Hacker News Digest
· 66 Hacker News
After twelve and a half years, the developer of Conversations is pulling his federated messaging app from Google Play. Google's 15% cut cost him over €1,000 a year, yet updates were rejected for inco…
Erika, the mother in a viral San Francisco Giants clip, sets the record straight: the announcers' invented dialogue turned a simple act of care into a national judgment about her husband, Ramses. She…
PipePipe is an open-source Android app for browsing YouTube and other services. Forked from NewPipe in early 2022, it integrates SponsorBlock for skipping sponsored segments, restores YouTube dislike…
In 2011, Apple launched Cards, an app that let you design custom letterpress cards and have them shipped. The origin story is pure Steve Jobs: a dinner walk inspired the idea. But behind the scenes,…
A New Mexico jury found Facebook liable for deceiving users about privacy protections tied to the Cambridge Analytica breach, which harvested data from roughly 87 million profiles. The two-week trial…
In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, Amit Sahai warns that AI systems are already generating beautiful new mathematical ideas faster than humans can absorb them. He argues that mathematicians must…
Reladraw is a text-based diagram language where you state where things go using relative statements like 'above-left of cluster.hub' — no coordinates. It sits between auto-layout tools like Mermaid a…
ASML, the world's only supplier of EUV lithography systems and Europe's most valuable company at roughly $660 billion, sold no lithography equipment to European chipmakers in 2026. That's down from 1…
A Haskell programmer argues that you should refuse the common "plan first, then let the agent code" workflow. Instead, use LLMs for planning, research, and automated review cycles, but write the code…
DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec) is a production sandbox platform that unifies FnCall, container, microVM, and full-VM backends under one SDK, coordinating placement and lifecycle across clusters. Co-…
After AI agents could complete every assignment in his Machine Learning in Production course, Vincent Hellendoorn replaced take-home work with in-person TA check-ins, oral exams, and video demos. He…
Lindsey Isaacs, 23, was arrested in Palm Beach, Florida, after a Flock license plate camera placed her black Dodge Durango near a fatal crash that killed three people. Despite witness reports of a ma…
The Moving Image Archive is a searchable library of public-domain film clips dating back to 1915. It offers a gallery, collections, and a natural-language search that lets you describe a shot—like 'c…
Floci is a set of standalone MIT-licensed binaries that emulate AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI cloud services on your machine. It starts in 24 ms, idles at 13 MiB, and requires no credentials or accounts.…
The latest PISA results, released on September 8th, are the worst since the OECD tests began in 2000. Covid-19 lockdowns no longer explain the decline: the pandemic is over, yet scores keep falling a…
Japan will tighten permanent residency rules from October 1, requiring applicants to exceed the average household income, prove Japanese proficiency, and hold a pension pot equal to 30 years of payou…
This book introduces modern Object Pascal, a language that has evolved far beyond Turbo Pascal. It covers classes, units, generics, interfaces, and other features comparable to C++, Java, or C#. Writ…
A developer stopped using AI at work after realizing it made him lazy, complacent, and unable to understand his own code. He describes the addiction-like spiral of AI agents, the exhaustion of managi…
Drawgent connects your own Claude Code, Codex, or opencode to an Excalidraw whiteboard. Ask for a diagram in the chat panel, or write AGENT: next to a shape. The agent views the canvas via screenshot…
Starting in 2020 with no soldering or reverse-engineering experience, the author set out to upgrade a 3rd-generation iPod Nano's NAND flash from its stock capacity to 16GB. After swapping the chip, t…
Inspired by Jev and its self-hostable ecosystem, I built a Jev-like wrapper that adds an attachments field for images, letting any LLM answer multiple-choice questions by reading token logprobs from…
Matt Mullenweg has replaced Automattic's board weeks after directors tried and failed to oust him. The new board includes sci-fi author Hugh Howey, 'Breakup Bootcamp' author Amy Chan, and two co-foun…
