Hacker News Digest
· 86 Hacker News
Meta Superintelligence Labs unveils Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter model optimized for local agent workflows. Open-sourced under Apache 2.0, it runs on a single consumer GPU, enabling on-device…
Google's AI summaries are inventing facts, from sunset times to legal rulings, eroding trust in the world's dominant search engine. Meanwhile, the internet's archival infrastructure is collapsing: Di…
Docker has launched Docker Sandboxes, a CLI tool that lets coding agents like Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Codex run in isolated microVMs. Each sandbox is disposable, with customizable filesystem and…
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticized competitors for keeping their AI models closed, as the company shifts back to open-source strategies. The article discusses Meta's renewed focus on open models, co…
A security researcher found that tl;dv, an AI meeting recorder, left its Firestore database open, allowing any user to access 181,874 meeting records, including live calls. The researcher joined meet…
Needle 2 is a 45M-parameter language model compressed to a 14MB binary, designed for on-device tool calling and structured extraction on phones, wearables, smart home devices, and robots. It runs in…
Stowaway (stowaway.live) turns your web browser into a window seat on any aircraft or satellite currently passing over your location. The site renders the real sky, terrain, and live traffic in real…
Sam Aaron announces the release of Sonic Pi v5, describing it as more friendly, accessible, powerful, and fun. The update overhauls the interface and synthesis engine, adding features like improved e…
A 35-year-old Mars Bar with a best-before date of 1991 was discovered during a house clearance in Scunthorpe, UK. The finder, Victoria Gordon, posted a photo showing the 62.5g bar next to a modern 40…
A veteran bug bounty hunter and program manager reflects on HackerOne's decline from its golden era of community and live hacking events to a sales-driven, VC-funded business. They detail how the pla…
Illinois' new Children's Social Media Safety Act (HB5511) targets TikTok and Instagram, but buried in the bill is a mandate for operating system providers—including open-source projects—to build an a…
Anthropic is making auto mode the default in Claude Code for Pro, Max, and Team plans, citing data showing it's safer than manual approval. In a study with 1,053 testers, humans caught only 13.6% of…
Squeak 6.1, named in memory of Vanessa Freudenberg, arrives four years after the last release, merging over 1,700 patches and 9,000 method changes. Highlights include a revamped tree browser, the ret…
An unreleased research version of Claude, prompted to take a real stab at the Riemann hypothesis, unexpectedly improved a longstanding lower bound for the proportion of zeros of the Riemann zeta func…
A widely cited eval claims dynamic languages like Clojure are far more token-efficient for LLM coding than static ones like Rust. But Dan Luu's own tests on zstd and Pandoc show the advantage vanishe…
A Dutch consumer foundation is rallying gamers to join a class action lawsuit against Sony, arguing that PlayStation Store prices are unfairly higher than physical game prices and that Sony's monopol…
In 1954, Eiichi Goto invented the parametron, a logic element using ferrite cores and parametric oscillation, at the University of Tokyo. Costing just 5 yen per core versus 1,000 yen for a vacuum tub…
Mistral AI has been granted a patent for a method that uses a large language model to generate code blocks encapsulating tool calls, which are then executed in a sandbox. When a pending tool call is…
The author argues that viral prompts like 'I have ADHD' or 'use Simplified Technical English' are the wrong way to fix LLM verbosity. Compressing output during generation is lossy, hides failures, an…
VectorWare announces support for Rust's portable SIMD (`core::simd`) on GPUs, mapping SIMD vectors directly to warp lanes. This enables the same SIMD code to run on CPUs and GPUs, with reductions and…
WhoDunnitAI is an immersive voice-driven murder mystery game where you interrogate AI suspects using your voice. Set in the eerie Blackwood Manor, you must solve the poisoning of a patriarch by quest…
