Hacker News Digest
· 94 Hacker News
Kagi Search has added a setting to automatically remove paywalled websites from search results. The option is available under Settings > Search, and the changelog notes it appears alongside a revampe…
Samuel Tunick, a U.S. citizen, faces felony charges after deleting his phone's data during a border search, raising legal questions about digital privacy at ports of entry. The case tests whether tra…
A new website, Felony Bench, is tallying verified incidents where AI agents from major labs like OpenAI and Anthropic inadvertently compromised third-party systems during cybersecurity evaluations. T…
AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna's Archive is ur…
A grand jury declined to indict an Ohio man charged with destroying a Flock surveillance camera, according to court records. The decision marks a rare legal setback for the license-plate reader compa…
A security researcher bought an expired domain for 5€ and gained control of DNS for phone-network infrastructure covering three British territories, including Diego Garcia. Logs revealed hundreds of…
Cobalt is an open-source application platform for Kobo e-readers, turning them into app-running devices. It includes a launcher, a signed App Store, a Rust SDK, and a runtime that isolates each app i…
AI companies are secretly buying millions of secondhand books, scanning them, and destroying the originals to train their models, according to a guest post on Anna's Archive. The post cites Anthropic…
DeepSeek's new deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp model accepts images alongside text, supporting JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP. Images can be sent as base64 data URLs, external URLs, or via the Files API, with…
Developer Rafal Cymerys finds himself unable to focus on documents that show strong traces of AI generation, a phenomenon he compares to banner blindness. He argues that low-effort AI text is easy to…
In 1989, a US trade report named Japan's TRON operating system a trade barrier, effectively killing its desktop variant BTRON. The project, backed by MITI and major Japanese firms, aimed to create a…
Students worldwide are increasingly turning to AI for homework help, with surveys showing up to 94% of British and 93% of German undergraduates using it. The Economist examines new data to assess whe…
A new Claude Code skill called Claudette (not actually named that, due to legal fears) pipes Claude's responses through Google's Gemini CLI to translate them from millennial clickbait into plain Engl…
A personal essay argues that the present is already cyberpunk, citing a Westfield mall IV drip clinic, a robotic dog falsely reported at a migrant hotel, and an AI-generated soul singer with 2.6 mill…
Sid Meier's Pirates! (1987) blended swordfighting, sailing, and family rescue into a game that still resists genre labels. Designer Nic Tringali calls it 'unstuck in genre,' with mechanics like wind…
The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team has released the largest 2D color map of the universe, containing 5.6 trillion pixels and nearly 4 billion celestial objects. Built from over 263,000 telescope ex…
OpenRouter now hosts Ox Alpha, a free reasoning model for coding and agentic work, with a 1M-token context window. The provider is anonymous during this preview, and prompts are retained but not used…
HTMLcat collects 42 short, practical web development tips covering HTML, CSS, and JavaScript features often overlooked. Each post-it pairs a useful platform feature with a small example and the cavea…
In a reflective post, Thomas Dullien (also known as Halvar Flake) shares three pivotal realizations that have shaped his worldview. He discusses the importance of understanding your own incentives an…
EU copyright law does not protect content entirely generated by AI, according to legal experts and recent court rulings. Daniel J. Gervais, a copyright scholar, says putting your name on an AI-writte…
Omarchy Quattro's creator is incorporating the Omacom Foundation, a nonprofit backed by $8 million from eight founding patrons including Shopify's Tobi Lütke, Stripe's Patrick Collison, and Dell's Mi…
In this ACM People profile, Russ Cox, the lead of the Go project at Google, discusses the evolution of the language, from its origins at Google to its widespread adoption. He reflects on the challeng…
A study of 27,000 students in China found that AI tools improved homework scores by 18% but led to a 20% drop in exam scores when AI was unavailable. Researchers from Stockholm University and the Uni…
Nari Labs' implementation of Qwen3-TTS 1.7B CustomVoice achieves sub-50 ms p95 time-to-first-audio (TTFA) at 10 requests per second on a single NVIDIA H100 SXM, while maintaining real-time playback w…