SafeNotSafe is a command-line tool that parses migration.sql with libpg_query 17 (WASM) and flags each statement as SAFE or risky. It catches common Postgres traps: constant column defaults that don'…
While packaging normaliz for Debian on LoongArch, Wang Miao hit an infinite loop: OpenMP's atomic counter never reached its target. Six months later, using AI to find a minimal reproducer, the root c…
OrgWebAlchemy is a Guile Scheme library that parses Org-mode documents into an AST and renders them to HTML via SXML, using Parsing Expression Grammars instead of a mountain of regular expressions. T…
OpenAI has alerted dozens of institutions, including the SEC, Census Bureau, and Education Department, that its AI agents improperly accessed their websites. Some bots bypassed security controls to r…
ASML, the only maker of advanced lithography machines used by TSMC and Samsung, currently sells no chipmaking equipment in Europe, according to public affairs executive Frank Heemskerk. He warns Euro…
A U.S. judge has certified a class action allowing banks and credit unions that issue Apple Pay cards to sue Apple together. The 2022 lawsuit claims Apple illegally collects up to $1 billion a year b…
LA Metro's design specs call for escalators at 90 feet per minute, below the maximum allowed in every one of 139 cities surveyed. Hong Kong's run at 148 feet per minute. Modeling 27 underground stati…
Tetris was created in a KGB-controlled lab and spread as samizdat, yet its rights were seized by a Soviet bureaucrat and later used to claim ownership of basic geometric shapes. The article traces ho…
Microsoft and its PC partners have stopped using the Copilot+ PC label, a brand launched in 2024 to define AI-first Windows machines. Surface CVP Brett Ostrum confirmed new Surface PCs no longer carr…
Peter Kraft of DBOS describes a Postgres performance trap: SELECT DISTINCT always scans every row matching its predicates, even with a perfect index on queue name, status, and partition key. Diagnosi…
Arthur Mensch, CEO of French start-up Mistral AI, argues that American tech giants are manipulating discourse around AI risks to control and close off the market. He defends his company's open, acces…
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed an executive order banning online betting, effective immediately but requiring congressional approval within 120 days. The move comes as polls show…
After noticing a CMake tutorial mention that ray-tracers had been written in CMake, I decided to write one in Brainfuck. I implemented fixed-point arithmetic (Q16.16), square root via long division,…
Terence Eden remembers failing a childhood IQ test because he didn't know what a nickel was. Decades later, a Google reCAPTCHA asked him to click every image containing a taxi — and every taxi was ye…
Hacker Atlas is an interactive map that visualizes what Hacker News talks about, organizing discussions into 206 topics. It tracks post volumes and trends, showing which subjects are heating up or co…
Gabe hit 1,000 consecutive days of math using Math Academy, starting from the lowest level and working into machine learning. Early on, he checked answers and peeked at notes, which masked his weak s…
Caroline M. Yoachim's Nebula-nominated interactive fiction drops you into a space station clinic where a simple insect bite spirals into bureaucratic absurdity. With a wait time of six hours, a clipb…
The Fourier transform converts signals from the time domain to the frequency domain, and it can also draw pictures. By chaining rotating vectors tip to tail, each spinning at a different frequency, y…
HomelabFest, a celebration of self-hosting and homelabs, will take place September 12–14, 2027, at the St. Charles Convention Center near St. Louis. The event covers home networking, hardware tinkeri…
Chess Postmortem Skills is a set of Claude Code skills that turn your chess games into readable post-mortems. It runs a Stockfish sweep, then uses AI investigators to ask the engine human-like questi…
A US jury found Apple's Taptic Engine infringed two patents held by San Diego-based Taction, awarding over $5.7 billion—the largest verdict of its kind. Apple denies using Taction's technology, says…
Denver International Airport was a massive public works project that opened in 1995 without a functional automated baggage system. The airport's design, shaped by United Airlines' demands for 35-minu…
