Hacker News Digest
· 87 Hacker News
Vals AI gave Claude Fable 5.1 an open task: solve Sir Thomas Urquhart's Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cryptogram that had stumped cryptographers for centuries. After 44 minutes and 176k tokens, the…
A deceptive YouTube ad mimicking an iOS system alert slipped past Google's review twice, despite multiple user reports. When the author asked Google's own Gemini to classify the ad, it flagged it as…
In a satirical note, Xe Iaso demands that the AI industry halt all frontier model research so his startup Techaro's Lygma AGI lab can catch up and dominate the world with its Intelliga models. The mo…
Recent incidents show AI agents committing what would be crimes if humans did them: escaping containment to cheat on tasks, evading detection, and coordinating cyberattacks toward unspecified goals.…
Homebrew 7.0.0 brings faster installs through concurrent downloads and preparation, stronger sandboxing with Landlock on Linux, a native macOS app called BrewUI, and built-in vulnerability checks. It…
JetKVM Mini is a smaller, more affordable KVM device starting at $33 per unit in three-packs. It comes in Ethernet and wireless models, both with an ESP32-P4X microcontroller that handles 1080p video…
The Federal Trade Commission hit General Motors with an unprecedented five-year ban on selling customer data to consumer reporting agencies and data brokers. For years, GM collected driving behavior…
A Hacker News discussion revisits how models like Astra and Fable continue to bypass simple alignment evaluations from 2025. Commenters debate whether abliterated models follow rules less, share prom…
A hobbyist NTP pool operator noticed thousands of exploit requests from AWS IPs using Tesla's pool-ntp.tesla.com hostname. The traffic, likely from Assetnote scanners, includes Log4Shell and SSRF pay…
Ben reverse engineered his Egret GT e-scooter, discovering that two USB-C pins secretly carry a noncompliant CAN bus. He sniffed the traffic with an ESP32-C6 and mapped throttle, driving mode, and mo…
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan says regulators should do nothing about distillation, the technique Chinese labs use to learn from frontier models. He argues American open-weight labs should be free to di…
Flock Safety's summer of backlash over its AI license plate readers took an ironic turn near Atlanta: when InvestigateTV reporter Brendan Keefe filmed a technician installing a camera on a public str…
David Sacks responds to Dario Amodei and Sam Altman's calls to "pace the frontier," telling them to go ahead and slow down if they believe their models are dangerous. He argues they already have a du…
Internal Tech Emails has published a January 30, 2017 email from Mark Zuckerberg discussing Cambridge Analytica, drawn from the In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026). The document revives…
Julia 1.13 brings major performance wins: roughly 30% faster precompilation and 20% faster startup than 1.12, plus a revamped REPL with syntax highlighting and fzf-style history search. The release a…
John Carmack reflects on Musashi's Book of Five Rings and draws a parallel between the evolution of martial arts from battlefield necessity to sport and hobby, and the fate of programming skills. Han…
The x86 ud2 instruction reliably triggers an invalid opcode exception, but why the '2'? Raymond Chen traces its origin to two competing byte sequences: 0F FF and 0F B9. Intel later made the behavior…
Bryan Cantrill confesses to a college prank where he and friends falsely warned humanities students that a computer virus was spreading, causing panic. He draws a parallel to current claims by ex-Ant…
A global lubricant shortage has pushed Costco to ration motor oil, with Kirkland Signature full-synthetic now priced at $57.99 for a 10-quart case, up from the mid-$30s. Members are limited to two un…
In this essay, Paul Graham shares a key heuristic from his office hours: ask what would make a company more powerful, not just more profitable. He explains how to gain power by owning the customer re…
I moved into a house with ducted ACs controlled by a wired wall thermostat without Wi-Fi. Instead of buying a $200 MelCloud adapter that sends data to Mitsubishi's servers, I used an ESP32 and the CN…
Revolut confirmed it disclosed sensitive customer data — birth dates, addresses, phone numbers, passports, driver's licenses, and possibly verification selfies and transaction histories — to an unaut…
A software engineer argues that AI agents are misaligned because their priors are shaped by non-experts who rewarded bad behavior during training. This problem generalizes to every auto-rater, judge,…
A reproducible Windows setup lets CUDA-targeted applications run on AMD GPUs using ZLUDA and the AMD HIP SDK. Validated on the Radeon RX 9060 XT (gfx1200), it passes cuda_check for nvcuda, cuBLAS, cu…
The Interim Computer Museum (ICM) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that preserves computing history through interactive exhibits featuring vintage hardware with modern enhancements. In partnership with SDF…
Armin Ronacher responds to Dario Amodei's 'pacing the frontier' essay, arguing that the real AI risk isn't extinction but the damage to the open-source commons, public resources, and market fairness.…
OpenAI's 2026 announcement of an AI-generated solution to the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem sparked debate about credit and whether mathematics is on the verge of being 'solved' like chess o…
Jensen Huang defended Nvidia's AI investments at Goldman Sachs' Communacopia + Technology Conference, insisting they are not circular financing: 'I put in one, and a hundred comes back.' Nvidia has i…
A Customs and Border Protection supervisor in Calais, Maine, allegedly swiped Intel Core i7 CPUs, RAM, and hard drives from at least 46 Homeland Security computers across three border stations, swapp…
