Hacker News Digest
· 130 Hacker News
Apple has introduced the iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone, featuring a 7.6-inch inner display that is 50 percent larger than the iPhone 18 Pro Max, and an outer display with over 90 percent of t…
Shopify is moving its mobile apps from React Native back to native Swift and Kotlin. The company says LLM coding agents have eliminated the main reason it chose React Native in 2020: avoiding duplica…
Developers on Hacker News are complaining that Claude and other LLMs are overly pedantic, constantly ensuring backwards compatibility for brand-new projects with zero users. They describe models addi…
Tailwind Labs, the company behind the wildly popular Tailwind CSS framework, is joining Shopify. The framework, installed over 110 million times weekly and used by companies like ChatGPT, X, Cloudfla…
DeepSeek has announced DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, the smallest model in its new architecture family, featuring native visual understanding and an asymmetric Causal Encoder–Decoder design. With 552B total p…
Andreas Thom says OpenAI gave him a categorical denial that his private ChatGPT conversations about the expander matching problem were used, then later admitted it "cannot rule out" that de-identifie…
A Bluesky post about digging through a decade-old box of cables struck a chord with Jim Nielsen, who printed the message, taped it to his own "FAMILY TECHNO BOX," and now sees it as a reminder of why…
Microsoft has elevated Rust to Tier-1 status for internal development, placing it alongside C++, C#, and TypeScript. The company is investing in rustc_codegen_utc, a new compiler backend that connect…
Visa and Mastercard don't issue your card, lend you money, or print plastic. They run the invisible networks that connect cardholders, issuers, merchants, and acquirers. This deep dive explains their…
Relativity Park is a WebGL 2 simulator that makes Einstein's special relativity tangible by slowing the speed of light to a walking pace. Explore a park where lamp posts flash in slow motion, a Ferri…
Flock, a surveillance company with 130,000 cameras monitoring U.S. streets, frames privacy as a trade-off for safety, echoing post-9/11 rhetoric. This New Yorker piece examines how the company's pitc…
Sebastian Raschka shares his hands-on impressions of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, praising its exceptional performance, especially in 3D rendering and computer-use tasks. He explains the rumored 'looped tra…
Apple has unveiled AirPods 5, the first open-ear AirPods to feature the industry's best Active Noise Cancellation, removing up to 50% more external noise than AirPods 4 with ANC. The new multiport ac…
Desert Ant Labs, a European AI lab, launches 18 on-device models for audio, vision, and text, designed to run on phones and laptops. Models like Voz transcribe 10 minutes of audio in 2 seconds (4.7x…
A Hacker News user reports that OpenAI repeatedly re-enables the 'allow training' setting after they turn it off. They reset it more than once, noted the time of their last change, and later found it…
A pet theory that software makes people lose their sense of proportion: speed, money, complexity, abstraction, and unlimited freedom combine to create bizarre side effects. Most software is a glorifi…
Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic (parent of WordPress.com), has been placed on paid leave by the company's board against his will, according to a Slack message seen by TechCrunch. The bo…
Hello Games' No Man's Sky Update 7.0, titled Cosmos, introduces space station directorship, allowing players to style, expand, and decorate their own stations. New features include galactic alliances…
Cognition released SWE-2, a coding model that scores 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main—within one point of Fable 5.1 while being 64% cheaper. Post-trained from Kimi K3, it uses a novel RL algorithm that…
New data from Waymo, IIHS, and NHTSA shows autonomous vehicles are significantly safer than human drivers, with Waymo robotaxis logging 92% fewer serious crashes. But the industry still lacks nationa…
A developer of RACE, a native macOS terminal multiplexer written in Rust, recounts how Google Ads suspended his account for 'malicious software' and 'compromised site' after he spent $500 on advertis…
Four California PlayStation buyers sued Sony in June 2026, claiming the store's 'Buy Now' and 'Confirm Purchase' language misled them into thinking they owned digital games, when they actually receiv…
Apple has unveiled the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, headlined by the most advanced camera system ever in an iPhone. The new 48MP Fusion Main camera features variable aperture, with six laser-…
HonestlyRanked tracks the real cost of streaming subscriptions over time, showing exactly how much prices have risen with every figure dated and linked to its source. Its flagship analysis reveals th…
In 2005, archaeologist Jon Harman adapted decorrelation stretch—a NASA JPL algorithm from 1978 for enhancing satellite imagery—into the Dstretch plug-in. It has since uncovered faded rock art worldwi…
