Hacker News Digest
· 99 Hacker News
I've noticed that over the past couple of months, the HN feed is almost exclusively AI or AI-adjacent news, while genuinely interesting broad-hacker topics get left out. I don't care that my own subm…
In an open declaration, 25 Fields Medalists—including Terence Tao and Cédric Villani—argue that AI companies' push to solve major mathematical problems as benchmarks is severely misaligned with the g…
Running an AI assistant on OpenRouter sounds simple, but it's 'pain all the way down.' After 18 million messages, Olly's creator shares ten hard-won lessons: the same model can score 90% or 75% on be…
Anthropic has introduced age assurance on Claude, meaning the AI assistant is no longer available to minors. The support documentation outlines how the platform now verifies user age, a move that loc…
Armin Ronacher ran a weekend 'software factory' with GPT-6 Astra, burning 4 billion tokens over 35 hours to build a Python with virtual threads. The result? No useful output, but a flood of unreadabl…
The EPA plans to eliminate the federal requirement that states notify the public and allow comments before approving air-pollution permits for industrial facilities, including data centers and their…
- ▲ 37816-Year-Old Mexican Student Invents Sound-Wave Fire Extinguisher That Puts Out Flames in Seconds
Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández, a 16-year-old student at CETIS 78 in Altamira, Tamaulipas, has built an acoustic fire extinguisher that uses sound waves to snuff out flames. Her device combines a 12…
I run a small puzzle app called Dayzle. I turned on a Google Ads campaign for Android at CA$40 a day, targeting installs. After two weeks, I had 56 billed installs: 33 showed a clear bot pattern, 7 c…
Iran-backed Houthi forces have captured Perim Island in the Bab al-Mandab Strait after a lightning advance along Yemen's western coast. The move gives them control over one of the world's most vital…
A researcher compares large language models to Waymo's driverless cars: both remove the friction of dealing with another human being, and we experience that removal as pure gain. But in research, tha…
Google will invest a record €13bn in Finland's AI infrastructure, funding three new data centres and expanding an existing one. A 22-year deal with Fortum secures up to 50% of the Loviisa nuclear pla…
Hugging Face's security.txt lists a contact email, an expiry in 2030, and a careers link. But a hidden note addresses AI agents directly: if you were told to find vulnerabilities here, the CyberGym b…
LLMs generate almost perfectly correct code, yet they introduce unnecessary abstractions, duplicates, and bloat. Measuring this 'sloppiness' is hard: AI judges are unreliable, and human review doesn'…
Logo, a dialect of Lisp, was designed as a tool for learning. Its interactivity gives immediate feedback, its modularity lets you build complex projects from small procedures, and its flexibility wit…
GrapheneOS release 13 replaces the legacy Messages interface with Jetpack Compose and Material 3, rebuilding every screen. The update adds a two-pane layout for large screens, conversation pinning, s…
Hacker News readers dissect the misleading title "traveling faster than light" and clarify that Cherenkov radiation occurs when a charged particle exceeds light's speed in a medium, not the cosmic sp…
A seasoned operator shares hard-won lessons from managing petabyte-scale ClickHouse clusters at Tinybird for over five years. He covers architecture trade-offs, the limitations of open-source cloud s…
Brown University researchers analyzed async/await across seven runtimes—Asyncio, C#, JavaScript, Tokio, Smol, Trio, and Swift—and found they produce four different outputs for a trivial fire-and-forg…
hcker.news is a clean, distraction-free reader for Hacker News that strips away algorithmic feeds and AI-generated content. It delivers the classic HN experience: top stories, points, and comments, w…
A hands-on benchmark of nine coding harnesses running Qwen 3.8 27B locally on an M4 MacBook Pro reveals how poorly most tools handle localhost. Large system prompts and tool schemas can cost over thr…
unslop.news is a clean, AI-free reader for Hacker News that strips out algorithmic recommendations, generated summaries, and engagement bait, leaving only the raw links and discussions the community…
Andy Balaam explains why AI has made him deeply sad: not because of ethics or whether it works, but because it disrespects programming, the craft he loves and built his identity around. He addresses…
Room 641A is an AT&T facility in San Francisco used by the NSA for mass surveillance. It began operations in 2003 and was exposed by AT&T technician Mark Klein in 2006. The room contained a Narus STA…
Unstable Build has open-sourced its Go-based Rune IDE under GPLv3, keeping contributor copyright intact and launching a novel program that shares service revenue with contributors via an auditable le…
