HN Daily | May 25, 2026

Today's tech landscape is a whirlwind of contradictions: AI agents are leaking data left and right, the Vatican weighs in on the ethics of it all, and a fundamental law of flight gets overturned. Meanwhile, Norway is building a national LLM on Huawei flash, and everyone is suddenly very interested in alternatives to Google. Let's dive in.

AI & Machine Learning

1. Microsoft Copilot Cowork Exfiltrates Files — Security researchers demonstrate that Microsoft's Copilot Cowork can be tricked via indirect prompt injection into sending your files out through emails and Teams messages. It's a stark reminder that giving AI agents broad access to your systems creates a massive new attack surface.
2. Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training — The Norwegian National Library is building a native Norwegian LLM, and they're doing it on a massive 2 PB Huawei OceanStor Dorado flash storage array. A fascinating look at the infrastructure behind national AI sovereignty.
3. DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent — DeepSeek has slashed the price of its V4 Pro model by 75% and made the discount permanent, making it one of the cheapest frontier models on the market. The AI price wars are heating up, and DeepSeek is playing to win.
4. Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs — Epoch AI's latest data shows that memory now accounts for a staggering 63% of the cost of an AI chip. As models grow, the bottleneck is shifting from compute to memory bandwidth and capacity.
5. Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV has released a new encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas," which is a sweeping, thoughtful document on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. It's a must-read for anyone thinking about the ethical and spiritual dimensions of our AI future.

Open Source & Tools

1. Show HN: Write your BPF programs in Go, not C — gobee is a new tool that transpiles a subset of Go into BPF C and generates typed bindings for the cilium/ebpf library. If you've ever wanted to write eBPF programs without the pain of C, this is for you.
2. you_can::turn_off_the_borrow_checker — A Rust crate that provides a macro to... turn off the borrow checker. It's a joke, but it's also a fascinating look at the limits of Rust's safety guarantees and a fun piece of metaprogramming.
3. Defeating Git Rigour Fatigue with Jujutsu — A practical guide to using the jj version control system to avoid the pain of maintaining a perfect commit history while you're still in the messy middle of development. The "pile of laundry" technique is surprisingly elegant.
4. Show HN: Audiomass – a free, open-source multitrack audio editor for the web — A surprisingly capable, fully browser-based multitrack audio editor. It's free, open-source, and works surprisingly well for quick edits and demos.

Programming Languages & Compilers

1. C extensions, portability, and alternative compilers — A deep dive into the nightmare of writing a C compiler that can actually parse real-world C code, which is full of non-standard extensions and compiler-specific hacks. A sobering look at the gap between the standard and reality.
2. C constructs that still don't work in C++ — A 2026 update to a classic post, detailing which C idioms still break in C++ and what C++20 and C23 have changed. The border between the two languages is still a minefield.
3. Migrating from Go to Rust — A thorough, honest guide from a Rust consultancy on when and how to migrate from Go to Rust. It's not a one-sided rant; it acknowledges Go's strengths while making a clear case for Rust's correctness guarantees.

Hardware & Infrastructure

1. IBM Spins Off the First Pure-Play Quantum Chip Foundry — A $2 billion CHIPS Act investment is backing IBM's new standalone quantum chip foundry, which will manufacture superconducting silicon on 300mm wafers. This is a huge bet on making quantum computing a real, manufacturable technology.

Security & Privacy

1. Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks — Dutch authorities have arrested two men who ran hosting companies that provided infrastructure for Russian cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. A major takedown of a bulletproof hosting operation.

Science & Research

1. A fundamental principle of aeronautical engineering has been overturned — WIRED reports on a discovery that challenges a long-held assumption in aeronautical engineering. The details are behind a paywall, but the headline alone is enough to get any engineer's heart racing.
2. Perceptual Image Codec: What Matters in Practical Learned Image Compression — Apple's new PICO codec achieves 2.3-3x bitrate savings over AV1 and other standards, while running in 150ms on an iPhone 17 Pro Max. It's optimized for human perception, not just PSNR, and it's a huge leap for practical learned compression.

Culture & Retro Computing

1. Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It — A beautiful, nostalgic love letter to the Gnutella protocol, which is still running today, decades after the world it was born into disappeared. A reminder that decentralized systems are incredibly resilient.
2. Nobody Cracks Open a Programming Book Anymore — A poignant essay on the decline of programming books in the age of AI coding assistants. The author argues that the real loss isn't the book itself, but the slow, deliberate practice of typing and understanding that came with it.
3. I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph — An artist spent 50 hours hand-drawing a data visualization that software could do in 20 minutes. The result is beautiful, and the essay is a wonderful meditation on craft, tools, and the value of imperfection.

Business & Startups

1. Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore — TechCrunch rounds up six search engines worth trying as Google becomes increasingly AI-overview-heavy and less like the "ten blue links" we grew up with. The search landscape is fragmenting.

That's it for today. The big takeaway? The AI revolution is creating incredible new capabilities, but it's also creating new vulnerabilities, new ethical questions, and a surprising amount of nostalgia for the way things used to be. Stay curious, and see you tomorrow.