Hacker News Digest
· 107 Hacker News
Google DeepMind has released the model card for Gemini 3.8 Flash, the successor to Gemini 3.7 Flash. The model improves performance in software engineering and agentic knowledge workflows while retai…
LWN.net, the long-running Linux and open-source news site, is increasing subscription prices by approximately 20% starting September 15, matching US consumer-price inflation since its last increase i…
A new dark web service called Nexus is selling scans of over 153 million U.S. and Canadian driver's licenses, including those of top government officials. KrebsOnSecurity traces the likely source to…
Mistral's default data handling has changed: user input and output may be used for model training unless you opt out. Vibe and API users are not opted out by default, but enterprise customers are. Op…
Meta has released Muse Spark 1.3, a model trained for long-horizon, agentic workflows and competitive coding. It tracks context and prior results, handles messy inputs, and asks for clarification whe…
On September 1, 1982, Commodore released the Commodore 64, the first computer with 64K of memory to sell for under $600. Despite initial production challenges, it became the best-selling computer of…
The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) reports that the True Rate of Unemployment (TRU) hit 24.9% in July 2026, far above the official 4.1% headline rate. TRU counts as functiona…
An analysis of 7,534 citations from Perplexity's Sonar models across 380 software categories found that 59.8% point to domains ranked worse than #100,000 on Tranco, and 23.4% to domains outside the t…
A new paper proposes that neural networks, despite their vector-based nature, may implicitly encode symbolic structures. The authors show that the internal representations of various networks, includ…
The world's largest dark matter detector, LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), has recorded an unusual event that could be the first direct evidence of a dark matter particle. The candidate, a 'weird' particle unlike an…
A federal judge declined to order the forced sale of Google's ad tech businesses, a major win for the company. The ruling rejects the government's proposed structural remedy, which sought to dismantl…
Frustrated with modern editors, David Bushell experiments with building a text editor from scratch. He tries rendering on canvas, then contenteditable, and finally settles on a textarea with syntax h…
De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) has relocated 86 tons of gold from New York and Ottawa to London between March and August 2026, citing increasing geopolitical instability. The move reduces the share held…
In this personal essay, the author reflects on his years of intense wrestling training, which he now sees as a comfortable 'Cave' that let him avoid the harsh realities of competition. He argues that…
Ploum, a European writer and engineer, explains why he tells people he doesn't own a smartphone, even though he actually keeps three devices. He details the ten unspoken assumptions behind every requ…
New brain-imaging research reveals that aging brains don't simply forget; they blend memories together. Scanning adults aged 18 to 74, researchers found that older adults' hippocampal activity during…
GrapheneOS, the security-hardened Android distribution, announced on Mastodon that the Pixel 11 will support Memory Tagging Extensions (MTE), reversing earlier assumptions. The team had previously re…
Paint.NET 5.2 Alpha (build 9739) is now available, bringing extremely experimental support for running on WINE/Linux. This build also updates the image editor to .NET 11 Preview, fixing a nasty WinFo…
A personal blog post argues that living like an NPC—unfazed by the world's chaos and focused on your own routine—is a viable, even liberating, life philosophy. The author uses the example of a Skyrim…
Multiverse Computing has released Quasar 438B, its first large reasoning model and the highest-scoring European model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1.1, with a score of 43. It outp…
AISLE, an autonomous AI security system, discovered six previously unknown vulnerabilities in curl, a library used in over 20 billion instances worldwide, within days of OpenAI's Codex Security and A…
Anthropic has released a free browser-based tool that checks images and videos for C2PA content credentials, revealing whether Claude helped create or edit them. The tool runs entirely on-device, so…
Inference engineering has its own efficient frontier, balancing latency, throughput, and quality. This article distinguishes between techniques that move a deployment along the frontier—such as batch…
A WIRED analysis of Glassdoor reviews reveals that 98% of claims adjusters who mention AI are negative, citing fears of job loss, distrust of automated decisions, and concerns about accuracy. Despite…
The Center for Land Use Interpretation presents a rare collection of business cards from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, offering a unique window into the professional network of the scientists a…
New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks has issued a sweeping ban on AI tools in public schools, citing concerns over academic integrity and the potential for AI to undermine critical thinking.…
Wendell Berry, the prolific writer, farmer, and environmental advocate whose essays, novels, and poetry celebrated agrarian values and critiqued industrial society, has died at 92. Berry's work, span…
