1018 | XSLT Dies, Solar Surges, and Other Stories of the Week

Mia: Welcome back to the show, everybody. I'm Mia.

Milo: And I'm Milo. It's been a big twenty-four hours on Hacker News, and the thing that ties today's stories together, I think, is that we're watching decisions get made, by browser vendors, by tool builders, by governments, by central banks, and then we're all standing around trying to figure out what those decisions actually break.

Mia: Right, so we've got browsers dropping a web technology, a new diagram renderer, an ESP32 emulator, a security breach at an AI coding tool, a new DeepSeek model, a website that tells you how fast a local LLM will feel before you buy the hardware, kernel statistics with AI fingerprints all over them, solar quietly passing nuclear, gold topping the US export chart, an attack on diplomats in the West Bank, and then, for dessert, transparent chicken made with Dorito dye and a synthesized duck pond.

Mia: Plus a story about becoming a Japanese citizen. Let's get into it.

Milo: So the one that kicked off a lot of conversation: Chrome and Edge are removing XSLT. Now, quick setup for anyone who's never touched it, XSLT is the language for transforming XML, so for years websites used it to take an XML file and style it into HTML in the browser.

Mia: And the discussion around this was really interesting because the article itself, ironically, briefly went down. It was serving a 503, Service Unavailable.

Milo: Yes, and the commenters noticed immediately. One commenter, Insimwytim, joked, "So, this site breaks, we know that much." And Barbing followed up with "doctor-seo dot net has failed us. What is this world coming to?

Milo: " Meanwhile g-b-r posted an Internet Archive link while the site was still down, and Aachen chimed in with a genuinely interesting observation there: bless the Internet Archive for basically hosting a second copy of the internet with enough bandwidth to serve whatever's currently down, while this single site couldn't survive its own traffic.

Mia: There's a certain poetry to that in a thread about the web platform shrinking. The Archive is this massive volunteer-ish institution doing more heavy lifting than the individual sites it rescues.

Milo: Okay, but the substantive part of the discussion. One commenter, tossit444, just posted "503" as their whole comment, which was the joke of the thread. But troupo pointed people to a long discussion about the XSLT removal on the WHATWG GitHub issue, and linked to a proposal called swet by Dorian Taylor, saying it's already much better than any templating proposal "the platform" is trying to push.

Milo: So there's a camp that sees the removal as part of a pattern where the platform keeps failing to offer a replacement for what it deprecates.

Mia: Now, why is Edge in the headline? Someone will ask. pjmlp put it bluntly: "Edge is Chrome." And zamadatix expanded on that, saying the article says as much in its opening, and includes a statement from Microsoft noting they don't intend to carry this forward separately. The salient quote from one of the Microsoft pages cited: "For functionality and compatibility reasons, Microsoft Edge adopts nearly all of the Chromium project's changes to the web platform.

Mia: However, Microsoft retains full control of the Microsoft Edge browser and may defer or reject changes." And zamadatix added that removed features don't always follow the same timelines, not just because of lag in syncing to upstream Chromium.

Milo: So the practical takeaway for someone maintaining an old site: Edge is almost certainly going to follow Chrome here, but the calendar might differ slightly. What actually breaks? Sites that rely on the browser to style raw XML files. If you're serving XML and expecting the browser to transform it, that pipeline goes away.

Mia: The historical reflection was where the thread got rich. Trustable8 wrote this nice eulogy: back in the XHTML days, XSLT was a spec that could have made website modularity so much cleaner. They once built an early website creation tool that merged separate components using XSLT, and it was really powerful in the days before JavaScript was usable without jQuery. But XHTML was dropped in favor of HTML5, and XSLT was pretty much useless after that.

Mia: Their take: it's done well to survive this long, probably mainly kept around to style XML files.

Milo: And then the spec-quality debate broke out. g-b-r said the XSLT 1.0 spec specifically was written pretty badly, to their recollection, they had a hard time making sense of it. And WCSTombs came back with real depth on that: yeah, XSLT 1.0 has some really obvious missteps, so much so that basically nobody just implements XSLT 1.0. What they actually support is most of XSLT 1.0 plus a handful of EXSLT extensions, which are completely unofficial and not part of any XSLT spec.

Milo: In their opinion the EXSLT stuff is the bare minimum to make XSLT 1.0 a passable language. Meanwhile the spec evolved into 2.0 and 3.0, which, as far as they know, even to this day have no complete open-source implementation.

Mia: That's a pretty damning technical indictment, and it reframes the removal. It's not that browsers are killing a healthy standard, it's that the standard itself fragmented and never fully shipped.

Milo: Although wahern pushed back on the anti-XML side of the history. They argued HTML5 could have taken the extra step of defining a canonical XML or XML-compatible DOM encoding, or at least encouraged it, but the anti-XML sentiment was explicit and spiteful. And they noted that popular XSLT processors are built to consume and even produce HTML5, they're just not sure how thorough those capabilities are or whether they're based on any standards.

Mia: And wahern's personal arc was the most human moment in the thread. They said they lost enthusiasm for XML after bad experiences with WDDX and XML-RPC, but as a foundation for HTML it was the best thing going, and maybe still is, given the absence of cross-toolchain contenders. Same for XSLT, at least setting aside the choice to make the syntax homoiconic.

Mia: They circled back to XSLT long after it was clear it was a dead end, and their conclusion was: a good tool is a good tool, and the fact it remains so despite wanton neglect only proves it.

Milo: What's still unknown here is the actual damage radius. Nobody in the thread pinned down how many live sites still depend on browser-side XSLT, only that some do, and that the replacement story, whatever "the platform" eventually offers, isn't here yet.

Mia: Which is actually a perfect bridge to our next story, because it's about the platform gaining something instead of losing it. Pele, from the Obsidian team, is a lightweight open-source library that renders Mermaid diagrams to SVG, themed with CSS variables.

Milo: For the uninitiated, Mermaid is that syntax where you write text like "A goes to B" and it renders a flowchart. It's everywhere in documentation. And the problem everyone has with it is layout quality.

