Hacker News Digest
· 63 Hacker News
OpenAI has notified SpaceX that it will terminate its contract providing OpenAI models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026. The decision stems from concerns that SpaceX, now…
Tether, an open-source project by Zack Bartel, brings Apple's Continuity features to Linux, including iMessage, SMS, notifications, clipboard sync, file transfer, and OTP autofill. It uses Bluetooth…
Debian's general-resolution vote on the use of large language models has concluded, with 'Responsible Use of Generative AI' emerging as the winning choice. The resolution neither endorses nor prohibi…
An engineering leader argues that while AI tools dominate the productivity conversation, the real multiplier is a strong team culture. Drawing on 13+ years in the industry, he explains how bad cultur…
Stephen Diehl, a 90s kid, contrasts the early web—slow, quirky, and human—with today's internet, which he argues is an optimized machine for exploiting vulnerability. He describes how scams have move…
The Trump administration has been using an obscure customs provision, 19 USC 1509, to obtain private records of journalists, nonprofits, and unions without judicial oversight. In one case, the DHS ob…
EVE Online has started the massive migration of its 2.4 million-line Python 2 codebase to Python 3, a process that will take years. The first stage, already deployed to Tranquility, uses automated to…
Tencent has released and open-sourced the preview of Hy4, its latest AI model. The announcement, made on May 17, 2024, highlights Tencent's commitment to advancing AI technology and fostering communi…
Icelanders are voting in a referendum on whether to resume European Union accession talks, 13 years after they were suspended. With a population under 400,000, the outcome is too close to call, with…
Glacier mice are fuzzy green balls of moss that live on glaciers and move in coordinated herds, puzzling researchers. Found from Alaska to Uganda, these colonies host tiny creatures like water bears…
After a week of work, GrapheneOS has a partial port to the Pixel 11 series but cannot finish it because ARM hardware memory tagging (MTE) is unsupported in software, firmware, and likely hardware. Th…
The author, a vulnerability researcher, found that LLM agents lose track of established facts during long investigations, leading to hallucinations. To solve this, they built Lemmalog, a Datalog engi…
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named after the agency's first chief astronomer, is scheduled to launch on August 30, 2026. With a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble's, it…
At Hot Chips 2026, Samsung detailed its Processing-in-Memory (PIM) implementation in LPDDR5X DRAM, placing MAC units inside each of the chip's 16 banks to exploit internal bandwidth. This yields 614…
SQLite's JSON support, combined with generated columns, lets you treat it as a document database. This post shows how to insert JSON, extract fields into virtual columns, enforce constraints, and ind…
StemDeck is a free, open-source desktop app that splits any song into six stems—vocals, drums, bass, guitar, piano, and other—using Meta AI's Demucs model. It runs entirely on your machine, so your a…
TurboKV is an async embedded key-value store for Rust, offering atomic batches, ordered range scans, configurable durability, compression, and background compaction. Benchmarks on an Apple M4 show it…
Starting a new job often triggers an urge to prove yourself by making an immediate impact. But action without context is just noise. Drawing on his move from Monzo to Engine by Starling, the author o…
A federal appeals court ruled that sports betting is not a 'swap' under the Commodity Exchange Act, undermining a judge's injunction that blocked Arizona from prosecuting prediction market Kalshi. Th…
The author argues that GDPR's success is proven by the intensity of opposition from the tech industry. He traces the regulation's origins, its rapid global spread, and its enforcement teeth, from Max…
An exploratory statistical analysis tests the hypothesis that the antediluvian reign lengths in the Sumerian King List encode real paleoclimate events. Using a Gaussian kernel proximity score, the an…
Monzo has built a completely separate backup banking infrastructure, Monzo Stand-in, to keep customers spending, transferring, and checking balances even during a full AWS outage. Running on GCP with…
Galaxium is an experimental space exploration app that leverages WebGPU, a cutting-edge browser technology, to render immersive celestial scenes directly in your browser. It offers a unique, hardware…
Defrag98 is a free, browser-based simulator of the classic Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter. It recreates the iconic grid of colored clusters, complete with authentic hard-disk sound effects, and lets yo…
This paper explores how Rust's type system can model state machines, using typestate and newtype patterns to enforce protocol correctness at compile time. It demonstrates encoding states as types and…
Typebase is a developer tool that turns your backend into a single folder of TypeScript files. Define your database schema, server actions, and auth in a `typebase/` folder inside your app. One comma…
The Wolsztyn steam locomotive depot in Poland still operates daily scheduled passenger trains pulled by steam locomotives, making it the last regular standard-gauge steam service in Europe. From Mond…
A Go application on a 32-bit ARM embedded Linux system crashed sporadically with a fatal netpoll error. The root cause was a pointer aliasing bug in the Go runtime: on 32-bit little-endian systems, t…
In 2002, the Italian collective Autistici/Inventati published a manifesto declaring their aim to reclaim internet spaces for free communication and social struggle. They provide web services—sites, e…
The official Python documentation details the time complexity of operations on built-in types, from lists and dicts to memoryviews and ranges. It covers average-case costs, worst-case scenarios for h…
This article explores how colors can be quantified physically, moving beyond imprecise word labels. It explains spectral power distributions, photoreceptor cells, and the science behind color percept…
vLLM v0.28.0 ships with 584 commits from 270 contributors, focusing on major performance optimizations for Kimi-K3 and DeepSeek V4. Key highlights include Decode Context Parallel (DCP), fused FlashKD…
