---
title: "AI & Tech News Digest — November 13, 2026"
description: "Nvidia's Jensen Huang resigns and CFO Colette Kress takes over as interim CEO; Google ships Gemini 4 Hydrogen; a critical Apache HTTP/2 RCE is patched."
date: 2026-11-13
categories: []
tags: []
---

## 1. AI News (Top 5)

- **Jensen Huang Resigns as Nvidia CEO Effective Immediately — CFO Colette Kress Named Interim CEO (Nov 12)** — [NVIDIA Newsroom](https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-ceo-transition) | [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/live/nvidia-live-board-meets-fate-ceo-jensen-huang-after-affair-reports-2026-11-12/) | [Wired, Nov 13](https://www.wired.com/story/nvidia-employees-petition-for-jensen-huangs-return/)
 The board announced Huang resigned as President, CEO, and board member on November 12; Colette Kress — CFO since 2013 — takes both the interim CEO and CFO roles, Harvey C. Jones becomes NVIDIA's first-ever board chair, and the Q3 FY2027 earnings call stays on schedule for November 17. The trigger: reports of extramarital affairs, one tied to MegaSpeed — a China-Singapore AI chip startup the US is investigating as a suspected spy's company — plus Huang's own November 8 email to staff ("I was unfaithful to my wife") and a board-initiated independent national-security investigation. Day two brought the twist: Wired reports an internal post urging the board to weigh employee sentiment drew 1,600+ comments, mostly backing his return; the main HN thread sits at 3,207 points and 2,973 comments. The board says operations, customer commitments, and the product roadmap continue without interruption — but with an interim CEO and earnings on Tuesday, treat near-term roadmap commitments from any vendor in crisis as softer than usual.
- **Google Ships Gemini 4 Hydrogen: the Cheap Execution Tier for Agent Workflows (Nov 12)** — [Google blog](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/introducing-gemini-4-hydrogen/) | [HN, 495 points](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50471431)
 Hydrogen is the Flash-class member of the Gemini 4 family: flat pricing across the whole 1M-token context at $1.50/M input and $7.50/M output, 1M-token input and up to 1M-token output, and a 51 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at its default high setting — a point above Argon — and 54 at the new xhigh level. Google claims it finishes tasks 2.5x faster than Gemini 3.8 Flash while more than tripling Terminal-Bench 4.1 scores (57% vs 18.2%), and the interesting bit is Orchestrator in Antigravity: it switches between Carbon and Hydrogen inside one session, hitting near-Carbon success rates on Terminal-Bench 4.0 with 24% less quota and 19% faster completion. It rolls out today to AI Studio, the Gemini API, Gemini for business, the Gemini app (free tier via auto-selection), Google Search globally, and Antigravity for paid subscribers. The pattern to copy is the multi-model split: frontier model as architect, cheap model as worker and verifier — now supported natively instead of hand-rolled.
