Hacker NewsFriday, May 23

Anthropic announces Claude 4 with two models: Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, featuring improved coding abilities, advanced reasoning, and AI agent capabilities. The update includes extended thinking with tool use, better memory capabilities, and generally available Claude Code with IDE integrations and GitHub support.

Google has introduced Gemini Diffusion, a new language model that uses diffusion instead of traditional autoregressive generation, resulting in significantly faster text generation while maintaining output quality. Early tests show impressive speeds of 857 tokens/second for generating code and chat applications.

Mozilla has announced the shutdown of Pocket, the popular read-it-later app, on July 8, 2025. Users can continue using the service until then and export their saved content until October 8, 2025. Premium subscribers will receive prorated refunds, and the Pocket Hits newsletter will be rebranded as "Ten Tabs" while maintaining its core content curation service.

The Trump administration has suspended Harvard University's ability to enroll international students, affecting roughly 25% of the student body. This action follows disputes over records requests and marks a significant escalation in the administration's pressure on the elite institution to comply with the president's agenda.

A critical examination of the decibel unit in scientific measurement, highlighting its confusing nature and inconsistent application across different fields. The author argues that the decibel's varying definitions, reference points, and usage patterns make it an unnecessarily complex and poorly standardized way to measure changes in magnitude.

A computer scientist at MIT, Ryan Williams, made a groundbreaking mathematical proof showing that memory is more powerful in computing than previously believed. His work demonstrates that a small amount of memory can be as effective as extended processing time, marking the first major progress in 50 years on a fundamental computer science question.

A cartographer describes their detailed project of creating a high-resolution map of Chiron, the fictional planet from the 1999 video game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. The project involved collecting and transforming in-game data, including elevation, rainfall, and terrain features, into a professionally crafted cartographic representation.

The article discusses challenges and solutions in handling large-scale data processing with language models. It suggests using output schemas and code execution instead of passing full tool outputs back to LLMs, which can be costly and slow. The proposed approach allows for more efficient data management and processing through structured formats.

This article proposes a simpler approach to collaborative text editing without using complex CRDTs or OT systems. Instead, it suggests labeling each text character with unique IDs and using "insert after" operations, making it easier to implement and customize collaborative features while maintaining consistency across multiple users.

A personal exploration of a geometric doodle pattern discovered in middle school, dubbed "the wallflower," which involves recursively copying and rotating squares. The author revisits this pattern years later with mathematical knowledge, comparing it to known fractals and analyzing its properties through L-Systems and numerical patterns.