Hacker News Digest
· 90 Hacker News
The author criticizes the habit of relaying AI-generated responses verbatim in conversations, whether in Slack, code reviews, or WhatsApp. They argue this adds no value, as the recipient could easily…
- ▲ 1319LLMs reward expertise
LLMs turn everyone into a generalist, but the real skill is domain expertise. Terence Tao's conversation with ChatGPT shows how deep knowledge lets you steer the model, push back, and extract far mor…
Qwen releases Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model that autonomously codes for over 10 days, reproduces and improves a research paper, and beats 87% of human teams in a 24-hour contest. It als…
A newly created GitHub repo published a batch of SQLite vulnerability advisories, quickly flagged as critical by NVD and CISA. JFrog's investigation revealed the cited code didn't exist, PoCs didn't…
The author argues that with AI agents, personalizing software is now so easy that closed-source tools are at a disadvantage. They describe how agents can modify source code and automatically sync wit…
OpenAI has released ten new results in mathematics and theoretical computer science, all achieved by an internal version of its upcoming Astra model. The solutions tackle problems that have been open…
Mert Bulan, a Turkish software developer, recounts his move to Hamburg for an internship and his subsequent decision to stay. He describes a welcoming flatmate, a supportive team, and a workplace cul…
Despite earlier skepticism, the author uses coding assistants on personal projects but limits them to chat suggestions, manually typing every edit. This slows him down to 2x speed instead of 10x, but…
John MacFarlane reflects on two decades of Pandoc, the universal document converter he started in 2006 as a way to learn Haskell. What began as a 3,000-line tool for converting Markdown, reStructured…
Jane Street's Bonsai is a UI library for building reactive web apps in OCaml, used internally for everything from corporate directories to trading tools. Unlike frameworks that fuse state, incrementa…
In a historic milestone for Germany's energy transition, wind and solar power generated more electricity than fossil fuels for the first time ever in the first half of 2026. Renewables accounted for…
Isopolis is an interactive isometric pixel map of San Francisco, blending the charm of retro pixel art with modern web technology. Explore 583 places, from iconic landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridg…
Andy Pavlo, a renowned database researcher and professor at Carnegie Mellon, is joining ClickHouse to lead a new research team, ClickHouse Labs. The lab aims to bridge academic research and industry…
MiniMax's third-generation video model, H3, is now natively supported in ComfyUI from day one. The open-weights model generates video with real stereo sound, up to 2K resolution and 15 seconds per cl…
An interactive visualization follows one HTTP request from a coffee-shop click to order confirmation in 211.4 milliseconds, revealing seven stops, six cross-country trips, and forty machines. It brea…
In the midst of a Cyclospora outbreak linked to shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms' central Mexico facilities, the company has issued five versions of its public statement, each shifting focu…
A defunct fish sauce factory in St. Mary's, Newfoundland, has been leaking a putrid odor for over two decades. With 900,000 liters of fermented capelin sauce to clean up, a food scientist explains th…
Cloudflare's Workers AI serves Moonshot's Kimi K-series and Z.ai's GLM models on GPUs close to users. To fit these large, long-context mixture-of-experts models into memory, they quantize the KV cach…
A new Georgetown Law report reveals that ICE may have added up to 920,000 DNA profiles to the FBI's CODIS database in 2025, making DHS the largest source of new genetic profiles in the criminal DNA s…
Rust's 2026 roadmap includes a project to introduce new auto-traits, `Move` and `Forget`, that let types explicitly opt out of being relocated in memory or forgotten via `mem::forget`. This aims to s…
AirLLM slashes inference memory usage, enabling 70B models to run on a single 4GB GPU without quantization, distillation, or pruning. It streams one layer at a time, so VRAM needs depend on layer siz…
We are looking for companies that are hiring. Please state the location and include REMOTE for remote work, REMOTE (US) or similar if the country is restricted, and ONSITE when remote work is not an…
