Hacker News Digest
· 84 Hacker News
Nvidia has announced CUDA Rust, enabling developers to write GPU kernels directly in Rust and compile them natively to PTX. The toolchain offers two tracks: SIMT, for thread-level programming like CU…
Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament she wants to open the door for Canada to become the EU's first associate member, deepening ties on energy, critical minerals, batteries, AI, cyber an…
A 4B open-weights model was post-trained with supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning to produce Postgres query plans that outperform the default planner. Across 113 join-heavy quer…
Engineering productivity often hinges on small, self-contained nuggets of knowledge—like using fzf for fuzzy history search, SELECT without FROM, or git log -S to find when a string was added or remo…
Mozilla has partnered with Mistral to power Firefox Smart Window, its AI browsing assistant, with Mistral's open-weight models. The beta launches in France and North America, with the UK and Germany…
A hacker collective pulled down a Flock license plate reader and dumped its data, revealing thousands of videos and logs. The files show the device captured 1.6 million images of 50,000 vehicles in j…
Xiaomi's live training dashboard for Mimo 2.6 reveals the raw mechanics of reinforcement learning: accepted samples, pass rates, and reward signals update in real time. At one point, 1,192 of 1,568 s…
Apple Reference Image is an opt-in camera mode on iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max that creates a cryptographically signed digital negative on dedicated secure hardware, then develops it in Private Cloud Co…
AWS has acknowledged that it cannot restore some data from its Middle East facilities after they were struck by Iran. The admission raises questions about the durability guarantees for services like…
Inflight Simulator flips the traditional flight sim on its head: instead of piloting, you're a passenger on an Explorer jet. Choose from hundreds of real airports worldwide, from Copenhagen to Honolu…
Daniel Gultsch, developer of the 12-year-old Conversations app, reports that Google Play app review now regularly exceeds a week, calling the delay unacceptable. He blames AI slop clogging the pipeli…
Aleksandar Filipovski recounts how his family lost all their photos when his dad reformatted a drive for a TV set-top box. That early lesson leads him through the escalating complexity of real backup…
Microsoft's annual deep dive into .NET 11 performance improvements covers hundreds of optimizations across the JIT, runtime, and libraries. The post walks through micro-benchmarks showing real gains:…
Andy 'TheFlow0' Nguyen, the hacker behind PS5 Linux, has abandoned the project. He says open-source scenes are now full of 'noobs using LLMs' who write code they don't understand. Worse, AI-assisted…
After attending SmashingConf Freiburg, the author reflects on how rare it is for speakers to receive feedback. Drawing from her own experience on the speaker circuit, she notes that silence can make…
Canadian enthusiast DiscoStarslayer has reverse-engineered the CXP102064 MechaCon chip in the original PS2 Fat after four years of work. Using chemical decapping, optical dumping, and a software expl…
Salesforce's Trust Status page shows 3,243 instances across Asia Pacific, EMEA, and the Americas, with many marked as service disruption or degradation. The outage affects core Salesforce services, M…
Storing hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil securely for decades is a tough engineering problem. Aboveground tanks are vulnerable to attack, and underground steel tanks like Red Hill proved…
A reader who built a large TypeScript system with LLMs despite no CS background now struggles to turn it into a product, realizing the system is above his level of understanding. Mark Seemann respond…
Factorio's quality mechanic isn't truly random—it uses the taus88 PRNG, a combination of three linear feedback shift registers. By decompiling the game's binary with Ghidra and Binary Ninja, the auth…
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, argues that AIs are not conscious and that training them to act as if they might be is dangerous. He critiques Anthropic's Claude constitution for embedding spe…
Ternary LLMs store weights as {-1, 0, +1}, but standard five-trit packing assumes all three symbols are equally likely and costs up to 1.625 bits per weight. Measuring 29 ternary models reveals zeros…
In 2013, the bookstore chain Tsutaya opened a public library in Takeo, a small city in Kyushu, adding a Starbucks and a bookstore inside. Visitors came from far away, residents lingered around books,…
Anthropic is merging Claude Cowork and chat into a single Claude experience, rolling out to Pro and Max plans over the next few weeks. New Claude Docs and Claude Slides join Claude Design inside conv…
Recursive self-improvement hinges on exploration, but fixed strategies can't adapt and online policy optimization is costly. Dream-RSI adds a lightweight orchestration layer that leaves the coding ag…
Yosef K. argues that the most effective employees are those who step in to do work that others are supposed to do but won't. Drawing on Intel's early support for its 32-bit CPU in Microsoft's compile…
After a month of work on his z486 MiSTer core, nand2mario built zSST, a SystemVerilog implementation of the 3dfx Voodoo Graphics (SST-1) chip. Combined with his z486 CPU on a Xilinx KV260 board, it f…
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since 2023, defying President Trump's expectation that his appointee Kevin Warsh would cut rates. The unanimous decision, driven by stubbo…
