Hacker News Digest
· 106 Hacker News
The author, jealous of a viral tweet, adopts a new policy: if you don't bother to review and edit your AI output, they won't bother reading it. They explain the growing frustration with unedited AI w…
Simon Willison tests Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 27B, a 17GB local LLM that impresses with vision, coding, and bounding box tasks, but its default 'xhigh' reasoning effort makes it overthink even simple promp…
GitHub is currently experiencing degraded performance on API Requests. The company has posted an incident report on its status page, noting that they are investigating reports of impacted performance…
DuckDB v2.0, code-named Cyanoptera, introduces a client/server mode via the Quack extension and the new CONNECT statement, allowing any DuckDB process to serve databases over the network. The release…
Bluesky's iOS app cleverly hides its logo in the UI, only revealing it when users take screenshots. The trick involves a UITextField with secure text entry, which iOS blanks out during screenshots, a…
A new preprint study from the Yale School of Public Health models the impact of adopting a single-payer universal health care system in the U.S., such as the Medicare for All Act. The researchers fou…
I've been experiencing consistent downtime with GitHub over the last few months, and I'm wondering if it makes sense to switch to alternative platforms. Has anyone else faced this issue and found a r…
OpenRouter now lists GPT-5.6 Sol, OpenAI's flagship model, with a 50% price cut on API access. Input costs drop to $2.50 per million tokens, and output to $15, with cache reads at $0.25. The model, r…
- ▲ 554GitHub Is Overloaded
I just tried to access GitHub and got the message: 'No server is currently available to service your request. Sorry about that. Please try refreshing and contact us if the problem persists.' It seems…
Scientists at UC Berkeley have discovered a new color called 'olo' that can only be seen by directly stimulating individual M cone cells in the retina with lasers. This color, described as a blue-gre…
In 1996, id Software packed Quake's shareware CD with encrypted versions of their entire catalog, hoping players would call a hotline to unlock them. The scheme collapsed when hackers cracked it in 3…
Memory prices have skyrocketed, with 128GB DDR5 kits now costing $3,399—ten times their lowest-ever tracked price. Even mainstream 32GB DDR5-6000 kits have jumped from $72 to $392 in just 12 months.…
Cursor is rolling out Origin, a new code hosting service in early beta for all paid plans. It offers repos, pull requests, code browsing, and GitHub sync, with agent-native features coming soon. Orig…
Wiz Research's autonomous AI agent, Red Agent, discovered a critical GitHub Actions workflow vulnerability in Snowflake's public repository snowflake-connector-net. The flaw, introduced by a Copilot…
Qwen3.8 27B, an open-weights model, achieves an Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index of 52, placing it among top performers. The index, based on nine evaluations including GDPval, Terminal-Bench, a…
OpenAI's latest GPT-5.6 lineup, including Sol, Terra, and Luna, shows significant vision improvements, especially in object detection and counting. Sol scored 46.2 mAP@50 in detection, up from 13.8 f…
A practical guide for people who want less AI in their tech environment. Covers disabling AI features in Adobe, Android/Gemini, Apple Intelligence, browsers (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, DuckDuckGo), Googl…
After a viral post about leaving Gmail, the author shares how the switch to Fastmail has gone. Starting fresh with subdomain addressing has improved inbox organization, and connecting a custom domain…
I'm trying to work on GitHub but it seems to be down again. I can't access pull requests, and the status page says everything is working, but it clearly isn't. Has anyone else experienced this issue?