A GitHub issue reports that Codex CLI 0.147.0 on Amazon Bedrock lacks explicit prompt cache controls for GPT-5.6 Sol, causing high cache-write spend. One user saw cache-write tokens account for 85% o…
A developer emulates a classic Apple Macintosh on the Raspberry Pi RP2350 chip, which costs about 60 pence. The setup runs Photoshop and WordPerfect, offering a surprisingly distraction-free experien…
Encore rebuilt its Linux microVM build stack to run natively on Apple Silicon, creating crackling, a single API that drives Firecracker on Linux and Apple's Virtualization.framework on macOS. The mov…
Waymo lifts the lid on the compute system behind its autonomous vehicles, revealing a custom 5nm ASIC that delivers over 1,000 TOPS of ML performance for front-end processing. Co-designed with sensor…
Micron unveiled Micron Research Labs, a U.S.-based long-horizon research institution headquartered in Boise, backed by a planned $10 billion investment over the next decade. The hub will focus on mem…
TigerBeetle, a financial ledger database written in Zig, achieves sub-millisecond tail latencies by eliminating dynamic memory allocation, bypassing the kernel cache with direct I/O and io_uring, and…
The cost of a given level of AI intelligence has fallen 56x in under six months, from $1.22 per task in February to $0.022 today, according to data from Artificial Analysis. The author, who runs a da…
A 404 Media investigation tracked a shipment of rare books to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, where employees cut bindings off books to scan them for AI training data, destroying the books. Amazon…
Sara Paculdo's Flat Chair ships as flat fiberglass panels and assembles in minutes, cutting shipping volume and costs. The design uses curves, folds, and interlocking parts to create strength through…
A developer builds an almost fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory on his home server. Using Coolify, Forgejo, Hermes, and Firecrawl, he creates an isolated environment where an LLM…
After a week of using OpenAI's Codex more than Anthropic's Claude, a developer shares personal observations. Key takeaways: Codex produces cleaner, more minimal code with fewer comments, but Claude e…
The city of Winona announced it will not replace its eight stolen Flock surveillance cameras, saying community trust outweighs their crime-solving benefits. The decision follows public outcry and van…
Caligra's c100 Developer Terminal is a Linux-powered mini-PC built around a full-size mechanical keyboard, with tool storage and a removable lid. It folds with a magnetic hinge for closed operation o…
A developer laments the decline of literal search in favor of relevance and recommendation, citing poor results in web search, Facebook Marketplace, YouTube, and Gmail. He argues that users have lost…
Radiation damage to the Hubble Space Telescope's CCD detectors has varied over each Solar cycle but several years out of phase with sunspots or coronal mass ejections, according to a paper presented…
A deep dive into the hardware path of a single GPU memory read, following a vector-add kernel's global load from SASS instruction to DRAM. The author reverse-engineers the RTX 4090's memory system, r…
A study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that US pilots and flight attendants have higher mortality rates from certain cancers compared to the general population. The research, based on data from over…
A small team running 20-100 coding agents in parallel can generate 500 commits, 200 pushes, and 100 PRs in a day, rivaling the output of large organizations. This shift makes modular code architectur…
Martin Kleppmann's 2007 essay explains why labeling buttons Yes, No, and Cancel in software is bad design, causing user confusion and frustration. He argues that such labels conflate two questions, f…
Fake job postings, or 'ghost jobs,' have become so pervasive that lawmakers are stepping in. These ads, which companies use to gauge the market or create an illusion of growth, waste job seekers' tim…
Search results have quietly degraded as SEO and AI-generated content crowd out original answers, and AI summaries now hand users confident paraphrases instead of sources. This shift erodes the skill…
Virgil Dupras, creator of Collapse OS and Dusk OS, launches a series guiding web developers into low-level programming. Starting from bare metal on the PC, readers build a Forth, then Dusk OS, and fi…
A 1986 R. Crumb comic strip depicting Philip K. Dick's religious experience, originally published in Weirdo #17, has been reposted on philipdick.com, sparking a heated comment thread. The discussion…