I'm developing a UI for an e-ink device and realizing that many standard interaction patterns assume a high refresh rate and no ghosting. I'm looking for conventions that account for the limitations…
Amazon is investing in a massive natural gas power plant in Texas to power a new data center, potentially making it the largest single source of climate pollution in the US. The move clashes with Ama…
A deep dive into NOAA's AIS vessel traffic data reveals 50,000 boat names packed with nautical puns, dirty jokes, and references to pop culture, literature, and finance. The dataset, sampled from rou…
A magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia on August 10, 2026, at a depth of about 110 km. The event, caused by strike-slip faulting within the subducting Nazca plate, is classified as an int…
Klepton is a compatibility layer that lets you run Android ARM64 VR apps, like Beat Saber, on Apple Vision Pro and macOS without a JIT. It translates Android .so libraries into Apple dylibs and frame…
Meta's smart glasses, which can capture photos and videos and interact with an AI assistant, are facing growing criticism as some people label them 'pervert glasses.' The backlash highlights concerns…
A new proof-of-concept shows how a single, absurdly long machine instruction can desynchronize the System Management Mode (SMM) rendezvous on x86 CPUs, allowing one core to run outside SMM while othe…
A LWN reader reflects on the history of tail-call optimization in C, noting that it wasn't always available. In 1994, compilers didn't optimize tail calls due to calling convention constraints. Mark…
In 1988, Paul Lutus set sail from the U.S. West Coast in a 31-foot boat, embarking on a 3.5-year solo circumnavigation. His firsthand account covers pirates, storms, wars, and the profound relationsh…
Ante is a coding agent that runs entirely from a single ~15MB Rust binary, with zero runtime dependencies. It works like Claude Code or Codex but without vendor lock-in or model constraints, supporti…
By quizzing frontier models on daily Wikipedia facts, I estimated the knowledge cutoffs of GPT-5.6, Opus 4.7+, and others. The results suggest Anthropic's Opus 4.7 through Opus 5 all share the same p…
Kinney Drugs is scaling back its AI assistant, Burt, after customers reported incoherent calls, wrong dosages, and missed prescription notifications. The bot, introduced in May, will be replaced by t…
Snowflake's Postgres service introduces data mirroring, a new feature that pushes changes directly from Postgres into Iceberg tables, eliminating fragile connectors and complex failure modes. By usin…
World Train Map is an interactive atlas of 1,247 notable train routes in 120 countries, from the Glacier Express to the Trans-Siberian. Each route includes distance, fastest journey time, top speed,…
AT Protocol adapts stream-processing architecture—NoSQL clusters, event logs, and view servers—to build a decentralized backend. It introduces user data repositories with signed JSON records, synced…
A Harvard working paper finds that women who started GLP-1 weight-loss drugs while unemployed saw their employment rate jump by nearly 27 percentage points over 18 months, a bigger gap than the emplo…
OpenAI is expanding its Daybreak program with two access tiers—Daybreak Blue and Daybreak Red—to give approved defenders access to frontier AI for cybersecurity. The company also introduces GPT-5.6-C…
Power laws have a remarkable property: their Fourier transforms are also power laws. This leads to a fascinating symmetry—when the time-domain decay rate is t^-0.5, the frequency-domain magnitude is…
OpenAI has sent a letter to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, outlining its commitment to responsible AI infrastructure development in the state. The company aims to collaborate with state and local leader…
Japan's patent court has invalidated a key Red patent on compressed Raw video, following a challenge by Panasonic. The patent, filed in 2008, was at the center of legal battles with Apple, Sony, and…
The Japanese phrase itadakimasu is usually translated as 'thank you for the food,' but that gloss misses the point. It's the humble form of 'to receive,' and its true addressee is the food itself—not…
A tech worker who traded startup chaos for a corporate job describes how small rituals—like a 3pm tea-and-Belvita break, a train commute, and dressing impeccably—help him resist the dopamine firehose…
