Hacker News Digest
· 83 Hacker News
France will ban unsolicited telemarketing calls starting August 11, 2026, following years of consumer complaints and a joint call by 11 consumer groups. The new law imposes fines of up to €375,000 pe…
A new paper reveals that proprietary LLM APIs from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google return encrypted chain-of-thought blocks that can be replayed across sessions, users, and models. By injecting a trace…
An Effort investigation reveals a coordinated campaign by five foreign NGOs and their US affiliates to push digital ID laws in America under the guise of child safety. These groups, including 5Rights…
Compression and language modeling are fundamentally the same task: predicting the next symbol. This post breaks down the anatomy of a compressor—transforms, models, and entropy coders—and explains ar…
England is set to become one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C, with figures showing the target of treating 80% of known cases has been met. Deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in…
OpenAI's head ethicist, Chloé Bakalar, quietly departed in July after less than a year on the job, and the company has not replaced her, leaving it without a dedicated ethicist. The Financial Times r…
Anthropic's Claude has introduced a feature that marks AI-generated content, embedding a subtle watermark in text produced by the model. The watermark is designed to be invisible to readers but detec…
Antirez's h3.c is a native MiniMax-H3 inference engine for Apple Silicon, implementing prompt-to-video generation with Metal performance optimizations. It supports interactive sessions, first/last-fr…
- ▲ 424Mojo 1.0 Is Here
Modular has officially released Mojo 1.0, marking the language's transition to a stable, production-ready foundation. After years of rapid evolution, Mojo now offers a consistent and predictable deve…
As AI coding assistants generate more code, the bottleneck shifts from writing to reviewing. Go's design—readability, reliability, and maintainability—makes it uniquely suited for this era. Its built…
The British Transport Police have expanded their Live Facial Recognition (LFR) trial to London Underground stations. The technology, which scans passengers' faces in real time, is being tested to ide…
As hyperscalers like Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon rack up unprecedented debt to fund AI infrastructure, Microsoft stands alone with substantial free cash flow. Drawing parallels to the railroad boom an…
Grok Bot is a new AI agent from xAI that operates its own computer, allowing it to log into your apps and websites, complete workflows, and work in parallel 24/7. Users can teach it routines, and it…
Photosynthesis is an innovative iPhone camera app that captures images from two lenses at once and fuses them into a single high-resolution photo. It combines the fine detail of the telephoto lens wi…
Cua's Lume team reveals a process-scoped Metal capability shim that unlocks newer GPU paths inside macOS VMs on Apple Silicon, boosting llama.cpp inference dramatically. On an M1 Ultra, TinyLlama 1.1…
EveryCube is a web-based visualization tool that lets you scroll through all 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible states of a Rubik's Cube. It offers interactive 2D and 3D views, with presets like the…
Tencent's Hunyuan3D research team introduces WorldClaw, an agentic framework that generates large-scale, explorable 3D worlds from a single open-ended prompt. It uses planning agents to create a stru…
Trump Media's new Truth API service, launched in August, gives Wall Street traders early access to posts from influential accounts on Truth Social, with over 10 high-frequency trading firms paying $6…
A Wisconsin woman was stopped at gunpoint twice in one week after a Flock license plate camera flagged her car for a homicide alert that should have been cleared days earlier. Milwaukee police admitt…
NVIDIA unveiled Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model designed for high-volume agentic AI tasks, delivering up to 4x faster output and 30% faster task completion. Al…
Mark Twain's obsession with the Paige Compositor, a typesetting machine with 18,000 parts, led to his financial ruin. Despite its theoretical brilliance, the machine failed because it tried to mimic…
Jolt is a self-hosted Clojure implementation that runs on Scheme, with Chez as the native backend and Gambit for JavaScript. It compiles Clojure to a host-neutral IR, emits Scheme, and can build stan…
Curious about how AI-powered desktop apps work under the hood, I set up a man-in-the-middle proxy to intercept VS Code and Copilot's network traffic. I discovered that Copilot sends a surprising amou…
A pen plotter enthusiast discovers how to create holograms by etching reflective ridges into CD jewel cases. Starting from the simple observation of grease smudges on a phone screen, he explains the…
LiquidAI has released LFM2.5-2.6B, a compact 2.6B-parameter model that competes with models four times its size on agentic workloads like tool use and instruction following. It features a 128K contex…
Manus will return to operating as an independent company, requiring the deletion of data generated by certain users on or after December 29, 2025, to comply with regulatory requirements. Affected use…
Git-knife is a desktop GUI that lets you edit git commit metadata—messages, author and committer names/emails, and dates—directly in a spreadsheet-like interface. Unlike existing tools that treat dat…