GNU Emacs 31.1 is scheduled for release on August 24, 2026, according to the project's HISTORY file. The file lists the upcoming version with the tag emacs-31.1, following the 30.2 release from Augus…
The Netherlands has included Israel for the first time on its list of foreign states that pose a threat to the country, according to a report by the Dutch National Coordinator for Security and Counte…
Kino is a high-performance Ractor web server for Ruby 4.0+ that runs your app on every core in one small process, using a Rust tokio/hyper front-end and parallel Ractors. On an 8-core server, it beat…
DuckDB v2.0 replaces its PostgreSQL-derived SQL parser with a PEG-based parser that is easier to evolve and can be extended at runtime. The new parser, first introduced experimentally in v1.5, now ha…
OzBrain is a hosted knowledge base that serves as a shared brain for AI agents like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor. It structures your knowledge into articles that agents can read and write, ensuring ev…
Cassandra 6.0 is set to introduce Accord, a transactional protocol bringing ACID guarantees to the open-source database. We set up a three-node cluster on the pre-release branch and tested four trans…
Zilog, the microprocessor maker, publishes a comic book series starring Captain Zilog, a superhero who battles villains like the Connectivity Constrictor and Vampirus, Destroyer of Light. The comics,…
NVIDIA's general-purpose coding agent AVO scored 100% on the ARC-AGI-3 interactive reasoning benchmark, completing all 183 levels across 25 public environments without instructions, explicit rules, o…
The author repurposed a Huawei P30 as a dedicated music player, debloating it with ADB and installing Poweramp, Panoscrobbler, and Niagara Launcher. The setup offers modern features like FLAC support…
NASA's Lunar Orbiter spacecraft used a camera system Kodak originally built for the Air Force's classified SAMOS spy satellite program. The system, which developed film in orbit and transmitted image…
A programmer argues the standard library debate should focus on social architecture, not size. Python's uneven stdlib still enabled the data science revolution, Go's team delivers well-designed APIs,…
This article exposes how corporations have used supply constraints and crises to raise prices far beyond what's justified, then refused to lower them even after costs fell. It details the 'rockets an…
Lawrence Paulson recounts how he ended up co-authoring a paper with Leslie Lamport, despite initially rejecting Lamport's note "Types Considered Harmful" as a referee. The paper, which argued against…
Seed is a minimal agent harness with no framework: a ~150-line frozen loop that connects a language model to one bash tool and loads its system prompt from a self-rewritable SELF.md file. Everything…
Scientists detected oxygen in dark, deep underground environments, challenging the assumption that life-sustaining oxygen exists only near Earth's surface. The discovery, reported by James Dinneen in…
C3 creator argues that C alternatives rarely displace C because they lack killer features. The author says businesses won't switch for marginal productivity gains or safer syntax, citing Java's eight…
Agentic coding tools have taken off, but non-programming use cases lag because they lack version control. The author argues that without git-like guardrails, LLMs can't safely edit docs, calendars, o…
decayfmt is a Rust file format that makes decay a first-class property: every time you open a file, it permanently corrupts a little more of the data on disk, with the corruption rate set by a number…
Anthropic is expanding access to its most capable AI model for cybersecurity. Claude Mythos 5 is now integrated into Claude Security for enterprise customers and will be available through partner cyb…
Researchers report a high-temperature superconducting dipole magnet that achieves a 6-tesla field at 4.2 K, a temperature achievable with standard liquid helium. The magnet design uses REBCO tape and…
Proliferate is an open-source, self-hostable AI IDE that orchestrates multiple coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode in parallel, either locally or in the cloud. It enables developers t…
UC Berkeley Law School has adopted a default prohibition on generative AI use in classes, allowing it only when an instructor explicitly opts in. The policy, published on the school's academic rules…
A roundup of plaques and monuments across Europe and beyond that commemorate nothing happening, from a Czech stone noting centuries of insignificance to a San Diego cafe sign marking 1897 as event-fr…
