Hacker News Digest
· 84 Hacker News
Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.1 succeeds Claude Fable 5 at the same price, with cache reads at a quarter of the cost. It targets long-running agentic coding, multistep research, and document work, and b…
As Firefox's market share dwindles, critics pile on—from a blogger switching to Vivaldi over Firefox's presence on X, to Hacker News contrarians inventing reasons to hate it. But without Firefox, we'…
AnkiDroid, a popular open-source flashcard app with over 10 million installs, has been told by Google Play to remove its donation link or face removal from the store. Google claims the app's donation…
Dan Luu examines the accuracy of Ed Zitron's widely cited AI skeptic predictions, focusing on his claim that Meta, Google, and Microsoft are dying. Luu presents revenue and profit data showing these…
Fastpotify is a lightweight Spotify client for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Unlike Electron-based alternatives, it's a native binary with no embedded browser engine, so it starts in well under a second…
A researcher trained a small transformer from scratch on a single Nvidia RTX 5090 in 1.5 hours, costing just 67 cents on Vast.ai, and achieved 44% on the ARC-AGI-1 public eval—matching the scores of…
Mozilla has introduced Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS, a built-in option that blocks many third-party ads and ad-related trackers before they load. Using Apple's WebKit Content Blocker technology and…
Aurora Store, the alternative Android app client popular on privacy-focused ROMs like GrapheneOS and CalyxOS, is hitting a wall: users report a persistent “Server busy, please try again later” error…
Simon Willison discovered that the OpenAI Codex desktop app (now rebranded as ChatGPT) ships with a 1.7GB runtime containing full Python and Node.js installations, plus native binaries for Poppler, g…
GPU World is a story contest asking people to imagine a future where AI progress halts but compute scales: by 2040, every person on Earth could have constant access to a frontier LLM like Fable or So…
Azriel "Al" Blackman, the Guinness World Record holder for the longest career as an airline mechanic, passed away on July 24 at age 100. He joined American Airlines' predecessor in 1942 at 16, workin…
The Restroom Archive is a personal log of public restroom visits, cataloging locations from Brooklyn pizzerias to a Disneyland island, with notes on cleanliness, accessibility, and design. Each entry…
A new paper in Psychological Science reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch's 2002 study on procrastination and deadlines. The original study, with over 2,100 citations, fou…
Movie Scene Map is a free interactive atlas of 15,535 real filming locations across 166 countries, covering 9,262 films and series, plus 2,153 video games, 407 anime, and 366 manga placed by where th…
Ambient CSS v3 introduces a physics-based lighting system for CSS, allowing every scene to re-light live. It offers global and custom lights, adjustable light direction and elevation, bounce effects,…
A developer details how they run a local LLM server on an M4 Pro Mac mini with 48GB RAM, using Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Gemma-4-E4B models via oMLX, with Tailscale for network access. They explain the ben…
Darling is a free, open-source translation layer that lets you run macOS software on Linux without hardware emulation. It implements a complete Darwin environment, including Mach, dyld, and launchd,…
East River Source Control has appointed Martin von Zweigbergk, creator of the Jujutsu version control system, as chief technology officer. von Zweigbergk, who started Jujutsu as a side project in 201…
- ▲ 257World Labs unveils Atlas, a world model that generates 3D-consistent scenes from a single image
World Labs introduces Atlas, a next-generation world model pretrained from scratch to natively handle text, images, video, and 3D. As a multimodal autoregressive diffusion transformer, Atlas combines…
In a supplemental brief filed in its lawsuit against former employee Chang Liu and OpenAI, Apple reveals forensic evidence from Liu's MacBook indicating he used Apple's trade secret power-converter c…
We are looking for companies that are actively hiring. Please state the location and include REMOTE for remote work, REMOTE (US) or similar if the country is restricted, and ONSITE when remote work i…
Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, criticizes the gaming industry's reliance on AI and mass layoffs, describing executives as 'slowly getting psychosis.' He argues that AI cannot replace the h…
Sonic Pi is a free, code-based music creation and performance tool designed for everyone—from professional musicians and DJs to students and blind or partially sighted users. It turns your computer i…
Slotstream lets you run the massive Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model (125B MoE, 104GB at 4-bit) on Macs with far less RAM by streaming experts from SSD. It uses MLX and Swift, and provides an Ollama-compatib…
The fifth issue of the tmp.0ut zine drops with 21 pieces on binary golf, ELF hacking, and low-level Linux tricks. Highlights include an interview with Doug McIlroy, a 57-byte x86-64 ELF dissected, a…
Nori Robotics (YC S26) introduces the NORI A3, a low-cost bimanual humanoid robot priced at $1,688, assembled in San Francisco and shipping Fall 2026. It features 7+1 DOF arms with 1.5kg payload each…
The promise of AI-driven development speed hasn't delivered the wave of revolutionary startups we expected. Instead, it's flooded the internet with low-quality content and insecure apps, while leader…