The past decade has seen Hollywood's film and TV production migrate overseas, driven by blockbuster economics and tax incentives. This article quantifies the exodus, showing that larger budgets incre…
An investigation reveals that Acutus, a news site launched in December 2025, is almost entirely AI-generated, with 69% of its articles flagged as fully AI-generated and only 3 of 94 as human-authored…
handwritten.blog is a unique blogging platform designed to slow down the digital experience by publishing content exactly as it was written by hand. It strips away the noise of modern social media, o…
ssh.place is a unique collaborative art project that lets you draw on a shared canvas directly from your terminal using SSH. No account, no install—just connect with `ssh ssh.place` and start placing…
After 15 years, C-Kermit gets a major update. The maintainer dove into the decades-old C codebase, fixing security issues, adding IPv6 support, and modernizing the build. The new release includes nea…
The Dunning-Kruger effect, a celebrated theory that incompetent people overestimate their abilities, may be a statistical artifact rather than a real cognitive bias. This article investigates the ori…
Book Corners, a service for discovering and sharing little free libraries, initially planned to let users contribute new libraries back to OpenStreetMap. But after researching OSM's import and automa…
AI hyperscalers are on track to issue a record $400 billion in bonds this year, but hidden debts—off-balance-sheet commitments like GPU purchase deals and data center leases—have exploded to $1.65 tr…
I'm looking for work and want to share my information with potential employers. I'll post my location, remote preference, willingness to relocate, technologies, résumé/CV, and email. I hope to connec…
Despite AI's promise, senior developers save only about 15% of their time, while juniors gain 25%. The reason: coding is a small part of the job. Most time goes to design, debugging, reviews, and mee…
DMARC is often mistaken for a spam or phishing filter, but it only verifies that the visible From address is authorized via aligned SPF or DKIM. This article clarifies what DMARC actually protects ag…
LocalAI's team explains why they sometimes write custom C/C++ ports of AI models instead of wrapping existing engines. The payoff: a 66 MiB binary that matches vLLM's throughput and memory footprint,…
Octane is a compiler-based React successor that eliminates the virtual DOM, rules of hooks, and dependency arrays. It compiles components ahead of time, allowing hooks behind conditions and automatic…
A QEMU fork now emulates the original Itanium (Merced) well enough to run Windows XP and Server 2003. The author details building an Itanium cross-compiler on macOS, compiling the firmware, and insta…
PlanetScale's sharded Postgres databases back up at over 50 GB/s, enabling petabyte-scale backups in hours. The system spins up temporary EC2 instances per shard, restores the previous backup from S3…
A 16-year Apple engineer alleges he was fired for refusing to share customer IMEI numbers with AT&T through unsecured email, without required releases. Apple denies wrongdoing, citing just cause. The…
In May, Utah generated more electricity from solar than from any other source, a historic first for the state. The milestone highlights the rapid growth of renewable energy in the region, driven by f…
Nightcrawler is an autonomous penetration testing agent that runs entirely on a smartphone, using a local AI model to discover hosts, map services, find vulnerabilities, and generate reports—all with…
After three years of building a physical UK Class 80x train simulator, the author upgrades from fragile hardboard panels to laser-cut, powder-coated steel, tests a custom headlight control PCB with s…
Epoch AI and METR introduce MirrorCode, a benchmark testing AI on long-horizon coding tasks by reimplementing entire programs from scratch. With a generous inference budget, AI models work for days,…
xkcd's comic 'Earth Temperature Timeline' presents a comprehensive and visually striking timeline of Earth's temperature changes, from the distant past to the present. The comic highlights the dramat…
CP/M-386 is an early-stage operating system that ports CP/M to the 386's 32-bit protected mode, with full Ring-3 TPA support. It boots from floppy or GRUB, supports VGA text and serial consoles, and…
Migrating legacy COBOL to Java is notoriously tricky, especially without test data. Researchers propose the 'Locksmith Loop,' an agentic method that instruments both the COBOL source and generated Ja…