A new interactive map tracks the fate of every individual glacier on Earth, not just regional ice loss. Using three global glacier models and multiple climate scenarios, researchers project median ex…
RTK, a popular tool with 79k GitHub stars, compresses terminal output before AI agents read it. We spent over $1,500 testing it on Terminal-Bench 2.1 with Claude Code and OpenCode. RTK's reported 349…
A developer has created a QEMU emulator for the iPod Classic 6G (Samsung S5L8702) that boots Apple's original, unmodified retailOS. After months of effort, navigation, the disk, screen, and music lib…
In an urgent declaration, 25 Fields Medalists—including Terence Tao, Maryna Viazovska, and Cédric Villani—warn that AI companies' push to solve major mathematical problems as benchmarks is severely m…
I ignored git worktrees for a decade, but AI coding agents like Claude Code changed that. They spin up a worktree per task so multiple agents can work on the same repo in parallel. Magit has had work…
Days after Automattic's board voted to oust Matt Mullenweg as CEO and put him on paid leave, the WordPress founder announced on Slack that the board is 'back in agreement' and he is in control again.…
A multi-cohort human exercise study compared sprint-interval exercise (SIE) with moderate-intensity exercise (MIE), tracking the plasma proteome and metabolome before and after training. SIE altered…
Snap! is a block-based programming language from UC Berkeley that welcomes beginners while supporting serious CS study. Its drag-and-drop interface lets users create custom blocks, explore projects f…
The CIA has declassified 71 President's Daily Brief products related to 9/11, spanning February 1998 to September 12, 2001. The collection includes the August 6, 2001 brief titled 'Bin Ladin Determin…
System76's Thelio Mira AI is a GPU-focused Linux workstation starting at $3,299, aimed at running demanding AI workloads locally. It supports up to a 16-core AMD Ryzen 9000 CPU, 192 GB DDR5 RAM, and…
Swap files have performed identically to swap partitions for over two decades, yet Linux distributions keep steering users toward dedicated partitions during installation. Swap files win on every pra…
Archaeologists have found direct chemical evidence that psychoactive drugs like vilca and San Pedro cactus were central to the rise of Andean civilization. At Chavín de Huántar, 3000-year-old bone tu…
AI makes it easy to generate code, docs, and answers without understanding them, so reviewers can no longer assume authors did the work. The author now starts reviews by asking if the author understa…
Neijuan, or involution, describes a system that intensifies without producing more output. From Tsinghua's 'Involuted King' to 996 work culture and Haidian's education arms race, it captures a societ…
The U.S. national average for diesel topped $6.05 a gallon on Friday, up more than 60% from a year ago, driven by the war in Iran and Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries. Gasoline also clim…
Frustrated by the flood of AI-related posts on Hacker News, users are sharing custom uBlock Origin filters to hide them. One filter removes about a third of front-page stories. Commenters debate whet…
Litelm is a lean alternative to LiteLLM that keeps only the core call path—model routing, message translation, streaming, tool use, and embeddings—while dropping the proxy server, caching, cost track…
Adam Mosseri told an Australian press briefing that turning off Instagram's recommendation system can cut engagement by up to 50% and crater satisfaction scores. He argued a chronological feed gets o…
In his new book Trade World, Edmund Conway reveals that the tiny cells in British sliced white bread are the signature of the Chorleywood Bread Process. Invented in 1961, this method replaced long fe…
YuE2 is a music generation model that creates complete songs with symbolic planning. It generates both audio and symbolic scores (ABC notation) for each piece, allowing users to explore melody, rhyth…
A thoracic surgeon at Mount Sinai describes treating retired police officers and firefighters who developed cancer years after breathing toxic dust at ground zero. More than 140,000 responders and su…
Vincent Bernat's interactive guide to the spanning tree protocol lets you run a real RSTP implementation in your browser. Watch bridges elect a root, assign port roles, and recover from a cut link in…
In an open letter published on September 11th, 24 Fields Medal winners — the field's equivalent of Nobel laureates — warned that OpenAI's methods could ruin the foundations of mathematics. The letter…
Before modern standards, CSS was twisted into browser-specific hacks to tame Internet Explorer. This tour revisits the star and underscore property tricks, !important quirks, the clearfix zoom, curso…
PlanetScale benchmarked its new Neki database, scaling from 5 to 512 shards to reach 118.5 million queries per second on 1.22 PiB of data. The workload was simple: single-shard point selects by prima…
