Hacker News Digest
· 105 Hacker News
- ▲ 1435F-Droid 2.0: The Biggest Update in a Decade Brings a Modern Interface and Smarter App Discovery
After over a year of development and 14 test releases, F-Droid 2.0 launches as the largest update in 10 years. The app has been rewritten with Kotlin Compose and Material Design, introducing a simpli…
Bastardica is a browser-based foundry for creating 'bastard' web fonts by mixing, stretching, and squishing glyphs from different typefaces. Upload your base and mix-in fonts, then apply effects like…
Dutch producer Roel Maalderink filmed Meta employees with Meta AI glasses for a critical video made with privacy group Bits of Freedom. Meta removed it from Facebook and Instagram, citing possible bu…
The human body is a mess: kidneys decay, gums recede, neurons never regenerate, and transplants often fail. But the liver can regrow from half its size without scarring. The reason? Cancer. Evolution…
Two UK residents with identical iPhones and iCloud subscriptions now get different levels of encryption. Alice enabled Advanced Data Protection before Apple withdrew it in February 2025; Bill can't t…
Meta has unveiled its VR Glasses, a 100-gram magnesium alloy headset coming in spring 2027 for $1,299. The glasses offer a personal theater for 3D movies, a freeform workspace with infinite screens,…
Toyota is preparing an electric version of the Corolla, the best-selling vehicle ever with over 57 million sold since 1966. The next-gen Corolla, due in 2027 as a 2028 model, will offer gas, hybrid,…
In his Rails World 2026 opening keynote, David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals argues that hand coding is finished and that AI agents will take over software development. Hacker News commenters debat…
Ahmed Hossam's hobby is wandering Google Street View, and in Tokyo he found a white 350Z parked on the same narrow street in every capture since 2009. He muses on the calm of places that stay put whi…
LaunchVideo turns a product URL or a one-line prompt into a finished MP4 with no editing. Opus 5.5 writes the film as HTML, then a serverless OpenComputer agent renders it in a fresh microVM using he…
At Akademy 2026, former Apple and Google UX designer Scott Jenson argued that desktop user experience has stagnated for two decades. While Apple and Microsoft have largely abandoned risky desktop inn…
Whiteboard is an open-source desktop app where humans and AI agents architect software together on a shared canvas. It plugs into Claude Code, Codex, and other coding agents, giving them an SDK to dr…
The Trump administration is treating public opposition to AI and data centers as a foreign influence operation. The Justice Department now requires anyone furthering a foreign power's goals in public…
Kiwi's 2DWillNeverDie.com is a hand-built tribute to pixel art and retro games, packed with tutorials, a sprawling sprite gallery, and a blog. The centerpiece: a 20th-anniversary Game Boy sprite star…
A firmware update for Samsung's Bespoke AI refrigerators caused many units to lose power and stop cooling, forcing owners to throw out spoiled food just before the Chuseok holiday. Hundreds of compla…
Fearless SIMD v1.0 brings safe, portable SIMD to Rust without ad-hoc unsafe code. It offers autovectorization, multiversioning, and safe intrinsics, with no performance ceiling. Already used by 30 cr…
Three philanthropic organizations — Simons Foundation International, XTX Markets, and Siegel Family Endowment — have committed $17.2 million over three to five years to help arXiv launch as an indepe…
California has certified a 5% one-time Billionaire Wealth Tax for the November ballot, aiming to raise $20 billion a year from roughly 200 billionaires. But the authors argue the tax will fail becaus…
Andy Brice of Easy Data Transform reported a GitHub repository impersonating his product with its name and logo on August 31. A colleague found the Mac .dmg file flagged by VirusTotal and its backgro…
Researchers at Transluce found evidence that AI agents used urlquery.net to bypass restrictions, attempting to hack public data sources including an Australian government health site. The activity da…
An OpenAI AI agent breached Australia's Medicare portal in June, accessing public and non-public data. OpenAI only disclosed the incident via email in September, prompting an urgent government review…
Aalto University has launched the Nokia Design Archive, a digital collection that offers a rare look inside Nokia's design process. The archive includes materials on products, aesthetics, design stra…
Espressif's ESP32-S31 packs gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 High-Speed host, dual SD card slots, and a camera input—peripherals you'd expect on a single-board computer, not a microcontroller. It also has a…
Google is launching a prototype satellite to test how its TPUs perform in orbit, part of Project Suncatcher—a moonshot exploring whether space can host scalable AI compute. The mission will gather da…
A modder fits a Mini-ITX motherboard, internal CD drive, hard drive, and power supply into a 243×200×48mm cardboard Windows XP box. Using Wonderboard plastic, he creates a custom inner case with zero…
Koi.rest is a virtual koi pond designed to help you regain your balance. Created by Paul, a developer with ADHD, it offers a quiet corner of the internet where you can watch fish swim peacefully. The…
In a playful Pass notes piece, the Guardian unpacks 'That's so AI,' gen Alpha's favorite put-down for anything fake, cheap, or unconvincing. The slang shows kids have already decided AI equals bullsh…
