Hacker NewsSunday, January 25

A website that calculates the cumulative time wasted by humanity due to unfixed Apple bugs. It uses a formula combining user impact, workaround time, and how long bugs remain unfixed to estimate total productivity lost, comparing it to the engineering effort needed for fixes.

In response to a January 2026 challenge that AI can't affect the physical world, a team is using Claude Code as an AI farm manager to grow real corn from seed to harvest. The AI aggregates sensor data, makes farming decisions, and coordinates human operators rather than directly controlling equipment. The project called "Farmer Fred" is operational across multiple regions with a timeline from challenge acceptance through harvest season.

Codex CLI is OpenAI's cross-platform software agent that uses an "agent loop" to orchestrate interactions between users, AI models, and tools. The agent takes user input, queries the model through inference, executes tool calls when needed, and repeats until producing a final response, enabling automated software development tasks.

Federal agents fatally shot Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, in south Minneapolis during an immigration enforcement operation. DHS said the Border Patrol agent fired in self-defense after Pretti was found armed. Video shows agents wrestling him down before shooting multiple times, sparking protests.

The author successfully achieved gigabit speeds over existing phone wires using a German-made gigacopper G4201TM device, solving connectivity issues previously experienced with unreliable powerline adapters. After dealing with complex UK import procedures post-Brexit, they tested the device and achieved full 500 Mbps speeds matching their internet connection, demonstrating that phone wire infrastructure can effectively deliver high-speed networking when proper equipment is used.

Microsoft confirms it provides FBI access to BitLocker encryption keys from Windows PCs when legally requested, receiving about 20 such requests annually. Unlike Apple which refuses such access, Microsoft stores these keys unencrypted in the cloud, creating privacy concerns. Users can check and delete their stored keys through Microsoft's account website.

Steve Yegge created Gas Town, an experimental agent orchestrator that runs dozens of coding agents simultaneously. While poorly designed and extremely expensive, it serves as speculative design fiction revealing how AI agents will transform software development. The system highlights that design and planning become bottlenecks when agents handle all coding, suggesting future patterns where specialized agents work hierarchically. Though chaotic and inefficient, Gas Town provokes important questions about the future of automated software development and demonstrates emerging constraints we'll face as agentic coding systems mature.

The software industry maintains a polite fiction that projects can be accurately estimated, but this is false since most programming involves unknown work that dominates timelines. Estimates aren't really made by engineers but are political tools shaped by management pressure. Rather than estimating how long work will take, engineers should work backwards from desired timelines to determine what approaches are feasible within those constraints.

A creative experiment that boots an IBM PC from a vinyl record player instead of traditional storage media. The setup uses a custom ROM bootloader that reads a 64K FreeDOS system from an analog recording on a 10-inch record through the PC's cassette interface, requiring specific amplifier adjustments to work properly.

BirdyChat becomes the first European chat app to offer interoperability with WhatsApp under the Digital Markets Act. Users can now message WhatsApp contacts directly using phone numbers while keeping work organized in BirdyChat. The feature supports encrypted 1:1 chats and will roll out gradually across the EEA.