Hacker NewsThursday, June 25

Bunny.net has made their DNS service completely free, eliminating query fees and offering free hosting for up to 500 domains. Originally built as an internal routing engine for their CDN network, Bunny DNS now handles 200 billion queries monthly across 300,000 domains and integrates seamlessly with their other services.

Discussion centers on whether the employee followed proper procedures for releasing open source projects at Google. Some argue he violated clear policies by using Google branding without approval, while others note DevRel teams often had latitude to publish projects and question if proper processes were actually breached.

FUTO Swipe is an open-source family of models and algorithms for fast, accurate swipe typing that runs offline on Android devices. It includes three model types and achieves ~4% error rate with 2.5M parameters. The system uses a dataset of 1M swipes collected in 2024.

Tony Krueger, a Microsoft Word developer who worked on multiple versions from 1.0 to 6.0 and beyond, created the red and green squiggles feature that underlines spelling and grammar errors in real-time. His innovation made spell checking unobtrusive and is now ubiquitous across word processors. Penn and Teller famously loved his feature.

Discussion centers on Jerry Gretzinger's decades-long artistic project of creating an imaginary map using a card-based system. Users share links to documentaries about the work and praise its systematic, rule-driven creative process.

A founder spent over 9,600 euros and five months to incorporate a company in Germany but still cannot send invoices due to waiting for a VAT ID. The process involved multiple expensive intermediaries including lawyers, notaries, courts, and tax firms, all of whom could bill immediately while the founder remains unable to generate revenue. The complex bureaucratic system required forming two companies (UG & Co. KG structure), rejecting simple company names like "Plenty" as "too generic," and locking away 2,000 euros in untouchable share capital, highlighting Germany's friction-heavy business formation process.

Carmack reflects on pushing employees too hard during startup intensity, leading to discussion about sustainable management practices, equity imbalances between founders/employees, and the difficulty of transitioning from scrappy startup to mature enterprise without burning out talent.

OpenAI has partnered with Broadcom to develop their first custom AI inference chip codenamed "Jalapeno." This represents OpenAI's move into developing specialized hardware for AI processing rather than relying solely on existing chips from other manufacturers.

The author created an open-source WYSIWYG TikZ editor that allows visual editing of LaTeX figures while maintaining synchronized source code. The editor parses TikZ code and tracks source locations, enabling users to drag elements while preserving code formatting. Built primarily using AI coding agents, it includes converters from other formats and implements LaTeX text algorithms.

The author discusses the growing trend of using automated loops and harnesses to control coding agents, where work continues beyond where models would normally stop. While these loops work well for tasks like code porting and performance experiments, the author struggles with using them for code they deeply care about, as current models produce overly defensive, complex code that lacks strong invariants. The shift represents moving from deterministic software engineering toward treating software like an organism that's diagnosed and treated rather than fully understood, and opting out may not be possible as automated systems increasingly dominate development workflows.