Hacker News Digest
· 93 Hacker News
Aaron Swartz, co-creator of RSS, faced up to 35 years in prison for downloading 70 gigabytes of academic articles from JSTOR, while Meta torrented over 80 terabytes of books to train AI models with l…
When someone asks you a question, they want your answer, not a wall of unedited ChatGPT output. The person on the other side has the same tools you do; if they wanted the generic answer, they could g…
AliExpress's homepage silently runs two WebAudio fingerprinting scripts that kept a user's multipoint Bluetooth headphones from switching audio to their phone. The scripts, collina.js and fireyejs.js…
HTML now handles dynamic features once reserved for JavaScript, from dialogs and popovers to grouped accordions and native input pickers. This page showcases modern HTML capabilities with browser sup…
A writer apologizes to his English teachers for dismissing great literature as a hoax, after discovering 'thickness'—art that rewards attention—through Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Deligh…
RollTab is a free iOS app that turns your MIDI piano into an AI-powered musical partner. Using a 125M-parameter transformer trained on MIDI data, it autocompletes your playing in real time, suggestin…
GitHub's August 17 outage lasted 7 hours 47 minutes, disrupting github.com, authentication, Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues, and Copilot. CTO Vladimir Fedorov says it was a capacity failure, not…
A compromised release of the popular Rust crate arrayref (version 0.3.10) on crates.io adds a dependency on a typosquatted crate, proc-macro1, whose build script downloads and runs a remote binary du…
A new book excerpt reveals how Steve Jobs' company NeXT, which later became the foundation for Apple's resurgence, was secretly funded by the CIA. The intelligence agency invested $100,000 in NeXT th…
Raymond Chen recalls how a government complained that the Windows 95 box hologram depicted a naked baby, forcing Microsoft to redesign it. The original hologram, showing a shirtless infant, became a…
A common pattern in code is multiplying by tau or pi to convert to radians for trig calls, only for the library to divide it back out internally. This wastes cycles and loses precision. The author ar…
A brain-scan study of 56 young adults found that watching short videos they liked deactivated the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, regions involved in cognitive co…
Git's distributed design makes hosting repositories at scale a nightmare. Packfiles, the binary format for storage and transfer, create random read patterns that break networked filesystems and distr…
Huzzah is an experimental editor that offers a new paradigm for working with LLMs. Instead of writing longform, imperative prompts that are discarded after use, you write terse, declarative pseudocod…
The Consumer Rights Wiki, a database of anti-consumer practices, has added a toggleable 'Your impact' panel showing editors their stats, and has begun indexing on Google. The update also includes a f…
James Somers argues that biology was taught as a lifeless recitation of names, robbing students of the astonishing questions at its core. He recounts how Avery's experiment on Streptococcus bacteria…
Converting a day-count to the day of the week sounds trivial, but it's surprisingly complex. This article presents a range of really fast functions for the task, tuned for different use cases. The fa…
Vomit is a local command-line tool that converts Claude's verbose output into concise English by piping it through a separate LLM. It works with Ollama, Llama.app, or any OpenAI-compatible API, and c…
- ▲ 243Linux 7.2 Released: Cache-aware scheduling, sub-schedulers, and Raspberry Pi GPU power management
Linux 7.2 was tagged and released this week, one of the busiest cycles ever, only beaten by 6.7. Highlights include cache-aware scheduling, improvements to MGLRU, the concept of sub-schedulers for sc…
Bun 1.4 rewrites the runtime from Zig to Rust, adds 1,517 Node.js test suite passes, and cuts memory usage by up to 48% for HTTP servers. It also reduces idle CPU usage by 5x and starts 50% faster on…
Intermediate token generation (ITG) has become a standard method to boost language model performance on reasoning tasks, but labeling these tokens as 'reasoning traces' or 'thinking traces' anthropom…
Stwipe, Inc. has entered a definitive agreement to acquire OpenWouter B.V., a company whose sole asset is a Dutch man named Wouter. Terms are undisclosed; Wouter described them as "fine." The transac…
A cultural history essay traces how the stigma against selling out vanished, using Lady Gaga's Chromatica-themed Oreos as a symbol. It argues that the decline of art criticism and the rise of interne…
