Rob Pike’s 1989 Programming Rules Hit 820 Points, OpenRocket Inspires Makers, and an AI Short Story Sparks Its Own AI Controversy

Kai and Maya cover the top stories from Hacker News for Wednesday, March 18, 2026: - Rob Pike's five Rules of Programming from 1989 hit 820 points and 400+ comments, reigniting debates about premature optimization and data-first design - OpenRocket, the open-source model rocket simulator with 6-DOF physics, inspires the STEM education crowd at 365 points - Wander is a tiny decentralized tool for exploring the small web, built in 90 minutes with just two files - NVIDIA NemoClaw offers sandboxed runtime for always-on autonomous AI agents at 220 points - NVIDIA GreenBoost transparently extends GPU VRAM using system RAM and NVMe storage - Stardrift predicts whether your specific flight will have Starlink internet by tracking aircraft tail numbers - An AI-assisted short story about debugging AI gets de-indexed from HN for lacking AI disclosure