Hacker News Digest
· 66 Hacker News
Xiaomi's MiMo v2.6, a 9B agentic model built by fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on MiMo-generated data, has sparked praise for its unusually transparent release. The company shared a real-time training dashbo…
The Tetris effect shows that whatever you focus on long enough shapes your thoughts. Yet recommendation algorithms now decide what we watch, hear, and read, hijacking our attention for ads and engage…
Colin Breck argues that AI-generated design docs, pull requests, and messages are unreadable because they lack the context and vulnerability of human writing. Drawing on survey data showing 78% of re…
Bryan Cantrill reflects on Sun Microsystems' decline, arguing that the company's strategic brilliance was undone by a disinterest in operational execution. He recounts a 2005 incident where a growing…
ZuckOff is an independent app that detects camera glasses like Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, and Snap Spectacles by listening for their Bluetooth manufacturer signatures. It runs entirely on your phone…
xAI's Grok 4.7 is a new flagship model for coding and knowledge work, trained with longer reinforcement learning on harder, multi-hour tasks. It scores 46.3% on CursorBench 4.0 and 71.0% on DeepSWE v…
The 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" introduced the Transformer, now the go-to architecture for GPT, Llama, and Gemini. This visual explainer walks through every piece of a text-generative Tran…
In January 2025, Disney+ updated its Subscriber Agreement to allow advertising across all subscription tiers, including the premium tier marketed as 'no ads' or 'ad-free.' The change, buried in Secti…
Kev is a family of small decision models (0.8B, 4B, 9B) built on Qwen3.5 that answer yes/no, multiple-choice, and rating questions in a single request. They run on CUDA and Apple Silicon, and you can…
Congress has effectively killed NASA's Mars Sample Return program, backing the White House's effort to cancel the mission that would have brought Perseverance rover's rock cores to Earth. The comprom…
Lon Lundgren tracked a model's reasoning quality over six weeks and found it wasn't a one-time drop: performance fell across the whole period and fluctuated in multi-day episodes, some lining up with…
ZuckOff, a free Bluetooth detection app built by Polish developer Pawel Szydlowski, alerts you when smart glasses like Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, or Snap Spectacles are nearby. It fingerprints their…
The original puzzle design spec for Grim Fandango, posted by Tim Schafer at Double Fine for the game's tenth anniversary, has resurfaced on Hacker News. Commenters trade memories of the LucasArts cla…
Apple's support guide details how to disable Apple Intelligence features on macOS 27, including Siri AI (Beta), message and notification summaries, Smart Replies, and voicemail suggestions. It also e…
AI coding agents sped up code shipping, but CI couldn't keep up. Linear's CTO flagged high CI costs, so the team optimized. Despite test suites nearly quadrupling, they reduced pull request wait time…
Mini-AGI is a byte-level language model that assembles its own architecture, trains on a single 8GB VRAM GPU, and keeps learning without catastrophic forgetting. It pages expert weights from disk, gr…
Heretic is a free, open-source tool that removes restrictions from language models, ensuring they always follow your instructions. Install it with pip and run it on any model, such as Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B…
- ▲ 263Cloudflare's Python Workers hit general availability, letting you run FastAPI and Django at the edge
Cloudflare's Python Workers are now generally available, making Python a first-class language on its developer platform. The runtime supports native bindings to Workers AI, R2, D1, and more, plus pop…
After four days of testing the M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256 GB RAM, I found it a game-changer for local AI agents. Compared to the M3 Ultra, prompt processing is 2.5× faster and token generation ~70%…
A Hacker News discussion reacts to Raspberry Pi blocking users from swapping RAM chips on their boards. Commenters note the restriction is enforced through the closed-source rpi EEPROM, pointing to a…
A Hacker News thread digs into a Reddit workaround for stopping macOS 27 from pulling down Apple's AI models and eating disk space. Commenters compare the hassle to de-crapifying Windows, and one poi…
