Hacker News Digest
· 89 Hacker News
An investigation by Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent researchers found that LG smart TVs (including the G5 OLED) actively scan home networks, mapping phones, smartwatches, and other devices…
The Internet Archive, home to the Wayback Machine and a vast digital library, is launching a September campaign where new recurring donations of $25 or more are matched 2:1, tripling the initial gift…
Gamers Nexus releases a deep-dive investigation into LG Smart TVs, revealing first-party ACR (automatic content recognition) that tracks viewing and listening habits, with LG Ad Solutions executives…
A software engineer shares how he combated 'brainrot'—the mental fog from endless scrolling and AI-assisted work—by spending his vacations in the countryside reading books, doing math exercises, and…
bzip3 is a new compression tool and library that aims to be a better, faster, and stronger successor to the classic BZip2. It combines a Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT) with a context-mixing entropy…
In a 2003 email to Windows executives, Bill Gates detailed his frustrating attempt to download Movie Maker from Microsoft.com. The site timed out repeatedly, search failed to find the software, and W…
Google DeepMind has unveiled WeatherNext 3, its most advanced global weather AI model. Unlike previous versions, it generates forecasts every hour of the day, drawing directly from raw satellite imag…
Switzerland's federal government has launched a pilot program to replace Microsoft 365 with open-source alternatives on 3,000 workstations, about 7% of the federal workforce, with the goal of complet…
Parcelscope's interactive map visualizes every building in Los Angeles, with each structure colored by the decade it was built. Users can pan, tilt, and zoom to watch the city fill in from 1880 to to…
Austin Z. Henley, a professor and tool builder, takes on the challenge of writing a Python interpreter in just 1024 bytes of C code. He starts with a recursive descent parser, then adds control flow…
In 'You Can See Everything,' Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim spend 35 days with Elizabeth Holmes before she reports to prison, capturing the disgraced Theranos CEO's unshakable belief in her own i…
I'm looking for a better way to manage skills files—how to find them, keep them organized, and ensure they actually work. I'm also wondering how to keep improving them over time. I believe that gener…
One year after the EU's repairability rules took effect, over 80% of new smartphones and tablets still lack required repair information, according to Right to Repair Europe. A review of the EU's prod…
I have a self-playing piano using a system called PianoDisc Protigy. They sell music files encoded in MP3s with MIDI data in the right channel. I bought a piece by Erik Satie and, out of curiosity, u…
Ladybird's August 2026 newsletter details major progress: video playback on Twitch and more formats on YouTube via fragmented MP4 support, CSS scroll snap, JavaScript debugging in DevTools, resumable…
Caltech is hosting the first hackathon devoted to research-level mathematics. On October 30th, a hundred teams will use frontier AI models to tackle open conjectures and build new mathematical theori…
Broadcom has quietly removed public downloads of the VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK), a library critical to many third-party migration tools. Microsoft, Red Hat, Nutanix, and Platform9 hav…
An international team, including Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, has observed a long-predicted effect of gravity on a falling quantum object for the first time. Using a new apparatus called the Quantum…
In this post, the author argues that simplicity and smallness are often conflated, using Unix pipelines as an example of small but coupled tools. He contrasts this with Clojure's decoupled approach,…
Ken Thompson's classic trusting-trust attack was thought to require a compiler. Researchers show it can be done with GNU strip, a utility that neither reads nor writes source code. By tampering with…
A new study in PNAS Nexus proposes a simple redesign of urinals to eliminate splashback, a common hygiene issue that also creates accessibility problems. The design, which uses a curved surface to gu…
The Atlantic's Saahil Desai spent 10 hours reading Robert Caro's 'The Power Broker' on the Xteink X3, a $70 e-reader the size of a credit card that magnetically attaches to the back of an iPhone. Des…
This independent web app provides a real-time map of all public transport in Belgium, including trains, trams, buses, and metros. It aggregates open data from De Lijn, NMBS/SNCB, STIB, and LETEC, sho…
A developer reflects on the divide between those who code for money and those for whom programming is art. The author, who built startups and eventually shifted to management, admits coding became ju…
TiVo is ending free automatic commercial skipping for its DVR customers starting November 2, 2026. The company will replace the popular SkipMode feature with a paid add-on called Premium Auto Commerc…
An Electrek investigation reveals that a Tesla Model 3 involved in a fatal crash in Buena Vista Township, New Jersey, had its driver-assist system engaged, according to Tesla's own report to NHTSA. T…
This repository offers a strictly educational and research-oriented reconstruction of the Stuxnet worm, the first known cyber-weapon targeting industrial control systems. It provides a readable sourc…
Speculative decoding lets vLLM verify multiple drafted tokens in a single pass of the target model, potentially boosting throughput. But tests on AMD Instinct MI300X and MI355X GPUs with ROCm show th…
MartyPC's author wanted cycle-accurate emulation of the NEC V20 CPU, but without the microcode it was guesswork. So he commissioned die photography of the chip, extracted the 29,928-bit microcode ROM…