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack has been targeting Norway's ID-porten, a central login system for public services, since early Monday, August 3. The attack, which also affects related s…
After years of faithful service, the author's Kobo Libra H2O started losing its charge within an hour. Fearing a complex repair, they discovered a cheap replacement battery on AliExpress and successf…
In this episode of The Drivecast, host Joel shares his firsthand experience of being wrongfully tracked by Flock Safety cameras due to an error in the FBI's NCIC database. He sits down with Flock CEO…
9front, the Plan 9 fork, has released version 11952, codenamed "This Was Supposed to Be Fun." The release includes a revised affinewarp API, a new gdbfs tool for mounting remote gdb as /proc, a Synap…
A developer discovers that Apple's Mail app triggers iCloud connections via cloudd and nsurlsessiond every time an email is sent, even when iCloud Mail is disabled and the account is non-iCloud. The…
A 2012 deep dive argues that modern regex engines like PCRE are far more powerful than formal language theory suggests. By using recursive subpatterns and named groups, they can match context-free gr…
Big tech's Q2 earnings reveal an AI bubble under strain: Apple's stock dropped 10% on a warning about component costs, IBM lost more value in a day than since Black Monday, and Meta's free cash flow…
Steve Yegge explains how to build a 'loop and graph' system that lets coding agents work through the night on massive problems. He introduces Beads, an issue tracker and knowledge graph, and describe…
Hoplite, a new tool from Y Combinator's S26 batch, aims to simplify the deployment of cloud-based coding agents. It provides a streamlined platform for developers to launch and manage AI coding assis…
KisakCOD is an open-source, fully-buildable reimplementation of Call of Duty 4's multiplayer executable, aimed at mod developers and enthusiasts. It requires Windows, Visual Studio 2022, CMake, Direc…
SearXNG in Rust is a metadata search engine that fans out queries to DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, and Yahoo concurrently, scrapes their HTML results, deduplicates by normalized URL, and ranks using…
Ham Vocke shares a practical tip for developers juggling multiple codebases: standardize common tasks like building, testing, and formatting with task runners. He compares four approaches—bash script…
Flock is a project that explores the transformation of Long Island into an open-air prison, blending surveillance, architecture, and social control. The website presents a collection of images, texts…
PPPoE Half-Bridge is an OpenWrt-based solution that fixes the slow PPPoE performance of UniFi gateways by offloading PPPoE dialing to a dedicated device. It uses a hotplug script to strip the public…
This simulator models bankroll growth under Kelly-based staking, revealing that even a positive edge can produce severe volatility and deep drawdowns. It compares full Kelly vs. fractional Kelly, sho…
The recent failure of hedge fund Situational Awareness (SA) highlights the reflexive, over-leveraged nature of AI-related stock markets. Citadel's block purchase of SA's assets is not necessarily bul…
In Beijing, AI pioneer Kai-Fu Lee sees a future where China leads the world, not just in manufacturing but in technology. The country has surpassed the U.S. in electric vehicles, solar power, and ind…
Converting a float to an int in C++ is undefined behavior when the truncated value doesn't fit the destination type, yet compilers often don't warn. Even Microsoft's Guidelines Support Library (GSL)…
During the early years of World War II, the Luftwaffe used radio navigation systems like Knickebein and X-Gerät to guide bombers to targets in Britain. British scientist R.V. Jones and his team detec…
In the Livelymerge project, we're building a system where the entire heap is an Automerge document, hoping for free merges. But convergence isn't enough: merging concurrent edits to a linked list can…
SPF records follow a single shape: a DNS TXT record starting with v=spf1, followed by space-separated mechanisms and modifiers. This reference covers all eight mechanisms (all, include, a, mx, ptr, i…
This post explores the ZX Spectrum's text mode from a machine code perspective. It covers system organization, loading and running assembly programs, and printing text via ROM routines. The author al…