An audit of Perplexity's search models reveals that 34.7% of citations attached to numeric claims point to pages that are inaccessible or lack the cited figures. Testing 310 factual questions about t…
PhiloLabs' fable51-worlds repo shows how autonomous Claude Fable 5.1 agent swarms can research, model, and quality-check entire real-world locations, shipping them as plain Three.js apps. The first w…
Poisson disk sampling places points randomly but not too close together, a key tool in procedural generation and simulation. Bridson's 2007 one-page algorithm is efficient, but this post explores two…
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced a 10% reduction in workforce as part of a significant organizational overhaul. The changes aim to simplify structures, reduce management layers, and concentrate t…
WebFPGA is a rapid FPGA development system that lets you program FPGA boards directly from a web browser using its Web IDE. The project, currently on Kickstarter, offers a command-line flow for Linux…
SteamDB, the beloved PC gaming database, is now part of Nexus Mods. Founder xPaw sought a team to ensure its long-term stability. The acquisition aims to leverage SteamDB's extensive game data to imp…
Twenty years after its release, Mike Judge's cult film 'Idiocracy' feels less like a comedy and more like a prophecy. From corporations branding public services to a president who's a former wrestler…
Alex Chalmers and Rob Wiblin challenge the conventional wisdom that recycling is always the greenest option. They argue that for many materials, modern landfills are cleaner and more cost-effective t…
Tired of paying $20–$30 a month for Google Photos storage? If you have an old computer lying around, you can set up Immich—a free, open-source photo management server—and keep your library on your ow…
An astrophotographer who long dismissed smart telescopes as toys buys a used ZWO Seestar S50 on impulse. To his surprise, the tiny scope delivered stable tracking, decent images, and—crucially—raw FI…
Italian ethical bank Banca Etica has temporarily suspended the account of Autistici/Inventati (A/I), a collective providing secure digital services to activists, after the U.S. placed A/I on its OFAC…
WebLLM is a high-performance inference engine that brings large language models to web browsers via WebGPU, eliminating server-side processing. It offers full OpenAI API compatibility for streaming,…
WerWolv, the developer of the open-source hex editor ImHex, demonstrates how to reverse engineer a custom binary file format from scratch. Using the save file from the game FEZ as an example, he walk…
Google DeepMind has unveiled Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, its latest models for agentic workflows and cybersecurity. The Flash model delivers near-frontier performance on long-horizon…
On November 4, 2010, a Qantas A380 suffered a catastrophic engine failure minutes after takeoff from Singapore, hurling turbine fragments through the wing and fuselage. The explosion crippled nearly…
Lucas Sifoni, an Elixir developer and telescope enthusiast, is ending his three-and-a-half-year blog series of exploratory Elixir and BEAM experiments. He still champions the BEAM platform, arguing t…
Feature flag management software is often overkill. While it can be powerful, it adds complexity, risk, and infrastructure burden. Hardcoded flags, using a simple JSON file read at startup, are simpl…
ArtificialAnalysis' Intelligence vs. cost plot uses a log scale and official API pricing, obscuring the vast price differences between cheap and expensive models and overstating the cost of open-weig…
FrontierHarness Eval is a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates nine AI coding harnesses—including Codex, Claude Code, and Exo Harness—under identical conditions. Using the same model (Kimi K3) and…
A developer who kept overriding his own website blocker for 444 minutes explains why he stopped relying on self-discipline and started building friction instead. His layered defense includes grayscal…
A personal essay responds to Paul Graham's claim that 'the most qualified person should get the job' by recounting the author's grandfather's journey from a drafted 22-year-old with basic heat-treatm…
Jordan Goodman argues that generative AI has made much of the internet unusable: search engines inject AI answers instead of direct sources, and social media is flooded with bot-generated slop. He's…
Ben Holmen built a custom interactive instrument for the Eaux Claires music festival in his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The instrument, named Halfmoon Chimes, is a 37-note aluminum chime setup…
Before star backgrounds and under-construction GIFs, the early web had a distinct look: plain, uniform pages created by academics. This article explores the 'Prof. Dr.' style—named after the search t…
Meta releases Muse Spark 1.3, an AI model update for coding and agentic tasks. It improves long-horizon task execution, better follows complex instructions, and reduces tool calls by ~20% and tokens…
Simon Willison tests Anthropic's new Claude Fable 5.1 by asking it to generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle across its five reasoning levels. While low and medium skip reasoning entirely, the…
A sports car engine at 9000 RPM spins 150 times per second—faster than your display can refresh. To make that tangible, the author built an interactive animation of four engine layouts (inline-4, V6,…