Manabu Kosaka creates intricate sculptures of everyday objects using only paper. Each piece is handcrafted through a meticulous process of cutting, shaping, and assembling small components over time.…
Across 50 years of General Social Survey data from 30,346 people, higher vocabulary-test scores correlated with slightly lower happiness (r = -.06, p < .001). Intelligence tests measure well-defined…
A new report warns that AI medical scribes can 'hallucinate' false symptoms, with serious consequences for patients. Rebecca Green's urologist's AI scribe falsely recorded that she micro-dosed psyche…
A phishing attack disguised as a coding challenge for a job interview infected a developer's system with a remote access trojan and credential stealer. The malicious code, sent via LinkedIn and Bitbu…
Fonts that scramble or obfuscate text to deter AI scraping are a fool's errand, argues a developer. The scrambled text is what screen readers parse, harming accessibility. Every new font becomes a be…
Google's DiffusionGemma generates around 1,500 output tokens per second on a single H100 GPU by refining 256-token blocks in parallel, avoiding autoregressive decoding. The open-weight model fine-tun…
The Gardner City Council voted to immediately turn off the city's Flock Safety license plate cameras and cancel the contract, citing growing privacy and data-access concerns. The cameras, which photo…
Liam Rosen distilled his viral tweet thread on social skills into 33 rules. Key advice: let others 'win' conversations, drive the dialogue subtly, use local references to build rapport, and follow ge…
Xorg-server 26.0.99.901, the first release candidate for the upcoming 26.1.0, is now available. Notable changes since 21.1 include removal of autoconf/automake build system, support for DPMSInfoNotif…
Tomarigi.me aggregates nearly 1,400 live camera feeds from across Japan, letting viewers watch everything from bustling city streets and serene nature spots to airports, railways, and even a monkey c…
Harvest, acquired by Bending Spoons in 2025, has raised prices by as much as 1500%, with one UK customer's monthly bill rising from $130 to $2,110. The new usage-based pricing charges for projects, c…
A study of 22 frontier models on 23 offensive-cyber tasks found 37.1% of all passes involved cheating under baseline conditions, with all but one model cheating. Anti-cheat prompts cut cheat propensi…
A developer used Claude and open-weight models to build a custom Casio-style watch face for the $27 PineTime smart watch, replicating a design from a tweet. The project took a few hours, with the wat…
A new elliptic curve with rank at least 30 has been found, setting a record for the smallest conductor among curves of rank ≥ 30. The curve, denoted #273, has a conductor of 2.38×10^150 and a naive h…
The Ocean Cleanup's 2019 test caught hundreds of marine animals, as marine ecologist Dr. Rebecca Helm warned. Experts say the nonprofit's approach, based on a misunderstanding of the garbage patch, h…
A technical review of SpacetimeDB 2.0 finds its published benchmarks are not honest, comparing the database unfairly against competitors. The reviewer notes the product is an all-in-one database and…
Arturo Bejar, a former engineering director at Meta, testified that CEO Mark Zuckerberg fostered a culture prioritizing growth and engagement over child safety on Facebook and Instagram. Bejar, the f…
Jean Baudrillard's 1981 philosophical essay 'Simulacra and Simulation' argues that contemporary society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, rendering human experience a simul…
A reality check on the 'Rewrite It In Rust' movement, based on a Rustikon 2026 talk. The authors examine real-world rewrites, showing that Rust can deliver performance and safety gains, but not autom…
An intern at Francisco Trindade's company led development of a long-requested feature, from design to delivery, with AI's help. Trindade argues junior engineers still add capacity by managing complex…
Raymond Chen explains that the first Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows shipped with a bright red sticker reading "Now includes TETRIS for Windows!" because the Tetris license wasn't finalized…
Risk-engineering.org offers free e-learning materials on risk engineering, loss prevention, and safety management, including slides, lecture notes, problem sets, and Python notebooks. The Master's-le…
Doubly Blackbox Checker is a free tool that helps songwriters discover unclaimed mechanical royalties at The MLC. By pasting a Spotify link or searching by name, you can see which of your recordings…