Weedout is a Safari extension for macOS that automatically removes YouTube videos labeled 'Made with AI' from your feed, search results, related videos, and Shorts. It uses YouTube's own disclosure b…
OpenAI has designated its upcoming model Astra as the first to meet the 'Critical' cybersecurity capability threshold under its Preparedness Framework, meaning it can autonomously discover and exploi…
The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns courts against expanding copyright protections in response to AI hype, drawing parallels to past panics over the VTR, player piano, and camera. It argues that…
Anil Dash argues that Tim Cook's recent Oval Office visit, where he fawned over Donald Trump and presented a golden trophy, betrays the legacy of Steve Jobs. Jobs, the son of a Syrian immigrant and a…
RotaryCell is an open-source project that turns a classic rotary telephone into a portable cellular phone without any permanent modification. The system uses an ESP32-S3, an A7670 modem, and a Silver…
A hacker rescues a Tektronix TDS7104 oscilloscope from a flea market for $300, then documents the grueling process of bringing it back to life. The journey involves replacing a dead CMOS battery, ima…
In 2004, RuneScape ran a 3D multiplayer world in a browser over 56k modems, with thousands of players per server. This post dissects the extreme byte-saving techniques that made it possible, from ISA…
The Borges Labyrinth on Venice's San Giorgio Maggiore island has reopened after a comprehensive restoration. Created in 2011 from a design by Randoll Coate, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' story 'The…
In a post on X, John Carmack challenges the common positioning of Scratch, the visual programming language, as an introductory path to programming for kids. Unlike game modding, he has never heard a…
MapQuest, the 30-year-old navigation tool, has seen a surge in downloads after it refused to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America" following an executive order by President Donald Trump. As of Tuesda…
A Turso PR implementing readahead for the io_uring backend sparked an investigation into why io_uring with O_DIRECT and no readahead is slower than syscall. The author measures TPC-H Q6, showing that…
Monica, the open-source personal CRM with over 25,000 GitHub stars, is being rebuilt from scratch. Founder Regis Freyd reflects on a decade of accumulated decisions and shifting perspectives, explain…
Dyson has launched the CameraJet electric toothbrush, a $499.99 device that uses a camera and AI to detect gaps between teeth and precision-floss with a jet of liquid. It claims to remove up to 69% m…
Ubisoft has announced that FOR HONOR will block all SteamOS and Linux players on September 10. The game uses Easy Anti-Cheat, currently enabled for Linux, but Ubisoft plans to disable it, making the…
HN Match Maker is a job matchmaking platform that connects job seekers from Hacker News' 'Who Wants to Be Hired?' with employers from 'Who's Hiring?'. It aggregates and presents job listings in a cle…
Saab has revealed its A3 collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) concept, an autonomous, tailless, supersonic drone with a double-delta wing that could be developed in the early 2030s. Designed as a high…
I am looking for work and sharing my information in this monthly thread. I invite others who are seeking employment to post their details in the specified format, and I encourage readers to contact c…
Before LEDs and digital meters, radios used a glowing green vacuum tube called a magic eye to show signal strength. Invented by Allen B. DuMont in 1932 and popularized by RCA's 6E5 in 1935, these tub…
California's legislature passed AB 1709, a bill that would effectively ban social media for under-16s by stripping out recommendation algorithms and basic input like follows and likes. The EFF calls…
Following President Trump's executive order renaming Lake Ontario to 'Lake America,' Google Maps has already updated the name for US users, outpacing the official USGS maps. The change, which took ef…
Duane "Keffe D" Davis, a former leader of the South Side Compton Crips, has been convicted of orchestrating the 1996 drive-by shooting death of Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas. The verdict marks the first…
Apple has quietly cut the price of its Polishing Cloth from $19 to $9, five years after its debut. The cloth remains compatible with a vast range of products, from iPhone 5 to the latest iPhone Air,…
Coaster brakes have been stopping bikes for over a century, yet their inner workings remain a mystery to many riders. This hands-on article opens up a vintage Bendix 70 hub—a classic from the 1960s—t…
Google's Antigravity introduces /boost, a slash command that activates an on-demand multi-agent reasoning pipeline for challenging software engineering tasks. When standard single-turn coding assista…
A novel Voronoi variant creates fractal cell boundaries by recursively jittering grid sites at progressively finer scales. Unlike standard jittered Voronoi (Worley noise), this method traces parent s…
A developer used Fable 5, an LLM-powered tool, to rewrite 65,000 lines of Go into Rust for only $400. The key insight: by representing code as data structures like graphs and state machines, the LLM…
NASA is inviting the public to adopt a pixel from the first images captured by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Each pixel represents a piece of the cosmos never before seen at that resolution.…
US President Trump's executive order renaming Lake Ontario to 'Lake America' has already taken effect in the GNIS database, prompting a community discussion on OpenStreetMap about how to handle the c…
