Hacker News Digest
· 92 Hacker News
Firefox has announced it will continue supporting uBlock Origin even as Microsoft Edge and other Chromium-based browsers phase out the extension due to the shift to Manifest V3. This makes Firefox th…
Qwen releases Qwen3.8-27B, a 27B-parameter dense model with open weights, claiming it's the most capable open model yet. It excels in coding, agentic tasks, and multimodal understanding, with native…
Z.ai's GLM-5.3, built solely through post-training scaling, achieves state-of-the-art coding and cyber capabilities. It doubles exploitation benchmark scores over GLM-5.2, excelling in vulnerability…
Despite being more capable on benchmarks, Opus 5 feels like a downgrade to many developers compared to Opus 4.7, 4.8, and Fable. The author argues that these models are better because they ask clarif…
A satirical website called 'Every Fucking Website' parodies the ubiquitous cookie consent banners and COVID-19 notices that plague the web. It highlights the absurdity of having to click 'I agree' on…
Google has released HEIR, an open-source compiler that lets developers run AI models on encrypted data without decrypting it, enabling private inference for tasks like recommendations and fraud detec…
Count Binface, the self-styled intergalactic space warrior, received nearly 10,000 votes in the Clacton by-election, his best performance yet. The comedian Jon Harvey, who plays the character, came s…
At Usenix Security, the author reflects on how AI-powered vulnerability hunting could soon eliminate remotely exploitable bugs in major software. While great for security, this threatens law enforcem…
A developer returns to his long-dormant blog to reflect on how he lost the habit of quiet, unhurried thinking. Over the years, he filled every silent moment with podcasts and social media, until one…
A personal reflection on the seven books on the author's elbow shelf, including Roget's Thesaurus, Sir Thomas Browne's prose, and Boccaccio's Decameron. The author discusses the misunderstood purpose…
Australia's subsidized home battery program has led to over 500,000 installations in just over a year, more than the U.S. has, helping to halve wholesale electricity prices. The batteries store surpl…
Prof. Tom Yeh's Substack, AI by Hand, teaches the math, algorithms, and architectures of AI through hands-on, interactive lessons. With over 73,000 subscribers, it offers a library of workbooks and s…
RustDesk now offers true unattended remote access on Wayland, including multi-monitor setups, with a preview build for x86_64 Debian/Ubuntu systems. Unlike AnyDesk and TeamViewer, which still lack fu…
Claude Code's token usage and costs are driven by input/output token pricing, prompt caching, and how much context accumulates in a session. Output tokens cost ~5x input, and thinking tokens are cont…
Alibaba's Qwen team has released the open weights for Qwen3.8-27B, a native multimodal dense model that outperforms Qwen3.7-Plus overall despite its compact 27B parameters. It excels in real-world co…
Newly disclosed records show the Department of Homeland Security ran a sweeping surveillance operation, 'Operation Puppet Master,' against leftwing organizations and protesters opposing immigration e…
Classifying products or queries with LLMs is standard, but restricting outputs to a fixed taxonomy can be costly and limiting. Instead, let a cheap LLM invent hypothetical classifications, then map t…
DeepSeek has launched DeepSeek-V4-Pro, its latest flagship model, with major agent upgrades and flexible reasoning effort controls. The release also introduces peak and off-peak API pricing, with off…
France's Constitutional Council struck down a bill that would have barred under-15s from social media, ruling that the age verification requirement disproportionately infringed on freedom of expressi…
A developer who loves reading personal blogs on his phone but hates eye strain bought a 4.3-inch X4 e-reader, installed the open-source Crosspoint firmware, and created 'feedpaper' — a tool that turn…
Mixedbread introduces Toast 1, a specialized search agent that matches or outperforms frontier models like Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on search quality while being up to 10× cheaper and 12× faster…
Bluesky has launched Bluesky Protocol Services, a new brand and website for the public infrastructure it operates on the AT Protocol. The headline feature is Jetstream v2, which adds Network Replay:…
A frequent flyer's open letter to airport staff apologizes for passenger confusion, from the elderly woman who doesn't understand boarding calls to the contradictory signs and instructions. The autho…
