Hacker News Digest
· 107 Hacker News
Andrej Karpathy gave Opus 5 the first paragraph of Lord of the Rings and a $10 token budget, asking for a Three.js render. The model spent two hours writing 5,500 lines of code that procedurally rend…
I am continuing the interactive tour series for Go 1.27, showcasing hands-on examples of new features like generic methods and struct literal field selectors. This guide covers generalized function t…
Wiki Workers United U.S. demanded voluntary recognition from the Wikimedia Foundation on July 20, but the Foundation declined, insisting on a secret-ballot NLRB election. The union accuses the Founda…
Meet cycloidal_gearbox, an open-source project by a 15-year-old engineer featuring a fully functional 3D-printed cycloidal gearbox and a custom Python script for generating its design. This project b…
eBay has agreed to pay $56 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a Massachusetts couple who were subjected to a campaign of harassment and intimidation by company employees. The couple, David and In…
Seven years after its launch, SwiftUI still feels like a perpetual beta, plagued by unpredictable layouts, performance issues, and a chaotic data flow. This deep dive, based on the author's experienc…
Kakehashi is an experimental userspace translation layer that lets you run macOS ARM64 binaries on Linux aarch64 systems without a JIT or kernel modifications. It loads Darwin Mach-O executables, map…
A comparison of two essential vocabulary lists for English learners, from 1953 and 2023, reveals a dramatic shift: words like 'telegraph' and 'tobacco' dropped out, while 'computer' and 'mortgage' we…
Brennan Kenneth Brown's critique of personal knowledge management systems (PKMs) misses the mark, conflating the tool with its users and shifting his own questions mid-argument. Obsidian, like Emacs…
Developers stick with tools like Vim and Emacs because they encode trust through familiarity and predictability. As AI coding agents gain adoption, trust drops—usage rose from 76% to 84%, but trust f…
The European Commission has ordered Alphabet to open up eleven Android features, including wake word detection, to third-party assistants under the Digital Markets Act. The Open Home Foundation, whic…
The EU's open-source age-verification project has mandated hardware-bound attestation, raising concerns among Linux and custom ROM users. A maintainer confirmed the requirement is non-negotiable, cit…
Wafer runs Kimi K3, a 2.8T-parameter model, on a single node of AMD MI355X GPUs, achieving 952 tok/s aggregate and 118 tok/s single-stream decode. This outperforms a two-node B200 setup and offers be…
This collection showcases a wide variety of futuristic and imaginative user interfaces found in popular anime series. From the tactical displays in Macross Plus to the whimsical screens in Dirty Pair…
Holocloth is a web-based project that explores the concept of a fabric that can display dynamic images and patterns, essentially a programmable textile. The demo showcases a virtual cloth that respon…
Norway's salmon farming industry, once a solution to a surplus of fish, has become a global behemoth, supplying over half the world's Atlantic salmon. But the industry's rapid growth has led to envir…
Meshdiff is a free, client-side tool for visually diffing STL, 3MF, and OBJ files. It parses files locally, so nothing is uploaded. The current version offers voxel-based diffing with adjustable tole…
The US Treasury has launched an unprecedented intervention in the yen market, marking the first such move by the US government. The intervention aims to address the yen's rapid depreciation, which ha…
Bor is an open-source policy management platform for Linux desktops, now in v0.8.0. This release adds policy types for Thunderbird, Microsoft Edge for Business, and Firewalld zones, alongside a redes…
F* is a general-purpose proof-oriented programming language that combines dependent types with SMT-based proof automation and tactic-based interactive theorem proving. It compiles to OCaml by default…
FoldingGlobes.com offers a stunning collection of free, printable paper globes. From the Sun and Moon to Mars, Jupiter, and even Pluto, you can download, print, and fold your own 3D models of celesti…
New data shows Linux desktop usage has crossed the 10% mark in North America, a milestone driven by growing adoption among developers and privacy-conscious users. The increase reflects broader shifts…
On June 20, 2006, RISC OS Open Ltd was incorporated with the ambitious goal of open-sourcing the proprietary RISC OS operating system. Twenty years later, the project has largely succeeded, with RISC…
Shitty is a terminal emulator that prioritizes speed and low latency. It keeps terminal state on the CPU and uses native compute backends (Vulkan on Linux, Metal on macOS) for rendering, achieving fa…
Tailwind CSS is popular for good reasons—it standardizes spacing, colors, and sizes, and its documentation is excellent. But for medium or large projects, the author argues, the costs can outweigh th…
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company produced weekly transit passes that were miniature works of art, featuring hand-drawn numbers, vibrant colors, and civic il…
A developer's personal benchmark pits AI models against a single prompt: generate an SVG of a frog with a Habsburg jaw. Each model gets three tries a month. The site tracks 14 models and 42 runs, all…
