Hacker NewsMonday, November 24

After the narrator's father died, they discovered love letters revealing a three-year secret relationship with Edward, a man from Canada. The father had lived closeted for nearly 40 years in an arranged marriage, finally finding happiness and authenticity with Edward in his final years. The narrator reflects on their distant relationship with their father, who was often absent but became a different person - joyful and glowing - when with his lover. Edward had sacrificed everything to be with him, expecting they would soon live openly together. The discovery brings both sweet understanding of who their father truly was and profound grief for the life he never got to live, while the mother feels her entire life was wasted on his deception.

Meta allegedly shut down internal research in 2020 after finding causal evidence that Facebook and Instagram harmed users' mental health, according to court filings. The "Project Mercury" study found people who stopped using the platforms reported lower depression and anxiety, but Meta discontinued the research and declared findings were tainted by negative media narratives. Plaintiffs also allege Meta designed ineffective youth safety features, ignored child safety concerns to prioritize growth, and misled Congress about product harms while knowing the risks.

A customer reports persistent Xfinity internet outages occurring 6-7 times daily for exactly 125 seconds each since June 2024, affecting both their home and neighbor's connection from different lines. Despite documented evidence showing over 3,000 outage incidents totaling 117+ hours of downtime following a predictable automated schedule, Xfinity refuses to investigate or fix the infrastructure problem.

Designer Emily Sneddon created Fran Sans, a display font inspired by the LCD destination displays on San Francisco's Breda Light Rail Vehicles. The font captures the utilitarian charm of the original 3×5 grid-based signage, which is being phased out for modern LED displays by end of 2025.

A news avoider created a system that delivers 40-year-old news stories to get the intellectual stimulation of current events without anxiety. The service uses AI to process historical newspaper scans and rewrite them as daily stories, creating an entertaining docudrama effect where readers know the outcomes.

China's thorium reactor achieved only 0.1 conversion ratio, far below current uranium reactors (0.6-0.8). While promising for future development, the breakthrough is oversold - conventional reactors already breed fuel more efficiently using uranium-to-plutonium conversion.

Discussion of technical inaccuracies in the article's diagram showing graphics API relationships, with extensive debate about Vulkan vs DirectX cross-platform support, WebGPU availability outside browsers, and the open source vs open standard distinction for various graphics APIs.

A pop star reflects on the realities of fame, describing both the glamorous perks like exclusive parties, free luxury items, and performing for devoted fans, as well as the downsides including constant judgment, living in liminal spaces, and people's assumptions about intelligence.

A court filing reveals Meta had a "17x" strike policy allowing accounts to engage in sex trafficking 16 times before suspension, despite having a zero tolerance policy. The lawsuit alleges Meta knew its platforms caused mental health issues in teens but prioritized growth over safety, failed to implement protections, and misled Congress about known harms.

macOS Tahoe now supports creating SSH keys backed by the Secure Enclave using the built-in ssh-keychain.dylib library, eliminating the need for third-party tools like Secretive. Users can generate biometric-protected keys with sc_auth, then use them with SSH through either direct file export or ssh-agent integration by setting the SecurityKeyProvider environment variable.