Court documents from a lawsuit filed by University of California researchers reveal that federal agencies, including the NIH, NSF, Department of Defense, and NEH, used keyword searches to terminate b…
Sun Clock is a free, ad-free web app that displays a 24-hour clock showing the sun's position, sunrise, solar noon, sunset, golden hour, and twilight times for your location. It also tracks the moon'…
A developer has written a driver for the Fairphone 6's main camera on postmarketOS, enabling autofocus and color correction, though the image quality still needs work. The post also covers an approve…
Sheldon Axler's fourth edition of Linear Algebra Done Right is now open access in English, Chinese, Farsi, Greek, and Portuguese. The book famously banishes determinants to the end, focusing on the s…
GIMP's August 2026 development update reveals major progress toward GIMP 3.4, including a new zipped XML project format to replace the aging XCF, spectral blending for MyPaint brushes, non-destructiv…
Germany's antitrust regulator, the Bundeskartellamt, has concluded that Apple's App Tracking Transparency Framework (ATTF) unfairly favored Apple's own apps over third-party apps. Apple has agreed to…
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responds to criticism that his messaging on AI regulation has been inconsistent. He argues that the dichotomy between concentrating power via regulation and distributing it…
A new framework built into rustc and LLVM enables zero-overhead, multi-vendor GPU programming in Rust without sacrificing memory safety. By leveraging Rust's ownership and strict aliasing, it manages…
A Google support thread reveals growing frustration with Google Photos' recurring pop-up urging users to back up their photos, which many describe as invasive and deceptive. Users report that the pro…
Reticulum is a cryptography-based networking stack that enables anyone to build local or wide-area networks using readily available hardware, even under adverse conditions with high latency and extre…
I'm asking GitHub employees directly to explain why these issues keep happening. I've noticed that most posts and replies are just people speculating based on published data. I think it would be help…
A UC Berkeley case study chronicles the rise and fall of Direct File, the IRS's first free online tax filing service. Launched in 2024 after a rapid build by a cross-agency team, it won over 400,000…
A Denver judge ruled that Nine PBS, not the defunct storage vendor OSS, owns its archival data held in an Iron Mountain data center. The court ordered Iron Mountain to cooperate with Nine PBS and a t…
India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has become a global payments giant, processing over 23 billion transactions a month, but the system's free-for-merchants model is under review. The government…
In Patagonia, los puesteros are solitary caretakers who tend other people's livestock for meager pay, sometimes going months without human contact. Photographer Pie Aerts captures their stark, isolat…
Desktopcolors.com is a digital museum dedicated to the solid background colors that shipped with classic operating systems and desktop environments. From Windows 95's iconic teal to the platinum-era…
A 404 Media investigation placed a tracking device in a rare book shipment to uncover Amazon's secret book-scanning operation. The book traveled from a bookseller to Biblio, then to a warehouse in Wi…
A new CNBC poll of Americans aged 18 to 34 reveals that the vast majority distrust nine prominent AI executives, including Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. Even dat…
Anthropic presents itself as the responsible AI lab, but its actions reveal a pattern of control: opaque model behavior, anti-competitive access rules, and regulatory lobbying. The author argues that…
The Financial Times reports growing concerns among investors about the solvency of the United States, as the national debt continues to rise and fiscal challenges mount. The article examines the impl…
After nearly two decades of searching, a team at China's BESIII experiment has presented compelling evidence that a particle called X(2370) is a glueball—a particle made entirely of gluons, the force…
Instead of another gadget, pool money with friends to buy each other home batteries. A 5 kWh battery costs about €1,600—affordable when split among a group. These batteries save money through energy…
Mean Hamster Software has announced AGI-64, a long-awaited AGI interpreter for the Commodore 64. Currently about 75% complete for Space Quest 1, which is fully playable, the engine aims to support mo…
A bookseller hid an AirTag in a rare book ordered in bulk, tracking it to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas. There, workers tear books apart and scan them, as evidenced by a T. rex logo dev…
Rhombus 1.1 is now available, adding new `annot` and `annot.def` forms for defining annotations without macro code, and an `as` binding form for clearer naming. The release also updates `class` to bi…
Ten years of DNS measurements from the OpenINTEL project reveal that self-hosted email in the Tranco top-1M has dropped from 44.6% in 2016 to 22.4% in 2026, with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 no…
Mexico's environmental protection agency, Profepa, has launched a crackdown on unauthorized coastal developments, closing four projects in Puerto Vallarta and threatening demolition for others. The a…
Atoms are mostly empty space—the nucleus is tens of thousands of times smaller than the electron's orbital. By exciting an electron to a far-out orbit, scientists create a 'Rydberg atom' over 1000 ti…
Speko, founded by Bek, is a platform that benchmarks and routes between speech-to-text, LLM, and text-to-speech models. It finds the optimal combination based on your constraints (accuracy, latency,…
