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FIGMA IS GOING PUBLIC

Figma will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol 'FIG'.

ASK HN: IS YOUR COMPANY FORCING USE OF AI? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Many workers are being encouraged to use AI tools, with only a few in the thread reporting they are being forced to use the technology - some companies are actually forcing non-use due to compliance or security concerns.

WE'VE ISSUED OUR FIRST IP ADDRESS CERTIFICATE

Let's Encrypt now offers certificates that cover IP addresses, valid for only about six days.

MARK ZUCKERBERG ANNOUNCES CREATION OF META SUPERINTELLIGENCE LABS. READ THE MEMO

Meta Superintelligence Labs will house Meta's various teams working on foundation models. It will be led by some of the company's most recent hires, including Scale AI ex-CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Meta plans to start research on its next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so. This article has the full internal memo that Mark Zuckerberg released yesterday - it contains a list of the company's recent hires.

APPLE HAS AN INCREDIBLY AMBITIOUS ROADMAP FOR SMART GLASSES AND HEADSETS

Apple is currently working on three Vision series products and four smart glasses variants. The company reportedly views head-mounted devices as the next major trend in consumer electronics. An upgraded version of the Vision Pro headset with an M5 chip is scheduled to enter mass production in the third quarter of 2025. Apple plans to launch a substantially lighter headset in the third quarter of 2027. An upgraded Vision Pro with a new design, lighter body, and lower price point will not be released until after the second half of 2028.

AMAZON IS ON THE CUSP OF USING MORE ROBOTS THAN HUMANS IN ITS WAREHOUSES

Amazon will soon have as many robots as humans working at its facilities. The company has deployed more than one million robots in its workplaces. 75% of Amazon's global deliveries are assisted in some way by robotics. The growing automation has helped Amazon improve productivity and deal with heavy staff turnover at its fulfillment centers.

THE SECOND LAUNCH OF NEW GLENN WILL AIM FOR MARS

Blue Origin's second launch of New Glenn may carry NASA's ESCAPADE mission, which includes a pair of small spacecraft that will be sent to Mars to study its magnetosphere. The mission will launch no earlier than August 15, but some say that a launch in late October or November is more likely. The Mars mission was originally supposed to be on New Glenn's first flight in October 2024, but it was taken off the flight due to uncertainty about the launch date - the two spacecraft needed to be launched within a certain time period. With a launch this fall, the spacecraft should reach Mars in 2027.

THE NEW SKILL IN AI IS NOT PROMPTING, IT'S CONTEXT ENGINEERING

Context engineering is the art of providing all the context needed for a task to be plausibly solved by a large language model. Context is everything a model sees before it generates a response - this can include prompts, data in memory, retrieved information, available tools, and definitions for structured output. The secret to building truly effective AI agents is to provide quality context.

TAIL LATENCY MIGHT MATTER MORE THAN YOU THINK

Tail latency, or high-percentile latency, refers to high latencies that clients see fairly infrequently. Modern architectures tend to have a lot of components, so these rare instances of latency can still have a large impact. This article looks at the different ways tail latency can affect projects. Developers should be aware of service latency and consider monitoring common customer or client use cases for their end-to-end latency experience.

OPENAI REPORTEDLY SHUTS DOWN FOR A WEEK AS ZUCK POACHES ITS TOP TALENT

OpenAI is shutting down for an entire week to force its staff to rest and recharge. The shutdown is being framed internally as a much-needed break. The company appears to be in 'panic mode' as Meta recently poached several high-value employees. Its decision to pause for a wellness week feels less like a perk and more like damage control.

APPLE WEIGHS USING ANTHROPIC OR OPENAI TO POWER SIRI IN MAJOR REVERSAL

Apple is considering sidelining its own in-house models and using AI technology from Anthropic or OpenAI to power a new version of Siri. It has asked both companies to train versions of their models that could run on Apple's cloud infrastructure for testing. Switching to a third-party provider for Siri would be an acknowledgment that Apple is struggling to compete in generative AI. Apple's investigation into third-party models is at an early stage and the company hasn't made a final decision on using them.

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REACT STILL FEELS INSANE AND NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT IT

React sucks because making an interactive UI where any component can update any other component is simply one of the most complicated things you could do in software.

WHY AUTOMATTIC CEO MATT MULLENWEG WENT TO WAR OVER WORDPRESS

Mullenweg felt WP Engine wasn't operating in the spirit of open-source by contributing very little back to the WordPress code base.

NEW PROOF DRAMATICALLY COMPRESSES SPACE NEEDED FOR COMPUTATION

Any problem solvable in time t needs only about √t bits of memory.