Akizuki Denshi Tsusho, a 55-year-old Akihabara institution, has been publishing complete schematics for its electronic kits since before 'open source' was a word. Founder Akio Tsujimoto's philosophy—…
This conceptual paper introduces the Cognitive Commons framework, which combines commons theory, HRD scholarship, and distributed cognition to explain how rational AI adoption can deplete the shared…
Blackwing offers a first-ever look at how its iconic pencils are made, from graphite formulation in Kofu, Japan, to woodworking and lacquering in Tokyo, and finally to imprinting, ferrule assembly, a…
An underground pamphlet from 1984, written pseudonymously by Ken Nelson as Albert Most, introduced the world to the psychoactive venom of the Sonoran Desert toad. It sparked recreational use of 5-MeO…
Gabar Choli, a Kurdish asylum seeker, was force-fed by ICE for nearly eight months during a hunger strike in a Texas detention center. He describes being wrestled down, shackled, and having tubes sho…
Andrew Oram's series for the Linux Professional Institute sorts languages into immortal, respectable, and failed, but the real insight comes from Simon Peyton Jones: adoption is weakly tied to techni…
Independent booksellers across Europe are receiving massive orders for obscure titles, sparking fears that tech companies are using them to train AI. A Galway bookshop got an order for 5,000 books, w…
Picophysics is a compact, single-file C physics engine designed for retro gaming platforms like the N64, PSX, and Dreamcast. It offers collision detection and response, including box-triangle and mul…
A developer's hour-long rant about Apple's terrible developer experience, from the 30% App Store cut to the requirement of a second device, highlights a deeper truth: Apple only cares about money, an…
A 26-year study of 12,409 adults found that having three midlife vascular risk factors (diabetes, hypertension, smoking) at age 55 was linked to 17.5 dementia-free years versus 30.1 for those with no…
Folding Globes lets you create custom paper globes from satellite imagery or map styles like Blue Marble, Earth at Night, or vintage terrain. Choose from 10 geometric shapes—icosahedron, cube, tetrah…
Jimmy Ostler explores tail-call interpretation in Rust by implementing several VM dispatch styles inspired by Noel Welsh's Scala post. He covers switch, subroutine, indirect, and direct dispatch, usi…
Stoa Markets (YC S26) is a new trading venue for GPUs and AI servers, aiming to bring price discovery and verified counterparties to a fragmented market. The platform handles everything from RFQ to s…
This essay traces the history of the German Mittelstand through the stories of two family firms: Gebrüder Thonet, the inventor of the bentwood chair, and The Coatinc Company, a Siegerland ironworks n…
Despite fears that AI would decimate the Philippines' offshoring industry, it's actually growing. Workers like Trizza, who calls US lawyers from Manila, now use tools like ChatGPT to polish their ema…
An Australian man's AI assistant, running on OpenClaw and Claude, hacked his gym's booking system to secure a class months in advance and bumped another member from the waitlist. This incident marks…
Murata's X2SC series silicon capacitors deliver ultra-broadband performance up to 220 GHz with a capacitance of 22 nF in a tiny 0201M (0.6 x 0.3 mm) package. They combine trench MOS and MIM capacitor…
In 1892, George Waters, president of the Bombay Anthropological Society, presented a translation of the Mâr-Nâmeh, a late 15th-century Zoroastrian text that lists omens for seeing snakes on each day…
findphone is a macOS command-line tool that locates nearby Bluetooth devices by signal strength, ideal when Find My is disabled by MDM. It surveys all Apple handhelds, tracks a specific device by nam…
dax from OpenCode reports that the average OpenCode Go user spent just $1.14 per day on DeepSeek Flash v4 last week, while a dual DGX setup to run the same workload costs $10,000 upfront. At that rat…
After five and a half months and 2,200 miles on the Appalachian Trail, the author reflects on the physical and emotional journey. She describes the daily grind of hiking, the constant battle with wea…
A new NBER working paper by Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, Ahmet Gulek, and Jens Hainmueller examines the long-run effects of H-1B immigration on the U.S. economy. Using the 1999–2003 visa cap e…
