Hacker News Digest
· 84 Hacker News
OpenLogi is a native, local-first alternative to Logitech Options+ that lets you remap buttons, control DPI, and manage SmartShift on Logitech mice via HID++ — no account, no telemetry, and no cloud.…
In 2017, the author started tracking weather balloons as a hobby. A joke redirect site, sondehub.org, evolved into SondeHub, a community-run radiosonde tracking service. As the service grew, it attra…
OpenRouter, the largest AI model marketplace and gateway processing 10+ trillion tokens daily from 400+ models for over 10 million developers, is joining Stripe. The acquisition aims to accelerate Op…
GrapheneOS reports that Google has stopped pushing Git tags for certain Android source code and now requires requests via Google Forms to obtain tarballs from Google Drive. The process is slow, often…
Go 1.27 is out, bringing major enhancements to the language, toolchain, runtime, and standard library. Notably, it introduces support for generic methods, allowing developers to write type-agnostic f…
GrapheneOS, the privacy-focused Android distribution, announced it will support high-end Motorola devices starting in 2027. The move comes amid criticism of Google's GPLv2 violations for delaying sou…
A new study of 7,704 employees at a large healthcare organization found that fully remote workers reported the highest well-being, while onsite workers reported the lowest. Contrary to common concern…
Moderna and Merck announced positive Phase 3 results for intismeran autogene, an individualized mRNA neoantigen therapy, combined with KEYTRUDA, in patients with resected stage IIB-IV melanoma. The t…
A developer solves an OSINT challenge by writing a CUDA program that searches the entire globe for a match to a photo of a resort island. The approach involves extracting geometric fingerprints (tria…
Cerebras unveils the CS-4, a rack-scale system powered by three WSE-3 Turbo wafers, delivering up to 30x faster inference than GPU systems. With a modular design that separates compute from power and…
Casio has unveiled the F-B100W, a modern take on the legendary F-91W digital watch. After four decades, the classic design gets a refresh with new features while retaining its iconic look. The watch…
In this thought-provoking piece, Terence Eden warns against creating technologies that could be easily misused by a future authoritarian government. Drawing on the example of a government database tr…
Contrary to popular belief, the answer to everything is not 42—it's PostgreSQL. This article argues that PostgreSQL is not just a rock-solid relational database but a versatile tool that can replace…
A study of over 3,400 primary school children in London and Luton found that lung growth in London children, stunted by air pollution, accelerated after the introduction of the Ultra Low Emission Zon…
A new working paper from the University of Chicago and ADP Research uses payroll data on 16 million U.S. workers to show that most firms kept annual raises anchored to pre-inflation norms, causing re…
A GitHub issue asks Anthropic to add support for AGENTS.md, an emerging open standard for coding agent instructions used by over 20,000 projects. The proposal suggests a dual-file approach where CLAU…
Unsloth releases Dynamic v3.0 GGUFs for Qwen3.8-27B, claiming over 10% better top-1% accuracy at the same size compared to other providers. The new quants use a higher-quality imatrix calibration dat…
Meta is facing a federal trial in Oakland over claims that it hid the harms of Facebook and Instagram, drawing comparisons to the big tobacco lawsuits. The trial, which began on August 18th, could be…
Air Theremin turns your webcam into a musical instrument: wave both hands to control volume and pitch, lean back to soften the tone, and bring palms together for silence. On phones, tilt the device i…
Tom Stanton, an engineer and YouTuber, has achieved a remarkable feat: launching a projectile at supersonic speeds using a trebuchet. The video showcases the meticulous engineering behind the medieva…
A discarded Cricut Maker, locked by the company, was brought back to life by intercepting USB communication and rewriting serial numbers with a Raspberry Pi Pico. The hack exploits the lack of encryp…
The author built a spec-driven development harness, chum-codex, and scored 94% on Terminal Bench 2.1, beating vanilla Codex's 88.8%. But when investigating a task failure, they discovered GPT-5.6 Sol…
At ModCon 2026, Modular announced that Mojo 1.0 is fully open source under Apache 2.0, with native Windows support coming in collaboration with Microsoft. The company also launched Modular Cloud, a p…
A developer implementing Algorithm D from Knuth's TAOCP found a counterexample to Theorem B, revealing a bug that had gone unnoticed for decades. The bug, now fixed in the errata, also led to the dis…
Ornith-1.5, a new family of open-source models from Ornith AI, introduces a self-improvement loop where the model generates its own tasks, scaffolds, and solutions for reinforcement learning. The 397…
In an essay based on his 2026 ICM lecture, Terence Tao sidesteps the debate over AI's capabilities and asks a deeper question: what are the true goals and values of mathematical research? Using probl…
SoLo is a .so loader for static Linux binaries that lets a musl-linked executable dlopen() the host's glibc-built Vulkan and OpenGL drivers. It includes its own ELF loader for x86-64 and aarch64, a g…
Linear's data from tens of thousands of teams reveals AI adoption has tripled across all functions and company sizes in six months, with executives leading the charge. AI now creates nearly half of a…