A realtor's tweet about a buyer canceling a showing after Deflock showed two HOA cameras pointed at the pool has gone viral, sparking outrage over privacy concerns. Critics argue that such surveillan…
Researchers at the University of Cambridge propose applying the Red Queen hypothesis to AI, suggesting that self-improving systems must continuously adapt and evolve to keep pace with ever-changing c…
Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter, a startup that lets companies switch between AI models, for over $7 billion. The acquisition comes months after OpenRouter raised money at a $1.3 bi…
Tadalafil (Cialis) is being promoted in wellness circles as a longevity drug, with observational studies linking it to lower risks of heart disease, dementia, and death. However, experts caution that…
Amazon is buying rare books, cutting off their spines, and scanning them for AI training, according to a 404 Media investigation that tracked a book to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas. The facility,…
In 2012, ultrarunner Mike Wolfe's career crumbled at the Transvulcania Ultramarathon, a collapse he later attributed to overtraining syndrome (OTS), a poorly understood disorder increasingly afflicti…
A personal realization hits hard: we now spend more waking hours facing computers than the faces of our loved ones. The author reflects on how this shift crept in over the past decade, becoming the n…
Oscar Toledo G. recounts how, at age 20, he wrote a C compiler and a web browser for his homebrew Am29000 computer. Faced with the processor's many registers and a machine with only 512 KB of RAM, he…
California's attorney general is co-leading a coalition of 29 states in a federal trial against Meta, alleging the company designed addictive features that harm teens and children. The stakes are hig…
A player reflects on a decade of exploring No Man's Sky, from the PS4 launch in 2016 to over 5,000 hours of play. The post covers the game's 286 free updates, the author's dedicated gaming PC and VR…
PJM, America's largest electricity market, has been overcharging its 66 million residents by $12 billion from 2025 to 2027 due to a flawed system model that underestimates existing power plant capaci…
As the US celebrates its 250th birthday, Business Insider maps the oldest continuously operating bar in every state, from Rhode Island's 1673 White Horse Tavern to Hawaii's 1957 La Mariana Sailing Cl…
Researchers have engineered a stripped-down thylakoid system from spinach, called LEAF, that produces NADPH and ATP when exposed to light. In lab tests, LEAF nanoparticles reduced oxidative stress in…
In the late 1920s, Japanese biologist Makoto Nishimura built Gakutensoku, the first robot in East Asia, as a response to the portrayal of robots as slaves in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. Unlike typical…
turbopuffer deploys dozens of database upgrades daily across 100+ clusters, including BYOC clusters it can't directly access. The key is a local Kubernetes controller that drives operations via a cus…
This is an interactive Sokoban puzzle solver that runs entirely in the browser. It features a custom AI that finds the provably fewest-moves solution for each board, using advanced techniques like ma…
Go's sync package uses a zero-size noCopy marker to prevent copying types like sync.Mutex and sync.Map. The marker works with go vet's copylocks checker, which flags copies of types that implement sy…
Archaeologists have identified the only known human killed by a trebuchet: a Scottish defender of Stirling Castle in 1304, crushed by a boulder flung at up to 300 km/h. Analysis of Skeleton 150's sha…
In this post, Raymond Chen explains how the `_alloca()` function allocates memory from the stack on x86-64, specifically addressing whether it performs the necessary stack probing via `_chkstk()`. He…
In 1990, Amit Patel created Solar Realms Elite, a BBS door game that became a classic. In this interview, Patel discusses his early programming experiences, from TRS-80 to Commodore 64, and how he le…
A look at Julian Jaynes's controversial theory that human consciousness is a recent development, arising around 3,000 years ago. Jaynes argues that before this, humans operated in a 'bicameral' state…
Saggar is a native Mac terminal that keeps projects, sessions, and attention organized. It runs shells, dev servers, tests, and coding agents across multiple projects while tracking their status: wor…
A federal court dismissed a lawsuit against a state judge who allegedly relied wholly on artificial intelligence to issue a ruling, holding that judicial immunity applies even if the judge delegated…
The author recounts their experience at HackEurope 2026, a hackathon that was a 'complete shitshow' due to poor organization. They argue that front-end demos and AI-generated projects dominate, with…
Prolly is a Rust library that implements content-addressed ordered maps on prolly trees, giving applications immutable snapshots, cheap branching, structural sharing, efficient diffs and merges, sync…
A GitHub issue highlights that the Pi coding agent stores its config in $HOME on Linux, violating the XDG Base Directory Spec. Users request support for XDG_CONFIG_HOME or a fallback to $HOME/.pi. Th…
Flags Quiz is an interactive learning platform that helps you master world flags, capitals, and maps through ten different game modes. It features a unique difficulty system that groups countries by…
After a decade in AI, I burnt out and left the field. But now, amid growing backlash, I'm returning to work on AI in education. My friends are right: there's a lot terrible about AI—slop-filled inter…
Roboflow Playground is a new tool for comparing zero-shot computer vision models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Google, and open-source providers like Florence-2. It supports object detection, image c…
