cedit is a lightweight, retro-styled text editor inspired by TempleOS and MS-DOS EDIT, featuring syntax highlighting for multiple languages, split windows, and theme customization. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows with prebuilt releases and can be compiled from source using CMake and a C compiler.
MIT engineers developed a flexible, shape-sensing sheet using soft optical fibers that digitally reconstructs its own form as it bends and twists. The design interprets changing light patterns through the fibers to create real-time digital images of movement, and remains functional even with damaged fibers. Potential applications include motion-capture garments for video games, teleoperated robots, and physical therapy tracking.
Rutter is a tool that maintains a shared decision memory across AI tools by storing decisions and their referenced notes in plain Markdown files you control. It tracks what you decided, which notes informed the decision, and lets you retrieve that context later even when switching between different AI tools, with built-in handling for file renames and reference tracking.
Waves, computations, and conscious experiences share substrate independence—they operate according to principles that don't depend on their underlying physical materials. This insight explains how intelligence can arise from physical matter while feeling abstract, and why artificial intelligence is theoretically possible since cognition requires only the right organizational structure, not specific biological components.
Margaret Hamilton, a pioneering computer scientist who led the software team for NASA's Apollo moon missions, died at 90 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She developed groundbreaking onboard flight software in the program's infancy and later became celebrated as a symbol of women in technology. Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 for her transformative contributions to software engineering.
Jasmin is a language and compiler for writing high-assurance and high-speed cryptographic implementations that prioritize efficiency, safety, correctness, and security. It is free software available through multiple package managers and has comprehensive documentation and community support.
Folio is a free, open-source Markdown editor and reader for Windows and Linux with a distraction-free interface, live preview, and offline-first design. It stores files locally without subscriptions, offers customizable themes and keyboard shortcuts, and supports multiple languages and export formats.
Unison Cloud, a distributed computing platform programmable in the Unison language, is now open source under an MIT license. The release includes four projects: the Unison Cloud client, Nimbus worker node, API server, and web UI, enabling users to turn node pools into distributed computers with features like fast inter-service communication, batch jobs, and transactional storage.
A researcher discovered two Earth-sized exoplanet candidates using NASA TESS data: one in Cygnus (158 light-years away) and one in Andromeda (134 light-years away), identified through periodic dimming patterns in starlight. The candidates passed multiple validation tests including independent verification and will be reported to NASA's ExoFOP for professional confirmation.
OpenAI withdrew three of its 722 preprints on math problems within 24 hours of release due to a sign error that cascaded through dependent papers. The company revised 14 additional manuscripts and acknowledged the need for better verification protocols, though mathematicians remain skeptical following OpenAI's rushed Navier-Stokes announcement in September.
Stanford PhD student Samuel King used generative AI to design genetic blueprints for microscopic viruses, raising questions about whether AI can create new life forms. MIT Technology Review is hosting a conversation between senior AI reporter James O'Donnell and King about his work and recognition as an Innovator Under 35.
A curated collection of Show HN projects categorized by their software licenses, indicating which are safe to use, require legal review, or are not usable based on licensing terms like MIT, Apache-2.0, GPL-3.0, and AGPL-3.0.
ModelRudder adds experimental per-task model routing to native Codex and Claude Code, allowing users to allocate stronger models to tasks that need them. The free, MIT-licensed preview runs locally on macOS, Linux/WSL, and Windows, requiring Node.js 24+ and a TypeSafe Jev API key for routing decisions across Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus models.
In September 2026, MIT professor Dor Minzer and his students rushed to publish a 95-page paper on computational complexity after learning that OpenAI had allegedly proved the famous unique games conjecture. Minzer's team had independently achieved a milestone result on a closely related problem, and their quick publication was vindicated when OpenAI announced its proof in October alongside hundreds of other mathematical results, with experts praising Minzer's contribution as genuinely significant.
Margaret Hamilton was Director of Software Engineering at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, leading a team of over 400 that developed flight software for Apollo and Skylab. She founded Hamilton Technologies and Higher Order Software, created the Universal Systems Language, and coined the term 'software engineering.' She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 and the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award in 2003.
Infants as young as 4-6 months old can infer social closeness between people based on saliva-sharing behaviors like kissing or sharing food, according to research from UC Santa Barbara, Harvard, and MIT published in Evolution and Human Behavior. The study found that babies looked longer at individuals who shared saliva with others, suggesting they understand that such intimate contact indicates close relationships.
bigarrow is a lightweight macOS CLI tool that lets AI agents draw arrows, boxes, and text on screen to guide users through actions they must perform manually, such as clicking permission dialogs or entering authentication codes. The tool is click-through, requires no permissions, and integrates with Claude Code and other agents via a simple Swift binary.
A lightweight JavaScript JPEG XL encoder library (12 KB gzipped) for offline image encoding in web apps and photography tools with no runtime dependencies, supporting lossless and lossy compression, various color depths, and metadata handling.
Margaret Hamilton, the pioneering computer scientist whose software powered the Apollo 11 moon landing, has died at 90. She developed the onboard flight software that detected and compensated for a critical hardware error minutes before the 1969 lunar landing, allowing the mission to proceed successfully. Hamilton was recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 for her groundbreaking work.
Margaret Hamilton led the Software Engineering Division at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed the Apollo program's flight software in the 1960s. An iconic 1969 photograph of Hamilton standing beside code listings has become widely shared, and the Apollo software was recently added to GitHub. Hamilton is credited with popularizing the concept of software engineering.