A Shively, Kentucky police officer was arrested after allegedly using the Flock Safety license plate reader system to track his ex-girlfriend over 2,000 times, including while a protective order was…
Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley faces doxxing after dismissing privacy concerns on Fox News, with users posting his home address on X. The backlash includes congressional action: Rep. Keith Self int…
A developer repurposes an old Ender 3 3D printer into a pen plotter by attaching a fineliner with magnets. Using Inkscape and the Simple Inkscape Scripting extension, they generate gcode from vector…
LLMs excel in greenfield projects but stumble on legacy codebases where ambiguity and missing shared language cause them to guess wrong. The author argues the fix isn't upgrading the model but prepar…
A newly discovered Windows backdoor, SLEEPWALKER, hides inside a fake ESET Management Agent DLL and waits passively for a single crafted network packet before executing any code. It carries no payloa…
This essay argues that our discontent with modern life stems from a yearning for a more personal, hunter-gatherer existence, but with the benefits of our advanced tools. It explores how industrializa…
After six years of looping the same YouTube video for FFXIV's aetheryte crystal ambience, one engineer finally extracted the actual game audio and built a seamless web player. Using XIVLauncher's Sou…
Kumander Linux is a new Linux distribution that offers a desktop experience inspired by Windows 7, aiming to ease the transition from Windows. It comes with the Software Center for apps and Flatpaks,…
Martin Uecker explores a hack to support nested functions on older GCC versions without requiring an executable stack. By extracting the code address and static chain from the trampoline that GCC gen…
Ashley from Construct explains practical techniques for recovering data from corrupt ZIP files, covering common causes of corruption, diagnostic steps, and manual repair methods using standard tools…
A growing number of open source projects are banning AI-assisted contributions, citing quality concerns and the burden on maintainers. A review of 120 projects found 37 with total AI bans, including…
NASA's $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch Aug. 30, aiming to unravel the universe's expansion and discover exoplanets. Built from a repurposed spy satellite, Roman will s…
A seasoned software engineer reflects on how AI assistants have drained the joy from building. Once a passionate maker who thrived on learning through hands-on problem-solving, he now finds himself b…
Colorado's Front Range cities face harsh growing conditions—hot summers, cold winters, low rainfall, and alkaline soils—that are worsening with climate change. To build a resilient urban forest, expe…
Warp, an AI-powered terminal and agentic development environment, has created self-improving agents using Claude's Agent Skills framework. The key insight: feedback to agents typically disappears whe…
Chuwi's Unibook, priced at $449, is one of the few laptops to undercut Apple's MacBook Neo, but it's a mixed bag. It offers a decent keyboard, plenty of ports, and easy upgradeability, but suffers fr…
Japan Post's postal code CSV, ken_all.csv, is notorious for its bizarre formatting: lines split mid-neighborhood, unquoted fields with a different comma, and parenthetical notes meant for humans. Dev…
A developer upgraded a MySQL database replica and switched over, only to discover an hour later that one table's auto-increment IDs didn't match the source. Five related tables correctly referenced t…
The EU's new Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) is forcing small tabletop RPG publishers to stop shipping to EU countries. Designers like Josh Fox of Black Armada and Jason Pitre of Gene…
In 1735, Queen Caroline, wife of George II, commissioned Merlin's Cave, a gothic folly filled with wax figures, in her Richmond gardens. Facing a dynasty viewed as foreign and a public feud with her…
UCLA's RePL lab introduces Prela, a query language built on binary relations. This tutorial shows how to implement a toy version in Python, revealing that complex SQL joins can be expressed as simple…
In 2022, a cardboard box containing over 300 love letters written by a WWII soldier named Louis "Speedy" Weber mysteriously arrived at a USO office. For years, archivists tried to identify the couple…
- ▲ 39I'm the Guy Who Destroys Antique Books After We Scan Them into Our Company's Insatiable AI Platform
In this satirical first-person account, 'Book Doug' describes his job as Senior Legacy Media Completion Specialist: after his company's AI scanners digitize rare antique books, he shreds and burns th…
Vim's autocmd feature lets you run code on over 100 events, but one event stands out: UserGettingBored. It's a joke that's been in the docs since 2000, but it's never actually worked. This article tr…
Aptera has announced a $44 million partnership with Launch Design to produce its solar electric vehicle. The deal makes Launch an early investor and gives Aptera access to Launch's mass production fa…
e is a tiny console text editor written in Chez Scheme that captures the spirit of Emacs—buffers, windows, a kill ring, incremental search, and a Scheme top level—without becoming a clone. It's built…
For over five centuries, a Shinto shrine in Japan has documented the freezing of Lake Suwa, creating one of the longest continuous climate records in existence. The data, now digitized and available…
Mason continues his Kmart digicam mod, now with a $20 eBay lens that turned out to be a super 8 projector lens. He redesigned the adapter to fit the larger 32mm thread, but the lens won't infinity fo…
Most quantum speedup claims rely on an oracle that exists only on paper. This course teaches the craft of building practical quantum circuits from scratch, covering oracle construction, reversibility…
In 1958, Shohei Imamura, then an assistant to Yasujiro Ozu, broke away to make his feature debut, 'Stolen Desire' — an earthy, picaresque comedy about a ragtag theater troupe. The film follows stage…
Flyway Community Edition lacks the `undo` command, but you can still rollback migrations by writing reverse migrations with higher version numbers and using `migrate` to apply them. This approach rec…