- **smolmaxxing: 16B Models on 1 GB of RAM — a TV Box and a 2013 iPad Prove It (Nov 12)** — [GitHub](https://github.com/hyperionaidev/smolmaxxing/) | [HN, 313 points](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50468888)
 An MIT-licensed llama.cpp patch set that runs real models on hardware most people recycled: a Xiaomi TV Box S (4× Cortex-A55, ~1 GB usable RAM, stock Android 14) runs Qwen3.5-2B at 7.7 tok/s and the 16B Ling-mini 2.0 MoE at 5.1 tok/s, and a jailbroken 2013 iPad Air (Apple A7, no dot-product instructions) manages a 1-bit Bonsai-1.7B at 24–26 tok/s and the same 16B MoE at 2.6–4.5 tok/s. The tricks are documented with measured gains: 1-bit lookup-table kernels that need only basic NEON, dropping rarely-used vocabulary rows, paging mixture-of-experts experts from flash with next-layer prefetch, and full streaming for dense models — plus a 160-experiment lab notebook including the failures. The HN thread at 313 points treats it as an e-waste-revival blueprint: the 1-bit kernel and flash-paging work on any Linux or Android device with more model than RAM, so the old tablet in your drawer is a candidate inference box.
- **Perplexity Open-Sources Decider v1.3 and Flash v1.3 — 27B and 4B Classifiers Under Apache 2.0 (Nov 12)** — [Perplexity blog](https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/perplexity-decider) | [Unite AI](https://www.unite.ai/perplexity-releases-decider-v1-3-models-with-text-span-extraction/)
 Perplexity's decision-model line moved to downloadable weights: Decider v1.3 (27B) and Decider Flash v1.3 (4B, Qwen3.5-based) ship under Apache 2.0 with 91.6% mean accuracy across its classification evals — 6.54 points above Perplexity's own production classifiers — and a new text-span extraction route that returns verbatim quotes instead of just labels. This is the second open drop in a month (v1.2 landed October 16), and the direction is clear: the unglamorous tier of agent stacks — routing, tool-choice, content classification — is becoming a commodity you run locally instead of a per-token bill. If your pipeline still calls a frontier model to pick between three tools, a 4B classifier on a single GPU is the cheaper replacement to benchmark this week.
- **GREP.AI Open-Sources AgentRun, a Managed-Agents Platform With Bring-Your-Own Harness (Nov 12)** — [Show HN, 89 points](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50471650) | [GitHub](https://github.com/Parcha-ai/agentrun/blob/main/README.md)
 The YC F26 company open-sourced the platform behind its own agent harness: self-improving agents, web-grounded workflows, a range of sandboxes and computer environments, thousands of tool integrations, and analytics on agent behavior. The differentiator is the harness contract — AgentRun speaks ACP, so it runs sessions from Pi, Claude Agents, Codex, OpenCode, or anything else that supports the protocol, and you can self-host it (one-click on Render with an OpenRouter key) or use their hosted console. The infrastructure layer is consolidating the same way CI did: where your agent's session runs is becoming a separate decision from which harness drives it, and open protocols like ACP are what keep that decision reversible.