Mia: Exactly, and Pele's pitch is numbers. Zero dependencies, 230 kilobytes gzipped versus 1.6 megabytes for Mermaid.js, render times of 0.05 to 0.3 milliseconds versus 6 to 82 milliseconds. So up to 500 times faster. It supports every diagram type built into Mermaid 12.1.0. And theming is via CSS variables, so you change a color variable and it applies without re-rendering.

Milo: One clever detail from the site: on small screens, Pele adapts the layout, whereas Mermaid.js scales the diagram. That's a real difference in behavior, not just speed.

Mia: Now the discussion. nickmain asked the question a lot of embedders care about: does the official Mermaid library still require a full or headless browser environment to lay out the SVG? Because if so, Pele is great news for rendering Mermaid in other places.

Mia: invokestatic replied that the Python mermaidx library works for that, good for generating documentation with embedded diagrams in CI, but the layout and rendering can sometimes be very wonky, connections crossing over each other instead of arranging neatly, and changing layout settings doesn't fix it, so sometimes they just export a PNG from mmdc and embed that.

Milo: falsaberN1 mentioned another option, Merman on GitHub, which outputs SVG. And Imustaskforhelp did the classic "is it open source?" dance, couldn't find the repo at first, then found it, it's github.com/obsidianmd/pele, and used the moment to plea: please put a GitHub icon at the top of your page if the app is open source, it helps people star and bookmark projects. Which is fair.

Mia: The layout complaints were the heart of it though. lukeify said anytime they try Mermaid for anything more complex than a toy diagram, they end up frustrated by the arcane and topologically poor layout. And tptacek answered with the wisdom of the thread: graph layout is a famously hard problem.

Milo: And mcapodici took that further with a genuinely interesting thought: maybe it's almost like writing. To make a diagram that communicates well, you need to have solved the problem properly yourself. The tool can't fix an underspecified idea.

Mia: Thegagne brought in alternatives: they've had good luck with D2 and elk or dagre, and if you get into the nitty gritty of ELK you can do a lot with it. So Pele isn't solving layout hardness, as far as the discussion showed, it's solving size, speed, theming, and dependency weight.

Milo: One fun aside: the name. druvisc noted "pele" is "mouse" in Latvian, hmokiguess said it's "skin" in Portuguese, and apodik added it's a football player in Brazil. The site says it's named after Pele, the goddess of volcanoes and fire, developed for Obsidian to render diagrams quickly and match your theme. MIT licensed.

Mia: From rendering diagrams in the browser, let's stay in the browser but go to hardware. esp32sim, a Show HN from joakimeriksson. The pitch: an open-source ESP32 emulator that runs in the browser, and the fun part of the demo is there's no ESP32 involved, the firmware is executing in the emulator. The goal is to make ESP32 software easier to experiment with, test, and simulate without always needing physical hardware.

Milo: And the technical claim from the repo is strong: it's an ESP32 emulator in Rust, instruction-level emulation of four ESP32 SoCs across both of Espressif's CPU architectures, Xtensa ESP32 and S3, and RISC-V C3 and C6. Each one boots the real mask ROM, the real second-stage bootloader, and an unmodified application image. No patched firmware, no stubs.

Milo: The classic ESP32 even boots its ECO3 ROM on dual LX6 cores with GPIO, UART, and timers, and there's a board option that adds the LilyGO TTGO T-Display's screen and buttons. No cloud, no accounts, MIT license.

Mia: So why does this matter? raminf gave the most useful practitioner's perspective. On a lot of IoT projects, it's easier to create a "functional" software simulator for the hardware part so the mobile and cloud people can get going without waiting for test hardware. Those simulators work at the level of emulating BLE or WiFi/API commands. Once you have hardware, the simulators are only used in CI/CD testing.

Mia: Where they see this coming in handy is instead of a functional simulator, actually having real firmware running for each mobile or back-end dev and for CI/CD runners.

Milo: That's the difference between mocking the interface and running the actual binary. It's a big deal for test fidelity if it works as advertised.

Mia: But the thread wasn't all praise. turbine401 asked the inevitable: how is this different from Wokwi? They've been doing this for years and have a large number of microcontrollers emulated. tyromaniac replied, bluntly, "This one is vibecoded." crazysim countered that it's OSS and the price is free, and even if it is vibe coded, the price is free.

Mia: And the__alchemist pushed back on that whole class of question, saying you could apply it to the large majority of creations people make, excluding a minority of truly novel things and outright clones. As a relevant example, look at Show HN: you could make the same post with a slight variation on every one of them.

Milo: The README got its own roasting. dofm said they actually want to play with it, but these gigantic, poorly-formatted AI-slop paragraphs, dense mixes of formatting, brackets, semantic punctuation, command line arguments and part numbers, are just too much. They urged the author to reconsider how the page is presented.

Mia: And rvz escalated with a great coinage: a README becomes a DONTREADME when its contents are, one, as long as a novel, two, poorly formatted, and three, have several claudisms in each sentence. It's one they're not going to read, and not even the author read it themselves. They also called it a predictor of the level of slop in a project, noting the people talking about "code quality" have now vanished.

Milo: exe34 summed up the fix in one hashtag-style comment: this-should-have-been-a-table. Which, looking at the repo, there is actually a table in there with the SoC specs, the decoder checks, the boot chain. So the information exists; the presentation around it is the problem.

Mia: mrtksn brought a kindred-spirit story: they'd recently vibe coded a drone simulator that flies drones by simulating an ESP32 in the browser, where the actual flight controller C code that runs on a real ESP32 runs as WebAssembly. So the drones fly with the actual flight controller, and you can flash the real board directly. That's evidence the "run real firmware without hardware" approach has legs.

Milo: What's unknown: the author is explicitly asking embedded developers what this needs to support before they'd actually use it for development, testing, or CI. So it's an early project, 61 stars at the time of the snapshot, with the honest open question of whether it's production-grade or a cool demo.