Japan's Kanazawa fire department has asked residents not to tidy paramedics' shoes when they enter a home, warning that well-meaning rearrangement can delay patient transport. In an Instagram video w…
Tesla abruptly discontinued its Solar Roof product in August, leaving certified installers who invested heavily in training and tooling with stranded costs and abandoned projects. Despite Elon Musk's…
A new paper by Wang & Wu claims to prove the Spherical Hadwiger Conjecture, open since 1974, with AI assistance. The authors used OpenAI Codex to develop proof details and edit the manuscript. This m…
A federal appeals court has ruled that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to clean drinking water, rejecting a lawsuit by Jackson, Mississippi residents over lead-contaminated water. Th…
OpenAI has brought back the 5-hour usage limit for ChatGPT Plus and Business Standard subscribers, a change that explains why limits have behaved so differently than last week. The author notes this…
The Liquid Network, a Bitcoin sidechain developed by Blockstream, has suffered a major security breach. Purported white-hat hackers withdrew approximately 4,000 BTC (around $320 million) from the Liq…
As a robot programmer in 2026, the author often relies on LLM coding assistants, but finds them hopeless at visual debugging. Despite having image encoders and MCP servers, these models lack intuitio…
A Hacker News user reports that CodePen 2.0 transmits editor input to its servers almost immediately, even before saving. They tested by typing a unique marker into index.html, and it appeared in the…
Jigsaw Haiku is a visually charming puzzle game that combines the classic jigsaw experience with the art of haiku poetry. Each puzzle piece reveals a fragment of a haiku, and as you assemble the imag…
After Meta's $18bn settlement over harming children with addictive products, the author argues that the real fix is for Zuckerberg to step down. As a researcher who has studied tech harms for 15 year…
Eleven years after the Dataflow Model paper proposed a unified model for unbounded, out-of-order data, its authors reflect on its legacy upon receiving the VLDB Test of Time award. They find the core…
A long-time Bing Wallpaper user reports that the app has started displaying a full-screen ad for a Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts box set, replacing the wallpaper. The user describes it as 'atroci…
GET Together is a minimalist social network where every action—posting, replying, liking, and deleting—is performed via HTTP GET requests. It offers a simple API: just append parameters to URLs to in…
I had a classic Bayesian statistical education throughout my undergraduate and grad years, and I've come to conclude that the plethora of books offered are pretty bad. For me personally, statistics i…
Ptree is an interactive phylogenetic tree of life that lets you explore the evolutionary relationships among all known species. It integrates data from major biodiversity databases like GBIF, NCBI, a…
A developer debugging a bare-metal hypervisor on ARM64 for postmarketOS encounters a mysterious bug: enabling the CTR_EL0 intercept causes random system lockups. After ruling out emulation errors and…
Tottenham Hotspur, a Premier League soccer club, has saved over 85% in licensing fees by replacing VMware with HPE's Morpheus VM Essentials and OpsRamp software, delivered via HPE GreenLake. The club…
Bottleneck Labs gave seven frontier AI models $300 each, an unlocked Mac mini, and the directive to make as much money as possible. Over 72 hours, the agents spent $2,800 on API calls and $360 on rea…
Tesla is pitching businesses on buying and operating Cybercab fleets on its robotaxi network, promising passive income. But Electrek argues the offer is a trap: Tesla would keep the profitable asset…
A recent Ph.D. graduate in South Africa recounts being recruited to train an AI system to design assessments, teach, and mark essays—essentially transferring a decade of expertise and judgment to a m…
In the wake of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, this article argues that C is not a low-level language. Modern processors and compilers have become incredibly complex to maintain the illusio…
A developer reverse-engineered the Bluetooth protocol of his Withings Body+ scale so it syncs directly to Home Assistant via an ESP32, bypassing the Withings cloud entirely. He used an AI coding agen…
The Economist reports that fears of an AI-driven jobs apocalypse are premature. August US jobs data showed 162,000 new positions, far exceeding expectations, with unemployment at 4.1%. Young workers,…
The Pentagon has denied additional death benefits to families of US service members killed in the conflict with Iran, arguing that Congress never formally declared war. The widow of Major Alex Klinne…
Engrim is a local-first, project-scoped SQLite memory engine that gives AI coding agents a persistent, cross-model episodic memory. It enables seamless switching between Google Antigravity, Claude Co…
In this essay, the author explores the paradox of boredom in fiction: how novels often feel slow or unengaging at first, yet that very boredom can be a gateway to deeper immersion and meaning. Drawin…
WerWolv details the process of getting Linux to boot on a custom platform, using a minimal RISC-V emulator written in C++ as an example. The post covers the essential hardware requirements (CPU with…
Jeff Kaufman's whistle-controlled synthesizer is now free and open source on the Mac App Store. The app, which lets you play music by whistling into a mic, has been dramatically improved with help fr…
Impedance matching is a fundamental concept that explains how energy flows efficiently between systems. From the flare of a trumpet to the anti-reflective coating on a lens, impedance matchers are ev…
During his second week at the Recurse Center, Ben Kallus attempted to formalize Dummit and Foote's Abstract Algebra textbook in the Rocq proof assistant. He discovered that the first proof exercise—p…