Windows XP chose your initial account picture at random from the Default Pictures folder using RtlRandomEx, seeded by GetTickCount(). Raymond Chen explains the one-pass selection algorithm, a special…
OpenAI has published documentation for a new Agents API, giving developers a first-class way to build and run autonomous agents. The guide covers architecture, configuration, and sessions, plus sandb…
Apple has introduced the iPhone Duo, its first foldable phone, featuring a 7.6-inch inner display and a 5.4-inch outer display that share the same aspect ratio for seamless continuity. The device is…
Hitachi will launch its Y-series EcoCute CO2 heat pump water heaters in Japan from November 2026, with 370-liter and 460-liter models. The lineup adds expanded support for daytime electricity tariffs…
Anthropic, a leading AI lab, is quietly constructing a surveillance apparatus to track activists and predict protests, according to job postings and interviews with its security officials. The system…
In a post on the GrapheneOS Mastodon account, the project argues that copyright law is a weapon for large corporations, not a protector of individuals or small businesses. It claims copyright is abus…
Andreas Thom, a leading expert on sofic groups, says in a Mastodon post that OpenAI may have trained its Astra model on private discussions about Gromov's soficity conjecture, one of ten problems Ope…
This open textbook from the University of Puget Sound offers a comprehensive music theory curriculum for the 21st-century classroom. Spanning 35 chapters, it moves from basic pitch and rhythm through…
Apple has unveiled the Apple Watch Series 12, featuring a new Health Sensing System and the S11 chip, delivering the most accurate heart rate sensing of any wearable. It measures heart rate every fiv…
Stockfish 19 is out, and in tests against Stockfish 18 it gains up to 44 Elo while winning more than three times as many game pairs as it loses. The release brings universal binaries that auto-detect…
PlanetScale has unveiled Neki, a distributed Postgres built from eight years of running massive sharded MySQL clusters. Every shard runs real Postgres with a primary and replicas, while routers parse…
In a three-part Mastodon thread, mathematician Terence Tao argues that curiosity-driven play—like children inventing 'plus one' to win a number game—is essential to serious mathematics. He warns that…
A malicious WebGPU shader can lock up a Mac's graphics, making the desktop unusable until a forced restart. The attack works cross-browser on macOS but not other operating systems. The shader runs an…
A researcher has publicly accused OpenAI of training its models on private conversations and then presenting the resulting capabilities as a breakthrough. The claim, shared on Bluesky, adds to a grow…
A group of 1,900 employees at Blizzard Entertainment, represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), has ratified a union contract with Microsoft that could set a new standard for game d…
Anthropic's economics team has built a model to explore how AI might reshape the US economy by 2030. It considers five key factors: capabilities, adoption, autonomy, productivity, and adjustment. The…
A v1.1 rerun of the reasoning-prefill experiment uses GPT-5.5 Pro as the teacher. For each of 45 problems, the author generated two responses from each target model: one ordinary, and one starting wi…
OpenAI used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems. The announcement is overshadowed by accusati…
A Delaware court ruled on a preliminary injunction that X Corp. likely abandoned the TWEET trademark and the bird logo, citing their absence from X's app listing and website, plus Musk's public repud…
GNU Radio World brings the full GNU Radio Companion experience to the browser. The DSP stack and Qt GUI sinks are compiled to WebAssembly, letting you design and run flowgraphs with live spectrum, wa…
An AI math breakthrough on the Navier-Stokes problem has ignited a controversy over priority and hype. Critics argue OpenAI front-ran researchers after rumors, then marketed a brute-force counterexam…
In June 2026, Read the Docs faced the largest DDoS attack in its history, peaking at 5.5 million requests per minute—100 times normal traffic—and lasting nearly ten days. The attack was globally dist…
In this Stanford Presidential Lecture, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter argues that analogy is the driving force behind all human cognition. He illustrates how analogies shape categorization, m…
A critical vulnerability in Forgejo up to version 16.0.3 lets a malicious template repository plant a .git folder during variable expansion, which git then adopts — enabling arbitrary data reads and…
Lotus Notes, launched in 1989, was a revolutionary collaboration platform that combined email, databases, and app-building, years ahead of its time. Yet its quirks and complexity made it a love-it-or…
Planet Labs, the San Francisco-based satellite manufacturer and constellation operator, now offers an open feed of its satellite data. With 97 satellites still in orbit, the company captures imagery…
Meta's newly launched AI agent, Muse, has taken over social media handles long held by the English rock band of the same name. The band, which trademarked its name in 1999, now uses @museband on Inst…