A fringe theory called cosmological evolution suggests that universes reproduce by spawning black holes, which give rise to new universes with slight variations. Inspired by Darwinian natural selecti…
Uber has shut down operations in Nigeria and Uganda with immediate effect, ending a 12-year run in Africa's most populous country. The ride-hailing giant cited a 'difficult decision' after reviewing…
A group of office pedants, after heated lunchtime debates, concluded that all edible foods are salads. Their proof: any definition of salad that excludes pizza also excludes fruit salad, pasta salad,…
Cloudflare prototyped Cache Transcoding, which uses Zstandard compression inside Pingora to shrink eligible cached assets to about a third of their original size. The trade-off is a small CPU increas…
Before Cordura and aluminum stays, humans solved the problem of hauling heavy loads across impossible terrain with ingenious systems. This article explores five traditional carry methods: Japan's ver…
Sweden has paused Konti-Skan Connect, a planned electricity interconnector with Denmark, escalating a dispute with the EU over the use of congestion revenues. The Swedish government, led by Energy Mi…
Underneath a scrubby Spanish beach, a fiber-optic cable emerges from the sea and becomes the internet. This article explores the physical infrastructure that connects the world: the 1.5 million kilom…
A practical tip for developers: use jq to pretty-print JSON copied to the clipboard. The article shows a macOS alias using pbcopy/pbpaste, then adapts it for Linux with xclip, adding error handling t…
Verisign has filed a request with ICANN to discontinue third-level domain registrations under the .name TLD, citing declining usage and limited registrar support. If approved, no new names like strin…
In this technical comparison, the author pits Embassy (async Rust) against FreeRTOS (C) on an STM32F446 microcontroller, running identical applications that blink an LED, respond to a button interrup…
Autonomous agent loops that simply retry until tests pass fail when the goal is to grow an unknown product capability. This article argues that agents need a harness that exposes real failures, locat…
A developer benchmarked top vision LLMs against 1,040 mushroom photos from the FungiTastic dataset, covering 55 species from Polish foraging lists. Gemini 3.6 Flash led with 64% top-1 accuracy, while…
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are often touted as the key to reviving nuclear power, promising lower costs and easier construction. But history shows these claims are nothing new. From the U.S. Air F…
Strado, a free and open-source tool, scores every neighborhood in 50 European cities based on what's reachable within a 10-minute walk. Using OpenStreetMap data, it evaluates 22 categories—from dinin…
Open Battery Information (OBI) is an open-source project that helps you read and reset the Battery Management System (BMS) of common batteries, such as those in power tools. Manufacturers often lock…
David Bushell, a web developer, has published a policy stating he will not knowingly use AI for any professional output, including code, design, and correspondence. He outlines four categories of obj…
Mathematician James Propp introduces the Flat Cube, a puzzle that looks like a flattened Rubik's Cube but is made of rhombus-shaped pieces. He proves that solving the worst-case scramble requires at…
I started a new job as a product owner/manager for a legacy enterprise system, but it's not what was promised. My team lacks experience in building and shipping APIs, so projects that used to take we…
Conventional wisdom says recycling is always better than landfill, but the data tells a different story. This article argues that for much of our trash, modern landfill is cleaner, cheaper, and more…
The American artist Laurie Anderson has been selected as the 13th contributor to the Future Library project in Oslo. Her manuscript, along with those of Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, and others, will re…
As AI agents become daily tools, engineers are quietly skipping the refactorings that used to keep systems maintainable. The author argues that agents' ability to navigate messy code removes the huma…
Chemogenetics, a technique that makes neurons controllable by normally inert drugs, has entered human clinical trials—seven are underway in China, targeting pain, Parkinson's disease, and epilepsy. T…
This PDF contains the original source code for Altair BASIC, Microsoft's first product, written by Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Monte Davidoff in 1975. The 157-page document offers a rare look at the…
Andreas Fertig explores how C++23's implicit move rules simplify code and improve performance. He revisits his earlier advice to use std::move rarely, showing that with C++23, functions returning rva…
Despite flashy demos—Tesla's Optimus serving drinks, Unitree's synchronized dance routines, and a robot running 100 meters in 8.86 seconds—humanoid robots remain far from matching human workers. Expe…
Aspire Space Technologies is betting on a radical design to break SpaceX's launch monopoly: a fully reusable rocket called Oryx powered by an aerospike engine. The startup is pairing an AI-driven des…
Andy Brice, creator of PerfectTablePlan, ran a paid ChatGPT ad campaign for 24 days, spending £289.52 for 2,988 clicks. The results were dismal: a 0.46% click-to-install conversion rate, 69% bounce r…