*Also tracked: Anthropic's IPO page itself hit the HN front page at 873 points (838 comments) with pricing expected November 18 — roadshow terms covered yesterday — [ipo.anthropic.com](https://ipo.anthropic.com/us/) | [discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50465829).*

## 2. Developer & DevOps News (Top 5)

- **Microsoft 365 Outage Takes Down Outlook, Teams, Copilot, Defender and Intune for Hours (Nov 12)** — [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-365-outlook-down-thousands-us-users-downdetector-shows-2026-11-12/) | [The Register](https://theregister.com/saas/2026-11-12/microsoft-struggling-to-fix-massive-cloud-outage-thats-taken-down-email-and-intune/5309531) | [HN, 665 points](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50471731)
 The incident (MO1550821) began late afternoon UTC on November 12 and degraded Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Defender for Office 365, Intune and Purview worldwide, with recovery dragging into the night — Microsoft pointed to backend servers failing automated health checks, and the status page was still showing degradation late in the evening. The r/sysadmin thread filled the gap admins usually rely on Microsoft for: the service-health dashboard itself was slow or unreachable for many during the incident. The operational lesson is the one every outage re-teaches: your mail, identity, and management plane sharing one vendor means one shared blast radius, so know in advance what your teams do when the admin center is the thing that's down.
- **Apache HTTP Server Patches Critical HTTP/2 RCE — CVE-2026-119618, Fixed in 2.4.71 (Nov 11)** — [Censys advisory](https://censys.com/advisory/cve-2026-119618)
 A race condition in `mod_http2`'s `assign_headers()` can corrupt the heap and lead to remote code execution — CVSS 9.8 per NCSC-NL, exploitable by a remote unauthenticated attacker on any server with HTTP/2 enabled (HTTP/1.1-only servers are not affected). It hits Apache HTTP Server 2.4.55 through 2.4.70 and the standalone `mod_h2` package 2.0.8 through 2.0.42 — which had no fixed release as of November 12. Apache credits Anthropic's OSS Scanner and Google Cloud Vulnerability Research; no exploitation or public PoC is known yet, and the fixed 2.4.71 shipped November 11. Censys counts roughly 1.5 million internet-facing hosts reporting an affected version, with only ~2,000 on the fixed build a day later — patch this one ahead of the PoC, and check your `Protocols` directives while you're in there.
- **PostgreSQL Ships Point Releases for Every Branch — Plus a Second 19 RC (Nov 12)** — [PostgreSQL](https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-187-1712-1616-1520-1425-and-19-rc-2-released-3442/) | [HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50467763)
 The November update drop covers all supported branches — 18.7, 17.12, 16.16, 15.20, and 14.25 — with the usual cumulative bug fixes, plus PostgreSQL 19 RC 2 on the road to GA. Nothing here is a security emergency, but point releases on five branches in one day is exactly the kind of maintenance window worth batching: update the standby-first, and if you're testing the 19 beta, RC 2 is the build your extension vendors are actually testing against. The quiet signal in the release train: 19's RC cycle is moving on schedule, so plan your upgrade-testing sprint now rather than after GA week.
- **Nintendo's DMCA Sweep Pulls Switch Emulators and Mod-Chip Firmware Off GitHub (Nov 11)** — [IGN](https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-takes-down-switch-emulators-and-mod-chip-firmware-in-massive-github-dmca-sweep) | [HN, 285 points](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50469994)
 Four DMCA notices targeted the Yuzu and Citron Neo emulators plus mod-chip firmware — 144 firmware repositories replaced with a takedown page, based on a November 6 notice arguing the firmware circumvents the Switch's technical protection measures. TorrentFreak notes the firmware is already rehosted elsewhere, and IGN frames the sweep as a response to emulators recently running the Ocarina of Time remake on PC — with the 2024 Yuzu takedown (8,500 copies via 12 mirrors) as precedent. The developer-platform angle matters beyond emulation: if your project ships anything adjacent to a vendor's DRM, GitHub is one notice away from removing every fork at once, so mirrors and backups are part of the design, not an afterthought.
- **ExcalidrawZ: a Native SwiftUI Excalidraw Client That Doubles as an MCP Server (Nov 12)** — [GitHub](https://github.com/chocoford/ExcalidrawZ) | [HN, 117 points](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50468944)
 The 1.8k-star, MIT-licensed app wraps the familiar Excalidraw canvas in a real macOS/iPadOS/iOS app: drawings become proper app documents with iCloud sync, file history checkpoints, PDF import, and Mermaid-to-Excalidraw conversion. Two features put it in this digest: a built-in AI drawing assistant with proposal previews before anything touches the canvas, and an MCP server mode that exposes files, history, canvas inspection, and export to local AI clients. Sensitive drawings can be locked with local auth, encrypted, and hidden from the AI entirely. The pattern is spreading — whiteboards, notes, and terminals are all becoming MCP endpoints your agents can operate — and this is a clean reference implementation of the per-file AI-visibility switch done right.

*Also tracked: Chainguard's Athena disclosed a second wave of 12 "silent" Java vulnerabilities across 9 libraries — including a critical Apache Kerby auth bypass where an unsigned JWT over TLS got a real Kerberos ticket, and a MockServer XXE/SSRF still partly reachable in the current 9.1.0 — none of which ever received a CVE; four of the 12 live in CI test tools, which Chainguard argues should be treated as reachable infrastructure — [post](https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/athenas-second-wave).*