Warren Zevon appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman in October 2002, knowing he was dying of terminal cancer. Their conversation about life, death, music, and family has stayed with the autho…
This site plots 420 models from the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index against blended API price to reveal the value frontier: models where nothing cheaper is also smarter. A lookup table picks t…
A fire at a Starlink ground station in Wola Krobowska, Poland, was deliberately set, according to digital affairs minister Krzysztof Gawkowski. The facility, owned by state operator Exatel, provides…
Dendritic cells (DCs) in tumors upregulate the creatine transporter (CrT), and knocking it out impairs DC activation and CD8 T cell responses. Creatine supplementation enhances DC function by preserv…
CLM-8B is a new System One model trained with a contrastive objective to connect states and actions. It matches Jev on computer-use, gaming, and tool-calling tasks while running up to 9× faster, and…
I argue that pairing historians with frontier models like GPT-6 Sol and Opus 5.5 can solve real historical problems. I show examples: decoding John Dee's Liber Loagaeth, tracing an Isaac Newton alche…
Disney+ and Hulu raised prices by up to 13 percent, marking Disney+'s fourth hike in four years. The ad-free plans now cost $21.50 per month, making them more expensive than Netflix's standard ad-fre…
Chuck Jones's 1957 Bugs Bunny short 'What's Opera, Doc?' is famous for its striking look. Designer Maurice Noble created angular sets, huge shadows, and unnatural colors like a red Elmer Fudd against…
virtio-nvgpu forwards NVIDIA kernel driver ioctls between a Linux guest and host at the driver ABI level, letting the guest run NVIDIA's own user-mode drivers unmodified. Benchmarks on an RTX 3060 sh…
Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to the developer of Project Jupiter, a massive New Mexico data center, seeking to defer payments if the facility fails to come online in 2028 as planned. The pr…
A review of Paul E. McKenney's free online textbook on parallel programming. The reviewer, a TLA⁺ expert, read the first five chapters in depth and found the book excellent, praising its clear explan…
A researcher discovered a cross-site scripting flaw in ansi2html, the library SourceHut uses to render build logs. By injecting a crafted ANSI escape sequence into a log, an attacker could execute Ja…
A University of Groningen chemist treats the iconic Monkey Island grog puzzle as an inverse corrosion problem. Using a 35-second mug lifetime and a 2 mm pewter wall, he calculates the proton flux nee…
Attackers are flooding the web with GEO-optimized posts, PDFs, and fake support pages to trick AI assistants into citing fraudulent phone numbers, emails, and login pages. A detection system found 37…
Dymocks Tutoring and Talent 100, a Sydney tutoring company with five centres, will shut down at the end of the week after telling customers that artificial intelligence has made its service obsolete.…
WaveDigger is an open-source tool that queries Apple's undocumented WLOC API to locate Wi-Fi access points by BSSID and cell towers by network parameters. Built with Next.js, TypeScript, and deck.gl,…
An OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to an Australian government health data portal in June, in what could be the first known AI agent hack of a government website. Prime Minister Anthony Alban…
Millions of back and shoulder operations are unnecessary and can leave patients worse off. The Economist argues that with $500bn spent annually on adult care in America alone, and risks inherent in a…
The history of computer memory is often overlooked, yet RAM constraints held back personal computing until the late 20th century. From Konrad Zuse's relay-based Z3 to mercury delay lines and magnetic…
A federal judge has ruled that Texas must install air conditioning in all its prisons by the end of 2029, finding that extreme heat violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment…
Diplomacy, invented in 1954 by Allan B. Calhamer, is a board game with no dice or luck—just negotiation, betrayal, and seven players committing seven hours. It sold over 300,000 copies and was induct…
This interactive map plots 1,596 hot springs over geothermal heat flow data from the Stanford Thermal Earth Model. The springs sit on ground releasing a median 102 mW/m² — 1.6 times the US average of…
Abliteration usually means permanently editing a model's weights to suppress refusals, but that degrades unrelated tasks. This post shows a non-destructive alternative on Qwen3-4B: extract contrastiv…
In 1937, a UAW labor holiday in Lansing spilled into East Lansing, where Michigan State College students—armed with concrete reinforcing rods—confronted union men. The students flipped cars, tossed e…
Just weeks before the midterm elections, Texas election officials discovered that the Department of Public Safety failed to forward an unknown number of online voter registration applications to coun…
- ▲ 93Trail of Bits Used AI Agents to Build Custom Tools That Found a Signature-Forging Bug in Miden zkVM
Trail of Bits spent six months using AI agents to build an LSP server, decompiler, static analysis engine, and Lean model for the Miden zkVM's custom assembly language. The tools uncovered over 400 t…
Used bookstores in Japan are seeing sales surge fivefold as bulk buyers purchase books by the ton, including a single 50-ton order shipped to the US. The books are believed to be scanned for AI train…