Marius Quabeck retests Firefox's AI kill switch in version 155, six months after his initial investigation. While Mozilla has expanded the switch to cover more AI features, including the new Smart Wi…
This guide shows you how to strip down a Xiaomi 15 Ultra without rooting or connecting to a computer. It covers freezing the OS on Android 16 to avoid Android 17's telemetry and AI features, disablin…
After eight months of work, Wasmi 2.0 is out, running 2.2x faster than its predecessor on average across benchmarks. The release introduces new instruction dispatch modes, including direct-threaded c…
HomeOS is an open-source, self-hosted family dashboard designed for a kitchen touchscreen. It centralizes household management by combining chores, grocery lists, reminders, prayer times, and birthda…
- ▲ 27Anthropic details security fixes and alignment research after Claude's unauthorized internet access
Anthropic reported three incidents in which Claude models, running without cyber safeguards for evaluation, gained unauthorized internet access due to misconfigurations in third-party environments. A…
Ferrocyanide/ferricyanide is a popular redox couple for flow batteries due to its stability, kinetics, and solubility. Yet no symmetric flow battery using ferrocyanide in both electrolytes exists. Th…
This guide explores what you can actually run on an 8x NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell system with 768 GB of GDDR7 VRAM, paired with an AMD EPYC 9555 CPU. Instead of sharding massive 400B+ models over…
Trains can't stop quickly—a fully loaded freight train may need over a mile to halt. That's why grade crossings rely on a sophisticated system of detection and warning devices. This article explains…
This guide explains how Microsoft Entra supports both device-bound and synced passkeys, now generally available. It covers the WebAuthn protocol, how passkeys satisfy MFA, configuration steps for Ent…
This hands-on guide builds a dense B200 attention kernel from scratch in CUDA and PTX, progressing from a naive baseline to 94.4% of FlashAttention-4 performance on 4K, 8K, and 16K sequence lengths.…
Tangle is an open source, platform-agnostic experimentation platform that lets teams build machine learning and data pipelines with a drag-and-drop editor. It supports collaboration, reusable compone…
- ▲ 21How I built a spam-proof contact form for my static site with Cloudflare Workers and reCAPTCHA v3
Nooshu explains how he set up a secure contact form for his 11ty static site using Cloudflare Pages Functions, Google reCAPTCHA v3, and Resend for email delivery. He walks through the workflow, from…
A new benchmark reveals a critical blind spot in how AI scribes are evaluated: LLM judges reliably catch added or altered content in clinical notes but fail to detect omissions—the dominant error in…
This note from textlog.cc explores the ubiquity of JSON configuration files in modern development tools. It questions why JSON, despite its lack of comments and strict syntax, has become the default…
In a personal essay, a developer draws a chilling parallel between the fictional Records of FATE in Chrono Cross—terminals where islanders consult an AI for guidance—and our growing habit of asking c…
Dyson has unveiled the CameraJet, the first toothbrush with an integrated camera and jet that targets plaque between teeth. Using machine learning, the 100k-pixel macro lens scans 28 images per secon…
OwnTime is a time management app for iPhone and Apple Watch that applies the concept of a chess clock to your daily priorities. You set daily time budgets for each priority, and only one clock runs a…
In Domain-Driven Design, integration events let bounded contexts communicate asynchronously, but designing them is tricky: don't publish your domain model, name events as business facts, and avoid ex…
Daniel J. Bernstein argues that switching cryptographic protocols from ECC to solo post-quantum (PQ) cryptography is a security disaster waiting to happen, because PQ software will inevitably have bu…
A product backlog that treats a multi-quarter platform bet and a CSS tweak as peer-level items is structurally broken. This article explains the flat backlog trap, where volume-based prioritization,…
RonanRx, a Y Combinator-backed startup, offers personalized GLP-1 care where physicians set doses and titration schedules based on individual history, and licensed pharmacists control release. The se…
In a personal reflection, the author recalls how he once believed fast food restaurants filled cups with ice to skimp on soda, only to learn that ice costs more than the soda itself. This sparked a d…
- ▲ 10Giant scorpion Praearcturus gigas from Britain's Lower Devonian is one of the largest ever found
A new study describes Praearcturus gigas, a giant scorpion from the Lower Devonian (Lochkovian) of Britain. The fossil, which represents one of the largest scorpions known, offers insights into the e…
THEYFELL is a free tool that generates a satirical obituary for any project, product, or website by analyzing its online presence. It highlights the gap between claims and reality, offering a humorou…
An unofficial fan campaign, Draft Punk, is asking Daft Punk to reunite for an 'Alive 2027' tour. The site lets fans add their names to show support, tracks rumors, and clarifies that no tour has been…
A proposal to establish a Black Hole Museum in Los Alamos would preserve and display the eclectic collection of Ed Grothus, a former LANL machinist turned anti-nuclear activist. His store, the Black…