## 3. Self-Hosting & Homelab (Top 4)

- **selfh.st Publishes the 2026 Self-Host User Survey Results — 6,221 Responses (Nov 12)** — [selfh.st](https://selfh.st/survey/2026-results) | [daily.dev summary](https://daily.dev/posts/2026-self-host-user-survey-results-mmg35jeyf)
 The annual snapshot grew 52% over last year, and the headline shift is in tooling: Docker's dominance of container platforms held while Portainer's share of container management fell from 66% to 33%, with newer options like Dockhand and Komodo splitting the difference. If you pick self-hosted tooling based on what the crowd runs rather than what Hacker News recommends, this is the dataset to check before your next stack rebuild — and it's the best public signal of where the homelab mainstream actually is, straight from 6,221 operators.
- **HolyArrs Replaces Six *arr Apps With One 15 MB Container (this week)** — [GitHub](https://github.com/HolyArrs/HolyArrs)
 A Go, AGPL-3.0 media manager that collapsed Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Bazarr, Prowlarr and Overseerr into a single web app — about 15 MB to download and ~140 MB RAM idle with 10,000 titles, versus 718 MB of combined downloads for the six it replaces — and it passed 1,000 stars this week. Version 1.1.0 adds 44 languages and aria2 as a downloader; it drives qBittorrent, SABnzbd and friends, reports to Plex/Jellyfin/Emby, and has a side-by-side importer that reads your existing *arr configs without changing them. The caveats are stated honestly: it doesn't download by itself yet, there's no AI/MCP layer in 1.0, and metadata comes from the author's self-funded server. Run it next to your current stack until it earns trust — the migration tool is built for exactly that.
- **ServerOS Panel: an Open-Source Control Panel for the Servers You Already Have (this week)** — [GitHub](https://github.com/serveroshq/panel)
 A Laravel/PHP panel (AGPL-3.0, 615★ and climbing fast) that connects your existing VPSes with one command via a small daemon, then handles Git and template deploys with domains and HTTPS, scheduled backups, uptime monitors with alerts, status pages, log aggregation, and cron-style workflows — plus teams with 2FA, an activity log, an API, and an MCP server so your assistants can operate the fleet. Self-hosting takes a Docker host, a wildcard domain, and one install script; the community edition is the whole panel, with SSO and SCIM gated behind a license. It sits squarely in the Coolify/Dokploy slot — worth benchmarking if your current panel's update cadence has gone quiet.
- **homelab-diagram: Your r/homelab Network Diagram, Generated From YAML With Claude (this week)** — [GitHub](https://github.com/Goblinmine/homelab-diagram)
 The script behind a widely-shared r/homelab post: it renders a YAML inventory into the classic homelab network diagram as SVG/PNG — switch ports with VLAN bars, cable width mapped to negotiated link speed, Proxmox VMs, TrueNAS pools, DMZ containers — with automatic redaction of domains and SSIDs for public posting. The README is refreshingly honest: the layout coordinates are hand-placed for the author's network, so it's a starting point rather than a product, and it was built with Claude Code (Opus 5.5) over roughly 60 feedback rounds. It ships a `CLAUDE.md` so your own agent can interview you, rewrite the inventory, and iterate the render — a working template for agent-assisted ops documentation.

## 4. Trending GitHub Repositories (Top 10, last 7 days)

| # | Repo | Stars | Lang | One-line |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | [HybridRobotics/supermimic](https://github.com/HybridRobotics/supermimic) | 1,343★ | Python | Humanoid whole-body motion tracking driven by a single differentiable world model |
| 2 | [dabingfy-dot/solo-to-team-skills](https://github.com/dabingfy-dot/solo-to-team-skills) | 806★ | — | Agent skills for one human leading an AI team: delegate, verify evidence, reuse lessons |
| 3 | [kolbicz/WQFiles](https://github.com/kolbicz/WQFiles) | 757★ | Objective-C | File browser and app-data manager for iOS 26/27 built on the worse_query hole, no jailbreak |
| 4 | [Goldoire/fefw-recomp](https://github.com/Goldoire/fefw-recomp) | 667★ | C++ | Static recompilation PC port of Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave — bring your own dump |
| 5 | [alexeyw/lot-map](https://github.com/alexeyw/lot-map) | 630★ | TypeScript | Live local map that lights up Claude Code tool calls, hooks, skills and subagents as they run |
| 6 | [JDhruv14/line-art-animation](https://github.com/JDhruv14/line-art-animation) | 602★ | TypeScript | Claude skill and TS library for animated line-art SVG scenes with a day/night cycle |
| 7 | [forcequitOS/worse_query](https://github.com/forcequitOS/worse_query) | 594★ | Objective-C | The iOS 26/27 sandbox escape, published as a public PoC — again |
| 8 | [TooonyChen/finallyshell](https://github.com/TooonyChen/finallyshell) | 466★ | Go | Source-available FinalShell-style SSH client on a Ghostty-based runtime with the mygo UI |
| 9 | [Dodaios/ste80-humanizer](https://github.com/Dodaios/ste80-humanizer) | 465★ | Python | Agent skill that rewrites AI text 80% toward ASD-STE100 simplified technical English, per Karpathy's method |
| 10 | [imxieyi/Kernarium](https://github.com/imxieyi/Kernarium) | 414★ | C++ | Run the real Linux kernel natively on iOS via user-mode virtualization |

