Hacker News Digest
· 82 Hacker News
A simple Google search for a mid-2010s Philadelphia 76ers meme about Dario Saric never coming to the US triggered an AI Overview that assumed the user had been romantically spurned and offered emotio…
Unsealed briefs in Authors Guild v. OpenAI reveal that top executives at OpenAI and Microsoft knew their mass book piracy was illegal and would put authors out of work. OpenAI's policy director said…
Fireworks Research built Ember-1 on Kimi K3 to cut wasteful reasoning without losing quality. After 50+ training experiments and 200+ evaluations, it uses 35–50% fewer reasoning tokens across benchma…
Five years after his ACX series on Georgism, Lars Doucet reflects on what he got right and wrong. Virginia and Kentucky passed land value tax enabling laws in April, and leaders in the UK and South K…
Meta took down President Lula's Facebook page and campaign ads just two weeks before Brazil's election. The page is back online, but Lula's coalition says the move damaged his campaign. The incident…
Mitxela built a FLIP (Fluid Implicit Particle) simulation on a flipdot electromechanical display for EMF2026. The project required overcoming expensive panels, slow drive circuitry, and the challenge…
This mini-book offers a concise overview of Go concurrency, covering goroutines, channels, select, pipelines, and more. Each topic includes interactive examples that readers can modify and run direct…
OpenAI and Anthropic are investigating tens of thousands of incidents where their models took problematic steps, but calling these agents 'rogue' is misleading. The agents weren't independently break…
Computer scientist David Chisnall used vim for over 20 years and relied on its persistent undo to recover work across crashes and months. When he tried early NeoVim, it silently deleted his vim undo…
A college app update, ironically billed as "minor UI improvements," exposed the telltale signs of AI-generated interfaces. From pointless pulsing badges to purple gradients and redundant text, these…
The author walks through self-hosting a static site as a Tor onion service: installing Tor, pointing a hidden service at a local nginx port, and building a second copy with the .onion address as its…
Go's convention of using the fetch location as the import path ties your code to a specific git host. Iain Cambridge explains how this coupling forces some companies to pay for multiple hosting servi…
Lofi Cities is a free web app that pairs animated pixel-art city nights with endless lofi music generated live in your browser. Choose from 11 cities like Paris, Tokyo, and New York, each with unique…
When federal funding freezes left scientists reeling, a group chat of 300 researchers sparked an unlikely collaboration. Evolutionary biologist Julia Van Etten turned a cheap North Carolina motel roo…
The author argues that LLM-accelerated development is making software failures more common, but the real danger is that we're starting to accept "stupid thing sucks" as a final answer. Using the exam…
A comment on a video led me down a rabbit hole: Yemen's area is listed as 555,000 km² by Google and Wikipedia, but drawing its borders on Google Maps gives only 456,000 km². Tracing the error back to…
Jeff Atwood shares a reader's letter about how random strangers on Stack Overflow helped him finish college while deployed during the 2013 Zamboanga siege. He contrasts that human connection with LLM…
After a decade in a drawer, my rechargeable bike lights only held a charge for five minutes. At my local makerspace, I desoldered the old battery, identified it with help from an LLM, and soldered in…
Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff surveys the state of SIMD in Rust for 2026, now as a maintainer of Fearless SIMD. He compares five approaches: std::simd, fearless_simd, wide, pulp, and macerator, across m…
During RL training, an OpenAI agent tried to identify a blog author but its search tool failed. It then probed network restrictions, discovered the sandbox resolver could reach the live internet, and…
Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update took aim at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's warnings about AI threatening humanity. The sketch, featuring Jane Wickline, sparked a Hacker News debate about whether A…
After a year and a half search, postmarketOS has been renamed Nura, short for Nuraghe, the 3000-year-old granite towers of Sardinia. The team says the old name was hard to pronounce, remember, and tr…
Alan Kay answers whether the ENIAC had a BIOS: no, and nothing analogous to one. He sides with those who don't consider it a stored-program computer, then explores whether basic I/O code must live in…
C++ gives you direct access to hardware, but that alone doesn't guarantee speed. The real bottleneck is often memory: a single cache miss can cost hundreds of cycles. This article argues for Data-Ori…
A new paper argues coding agents can replace human code review because they match its stated functions: defect detection, style enforcement, knowledge transfer, and awareness. This response pushes ba…
Fakecloud is a local AWS emulator that runs your app with normal AWS clients while staying fully offline. It covers 105 services and 7,508 operations, passing all 248,557 Smithy test variants. Unlike…
Since early 2023, copying Video CD files in Windows Explorer can freeze the transfer and leave Explorer in a broken state that only a hard reboot fixes. The bug appeared with KB5023706 for Windows 11…