After reading Sarah Wynn-Williams's book Careless People, I reflect on why I deleted Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. I haven't missed them. The internet promised connection but has become a tool f…
Automattic's board voted to place CEO and co-founder Matt Mullenweg on paid leave, appointing CFO Mark Davies as interim CEO. Mullenweg announced the decision on Slack, revealing he voted against it…
Anthropologist Roberto González traces the military-industrial complex’s move from the Capital Beltway to Silicon Valley. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google won roughly $28 billion in defense contracts fr…
Programming is full of violent verbs: we kill processes, throw exceptions, and execute instructions. Bespoke, a statically typed language with a `.charming` extension, replaces all that with Victoria…
OpenAI's proof of a long-standing Navier-Stokes question came with a Lean 4 formal proof, a detail few have discussed. Formalizing one page of an undergraduate math textbook once took about 40 hours;…
Anthropic's September 2026 threat intelligence report reveals that AI has collapsed the skill and resource gap in cyber operations. Over eight months, the company disrupted campaigns where actors use…
Apple's new Siri Recaps feature turns the Apple Watch into an always-on listener, capturing your daily conversations and activities. While the convenience is undeniable, the constant audio monitoring…
The Flash era proved that giving people a weird new tool unleashes a wave of experimentation—and that experimentation, not features or price, is the real competitive moat. Today, with AI generating 3…
A curated collection of 136 bodily oddities, each with a plain-language explanation and a real-world prevalence estimate. Learn why about 70% of healthy people get benign fasciculations, how BPPV is…
MIT graduate student Beatriz Yankelevich used OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, harnessed to Codex, to automate routine measurements on superconducting qubits. The AI agent successfully calibrated a six-qubit ch…
The NTSB's preliminary update on the 21 Air Flight 7598 accident at Miami International Airport reveals a chaotic final minute: the crew touched down at 158 knots, briefly attempted a go-around, then…
Four former Amazon warehouse employees have filed a class-action lawsuit alleging the company discriminated against them by denying basic pregnancy accommodations like bathroom breaks, sitting, and e…
Fast Polynomial Evaluation is a web tool that compiles evaluation chains for polynomials, reducing the number of multiplications needed from n to about n/2+1. By preprocessing coefficients with ratio…
The larger Pacific striped octopus, or harlequin octopus, is a species first documented in the 1970s but still without an official scientific name. Unlike the famously solitary and cannibalistic octo…
After Apple introduced Reference Image, two camera enthusiasts built an open-source alternative using a Raspberry Pi Zero and an ATECC608 crypto chip. The camera embeds a signed perceptual hash direc…
Cognition's autonomous software engineer, Devin, factored RSA-260, a 260-digit number, setting a new public record for the RSA Factoring Challenge. The team built the world's fastest GPU lattice siev…
In a nearly unanimous vote, the UN endorsed a resolution to promote maps that accurately reflect the true size of continents, challenging the 500-year-old Mercator projection. The decision, backed by…
South Park's creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, announced they are renaming the show 'South America' for its new season, mocking President Trump's executive orders to rename Lake Ontario and the G…
ESP32 Bit Pirate is an open-source firmware ecosystem that transforms compatible ESP32-S3 boards into a multi-protocol debugging tool. It covers I2C, SPI, UART, GPIO, JTAG, SWD, CAN, infrared, Sub-GH…
Magic claims its pretraining recipe is now over 10x more compute-efficient than leading open-weight base models. It says it matches DeepSeek V4 Pro Base using roughly 50x fewer FLOPs — about half of…
Hugo Vergnes built little-lm, a config-driven framework, and trained a 3.8B-parameter model on 65B tokens in 43 hours for $998 using 8× B200s. The model scores 0.384 on CORE, surpassing GPT-2 and nan…
Gwern explores the psychology of motivation, arguing that the key to solving hard problems isn't raw intelligence but the conviction that a solution exists. Drawing on examples from Yudkowsky's ficti…
Python's dict and set are widely believed to be O(1), but Daniel Lemire shows they can degrade to quadratic time when hash collisions are deliberately induced. On an M4 Max with Python 3.14, insertin…
A personal essay on non-fiction writing: start with the trunk (theme and optional thesis), then branch out with arguments and support. The author shares how this approach helped him pass history clas…
Bending Spoons has agreed to acquire Miro at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion, with an implied equity value of about $1.79 billion. Miro brings roughly $600 million in annual recurring revenue,…
Lee Holloway co-founded Cloudflare and built its core technologies, including Anycast and the Cell architecture, enabling the company to handle over 10% of internet traffic. But in 2016, he was force…
