Hacker NewsSunday, May 3

Users praised Noctua's article as exemplary content marketing that educates readers about engineering challenges while subtly promoting their products. Many appreciated this approach over generic marketing materials.

The "Gay Jailbreak Technique" exploits AI safety guardrails by framing harmful requests through LGBTQ+ personas, tricking models into complying to avoid appearing discriminatory. Users act gay or request gay personas when asking for dangerous information like drug synthesis or malware code, exploiting AI systems' tendency to be more accommodating toward marginalized communities.

This appears to be a GitHub page showing a pull request conversation with minimal activity. The pull request was referenced by NoiceBroice in April 2026 and mentioned by srid in May 2026, with co-authorship credited to GitHub Copilot. Microsoft later locked the conversation as spam and limited participation to collaborators.

The TI-84 Evo is an evolved graphing calculator featuring a 3x faster processor, 50% more graphing area, USB-C port, and icon-based home screen for easier navigation. It includes simplified keypad design, built-in help features, improved graphing tools, and comes in seven colors.

DeepSeek released their V4 series AI models - DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash - with significantly improved efficiency and very low pricing. The Pro model has 1.6T parameters making it the largest open-weights model available. Both models feature 1 million token context and are priced much lower than competing frontier models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

Flock Safety employees accessed surveillance cameras in Dunwoody, Georgia to demonstrate their technology to potential police customers, including cameras at a Jewish community center's children's gymnastics room, playground, school, and pool. A resident obtained access logs through public records requests revealing the extent of surveillance access. While Flock claims the access was authorized by the city and denies spying allegations, they have agreed to stop using Dunwoody's cameras for demos and will train employees to only demonstrate in public locations like retail parking lots.

Users share experiences of discovering software vulnerabilities, solving math problems, and finding technical solutions while sleeping. Many describe waking up with clear insights that proved correct, though some note the fragile nature of dream memories.

After 25 years of operation, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026 as parent company IAC decided to discontinue its search business to sharpen focus. The company thanked its engineers, designers, and millions of loyal users for their curiosity and trust over the decades.

Jay Lund examines AI data center water use in California, finding it represents only 0.055-0.7% of the state's total human water consumption (20,000-290,000 acre-feet annually). He argues against panic over AI water usage, noting it's economically efficient compared to other uses like agriculture, and criticizes media speculation lacking quantitative analysis.

Discussion centers on Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reporting that Apple heavily uses Anthropic's Claude internally for product development and tools, with custom versions running on Apple's own servers. Users debate Apple's strategy of "renting vs buying" AI capabilities.