Hacker NewsThursday, November 6

The author spent years researching tech inventors for his book, including tracking down Stephen Carlsen who created the TIFF image format at Aldus. After extensive detective work involving misspelled names and a mailed letter, he found Carlsen and learned about TIFF's development. Two years later, Carlsen's ex-wife contacted him to say Stephen had passed away, calling him "Mr TIFF." The author then updated Wikipedia to properly credit Carlsen as TIFF's creator rather than just listing the company Aldus.

Democrat Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, won New York's mayoral race, defeating former Gov. Andrew Cuomo by 9 points. The victory caps a meteoric rise from virtual obscurity to leading America's largest city, with an ambitious progressive agenda including rent freezes and universal childcare.

A developer moved all projects from AWS to Hetzner, reducing monthly costs from $1,400 to $120 while improving performance. The viral tweet sparked debate, with many cloud engineers criticizing the move. The author argues that most developers are unnecessarily scared of managing servers and overpay for cloud services, when simple Linux servers can handle most needs at a fraction of the cost. Critics often have vested interests in maintaining complex cloud infrastructure for job security.

Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing a revolutionary infrastructure transformation as startups bypass traditional grid expansion by selling solar systems through pay-as-you-go models. Over 30 million solar products were sold in 2024, with companies like Sun King and SunCulture achieving 50% market share by combining cheap solar hardware, mobile money payments, and financing plans that replace expensive kerosene spending. This approach is generating carbon credits that subsidize costs, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that could become the template for global infrastructure development.

In November 1988, Cornell graduate student Robert Tappan Morris accidentally created the first major internet worm while trying to measure the internet's size. The Morris worm infected 10% of the internet within 24 hours, affecting around 6,000 systems and causing massive slowdowns at prestigious institutions like Harvard, MIT, and NASA. Though unintentional, it resulted in millions in damages and led to Morris being prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, receiving probation and community service.

YouTube deleted accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights groups in October, removing over 700 videos documenting alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. The deletions followed U.S. sanctions against Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center, and Palestinian Centre for Human Rights over their work with the International Criminal Court. Critics argue YouTube is complicit in censoring Palestinian voices and removing evidence of human rights violations to support the Trump administration's defense of Israel.

The post humorously warns about AI replacing Excel experts like "Brenda," a skilled mid-level finance employee who masters complex spreadsheets. The concern is that managers will bypass Brenda's expertise for AI, which may make errors through hallucinations, potentially disrupting financial operations.

This experimental firmware allows users to flash custom software onto Nest Thermostats, breaking them free from Google's cloud services and redirecting them to an independent NoLongerEvil platform for complete user control. The process involves putting the device in DFU mode and flashing modified bootloader and kernel components, though it comes with warnings about potential device bricking and should only be used on non-critical thermostats.

Manifolds are mathematical spaces that look flat when you zoom in on any point, even though they may have complex global structures. Introduced by Bernhard Riemann in the 1850s, they revolutionized mathematics by providing a framework to study curved spaces and higher dimensions. By dividing manifolds into overlapping patches called charts, mathematicians can use familiar Euclidean techniques to analyze complicated shapes. Manifolds are fundamental to modern physics, including Einstein's relativity theory, and are used to study everything from planetary motion to brain activity, serving as a universal mathematical language.

Anna's Archive, a shadow library meta-search engine for pirated books launched in 2022, has become a major target for copyright holders. Despite Google removing 749 million of its URLs from search results over three years (representing 5% of all Google takedowns ever), the site remains easily discoverable and operational across multiple domains, with publishers continuing to report roughly 10 million new URLs weekly.