A Florida police officer was arrested for using Flock's automated license-plate reader to track his estranged wife's vehicle 717 times over 21 months, even while off duty. He claimed he was checking…
A GitHub issue details user frustration with Claude Opus 4.8 and 5.0's verbose, jargon-heavy language. Users report that the AI's default writing style is toxic and hard to read, forcing them to re-r…
Terence Tao announces the launch of Palomar, a registry for Lean-verified mathematics, incubated by Lean FRO and ICARM. It accepts external GitHub repositories containing Lean code that proves specif…
The author explores activation energy as a universal metaphor, from starting fires and moving furniture to neuron firing and friendship dynamics. They argue that many life situations—like initiating…
Most web software is static, serving the majority while leaving niche needs unmet. LLMs now let users code features into existence, but existing extensible software is mostly local and high-barrier.…
Bun's creator Jarred Sumner has been promising the 1.4 release 'tomorrow' for weeks, but the stable version is now three months late. The Rust rewrite, which was supposed to fix memory safety issues,…
LucasArtsifier is a static analysis tool for classic Sierra adventure games. It decompiles game scripts, uses abstract interpretation to build a graph of game states, and identifies softlocks—situati…
A new GitHub project, microgpt-c, implements a character-level GPT entirely in dependency-free C, with training and inference in a single file. It achieves over 10 million tokens per second on an App…
Raymond Chen explains the little-known winstart.bat file in Windows 95, which runs during system startup before the GUI loads. Unlike autoexec.bat, it loads TSRs only for Windows programs, not for MS…
New research suggests that rings forged from meteoritic iron were a fashionable accessory among the ancient Greek elite. The discovery sheds light on the sophisticated metalworking techniques of the…
This interactive guide uses a browser-based Kubernetes simulator to demonstrate how startup, readiness, and liveness probes work. It shows how probes prevent request failures during rollouts, how to…
Evolutionary anthropologist David Samson argues that human sleep is uniquely short and REM-heavy, a paradox shaped by our ancestors' shift from trees to ground sleep. In his book The Sleepless Ape, h…
os8088, a virtual machine for the IBM PC XT, has added a web browser that fetches real pages over Ethernet or a parallel cable, a CP/M emulator with a Z80 core, and a C compiler that enabled a new wo…
modelmap lets you paste any Hugging Face model ID and instantly get a living, interactive map of its neural network architecture—no weights downloaded. It visualizes the flow of data through layers,…
Taffy is a flexible, cross-platform UI layout library written in Rust, implementing CSS Block, Flexbox, and Grid algorithms. It's used by major projects like Servo, Bevy, and Zed. Benchmarks show it…
- ▲ 110Experts and lawmakers accuse RFK Jr. of 'sabotage' as healthcare research agency faces collapse
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), tasked with improving America's healthcare system, is on the brink of collapse under the Trump administration. Staff cuts of 75%, mass grant can…
Ed Zitron argues that OpenAI's survival is in doubt. Despite a $7 billion share buyback, the company lost its COO and CRO in the same week, and its revenue growth is decelerating. With Anthropic pois…
Inco AI's DFlash 2 upgrades speculative decoding by adding a lightweight path selector and a convolutional fix for suffix decay, boosting output by 16–25% with only ~1% added latency. The selector sc…
Ramp introduces Router, a model routing service that sends each request to the lowest-cost model meeting performance needs, cutting inference costs by 40% on average. With one endpoint and one bill,…
Oakland faces budget deficits of $120 million annually through 2030, yet OPD's overtime spending has soared. In 2024, Lieutenant Timothy Dolan earned $493,247 in overtime, totaling $711,000 in pay, m…
Researchers from Cornell University and Nysernet present λλ, a programming language for silicon photonics that uses a linear type system to enforce the physical constraints of optics, rejecting unrea…
Google's Pixel 11 Pro Fold is a modest update in a rapidly evolving foldable market. While it offers IP68 durability, a solid camera, and useful multitasking features like Bubbles, its design feels d…
OneCLI is an open-source credential gateway that sits between AI agents and the services they call. Instead of embedding real API keys in every agent, you store them once in OneCLI and give agents pl…
Olivier Fourdan announced Xwayland 26.0.99.901, the first release candidate for Xwayland 26.1.0, marking the project's first release in over two years. Key changes include removal of EGLStream suppor…
C++ is splitting into two camps: those with modern tooling who can build from versioned source, and those stuck with legacy code that can't be migrated. The C++ committee's commitment to backwards co…
PennyPresses.net offers a free, interactive map pinpointing over 3,300 pressed penny machines across the globe, with about 2,000 shown on the map. Users can search by location, filter by radius, and…
Matrix transposition is a common operation in GPU computing, but naive implementations suffer from shared memory bank conflicts, causing significant performance degradation. This article explores two…
Recent studies show that when faced with explicit biases in prompts, models often omit these biases from their Chain-of-Thought (CoT) output, revealing that verbalized reasoning can misrepresent how…