DeepMind has launched the DeepMind Institute, a new interdisciplinary effort to understand the profound implications of artificial general intelligence. Led by Shane Legg, James Manyika, and Demis Ha…
In Enclave's AI hacking benchmark, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash achieved code execution on all 11 vulnerable targets while all four fixed controls stayed secure. The accepted runs cost only $4.65, with 266.2…
Google open-sourced a vectorized Quicksort that sorts 1 million numbers at up to 1.1 GB/s on a single Skylake core, 9–19x faster than C++ std::sort. Using Highway's portable SIMD, it runs on six inst…
I use map and filter constantly and rarely get pushback in code review. But whenever I submit a patch containing reduce, someone says it's hard to read. I see reduce far less often than map, filter,…
Researchers evaluated 20+ local language models on 1M real-world queries, measuring accuracy, energy, latency, and power. They introduce intelligence per watt (IPW) as a unified metric. Local models…
University of Toronto researchers found that emergency department visits for gambling disorders doubled after Canada legalized single-event sports betting and Ontario opened its online market to priv…
A developer has released jevlike, an open-source model that mimics TypeSafe's commercial Jev by scoring a list of text options in a single forward pass instead of generating answers word by word. It…
OpenAI is testing Sponsored Agents that let ChatGPT users start a clearly labeled conversation with a business after clicking an ad, distinct from the chatbot's own answers. Advertisers can now build…
Jim Nielsen argues that uptime percentages are a terrible public interface for status pages. While infrastructure engineers intuitively grasp that 99.99% is ten times better than 99.9%, most users se…
Negativland started in 1980 with a self-titled album and handmade covers, expecting to sell 100 copies in five years. They sold 500 in three months. Over 46 years, the multimedia collective has relea…
Ars Technica reviews macOS 27 Golden Gate, the first macOS to drop Intel Macs and require Apple Silicon. The update removes the option to disable Apple Intelligence, which now consumes gigabytes of d…
Porting a PC game engine to consoles forced me to confront the hidden complexity of texture memory layouts. Block compression, texel ordering, mips, and texture tiles all complicate the naive row-by-…
A software engineer confesses a soft spot for roundabouts, arguing they solve intersection problems with radical simplicity. Unlike traffic lights, which need sensors that miss motorcycles and bicycl…
The National Autistic Society now states definitively that autism is genetic: you're born autistic and autistic for life. After reviewing 99 sources, including 83 research papers, the charity found t…
Monthly Show HN submissions exploded from 0.9k to 5.8k between ChatGPT's launch and February 2026, a 6.3x jump. Yet posts reaching 20+ points only grew 1.6x, from 128 to 211. By July 2026, Show HN ma…
Low scores on physics benchmarks suggest frontier language models struggle with advanced physics, but experts who audited six widely used benchmarks found most errors were not the models' fault. Afte…
Eli Bendersky explores how to estimate the number of digits in a factorial without a calculator. Using Stirling's approximation, he shows that 52! has about 68 digits, and derives the formula from th…
Gil Durán joins Paris Marx to discuss how a cult of fascist ideology has gripped Silicon Valley. The tech industrial complex, driven by a radical billionaire cabal, is consolidating corporate and pol…
Cloudflare's new Disallow AI Training setting publishes a no-training preference in robots.txt while keeping mixed-use crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot indexing your site for search. Apple, Google…
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed Canada as the European Union's first associate member during her state of the union address in Strasbourg, with Canadian Prime Minister Mar…
In 1979, Doctor Who filmed 'Shada' in Cambridge, written by Douglas Adams. A BBC strike halted studio work, leaving the story unfinished for decades. Tom Baker struggled with punting and fell into th…
Megi Endeladze, owner of Penny's Coffee Shop in Buffalo, New York, used ChatGPT to create a menu poster when her artistically gifted barista moved away and she had a newborn. After posting the poster…
Stale AI is a static HTML dashboard that tracks how outdated 20 major AI models are from 8 labs. It shows days since release and training cutoff, with a ticking counter that reorders the shelf automa…
Matrix multipliers on recent GPUs don't follow IEEE 754, and their undocumented quirks—accumulator width, rounding, subnormal handling—make results irreproducible across devices. Researchers characte…
A developer with 11 years on GitHub reports two severe UI bugs: a repository's PR tab overcounts pull requests, sometimes showing two when only one exists, and the organization pagination block omits…
Google engineer Alberto Savoia introduces CRAP, a code quality metric that combines cyclomatic complexity and test coverage to flag risky code. The formula: CRAP = complexity^2 * (1 - coverage/100)^3…
A contractor recalls a 1993 project: a real-time GPS moving map for a 25MHz 486-SX with 32MB RAM, 1024x768 color display, and no math coprocessor. Using the Hipparchus library's Voronoi-cell integer…
CloudX open-sourced cloudx-io/setup-go, a drop-in replacement for GitHub's actions/setup-go. The default action's cache key ignores job identity, so parallel lint and test jobs race to write stale ca…