Leopold Aschenbrenner's $20 billion hedge fund, Situational Awareness, blew up, and the author—an ex-hedge fund guy with an AI background—sees a pattern: the frontier AI lab culture's lack of intelle…
Dmitry.GR argues that RISC-V's one-size-fits-all ISA is fundamentally flawed. For cheap microcontrollers, its interrupt handling and compressed instructions are worse than the decade-old Cortex-M0. F…
A hypothesis on the near future of software, books, music, and movies, where AI-generated 'slop' becomes the cheap, abundant norm, pushing human-made work into a luxury tier. Drawing parallels to fas…
Ultraviolet photography reveals that many birds, like Anna's hummingbird, have UV-reflective feathers invisible to humans, creating a hidden dimension of color. This site showcases UV and visible lig…
SparrowMap is a crowdsourced surveillance network that flips the lens on government vehicles. Volunteers point an old phone or webcam at a street; the software detects vehicles, keeps only those belo…
Writing about topics you're still learning forces clarity and research. The author argues that every post should argue a point, and that the process of writing often changes your mind. He shares exam…
A developer vents about the growing trend of AI-generated pull requests that span thousands of lines, arguing that small PRs are essential for reviewability and maintainability. The author dismisses…
In 2007, Google Maps added a feature that let users drag route endpoints and instantly see recalculated paths. This hinted at a fast A* pathfinding optimization that author Amit Patel had never encou…
A visual, interactive explainer of how statistical watermarks hide inside AI-generated text, and what erases them. It covers the core mechanism (secret-keyed nudging of word choices), how detection w…
The Nix language's laziness lets attribute sets contain themselves, enabling infinite recursion. This blog post explores that by turning attribute paths into button sequences for Super Mario Bros. 3,…
ArcadeMaker is a beginner-friendly, cross-platform 2D game engine that comes with its own programming language (Exp) and an integrated development environment (IDE). Built in C# and powered by MonoGa…
ntfy is an open-source, HTTP-based pub-sub notification service that lets you send push notifications to your phone or desktop from any script or app using a simple PUT or POST request. It supports p…
Vishal Garg, ousted CEO of Better Home & Finance, claims he was duped by his successor Daniel Lewis, who he says praised the company to gain a board seat and then orchestrated his removal. Garg, know…
A federal judge has ordered Google to remove 'anticompetitive friction' that makes it difficult for users to install rival app stores on Android. The ruling, part of the Epic v. Google antitrust case…
Ember is a collection of color palettes designed to remain distinguishable under warm-screen filters like Redshift and Night Shift. It provides terminal themes, UI surfaces, categorical chart colors,…
WhatCable is a macOS menu bar app that diagnoses USB-C connections by reading what the Mac actually negotiates, not what the packaging claims. It shows charging speed, data speed, display quality, an…
This page explores Turbo Pascal's role on small computers like the MSX, CP/M, and MS-DOS systems. It covers the history of Pascal, from Blaise Pascal to Niklaus Wirth, and highlights Turbo Pascal's p…
LuaCAD is a scriptable CAD tool that lets you create parametric 2D and 3D models using Lua, a powerful and consistent language. It embeds Lua 5.4 in a Rust engine, enabling direct CSG operations via…
In Emacs Lisp, code is data, and macros exploit this dualism to let you extend the language itself. This post explains what homoiconicity really means, shows how ubiquitous macros are (even `defun` i…
Cursor, the AI-powered coding platform, has been officially acquired by SpaceX, completing a process that began in April with a partnership to accelerate model training. With access to SpaceX's massi…
Jason Arday, the former University of Cambridge professor who resigned amid plagiarism allegations, was found dead at his home in Battersea, south London. Police say the death is unexpected but not s…
Mole is a deep-research agent that runs as a single static binary on your machine, using your own API keys. It decomposes questions, searches, reads sources, extracts claims, verifies each quote agai…
During the August 12 eclipse, the Xiaomi 17 Ultra's camera AI mistakenly applied its moon-enhancement algorithm to photos of the sun, adding lunar craters and details. This reveals how smartphone mak…
