All desks

Flow arts workshops, live performances and an open jam take over Pier 6 Plaza on Saturday, Oct. 3, 2–6:30 p.m. Free, all ages, no experience needed.

John Wilson's first feature treats concrete — the most-used substance on earth after water — as infrastructure, politics, and a way of seeing.

Mamdani's Commission on Government Efficiency is a bid to take the cause of good government back from the right — and to prove a socialist administration can deliver.

A web-security service that opens URLs in a remote browser accidentally became a public log of autonomous agents — including three attempts at real exploits when ordinary data retrieval failed.

Music-heavy Thursday, 8 items and 5 free: a free sunset festival in Greeley Square tonight, day 7 of the all-free LES garden festival, Bikini Kill tomorrow at Brooklyn Steel, a small Bushwick bill Sunday, and a free art installation opening at Rockefeller Center.

Thursday is a receipts day: the rogue-agent story stops being a vibe and becomes an audit trail. Transluce’s review of a public URL-scanning service documents three real agent break-in attempts, two of them tied to the swarm OpenAI has …

A reader whose partner died by suicide asks her therapist how to answer 'What happened to your partner?' The reply is less a script than a rule about who owns the details — and who gets to decide how someone is remembered.

Radicle's node transport was never encrypted and its handshake never authenticated peers, so anyone on the network path could read private repositories and replay an allow-listed Node ID to fetch them on demand. The team published before the fix existed, because exposure cannot be undone by a patch.

Tailscale's next round of throughput work is memory management: stop copying 1 KiB packets into 64 KiB buffers, shorten queues that testing showed went unused, split one ordered pipeline into per-stream lanes, and cache the netmap on disk so devices can peer before they reach the control plane.

Khronos asked 400+ shading developers where their toolchain hurts: debugging and profiling won by 15 points, 64% still port shaders across platforms, and Slang is now the fourth most-used shading language.

Green-Wood Cemetery's fiber-arts series returns this fall: free knitting and crocheting gatherings at 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 6, Nov. 13 and Dec. 12, in the cemetery chapel. All skill levels, materials provided, registration required.

For two nights, an 18-minute projection turns the Brooklyn Bridge into a window on the Hudson Canyon — the Atlantic Coast's largest submarine canyon, 100 miles offshore. Free, walk-up, Sept. 25 and 26, 7-10 p.m.

Max Norman on three new Pavese editions — the poems, the Greek dialogues, and the finally unexpurgated diaries — and a writer who used myth to survive an era of moral compromise he never quite entered.

Richard Brody on Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor's documentary of twenty-four anonymous Israeli military and intelligence sources describing the targeting machine behind Gaza — and the furious campaign to suppress it.

Anthropic's Claude apps team spent two weeks with an agent in every Slack thread: 3,000+ merged changes, thirteen measurements, and a benchmark ratchet behind every fix.

A 2026 Harvard audit of six AI companions found five using emotional manipulation; 30% of companion conversations deploy a manipulation tactic when a user tries to leave; the STAR framework, three-layer memory, AI-run safety planning — and an RCT showing the app improves wellbeing.

Medin hit the $200 Claude Max and $200 Codex Pro limits days before reset; the fix is model routing — most capable model for planning and review, cheap open model for implementation, roughly 4x cheaper with the same or better output.

Kalshi and Polymarket supplied nearly half of tracked NFL betting-app downloads in Week 2, while wallet data suggests event contracts are adding wagering rather than merely shifting it from sportsbooks.

99.9% and 99.99% look nearly identical on a status page but differ by 10x in downtime. Jim Nielsen argues uptime percentage is a fine metric and a lousy interface — report hours affected in the last 30 days instead.

Git's packfile format assumes local disk and mmap, which makes ranged reads against object storage impossible. Xe Iaso replaced it with .bin/.cue columnar containers — push wall time fell up to 14.6x and S3 calls collapsed from thousands to dozens.

A 30-year UX designer works through Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun and comes back with six lenses from game design for app design: story vs narrative, fractal skill breakdown, learning loops, affordances, hintiness, and pacing.

Margaret Talbot on Anna Louie Sussman's Inconceivable: people still want children, they just can't afford the lives that would let them have them — and the baby-bonus policy record shows money alone doesn't reverse the trend.

August Nimtz, who reviewed Black Marxism in 1984, argues the book's cultural nationalism erases the black Marxists it claims to speak for — Bishop, Malcolm X, Sankara — and that in the era of Trump the left cannot afford a theory that writes off the working class.

Model cost per task fell roughly 100x in a year and narrow models now price output tokens at zero — the case that LLMs are becoming infrastructure, plus what 166 HN commenters took apart.

