8.25.26 | Europe harming makers, Xiaomi's CPU performance, MS Paint and Photos watermarking

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on Aug 25, 2026.Feel free to leave feedback on Github: https://github.com/denolfe/hacker-news-highlights(00:00) - Intro (00:19) - How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs (01:58) - Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded (03:16) - MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID (04:34) - The entire city of San Francisco as a video game (05:42) - iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com (07:02) - Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence (08:12) - Where did all the public bathrooms go? (09:40) - SeL4 security proofs now complete on AArch64 (11:07) - Moon (2024) (12:10) - Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation (13:27) - Outro How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurshttps://lectronz.com/u/lectronz/articles/how-europe-is-killing-makers-and-micro-entrepreneurshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49419237Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreadedhttps://twitter.com/lemire/status/2091894299289874926https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49420873MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUIDhttps://xusheng.dev/posts/reversing/mspaint_invisible_watermark/main/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421158The entire city of San Francisco as a video gamehttps://sf.thijs.gg/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422784iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.comhttps://developer.apple.com/news/?id=1ptvdtcmhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49426564Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independencehttps://gultsch.de/posts/25-years-of-digital-independence/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421536Where did all the public bathrooms go?https://daily.jstor.org/where-did-all-the-public-bathrooms-go/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422800SeL4 security proofs now complete on AArch64https://proofcraft.systems/news-2026/#2026-08-21https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49418255Moon (2024)https://ciechanow.ski/moon/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49426466Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutationhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-are-some-octopuses-so-smart-the-answer-might-lie-in-a-never-before-seen-mutation-that-helps-them-accurately-build-proteins-180989319/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49423539