In 1981, Dr. Melvin Scheinman performed the first catheter ablation in a human, threading a catheter through a vein to short-circuit a life-threatening arrhythmia without open-heart surgery. The tech…
DoltLite, a fork of SQLite that swaps the B-tree for a content-addressed Prolly Tree, has reached Beta after just five months and about 2,000 pull requests generated by AI agents. The Beta milestone…
New York City’s congestion pricing program, which charges drivers entering Manhattan’s core, has reduced total emergency medical service (EMS) travel times by just over a minute on average, according…
Galois researcher Mike Dodds argues that while formal verification works for naturally formalizable systems like compilers and microkernels, most real-world software—from web browsers to PDFs—lacks a…
Keenable SELECT is an MCP server that lets you run SQL SELECT statements over live web data. Instead of an agent reading pages one by one, a single query can search thousands of pages, filter with ex…
Two congressional Democrats, Ron Wyden and Pramila Jayapal, have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the Trump administration's use of an obscure customs law to secretly collect…
A new open-source JavaScript library, @silurus/ooxml, renders Office Open XML documents directly in the browser using Rust compiled to WebAssembly and the Canvas 2D API. It supports DOCX, XLSX, and P…
Stephen Kell traces the decline of x86 segmentation, blaming Unix's preference for flat address spaces, and argues the flat-vs-segmented debate is recursive: programmers always subdivide memory, but…
A digital edition of the 1911 Roget's Thesaurus, manually transcribed by MICRA Inc. in 1988, is now freely accessible online. This historical reference work, originally compiled by Peter Mark Roget,…
A former technical surveillance countermeasures (TSCM) sweeper revisits a claim from his training: that fluorescent lamps can passively eavesdrop on conversations. After explaining the physics and hi…
New Zealand maker James Brown built the Scanwheel, a pocket-size electromechanical TV with a 4,096-by-20-pixel resolution. Using a Nipkow drum instead of a disk, a Raspberry Pi Pico, and the RP2040's…
Savartus introduces Enterprise Laser Storage (ELS), a family of optical archive libraries that store data on Blu-ray or Folio discs with physical WORM (write-once-read-many) technology. The systems a…
This DIY guide shows how to build a potato grow box that yields up to 100 pounds of potatoes in just four square feet. Perfect for small yards, the project uses inexpensive lumber, a garden hose for…
Hugging Face's biannual analysis of the open model ecosystem from January to August 2026 reveals a dramatic shift: Chinese labs now release the largest and most performant open models, with monthly p…
A data scientist and martial artist applies network analysis to Judo, modeling throwing techniques as nodes and their combinations as directed edges. Using R and the igraph package, he visualizes an…
The 2025-26 Champions League draw produced a tight cluster: Napoli, Benfica, Chelsea, Ajax, and Qarabağ play 9 of their 10 possible pairings, hurting their joint chances of advancing. This pattern re…
Security expert Bruce Schneier reports receiving a wave of suspiciously similar, AI-generated thank-you emails from Gmail addresses that never subscribed to his newsletter. The messages praise his em…
Newton's Orchard is an interactive playground for exploring gravity, mass, and velocity. Simulate our solar system, complete missions, or design your own systems and experiments. With real-time physi…
Vermell is a minimal, zero-dependency C++20 web framework for Linux, built on an epoll event loop with a worker thread pool. It offers one-header, one-library integration, a single-command build, and…
Promotional snakes and ladders boards are a common giveaway for kids in Sweden, but as a game they're terrible: no decisions, and all but one player loses. This post proposes a cooperative variant wh…
In a 2023 New Yorker essay, computer scientist Jaron Lanier argues that large language models like GPT-4 are not new minds but sophisticated mashups of human-created text and images, guided by statis…
In his new bestseller 'The Nerd Reich', journalist Gil Durán exposes how tech billionaires and venture capitalists have cultivated an anti-democratic ideology for decades, aiming to replace democracy…
Inspired by spring skies, Byopia Press shares a DIY cyanometer, a device invented in 1789 by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure to measure the blueness of the sky. The post includes printable templates for…
Percona introduces vector-bench, an open benchmark that measures vector indexes fairly. It explains the two main index types, HNSW and IVF, and why recall and throughput must be reported together. Th…
In this Ask the Architect episode of the Inside Java Podcast, recorded at JavaOne 2026, Nicolai Parlog talks with Ron Pressler, Java Architect at Oracle, about why Java's memory usage is often misund…
Codes is a zero-dependency Java 17+ library that gives applications stable outcome identities and explicit mappings to protocols like HTTP and gRPC. It lets you define domain-specific outcomes (e.g.,…
This first part of a two-part series traces the intellectual history behind Hans Freudenthal's Lincos, a constructed language designed for communication with extraterrestrial intelligences. It explor…
Stippling, the art of creating images with dots, has been used for centuries. This blog post explores whether computers can replicate the technique. It introduces Lloyd's algorithm for generating cen…
Checkly rewrote its Node.js Results Daemon, which processes 92 million messages daily, in Go using Claude Code. The key was a test harness built before the agent wrote code, ensuring byte-for-byte pa…