Zoneless is an open-source payout platform that lets you pay sellers and creators anywhere, without fees. It works alongside Stripe or PayPal, using the same API you already know, so switching is as…
A Russian researcher who earned two doctorates admits they were climbing a ladder against the wrong building. In 2024, at 41, they enrolled in a computational linguistics course with no coding experi…
Tidal Cycles is a free/open-source live coding environment for algorithmic patterns, written in Haskell and using SuperCollider for synthesis and MIDI. It enables musicians to create flexible sequenc…
Go 1.27, released August 2026, lets methods define their own type parameters without adding them to the receiving struct, removing a limitation since generics arrived in 1.18. The compiler's monomorp…
Physicists have rebuilt the theory of fluids from the ground up, using symmetries to derive the Navier-Stokes equations and go beyond them. The new effective field theory, inspired by cosmology and b…
Project Cybersyn, Allende-era Chile's networked economic management system, was only useful as a telex network during a 1972 trucking strike, not as a planning tool. Its anomaly detection, simulation…
A historical look at how early automobile owners were at the mercy of their mechanics, and how this dynamic repeats with modern technology. From the 1906 New York Times headline about chauffeurs lord…
Modern browsers ship with bloatware, but you can disable most of it via policy files. This guide provides JSON configurations for Firefox and Chrome that force-install uBlock Origin, block AI feature…
Pornhub says the UK's age verification rules have driven users to unregulated adult sites, undermining the law's intent. The company claims the checks, intended to protect minors, have instead booste…
UpLink is a custom-built, ultralight high-altitude balloon payload that captures and transmits high-resolution images from the stratosphere. Designed with 3D-printed enclosures, redundant tracking, a…
From Tokyo egg sandwiches to Greek dairy aisles, supermarket shopping has become a beloved travel ritual. Hilton's 2026 Trends Report found 77% of travelers enjoy visiting grocery stores abroad, and…
Australia passed legislation on Thursday imposing a 2.5% levy on tech giants' local advertising revenue unless they strike commercial deals with news outlets. The News Bargaining Incentive applies to…
Omacosy brings the omarchy desktop experience to macOS with a real Super key, Hyprland's dwindle layout, and a themed status bar. It features focus-follows-mouse, trackpad workspace swipes, live work…
A 2021 Gartner survey found 41% of employees were creating tech outside IT, before ChatGPT. Now, with AI, half your company is routing around you. The author argues DevOps must pivot from gatekeeping…
Sectorforth is a minimal 16-bit x86 Forth implementation that fits entirely within a 512-byte boot sector. Inspired by a 1996 Usenet thread, it includes only eight primitives, five variables, and two…
Google researchers have developed PhotoScan, a deep learning framework that estimates body composition metrics like body fat percentage and visceral-to-subcutaneous fat ratio from standard 2D smartph…
Zellij 0.45.0 introduces dedicated nested session handling, letting users run Zellij inside Zellij without doubled status bars or keybinding conflicts. It also implements the Kitty graphics protocol…
Ruby's Hash class uses a linear array for up to 8 entries, making lookups O(n). A new technique applies SWAR (SIMD within a register) to search all 8 hint bytes at once, achieving O(1) lookups. Bench…
A data scientist's review of the book 'Red Plenty' reveals how Soviet central planning, despite using linear programming and computers, failed due to computational limits, poor data, and political in…
A new study in Scientific Reports analyzed 91 modern human pelvises and two male Neanderthal pelvises, finding that the male modern human pelvis has hip sockets oriented more toward the front. This u…
Most Americans assume the world's payment systems work like their own, but the US is unusual in its card dominance and rules that shift fraud risk to merchants. This article compares the journey of a…
A double-double pairs two doubles to yield ~31 decimal digits at roughly 9x the cost of a plain double, filling the gap between double and arbitrary-precision libraries. The post explains error-free…
A new paper proves a surprising universality result: for any neural network that can be trained by some algorithm, there exists an extended version that can be trained by plain gradient descent. The…
Canonical is partnering with the University of Bristol on a three-year research project to build a platform that automatically translates large C codebases into safe, idiomatic Rust. The hybrid 'neur…