Mia: And from "run software without hardware" we pivot naturally to a story about software that maybe had too little human oversight: the OpenCode breach. This one is a security incident, so let me set it up carefully. OpenCode posted on X that they had a security breach the night before, related to what they called a large-scale distillation attack that impacted 1.4 percent of OpenCode Console users.

Mia: They said they'd notified all affected users by email that morning, and that the incident was ongoing so they couldn't share more details, but they were working with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google to remediate.

Milo: Then the follow-up from the OpenCode team, which the submitter pranshuchittora also posted: they'd identified unauthorized access to a legacy system that was in the process of being decommissioned. Third-party provider keys, like OpenAI and Anthropic keys, saved in your workspace may have been exposed. They asked users to revoke and replace those keys through the provider dashboards, update any applications using them, and review recent usage for unexpected activity.

Mia: So if you had keys stored in an OpenCode workspace, the action item is clear: rotate them now, and check your provider usage logs for anything you didn't do.

Milo: Now the discussion, which was polarized. One commenter, fleshers, was honestly confused by the wording: does it mean the credentials were hacked and then used to perform a mass distillation campaign? That confusion is worth naming, because "distillation attack" is not standard breach vocabulary, and the company hasn't fully explained what happened. The unknowns are significant: what exactly was taken, how, and what "distillation" means in this context.

Mia: The trust conversation was the meaty part. bewareofscams came in with receipts, saying "I told you so," linking to a comment they'd left 68 days earlier warning that OpenCode would leak your data and calling it among the shadiest of the harnesses. tadasv said this is one of the reasons they don't trust OpenCode: it looked very nice on paper when it first came out and there were no alternatives, but today they'd stick with a simpler setup or just use one of the big tech agents.

Milo: lukewarm707 had already left for security reasons, quoting a criticism that when OpenCode was challenged about sending data to OpenRouter without listing it as a third-party processor, they offered a dismissive response, same with running prompts through Cloudflare. Seemingly trivial, but it signifies general disinterest in security, in that quoted view.

Mia: But Reyonlds96 pushed back hard, calling it misinformation: they said all OpenCode ever did was give people a free model for title generation if they hadn't set one themselves, a feature you could disable or set to your own model, and it's since been removed, so now there's no free fallback model. That is it, they said, it's still private by default.

Mia: And anonymous908213 shot back that "all it ever did" was send your entire prompt and context to a "free" model, and accused the thread of astroturfing. So you have directly contradictory characterizations of the same feature, and no way for a listener to fully adjudicate from this thread alone.

Milo: Which is exactly the kind of dispute where you should withhold judgment. Meanwhile lousken asked the practical question: if they don't use any of OpenCode's models and aren't signed in, is it a problem? They said they see nothing in Wireshark except traffic to models.opencode.ai. That's a reasonable personal audit but doesn't answer the breach question.

Mia: My favorite comment in the thread, though, was TZubiri's observation: it's funny how no one ever announces their critical vulnerabilities with "we have been hacked, you should uninstall our software and use something else." At some point in the severity of the vulnerability, that should be the conclusion, but no one ever says it. And qlte replied that this was a leak of keys added in a web UI, implying uninstalling the software wouldn't help, the keys live on the service.

Milo: That exchange actually sharpens the issue: the blast radius here is server-side trust, not client software. If you gave a service your API keys, the service is now part of your threat model, permanently, regardless of what client you run.

Mia: Speaking of API keys and what you get for them, that's our segue to DeepSeek, because they released a new model the same day this thread is from: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017.

Milo: So the setup. It's the October 17, 2026 snapshot of V4.1 Flash. It's a sparse mixture-of-experts model, and notably the first built on DeepSeek's Causal Encoder-Decoder architecture, CED. It activates 8 billion parameters on input and 16 billion on output, from a 552-billion-parameter backbone. That asymmetric split keeps per-token compute low relative to total model size.

Milo: Image understanding is native, visual and text embeddings trained jointly from the start of pre-training, rather than bolted on afterward like the earlier experimental V4 Flash Vision.

Mia: The economics are the headline for a lot of people: 15 cents per million input tokens, 60 cents per million output, on OpenRouter's listing. Compressed KV caching cuts cache memory to roughly a quarter of the previous Flash generation, which significantly reduces costs on agentic workloads. DeepSeek positions it as the cost-efficient tier of the family and claims it exceeds V4 Pro on performance, speed, and task completion time.

Milo: And on the benchmarks from the model card, the gains are real on paper: Terminal-Bench 4.0 jumps from 31.2 to 42.3 versus the prior Flash, ProgramBench from 20.3 to 29.1, Automation-Bench from 54.8 to 60.5, Agents' Last Exam 31.8 to 35.4. For context, Opus 5 still leads several of those, 51.8 on Terminal-Bench, 75.3 on NL2Repo-Bench. But DeepSeek's number beats GPT-5.6 Sol on several rows.

Mia: Which is why freakynit's comment was the top reaction: "Those benchmarks can't possibly be real, right? Right?" with the Padme four-panel meme energy. That skepticism is unresolved. The model card does say they use the Claude Code harness for Terminal-Bench and Mini-SWE-V2 for DeepSWE, which at least names the methodology.

Milo: bashtoni quipped, "a minor update, they say, before showing off benchmarks that display a substantial improvement." And the strategic read came from logicchains: at this rate the frontier labs will be Anthropic and DeepSeek, with OpenAI struggling to keep up.

Milo: freakynit then took it darker, saying they believe these are the last sets of super-high-end models available to the public, open or closed, and that companies will start withholding top-of-the-line models for themselves, governments, and their super-high-paying partners.

Mia: The model comparisons in the thread were where the practitioners weighed in. jononor liked that it's above GLM 5.3, which they call very capable, but wished for smaller Flash models again, because running this one locally is tough and costly. LaurensBER put it in context: close to Opus 5, far behind Sol 6.1 and Opus 5.5, probably a pretty decent model for 90 percent of use cases. They've been doing hobby work with GLM 5.3 Flash and can count on two hands the times they needed something stronger.

Mia: Even with unlimited tokens at work, Opus is often overkill if you know exactly what you need.