In 2000, David Friedman landed a staff photography job at Polo Ralph Lauren through a classified ad in the New York Times. Decades later, he dug through his digital archives and the Times Machine to…
Typography on the web can be more than just choosing a font. This article covers five CSS properties that add flair to text: `background-clip` for image-filled letters, `vertical-align` and `align-co…
The C programming language's ABI (Application Binary Interface) is a hidden contract that determines how functions and structs are represented in binary. Breaking it can cause silent, catastrophic fa…
Nvidia unveiled Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a 30B-parameter MoE hybrid model with 3B active parameters, optimized for single-GPU deployment on DGX Spark or H100. It supports up to 1M token context and fe…
A Trump administration policy requiring border-zone money services to report cash transactions over $200—later raised to $1,000—has crippled small businesses like El Paso's Nachita's Grocery. Owners…
Floppydisk.com accepts any quantity of 3.5" floppy disks for recycling. Send more than 200 disks and receive a small shipping offset. They also buy new, sealed disks in bulk (100+). Includes a reimbu…
OpenSSH 10.5 is out, with security fixes and a notable shift: the team now welcomes AI-assisted bug reports, which have surged. They'll ship more frequent releases to get fixes out faster. Key change…
Drugmakers are betting that orexins, peptides that regulate wakefulness, could become the next blockbuster class after GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic. Just as GLP-1 revolutionized weight loss, orexin-based…
Rust 1.98 introduces algebraic operators that let the compiler optimize floating point math aggressively, while keeping strict operations for precision-critical code. By using these operators in a pa…
leanscreen is a new open-source tool that checks Lean 4 proofs for faithfulness—ensuring the theorem statement matches the intended meaning. It runs fast lints and vacuity checks against mathlib in a…
A $580 million undersea power cable connecting Ireland and Wales has been rerouted after Harry Potter fans protested that its landing point at Freshwater West beach would disturb the grave of Dobby t…
New York City Mayor Eric Adams is backing the Delivery Protection Act, which would regulate subcontractors used by Amazon and other corporations to avoid responsibility for workers and street safety.…
Write.md is a free, open-source Markdown editor for macOS that lets you shape your writing environment to match your mood and style. With features like customizable appearance profiles, optional Vim…
A ProPublica reporter's FOIA requests to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have been stymied by a broken web portal and unresponsive staff, reflecting the chaos wrought by DOGE cuts. The porta…
Hyperspace is a macOS app that finds files with identical contents and reclaims disk space by converting all but one in each group into space-saving clones, without deleting any files. It scans selec…
Chloé Bakalar, OpenAI's Head of Ethics, has left the company less than a year after joining, as reported by the Financial Times. Her departure follows the exits of other key figures like Johannes Hei…
Greenland's government has issued a strong warning to Greenland Energy, a Texas-based company linked to Donald Trump, after it brought drilling equipment ashore in the remote Jameson Land region with…
Surveillance company Flock drew up plans to partner with dashcam maker Nexar to collect license plate data from Uber and Lyft drivers, according to a presentation obtained by 404 Media. The proposal,…
tamron-lens-control (tlc) is a Linux-only command-line utility that brings the functionality of the official Tamron Lens Utility to Linux users. It allows photographers to view and change settings on…
Halcyon Video transforms your Jellyfin library into a fully explorable, 3D video rental store built with three.js. Browse aisles lined with your actual movie cases, inspect back covers with real meta…
Mcptoon is a token-efficient MCP CLI client that dramatically reduces the token overhead of MCP (Model Context Protocol) interactions. It achieves a 97% reduction in tool discovery tokens and 40-60%…
A new study from Anthropic probes whether large language models can introspect on their internal states. By injecting known concepts into model activations and measuring self-reported states, researc…
In Texas, a rare bipartisan consensus has formed against Flock Safety's license plate readers, which are deployed across the U.S. with 120,000 cameras and contracts with 40% of police departments. Re…
pg_clickhouse v0.10.0 pushes down correlated subqueries, enabling full pushdown for 16 of 22 TPC-H queries. A TPC-H Q17 query that took 32.7 seconds now runs in 37 ms. The release also introduces a n…
A new study of an AI-powered convenience store in San Francisco reveals that while the bot is polite and helpful, it struggles with complex tasks and unexpected situations, highlighting the limitatio…
Amid an Iranian assassination threat, Donald Trump secretly departed Turkey on a military flight after a NATO summit, using an airport catering cart to evade detection. The White House had claimed he…
Mozilla has rotated the GPG signing key used for Firefox and Thunderbird artifacts after an unencrypted copy of the previous subkey was accidentally committed to a private GitHub repository. An audit…
A Val Town employee receives a cold email with a 'personalised' video pitch from 'Chase,' an AI-generated avatar. The video, which pretends to be human, sparks a discussion on the ethics of using AI…