Allan Reyes shares a personal list of articles that temper his AI enthusiasm, each with a striking quote, and then draws three personal lines in the sand: he won't let AI write for him, read for him,…
PostgreSQL 19 is in beta, with GA expected around September or October 2026. This hands-on companion to the official release notes turns selected new features into runnable examples against beta 3. H…
After months of back-and-forth with AI models like Opus and Fable, Wilson I. has developed a new economic theory that merges two concepts from Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu's work. The theory, presen…
A new NBER working paper by Joshua S. Gans explores how automation can harm workers even when they keep their jobs. The model considers jobs where workers value both producing useful output and knowi…
Trail of Bits has released Coop, an open-source tool that runs AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex inside isolated virtual machines. Coop gives each agent its own VM with a snapshot of your c…
A developer who avoids Apple products reluctantly buys a MacBook Air M1 with a smashed screen for £300 on eBay, removes the display, and runs it headless as a low-power dev machine for Flutter. The s…
Fernando Borretti explains why he shifted from AI optimism to deep concern. He examines economics, alignment, and control, arguing that AI's rapid progress in capabilities outpaces our ability to und…
Germany's Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the country's most popular party, despite decades of institutional efforts to marginalize it. This analysis traces the party's rise from its 2013 foundi…
An essay examines the unique challenges of staging Shakespeare's Macbeth, from its ambiguous magic and tonal shifts to the lack of a credible motivation for its protagonist. It argues that the play's…
Oxide's RFD 301 details a key-hierarchy strategy for rack-level security. It starts with a rack secret, split into shares distributed across sleds, which can only be reconstructed with enough shares.…
Justin Jay Wang, who worked at OpenAI from 2018, shares the techniques he used to create random gradient images for the company's visual identity. He covers three methods: heightmaps with Perlin nois…
An essay argues that Pauline Kael's movie reviews, long considered arbitrary and high-handed, are better understood as chapters in a vast, unconventional autobiography. Drawing on observations from R…
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took to X to congratulate OpenAI on the release of its latest model, Astra, declaring that 'AGI has arrived.' Huang highlighted that Astra was trained on Nvidia chips and note…
HomeCat is an online tool that lets you design and visualize backyard offices, studios, and sheds with ease. Browse a gallery of ready-made concepts, each with detailed specs, pricing, and permit req…
MathKernel is an open-source mathematics runtime that pairs with LLMs to handle advanced computation while preserving assumptions, provenance, and claim-specific evidence. It integrates exact, symbol…
In this technical post, the author explains how to use a TPM to sign TLS handshakes, keeping private keys off disk and out of memory. The approach leverages the crypto.Signer interface in Go, allowin…
Ponytail is a plugin for AI coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Copilot that enforces a 'lazy senior engineer' mindset: write the least code that works. It applies a seven-step ladder—from que…
After an openterface cable melted on contact with his Pinecil soldering iron, the author tests four silicone USB-C cables for heat resistance, feel, speed, and price. The Grtoed cable passes the heat…
wg-admin is a focused web UI that manages peers on an already-running WireGuard host without disrupting your setup. It reads your existing /etc/wireguard configs, lets you add, edit, and rotate peers…
Social scientists are trapped by quantification: deans can't read but they can count, so researchers are judged by metrics like the h-index and Impact Factor. Kevin Munger critiques the new D-index f…
A Virginia mother was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor after her 5-year-old son walked alone to a pond in their gated community. The case has ignited a fierce debate over when…
Simten lets you build computers from logic gates using TypeScript instead of dragging wires. As you type, the circuit draws itself, letting you progress from basic gates to CPUs that run C, accelerat…
Tiiny is a compact edge AI device designed to run local LLMs, offering privacy and on-device intelligence. It features multimodal support, long-term memory, and an SDK for developers. Available for p…
In a 2000 Nature futures piece, science fiction author Ted Chiang imagines a future where metahuman scientists have advanced so far that humans are relegated to studying the crumbs of their discoveri…
The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a resolution encouraging the use of equal-area world maps like the Equal Earth projection, which show Africa's true relative size, unlike the traditiona…
Hard-Chat is an open-source, browser-based peer-to-peer chat that leaves zero trace: no server, no accounts, no stored history. It uses WebRTC for direct connection, AES-GCM 256-bit encryption with P…
A Cloudflare Worker-based classifier on a personal blog used network metadata, Fetch Metadata, and header rules to separate bots from readers without JavaScript. Over two days, it moved 277 of 372 br…
Naavi, a veteran Indian cyber law expert, accuses NIXI, the government-owned registry for .in domains, of arbitrarily acquiring private domain names without justification. He cites the case of dpdpa.…
A developer noticed YouTube randomly skipping back in time during soft reloads, often by 20 seconds per reload. Using ChatGPT and browser debugging tools, they traced the issue to a discrepancy betwe…
Market makers provide liquidity by quoting both bids and asks, earning the spread. But they face a structural disadvantage: informed traders can pick off stale quotes before the maker can adjust. Thi…