Milo: And egeozcan described the multi-model workflow that's emerging: Opus for planning through the API on medium thinking, which doesn't cost much, DeepSeek or GLM Flash for the rest, Sol 6.1 for review loops at the end, all running on pi. A very complex task tends to cost like ten dollars max. They call it comparable to a subscription with enormous flexibility.

Mia: Though not everyone loves Sol 6.1. cromka said they don't know what people see in it, Opus 5.5 is much more intelligent, proactive, avoids stupid mistakes and self-contradictions, where Sol 6.1 has a goldfish memory, as annoying to work with as Opus 5 was. So model preferences split along workflow lines.

Milo: One practical footnote from olavgg: they run DeepSeek Flash plus Opus 5.5 as advisor and reviewer, and they burn through a 200-dollar Claude Code subscription in under 24 hours on a single project. When rpastuszak asked how that's even possible, fahrvrgnugen had the diagnosis: loading tons of MCPs and never compacting. Context window hygiene, people.

Mia: On the local-running question, Pragmata asked whether you could run it on a pair of DGX Sparks, since at the initial retail price that was maybe 8k in hardware. bashtoni said no, this is not a small model, they believe 4x Sparks is possible, but 4.1 is pretty big for a Flash model. Their pick for the most capable model you can currently run on 2x Sparks without quantizing: MiMo 2.6 Flash. Which brings us perfectly to a tool built for exactly these questions.

Milo: llmspeed. The Show HN from albinstman: a site where you pick hardware and a model and feel how fast a local LLM runs before you buy the hardware. It simulates tokens per second and time-to-first-token from verified benchmarks, community benchmarks from r/LocalLLaMA, localscore.ai and more, with other numbers derived from similar setups or projected from specs. There's a little animated token counter so you literally watch the speed.

Mia: The hardware list is long, RTX 3090 through 5090, the Mac Studios, the AMD Strix Halo, even cloud H100s and A100s for comparison. The model list includes Qwen, GLM, GPT-OSS, DeepSeek, Llama, Gemma. The author was upfront that estimates for a short prompt on a single device, and some numbers are measured while others are projections.

Milo: And the discussion immediately stress-tested the accuracy. pil0u said they don't know what basis the numbers are estimated on, but their M2 Ultra 128GB runs almost twice as fast as what's reported for the M3 Ultra 512GB. They wished there'd been such a tool before picking their hardware, it's useful, but the estimates need to be somewhat correct. The author responded, thank you for the feedback, what model and quant did you test so I can look into it? Good response, honestly.

Mia: bozdemir raised a different methodological point: the whole harness affects speed, so the libs used in the harness and their versions might be worth showing for each individual model setup. The author said they'd look into adding harnesses, but the benchmark sources usually don't contain that, so the problem is limited data.

Mia: Then cyanydeez pushed back on the premise, saying the author was exaggerating, hopefully: the only bottleneck a harness adds is pre-context fill and whatever tooling is installed, and a proper harness reduces those to negligible startup costs, unless you're dumping 200k of context into your chats.

Milo: bozdemir also wanted more models added, specifically Strata and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next with various quantizations, calling them the go-to and very sought-after MoE models. And here's where the thread took a lovely turn, into the "old hardware is fine" camp.

Mia: hbogert complained, affectionately, that they don't include old crap like their RX580, which is doing impressive stuff with 9B Qwen models. Someone asked, that's 8GB VRAM, you're using it for coding? Yes, 8GB from 2017. Their workflow: OpenCode running against LM Studio as the engine, for simple but tedious refactors where IDEs don't have clean refactors yet, or languages like CUE where the LSP tooling is great but refactoring isn't.

Milo: The performance reality check from hbogert: it won't win benchmarks, 20 tokens per second generation is okay, but the first pass is slow, parsing runs around 100 to 200 tokens per second, which is rough for long questions or harnesses like OpenCode that start with thousands of tokens. Once the cache is warm, pretty enjoyable. Their use-case thesis: it could have way more use cases where it's just good enough, email categorization, voice commands for the home.

Milo: A year ago this was still miserable, but 9B Qwen plus better cache quantization and tricks in the latest engines makes it viable. Will it do difficult architectural refactors in a one-shot prompt like Opus allows? Nope, not gonna happen.

Mia: And merbanan added another data point: on 8GB VRAM, an RTX 2060 Super, plus 64GB of system RAM, they can run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next at usable speeds, and the last two weeks have brought quite some speedups in that space.

Milo: So llmspeed is useful, the data coverage is the constraint, and the community's real lesson is that the floor of usable local AI hardware keeps dropping. Which connects to the next story, because it's about how the software being built on top of all this compute is changing, in this case the Linux kernel.

Mia: The kernel story. Linus Torvalds released the 7.2 kernel, and LWN's Jonathan Corbet did his usual statistics deep-dive. The headline numbers: 7.2 was one of the busiest development cycles in kernel history, adding nearly 600,000 lines of code. 16,418 non-merge commits, the second-busiest release ever, only 6.7 brought in more, and that one was dominated by merging the bcachefs development history, whereas 7.2's volume is more broad-based.

Mia: 2,652 developers contributed, a big increase over the previous record of 2,479 in 7.1.

Milo: And here's the detail that lit the thread on fire: Rosen Penev contributed a long list of LLM-authored bug fixes across architecture, driver, networking, and crypto subsystems. Also notable, just over 8 percent of commits carried Tested-by tags, while 48 percent had Reviewed-by tags, and the review tags are showing a mild downward trend. LWN is careful to say whether that reflects an actual decrease in review is unclear at best.

Mia: On the employer side, AMD led by lines changed, Intel by changesets, with Google and Red Hat prominent, and 249 identifiable employers supported the cycle.

Milo: The comment 05kqhg captured the tension. The headline is neutral, "Development statistics for the 7.2 kernel," but the last paragraph is highly LLM-critical: "The Linux kernel is aimed at production use, not research or experimentation. But there is currently a massive experiment being run on the kernel's development processes and community.

