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Tech News
Former Opendoor CEO Eric Wu has emerged from a year-long break to found a new company, now out of stealth since May, that builds AI-powered voice assistants for construction and field workers. The tool acts as a hands-free coach guiding laborers through tasks, aiming to address a labor shortfall the industry group Associated Builders and Contractors pegs at roughly 349,000 missing workers this year.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld dismissal of a 2022 lawsuit brought by four Jackson residents who claimed the city's lead-tainted water supply violated their constitutional right to bodily integrity. Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote that while the harm was serious, it did not fall under any established constitutional protection, and there is no constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis.
A reply-post analyzing a reader's use-after-free bug in a limit-order matching engine argues that object pools change the nature of memory bugs rather than eliminating them. The author explains that without pooling, a freed-and-reused memory slot can let two different object types collide, potentially turning a stale pointer into a code-execution exploit via a mismatched function pointer. With pooling, the same logical use-after-free persists, but because the recycled memory always holds the same type, the dangerous type confusion is avoided—unless the object itself contains an inline tagged union, which reopens the original hazard.
Southwest Airlines is building its first-ever airport lounges, with four locations already under construction and at least seven more planned. The move marks a major shift for a carrier historically known for its no-frills, open-seating approach to air travel.
Research on leadership psychology finds that many leaders struggle to deliver constructive criticism, even though guiding people toward better performance often requires telling them things they don't want to hear. The pattern shows up across organizations, where leaders prioritize comfort and likability over honest, corrective feedback.
Homebuilders in several booming Southern housing markets have ramped up construction so aggressively that newly built homes are now priced at or below comparable existing homes. This reverses the usual pattern where new construction commands a premium over older housing stock.
President Trump argued that communities blocking data center construction risk falling into economic decline, framing local resistance as a threat to competitiveness. His remarks come as polling shows most Americans are wary of having such facilities built near their homes.
A developer released a free browser-based logic puzzle called 'Plan The Roadmap' on Show HN, part of a series called Corporate Mind Games. Players drag 16 tickets into four quarterly columns, each with a point target, while satisfying constraints set by simulated meeting participants, winning when all indicator faces turn from frowning to smiling.
Japanese researcher @dydt_Nao successfully demonstrated a dinner-plate-sized USB flash drive built from magnetic core memory, transferring both a text file and a small monochrome bitmap image between two PCs. The device, which uses a Raspberry Pi Pico as its controller, stores only 128 bytes of data and displays activity through a 32x32 LED array that lights up as each magnetic core is accessed. The creator plans to showcase the device at Maker Faire Tokyo 2026 in early September.
Residents and advocacy group Stand.earth allege that the DataOne data center in Vineland, New Jersey — tied to a $19.4 billion Nebius-Microsoft GPU deal — has been running dozens of unpermitted gas turbines and building an unpermitted 1.5-million-gallon LNG storage tank near two schools. Locals say they only learned the site was a data center after the Microsoft deal became public, and complaints about nighttime noise and air pollution led to a delayed town hall in January 2026, months after construction began.
An entrepreneur who has built companies in hospitality, real estate, construction, home inspections, healthcare and digital marketing argues that success comes from recognizing recurring problem patterns rather than industry expertise. He points to a NBER study of Danish firms showing serial entrepreneurs are 39% more productive than first-time founders, crediting this edge to pattern recognition rather than diversification itself.
Skywatchers can catch two minor meteor showers in September: the Aurigids, peaking September 1 and fueled by comet C/1911 N1 Kiess, and the Southern Taurids, which begin September 20 and run through November, driven by comet 2P/Encke. Both are best viewed by locating their radiant constellations—Auriga and Taurus—though neither shower produces a heavy meteor count this early in its cycle.