NEW MACBOOK WITH A18 PRO CHIP SPOTTED IN APPLE CODE

Apple plans to launch a low-cost MacBook powered by an iPhone chip.

GOOGLE INKS ITS FIRST FUSION POWER DEAL WITH COMMONWEALTH FUSION SYSTEMS

Commonwealth Fusion Systems will send Google 200 megawatts of electricity from its Arc power plant when it comes online in the early 2030s.

CORPOSPEAK: WHY YOU STILL SOUND LIKE A FACELESS CORPORATE ENTITY

Stop outsourcing communications to marketing experts and start letting the builders of products actually talk to people.

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IT'S KNOWN AS ‘THE LIST'—AND IT'S A SECRET FILE OF AI GENIUSES

Mark Zuckerberg has spent months putting together a list of the most talented engineers and researchers in artificial intelligence. Recruits on the list typically have PhDs from elite schools and work experience at places like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. Their specialized knowledge is the key to cashing in on the artificial intelligence revolution. Many of the candidates have taken meetings at Zuckerberg's homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe. This article looks at some of the people on the list.

TESLA SAYS IT MADE ITS FIRST DRIVERLESS DELIVERY OF A NEW CAR TO A CUSTOMER

Tesla routed a Model Y SUV from its Austin, Texas, Gigafactory to an apartment building in the area on June 27 - its first driverless delivery of a new car to a customer. The vehicle transversed public roads, including highways, without a human in the driver's seat or front passenger seat. Tesla did not say which version of its software and hardware the vehicle had, but the company's Head of AI said that the vehicle was exactly the same as every Model Y produced in the Tesla factory. A video of the Model Y completing the delivery is available in the article.

SCIENTISTS LAUNCH WILD NEW PROJECT TO BUILD A HUMAN GENOME FROM SCRATCH

The Synthetic Human Genome Project aims to write artificial human DNA from scratch - the scientists behind the project are hoping that it will answer fundamental questions about the human genome and transform our understanding of health and disease. The technology could be used to create new medical treatments like designer cell-based therapies and virus-resistant tissue transplantation. The research team hopes to be able to create the foundational tools, technologies, and methods to allow researchers to create genomes from scratch over the next half-decade. The project runs along a parallel research effort into the social and ethical issues of creating human genomes in a lab.

7 PEOPLE NOW HAVE ELON MUSK'S NEURALINK BRAIN IMPLANT

Neuralink has increased the number of patients with its N1 brain implant to seven. The implant allows those with cervical spinal cord injuries or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to control a computer with their thoughts. Six of the seven are participating in a study aimed at proving that the N1 implant, R1 surgical robot, and N1 User App are safe and effective. The implant has enabled some of the patients to work to help provide for themselves and their families financially.

VET

vet is a command-line tool that acts as a safety net for the risky curl | bash pattern. It lets users inspect, diff against previous versions, and lint remote scripts before asking for explicit approval to execute. vet is a safer, more transparent way to handle remote code execution.

SIRIUS

Sirius is a GPU-native SQL engine that plugs into existing databases such as DuckDB via the standard Substrait query format without requiring any query rewrites or major system changes. It currently supports DuckDB and Doris, with support for other systems coming soon. Sirius is under active development and several features are still in progress. Its current limitations include data size limitations, row count limitations, data type coverage, operator coverage, and a lack of support for partially NULL columns.

OPENAI REPORTEDLY ‘RECALIBRATING' COMPENSATION IN RESPONSE TO META HIRES

OpenAI's leaders have been working around the clock to talk to employees who have received offers from Meta. Meta has successfully poached a number of OpenAI's senior researchers. Eight researchers have departed OpenAI for Meta over the past week. OpenAI has recalibrated its compensation and is looking for creative ways to recognize and reward top talent.

TRUMP SAYS HE HAS 'A GROUP OF VERY WEALTHY PEOPLE' TO BUY TIKTOK

President Donald Trump says he has a group of buyers willing to acquire TikTok. A sale would need approval from the Chinese government, but Trump has told the media that President Xi Jinping 'will probably do it'. It is unclear whether the current buyer is the same as the one from three months ago - the deal fell apart in April due to a disagreement on tariffs. The US Congress passed a law forcing TikTok's sale in April last year, but the deadline for the sale has been repeatedly delayed.

THE SOFTWARE ENGINEERING "SQUEEZE"

There's no place for 'coasting' in software engineering anymore, but there is a lot of space for ambitious engineers, even if they're fresh graduates.

MCP: AN (ACCIDENTALLY) UNIVERSAL PLUGIN SYSTEM

If you remove the 'AI' aspect of MCP (Model Context Protocol), it becomes a standardized way to connect literally anything to different data sources and tools.