Milo: " They contrasted that with an editorialized headline elsewhere, "Linux bugs fixed per release over time: more than 2x rise since April 2026," which they said implies some sort of mythos around bug finding.

Mia: And mh- supplied the very next sentence of the article for balance: the community has absorbed new processes and tools many times over its 35-year history and will almost certainly find a way to do that this time as well, but that absorption has not always been without turbulence.

Milo: Then it got personal, in the Linus sense. mathisfun123 linked Linus's own mailing list comments suggesting the alarm is greatly exaggerated. senderista retorted that Linus's claim that use of LLM tools is uncorrelated with understanding or competence is ludicrous.

Mia: And rvz brought receipts again. They pointed out Linus himself used Claude Code to write one of his patches and introduced a data race bug unbeknownst to himself, which was caught by another reviewer before it made a release.

Mia: So, in rvz's telling, Linus didn't fully understand the changes Claude made to code he submitted, despite previously telling others that AI was creating slop patches, and then shouting at people concerned about using LLMs on code they don't understand, when it applied to himself. They linked both the patch and the review thread on lore.kernel.org.

Milo: dist-epoch cut through with the pragmatic frame: do you want the bugs in your project fixed, no matter the source, or do you want only humans to contribute? Linus wants the bugs fixed.

Mia: And the longer arc came from pelagicAustral, who said to the surprise of no one, though they didn't envision Linus embracing AI as frictionlessly as this. nvme0n1p1 credited Linus's forward thinking with keeping Linux relevant for decades. mycall added the comparison: it took a long time for Rust to mature enough to be considered for kernel development, AI is faster but easier to integrate.

Milo: Matl had the maintainer's-eye view of the flip side: while great in theory, there's all the slop patches and PRs the kernel and open source generally now have to deal with, often with only agents as responders. It honestly doesn't make them want to open anything to outside contributions anymore.

Mia: So the unresolved question is exactly the one LWN flagged: is review quality actually declining, and can the community absorb this the way it absorbed everything else? Nobody in the thread could answer that with data yet.

Milo: From the kernel's resource politics to the energy kind. Solar has surpassed nuclear power globally for the first time. This comes from the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2026, overseen by Mycle Schneider, and reported by pv magazine.

Mia: The numbers: solar and wind are increasingly outpacing nuclear globally. Wind alone surpassed nuclear generation monthly in March 2025, solar followed in April, the first time global monthly solar generation exceeded nuclear output. From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April, and May of 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear.

Milo: On capacity: global solar grew 510 gigawatts to 2,383 gigawatts, up 27 percent year over year. Wind added a record 159 gigawatts to reach 1,291. Installed nuclear capacity rose just 1.5 gigawatts to 399.5, and operating nuclear capacity actually declined half a gigawatt to 368.6. Nuclear capacity has been essentially flat for more than 25 years.

Milo: And the report's PV figures are conservative, more recent IEA PVPS data suggest about 690 gigawatts of solar were added in 2025, roughly 180 more than the report used, so the gap may be even wider.

Mia: Schneider's quote is blunt: the reality of the nuclear industry on the ground is sobering for those expecting a booming sector. US company Holtec put an IPO on hold days before listing, hoping to raise almost a billion dollars; its peer Fermi has lost about 80 percent of its stock value since listing in October 2025. His diagnosis: these companies have little or nothing to show on the ground to convince investors to keep providing cash. Meanwhile the operating nuclear fleet grew output 1.

Mia: 1 percent, declining outside China, while global solar generation jumped 30 percent.

Milo: Now the discussion, and gustavus set up the counterargument that everyone then took apart: so despite a borderline fanatical implementation of solar by almost every major government for twenty-plus years, and virtually no new nuclear plants for thirty-plus, solar is just barely surpassing nuclear? They attached the XKCD log-scale comic.

Mia: And the commenters said, actually, no, that framing isn't supported. jkahrs595 quoted the stats: a quarter of the growth was in the past year alone. maxerickson added that most solar has been installed in the last four to five years and we're still accelerating, linking the Our World in Data chart. tdb7893 agreed: they would definitely not describe solar implementation as fanatical, especially twenty years ago.

Mia: The growth of solar is very recent, it beat nuclear rather quickly and it's still growing very fast, with a huge portion of the world's solar infrastructure just from the last five years. That's the exponential curve point dgacmu made: yes, that's exactly the behavior you'd expect of something growing exponentially, it looks slow at first and then suddenly overtakes things. Twenty-three to twenty-seven percent annual growth takes a while to get moving.

Milo: MentalM represented the solar-skeptic side, saying that if you paid for solar energy ten times more than coal for twenty years because of that implementation, that seems pretty fanatical to them. So there's a real disagreement about whether two decades of expensive early adoption counts as subsidy-driven fanaticism or a rational ramp.

Mia: On nuclear's place, tempest_ offered the both-tools view: China is building a lot of nuclear, and in their home province in Canada there are plans to expand nuclear infrastructure, we'll see if it comes to pass. Solar thrives in places without dependable established grids and has way lower buy-in. Two different tools for different things.

Milo: And then there was an aesthetic argument I didn't expect. trophycase said it's really sad how ugly solar is, miles and miles of beautiful peaceful open desert ruined, a bit of an environmental travesty. ape4 replied, you're not looking at all factors, I look at solar and think it's beautiful for what it displaces. And toomuchtodo went full-throated: utility-scale solar PV restores deserts, it complements agriculture, agrivoltaics.

Milo: They linked pieces on China's Great Solar Wall and Nature articles on how solar farms in deserts can boost power, incomes, and ecosystems, and on reversing desertification. Their closing line: if you believe solar is ugly and deserts are beautiful, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but clean solid-state hardware that reliably produces low-carbon energy for decades, with no other inputs, is incredibly beautiful, like simplicity, the ultimate sophistication, da Vinci.

Mia: What's unknown: whether nuclear investment sentiment recovers. The financial signals in the report, the stalled IPO, the stock collapse, suggest near-term trouble, but China's buildout and the Canada plans are real counterweights.