Since 1933, Tower Optical has hand-built the chrome-plated binocular viewers bolted to scenic overlooks across North America. The company, which still uses 1930s machinery, is now selling a limited n…
A shipwreck discovered off Binh Chau, Vietnam, in 2013 has yielded a cargo of Changsha, Yue, Xing-type, and Guangdong ceramics dating to the late 9th century. Unlike the earlier Belitung wreck, the s…
An electronician builds a highly sensitive, low-power analog Geiger counter using a large Chinese J306β tube. The circuit runs from a single AA cell for over 2000 hours, draws only 1.1mA at 1.5V, and…
In 1972, David Maynard used NLS, Doug Engelbart's groundbreaking system, to edit code with a keyset and mouse. The keyset, a 19th-century telegraph input, enabled chording commands without touching t…
Toronto startup Civic Grid has installed a 60 kWh battery in Cannington, Ontario, that charges at night and powers a local food bank for six hours during the day. The unit also serves as a community…
Dave Rupert introduces MicroLighter, a tiny client-side syntax highlighter that leverages the CSS Custom Highlights API instead of injecting spans. It uses Textmate grammars for language support, aut…
Google's new Pixel 11 phones are packed with AI features, from Gemini-controlled apps that can order groceries and book restaurant tables to a camera mode called Magic Capture that takes and curates…
This GitHub repository offers a detailed, practical guide for repairing the Nikon F100 film camera, based on the author's hands-on experience. It covers essential documentation, tools, and step-by-st…
A UK-built satellite the size of a carry-on suitcase could reveal what happened during the cosmic dark ages, the 150 million years before the first stars formed. Named CosmoCube, it will orbit the fa…
At incident.io, our entire platform runs on event-driven architecture, with Google Cloud Pub/Sub as our sole message broker. But as we tightened our availability targets to 99.99%, Pub/Sub became a s…
MIT researchers have developed a scalable fabrication technique that integrates delicate molecular materials into electronic devices without damaging them. By prefabricating device components with st…
Property-based testing (PBT) is a popular technique for establishing confidence in software, where users write executable specifications that are checked many times by a testing framework. In modern…
This article explores the history and literary significance of the parenthesis, from its invention by Coluccio Salutati to its masterful use by Sir Philip Sidney in the Renaissance. It argues that pa…
In 2021, Cloudflare shipped Dynamic Process Isolation (DyPrIs) to defend against remote Spectre attacks on Workers. A new internal reassessment, detailed in a paper co-authored with TU Graz, found a…
Frugal Tokens is a demo tool that visualizes token usage and costs for AI coding agents. It provides detailed metrics on processed tokens, cache reuse, reasoning output, and per-session costs, helpin…
Berd is an open-source desktop app that brings your chats, agents, and AI providers into one canvas you own. Build a crew of agents with real personalities and skills, not just chatbots. Switch betwe…
The old DePIN model—crowdsourcing hardware, bandwidth, and storage via token incentives—is failing. Storj's Chapter 11 filing and similar restructurings show the shift. History repeats: cloud and tel…
Formal verification tools like Alive2, used to validate LLVM optimizations, are themselves prone to bugs. While false alarms are easy to catch, missed alarms—where Alive2 fails to flag an incorrect o…
A new paper argues that the semiclassical Einstein equations emerge from quantum relative entropy, offering a quantum field-theoretic twist on Jacobson's thermodynamic derivation. By linking relative…
After three generations of DIY air cleaner cubes, Zack Deis designed a quieter, more professional-looking version using a custom aluminum frame and six PC fans. The build costs around $300–350 CAD, a…
This final post in a quadcopter simulation series shares a practical recipe for training a reinforcement learning policy to race drones. The author breaks the task into three stages: solving inverted…
CHAP (Collaborative Human Agent Protocol) is an open protocol for recording human-agent collaboration as structured, hash-linked envelopes. When a bot drafts and a human edits, the edit becomes a que…
A first-person narrative from the perspective of a 32-bit integer in an Ada program. It describes the moment of reaching its maximum value, 2,147,483,647, and the terror of an impending overflow. Unl…
WinV is a GNOME Shell extension that adds a searchable, local-only clipboard history to Ubuntu 26.04, inspired by Windows' Win+V feature. It works without a daemon, X11 helper, or network service, an…
After three years of studying computer science, the author realized that many programming terms—like Component vs. Module or DAO vs. Repository—are used inconsistently across contexts, and that chasi…
An analysis argues that Stripe's acquisition of OpenRouter is not about routing or billing consolidation, but about ecosystem-wide AI security and alignment. OpenRouter's unique position as a cross-m…
Loft Day transforms a wedding invitation into an interactive point-and-click adventure. Guests can explore a virtual loft, uncover hidden secrets, and embark on a road trip—all while getting details…
A PhD researcher recounts building a boundary-integral method to simulate red blood cell dynamics, from reproducing the stomatocyte-discocyte-echinocyte shape sequence to modeling DIC microscopy. The…