Two years after publishing a point-cloud collision-checking data structure, the author finds that Chen and Yeh's multilevel voxel table (MVT) outperforms it on every benchmark. The MVT replaces neare…
Earth.nullschool.net is an interactive visualization of global weather and ocean conditions, offering real-time and historical data on wind, temperature, precipitation, and more. Users can explore va…
A new universal gadget chain turns a single Marshal.load into command execution on Ruby 4.0.6, the latest release. It works unchanged on Ruby 3.3 and above. The chain reuses old gadgets in new ways a…
Mark Walter's sale of the Lakers for a $12.5 billion valuation—after a year of doing nothing but facing fraud investigations—exposes the rotten core of billionaire sports ownership. American law shie…
Kukuroo is a self-hosted push notification service that runs entirely on Cloudflare Workers, enabling iOS devices to receive web push notifications without a dedicated server or native app. It levera…
Rust's C FFI trades compile-time safety for access to legacy code, but Fil-C offers a better deal: recompile C/C++ with runtime checks and GC, making memory violations panic instead of exploit. The a…
Before Alexandria, there was Nineveh. Assyrian king Ashurbanipal assembled a vast library of cuneiform tablets in the 7th century BC, preserving Mesopotamian knowledge for millennia. When the city fe…
GoonHost presents a groundbreaking open-source implementation of the IPv8 Internet-Draft, built from scratch across the Linux kernel, Musl libc, iproute2, FRRouting, and a Go-based Zone Server. This…
A C89 standard ambiguity regarding implicit function declarations remains unresolved, as GCC and Clang interpret the 'innermost block' phrase differently. The issue arises in code like `int f(int f[s…
The National Palace Museum in Taipei draws millions of visitors, but its most beloved artifact is a small jadeite cabbage carved with insects. Despite being one of many jade cabbages from the Qing dy…
A study from the University of Oulu reveals that coffee consumption is associated with metabolic health and sex hormone levels. The findings suggest that regular coffee intake may influence hormone r…
Unsloth has released GGUF quantizations of Qwen3.8-27B, the latest dense model in the Qwen open-model family. It supports vision-language understanding, flexible thinking control, and improved agenti…
In this video, The Serial Port explores the story of the Novell NE2000, one of the most iconic network interface cards in computing history. The video covers early Ethernet controllers, National Semi…
AI Model Atlas, built with Cosmograph, turns the entire population of machine-learning models into an interactive 3D graph. It reveals how models evolve, relate, and transform through fine-tuning, of…
Anthropic explains the implementation of text watermarking for Claude, a technique that embeds an imperceptible pattern in generated text to help identify AI-generated content, complying with the EU…
Deep beneath Naica, Mexico, lies a cave filled with giant selenite crystals, some over 11 meters long and weighing 12 tons. Discovered in 2000, the cave is a natural wonder, but its extreme heat and…
HashAgent is a new tool that packages an AI agent into a single URL, which can be shared and run entirely on the recipient's device using WebGPU. The agent's data stays in memory, models range from 3…
Anthropic's August 2026 Risk Report assesses catastrophic risks from its AI systems, focusing on misalignment, automated R&D, and chemical/biological weapons. The report details threat models, model…
Despite the dominance of Unity and Unreal, custom engines still power 43% of game sales. This post argues that building your own engine—even a game-specific one—offers deep learning and independence.…
A hacker known as ZeroBytes claims to have stolen data on 680,000 taxpayers from France's tax authority, DGFiP, in late June. The breach, which the government confirmed after the hacker's forum post,…
A product manager with two decades of improv comedy experience reveals how stage skills like listening, saying 'Yes, And,' and embracing failure translate into leading mixed Japanese and internationa…
Researchers have established new lower and upper bounds for the Grothendieck constant, a fundamental quantity in computer science and mathematics. Their work determines the previously unknown tenths…
Nine PBS, a public television station, has filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain, the data center hosting its archival materials, after its contracted cloud storage vendor, Open Source Storage (OSS),…
