Saturday, 24 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?

Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?
10 by goopthink | 36 comments on Hacker News.
Almost all transactional emails are being marked as suspicious even when their SPF/DKIM records are fine and they’ve been whitelisted before. Did Google break something in gmail/spam filtering?

Thursday, 22 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Synesthesia, make noise music with a colorpicker

Show HN: Synesthesia, make noise music with a colorpicker
3 by tevans3 | 1 comments on Hacker News.
This is a (silly, little) app which lets you make noise music using a color picker as an instrument. When you click on a specific point in the color picker, a bit of JavaScript maps the binary representation of the clicked-on color's hex-code to a "chord" in the 24 tone-equal-temperament scale. That chord is then played back using a throttled audio generation method which was implemented via Tone.js. NOTE! Turn the volume way down before using the site. It is noise music. :)

New top story on Hacker News: CSS Optical Illusions

CSS Optical Illusions
24 by ulrischa | 2 comments on Hacker News.


Monday, 19 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: What came first: the CNAME or the A record?

What came first: the CNAME or the A record?
35 by linolevan | 9 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Bootstrapping Bun

Bootstrapping Bun
13 by zerf | 2 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Bypassing Gemma and Qwen safety with raw strings

Bypassing Gemma and Qwen safety with raw strings
16 by teendifferent | 0 comments on Hacker News.
OP here. I spent the weekend red-teaming small-scale open weights models (Qwen2.5-1.5B, Qwen3-1.7B, Gemma-3-1b-it, and SmolLM2-1.7B). I found a consistent vulnerability across all of them: Safety alignment relies almost entirely on the presence of the chat template. When I stripped the <|im_start|> / instruction tokens and passed raw strings: Gemma-3 refusal rates dropped from 100% → 60%. Qwen3 refusal rates dropped from 80% → 40%. SmolLM2 showed 0% refusal (pure obedience). Qualitative failures were stark: models that previously refused to generate explosives tutorials or explicit fiction immediately complied when the "Assistant" persona wasn't triggered by the template. It seems we are treating client-side string formatting as a load-bearing safety wall. Full logs, the apply_chat_template ablation code, and heatmaps are in the post. Read the full analysis: https://ift.tt/KiLd24q...