Cloudflare's new Billable Usage API gives self-serve accounts a single endpoint to pull usage and cost data for all usage-based products, including Workers, R2, D1, Workers AI, Vectorize, Images, and…
While Americans fear AI, over 85% of Chinese see it as beneficial. This optimism, the article argues, stems from the 1990s state-sector reforms that caused mass layoffs in the Northeast but prosperit…
After years of drinking four to five mugs of coffee daily, the author cut back to a single cup each morning. The result: falling asleep easily, waking refreshed, and feeling clear-headed all day. The…
Mu gives AI agents access to the everyday internet as tools: news, web search, mail, markets, weather, video, places, images, files, calendar, contacts, and more. 67 tools behind a single MCP endpoin…
The ZX Spectrum's sound capabilities are explored, covering the 1-bit beeper and the AY-3-8910 chip. The article details using the ROM's BEEPER routine for precise tones, then implementing a custom o…
Monte Carlo methods like Walk on Spheres solve elliptic PDEs without meshing, but they suffer from high variance and slow convergence on complex geometries. This work introduces a decomposition strat…
RFC 9851 declares TLS 1.2 in feature freeze, allowing only urgent security fixes, new exporter labels, and ALPN IDs. This move, driven by TLS 1.3's growing adoption and superior security, also means…
Armature is a product analytics platform designed for AI agent sessions. It captures and analyzes user interactions with your product through AI clients like Claude and ChatGPT, revealing user intent…
I dropped Google Search over 10 years ago because my searches were enshitified and bubble wrapped, and quotes stopped mattering, making it impossible to escape the bubble. As the saying goes, it happ…
MPs on the Business and Trade Select Committee have written to the secretary of state demanding answers over Fujitsu's inclusion in government procurement frameworks worth over £50bn, despite its sel…
Collabora's Kraid compiler for the Panfrost driver stack now passes all 800,000 Vulkan CTS tests for compute shaders, including some that the old compiler fails. While vertex and fragment shading are…
Pinterest's ML training jobs on Ray were crashing due to intermittent network connectivity issues, traced to ENA network driver resets caused by CPU starvation. After months of investigation, the tea…
INT8 ConvRot, natively supported in ComfyUI v0.27.0, is a new quantization method that combines INT8 encoding with a rotation-based technique to handle outliers. It outperforms FP8 and FP8 Scaled on…
In 1989, Bubble Bobble designer Fukio Mitsuji (MTJ) wrote a column for Japanese arcade magazine GAMEST warning that a machine—the "Rip-O-Bot"—could soon generate copycat games at the press of a butto…
I present Cro, a suite of libraries designed to build reactive distributed systems using the Raku language. Our high-level APIs simplify common tasks while the asynchronous pipeline handles complex c…
A new study tests the assumption that NVIDIA GPUs handle warp divergence uniformly since Volta's Independent Thread Scheduling. Using microbenchmarks, hardware counters, and SASS analysis across Pasc…
PISIGuard is a browser extension that automatically detects and masks personal and sensitive information—names, emails, phone numbers, credit card numbers, passwords, API keys—before you send message…
Luca Palmieri from Mainmatter discusses practical strategies for migrating C/C++ projects to Rust. He argues that incremental migration is often safer than a full rewrite, starting with isolated modu…
pytest-leak-finder is a plugin that helps you pinpoint which test is causing another test to fail when run together. It uses a binary search approach, similar to git bisect, to narrow down the culpri…
Visitors to mighil.com from Georgia are met with a security check page, as the site uses a bot protection service that may require CAPTCHA. The page, titled 'Just a moment...', indicates that the web…
is.team replaces Jira, Slack, and Miro with a single infinite canvas where AI agents and your team plan, build, and ship together. It offers built-in AI for task automation, workflow planning, and me…
Sudoku's global journey spans centuries and continents, from Latin squares studied by Euler to a 1979 American puzzle called Number Place, then to Japan where Nikoli gave it a name and style, and fin…
LLMs use positional encodings like RoPE and ALiBi to track token positions. This post shows how to emulate ALiBi's linear bias using a fixed RoPE pair, by adding two dimensions to Q and K and tuning…