Thursday closed on a split screen: Trump's primetime address rehashed 2020 election claims and declassified documents that critics said added little new proof, while open-weights Kimi K3 owned Hacker News, SoftBank and Asia chips sold off hard, SpaceX scrubbed a Starship attempt, and U.S. forces boarded a tanker as strikes on Iranian bridges marked a sixth night of fighting.
In a nearly half-hour primetime East Room address, Trump alleged sweeping election-system vulnerabilities, announced a declassified intelligence dump, and pressed Congress to pass his voter ID Save America Act—without offering new evidence that foreign actors changed 2020 tallies. Semafor reports the squeeze is aimed at reluctant Republicans, but the bill still lacks a path to 50 Senate votes and battleground GOP voices urged him to move on.
Trump Media announced Truth PSI, a paid feed giving Wall Street firms millisecond-priority access to top Truth Social accounts—including, potentially, the president's—so traders can front-run market-moving posts. Ethics scholar Kathleen Clark called it improper exploitation of presidential power for private gain; the company did not say whether Trump's own posts would be excluded.
Longtime Trump teleprompter operator Gabriel Perez was suspended amid a CFTC look at Kalshi "Mentions" contracts on words Trump would say in scheduled speeches. Reports put alleged profits around $90,000–$100,000 before Kalshi froze most of the winnings as suspicious; the case lands as prediction markets boom and regulators duel with states over gambling vs. futures rules.
A century-old 36-inch steel water main burst under Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood early Thursday, opening a sinkhole, flooding streets, and partially submerging metro buses. No injuries or evacuations; LADWP said drinking water remained safe while crews shut valves and assessed a weak spot revealed under overnight pressure.
Centcom said a sixth consecutive night of strikes hit coastal surveillance, air defenses, logistics, and maritime targets to degrade Iranian military capability, while boarding a vessel under the Hormuz blockade. Iranian media reported hits near Qeshm, Bandar Abbas, and Bushehr; the BBC verified at least one bridge strike west of Bandar Abbas after Trump's infrastructure threats.
U.S. Marines boarded the M/T Wen Yao in the Gulf of Oman to enforce the blockade that began Tuesday; Centcom said three other commercial ships were redirected and an earlier tanker was disabled from the air. Expanded bridge strikes in southern Iran drew Iranian fire toward Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait as Gulf hosts of U.S. forces absorbed repeated attacks after the interim deal collapsed.
SoftBank fell 9.2%, Tokyo Electron and Advantest about 9%, and Kioxia more than 14% after a Texas jury hit it with $229 million in patent damages, as Asia tracked another U.S. semiconductor rout. TSMC slipped despite strong profits; SK Hynix had already closed over 11% lower Thursday. Investors kept fretting that AI capex expectations had run ahead of near-term returns.
Thousands of unionized workers at Hyundai's Ulsan complex—the world's largest auto plant—cut shifts early and plan longer walkouts after 15 failed negotiation rounds over Atlas humanoid deployments. Boston Dynamics' Atlas, soon under full Hyundai ownership, is slated for tens of thousands of units starting with U.S. plants in 2028; the stoppage is the industry's first major factory action framed around humanoid robots.
SpaceX scrubbed Thursday's Starship V3 attempt at Starbase when booster engines failed to start, triggering an automatic abort after propellant load. Musk said two Raptors will be removed and replaced, with the next try "hopefully" early next week; shares fell more than 3% after hours on a five-day losing streak since the IPO.
Q2 revenue of $12.56 billion rose 13% but slightly missed estimates; after-hours shares dropped more than 8% on a soft forecast. Netflix also said it will issue fewer "What We Watched" engagement reports, while separately noting roughly 300 titles already use generative AI—mostly in post for crowds, battles, and establishing shots.
The European Commission issued binding DMA specification measures requiring Google to open Android AI system hooks beyond Gemini and share search data to boost rivals. Google argues the changes endanger privacy and security; as a designated gatekeeper it must comply. Gemini currently enjoys hot-word, preload, and automation privileges competitors lack.
Alphabet sank about 4% after Bloomberg reported Gemini 3.5 Pro is months behind schedule as the company tries to lift coding quality short of internal bars—while OpenAI and Meta ship stronger coding models. Google said it is testing 3.5 Pro and other models with partners; the model was previewed at I/O as internal-only with a broader rollout that has slipped.
On the kernel mailing list, Torvalds said Linux is not an anti-AI project and he will "very loudly ignore" bans on LLM tools, telling dissenters to fork or leave. The flare-up centered on Sashiko, an agentic review system that claims to catch roughly half of bugs humans later fix, with false positives estimated under about 20%.
Satya Nadella told Copilot engineers that Anthropic's high-end Fable model refuses "random" requests in ways that feel editorially controlled for a creation tool—despite Microsoft's partnership ties to Anthropic. Users report some advanced model-building queries get routed to older models; Anthropic did not immediately comment.
Moonshot's open-weight Kimi K3 claims frontier-class performance and lights up the open-model race.
Microsoft open-sources its mid-90s Comic Chat IRC client — nostalgia with a modern license.
A typeface that only decodes when you squint or step back; otherwise it looks like decoy noise.
Richard Feldman reports on porting a production codebase from Rust to Zig — wins, losses, tradeoffs.
Google renames NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook as it folds research notes deeper into Gemini.
LM Studio ships Bionic, a local agent layer aimed at open models rather than cloud APIs.
Classic free textbook with interactive figures that still earns front-page love a decade later.
Side-by-side $100 AI music-video bake-off between Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol.
Classical ML features still beat some black-box detectors for spotting LLM-written text.
NOAA puts GOES-19 into safe hold; weather satellite operators diagnose the anomaly.
Arxiv survey/course notes on the math underpinnings of modern data science.
Train a diffusion kick-drum model on six gigs of VRAM and an old Linux box.
Compile Lua into native binaries via a C++20 backend — Show HN tooling.
Essay on the fake-but-useful catastrophe and how prediction culture bends reality.
Helium detected escaping a nearby rocky exoplanet that sits in its star's habitable zone.