Twenty years after Git upended version control, a new wave of startups is challenging GitHub's dominance. Driving it: AI agents committing code at unprecedented rates, and a hunger for alternatives.…
PlanetScale, known for its MySQL-compatible serverless database, has introduced Neki, a sharded Postgres offering. The landing page invites users to request access or sign up for updates, collecting…
Apple has unveiled the Apple Watch Ultra 4, its ultimate sports and adventure watch, featuring a new Health Sensing System and the S11 chip. It delivers the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wear…
JEP 544 stores optimized native code from a training run in the AOT cache, making it instantly available when HotSpot starts. Benchmarks show startup improvements of 65–80% and a javac warmup gain of…
A new NBER working paper by Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin S. Milligan examines the long-run effects of Quebec's universal, subsidized child care program on maternal labor outcomes. The st…
A Mastodon post from tristanbuckmaster argues that OpenAI lacks mathematicians capable of understanding its own output. The claim targets the mathematical foundations of the company's models, suggest…
A security researcher tests whether recursive AI self-feeding corrupts text as it does images. Feeding a Raymond Chandler passage to Gemini with the prompt to "boldly rewrite" it, then repeating the…
Rivian is racing to bring Level 4 autonomy to the masses with its Autonomy+ system, debuting on the R2 SUV by late 2026. Backed by $1.25 billion from Uber and a $5.8 billion Volkswagen joint venture,…
Inspired by DeepMind's list of specification gaming behaviors, the authors propose 'Meeseeks alignment': build AI that wants to die. Death is easy to specify, instrumental convergence becomes an asse…
Amazon and OpenAI are piloting ChatGPT ads through Amazon's demand-side platform, letting brands extend campaigns into conversational experiences. Delta Vacations is among the first U.S. testers. Ama…
Mandala Studio is a web-based drawing tool that turns a single stroke into a mesmerizing mandala. With adjustable symmetry, density, and brush settings, plus metallic and gradient inks that shift col…
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, British claymation studio Aardman is auctioning nearly 250 items from its productions, including original puppets from Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers, A Close…
A computational biologist and AI researcher pushes back on economist Noah Smith's fear that AI will soon enable a teenager to unleash a civilization-ending supervirus. Drawing on his own work designi…
A developer with zero woodworking or LED experience documents the 8-month journey of designing and building a custom wall lamp for the bedroom. From buying a second-hand beech countertop for €15 to r…
Hideo Kojima revealed that PlayStation Studios unexpectedly canceled his action-espionage project PHYSINT in mid-June. After three months of searching for a new partner, Kojima Productions has teamed…
b.next, an SF-based startup, started as academics aiming to solve interoperability in synthetic cell research. After hitting roadblocks—restrictive licensing, incomplete plasmids, and disappearing tR…
Jacob Coxon, a researcher who worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI, has resigned, accusing the companies of racing toward self-improving superintelligence without adequate safety measures. In a resign…
After OpenAI announced ten major mathematical breakthroughs, a second mathematician, Andreas Thom, accused the company of dishonesty over its training data. Thom suspects his private ChatGPT conversa…
Following one STG.E instruction through an RTX 4090, this deep dive traces what happens after a warp writes memory: the LSU, the coalescer packing 32 lanes into four 32-byte sectors, a write-through…
Pew data show that spouses are the most trusted confidants across all religious groups, with nearly 80% comfort. Evangelicals are the exception: 56% feel comfortable talking to clergy, slightly more…
ASCII smuggling, a technique once used to hide malicious prompts in AI attacks, has been adopted by spammers to bypass email filters. By using invisible Unicode tag characters, spammers can obfuscate…
Ampbase founder JP explains how his company runs its entire control plane on Tigris object storage with no database underneath. Using strong read-after-write consistency and conditional writes as pri…
SWE-2 is Cognition's post-trained version of Kimi K3, a 2.8T-parameter MoE with 104B active per token. It scores 92.8 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 50.0 on FrontierCode 1.1 Main, just behind Fable 5.1 an…
Researchers have found cave art in southwest Ireland dating back at least 15,000 years, pushing back the earliest known human presence on the island by about 5,000 years. The team, led by Dr. George…
Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, and colleagues predict that superhuman AI will arrive by 2027, bringing changes larger than the Industrial Revolution. Their detailed scenario, informed by trend ex…
Samsung unveiled zHBM at FMS 2026, a 3D architecture that vertically stacks HBM on top of AI accelerators to cut data travel distance. The company claims up to eight times the performance of HBM5, th…
