Hacker NewsSunday, December 21

CSS Grid Lanes is a new web layout feature now available in Safari Technology Preview that enables masonry-style layouts with just three lines of CSS. It automatically arranges content in columns like a photo gallery, placing items in whichever column gets them closest to the top, similar to how cars change lanes in traffic to move ahead.

Garage is a lightweight, self-contained distributed storage system designed for sysadmins. It runs on minimal hardware requirements (1GB RAM, 16GB disk, x86/ARM CPUs) and operates resilient across multiple datacenters over the Internet. The project has received European Union funding through NGI programs from 2021-2025.

Anna's Archive has created the world's first open music preservation archive by scraping Spotify's entire catalog, containing metadata for 256 million tracks and archiving 86 million music files totaling 300TB. The collection represents 99.6% of all Spotify listens and is distributed through torrents, prioritizing popular tracks at original quality while compressing less popular songs to save space.

Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract worth over €50 million to migrate mission-critical workloads to a European sovereign cloud, seeking to avoid US jurisdiction under the CLOUD Act. The aerospace manufacturer gives only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider, as European cloud providers may lack sufficient scale compared to US giants like Microsoft, AWS, and Google.

NIST's Boulder campus lost power due to high winds and utility shutdowns for wildfire prevention on December 17, 2025. The atomic time scale failed when backup generators malfunctioned, causing Boulder Internet Time Services to lose accurate time reference. Multiple NIST time servers are affected and may be disabled to prevent incorrect time distribution.

The author argues that self-hosting PostgreSQL databases is much simpler and more cost-effective than commonly believed, challenging the narrative pushed by cloud providers. After running self-hosted Postgres for two years serving thousands of users, they found it stable and cheap with minimal operational overhead. They argue that managed database services like AWS RDS are essentially the same open-source Postgres with operational tooling, but at significantly higher costs. The article provides practical configuration advice and suggests self-hosting makes sense for most companies between startups and enterprise scale.

The article argues that most companies claiming to prioritize privacy are actually engaging in "privacy theater" by collecting extensive personal data like emails, phones, and IDs while promising to protect it. True anonymity requires architectural decisions that make data collection impossible, as demonstrated by Mullvad VPN and Servury, which use only random credentials without storing any personal information, making user identification impossible even under legal pressure.

2025 marked significant paradigm shifts in LLMs including the emergence of Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) that enabled reasoning capabilities, recognition that AI intelligence is "jagged" rather than human-like, rise of specialized LLM apps like Cursor, Claude Code enabling AI agents on personal computers, "vibe coding" allowing programming through natural language, and early development of LLM GUIs that communicate through images rather than just text.

A security researcher conducted AI-assisted reverse engineering on TP-Link Tapo C200 cameras and discovered multiple vulnerabilities affecting 25,000 internet-exposed devices. The researcher obtained firmware from an open S3 bucket, decrypted it using existing tools, and used AI to analyze the code in Ghidra. They found vulnerabilities including hardcoded SSL private keys enabling traffic decryption, pre-authentication memory overflow in ONVIF SOAP XML parsing, HTTPS Content-Length integer overflow causing crashes, and authentication bypass allowing device hijacking through malformed JSON requests.

The open-source reVC engine, a reimplementation of the classic GTA engine, now runs directly in web browsers through WebAssembly. This independent technology demo on DOS.Zone showcases how the iconic game operates in a modern web environment without requiring native installation.