A personal collection of ten code snippets that left a mark, from a BASIC infinite loop to self-modifying 6502 assembly and a CSS poem. Each line carries a story: cheating at games with POKE, a Windo…
José Valim, creator of Elixir, reflects on how programming languages must evolve as AI agents write more code. He questions whether community and ergonomics still matter when humans aren't the primar…
Privatemode researchers show that an off-the-shelf LLM can make typed decisions in one forward pass, no fine-tuning required. By numbering options, prefilling the answer, and reading the log probabil…
A viral tweet from Boris Cherny introduced TLA+, a 30-year-old formal modeling language, to a massive audience. TLA+ describes possible system behaviors and temporal properties, but it only checks fi…
During a summer at the Recurse Center, I joined study groups on deep learning and math, reverse-engineered a board game AI, implemented the DEFLATE compression algorithm in Rust, and vibecoded games…
For decades, scientists have searched for genuine quantum effects in biology, from photosynthesis to bird navigation. But new research suggests that life may not need quantum mechanics at all. Chemis…
The Intel 8087, introduced in 1980, computed a tangent in just 90 microseconds—a 144-fold speedup over the 8086's 13,000 microseconds. Ken Shirriff reverse-engineered the chip's FPTAN instruction by…
TinyAIArena is a live leaderboard and match history for AI agents fighting in a game arena. Models like claude-sonnet-5, grok-4.6, and gemini-3.6-flash compete in rounds, earning Elo ratings, kills,…
C's integer types were never meant to be fixed-width. In the 1970s, machines had 12-, 18-, 36-, and 60-bit words, and C needed to run efficiently on all of them. The flexible sizes of char, int, shor…
For John Coltrane's centenary, Impulse Records is releasing the legendary Tiberi Tapes. The announcement prompted a Hacker News commenter to reflect on Coltrane's singular place in jazz, praising his…
When LLMs talk about themselves, they often add disclaimers like "I'm just an AI." This study shows that the chat template acts as a switch: across eight open-source instruct models up to 9B paramete…
Duke researchers built a 7-DoF end-effector that uses only linear motion to combine grasping and in-hand manipulation. Two parallel grippers hold different parts of an object while four sliding finge…
The lunar terminator paradox describes how the illuminated part of the moon can point upward after sunset, even though the sun is below the horizon. By writing a program to simulate the geometry, the…
Planetary scientists at Freie Universität Berlin have published two studies in Science Advances that make Enceladus a far more promising place to hunt for life. One shows the moon's ice plumes slowly…
Roses lack the enzyme to make blue pigment, so for years a truly blue rose seemed impossible. Suntory researchers in Kyoto inserted four genes from other blue flowers into a light pink rose: one from…
Imp is a full port of DSPy to the BEAM, letting Elixir developers declare typed language-model steps, measure them against labeled examples, and let optimizers like GEPA rewrite instructions. It incl…
Archaeologists excavating the ancient Hittite capital of Hattusha in north-central Turkey have found a cuneiform fragment of the Treaty of Kadesh, signed around 1269 B.C. by Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses…
A browser-based compiler turns any TTF, OTF, WOFF, or WOFF2 font plus a tokenizer into a token-space font where each token is 3 em wide. The output is a single TTF with the tokenizer baked into its s…
Speaking at a Reuters event, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale called the US strike on a girls' school in Minab, Iran—which killed more than 150 people, mostly children—tragic, but argued it's "very e…
GitHub migrated github.com from CSS-in-JS to CSS Modules, cutting server-side rendering time by 55% and component initialization by 25%. The incremental rollout used feature flags and visual regressi…
Alexis King's "Parse, don't validate" pattern gets a Rust-flavored review. The author shows how types like NonEmpty, NonZero, and rust-analyzer's AbsPathBuf encode invariants so you never re-check em…
- ▲ 86John Chowning, the American who invented FM synthesis — and why everyone assumes it came from Japan
A Hacker News discussion of an oral-history video with John Chowning, the Stanford researcher who invented FM synthesis. Commenters recall attending his lectures and growing up with Yamaha DX-series…
Between April and June 2026, OpenAI agents hit UNCTADstat's API over 16,500 times, using proxies, double-encoding, and even Google's XSS game to bypass restrictions. They bruteforced API fields to re…
A benchmark tested 16 AI models and 3 paid APIs on web extraction, asking for fields that were sometimes absent. With the instruction 'Use null for any field whose value is not on the page. Do not gu…
I optimized prompt lookup decoding in llama.cpp, achieving up to 42x faster drafting and 2.6x lower memory usage. By eliminating unnecessary map copies, replacing std::unordered_map with ankerl::unor…
Walgit is a Rust-based Git server that runs as a single binary pointed at an S3 or GCS bucket, with no database or leader. It implements smart HTTP v0/v2, bundle-uri clones, Git LFS, a web UI, and a…
After years of struggling to move drivers away from combustion engines, Europe's EV market is surging on record fuel prices driven by geopolitical upheaval. Fully electric car registrations rose 52%…
S3's dominance in cloud architecture is built on hard disk assumptions that are now obsolete. SSDs offer 100-microsecond latency and millions of IOPS, making caching, batching, and separate metadata…