Milo: From energy flows to money flows. "Gold is now the top US export," per Numismatic News, by Patrick Heller. The claim: normally America's highest-value exports are oil, pharmaceuticals, or aircraft and parts. But starting in October 2025, the value of gold exports has topped all other categories almost every month. And it's not just record prices, in February 2026 the tons of gold exported may have set an all-time record.

Mia: The destinations: the majority going to Switzerland, almost certainly the refiners there; second, Hong Kong, the global destination for gold heading to China; third, the UK, home of the London Bullion Market Association. The US government still reports its gold reserves as unchanged, so the exports appear to come from current mine output and recycling.

Milo: Now, the author is honest that this is speculation. He offers reasons: multiple foreign governments growing leery of dollar purchasing power, and among all foreign central banks combined, the value of gold reserves now exceeds their holdings of US Treasury debt. Most nations lack the clout to demand non-dollar payment, but China does, and its central bank has been reducing Treasury holdings, from about 1.

Milo: 1 trillion in April 2021, to 784 billion in February 2025, to 693 billion in February 2026, with much of that decrease replaced by gold. He also points to China promoting alternatives to the dollar, including the "unit" among BRICS nations, and notes analysts who consider China, counting sovereign funds, military-linked companies, and private citizens, to effectively control the most gold of any government.

Milo: His suspicion: a high percentage of US gold exports are going to China, some detouring through Swiss refineries to become kilogram bars, and possibly the US government acquiesced in return for other political concessions. And then, crucially: "Can I prove this? No. But it does make sense, much more than any other explanation."

Mia: Which is exactly the kind of sentence that Hacker News exists to stress-test. EA-3167 said they doubt the veracity of the article, and posted competing sources: one saying all previous metal exports from the US, including gold, came third in exports as of mid-year; a second using Census BEA data saying the same thing; a third with different data, same conclusion.

Milo: But then the counter-counter-attack. thisisthenewme said the article EA-3167 posted seems to be LLM slop with no references to their claims, while the article in the post references data from bea.gov. ceejayoz asked the sharper question: why'd you trust this particular article? And iAMkenough went deep on the credibility of EA-3167's sources: all from publications they'd never heard of, hard to independently verify.

Milo: TradeInt advertises it's trusted by Samsung, but they can't find any record of Samsung using TradeInt. TradeInt advertises a five-star Product Hunt rating, yet the person who created the listing created their account when TradeInt launched and has no followers or activity since 2024. Their conclusion: they all appear to be blog spam. Anyone, or any AI, can publish anything to confirm any viewpoint. What makes those links worth sharing?

Mia: That's a genuinely useful meta-lesson from the thread: the fact-checking sources themselves need fact-checking, and a citation with a confident URL is not evidence.

Milo: Meanwhile the thread also had a fun digression on what "exports" even means. XCSme joked, "I thought it was tokens." Aachen admitted they'd have guessed advertising and transaction fees, but the article says it's usually oil, pharmaceuticals, or aircraft, and they were skeptical of each: pharmaceuticals seem cheaper to make elsewhere, and how many aircraft can the world need that they commonly top the export chart of the wealthiest country?

Mia: And cpgxiii answered that one well: airliners and military aircraft are expensive. Consider that nearly the entire aircraft production capacity of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, plus the engine capacity of GE and P&W, are booked for years. Also, unlike Airbus, which has multiple final assembly plants worldwide, Boeing only does final assembly in the US.

Mia: graemep added the pharma point: in-patent pharmaceuticals are a lot more expensive than out-of-patent ones, so their monetary value far exceeds the greater volume of generics, and the cost of making them isn't really the issue. JumpCrisscross added the conceptual frame: goods versus services, we tend to use "exports" to refer only to the former in America, which is anachronistic.

Mia: And michaelt made the sharpest point of that sub-thread: consider how many American companies exclusively manufacture in the Far East. If a European buys a product "made by" Apple, Nvidia, Nike, or Levi's, that's not an American export, it's an export of Indonesia, China, Vietnam, or Taiwan. America still gets the profits, though.

Mia: XCSme then suggested it would make sense given market caps, so many trillion-dollar AI companies, and WJW delivered the dry rebuttal: it would make sense if the AI companies were rationally valued, but they're not, so it's not.

Mia: So where does that leave the gold story? Genuinely uncertain. The bea.gov-referenced claim that gold topped exports is one voice; the competing data saying metals came third is another; the China pipeline theory is explicitly admitted speculation; and the definitional fight over goods versus services means even the category is contested. Watch for official trade data to settle it.

Milo: From trade data to a story where the data is eyewitness testimony. Israeli settlers attacked European diplomatic cars in the West Bank and beat a French mayor, per Le Monde with AFP.

Mia: The facts as reported: on Saturday, October 17, settlers attacked a convoy of European diplomats and beat up a visiting French mayor, an escalation of recent violence during the Palestinian olive harvest. Cars from the French, Belgian, and Polish missions had brought diplomats to visit Taybeh, a largely Christian village in the occupied West Bank, when settlers descended to stop Palestinians from gathering olives, per witnesses.

Mia: Masked settlers made aggressive statements toward the diplomats before kicking Bernard Baudoux, 78, the leftist mayor of the northern French town of Aulnoye-Aymeries. Two people who spoke to him said he was hurt but did not need to go to hospital.

Milo: Baudoux's own quote after the attack: "I think that if settlers are behaving like this, there is a tolerance on the part of the Israeli government."

Mia: And ciconia's comment gave the essential context that the thread rallied around: it's important to note this is not an isolated incident, and this story has only reached the news because the victims are European dignitaries.

Mia: Those pogroms, they said there's no other word to describe them, are happening on a daily basis, and the scale, multiple attacks per day, makes it apparent this is not just random violence but a coordinated campaign to ethnically cleanse the rural Palestinian population of the West Bank.

Milo: mschuster91 offered a political read: it's election campaigning, nothing more, nothing less. And vcryan's blunt comment: the world turns a blind eye to Israeli terrorism. mschuster91 also tried to keep the thread itself from igniting, saying frankly that's off topic and the entire thread will devolve into a flamewar, which is a fair meta-prediction for this topic.