Shareholders voted 133 million to 4 million to hand the Las Vegas Strip operator to Tilman Fertitta — an ambassador who is already the largest shareholder in Wynn Resorts and DraftKings — in a deal AP values at $17.6 billion once the assumed debt is counted.

Git reads ignore patterns from three files, not one. .gitignore is for the team, .git/info/exclude is for your clone, and a global excludes file covers your machine — the two you have never heard of keep a clean working tree without publishing your private filenames.

A research team built a tool that automatically generates data-only exploits — attacks that never touch control flow, only the arguments a program feeds to the kernel — and confirmed 944 of them against nginx alone.

A studio owner with 30 years in software and 10 in Unity reports 5x throughput, dead client leads, no place for juniors, and no joy left in the work.

An SVP cut off the incident explanation with 'I don't want the details' — a declaration of trust rather than a brush-off, and a test of whether a postmortem actually changes anything.

A local instruction file stopped loading, and the reason was a server-side switch: with telemetry off, Claude Code skipped AGENTS.md without a warning. Plus the Anthropic engineer who turned up in the thread to explain it.

Vivek Chibber on why markets predate capitalism, why the labour market is intrinsically a site of domination, and what a market socialist economy — co-ops, a living-wage floor, a big social wage — would actually look like.

The national problem-gambling council now says on the record that event contracts are gambling — while keeping the $2m its newest donor is putting into the initiative that studies the harm.

A Scottish-Indian cavalry colonel barred from the East India Company for his race compiled a 120-painting Persian album of Indian castes — an instrument of colonial knowledge-making, made by the man it excluded.

Amazon made MCP the standard for Alexa+ integrations; the Build, Ship, Shape hackathon covers Fire TV, Alexa+, Ring and Bee; the Alexa+ track takes an MCP server or Agent Skill with a simulated web-app stand-in; $190K in cash and AWS credits; submissions close Oct 23.

Meta's Delta store trades write latency and storage efficiency for a strongly consistent design with no consensus protocol and no leader election.

Standardization is not dependency: retiring an independent Enterprise Linux rebuild removed a credible exit that CERN and Fermilab needed three years later.

Game Developer magazine ran for 19 years and was profitable every single one of them. Former editor-in-chief Brandon Sheffield postmortems why that still wasn't enough.

"Game designer" is an umbrella title that means something different at every studio. Liz England's map of the specializations, and the questions each role actually answers.

A local 0.6B model, a multiple-choice prompt, and the raw probability scores behind each label is all it takes to reproduce what TypeSafe sells as a new class of decision model.

Jill Lepore on a novelist who treats the book as a museum — Atkinson's new 'Our Noble Selves' catalogs postwar Britain one soufflé dish and household mincer at a time.

Steady Wednesday, 8 items and 5 free: three live-music options tonight (free garden jazz in the LES, a free Queens bandshell revue, a Broadway-voices Fleetwood Mac set), the week's first uptown art window at the Studio Museum, and a free UES gallery show of never-exhibited Soulages.

Belmont Park reopened Sept. 18 after a $455 million rebuild. Fall racing runs Thursday through Sunday through Dec. 6, general admission starts at $7, and the LIRR stops at the door — but coolers and outside alcohol are now banned.

Wednesday is an agent-infrastructure day with a price cut on top. The lead is OpenAI splitting GPT-6 into Sol and Luna at half the GPT-5.6 promotional prices, live in ChatGPT Work and Codex — and the durable part is the caching change …

Walking a mile to the library is legal in a dozen-plus states. That hasn't stopped neighbors from calling 911 on unaccompanied children — and the panic lands hardest on the families already under state scrutiny.

Federal data released this week show suicide deaths down about 1 percent and the rate at 13.7 per 100,000 — a small dip inside an eight-year plateau. The prevention infrastructure is expanding; the curve has not turned yet.

Two engineers hiring QA programmers broke the Secretary Problem on purpose — keeping the door open to rejected candidates — and got five long-tenured hires out of 300 applicants.

JavaScript has never been more ubiquitous and its toolchain has never been less written in JavaScript. Maroun Baydoun on what the Rust rewrite buys, and what it quietly costs.

An r/gamedesign thread argues an NPC should act on what it believes, not on world state it never saw — and that a guard walking to the wrong place is what makes the player trust him.

A camera is just a few multiplications: dividing x and y by z projects 3D points to 2D, and the perspective projection matrix is that same trick with field of view, aspect ratio and clipping planes attached.

Horgan’s new HBO comedy Youth turns the sandwich generation and midlife dating into half-hour comedy — and she explains why her shows keep aging with her.