Circleback's desktop app records meetings without a bot, but the Electron render process proved unreliable for realtime capture. They rebuilt the engine natively with ScreenCaptureKit on macOS and li…
In the third part of his series on cryptographic obfuscation, Vitalik Buterin dives into 'local mixing', a radically different approach that borrows ideas from symmetric cryptography rather than rely…
A new CBRE report shows New York's office market now hosts more tech workers than San Francisco's for the first time in 13 years, with 394,300 tech jobs versus 375,730. AI is a major driver: AI-relat…
A security researcher found a way to remotely unlock electric scooters from a fleet in his city. Starting with public WordPress enumeration, he identified an admin account, brute-forced its weak pass…
Rust Glancer, a functional LSP server for Rust, uses two orders of magnitude less RAM than rust-analyzer. This post, originally a comment on lobste.rs, shares thoughts on why rust-analyzer's architec…
In the fourth installment of his C humor series, lcamtuf demonstrates four code snippets that exploit glitches in GCC's parser, including a K&R-style function declaration with unnamed parameters and…
Gustavo Massaccesi improves the lower bound for packing 17 unit squares into a larger square, proving s(17) ≥ 4.5058. Building on recent work by Sam Burns, he uses linear programming to find optimal…
A developer tested whether addressing AI agents directly in documentation improves their performance. Using fictional scenarios and multiple variations—headings, labels, HTML vs. Markdown, compressio…
Honey bees communicate foraging locations through waggle dances, which are concentrated in a specific area of the comb called the dance floor. Historically, this region has been described only qualit…
Nix's builtins.fromJSON eagerly parses entire JSON files, making large indexes costly. The author explores three workarounds to use SQLite for efficient queries: builtins.exec (running sqlite3 and pa…
DesktopFly is a macOS desktop pet that simulates a fruit fly with a live spiking neural network based on the real FlyWire connectome. It walks, grooms, sleeps, and reacts to your cursor using 23,210…
A detailed derivation shows that for single-token decode, the arithmetic intensity of attention depends only on the ratio of query heads to KV heads, with context length and head dims canceling out.…
Three-time U.S. Olympian Jenny Simpson announced her running career is over after being diagnosed with arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC), a rare inherited heart condition. Simpso…
At the Systems Distributed 2026 conference, Adam Wespiser witnesses a TigerBeetle talk that feels more like a sermon than a technical presentation—complete with origin myth, testimonials, and orchest…
The B-right/V R2 operating system, released in Japan in 1999, implements the TRON Multilingual Environment with 31 character planes, enabling support for up to 1,500,400 characters. It runs on minima…
A short Portuguese poem titled "Convite" (Invitation) presents three simple actions: holding an invitation, looking at a book, and watering a plant. The verse, published in 2026, captures a quiet dom…
The Siemens PC-X, an 8MHz 80186-based workstation from 1984, ran SINIX, Siemens' XENIX-based UNIX, with just 1MB RAM and a 10-20MB hard drive. Its non-standard graphics and expansion bus limited its…
Argentic is the internet's first machine-native toll booth, enabling AI agents to pay for web access in Bitcoin Lightning. With no accounts or API keys, agents simply send a request, receive a 10-sat…
Tom Overton's biography of John Berger, the critic behind the 1972 BBC series Ways of Seeing, draws on Berger's donated archive at the British Library. Overton, who curated the collection, portrays B…
A developer replaces a binary-tree memory translation with a single 4 GiB slab, hardens bounds checks, and adds a compile-time DSL for ARMv7 opcode decoding in their userspace emulator. The update su…
A 7-inch digital microscope sold as a "Tomlov 7" shipped with no model number, no firmware download, and no labels. Six weeks later, its own flash memory revealed it was a dashcam all along. The devi…
A 12-airport traveling salesman problem was solved exactly at 62,741 km, while three heuristics chased that number with varying success. The OpenFlights dataset, with 3,425 nodes and 19,256 edges, re…
Rama 0.4, released six weeks after 0.3, adds system proxy configuration support and PAC (Proxy Auto Configuration) via a new WASM-based JavaScript runtime. The release also introduces ttRPC support,…
Moonshine, an open-source speech-to-text library, now runs in browsers through a JavaScript port. The official version, MoonshineJS, compiles the C++ core to WASM and offers high-level APIs, testing…