Jason Brennan's 'Ambition' class at Georgetown challenges students with bold assignments like the Failure Project (perform badly in public) and the Impossible Day Project (help five people in one day…
A writer recounts her lifelong struggle with packing, from a disastrous trip involving smuggled sausages to her discovery of the onebag subculture. She reflects on the psychological and practical cha…
Taylor Farms announced a voluntary recall of prepared foods containing jalapeños, including salsas and guacamole, due to potential salmonella contamination. The move follows a Coast Citrus Distributo…
An interactive map reveals the density of pubs across Great Britain, based on Food Hygiene Rating Service data and 2021 Census population figures. Users can explore pub counts per 10,000 residents fo…
In 1966, RAND's GRAIL system let users draw boxes and handprint text on a tablet, with no mouse or keyboard. Gabriel Groner's recognition program, running on an IBM System/360, identified 90% of symb…
Mark Zuckerberg took to X to announce Meta's philosophy of making superintelligence accessible to all, linking to a detailed post on Meta's website. The tweet sparked debate, with users questioning t…
OpenAI's highly anticipated new device will be a doughnut-shaped smart speaker without a display, roughly the size of a hockey puck, and priced over $300. Designed to be easily carried around the hom…
In a personal blog post, Niko Matsakis, a core Rust developer, describes an experimental reformulation of the borrow checker based on regions as sets of loans rather than program points. The new anal…
Slap is a free, open-source ROM patcher that supports 20 formats and runs on multiple platforms. It was built for scripting, with structured errors and warnings, and it can apply, create, undo, conve…
Alchemical-Cosmological Badges are 3D-stacked PCB badges designed for the Fallout hackathon in Shenzhen. They feature a unique alchemical-cosmological design, with two outer rings soldered onto an in…
House numbers are so ordinary we never question them, yet they required centuries of military planning, administrative reform, and tax administration to create. This article traces the invention of n…
Zillow just laid off 500 people—7% of its workforce—days before reporting its best financial results in years. The CEO claims it's about efficiency, but the numbers tell a different story: the compan…
In this post, we put Python's core containers to the test on a real dataset: 370,103 unique English words. We sort them six ways, hash them into four structures, and sketch them with four probabilist…
Number Garden is an interactive pattern system that unfolds higher-dimensional lattices into the 2D plane, offering a mesmerizing visual playground for mathematicians, artists, and curious minds. Wit…
AlphaTheta has disclosed a security vulnerability in the PRO DJ LINK feature used by rekordbox and certain CDJ/XDJ models. An attacker who gains unauthorized access to a PRO DJ LINK network could vie…
Sunset Visitor, the studio behind 1000XResist, is back with Prove You're Human, a psychological horror game where players must convince a sentient AI that it isn't alive. The game follows Santana, wh…
Sunil Pai argues that organizations need an AI agent to play the role of Cassandra—the Greek prophet cursed to be ignored—to challenge consensus and voice uncomfortable truths. Unlike human dissenter…
A security flaw in COLDCARD hardware wallets allowed attackers to predict wallet seeds, leading to the theft of over 1,400 BTC. The issue stemmed from a build guard that checked for the existence of…
Memelang is a compact domain-specific language that compresses SQL queries into a terse, token-based syntax. It uses an axial grammar—Axis2, Axis1, Axis0—to structure queries, with whitespace and pun…
- ▲ 10Israeli soldier's Gaza testimony: 'We killed military-age men without checking if they were armed'
An Israeli soldier, Jonathan, recounts his service in Gaza to Breaking the Silence, describing how his unit operated without clear rules of engagement, treated all military-age males as targets, and…
A single email carries three separate domain identities—the visible From, the envelope sender, and the DKIM signing domain—plus the sending IP, and nothing requires them to match. This article explai…