Hacker News Digest
· 77 Hacker News
In Mario Kart 8, choosing a driver, kart body, tires, and glider involves trade-offs between speed, acceleration, and mini-turbo. With 585 unique builds, finding the best is a multi-objective optimiz…
AMD has acquired AI chip startup Taalas, which bakes model weights directly into silicon to dramatically speed up inference. Taalas's first chip, the HC1, served Meta's Llama 3.1 8B at 16,960 tokens…
A passionate botanist offers a practical, no-nonsense guide for self-taught botany, debunking intimidation around Latin terminology and taxonomy. The post recommends key textbooks like Michael Simpso…
The cost of making software has collapsed: AI can now generate plausible code instantly, removing the friction that once filtered out mediocrity. The author argues that this friction was the curricul…
Artificial Analysis has updated its Agentic Index, and Qwen3.8 Max from Alibaba now ranks as the best overall model for agentic capabilities. The index, part of the Intelligence Index v4.1, aggregate…
GitHub Actions is currently experiencing degraded availability, with some workflow runs failing to start or failing partway through. Requests to the Actions REST API are also returning errors, and so…
In this first-person account, developer Dominic Szablewski details the creation of Xibalba 64, a new physical N64 game published by Modretro in 2026. He explains how he ported his JavaScript game eng…
AI-generated software is like steak from a cheap restaurant: technically edible, rarely great. We churn out agents, prompts, and workflows, hoping for a perfect medium-rare, but often get charcoal. T…
To celebrate Quake's 30th anniversary, id Software and MachineGames have released Dawn of the Machine, a free update for Quake owners on all major platforms. The new episode features 19 new maps, a n…
A browser game simulating human oversight of an AI coding agent reveals that players missed 32.9% of malicious commands, with the most-missed being 'npm run analyze' (64.7% approval). The game's 40,0…
Nashville's Metro Council voted 27-5 to authorize eminent domain proceedings against a 23-acre site where developer DC Blox planned a $700 million data center next to the Nashville Zoo. Mayor Freddie…
OpenAI is rolling out updates to ChatGPT, introducing GPT-5.6 Sol for Plus and Pro users with improved factual accuracy and a new slider to control reasoning depth. Free users get GPT-5.6 Luna as the…
Using the world's most powerful solar telescope, scientists have captured the Sun's surface in unprecedented detail, revealing 'whirlpools' of activity caused by twisted magnetic fields. These vortic…
Altar II is a revolutionary mechanical keyboard that combines the tactile feel of a mechanical switch with an impossibly thin 4.75mm profile, thinner than Apple's Magic Keyboard. It features a unique…
Filtering a slice of numbers sounds trivial, but a simple `if` can tank performance when the data is unpredictable. Serhii Potapov discovered that his idiomatic Rust filter was 4x slower on shuffled…
Can, the solo developer behind Herdr, announces that the open-source agent runtime is joining Y Combinator's F26 batch. Herdr, which has gained 25k GitHub stars and 340k downloads, offers a terminal-…
USB-C was supposed to be the one connector for everything, but its versatility means cables look identical while hiding wildly different capabilities. The author, tired of guessing which cable could…
The Pareto front, also known as the Pareto frontier or curve, is a fundamental concept in multi-objective optimization. It represents the set of all Pareto efficient solutions—those where no solution…
ProvenMetal, a YC S26 startup, offers a seven-day standard turnaround for PCB fabrication and assembly, with no expedite fees. The entire build process—sourcing, fabrication, assembly, and testing—is…
A GitHub issue proposes making 'Disable' the default action in Universal Android Debloater Next Generation, as Android 17 now prevents uninstalling system apps via ADB. The issue highlights that disa…
Nepal's National Cyber Security Centre is the 47th government to join Have I Been Pwned's free government service. The service monitors government email addresses against breach data, enabling rapid…
Chip Tycoon is an interactive animation that turns chip manufacturing into a theme park ride. A cart carries a silicon wafer through 20 stages, from sand to finished chips, with each stop explaining…
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a bioengineered chewing gum that dramatically reduces microbes linked to head and neck cancer. In tests on patient samples, the gum cut HP…
Fabian Giesen, a game developer, noticed that after a recent update, his phone's motion detection misinterprets the start of a run as a snatch-and-grab. The phone triggers an alarm, assuming someone…
In 1996, I developed a windowed operating system in 32-bit machine code for a custom Am29000 computer built by my father. Despite the processor's legendary speed, I faced challenges with memory and p…
The Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 to eliminate the 22-year-old rule limiting a single company's reach to 39% of U.S. TV households, replacing it with a case-by-case review. Chairman Bre…