In this 2005 rant, Ursula K. Le Guin pushes back against the notion that her work avoids technology. She argues that technology is the active human interface with the material world, and that all sci…
8bitbubsy has released a portable clone of the classic tracker Fasttracker II, written in C and using SDL 2. The latest version, v2.22, is available for Windows, macOS (universal binary), and Linux,…
The Ohio State Fair has announced that AI will be prohibited in future poster contests, following a 2024 rule that allowed AI if disclosed. The decision comes after an AI-generated poster won the 202…
Starting Aug. 1, registered data brokers in California must honor deletion requests submitted through the state's Delete Request Opt-out Platform (DROP). About 350,000 residents have already signed u…
Long before Neo's instant kung fu in The Matrix, medieval scholars sought a shortcut to learning. The Ars notoria, a magical manuscript from the 13th century, promised to fast-track university knowle…
I argue that Atom is technically superior to RSS and should be the standard for all feeds. While many differences seem minor, Atom offers clear encoding semantics for titles and a better distinction…
In 1998, Patrick O'Brian, celebrated author of the Aubrey-Maturin series, was exposed as a fraud who had invented his biography, abandoned his first wife and children, and changed his name. Despite t…
Matt Beton trained a BitNet-based autoregressive language model small enough to run on his dad's BBC Micro, a 1980s computer powered by the 8-bit MOS 6502 processor with only 32KB RAM. The model uses…
NixOS-DGX-Spark brings the power of Nix and NixOS to NVIDIA's DGX Spark, offering a reproducible, declarative environment for AI development. It provides USB boot images, a NixOS module with optimize…
Apple marketed Mac OS X Snow Leopard as a stability-focused release with '0 new features,' a promise that has since become a rallying cry for users of every platform. But as Rubenerd recounts, the re…
Fuse is a statically typed, purely functional language that combines modern type system features with clean syntax inspired by Rust, Python, Scala, and Haskell. It offers higher-kinded types, ad-hoc…
A hands-on teardown of a TP-Link TL-841N router reveals an end-to-end hardware hacking workflow: locating UART pins, dumping firmware via UART and on-chip flash extraction, carving the flash dump int…
I share my complete setup guide for the ASRock BC-250, proving it offers unbeatable value for budget gaming projects. Key optimizations include allocating 6GB of VRAM, disabling Steam shader precachi…
Shanghai Aishengna Electronic Technology Group has started mass producing domestically developed immersion deep-ultraviolet lithography machines. This move supports Beijing's semiconductor self-suffi…
The Rust All Hands 2026 brought 166 Rust project members and guests to Utrecht for three days of collaboration. Sessions covered governance, language evolution, and interoperability, including topics…
In this first-person account, the author rebuilds a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150 and upgrades it with more RAM, a faster CPU, and various video cards to run MkLinux alongside classic Mac OS. The…
According to Statcounter, Linux has reached 10.65% of desktop web usage in North America for July 2026, nearly doubling from 5.52% in June. The sharp increase is partly attributed to a reduction in t…
Plug-in batteries, which charge from a wall socket and discharge to offset peak-time electricity, could cut household energy bills by up to £2,400 over a decade, according to Regen. Unlike traditiona…
In June, Europe saw a record 366,000 BEV registrations, up 50% year-over-year, pushing the BEV share to 26% and plugin share to 37%. Tesla's Model Y and Model 3 led the EV charts, while BYD's Atto 2…
In July 2019, a remotely operated vehicle captured footage of a goblin shark 2 kilometers below the surface near Jarvis Island in the central Pacific. Five years later, researchers spotted the same s…
I investigated the Coldcard hack and found a critical failure caused by a developer trying to fix a compiler error without understanding the code. By disabling the hardware RNG to silence a duplicate…
Microsoft has announced significant price increases for its Xbox consoles in Europe and the UK, with some models jumping by over 40%. The 1TB Xbox Series X with a disc drive now costs €799.99 / £669.…
CreakWork12 is a playful Rust-based utility that transforms your Framework 12 laptop's hinge into a creaky wooden door, complete with realistic sound effects. It uses the lid angle sensor to adjust p…
The ESP32-C3 SuperMini's tiny SMD antenna severely limits WiFi range. A simple modification—adding a 31 mm quarter-wave wire antenna—yields 6-10 dB signal improvement, effectively doubling range. The…
This document deprecates Diffie-Hellman and RSA key exchanges in TLS 1.2 and DTLS 1.2 due to critical security flaws like the Raccoon attack and lack of forward secrecy. It also discourages static El…
Syncular is an offline-first sync framework for TypeScript that keeps a real local SQLite database on the client (using OPFS in browsers) and Postgres on the server, with a single ordered commit log…