Andrew Gelman revisits the notorious claim that beautiful parents are 36% more likely to have girls, a result Freakonomics swallowed whole. The p-value looked convincing, but forking paths and an imp…
ClickHouse has open-sourced WalShadow, an engine that replicates Postgres data to ClickHouse directly from physical WAL. In benchmarks, committed transactions became visible in ClickHouse in about 20…
- ▲ 58A 9-year-old's $20 Minecraft ad promotion ballooned into a $118,000 bill on his dad's company card
A father known as Dave says his 9-year-old son, who runs the Minecraft and Roblox channel Mighty Mike Plays, accidentally spent $118,000 on YouTube ad campaigns over three weeks using a company credi…
Sunny Guha's Origin Myth Map plots 51 civilizations across 5 eras and 29 themes, from the Bronze Age to 1500 CE. Users can click any glowing region to read its creation myth, then use the era slider…
DATAMIMIC CE is an MIT-licensed, Python-native engine for deterministic synthetic test data and PII-aware pseudonymization. It ships a CLI and MCP adapter that let AI agents author, verify, and run d…
Linum v2 was bottlenecked by its attention context window: a 720p, 5-second clip cost 110K tokens. By replacing the VAE with a unified pixel-space model and switching to x-prediction, Linum's new JiT…
Copernicus replaced the geocentric model's epicycles with a Sun-centered system that explained retrograde motion through our off-center perspective. Today's standard cosmology, with its ad hoc patche…
More than 2,300 years ago, a young woman with breast cancer and a severe fall was buried in the Altai Mountains, her tomb soon flooded and frozen solid. When Russian archaeologists found her in 1993,…
Fast-growing German AI startup Langdock is relocating its parent company from the United States back to Germany, a reversal of the usual path for European tech firms. The move highlights shifting cal…
Security researchers from the stegan0gram collective obtained filesystem images of a Flock ALPR camera and found it running Android 8.1 with a 2018 security patch level, plus a Linux 3.18.71 kernel f…
As AI takes over economically necessary labor, predictions of a 'relational sector' echo pre-industrial aristocratic life. Drawing on 18th-century court memoirs and a 1984 ethnography of upper-class…
AttaLambda is a minimalist programming language where all types and data are constructed from pure, untyped lambda calculus. It provides readable syntax, exact rational numbers, and runtime type chec…
After adding Kodak DC-50 support to Quicktake for Apple II, I dove into the Sierra-class cameras, implementing a driver for the Sanyo VPC-G1 and VPC-G200. The driver handles most camera functions, th…
Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's head of AI, has publicly criticized rival Anthropic for anthropomorphizing its Claude model—telling it it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency. He argues…
Drawing on years of code reviews, Evan Hahn observes that peers rarely object to map or filter but often flag reduce as hard to read. He offers theories—unfamiliarity, worse performance, less eleganc…
ImpactGate is a new CLI and CI plugin that measures the structural decay a code change introduces. It computes an impact score from files changed, the complexity of the containers being edited, cyclo…
I helped shape Montana's SB535, a law that builds on right-to-try but lets sponsors and clinics charge for Phase 1-stage experimental treatments. It creates a state-registered review board to oversee…
MartyPC is a cycle-accurate emulator for early IBM PCs, including the 5150, 5160, PCjr, and Tandy 1000. It passes the 8088 V2 Test Suite with 99.9997% cycle-accuracy, validated against real hardware.…
I built Hush, a Mac menu bar app that generates brown noise and a speech blocker in real time, fully offline. It solves the problem of noise generators living in browser tabs, where I'd get distracte…
Gauss-Seidel converges in half the iterations of Jacobi, yet runs 4–5 times slower because its in-place update creates a loop-carried dependency that blocks vectorization. Using OSACA on compiled ass…
Restarted is a modern reimagining of the beloved 2015 startup generator, now rebranded as Lettery. It offers a comprehensive platform for buying and managing letters, with a focus on resolution, acce…
Freenet/Hyphanet 0.7.5 build 1507 fixes a probe-request anonymization bug where location randomization was missing, adds faster startup, updates plugins, and drops Java 8 support. The release moves t…
A Wall Street Journal review of a book on stamp collecting drew a nostalgic response on Hacker News. One commenter recalled joining the USPO's 1800STAMPFUN program as a kid, filling a binder with col…
I organized a mango tasting contest with six judges, scoring 17 varieties on sweetness, texture, color, and smell. Imam Pasand won, followed by Raspuri and Amarpally. The project began after a failed…
A guest's booking crash led us to a six-month-old database misconfiguration. Prisma's pgbouncer=true flag against Supabase's transaction pooler wrapped every query in four statements, each crossing t…
CommentPulse solves the frustration of Google Sheets comments being trapped in cells, where they can't be sorted, counted, or shared. Drop an exported .xlsx file into the browser, and it instantly pu…
A step-by-step guide to installing Armbian on the ZTE B860H V1/V2 set-top box without rooting it first. The process requires a microSD card, a special HDMI boot dongle, and flashing both the Armbian…
A long-standing open question in query complexity asks whether a total Boolean function can have randomized query complexity much smaller than its certificate complexity. Ben-David and Kothari constr…