*Also tracked: [paulirish/chrome-capture](https://github.com/paulirish/chrome-capture) (402★) grabs 60–120 fps / 2160p video and audio straight out of a Chrome tab, and [Robbyant/lingbot-touch](https://github.com/Robbyant/lingbot-touch) (423★) trains heterogeneous tactile representations for dexterous robot hands. The star-farm clusters (fake installers, fork-ratio-1 utilities) are still farming — verify before you star.*

## 5. Hacker News Top Stories

1. **Show HN: My $300 embroidery machine needed a subscription, so I built my own app** (418 points, 163 comments) — [GitHub](https://github.com/simpsoka/zigzag) | [discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50470488)
 Zigzag replaces the vendor's subscription app for a consumer embroidery machine — the thread is half right-to-repair, half file-format archaeology.
2. **Abandoned Quake 4 expansion finished by modders and now playable** (254 points, 91 comments) — [ModDB](https://www.moddb.com/mods/openq4/downloads/openq4-0141-windows-x64) | [discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50467618)
 OpenQ4 1.4.1 ships the expansion the original team never finished — a full playable build from a dormant mod.
3. **Talking Zen 6 with Mike Clark at AMD In-Depth** (206 points, 3 comments) — [Chips and Cheese](https://chipsandcheese.com/p/talking-zen-6-with-mike-clark-at) | [discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50467460)
 A architect interview on Zen 6 design choices — pairs with last week's microarchitecture teardown from the same site.
4. **Our software engineering interviews are changing a little** (194 points, 205 comments) — [Jane Street](https://blog.janestreet.com/software-engineering-interviews-are-changing-a-little/) | [discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50467297)
 The Nov 2 post hit the front page again: new onsite rounds lean toward design, verification, and LLM-assisted work, while most rounds stay traditional no-LLM coding — a concrete template for anyone redesigning interviews in 2026.
5. **Africa's solar revolution is vast and speedy** (118 points, 57 comments) — [The Economist](https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/11/12/africas-solar-revolution-is-vast-and-speedy) | [discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50477331)
 Grid-scale solar deployment moving faster than the interconnect can keep up — the thread digs into what leapfrogging looks like on the ground.
6. **Fitting Four 32 GB Resizable Bars Behind a PCIe Switch on Linux** (82 points, 32 comments) — [doug.sh](https://doug.sh/posts/gpu-bars-behind-a-pcie-switch/) | [discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50468720)
 Multi-GPU Resizable BAR through one upstream switch on Linux — the PCIe mechanics your multi-node inference box wishes it had documented.

*Also tracked: Chicago schools to Google — "we'd rather lose Search than be forced to accept AI" (68 points) — [TechSpot](https://www.techspot.com/news/114532-chicago-schools-tell-google-they-can-live-without.html) | [discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50476586).*

## 6. Reddit Highlights (Top 5)

- **r/sysadmin — Microsoft Office seems to be down** — [Thread](https://reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1xuje83/microsoft_office_seems_to_be_down) — Admins live-posting the 365 outage from every region, including reports that Microsoft's own status page wouldn't load.
- **r/singularity — Google releases Gemini 4 Hydrogen, its new fast model, at $1.50/$7.50 per million tokens** — [Thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1xujwqq/google_releases_gemini_4_hydrogen_its_new_fast/) — Cost-per-task math against 3.8 Flash and the 2.5x speed claim, in progress.
- **r/pcmasterrace — Bring back the boss: Nvidia employees petition for Jensen Huang** — [Thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1xuw2co/bring_back_the_boss_nvidia_employees_petition_for/) — The 1,600-comment internal petition going mainstream, with the founder-vs-board debate playing out in the comments.
- **r/Games — Nintendo takes down Switch emulators and mod chip firmware** — [Thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1xu5cb5/nintendo_takes_down_switch_emulators_and_mod_chip/) — What the four notices actually cover, and why mirrors are already reappearing.
- **r/technology — Microsoft Outlook goes down, paralyzing business** — [Thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1xula8r/microsoft_outlook_goes_down_paralyzing_business/) — The non-admin view of the same outage: nearly ten hours of degraded mail and Teams, and what businesses did instead.