In a detailed response to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's post on AI regulation, David Sacks argues that Amodei misrepresents his critics, ignores the revolving door between AI companies and regulators,…
At HOAi, we built a voice agent that answers phone calls, and slow LLM responses caused awkward silences that made callers hang up. We benchmarked two fixes: upgrading to OpenAI's priority tier (2x c…
Vocal Slice is a desktop app for Mac and Windows that revolutionizes audio editing by letting you select text to cut audio. It transcribes recordings locally with Whisper, then highlights the corresp…
Ben Balter wrote his book using Git, Markdown, and a CI pipeline, complete with a linter that fails the build if he implies he still works at GitHub. He built 30 custom validators, ran ~5,500 automat…
Lake Powell, the nation's second-largest reservoir, fell to a record low on Saturday, and Lake Mead, the largest, hit its lowest point a week earlier. The combined system hasn't held this little wate…
The SecretSpec team has released dotenv-ng 1.0, a Rust implementation for loading and rendering .env files, forked from dotenvy after a parser bug corrupted secrets containing dollar signs. The fork…
A playful experiment turns 1,000 particles into dancers, each with a randomly chosen friend and enemy, moving closer to the center, toward friends, and away from enemies. The simple rules produce mes…
A Columbia statistician argues that the media's focus on academic grifters, while important, is misplaced compared to the harm caused by science-adjacent medical scams like the Q Collar. The Q Collar…
A curated list of intriguing stories from computer science history, from catastrophic bugs like the Ariane 5 explosion and the Therac-25 radiation overdoses to legendary design philosophies like Unix…
The llama.cpp project, a popular C/C++ implementation of Meta's LLaMA models, has reached its first official release, v0.1.0. This milestone marks a significant step in making large language models m…
Modern marketing is drowning in metrics—click rates, impressions, ROAS, and endless KPIs—but most of it is meaningless. Ad blockers make website tracking unreliable, email open rates don't reflect re…
scScript is a C-like scripting language that compiles to bytecode and runs in a fast virtual machine. It features pointer-less scripting with 64-bit integers, doubles, immutable UTF-8 strings, auto-g…
A developer details how they achieved 50 tokens per second with Qwen3.8 27B at 256K context on a 24GB RTX PRO 4000 SFF GPU. The key was a custom quantized model that used NVFP4 for bulk matrices and…
Nurb gives AI real CAD skills, letting you describe a part in plain English and watch it take shape live. It asks for real measurements, checks for printability, and generates STL files ready for you…
1667 is a terminal-based writing tool that integrates language models to help authors draft fiction. It generates the next paragraph on demand, keeps every alternative take in a navigable tree, and s…
Sean Conner, who snagged [email protected] early, explains how Gmail's policy of ignoring periods in usernames causes occasional email mix-ups. He shares a Lobsters thread full of similar stories…
Most countries will never build frontier AI, yet they face the greatest risks from it. While American labs and workers may be cushioned by domestic policy, the rest of the world could be locked out o…
Commodore, once a home computer giant, is now a niche brand run by YouTuber Christian Simpson. The company, founded in 1976, went bankrupt in 1994, and its assets were sold piecemeal, leading to a ta…
Chainguard's open-source osquery-defense-kit (ODK) provides over 250 detection and incident response queries designed for production use. Unlike typical osquery packs, these queries are tuned to retu…
Strong gravitational lensing and microlensing of supernovae (SNe) are emerging as powerful probes of cosmology and astrophysics. This review covers the first discoveries of strongly lensed SNe, the u…
A new study reveals that brief, intense sprint-interval exercise (SIE) triggers a vastly different and more extensive plasma protein and metabolite response than longer, moderate-intensity exercise (…
In this manifesto, Brennan Day argues that the webmaster—the one-person web professional who builds, designs, and advocates for the web—is not dead, but waiting for a comeback. He traces the role fro…
The author's toy language Plush had a copying GC that was too slow, taking 117ms to collect a million live objects. After discovering Rust's default HashMap was a performance bottleneck, they switche…
Foreman is an eve software factory that puts AI agents on every stage of the development loop while keeping humans on the judgment calls. It takes tasks from GitHub and Linear, moves each through fou…
Mária Telkes, a Hungarian-born scientist, dedicated her career to harnessing solar energy. She created the world's first solar-heated home using Glauber's salt, a solar still that saved downed WWII p…
David Anderson explains the FastLanes Unified Transport Layout (UTL), a data permutation designed to make delta encoding and decoding highly data-parallel. The post derives UTL step-by-step, showing…
Textbooks claim LOOCV has the lowest bias but highest variance compared to 10-fold and 5-fold CV. I coded K-Fold CV from scratch to test this on simulated data. At n=1000, the claim holds, but at n=1…
Narrative poetry has deep roots in literature, from Gilgamesh to the Iliad, but modern critics often ask why poets don't just write prose. This essay argues that narrative verse offers unique virtues…
A solo developer audits 22 repositories and finds over 2,000 tests, yet only one repository runs them in CI. The tests excel at static invariants—like preventing unscoped database reads or accidental…