xAI, now under SpaceX, has been running unpermitted gas turbines at its Memphis Colossus data center, polluting the air and harming local communities. Despite a lawsuit from the Southern Environmenta…
This post breaks down the core components of vLLM, a high-throughput LLM inference system. It covers the LLM engine, scheduling, paged attention, continuous batching, advanced features like chunked p…
The author reflects on why Django remains a favorite framework after years of building Buttondown, praising its invisible structure and the long-term leverage of middlewares, model inheritance, actio…
France is set to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls next week, a move aimed at shielding consumers from intrusive calls. The new law, reported by AP News, will require companies to obtain prior cons…
In a mechatronics project, the author needed to anchor timing belts to a carriage. Instead of using zip ties or clamps, they designed a loopback fastener directly into the carriage: a circular recess…
Japan's cities consistently rank among the world's most liveable, and residents say it's down to intentional design. From covered shopping streets that make errands social, to a transit system that w…
A personal look back at working for London digital agency Blueberry during the dot-com boom, featuring photos of the office, translucent iMacs, CRT monitors, and the author's hand-coded HTML. The aut…
Channels SDK is an open-source toolkit that connects AI agents to communication platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and Telegram. It enables native interactive UI, tool calling, and human…
GitHub is battling a multi-service incident that began with degraded Actions performance and escalated to widespread failures. Workflow runs are failing or delayed, queued jobs may time out, and GitH…
Artist David Revoy shares a collection of screenshots showing dozens of online comments accusing his hand-drawn artworks and comics of being AI-generated. Despite sharing timelapses and creating ever…
In Guerrero, Mexico, a vigilante group of 50 men, armed with military-grade weapons smuggled from the U.S., defends their communities against the La Nueva Familia Michoacana cartel. Formed in 2020 an…
Jane Street has released a new puzzle that challenges you to reverse engineer an ASIC from its GDS layout. The chip's design is unlabeled, so you must recover the netlist, figure out its purpose, and…
Several U.S. cities have replaced Flock's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras with Axon's systems, citing privacy concerns, data sharing with ICE, and the lack of a national network in Axon…
New research suggests that primordial black holes—hypothetical remnants from the early universe—could trigger white dwarf stars to explode as Type Ia supernovae. By comparing models with real superno…
Rafa shares his approach to building a bookmark editing form for ties.pub using progressive enhancement. He starts with a no-JS version, then layers htmx for interactivity like live search. The post…
Researchers in China have created a textile from living mycelium that is self-cleaning, can repair itself, and can be customized with 'plug-and-play' add-ons like color or UV resistance. The material…
DeepSeek announced plans to significantly increase prices for its platform services. The announcement was made via the DeepSeek Platform usage page, which also includes a cookie policy update. The ex…
Security researcher Hyunwoo Kim (@v4bel) has published Zapscape (CVE-2026-64561), a use-after-free vulnerability in KVM/x86's shadow MMU that allows a guest to escape to the host and execute code wit…
Japan's foreign ministry has formally expressed concern to the US Embassy in Tokyo over the Trump administration's unauthorized use of Japanese anime and game characters like Pokemon and Naruto in of…
Anthropic's LLM Claude Mythos found a key-recovery attack on the post-quantum signature candidate HAWK-512, reducing its security from 128 bits to at most 108, but the attack isn't practical. It also…
Software's historic superpower — near-zero marginal cost per user — is eroding as AI products require expensive LLM calls for every interaction. Gross margins on AI products average just 52% in 2026,…
Morioka Shoten in Ginza, Tokyo, sells only one book at a time, for six days a week. Owner Yoshiyuki Morioka, a former bookstore clerk, conceived the idea to deepen the reader's connection to each boo…
Quantego is a family of LEGO models of IBM Quantum Computers, created by Mathilda Lahmann and featuring three versions: a 49-brick System One, a 105-brick System Two, and a 1024-brick high-end System…
A developer added a simple, ephemeral chat widget to his blog, expecting nothing from it. But after sharing a controversial article on Hacker News, the chat became a weapon: trolls flooded it with in…
Washington, DC's Metro system is known for its distinctive vaulted ceilings, but not all stations are alike. This guide breaks down the 11 basic architectural designs, from the common 'waffle' vault…