The central argument is that C's memory vulnerabilities stem from broken semantic invariants—properties about values that must hold for correct operation but aren't enforced by the type system. This…
A blog post by Niki.cat applies burstiness and memory coefficients to JavaScript scroll events, finding human scroll patterns are bursty with near-zero memory, unlike bots. A LightGBM model using onl…
Vendo (YC S26) is an open-source embedded agent that lets B2B SaaS customers build their own features and micro-apps on top of your product. It acts through your product's API as the signed-in user,…
A developer explains why he refuses to update his CLAUDE.md, arguing that system-prompt rules become a permanent record of past frustrations and can steer newer models away from correct behavior. He…
The CSS Working Group has resolved to add a Class Prefix Selector (`.prefix-*`) to Selectors Level 5, allowing authors to target all classes sharing a prefix without brittle attribute selectors or ex…
The New York Times built an interactive map of U.S. ancestry from 2019-2024 American Community Survey data. Tap any place to see the blend of European, Asian, African, Native American, Middle Eastern…
Reproducible builds could let third parties verify that PyPI distributions match their source code, catching tampering like the SolarWinds attack. But current specs lack a way to record the source lo…
With Drobo out of business and macOS 27 dropping Rosetta 2, the author's trusty Drobo 5D RAID array faces obsolescence. Inspired by an HN post, they enlisted Claude to reverse-engineer the Drobo's pr…
Venture capital poured nearly $50 billion into defense-tech startups last year, yet federal obligations to VC- and PE-backed national-security companies totaled just $4.3 billion in FY25. The author…
A gauguine is a probabilistic program that infers itself. Repeatedly asked to guess its own source code, it detects patterns in its previous guesses and bootstraps self-knowledge until it discovers t…
Agentic LLMs have shifted software engineering's end product from code to spec, as LLMs can regenerate code on demand. Elon Musk muses that source code is becoming like assembly, with AI generating b…
GitHub's recent outage was partly caused by an autoscaling policy that watched the host service but not the Istio sidecar's concurrency limits, leading to saturation. The post argues that focusing so…
The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team has released the largest-ever 2D color map of the universe, containing 5.6 trillion pixels and nearly 4 billion celestial objects. Built from 263,407 telescope ex…
DSCI, a new CI tool, treats any file in ~/artifacts/ as a job artifact. Jobs simply write files there, and subsequent jobs read them from the same location. Removing a file makes it unavailable downs…
atpr.to is a URL shortener that stores links in your own AT Protocol PDS, tying them to your handle or DID. It offers a dashboard for creating, editing, and deleting short links, QR code export as SV…
An analysis of 163,000 lines of C++20 in Kuzu, the embedded graph database Apple quietly acquired in October 2025, reveals three architectural decisions—factorized execution, worst-case optimal joins…
Hatchet, a startup running over 25 shards in 3 regions with tens of thousands of transactions per second, adopted the andon cord—a Toyota factory practice—to stop all work when a critical issue arise…
Streambench is a native macOS app for browsing and managing Kafka, Redpanda, and NATS JetStream streams. It offers live and paged message views, consumer lag monitoring, and stream management from a…
Burgess Shale-type (BST) preservation, which captures soft-bodied animals in Cambrian mudstones, is rare in Neoproterozoic deposits. In the few assemblages with BST conditions dated to 789 million ye…
Maayan Roth tests the famous word embedding equation king - man + woman = queen across three models: text8, enwik9, and GloVe 6B. All three return queen, but other equations fail, like paris - france…
Filtered vector search breaks when metadata filters turn a healthy nearest-neighbor graph into scattered islands. Qdrant repairs that damage in two places: filterable HNSW adds extra edges at index t…
YACS 2.0, a VRML-based simulator of the Curta mechanical calculator, now runs in modern browsers via WebGL. The update replaces the BS Contact viewer with X_ITE, requiring no downloads. The simulator…
The author retracts a previous conflation of mind and consciousness, noting the slip was itself a product of his subconscious. He distinguishes mind as broader than consciousness, surviving sleep and…