Elena is a 2.9kB library that lets you build web components with HTML and CSS first, then progressively enhance them with JavaScript. It solves common issues like accessibility, SSR limitations, and…
The TinyNES is a niche console that combines original NES CPU and PPU chips with a modern, open-source design. It offers cleaner video and audio output than a stock NES, but only via composite, with…
Arch Linux's AUR (Arch User Repository) has temporarily disabled package pushes and adoptions following a surge of malicious package adoptions and commits. The Arch Linux DevOps team, represented by…
The computational theory of mind (CTM) holds that the mind is a computational system, and mental processes are computations. This Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry traces the theory's roots i…
Cyber is a new scripting language designed for speed and ease of use. It combines dynamic and static typing, supports concurrency via fibers, and is memory-safe. The language features a fast VM and J…
Across American and European dance floors, clubgoers are falling for 3-MMC, a synthetic stimulant said to be 'coke without the irritation.' It's cheaper, longer-lasting, and enhances libido, making i…
While building Catalyst, a quantum compiler for PennyLane, we aimed to optimize hybrid workflows using MLIR. In the process, we discovered that our pipeline could compile pure JAX code directly to LL…
A security researcher shares data from a 30-day honeypot network of 15 servers worldwide, revealing 6,790 unique attacker IPs and 1.5 million login attempts. The top credentials are predictable (root…
Marcin Wichary, a well-known designer and writer, recently noticed that Google Search's time filter has been broken for a few days, and he's surprised by the lack of attention. He recalls a time when…
IBM i, formerly OS/400, is a unique operating system where the database is built into the kernel, not an add-on. It uses object-based architecture, single-level storage, and the TIMI abstraction laye…
The author reflects on how nerd culture, once a niche interest, has become mainstream, thanks in part to the tech industry's rise and the wealth of its founders. While this has brought benefits like…
As of August 2, 2026, the European Union's AI Act begins enforcing obligations for AI models, marking a significant shift in how AI is regulated in the bloc. The rules target high-risk AI systems, re…
Drawing parallels between the tulip craze and today's AI boom, the author reflects on how tools shape their users, from GPU-powered crypto to language models. He critiques the lack of transparency in…
Noam Brown announced on X that an internal version of OpenAI's next major model family, Astra, has solved 10 long-standing open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer s…
OpenAI announced that an unreleased model solved ten open problems in mathematics, a milestone that has mathematicians and observers scrambling to rationalize its implications. The author, a software…
German automakers, having recently slashed thousands of jobs, are now seeing a surge of managers entering the job market. The trend highlights the industry's shift towards electric vehicles and digit…
In a 1995 Usenet post, John Mashey of Silicon Graphics analyzed the prospects for 128-bit processors, predicting they wouldn't be needed until around 2043 based on physical memory growth, or possibly…
A UCLA-led study in mice shows that a single dose of the immunosuppressant rapamycin rapidly—within about two hours—reverses autism-like brain and behavior changes in adult offspring of mothers expos…
When running X11 apps in containers, chroots, or over SSH with a bind-mounted .Xauthority, you may hit 'Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified'. The cause: the cookie's hostn…
A common argument for explosive AI-driven growth cites the Industrial Revolution, when UK per-capita GDP growth accelerated ~15x. But this post shows that 10x-above-average growth was already common…
Katharos is a Python library that brings functional programming and message-passing concurrency together. It provides algebraic abstractions like Functor, Applicative, Monad, Semigroup, and Monoid, a…
A study of 14,419 self-published genre-fiction books on Amazon from 2023 to 2026 found that books with substantial AI-generated text (>25%) make up a large share of the catalog but a smaller share of…
Isaac Su challenges the growing habit of crediting LLMs for work, arguing that tools deserve no credit and that doing so dilutes personal accountability. He explores why people disclose LLM use—from…
Despite Australia's world-first ban on social media for under-16s, a new study reveals that over 80% of teens are still online three months after the restrictions took effect. The government defends…
I discovered that random manual commits hidden deep in my codebase were breaking atomicity, causing data loss despite using transaction managers. The solution is strict: the database abstraction laye…
We developed a low-cost, open-source AI system to automate cognitive testing of wild capuchins in Costa Rica. By integrating facial recognition with interactive touchscreens, we bridge the gap betwee…
The author, an AI company founder, reflects on the surprising success of large language models, which have achieved a remarkable degree of human-like intelligence through statistics and scale. This r…