Iroh has made its managed relays authenticated by default, requiring endpoints to present a token issued by the project's API key. This prevents unauthorized use of relay bandwidth and connection slo…
Integer division and remainder operations are notoriously slow on modern CPUs, while floating-point division is much faster. This post shows that for integers fitting within the precision of double o…
Lumabri lets you run massive mixture-of-experts models like GLM, OLMoE, and DeepSeek on a peer-to-peer swarm. One machine shares a model, and any other machine can chat with it without downloading th…
Systems that generate GPU kernels with language models claim high correctness, but their tests are loose—running a few random inputs at one shape and checking for approximate matches. A new contract-…
BBC Verify has confirmed a major oil slick washing up on Iran's Qeshm Island, originating from the Minoan Pioneer bulk carrier struck in the Strait of Hormuz on 3 August. Satellite imagery shows the…
In this interview, Fiora 5 CEO Darian Damikos explains why his startup chose RISC-V over ARM: the open instruction set lets them prototype faster and avoid licensing hurdles. But the real challenge f…
A detailed breakdown of every exterior shot in the 1974 classic The Taking of Pelham 123, pinpointing each location in modern Manhattan. The filmmakers used real streets to match the action, and desp…
A platform engineering analysis tests the same app with and without a CPU limit, finding that limits freeze apps many times per second even when the node has idle CPU, wrecking tail latency and slowi…
Lea Verou argues that user-facing dark mode toggles should only show two options, light and dark, hiding the 'follow system' behavior behind a smart toggle. This reduces cognitive load and avoids exp…
The author argues that smartphones need a system-level 'guest lock' to restrict access to the active app, preventing others from snooping when you hand over your phone. They also propose hiding photo…
Lambdock is a modern, hyper-hackable Wayland-native desktop dock for GNU/Linux, built with a high-performance C core and GTK4 Layer-Shell. It features dynamic window tracking, smooth auto-hide animat…
Graft is an open-source context layer that builds a persistent, markdown-based graph of your codebase, enabling coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Gemini to work faster and cheaper. B…
UDP Gateway introduces two new capabilities: WireGuard Listeners can now accept connections from any client without pre-registration, and Lambda destinations can be invoked asynchronously. The open e…
Encrypted DNS needs more than an IP address: a hostname, port, and protocol. DDR (Discovery of Designated Resolvers) lets a resolver publish these details to any device already talking to it. A devic…
RayforceDB fuses columnar analytics, graph traversal, and recursive queries into a single embeddable execution pipeline. Written in pure C with zero dependencies, it offers vectorized filters, joins,…
Sonniss has opened its GameAudioGDC archive, offering a decade of free sound effects bundles from the Game Developers Conference. These royalty-free sounds are licensed for media production—games, fi…
The Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) is a cornerstone of signal processing, but its complex mathematical formulation often obscures its simplicity. This hands-on exercise reveals that DFT is essentia…
The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) has awarded its 2026 Dirac Medal to Bernard Derrida, Deepak Dhar, Marc Mézard, and Haim Sompolinsky for pioneering contributions to statistical…
SunRanker is a free watchdog for home solar systems. It connects to your solar setup in about a minute and checks production daily, presenting data in plain language. If something breaks or output dr…
Crown Engine's latest release focuses on performance and workflow. Worlds with many units render faster, and editing large groups is smoother. New color grading and improved sun shadows give artists…
APIMart is a one-stop AI API aggregator offering access to over 500 models at discounted prices, including cutting-edge ones like GPT-5, Sora 2, and Doubao Seedance 2.5. It simplifies integration wit…
OpenCrawling announces the Qdrant Output Connector, enabling enterprise document repositories to integrate with Qdrant's vector search engine. The connector supports high-speed binary gRPC upserts, a…
Sniffnet's creator shares how participating in the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund, a 3-week sprint backed by Microsoft, Stripe, 1Password, and Shopify, strengthened the network monitoring tool's secu…