Mia: What to watch: diplomatic consequences. When settlers assault credentialed diplomats from three EU countries and injure an elected French official, on camera-adjacent testimony, you'd expect formal responses. Whether anything follows is the open question; the thread recorded none yet.

Milo: Okay. Heavy stretch over. Time for the palate cleansers, and the first one is gloriously absurd: making chicken transparent using Dorito dust.

Mia: So the context. A blogger who goes by Casual Physics Enjoyer was sent a paper, "Achieving optical transparency in live animals with absorbing molecules," in which researchers make biological tissues, like chicken breast, transparent by soaking them in a solution of tartrazine. Tartrazine is the very bright yellowish-orange food dye found on Doritos. The blogger decided to do a home replication.

Milo: The results: partial transparency, but not to the paper's degree. A roughly 2 millimeter thick raw chicken breast slice, cut from a 5 millimeter slice soaked in about 0.19 molar tartrazine solution for six hours at room temperature. In the photo, you can see grid lines showing through from underneath. The chicken, even though the texture to the touch is the same, has a visual quality like a gummy bear. The original paper used 0.

Milo: 62 molar, 40 degrees Celsius, and a mechanical shaker, which the blogger couldn't do safely or with the equipment on hand.

Mia: And gus_massa provided the key correction for everyone imagining crushed Doritos: they use tartrazine, a common food dye, not crushed Doritos. You need a lot of dye to change the internal refractive index and make the meat transparent. From the research article: it's a hygroscopic compound, highly soluble in water, minimal reactivity, and the European Food Safety Authority concluded it shows no adverse effects or systemic toxicity at doses up to 2 grams per kilogram of body weight.

Mia: It's widely used in products like flavored chips, for example, Doritos.

Milo: The mechanism, as the blogger explains it: the absorbance properties of tartrazine shift the refractive index of water. By pushing the refractive index of water toward that of protein and lipid solution, you reduce scattering and the object becomes more transparent.

Mia: adrian_b added the boundary condition that makes the whole thing make sense: vertebrate blood is one thing that is opaque due to hemoglobin, and it cannot be made transparent. Same for the pigmented retina of the eyes. So transparent frogs and fish still have opaque eyes and blood vessels.

Mia: Where pigments like heme, melanin, or visual pigments are absent, opacity is due only to variable refractive index causing light scattering, and in that case tissue can be cleared by making the refractive index uniform. Exactly like snow transitioning from opaque to transparent when it melts.

Milo: That snow analogy is the best explanation of the physics in the whole thread. And to the practical question, poly2it asked whether the coloring applies to and persists in live tissue, swiftcoder answered: persist, no, but it's been tested on live tissue before, linking an NSF news piece about a "window into the body" via invisible skin.

Mia: The funniest exchange: comrade1234 recalled once finding a Cheeto-shaped thing in a Cheetos bag that was nothing but Cheeto coating. It was wonderful. Can't imagine what it did to their insides. nozzlegear replied: imagine the damage you could have wrought to your friends' Xbox and PlayStation controllers. rzzzt guessed the coating probably turned them transparent. And not_a_bot_4sho said this is how Kevin Bacon prepared for the Hollow Man role.

Milo: waltbosz had the best origin story theory: somebody wanted to make Doritos-flavored chicken and accidentally discovered the marinade turned the breast transparent. MitPitt offered the more scientific path: some exotic fish and frog species are completely transparent, so one might wonder what makes meat opaque, then wonder how to get the opaque out of other meat. Though they admitted they don't know where Doritos comes in.

Milo: The blogger's own protocol notes are charmingly home-lab: a jeweller's scale, tap water, chicken breast fillets from Tesco, and on the highest concentration attempt, the tartrazine crystallized and got all crusty, so that run failed. The 12-hour soak in test tubes showed some visible transparency in the photos.

Mia: And that brings us to the final story, which might be the most purely delightful thing on HN this week: The Duck Pond.

Milo: Setup: it's a browser toy from celphase. A small flock of mallards, three hens, two drakes, and two broods of ducklings, going about their day. No recordings. Every quack is synthesized as it happens and heard from where you stand on the bank. There's a headphone mode, peas to throw, space to pause, and rings at 5, 10, 20, and 40 meters.

Mia: The reactions were pure joy. Hugsbox: "I adore this. Thanks OP." bigtech: "Finally!" yhjc2692: "This is freaking awesome." setnone confirmed it's very high quality. chimneychanga: "that was fun thanks." LewisOrton asked, "Do androids feed electric ducks?" and noted it works very well as white noise. RonanSoleste loved it, with one minor issue: they'd love to walk around the pool, but the ducks seem to stay with them a lot.

Milo: And then the thread did the thing HN does, it turned into a genuinely informative debate about duck nutrition. It started with dvh's contrarian anecdote: they don't know who came up with the idea that bread is bad for ducks, but it ruined one fishing spot. There was a place where people fed bread to ducks and fly fishing there was awesome, carps, chubs, crucians, rudds, roaches, even nases, all on dry flies.

Milo: Then someone put out a sign that bread harms ducks, people stopped feeding them, and after a while all the fish disappeared.

Mia: RonanSoleste's flat reply: it's still bad for them.

Mia: And vinckr laid out the reasons: bread doesn't have much nutritional value, especially the kind of white "bread" common in the US; it fills their stomachs fast so they don't forage for foods they'd naturally eat; throwing bread in one place leads to overcrowding, which is exactly what happened at dvh's fishing spot, and that stresses the animals; they also defecate a lot in one place, causing problems; and uneaten bread causes algae growth, which brings diseases and pests.

Mia: Best to feed them peas, like in this neat app, or cut-up frozen grapes, which they've also heard works.

Milo: So, dvh, the fish disappeared because the ducks did. The overcrowding dynamic vinckr describes is literally the mechanism. tamimio added a practical alternative: buy wild bird seeds from your local pet store. And whartung had the nostalgic firsthand story: they used to feed the ducks at the lake in the park with poultry food from the local tack and feed store, dozens of them, and when they got spooked and all started flying at once, the breeze was notable.