I have identified four distinct time scales for technology: research ideas taking decades, hype cycles rising and falling quickly, mass deployment requiring twenty years or more, and economic reshapi…
Logan BASIC is an online BASIC interpreter that runs directly in your web browser, supporting both text-based and graphics-based programs. It offers a user-friendly code editor, a collection of examp…
A personal blog post details the author's plan to build a reliable NAS for lifelong data storage, using four 8TB drives in a two-site btrfs RAID1 setup. The author analyzes failure modes—whole-drive…
A developer treats his Gaggia espresso machine as a distributed system, instrumenting it with OpenTelemetry and shipping telemetry to ClickHouse Cloud. He details the hardware challenges: flattening…
Police departments in the US are increasingly producing their own true crime podcasts to solve cold cases. From a California podcast that helped capture a fugitive murderer to an Illinois podcast tha…
CostPerPrompt delivers live pricing for over 232 AI models and specialized calculators for chatbots, agents, RAG, and voice AI. It transforms complex token rates into accurate monthly cost estimates…
A developer explores adding Go's defer statement to the TypeScript compiler, transforming it into a try/finally with a stack of closures. The implementation reveals fundamental mismatches: JavaScript…
MicroCodex is an ultra-lightweight coding agent that runs locally in your terminal. Written in C++23, it delivers a binary under 1MB, making it incredibly fast and resource-efficient. It offers one-s…
Icons serve as essential interface elements that must balance simplicity with clarity. I emphasize simplifying designs for legibility while avoiding overly literal or complex shapes. Consistency in v…
Maze Toys offers a variety of maze puzzles, from classic rectangular mazes to immersive first-person corn mazes and circular mazes. Challenge yourself with faultless mazes where any backtracking or w…
A Schmitt trigger is a comparator with built-in hysteresis, ensuring clean digital output even with noisy or slow inputs. This article covers the principles, derives threshold voltages for inverting…
I am designing a new experimental type system for Uiua that balances dynamic flexibility with static safety. Unlike traditional approaches requiring separate syntax, this system uses Uiua arrays them…
legionlinuxtui is a powerful terminal user interface designed specifically for Lenovo Legion laptop users on Linux. By leveraging the Lenovo Legion Linux Drivers and lm_sensors, this tool allows you…
I explore the hidden world of test engineers who ensure our modern world works safely. From Kobuk the Destroyer testing bear-resistant coolers to engineers firing frozen chickens at jet engines, thes…
During a penetration test, the author discovered that IBM i's QSYRUPWD API returns encrypted password data that doesn't match existing John the Ripper formats for QPWDLVL 2-4. Using system tracing an…
This interactive project teaches Python fundamentals by guiding you to draw a spider web. You'll learn to import modules, call functions, pass arguments, and control code order, all while watching ea…
Temporize is a zero-dependency TypeScript library offering debounce, throttle, batching, retries, concurrency limits, and React/Vue adapters. Every scheduled call returns a real promise for the wrapp…
Most CRMs are databases with forms, and AI ones bolt on a chat box. This open-source CRM flips that: the durable research agent is the product, and the database is just where it writes notes. It runs…
Khalid Alshaikh built a browser-based Windows 98 that boots, dials up, and browses the archived 1990s web with Flash, MIDI, and VRML restored. The site also serves a Gopher hole with 30,000+ catalogu…
Draco is a fast, stealth, native-Rust web scraper that converts URLs into clean Markdown and metadata using a browser-faithful TLS/JA4 fingerprint, avoiding headless browsers and Node dependencies. I…
In this Paris Review interview, Bill Buford discusses his 1991 book 'Among the Thugs', recounting his immersion in English football hooligan culture in the 1980s. He explains how he moved from litera…
I present a formal framework for Large Language Model attention using Persistent State Machines with stationary in-memory cells. My work includes complete mathematical proofs for quantization error b…
I explore two distinct approaches to using agentic AI: the Greenhouse mode for chaotic exploration when goals are unclear, and the Lens mode for focused execution on known targets. Frustration often…
Tone Generator is a free, browser-based tool that lets you play any tone from 1 Hz to 20,000 Hz with no installation required. It offers four waveforms (sine, square, sawtooth, triangle), individual…
Effective HTML is a visual field guide for choosing and creating the right artifact—from wireframes to prototypes, diagrams, and purpose-built interfaces—to enhance thinking with agents. It emphasize…
I believe the coming AI revolution will drastically lower the cost of goods and services, creating immense wealth. However, without policy shifts to tax capital like companies and land instead of lab…
I built Walsh, a multi-agent stock research system where Fundamental, Technical, Sentiment, and Macro analysts generate parallel theses. A Portfolio Manager aggregates these views, but a strict Rule-…