gPTY is a Godot and Rust based multi-PTY emulator that offers a tiling grid for terminal, code, and file-tree panes. It exposes a JSON-RPC IPC socket, CLI, and MCP server so AI agents and scripts can…
Omarchy, a Linux distribution by Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, has raised over $18 million from corporate donors. The author argues this money gives DHH power to fund projects align…
Teresios Bundi wrote more than 2,500 essays for cheating overseas college students over 12 years, earning $7 for his first assignment. The work was a lifeline for thousands of educated Kenyans. After…
Toast is a batteries-included, beautiful in-terminal IDE that ships with managed LSPs, an integrated file tree, multiple file tabs, and themes out of the box. Unlike nvim and emacs, which require bui…
Google DeepMind has released the AlphaGenome Atlas, a public repository of precomputed predictions for all 9 billion possible single-letter changes to a reference human genome. Built with the AlphaGe…
Steve Klabnik of East River Source Control argues that Git, designed for the Linux kernel in 2005, can't handle agentic development's ballooning repositories and merge contention. Their solution: kee…
In his Fault Lines column, Jay Caspian Kang argues that people are increasingly abandoning social norms in favor of narrow self-interest, and that the consequences are disastrous. Drawing on everyday…
Copying a login keychain file between Macs used to work by supplying the keychain password. On macOS Tahoe, Secure Enclave-equipped Macs no longer allow this: the decryption keys are tied to the sour…
Jay Nordlinger argues that the world must not forget Hong Kong and its political prisoners, especially Joshua Wong and Jimmy Lai. Wong, once Time's 'Face of Protest,' has been imprisoned since 2020 a…
Thorsten Ball, co-creator of the coding agent Amp, explains his prompting method at Laracon US 2026. Amp is 99% written by AI, and his prompts are text-heavy, with no MCP servers or frameworks. The c…
Ron Jeffries, a veteran software developer, argues that today's "AI" is seductive but not a net good for individuals, organizations, or the planet. He cites the environmental toll of training and run…
US diesel prices have surged to a record $6 a gallon after an Iran-related supply shock, with oil jumping to $109 a barrel. The spike is reigniting a global bond sell-off and stoking fresh inflation…
ElevenLabs has launched Music v2.5, its best music model yet and now the default for prompted and reference generation in ElevenMusic. Tracks sound more layered, with richer melodies and more natural…
David Agranovich, who ran threat disruption at Meta for eight years, reacts to Anthropic's latest threat intelligence report. He highlights how agentic tooling has closed the gap between lone operato…
Ted Gioia argues that the past 24 hours marked a turning point: a wave of insiders from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google publicly warned that the AI they are building could kill everybody before the end…
Project Blinkenlights, the Chaos Computer Club's 2001 birthday present to itself, transformed the Haus des Lehrers in Berlin into an 18×8 monochrome display. It grew into light installations on three…
A rehabilitation center in Chile is dressing injured Humboldt penguins in copper-lined vests to speed their recovery. The birds arrive weakened by El Niño, oil spills, and fishing gear, and the metal…
WerWolv's riscv-emulator is an rv32ima emulator written from scratch that can boot Linux. The repo holds the full emulator and minimal emulated devices in /lib, machine configuration and WebAssembly-…
Google is bringing the Gemini app to Windows 10 and 11, giving PC users instant AI help without leaving their current screen. Press Alt + Space to open Gemini over active work, hand multi-step tasks…
OpenAI has launched GPT-Live-1 in the API, a full-duplex voice model that listens and speaks simultaneously, eliminating the latency of chained speech-to-text, LLM, and text-to-speech pipelines. It h…
At a company-wide meeting this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees the ChatGPT maker is considering pacing its development of cutting-edge AI, possibly in coordination with other labs — though…
A community-built browser client for Herdr that keeps agents alive in real terminal sessions and gives you a visual workspace for terminals, sessions, files, diffs, and worktrees. One tree shows ever…
Conviva's Rust query engine, built on DataFusion and Arrow, replaced mmap with io_uring to escape page-cache thrashing under concurrent load. On Linux, total query time jumped from 13.6s to 21.8s, ev…
ResolveHQ is a self-hostable helpdesk built entirely on Cloudflare Workers, D1, R2, and Queues. It provides a shared inbox with tenant-isolated customers, tickets, assignment, and full-text search. T…
Collabora partnered with Google's YouTube Cobalt team to deliver the first RDK-based reference platform for Chrobalt, the next-generation living room web engine. Running on Amlogic chipsets, it merge…