Long-term bond yields in the US, France, Japan, and Britain have climbed to their highest levels since the 2007-09 financial crisis, signaling that the era of ultra-low interest rates is over. The Ec…
Wirecutter's investigation reveals that Talenti, once beloved for its premium gelato, has quietly changed its recipe and manufacturing process, leading to a noticeable decline in quality. The brand,…
This project ports Pokémon Emerald to the RP2350 microcontroller, running the full game at 60 fps with HDMI output, real buttons, and persistent saves—no emulator involved. The GBA's video hardware i…
Twelve former federal prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases sent a letter to the Senate urging it to stop confirming judicial nominees who refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden legitimately won th…
Decimen Optical Transfer is an open-source web app that transmits files between devices using only a screen and a camera. It encodes data as an endless stream of animated QR codes, which the receivin…
Virginia, home to the nation's densest data center concentration, now requires data centers to cover the cost of new dedicated power infrastructure, aiming to shield homeowners from rising electric b…
Skyline Co-op reimagines the classic tower-building game with democratic socialism at its core. As the elected steward of a resident-owned skyscraper, you manage housing, amenities, and infrastructur…
demake is a revolutionary tool that lets you write a game once and compile it to ROMs for any retro game console, all in your browser. With a simple, high-level language and built-in asset management…
Venkatesh Rao invites fiction writers to contribute to Jamverse, a near-future Earth setting with strange but non-magical rules. A worldbuilding contest runs until July 31. Rao shares two microfictio…
Nashville's Metro Council voted 27-5 to authorize eminent domain proceedings to acquire the property next to the Nashville Zoo, where developer DC Blox plans to build a data center. The move, initiat…
A hiker's question about the least accessible point in the San Gabriel Mountains led to a computational quest. Using OpenStreetMap data and Voronoi diagrams, the author mapped all roads and trails, p…
Comics historian Guy Lawley traces the printing technology behind the classic vintage comic aesthetic—from the rotary presses and newsprint of the newspaper industry to the CMYK color system. Part on…
Wallfacer is a terminal session manager for AI coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor CLI, Kiro CLI, and Codex. It indexes all your AI coding sessions into a single searchable database, allowing you t…
Astronomers have achieved a groundbreaking milestone by capturing the highest-resolution image of the Sun's surface to date. The image reveals intricate details of solar granules and sunspots, offeri…
In the early 1980s, the American telephone industry underwent a chaotic transformation. This article explores the shift from leased, centrally-managed telephones to customer-owned devices, focusing o…
A new study in the journal Behaviour investigates whether birds experience positive emotions during flight. Researchers observed galahs (Eolophus roseicapilla) and found that after flying, the birds…
After a year with his handwired prototype, Marcin Juszkiewicz built a new keyboard, Alicja v2, using KLE NG to generate PCB and plate files, then assembling it with an RP2040 Stamp, Kailh hotswap soc…
We present two small library combinators for miniKanren that bring bottom-up enumeration with observational deduplication, a standard tool in non-relational program-by-example synthesizers, into the…
Science for Kids is an illustrated science platform that answers everyday questions with real mechanisms, real research, and experiments you can run at home. Covering chemistry, biology, astronomy, t…
During a penetration test, the author found that IBM i's QSYRUPWD API, which returns encrypted password data, produces output incompatible with existing cracking tools like John the Ripper for QPWDLV…
A step-by-step visual guide to a coloring game studied since 1955, for which Erdős offered prize money. The guide explains the game, the known results for two and three colors, and the 2026 result th…
A distributed message broker kept OOM-killing pods under identical memory loads, revealing a design flaw: each node loaded the entire fleet's session state at boot. The fix wasn't tuning but reclassi…
Agrivoltaics—combining solar panels with farming—is proving that shade can improve crop yields and reduce water consumption. In Arizona, chiltepin peppers produced three times more fruit, jalapeños m…
Fabian Giesen's ryg_rans, a 2014 rANS coding example, is not meant for production use. It's a toy implementation to illustrate algorithm ideas, not a robust or optimized library. Giesen advises again…
After paternity leave, a developer realizes he never used most IDE features and, with AI coding assistants now 'really good,' builds his own custom IDE called Toast. He reflects on how LLMs enable bu…
Ship Safe is a free, open-source CLI that scans your repository for security issues introduced by AI coding agents. It detects CI/CD misconfigurations, over-permissive agent permissions, MCP tool inj…