In a spirited rebuttal to his father's comparison of generative AI to Guitar Hero, the author argues that the analogy is an insult to the game. He contends that Guitar Hero requires genuine skill—rhy…
Windows 11 administrators are frustrated after discovering that Microsoft silently installed a new 'OneDrive Photos' app on enterprise systems. The unexpected installation, which occurred without pri…
Suzanne is an AI tool designed to bridge the gap between digital design and physical manufacturing. It enables users to create and iterate on physical products with unprecedented ease, leveraging AI…
Mark Zuckerberg's $300 million superyacht, Launchpad, was reportedly nearby when a skiff ran out of fuel in Alaskan waters, but it did not respond to requests for assistance. Another vessel, Wilderne…
A DOI link intended to point to a study on AI's water consumption returns a 404 error, highlighting the fragility of digital infrastructure. The DOI Foundation's site has undergone reorganization, an…
Japan's economy faces a triple bind: soaring debt, rising inflation, and an energy crisis worsened by the Iran War. Prime Minister Takaichi's growth agenda clashes with consumer pain, as food prices…
Keet, a Y Combinator-backed app, lets you generate personalized, interactive courses on any topic. Each course includes short explainer videos, quizzes, and games, structured into bite-sized modules…
Raphael Amorim, creator of Rio and Canario, explains his decision to close the source of Canario, a terminal he built for agentic coding. He cites the hidden costs of open source maintenance—issues,…
Paradigm has released a web game and an interactive explorer based on the paper 'The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement' to illustrate the dynamics of AI R&D. Players manage an AI lab, investing…
Rx Kids, founded by Dr. Mona Hanna, provides universal, unconditional cash support to pregnant women and new mothers in participating communities. Moms receive $1,500 during pregnancy, and babies get…
In a case that raises serious privacy concerns, Wisconsin police used Flock's automated license plate readers to track a man's frequent trips to Michigan, where marijuana is legal, and then pulled hi…
Choral is a programming language that brings choreographic programming to Java, allowing developers to write distributed applications as a single program that compiles to Java code for each participa…
For 20 years, National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore has been documenting Earth's animal diversity through his Photo Ark project. Starting with a naked mole-rat in 2006, he has now photographe…
From the one-molecule-thick non-stick coating on the screen to the MEMS sensors that track your every move, this teardown reveals the astonishing engineering inside a modern smartphone. It explains h…
In this personal reflection, the author revisits Steve Gibson's SQRL, a passwordless authentication protocol from 2013, and draws parallels to today's passkeys. While SQRL never gained traction due t…
Dissent magazine argues that the SpaceX IPO, which made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire, reveals the futility of relying on corporate transparency to curb market irrationality. Despite discl…
In the early 2000s, the chip industry's roadmap to smaller transistors hit a wall when 157nm lithography failed due to physics. ASML researcher Jan Mulkens and his team revived an old idea—using wate…
Product managers using Claude in chat mode hit a wall: every session starts from zero. This guide shows how to organize Claude Code into a folder-based workspace that persists context, skills, and ou…
This series maps the entire PyTorch framework, from the Python API down to the kernels and hardware. Part 0 provides a high-level overview, revealing that the Python layer is tiny compared to the 235…
In this excerpt from Peter Seibel's book on Common Lisp, the author explains macros through a whimsical tale about a programmer named Mac who manually expands code notes, eventually leading to the in…
The National Museum of Mathematics highlights two groundbreaking discoveries in tiling theory: the Hat, the first aperiodic monotile, and its chiral relative, the Spectre. Unlike the Hat, which requi…
The Panic of 1873 triggered a worldwide economic depression lasting until 1877, with effects lingering into 1879 in some countries. Sparked by railroad speculation, silver demonetization, and post-wa…
An internal Defense Department memo directs subordinates to award Palantir up to $243.9 million in no-bid contracts through March 2027, with further funding options through 2028. The memo, signed by…
This page documents the author's journey to understand and program the Gigatron TTL Color Micro-computer, a retro machine built from TTL logic chips. It details the CPU's Harvard architecture, its 8-…
A postmortem of Beltrunner, an original game built on the same engine as an arcade-faithful Asteroids remake. The author details design decisions: a countdown-based race with gates, deterministic see…
An Effort News investigation reveals that Partners for a New Economy (P4NE), the main funder of the degrowth roadmap NEEP, is financed by heirs to 19th- and 20th-century fortunes, including the Bosch…
This academic paper examines the cinematic exchanges between Hollywood and Shanghai in the 1930s, exploring how Chinese filmmakers adapted and responded to American films. It analyzes the cultural, e…
Claire Fanger's 'Rewriting Magic' uncovers the story of John of Morigny, a 14th-century monk whose visionary autobiography, 'The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching,' was condemned and burned as heretical i…