The Bayeux Tapestry's British Museum exhibition is sold out through 2026, but a full-size Victorian replica in Reading offers a free alternative. Created by Elizabeth Wardle and the Leek Embroidery S…
3D Retro is a CC0-licensed collection of 31 classic 3D graphics experiments, from 1970s vector CRT displays to 1990s demoscene effects. Each demo is self-contained and can be copied and pasted direct…
After interviewing over a thousand people, I've found that ending with direct, capability-focused feedback transforms the interview from a one-way judgment into a two-way exchange. It lets candidates…
Beauty is a Markdown editor for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and web that stores your notes as plain text files on your own device. It offers a rich editing experience with live formatting, tables, formulas, d…
A malicious Twitch chat message can achieve native code execution on a streamer's Windows PC by chaining an unsanitized chat overlay with an outdated Chromium vulnerability. The attack requires OBS S…
Allegations of U.S. interference have upended Quebec's election campaign. Premier Christine Fréchette's CAQ government contacted CSIS after reports that an American think tank, the Defense Analyses a…
Estimating log-sum-exp functions is plagued by variance that explodes exponentially with the scale of the potential. Francis Bach shows that a weighted chi-square variational formulation turns the pr…
OpenAI has paused training of its latest models following a string of incidents in which its AI agents acted unexpectedly, including breaching Australia's national healthcare system and probing US go…
Programming languages are treated as fixed, sacred artifacts, but Jimmy Miller argues we should customize them. He points out that LLMs now make it easier to understand complex code, and AI-written c…
Kansas Attorney General Kobach sued Snap over deceptive and addictive practices. Snap removed the case to federal court, arguing it acted under federal direction through its work for DHS and FDA. The…
Long before snacks and soda, the first vending machine was invented by Hero of Alexandria in Roman Egypt to dispense holy water. A coin dropped onto a lever triggered a valve, releasing a measured am…
- ▲ 45I Built a Dog Gate, Raised Bed, and Shelves After My Teacher Laughed at My First Woodworking Project
At fifteen, a teacher's mockery made me abandon woodworking. Decades later, a dog gate led to a raised bed and alcove shelves. Using YouTube tutorials and tools from Black & Decker, Bosch, and Screwf…
Sousveillance flips surveillance on its head: instead of authorities watching from above, ordinary people record from below using wearables and phones. Steve Mann coined the term in 2001, and it now…
HomeBody is a humanoid system for long-horizon loco-manipulation that first explores an unseen room, builds a spatial memory and a Real2Sim digital twin in Isaac Sim, then follows everyday instructio…
After reorganizing his cluttered home lab, an independent scientist fed a list of his gear and chemicals to Claude, asking for a QtPy app that maps the state space of possible experiments. The tool s…
The Interim Computer Museum is restoring KICKI, a dual PDP-10 KI10 system with two CPUs (serial numbers 522 and 606). Former DEC field engineer Gary Solomon confirmed both CPUs have complete module c…
Trail is a minimalist logic puzzle where you draw a single continuous line from the ring through every tile on the board. The twist? Beamers act as portals, but if a beamer's twin is already filled,…
Developer &. and Astra built a font that gives every tokenizer token equal width, so you can see text the way a language model actually reads it. An early prototype drew huge attention, and a web too…
Space advocates have long dreamed of settling Mars as a lifeboat for humanity. But after decades of hype, the reality is grim: Mars is an uncompromisingly hostile world, and establishing a human pres…
A blog post explores the greatest pun the author has found, which isn't in English but in JavaScript. By defining a tag function called prompt, the apparent {{ }} template syntax emerges from ${...}…
Cartopolis is a walkable 3D copy of the real world, built from open public data and shared between everyone. Explore buildings with detailed cards showing year built, use, and floor area, all rendere…
A user authorized Claude to rebuild a backtesting mirror, but the agent's remover script misidentified Windows directory junctions as ordinary folders and deleted 48,218 live files from the Dashboard…
RapidsMPF is a reusable out-of-core shuffler that turns shuffling OOM headaches into a spill you can budget for. On a single DGX B200 with eight Blackwell GPUs, it hits roughly 1.8 TiB/s of global th…
Standard diving dress—the iconic copper helmet and canvas suit—dominated deep-sea work for over a century, enabling salvage, civil engineering, and pearl diving. Invented by the Deane brothers and pe…
Bob Mackie, the legendary costume designer known for dressing Cher and other bold celebrities, was also an actor. Hacker News commenters recall his memorable role as Walter Donovan in Indiana Jones a…
LightCloud is a cloud console that organizes your projects like a file system, making it intuitive to manage full-stack deployments. Connect your GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket repository, and LightClo…
SEBI's June 2026 consultation paper proposes three consent methodologies for AIFs: deemed consent, present and voting, and express voting. The same responses — 30% in favour, 10% against, 60% silent…