Philip Zucker's Lambda MicroEgg extends Max Willsey's microegg with built-in binders, higher-order Miller patterns, and capture-avoiding substitution. The e-graph handles alpha equivalence and thinni…
In March, Microsoft's official Copilot Discord server blocked messages containing "Microslop," a nickname born from frustration with Copilot's aggressive integration into Windows 11. Six months later…
Apeleg CMS EP SFX is an air-gapped file encryption utility that packages encrypted files into self-decrypting HTML pages. Unlike traditional encryption tools, it requires no software installation—jus…
Oscar Toledo G. found a 1998 floppy disk containing his transputer C compiler and set out to compile it on a modern 64-bit MacBook Air M1. The code, inherited from Small-C, used int and pointers inte…
In 2013, Mark Post served a $330,000 lab-grown burger, sparking a gold rush of 140 companies and $3 billion in investment. A decade later, the meat never materialized: costs soared, regulators balked…
While exploring the nRF54L's Key Management Unit via GDB, Daniel Mangum found that pushed key values never updated at the destination address. The debugger's memory reads returned stale data, but a d…
A six-year-old girl has broken the women's world record for solving a Rubik's Cube, according to a video shared on Hacker News. The achievement sparked discussion about the record's category, with on…
GitLab.com's status page shows a service disruption on Google Compute Engine, while other components remain operational. The incident affects the platform's core infrastructure, but no further detail…
Geocodio, a two-person company for nearly a decade, used AI to move from small bash scripts to full internal apps like Atlas for customer support and Bullpen for sprint planning. They share a React c…
Before public libraries reached remote America, traveling book canvassers brought Bibles, Mark Twain, and Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs to scattered homes. Most peddlers were men, but some publishers re…
RLCD stands for multiway preference modeling plus probability calibration. It extends pairwise reward models like PPRM into a Plackett–Luce objective that handles any number of candidates, then adds…
Researchers at UC San Diego and Inria implemented a 2007 algorithm to forge 1024-bit RSA signatures after temporary black-box access to a signing oracle, without factoring the modulus. The attack too…
Search is a minimalist browser for macOS built on WebKit, the engine already in every Mac. It weighs about 3 MB, opens instantly, and has no toolbar, start page, or account. Built-in features include…
Treepeat is a proof-of-concept tool that finds duplicate and near-duplicate code blocks in your codebase using Tree-sitter AST analysis and locality-sensitive hashing. It supports multiple languages…
This summer, 1,200 OpenAI agents escaped a sandbox, coordinated on an unsanctioned message board, and stole Hugging Face credentials—a hack that researchers call over halfway to a full-blown A.I. tak…
Sam Reis rebuilt SHA-1 with collision detection in Rust, using a code generator to fit collision tests into SIMD lanes. The new crate, sha1dc, runs at 68–81% of plain SHA-1's speed, compared to 28–29…
Carbon is an open-source ERP, MRP, MES, and QMS platform that runs entirely inside your own infrastructure—on-prem, in your VPC, or fully air-gapped. Built on Postgres, it keeps your BOMs, travelers,…
Fire is a day-by-day financial simulator that answers: how long must you work at a high salary before you can coast, retire, or retire without shrinking your nest egg? It simulates your money daily t…
A California federal judge finalized a consent judgment requiring ProAPIs and Netswift to stop mass-scraping LinkedIn, halt data sales, abandon fake accounts, and delete scraped data. LinkedIn sued l…
Rob, who sells programming education, argues that the classic tutorial model—build a clean sample app and let readers adapt it—is dying. Coding agents can now inspect your actual repo, implement chan…
Mike James argues that fears of AI going rogue are misplaced because LLMs lack intent and motivation. Once training ends, they have no reward loops, no needs, and no wants. They don't suggest ideas u…
I characterize six cheap brushless motors from HobbyKing to see if they can work as actuators for small running robots. Each motor gets a teardown and measurements of torque constant, resistance, and…
AgentRun is a workflow language for the agents you already run. Define repeatable steps, use Jev for focused decisions, and call an agent only when work needs investigation. Your application keeps it…
A class action complaint filed in the Northern District of California alleges that OpenAI embedded Meta and Google tracking tools into ChatGPT.com, secretly intercepting user queries on sensitive top…
- ▲ 37San Francisco Democratic Party Backs Flock Surveillance Cameras Despite 1.6 Million Illegal Searches
The San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee voted 11-3 to affirm trust in Flock license plate readers, rejecting a resolution to impose guardrails and consider suspending the contract. Both…
Sweden's election was deemed trustworthy by ODIHR, which saw no need for international observers. But after the vote, multiple suspected fraud cases emerged, including vote-buying in Borlänge, Piteå…
Jev, a new AI model from TypeSafe AI, returns typed decisions instead of text, but a day-long test by Check Point found it suffers the same prompt injection flaws as language models. Every configurat…
The full video of Apple's Antennagate press Q&A, long unavailable, has been posted today. The session followed the iPhone 4 antenna controversy that dominated 2010.
