtures. Quick start: install deps, run perlsky daemon and health check; deployment docs cover TLS/systemd.

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How long does it take to get last liquid drops from kitchen containers?

Brown physicists Thomas Dutta and Jay Tang used Navier-Stokes equations and experiments to quantify how long it takes for last drops to drain from tilted shallow liquid films. They find decanting time depends on viscosity: milk (~low) about 30 seconds to reach 90% drained at 45 degrees; olive oil (high) over nine minutes for 90%. They weighed liquid as it flowed off a plate to determine 90% decanted. They also modeled the residual water on a washed wok; simulation predicted ~15 minutes, though Tang usually waits 1–2 minutes. The work links everyday kitchen physics to Tang's biophysics lab research.

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Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

Don’t spend tokens on LLM-assisted Django contributions. Instead contribute time and money to Django Software Foundation. LLMs can accelerate building features, but Django’s size and long horizon require real understanding of tickets, solutions, and feedback. If you rely on an LLM to generate code and PRs, you may obscure your understanding and frustrate reviewers. Use LLMs as a learning aid to grasp concepts, then explain in your own words and disclose any AI assistance. Contributing should emphasize transparency, human collaboration, and growth; donate to Django and build with genuine understanding.

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Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360

Bruce Dawson describes a design bug in the Xbox 360’s PowerPC CPU: the xdcbt prefetch could bypass L2, causing incoherent memory when another core wrote to data. The bug surfaced in a memory-copy routine that prefetches beyond the buffer end; crashes vanished when the code stopped using xdcbt. Even more dangerous, xdcbt could be speculatively executed by the branch predictor, acting like a real prefetch and crashing. Replacing xdcbt with breakpoints proved the crashes were caused by speculative execution. The tale foreshadows Meltdown/Spectre: unsafe speculative execution and why some instructions must be avoided.

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