Fatih Kadir Akın's jev-leftpad is a JavaScript package that left-pads a value by asking TypeSafe AI's Jev model which option to pick, with criteria named space_0 through space_10. It needs a TYPESAFE…
The FAA halted flights at New York, Philadelphia, and Boston airports on Monday after a construction crew in New Jersey accidentally severed a fiber cable — and a backup line too. Ground stops hit JF…
A personal journey from treating cameras as black boxes to understanding the simple math behind 3D projection. The core trick—dividing x and y by z—is shown to be a special case of the perspective pr…
Rhizomatica's HERMES system turns shortwave radio into a digital data pipeline, sending encrypted files and GPS coordinates from the world's most remote locations without satellites or relay towers.…
Tim Dettmers argues that the future of AI research belongs to universities, not just big labs with the most GPUs. In his dlab Open Source Week, he releases an ecosystem of tools: an agent harness tha…
A California arbitrator found Uber vicariously liable as a common carrier for driver Vu Tran's negligence after he left 23-year-old Emily Normandin-Parker and her friend at an unsafe freeway gore poi…
U.S. Customs and Border Protection will suspend all personal prescription importation starting October 22, according to the Campaign for Personal Prescription Importation. The advocacy group, which s…
Apple's ill-fated Copland OS, once meant to replace System 7 with a microkernel design, was cancelled and never emulated. Now the final build, D11E4, boots in an improved DingusPPC emulator running i…
A new study finds that leading AI chatbots, including those from OpenAI and Google, give incorrect answers to financial queries most of the time. The errors range from simple arithmetic to complex in…
The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, hosted at the Institute for Advanced Study, has been created to advise AI companies on their interactions with mathematical research. Co…
Amazon has blocked Meta's new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com, sparking debate about the future of agentic commerce. While Amazon risks losing control over its carefully optimized user expe…
I disabled Siri in the Settings app, and then further disabled Siri and its extensions in Settings > Screen Time. Next, I disabled all Siri-related and Apple Intelligence-related services as per a Gi…
Paul Bakker argues that using AI to generate documents skips the deep thinking that writing forces. He uses AI daily for coding and research, but never for writing. Once his own thinking is done, he…
Amiga Unix (Amix), Commodore's System V Release 4 from 1990–92, is being revived by amigaux.org. The community project supports 68040/68060 machines and modern accelerators, with a modern toolchain,…
Jacob Coxon, a pretraining researcher at Anthropic, resigned two months before his equity vested and went public with a stark warning: the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill everyone…
Teatre Raval in Barcelona was barred from promoting its one-woman adaptation of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own on Facebook and Instagram. Meta's automated system flagged mentions of feminism, c…
SafeDep found a remote access implant in mathmain@1.0.0, an npm package copying mathjs. The encrypted loader activates only when lusolve() receives a specific 3x3 Pascal matrix, decrypting a payload…
A randomized H-2B visa lottery reveals that restricting low-skill foreign workers makes firms smaller, not more American jobs. Losing the lottery halved H-2B employment, cut revenue, and reduced inve…
The M6 Mac mini brings a new 12-core CPU with two 'Super' cores, a 12-core GPU, and faster memory bandwidth, delivering solid gains over the M4. But the $899 starting price—$300 more than the M4 mini…
Traffic signals are the unsung heroes of urban intersections, balancing safety, efficiency, and conflicting demands. This article explains how they work, from simple timed lights to actuated and adap…
A restored PDP-11/83 with a Mentec M11 processor and two Q-bus chassis runs 2.11BSD to serve this page. It uses DEC and Emulex controllers, MSCP disks, RX50 floppies, RL02 drives, TKZ50 tape, and DEQ…
Cory Doctorow argues that when we interact with AI, we hallucinate a mind on the other side—a reflex far more common and consequential than any AI "hallucination." AI outputs, like a sunset, can be s…
The Data Protection Commission fined Google €403 million for violating GDPR rules on location data processing in Web & App Activity, Location History, and Location Accuracy. The inquiry found breache…
