Hacker News Digest
· 60 Hacker News
Fastpotify is a lightweight Spotify client for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Unlike Electron-based alternatives, it's a native binary with no embedded browser engine, so it starts in well under a second…
AnkiDroid, a popular open-source flashcard app with over 10 million installs, has been told by Google Play to remove its donation link or face removal from the store. Google claims the app's donation…
A researcher trained a small transformer from scratch on a single Nvidia RTX 5090 in 1.5 hours, costing just 67 cents on Vast.ai, and achieved 44% on the ARC-AGI-1 public eval—matching the scores of…
GPU World is a story contest asking people to imagine a future where AI progress halts but compute scales: by 2040, every person on Earth could have constant access to a frontier LLM like Fable or So…
A new paper in Psychological Science reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch's 2002 study on procrastination and deadlines. The original study, with over 2,100 citations, fou…
The Restroom Archive is a personal log of public restroom visits, cataloging locations from Brooklyn pizzerias to a Disneyland island, with notes on cleanliness, accessibility, and design. Each entry…
Azriel "Al" Blackman, the Guinness World Record holder for the longest career as an airline mechanic, passed away on July 24 at age 100. He joined American Airlines' predecessor in 1942 at 16, workin…
Aurora Store, the alternative Android app client popular on privacy-focused ROMs like GrapheneOS and CalyxOS, is hitting a wall: users report a persistent “Server busy, please try again later” error…
Darling is a free, open-source translation layer that lets you run macOS software on Linux without hardware emulation. It implements a complete Darwin environment, including Mach, dyld, and launchd,…
Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.1 succeeds Claude Fable 5 at the same price, with cache reads at a quarter of the cost. It targets long-running agentic coding, multistep research, and document work, and b…
The fifth issue of the tmp.0ut zine drops with 21 pieces on binary golf, ELF hacking, and low-level Linux tricks. Highlights include an interview with Doug McIlroy, a 57-byte x86-64 ELF dissected, a…
Mozilla has introduced Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS, a built-in option that blocks many third-party ads and ad-related trackers before they load. Using Apple's WebKit Content Blocker technology and…
The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns courts against expanding copyright protections in response to AI hype, drawing parallels to past panics over the VTR, player piano, and camera. It argues that…
Anil Dash argues that Tim Cook's recent Oval Office visit, where he fawned over Donald Trump and presented a golden trophy, betrays the legacy of Steve Jobs. Jobs, the son of a Syrian immigrant and a…
RotaryCell is an open-source project that turns a classic rotary telephone into a portable cellular phone without any permanent modification. The system uses an ESP32-S3, an A7670 modem, and a Silver…
In 2004, RuneScape ran a 3D multiplayer world in a browser over 56k modems, with thousands of players per server. This post dissects the extreme byte-saving techniques that made it possible, from ISA…
The promise of AI-driven development speed hasn't delivered the wave of revolutionary startups we expected. Instead, it's flooded the internet with low-quality content and insecure apps, while leader…
We are looking for companies that are actively hiring. Please state the location and include REMOTE for remote work, REMOTE (US) or similar if the country is restricted, and ONSITE when remote work i…
The Borges Labyrinth on Venice's San Giorgio Maggiore island has reopened after a comprehensive restoration. Created in 2011 from a design by Randoll Coate, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' story 'The…
In a post on X, John Carmack challenges the common positioning of Scratch, the visual programming language, as an introductory path to programming for kids. Unlike game modding, he has never heard a…
Duane "Keffe D" Davis, a former leader of the South Side Compton Crips, has been convicted of orchestrating the 1996 drive-by shooting death of Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas. The verdict marks the first…
Ambient CSS v3 introduces a physics-based lighting system for CSS, allowing every scene to re-light live. It offers global and custom lights, adjustable light direction and elevation, bounce effects,…
Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, criticizes the gaming industry's reliance on AI and mass layoffs, describing executives as 'slowly getting psychosis.' He argues that AI cannot replace the h…
California's legislature passed AB 1709, a bill that would effectively ban social media for under-16s by stripping out recommendation algorithms and basic input like follows and likes. The EFF calls…
A Turso PR implementing readahead for the io_uring backend sparked an investigation into why io_uring with O_DIRECT and no readahead is slower than syscall. The author measures TPC-H Q6, showing that…
Saab has revealed its A3 collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) concept, an autonomous, tailless, supersonic drone with a double-delta wing that could be developed in the early 2030s. Designed as a high…
Apple has quietly cut the price of its Polishing Cloth from $19 to $9, five years after its debut. The cloth remains compatible with a vast range of products, from iPhone 5 to the latest iPhone Air,…
Monica, the open-source personal CRM with over 25,000 GitHub stars, is being rebuilt from scratch. Founder Regis Freyd reflects on a decade of accumulated decisions and shifting perspectives, explain…
Google's Antigravity introduces /boost, a slash command that activates an on-demand multi-agent reasoning pipeline for challenging software engineering tasks. When standard single-turn coding assista…
A novel Voronoi variant creates fractal cell boundaries by recursively jittering grid sites at progressively finer scales. Unlike standard jittered Voronoi (Worley noise), this method traces parent s…