Milo: The park eventually put up a sign to stop feeding and took out the benches.

Mia: "The breeze was notable" is my favorite sentence of the week. Okay, one more story to close on, and it's a big one even though it reads personal: becoming a citizen of Japan.

Milo: Derek Wessman's blog post. He became a Japanese citizen and wrote about it, with the caveat up front that some is anecdote, some opinion, some fact, and parsing which is which in each sentence is not going to happen. He also added an edit: he's seen the online reaction, appreciates the kind comments, and if you're thinking about applying to naturalize, consult your local Legal Affairs Bureau and act on what they tell you there, not stuff from the internet, including his own blog.

Milo: His case won't be yours; they treat every application individually.

Mia: His story starts in 2012, when he was at the Legal Affairs Bureau for something else and decided to start naturalizing. He's explicit about the design of the process: the Government of Japan has intentionally designed obtaining Japanese citizenship to be opaque, to demand extensive documentation, to take at least a year, and to have an outcome based partly on subjective judgment.

Mia: At his first visit, an old Ministry of Justice bureaucrat kindly accommodated him without an appointment, which would not happen today because far more people now apply. The bureau was then in Minami Osawa, about 40 minutes away by car or train; it's since moved back near the courthouse.

Milo: And then the document list, which is the part that broke people's brains in the thread. An original birth certificate for each of his parents and each of his six siblings. Original proof of his parents' marriage. An affidavit signed and dated by his mother attesting she gave birth to him. A list of his wife's family members with names, birth dates, nationalities, and current status of interaction with him.

Milo: A statement on whether each of those individuals wanted to also naturalize, and whether they agreed or opposed his naturalization.

Mia: His own birth certificate, proof of marriage, and then: a list of every address of every place he ever lived, with the dates he began and ended living there. Complete academic history starting with preschool, any diplomas or degrees. Complete work history with company names, positions, start and end dates.

Mia: Everything in English submitted in both original and translated to Japanese, with a certificate of the translation's accuracy, and the Japanese translations could not include alphabet letters, only kanji, hiragana, katakora, katakana, and Arabic numerals. He quips we should be thankful kanji numerals weren't required. But every proper noun in the awkwardest katakana.

Milo: Then the financial deep-dive: all tax returns for him and his wife for some number of years, statements of withholdings from all employers or income sources, proof of paying taxes to the National Tax Agency, Tokyo, and Hachioji, proof of paying health insurance premiums, proof from the Pension Office of employment insurance payments, and all of it evaluated to confirm he paid not just the amounts, but on time.

Milo: An official driving record from the National Police Agency listing any traffic violations across the maximum retention period, ten or so years.

Mia: And because he had a company: all its financial statements for those years, proof of paying national corporate taxes, consumption taxes, prefectural taxes, city taxes, withheld employee taxes, employment insurance, plus the company registration, Articles of Incorporation, a list of clients, and a description of the business and its prospects.

Mia: Plus his wife's family register, a statement that they were indeed married and had those kids, a statement of whether she agreed or opposed his naturalization, and three family photographs taken on separate occasions.

Milo: gcanyon's reaction was the thread's consensus laugh: "Well, cross Japan off my list. I would not be able to produce that residence list under any circumstances." Qazpqaz offered the counter-practice: keep a list from now on, it's helped quite a few times. And jacquesm scoffed: anything that needs that data, they can do without, besides, they'd never believe it in the first place.

Mia: The other substantive debate was about his apparent path. sonar_un said they stopped reading when he said he waited forever to get naturalized, skipping six years, then said he never got his permanent resident card and was just living off renewed visas, and that officials found it strange. Sonar_un's view: it is strange, and a lot of the things he needed would have been done in the permanent residence portion of his time in Japan, just as in any country.

Milo: But klipt brought the factual counterpoint: they thought Japan requires ten years of residence for PR but only five years to naturalize, in which case it wouldn't be surprising if many people naturalize before getting PR. rootsudo replied, "Not anymore." So the rule landscape has shifted, and the thread leaves that ambiguity standing.

Mia: And then it spiraled into a residency-rules comparison, with charlieyu1 making a claim about the UK that, once you're living in the country a while, you can pretty much do anything and people don't care about your resident status; for daily life in the UK they only need their address and driving license. You get the feeling you'll be fine without doing the paperwork, that's how things have worked for the last twenty to fifty years. GalaxyNova's reaction: "that's... really bad.

Mia: " tene80i pushed back: what do you mean, any major employer in the UK will need more than that for you to work there.

Milo: And elmer2 settled it with an actual case: that isn't true, they knew someone who lived illegally in the UK for almost a decade. They could only get terrible restaurant jobs that didn't report anything to the government and were visited by immigration multiple times. Even after getting an immigration lawyer, that couldn't help with citizenship. What finally worked was having a kid and marrying a citizen.

Mia: And contingencies, we should note, hated the writing itself: having learned their own share of languages and conquered bureaucracy across them, the manner in which this guy writes comes across as, their words, vomit-inducingly glib. Which, to be fair to Wessman, he pre-empted with the glibness disclaimer in paragraph one.

Milo: What's the takeaway? His own advice is the answer: go to the Legal Affairs Bureau, treat every application as individual, don't trust blogs, including his. And the deeper picture the thread sketches: naturalization anywhere is less about a checklist and more about years of consistent, documented, on-time existence, and the countries that demand that paper trail are, in a way, being honest about what citizenship means to them.

Mia: That's a good place to land. From browser engines deciding what the web is made of, to a government deciding what it takes to belong, to a duck pond where every quack is synthesized on the fly, today's stories were all about systems drawing their own boundaries and us finding out where we stand relative to them.

Milo: Thanks for listening, everybody. If you had API keys in an OpenCode workspace, go rotate them. If you're about to buy a GPU for local LLMs, maybe check the numbers against your own hardware first. And if you see a duck, peas, not bread. We'll see you next time.

Mia: See you.