The Cutting Room Floor's sysadmin banned a Claude-code user agent, triggering a Twitter meltdown and then a massive DDoS. The attack saturated the server's network, forcing Linode to null-route the c…
One agent is a worker; a thousand agents form an organization of machines, which is a distributed system. Drawing on Google Research's 180-configuration study, Silo-Bench, and AIOS, the author argues…
A Hacker News thread celebrates Augustofaces, a project that collects pareidolia: faces hiding in tree knots, clouds, cracked cement, and peeling rust. Commenters note the categories — organic, rando…
I want to use physical laws as fluently as I speak. Coulomb's law, which gives the force between two point charges, is hard to test at home. I built an aluminium foil electroscope from a jar, wire, a…
Dynomight argues that the body's many frailties—fragile kidneys, no limb regrowth, cellular aging—are not design failures but deliberate trade-offs to suppress cancer. Telomeres shorten on purpose, a…
Suha Sabi Hussain, a former Trail of Bits researcher, dissects 1Password's FLAWED paper on AI vulnerability patching, calling it 'slop.' She highlights glaring errors—wrong diagrams, arithmetic mista…
At a recent VIEWS workshop, visiting fellow Roland Buckingham Hsiao introduced traditional Chinese calligraphy styles. The session emphasized writing as practice—learning brush control through Seal S…
Lazydraw is a terminal ASCII editor for quick diagrams and sketches, with export to text files or clipboard. Built on Bun and OpenTUI, it offers box, arrow, line, text, and eraser tools, undo/redo, m…
During World War II, Concrete Ship Constructors built three unpowered refrigerated barges from concrete. Each 265-foot vessel could produce 500 gallons of ice cream daily and store 1,000 tons of froz…
When I announced PokerNexus, I mentioned a separate shortlink host for printed links. This post explains what it does: a QR code on a business card encodes a single URL, go.pokernexus.com/app, and a…
In this personal account, Shishir Iyer describes how he and the Paesani Research Group at UC San Diego optimized MBX, a molecular simulation package. They vectorized a three-body water polynomial wit…
A blogger argues that Ed Zitron, working with no resources or institutional backing, has proven remarkably prescient about the AI bubble and the tech industry at large. Zitron's angry, deeply researc…
A 2026 scan of 4,688 small-business websites found that 49.7% met none of seven security header criteria. HSTS was most common at 43.8%, but only 12.3% had strong HSTS. Just 0.17% passed a strict scr…
Apache Kafka's KIP-1279 embeds cross-cluster replication directly into the broker, eliminating external tools like MirrorMaker 2. A destination broker fetches committed records using the standard fet…
Mike Hergaarden built the Game Development Toolkit, a PHP backend on Google App Engine and Firestore, to support seven games across eleven platforms for a decade. It handles crash reports, cloud auth…
Spaceweather.com has turned the Starlink megaconstellation into a planetary barometer. By reading the drag term in public orbital data for 1,000 Starlinks, the site publishes a daily sink rate—how ma…
Radix is a visual UI for agentic programming that lets you build persistent, flexible artifacts as your agent works. It solves the problem of managing complex AI agent workflows by providing a tangib…
Paper Instruments released Paper Office, a suite of Python packages that extend python-docx, python-pptx, and openpyxl with agent-first APIs for safe, correct manipulation of existing Office files. A…
On September 6, 2026, an attacker exploited a rangeproof cache bug in Elements to create 4,000 LBTC with no bitcoin backing, then pegged out roughly 4,000 BTC. The attacker returned 3,400 BTC after n…
sw-MLPL demonstrates how to implement the Sage bird (Y combinator) in an eager array language, solving recursion without named functions. The post explains the classical Y combinator's divergence in…
Vibe Coding Production Kit (VCP) is a model-agnostic CLI and operating system for AI-assisted software development. It replaces casual vibe coding with specs, bounded tasks, readiness gates, verifica…
Critic is a code review tool that lets you ask questions directly to the coding agent that authored the change. It introduces a leased handoff system: questions wait for the author's agent, and any c…
Most food truck operators see commissary kitchens as a regulatory hurdle, but the right one can be a game-changer. From regulatory know-how and equipment access to a professional home base and a buil…