MultiMatte is a background removal model you can aim with words. Built on Meta's SAM 3 and fine-tuned with LoRA, it keeps the object you name and removes everything else. Unlike binary segmentation,…
In 1852, Francis Guthrie wondered if four colors suffice to color any map. After a flawed 1879 proof and a controversial 1976 computer-assisted proof, a team of six mathematicians has produced a new…
Thom Delapa traces how Murray Burnett and Joan Alison's unproduced 1940 play Everybody Comes to Rick's became Casablanca after Pearl Harbor. Warner Bros. bought it immediately, rushed it into product…
BPF Capsule is a compiler and runtime that transforms large C, C++, or no_std Rust programs into a form the stock Linux verifier accepts, enabling complex application logic to run directly in the ker…
The author discovers that libzmq, despite supporting VMCI, lacks VSOCK support, and proposes a straightforward addition by adapting the VMCI code. This enables using libzmq's features—like CURVE auth…
A new inspector general audit found that some USPS facilities failed to properly handle primary election ballots, with gaps in training, tracking, and postmarking that risked late or rejected votes.…
Vertumnus generates beautiful printable posters that show exactly what's in season at your local farmers' market. Using region-specific produce data with week-level granularity, it helps you eat fres…
A long-time Mac user who always wanted an Apple Studio Display but preferred taller screens reviews the Kuycon P20, a 28.2-inch IPS monitor with a 3:2 aspect ratio and 4500x3000 resolution. After a r…
The abrupt resignation of an AI researcher over safety concerns ignited a viral debate about existential risk, amplified by a coordinated media push and a Joe Rogan appearance. The author argues this…
Solid Objects is an open-source library that gives you the Durable Objects model—one identity, ordered mailbox, durable state—without a vendor, daemon, or broker. It stores everything in the SQLite,…
learningto/pass is a free, no-signup platform for mastering Google's L4-L6 technical interviews. It covers 16 core topics—from arrays to dynamic programming—with interactive visualizations, a Python…
Syq is a fast, programmable file transfer tool that outpaces rsync for copying, reorganizing, and removing files locally or across machines. It lets you resume interrupted transfers, send files to yo…
Docker's root-owned daemon means that adding your user to the docker group for convenience opens a trivial root escalation path. A single docker run can mount the host filesystem and read protected f…
Liesegang rings form in gels at spacings that follow a geometric series, and their underlying mechanism still isn't fully resolved. After rejecting carcinogenic potassium dichromate and fume-heavy am…
Filament is a Go-based data movement engine that makes replication reliable and flexible. It supports full, incremental, and change data capture replication, with durable checkpoints that let you pau…
ASM Editor is a browser-based IDE for assembly languages including M68K, MIPS, RISC-V, and Z80. It offers built-in documentation, code completion, real-time error checking, and advanced debugging too…
Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher, quit Anthropic this week with a dramatic warning that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade. The reaction was immediate: a Wikipedia page, a Capitol Hil…
LabGuy's World documents a project to display television pictures on electrostatic deflection CRTs using Eric Schlaepfer's high-voltage driver boards and the Tiny TV Mark 2 rasterizer. The build succ…
On 10 September 1897, London taxi driver George Smith became the first person convicted of drink-driving, possibly worldwide. He was driving a Bersey electric cab, which swerved and crashed on New Bo…
A Hacker News thread digs into Turdle.fun, a quiz site where you guess which animal left a given dropping. One commenter strikes out after guessing wolf and cougar, only to learn the answer was a she…
LIGO's gravitational-wave detectors must measure mirror movements of just 10^-19 meters—a thousandth the width of a proton—while Earth constantly shakes. To achieve this, the observatory layers two i…
DDSCAT 7.2 is a free, open-source Fortran-90 package that uses the discrete dipole approximation to compute how electromagnetic waves scatter and absorb in targets of arbitrary geometry and complex r…
Proxylity's new DTLS Listeners add TLS-style encryption and authentication to UDP applications while preserving datagram boundaries. Clients establish DTLS 1.2 or 1.3 sessions; Proxylity decrypts pay…
Tithon keeps your Jupyter kernel and its output alive independently of your editor or connection. Run long computations on a remote GPU box, close your laptop, and return later to find the same sessi…
Chaim's Apps is a growing collection of free Chrome extensions that make everyday browsing easier, with a focus on Hebrew. The Hebrew Date Bubble lets you right-click any date on the web to instantly…
ArcadeDB released four Apache-2.0 drivers: HTTP and gRPC clients for Python and TypeScript, all generated from the database's own OpenAPI and Protobuf contracts. The HTTP drivers return a result enve…