APPLE'S M5 CHIP LAUNCHES THIS FALL, AND THESE NEW PRODUCTS GET IT FIRST

The M5 chip will come to the MacBook Pro and iPad Pro this fall.

I MADE MY VM THINK IT HAS A CPU FAN SO THE MALWARE WOULD FINALLY SHUT UP AND RUN

One of the common checks that malware programs perform to determine whether they are running on a virtual machine is to look for the presence of certain hardware components, like a CPU fan.

ENGINEER CREATES AD-BLOCK FOR THE REAL WORLD WITH AUGMENTED REALITY GLASSES — NO MORE PRODUCTS OR BRANDING IN YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE

A software engineer has created an augmented reality app for Snap's fifth-generation AR Spectacles that identifies and blocks out advertisements, billboards, and product branding in real life.

COMMUNITY IS MOTIVATION ON TAP

A good community can have a tremendous influence on motivation.

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UBER IN TALKS WITH ITS FOUNDER, TRAVIS KALANICK, TO FUND SELF-DRIVING CAR DEAL

Uber is in talks with Travis Kalanick, the company's co-founder, to help fund his acquisition of the US subsidiary of Chinese autonomous vehicle company Pony.ai. Kalanick was forced out of Uber in a boardroom coup eight years ago - after, he founded CloudKitchens, where he will remain if the deal goes through. Pony.ai has permits to operate robot taxis and trucks in the US and China. Kalanick will run Pony.ai if the deal is completed.

GOOGLE BEGINS ROLLING OUT AI SEARCH ON YOUTUBE

Google has been transforming its web search into a zero-click experience with AI, and now, the same focus is coming to YouTube. Select searches on YouTube will now return a collection of relevant videos with AI-generated summaries. Each summary will extract the information most related to users' search queries, so they may not even have to watch the videos. The AI results carousel is currently being tested with YouTube Premium subscribers and is entirely opt-in.

THE FAILURES AND FUTURES OF CANCER VACCINES

The cancer vaccine field has yet to become a systematic science despite decades of work. This article speculates on why the field has failed and the next-gen approaches worth looking out for. One of the core problems in cancer vaccine development lies in the nature of neoantigens, which are often overwhelmingly similar to normal cellular proteins. The field has had some tentative early successes in pancreatic cancer, kidney cancer, and a range of solid tumors. There is potential for a startup to outcompete incumbents by exploring novel target areas outside of the field's almost singular focus on single nucleotide variants.

THE FIRST NON-OPIOID PAINKILLER

The FDA approved Vertex Pharmaceuticals' Journavx (suzetrigine), the first non-opioid pain reliever suitable for treating post-surgery pain, in January. Clinical trials found that patients didn't show any of the problematic side effects associated with opioids. Unlike opioids, Journavx doesn't meaningfully interact with the brain - it instead targets a specific sodium ion channel found almost exclusively on peripheral nociceptors (pain-sensing neurons), blocking them from sending pain signals to the brain. The drug is a product of 27 years of research and billions of dollars.

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MAGNITUDE

Magnitude is an AI browser automation framework that uses vision AI to enable users to control their browsers with natural language. It can navigate and interact with any interface and extract useful structured data. Magnitude has a built-in test runner with powerful visual assertions for verification. The framework can be used to automate tasks on the web, integrate between apps without APIs, extract data, test web apps, or as a building block for browser agents.

SAVE YOUR DISK, WRITE FILES DIRECTLY INTO RAM WITH /DEV/SHM

/dev/shm is a world-accessible RAM scratchpad available in virtually every Unix (Linux system already has it mounted as a tmpfs by default). Files in the folder perform much better as they are running in RAM. The folder is cleared on reboot.

SCALE AI'S SPAM, SECURITY WOES PLAGUED THE COMPANY WHILE SERVING GOOGLE

Scale AI's long relationship with Google was fraught with lapses in security protocols for at least 11 months between March 2023 and April 2024. Scale AI's efforts to train Google AI programs were meant to be exclusively staffed by experts in various specialties, but the program instead became flooded by spammers who abused the system by submitting transparently shoddy work that managed to evade detection. The spammers were often paid because it was too difficult to detect them due to their sheer numbers.

I FOUGHT IN UKRAINE AND HERE'S WHY FPV DRONES KIND OF SUCK

FPV drones are unmanned aerial vehicles commonly used in the Ukraine war to deliver and detonate explosive charges of up to 1.5 kilograms. While they are touted as a cheap and accessible solution for precision strikes, their actual success rate, when including pre-aborted missions, is between 20 to 30 percent. These drones are rarely successful because they are often more expensive than other options, hard to use, susceptible to electronic interference, and most don't have night-vision capabilities, which is important for a battlefield that's in the dark for 14 hours a day.