Hacker NewsWednesday, January 21

Users reported spectacular aurora displays across Europe, from Berlin to Ireland to the Netherlands. Many shared experiences of green and pink lights visible even in cities, with discussions about optimal viewing times and alert apps for future events.

Apple is testing a new App Store search ad design on iPhone that removes the blue background around sponsored results, making ads harder to distinguish from organic search results. Only a small 'Ad' banner differentiates paid placements, potentially misleading users but likely increasing click-through rates and Apple's ad revenue.

Danish pension fund AkademikerPension announced it will sell its $100 million U.S. Treasury holdings by month-end, citing poor U.S. government finances as the reason for seeking alternative liquidity management, while denying the decision relates to Denmark-U.S. tensions over Greenland.

Despite the U.S. dollar maintaining dominance in foreign exchange trading and trade invoicing, de-dollarization is occurring in central bank reserves, Treasury ownership, and commodity markets. The dollar's share of global FX reserves has fallen to a two-decade low while gold demand rises among emerging markets.

A developer was asked to update radio button styling and discovered their codebase used complex React components from Shadcn and Radix libraries instead of simple HTML radio inputs. These frameworks added hundreds of lines of code, JavaScript dependencies, and ARIA attributes to recreate what browsers provide natively. The author argues this unnecessarily complicates something that can be easily styled with basic CSS, advocating for using built-in HTML elements over complex component libraries for simple UI elements.

The author loves being a software engineer despite industry challenges, comparing himself to Gogol's character Akaky who found joy in mundane work. He's driven by an "addiction to being useful" and solving problems, viewing this compulsion as perfectly suited to his role. He acknowledges this isn't universal among engineers but suggests many are motivated by internal drives rather than external rewards, and advises harnessing these compulsions effectively.

On January 8, 2026, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver experienced widespread failures after a code optimization accidentally changed the order of DNS records in responses. The change moved CNAME records from appearing first to last in DNS responses, breaking older DNS client implementations like glibc that expect CNAMEs to appear before other records. The issue affected Linux systems and caused Cisco switches to reboot repeatedly. While most modern DNS software handles record ordering flexibly, some legacy implementations failed because they process records sequentially and need CNAMEs first to properly resolve domain chains. The problem was caused by 40-year-old DNS protocol ambiguity about proper record ordering.

Porsche delivered 279,449 cars globally in 2025, down 10% from 2024's 310,718 units, due to supply gaps for 718 and Macan combustion models and weaker Chinese demand. The 911 set a delivery record with 51,583 units, while Macan remained top-selling at 84,328 cars. Electrified vehicles comprised 34.4% of deliveries.

GLM-4.7-Flash is a 30B-A3B MoE model that balances performance and efficiency for lightweight deployment. It outperforms competitors on various benchmarks including AIME 25, GPQA, and SWE-bench Verified. The model supports local deployment through vLLM, SGLang, and transformers frameworks.

Nova Launcher's latest update has increased from 2 to 6 trackers and from 30 to 36 permissions, now including Facebook Ads and Google AdMob. The app's ownership has also changed from Branch to Instabridge Sweden, raising privacy concerns among users in the Android community.