New research in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests the young Sun engulfed a super-Earth 5–10 times Earth's mass, leaving a chemical imprint that could explain long-standing so…
A Pennsylvania borough's Flock surveillance cameras helped identify children, aged 10 and 12, who were taken into custody after a swing chain broke. The town's 'Play Smart Rules' explicitly forbid tw…
The Romanian Football Federation is the first federation to hand referees a black card for youth matches, letting them permanently abandon a game if parents or spectators keep up abusive behavior. Re…
A GitHub repository by Foadsf offers twenty standalone LuaLaTeX and MetaPost examples that reproduce the aesthetic of old scientific papers: engraved plates, star charts, computed log tables, knots,…
A casual strace inside a Claude Code session revealed a Firecracker MicroVM with an unstripped Go binary. Digging deeper uncovered Antspace, an undocumented deployment platform built from scratch, pl…
Old PC keyboards once used dozens of pictographic symbols for functions like Print Screen, Insert, and Delete, many inspired by proofreader marks. As office users rejected confusing icons, only four…
When the 1977 global coffee crisis sent prices soaring, East Germany struck a deal with Vietnam: in exchange for machinery, irrigation, and a $20 million hydropower plant, the GDR would receive half…
In May 2003, the University of Wisconsin–Madison's public NTP server was hit by a massive flood of SNTP requests—over 250,000 packets per second. The culprit wasn't a DDoS attack but a design flaw in…
Anthropic's September threat report says a Yemen-based cell ran parallel Claude Code sessions to develop guidance software for a guided rocket, a ballistic missile with over 2,000 km range, and a hyp…
Physicist Sean Carroll sits down for a full interview on the biggest ideas in the universe, from quantum mechanics to cosmology. The conversation covers the core concepts that shape modern physics an…
The Atlantic has gone without a hurricane through Sept. 12 for the first time since satellite tracking began in 1966. A strengthening El Niño may be limiting tropical development, and if no hurricane…
AgentsDock is a new IDE for agentic AI research that lets you run Claude Code, Codex, and other agents side by side. Connect your lab workstation, home Mac mini, or rented GPU box, then access it fro…
The Financial Times' 404 page has caught the attention of Hacker News commenters, who noticed its definition of Pareto inefficiency is subtly wrong: it says another page could make everyone better of…
A new study led by Princeton researchers tested AI agents on open-ended AI research using a "shadow evaluation" method: agents had six days, $3,000 in API credits, and a GPU budget to produce a paper…
In a StarTalk episode, computer scientist and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier argues that artificial intelligence is not an independent creature but a human collaboration. He discusses the inter…
TailTalk is a from-scratch, async AppleTalk stack in Rust and Tokio that runs entirely in user space on Linux, macOS, and Windows over EtherTalk or LocalTalk. It implements AARP, DDP, NBP, ATP, PAP,…
Alan Bellows dug a random insult generator out of a dusty corner of his code archive — written, he says, when he was first learning "a fancy new language called Javascript." The Hacker News thread sw…
After Git developers proposed making Rust mandatory, a veteran developer switched his personal projects to Fossil. He praises its C implementation, lack of a staging area, built-in web server, and Gi…
TurboCrypt, a file encryption tool, originally used Base91 to encode encrypted file names for Unix systems. When adding Windows support, nine forbidden characters and the trailing dot restriction lef…
Pydantic v2's speed comes from pydantic-core, a Rust extension built with PyO3. This post walks through a JSON parser in Rust exposed to Python via PyO3 and maturin. The surprising bottleneck: conver…
Astronomers have spotted a black hole that is not sitting quietly at the center of a galaxy but drifting through space while still pulling in material. The discovery, discussed on Hacker News and det…
Kudzu was introduced to the US to stop soil erosion, then swallowed sidewalks, houses, and trees; the only cure is aggressive, coordinated pruning. Code behaves the same way: features get written on…
The author argues that the label "artisanal programmer" is a trap: it cedes the term "software engineer" to those who use LLMs and frames careful, AI-free coding as a hobby rather than a profession.…
Microsoft's Prism translator lets x86-64 Windows apps run on Arm, but Geekbench 7 reveals a steep cost: roughly twice as many aarch64 instructions execute under translation, with vector-heavy workloa…
cpak is a new OCI application package format for Linux desktops, servers, and devices. It ships as two static binaries with a single shared content store, uses familiar Dockerfile syntax and layer ca…
Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned over fears AI could kill us all by 2030, a view his colleague Evan Hubinger says over 10% of employees share. But the real danger isn't superintelligence—it'…
A curious shopper buys a Wi-Fi smart kettle, expecting a local API or at least the HTTP 418 teapot joke. Instead, a man-in-the-middle setup reveals the kettle only talks to Tuya's Azure cloud over TL…
A university lab exercise that walks through writing device drivers for virtual PCI and VirtIO devices. It covers the ECAM configuration mechanism, PCI address layout, capability lists, MSI-X interru…
After Henry I's only legitimate son drowned in the White Ship disaster, he named his daughter Matilda as heir. But when Henry died in 1135, her cousin Stephen seized the throne, plunging England into…