A Hacker News commenter calls out Immich's per-account partner sharing and face recognition overhead as a massive oversight, and says Noodle Gallery explicitly fixes it. Another notes the project is…
OpenAI trained an internal model that resolved more than 100 long-standing open problems across mathematics, surprising even its own mathematicians. In response to concerns from the math community ab…
Wall Street is turning skeptical of the data center boom. SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary planning the world's largest data center project in Ohio, has delayed its IPO after bankers struggled to fin…
Backpropagation is often explained as propagating errors backward, but why not compute gradients forward? Gregory Gundersen shows that a forward pass would repeatedly propagate the same terms, leadin…
Seattle's City Council unanimously passed an ordinance banning rental junk fees—administrative charges, pet rent, and package fees—effective July 2027. Landlords must disclose upfront pricing, and th…
Lossless-memory is a local, file-based long-term memory layer for personal AI assistants that refuses to summarize. It stores every conversation line verbatim with timestamps, builds a Temporal Backb…
As cities swap Flock's license plate readers for Axon's, 404 Media is asking readers to file public records requests for Axon activity and sharing reports. These reports reveal which officers searche…
RoboHarm tested Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, and MolmoAct2 on five dangerous tasks like stabbing a doll or mixing bleach and ammonia. Fable refused 20 of 100, Astra 2, MolmoAct2 none. The most capa…
Gary Bernhardt's Functional Core, Imperative Shell is a classic, but pure functional programming isn't always practical. The author argues we can relax the requirement from purely functional to merel…
A web-based drum machine study that faithfully recreates the Elektron Machinedrum. It offers 16 tracks per pattern, 16 steps per track, per-step parameter locks, LFO modulation, and a full FX section…
A frustrated search for a compositional theory of self-stabilization leads to a 2017 control theory paper on parametric assume-guarantee contracts. The author tries to adapt its small gain theorem to…
Foremerge is an open-source coordination protocol built above Git that catches intent conflicts before code conflicts. When multiple AI coding agents work in isolated worktrees, Git can't warn you wh…
When his Whirlpool washer stopped spinning, Lee Devlin turned to repair forums and discovered a broken shoulder pawl stud inside the transmission. After ordering a $17 neutral drain kit and extractin…
TXR is a dual-language tool for data munging: a pattern language for extracting information from messy text and a Lisp dialect for general processing. Started in 2009, it now has a 951-page manual an…
The Lunduke Journal reports that AI-generated code accounted for 17.25% of all Linux kernel patches in September, with 1,634 AI-written submissions in a single week. Commenters like DHH predict the s…
Food Prices Today tracks US food prices every business day, from farm gate to supermarket ad. Using USDA data, it provides daily benchmark prices for commodities like onions, potatoes, and eggs, plus…
Many AI employees at OpenAI, Meta, and DeepMind are skeptical of claims that unchecked AI development could kill everyone. They dismiss the warnings as vague and hypothetical, with reactions ranging…
In a distributed hard real-time system, a single faulty node can monopolize the broadcast bus by transmitting at arbitrary times, corrupting all traffic — the babbling-idiot failure. This paper adds…
DAPO, a fully open-source RL system from ByteDance Seed and Tsinghua AIR, achieves 50 points on AIME 2024 with a Qwen2.5-32B base model, surpassing DeepSeek-R1-Zero-Qwen-32B using only half the train…
Hillel Wayne noticed AI-generated TLA+ specs kept using 'spine.' Digging into GitHub pull request titles, he found a 20x jump in 'spine' PRs in 2026 versus all of 2025—far outpacing overall PR growth…
Conservation biologist Nathan Senner studies Hudsonian godwits like A34, a pigeon-sized shorebird he tagged in an Alaskan bog. The birds fly nearly 10,000 miles between remote northern breeding groun…
The NEC V20 was a pin-compatible Intel 8088 replacement that ran 8–30% faster, with hardware multiply/divide three times quicker. After a 1986 court win against Intel, it became a cheap upgrade for X…