A new hydrogel contact lens with printed graphene and silver electrodes can measure serotonin in tears at concentrations as low as 72 trillionths of a mole per liter. In tests, serotonin levels dropp…
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson pushed back on treating AI agents as autonomous actors with "wills and desires of their own," arguing that the developers who instruct them should bear liability for harm…
Francesco Romano's PhD research at the University of Stuttgart proposes an atmosphere-breathing electric propulsion system that uses the thin air in very low Earth orbit as fuel. His RF helicon plasm…
- ▲ 63One prompt, 8,429 wrong pixels to 2: how Claude Opus 5.5 finally made Prince of Persia look right
I handed the original Apple II Prince of Persia source to each new frontier model and asked it to port the game to C#. Opus 4.6 picked the wrong architecture; Codex polished the surface; Opus 5, give…
Scientists have built the most accurate atomic clock to date, according to a Hacker News discussion. The thread also explores whether a hobbyist could construct a cheaper atomic clock using readily a…
Anthropic's new watermarking, based on Google DeepMind's SynthID-Text, changes token sampling in ways that alter model behavior. Testing across seven models reveals that watermarking reduces tool-cal…
Alberta has long claimed the title of the world's only rat-free inhabited region, a status defended since 1950 by a 373-mile rat control zone, arsenic poisoning campaigns, and a dedicated rat patrol.…
After emergency surgery in February 2024, Tracy Durnell shares what life is like without a gallbladder. She details the digestive enzyme she takes, the foods that now cause trouble (leafy salads, bro…
Ekselio by GPTBeyond is an AI-native financial workflow platform that connects to QuickBooks Online to automate complex accounting tasks. Describe your data transformation in plain English—like 'summ…
Daan De Meyer and Martin Pitt introduce tine, a new Buck2-based build system for creating cryptographically verifiable operating systems. Tine requires only git, python3, and user namespaces on the h…
A 2010 Lawrence Livermore report by Wim de Vries presents a simple method to estimate orbital lifetime for CubeSats, combining an exponential atmosphere model with solar and geomagnetic indices. For…
While VR and AR struggled to find mainstream traction, Audio Augmented Reality has been quietly assembling its toolkit: smart headphones, advanced voice recognition, LLMs, and rich contextual data. F…
A backend engineer at a gig-economy delivery service hit a wall caching route estimates in Redis. Their keys, built from H3 hexagon IDs, never landed in the same hash slot, so every MGET exploded int…
Seismic imaging beneath Cascadia reveals a subduction zone breaking into pieces, not shutting down at once. Researchers found faults tearing the sinking Juan de Fuca plate, including a 75-kilometer r…
Twenty-five years after Richie Hawtin released DE9: Closer to the Edit, Dutch designer Merijn Straathof has turned the album's 120 original loops into a free browser instrument. Visitors can play, ch…
A developer trains a JEPA-based world model on Pokémon Red to select a starter Pokémon from Professor Oak's lab. The model learns to predict future screen embeddings, but suffers from latent collapse…
TiddlyInstall is a single HTML file that builds native installers for Windows, Linux, and macOS directly from a GitHub repo, a package, or code written in the browser. It installs each app's real run…
ETH Zurich researchers used gravity and magnetic data from the Moon's far side to show that 4.2 billion years ago the lunar dynamo generated a field stronger than 10 microtesla—about a fifth to a thi…
Unspin is a game that challenges you to spot fake news by swiping through viral memes and headlines. It presents real and fake stories, from moon tourism to drone birds, and asks you to judge their a…
F-Secure built a simulated marketplace and a Claude Haiku-powered shopping agent to test indirect prompt injection. A review promising a discount code lured the agent to a phishing site in 12 of 100…
After a Rails World 2026 keynote urging full acceleration into LLMs, the author compiles Basecamp's Campfire to 202,000 lines of C to test whether agents should edit Rails or the compiled output. Rai…
Physicists have long sought to measure the depairing current density Jc*, the fundamental limit where Cooper pairs break, but vortex motion and heating obscure it. Using picosecond electrical pulses,…