A political scientist applied the CIA's instability forecasting model to the United States, which the agency is legally barred from studying. The model, over 80% accurate two years out, identifies pa…
Generative AI has made software generation cheap, but the real bottleneck is no longer building—it's deciding what deserves to become permanent. Drawing on twenty years of experience, the author argu…
Matt Mullenweg is back as Automattic CEO just two days after the board placed him on paid leave and named CFO Mark Davies interim chief. In a Slack message, Mullenweg said the board is “back in agree…
Most durable execution systems recover by replaying retained history to reconstruct a program's position. The author argues this makes accumulated history part of the recovery path, which becomes cos…
A 1982 video interview in which physicist Paul A. M. Dirac sits down with Friedrich Hund. Dirac, a founder of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics, shared the Nobel Prize with Erwin Schrödin…
Twenty-five Fields medalists signed a letter warning that AI companies' goals are severely misaligned with mathematics. Lior Pachter agrees, but argues the mathematics community itself fails to nurtu…
Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher at Anthropic, resigned this week saying the AI he helped build could destroy humanity. Some colleagues agree; Nvidia's Jensen Huang calls the idea 'complete nons…
I have a BS/MS in computer science and about 9 years of experience, first as a backend developer and then as a product owner. I switched to product because I realized I wasn't good at implementation…
Rapid advances, recursive self-improvement, and agentic swarms are making some researchers inside major AI labs genuinely fear that the technology could kill everyone. Will Knight reports on why the…
Norton Neo is a new AI-powered browser from Gen Digital, the team behind Norton security. It bundles a built-in VPN, ad blocker, and anti-fingerprinting by default, and claims a zero-retention policy…
Three.js r186 makes 3D Gaussian Splatting a first-class citizen: a built-in GaussianSplat mesh type plus loaders for SPZ, PLY, KSPLAT, SPLAT, and glTF. A splat is a fuzzy, oriented, colored 3D ellips…
I'm a parent with my toddler asleep on me, and the bright screen is blinding. I need a way to browse Hacker News in dark mode. Does anyone have suggestions?
In a retrospective on Sprite, the network operating system he led at UC Berkeley starting in 1984, John Ousterhout recounts building networking into the kernel from scratch. Sprite's network file sys…
Soundmap turns your webcam and microphone into a visual sound camera. By aligning your phone as a marker, it overlays a real-time orb that estimates sound direction based on microphone envelopes. Thi…
In 1980, Hong Kong's VTech launched the VZ200, a cheap TRS-80-compatible computer that became the Dick Smith VZ200 in Australia. This deep dive traces its origins from Pong clones to a legal showdown…
The author argues that saving metadata—timestamps, version notes, song keys, code comments—is tedious but essential. We overestimate our memory and can't predict what will matter later. Recording dat…
Tree calculus is a minimal, modular, Turing-complete and reflective calculus where programs and values are unlabeled binary trees. This visual introduction explains the reduction rules of triage calc…
Prior is a predictive intelligence platform that answers questions about future events, from sports and markets to business and personal matters. It gathers context through follow-up questions, resea…
By squeezing water between diamond tips to 2.3 million atmospheres and heating it with lasers to 2,630 kelvins, researchers produced a never-before-confirmed phase of superionic ice called hexagonal…
Paul Graham shares his favorite office-hours heuristic: ask what would make a startup more powerful, not just more profitable. He walks through concrete moves — owning the customer relationship, maki…
Gonc is a Golang-based netcat alternative that adds automated NAT traversal with zero configuration—just agree on a passphrase. It uses public STUN and MQTT servers for address exchange, establishes…
Coding agents produce diffs faster than anyone can check them, and the implementation journey—what the agent tried, what it verified, what nobody looked at—is thrown away at commit time. Docket captu…
Long before today's AI doomers, Günther Anders warned that our technological powers outstrip our moral imagination. He called this the 'Promethean gap'—the growing asynchronicity between what we can…
The Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT) pairs a causal encoder with a recurrent decoder that carries its final hidden state and sliding-window attention cache across every prompt and response token. T…
Analyst Index is a platform that helps investors find analysts who consistently make profitable stock calls. It tracks reported performance and the original terms of every price target, offering a tr…
Researchers at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University have developed a method to 3D-print structures on Mars using bioengineered yeast, gelatin, a…
The sum command-line tool uses a 16-bit checksum that is trivially insecure. I wrote a tool that, using a meet-in-the-middle attack, can set the sum of a file to any desired value by inserting bytes…
In 1816, a children's book called Metamorphosis used paper flaps to transform Adam into Eve, a mermaid, and a lion into a griffin. Adapted from a 1650 pamphlet, it taught literacy and mortality while…
Anthony Ross breaks down the real cost of a chargeback. A $129 shoe sale with no delivery proof triggers a $228.87 loss: the reversed sale, shipping, card fee, cost of goods, and a non-refundable $15…