Hacker NewsThursday, January 15

The FBI raided Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson's home, seizing devices in connection with a classified materials investigation involving Pentagon contractor Aurelio Perez-Lugones. Press freedom groups condemned the search as aggressive government overreach against independent journalism.

The MetaBrainz team is fighting AI companies that ignore robots.txt and scrape their sites, overloading servers and blocking legitimate users. To protect their services, they've added authorization requirements to several ListenBrainz API endpoints, removed some debugging endpoints, and now require users to be logged in for LB Radio access.

Content creators and influencers are increasingly applying for O-1 work visas in the US, with approvals rising 50% from 2014-2024. The O-1B visa, once for Hollywood stars, now accepts social media metrics and follower counts as evidence of extraordinary ability. Creators like Julia Ain and Luca Mornet successfully obtained visas by highlighting their large followings and income. Immigration lawyers argue the creator economy represents a new form of American exceptionalism, though critics question whether influencing qualifies as extraordinary ability deserving of these specialized work visas.

The author expresses intense frustration with GitHub Actions after spending hours debugging a CI build failure. While implementing a build script for their project, one platform in their build matrix failed due to architecture compatibility issues. The slow feedback loop of making changes, pushing commits, and waiting for CI results proved extremely inefficient. They ultimately solved the problem by simplifying their approach and moving logic out of GitHub Actions into a Makefile.

The author argues that companies should be legally required to open-source software when hardware products reach end-of-life, preventing functional devices from becoming e-waste when apps are discontinued. They suggest publishing hardware specs and connection protocols to let communities build replacement apps, citing examples like defunct smart scales and Spotify's Car Thing as unnecessary waste that could be avoided with proper legislation.

Tesla Cybertruck production is running at only 10% of planned capacity with estimated Q4 2025 sales of just 5,500 units globally. Despite price cuts and new variants, annual sales reached only 21,500 units, falling behind Ford's discontinued F-150 Lightning which sold 27,300 units.

OpenJDK developers replaced a slow implementation of ThreadMXBean.getCurrentThreadUserTime() that read from /proc filesystem with multiple syscalls, file I/O, and complex parsing, with a much faster approach using Linux's clock_gettime() system call with a clockid bit manipulation trick. The new implementation is 40x faster, reducing average latency from 11 microseconds to 279 nanoseconds by eliminating file operations and using a direct kernel function call chain instead of the heavyweight /proc interface.

SparkFun has terminated its business relationship with Adafruit Industries due to Code of Conduct violations, including sending offensive emails to employees and customers, and inappropriately involving customers in private matters. SparkFun clarifies this is their only public statement on the matter.

1000 Blank White Cards is a party card game created in 1995 where players create the deck and rules as they play. Players draw cards, create new ones during gameplay, and can modify rules freely. The game has no fixed structure, making it a form of nomic where conventions emerge organically among player groups.