Slotstream lets you run the massive Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model (125B MoE, 104GB at 4-bit) on Macs with far less RAM by streaming experts from SSD. It uses MLX and Swift, and provides an Ollama-compatib…
DoltLite, a fork of SQLite that swaps the B-tree for a content-addressed Prolly Tree, has reached Beta after just five months and about 2,000 pull requests generated by AI agents. The Beta milestone…
MapQuest, the 30-year-old navigation tool, has seen a surge in downloads after it refused to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America" following an executive order by President Donald Trump. As of Tuesda…
NASA is inviting the public to adopt a pixel from the first images captured by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Each pixel represents a piece of the cosmos never before seen at that resolution.…
Stephen Kell traces the decline of x86 segmentation, blaming Unix's preference for flat address spaces, and argues the flat-vs-segmented debate is recursive: programmers always subdivide memory, but…
Nori Robotics (YC S26) introduces the NORI A3, a low-cost bimanual humanoid robot priced at $1,688, assembled in San Francisco and shipping Fall 2026. It features 7+1 DOF arms with 1.5kg payload each…
Keenable SELECT is an MCP server that lets you run SQL SELECT statements over live web data. Instead of an agent reading pages one by one, a single query can search thousands of pages, filter with ex…
A new open-source JavaScript library, @silurus/ooxml, renders Office Open XML documents directly in the browser using Rust compiled to WebAssembly and the Canvas 2D API. It supports DOCX, XLSX, and P…
In 1981, Dr. Melvin Scheinman performed the first catheter ablation in a human, threading a catheter through a vein to short-circuit a life-threatening arrhythmia without open-heart surgery. The tech…
A digital edition of the 1911 Roget's Thesaurus, manually transcribed by MICRA Inc. in 1988, is now freely accessible online. This historical reference work, originally compiled by Peter Mark Roget,…
Movie Scene Map is a free interactive atlas of 15,535 real filming locations across 166 countries, covering 9,262 films and series, plus 2,153 video games, 407 anime, and 366 manga placed by where th…
This DIY guide shows how to build a potato grow box that yields up to 100 pounds of potatoes in just four square feet. Perfect for small yards, the project uses inexpensive lumber, a garden hose for…
Hugging Face's biannual analysis of the open model ecosystem from January to August 2026 reveals a dramatic shift: Chinese labs now release the largest and most performant open models, with monthly p…
US President Trump's executive order renaming Lake Ontario to 'Lake America' has already taken effect in the GNIS database, prompting a community discussion on OpenStreetMap about how to handle the c…
Two congressional Democrats, Ron Wyden and Pramila Jayapal, have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the Trump administration's use of an obscure customs law to secretly collect…
A data scientist and martial artist applies network analysis to Judo, modeling throwing techniques as nodes and their combinations as directed edges. Using R and the igraph package, he visualizes an…
East River Source Control has appointed Martin von Zweigbergk, creator of the Jujutsu version control system, as chief technology officer. von Zweigbergk, who started Jujutsu as a side project in 201…
Promotional snakes and ladders boards are a common giveaway for kids in Sweden, but as a game they're terrible: no decisions, and all but one player loses. This post proposes a cooperative variant wh…
Vermell is a minimal, zero-dependency C++20 web framework for Linux, built on an epoll event loop with a worker thread pool. It offers one-header, one-library integration, a single-command build, and…
New York City’s congestion pricing program, which charges drivers entering Manhattan’s core, has reduced total emergency medical service (EMS) travel times by just over a minute on average, according…
Inspired by spring skies, Byopia Press shares a DIY cyanometer, a device invented in 1789 by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure to measure the blueness of the sky. The post includes printable templates for…
Savartus introduces Enterprise Laser Storage (ELS), a family of optical archive libraries that store data on Blu-ray or Folio discs with physical WORM (write-once-read-many) technology. The systems a…
The 2025-26 Champions League draw produced a tight cluster: Napoli, Benfica, Chelsea, Ajax, and Qarabağ play 9 of their 10 possible pairings, hurting their joint chances of advancing. This pattern re…
Codes is a zero-dependency Java 17+ library that gives applications stable outcome identities and explicit mappings to protocols like HTTP and gRPC. It lets you define domain-specific outcomes (e.g.,…
Before LEDs and digital meters, radios used a glowing green vacuum tube called a magic eye to show signal strength. Invented by Allen B. DuMont in 1932 and popularized by RCA's 6E5 in 1935, these tub…
Ubisoft has announced that FOR HONOR will block all SteamOS and Linux players on September 10. The game uses Easy Anti-Cheat, currently enabled for Linux, but Ubisoft plans to disable it, making the…
Percona introduces vector-bench, an open benchmark that measures vector indexes fairly. It explains the two main index types, HNSW and IVF, and why recall and throughput must be reported together. Th…
Checkly rewrote its Node.js Results Daemon, which processes 92 million messages daily, in Go using Claude Code. The key was a test harness built before the agent wrote code, ensuring byte-for-byte pa…
This first part of a two-part series traces the intellectual history behind Hans Freudenthal's Lincos, a constructed language designed for communication with extraterrestrial intelligences. It explor…
Stippling, the art of creating images with dots, has been used for centuries. This blog post explores whether computers can replicate the technique. It introduces Lloyd's algorithm for generating cen…