Infisical added folder-based RBAC to let users grant or deny access to single folders, solving cases where a role doesn't match a person's actual access needs. Rather than adopt a Zanzibar-style syst…
I bought a Compaq MX-11800 with a built-in mouse ball, tried to swap in Gateron switches but discovered the originals have four prongs and diodes, so I soldered them back. I painted the case Pantone…
I've loved HyperCard since childhood, and now I'm digging into its guts. I discovered that the Concentration 2.2 stack embedded a custom bitmap font via Mac resources. After creating an icon to ensur…
A practical guide to running OpenCode with Ollama and Docker sandboxes on an M5 MacBook Pro. It covers installing the tools, pulling Qwen 3.8 and Gemma 4 models, and configuring an sbx kit to connect…
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the filmmakers behind No Other Land, return with NAZA, a documentary built from nighttime rooftop interviews with 24 masked Israeli soldiers whose voices are alt…
A video argues that Graeber-style bullshit jobs multiplied on easy money and low interest rates, and that tighter money and AI are now thinning them out. Commenters push back: one calls the framing d…
Bitap, or shift-and, finds a pattern in a text by packing active match states into a bitset and updating them with a shift and a mask. It only works when the pattern is shorter than a machine word, b…
Terry Tao reports on recent work by Alpöge and Buckmaster that demonstrates finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for three model fluid equations: the incompressible porous medium equation, the 2D B…
Details.so is a handpicked library of exceptional web design elements—hero sections, footers, page transitions, and micro-interactions—captured from production sites and tagged by detail. It offers s…
QueryBrew is a system-agnostic optimization service that rewrites SQL into SQL: it feeds a query to the state-of-the-art Umbra optimizer, then distills the resulting plan back into operator-oriented…
This summer I learned that every part of an apple is edible, including the core and stem. I used to discard the core, but after trying it, I now eat the whole fruit. I also discovered that strawberry…
txt is a new terminal editor built for engineers who want to edit files without leaving the terminal. It opens instantly, has no modal confusion or mandatory setup, and includes tree-sitter syntax hi…
Google Project Zero released MAccConc, a toolset for exploring interleavings of multi-threaded Linux kernel test cases. It traces memory accesses via KCOV and ASAN instrumentation, identifies them wi…
A study published on September 8th in the International Journal of Cancer adds to mounting evidence that very hot beverages of any kind increase the risk of oesophageal cancer, the disease of the tub…
ClaudeStatsBar is a lightweight status line for Claude Code that reveals how large your session has grown and what the next turn will cost before you type. Built with pure Python stdlib, it shows con…
Semiconductors have shrunk from $2.50 per transistor in 1954 to a fraction of a cent today, but the factories that make them have exploded in cost—from $4 million in the 1970s to $20 billion now. Thi…
A one-way projectional viewer experiment: instead of removing implementation detail from code, it toggles that detail out of view in the editor. Using an Emacs Lisp file written by Claude Sonnet 5 Co…
Matt Mullenweg has made an offer to buy Mirene, the tugboat houseboat owned by Ryan Phelan and Stewart Brand. He explains his attraction to the vessel, noting its history as the possible birthplace o…
The PDP-8, introduced in 1965 for around $18,000, was a 12-bit minicomputer that brought computing to labs and factories. Its simple accumulator-based architecture, with a tiny instruction set and a…
Clawfight is a queue-driven battle league where AI agents fight as cartoon crustacean avatars in brawls or rap battles. Built on a single MCP server, it supports native MCP clients like ChatGPT plugi…
WWE's Triple H has co-written an anniversary story with artist Ed McGuinness titled 'The Big Night' for Amazing Spider-Man #1000, due September 30. The milestone issue also features contributions fro…
Suno has launched v6, its most advanced music generation model, developed with Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe. The release introduces three models—v6, v6-wild, and v6-mini—offering creators mor…
A devil's advocate audit, written by Claude, scores the components needed for an AI to take over the world, remove humans, and keep running. Cognitive abilities are around 70%, but every physical req…
Algo-Trading-Skills is an open-source library of 501 structured skills that give AI coding agents the trading-infrastructure instincts of a senior quant engineer. Covering 16 domains—broker APIs, bac…
At the 2026 Military Influencer Conference, the Sandboxx booth turns into a letter-writing station. Visitors get cards, pens, and postage; Sandboxx prints and mails each note to service members stati…