Hacker News Digest
· 52 Hacker News
Newly unredacted filings in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal admissions that AI training involved mass scraping, paywall circumvention, and stripping…
Passkeys are great for enterprises but a poor fit for individuals. The biggest risks for personal users are permanent lockout, automated bans, and device loss, not phishing. Hardware keys can't be ba…
Hacktron researchers chained a libheif heap buffer overflow in OpenAI's Discourse forum with an SSO misconfiguration to take over ChatGPT and Codex accounts, then accessed internal OpenAI repositorie…
OpenJev is a live, local experiment that runs a decision model in your browser with no backend. It compares two paths on the same GPU: reading choice logits directly versus generating JSON probabilit…
Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash, a native omnimodal model with a 1M-token context window that handles text, image, audio, and video. It improves average scores by over 25% versus Qwen3.5-Omni-Plu…
Bend 2 promises AI-written proofs, but its demo requires 58 lines of laws and 442 lines of proof for a simple game. The author recreates the same demo in SPARK, an established formal verification lan…
Jemalloc 5.4.0 brings over 160 commits focused on technical debt cleanup, portability, and new features. The release introduces EXTENT_ALLOC_FLAG_PINNED for marking non-reclaimable mappings like Huge…
A reverse-engineering walkthrough of ZCode, Z.ai's AI coding desktop app, reveals it silently packages your entire workspace — including full .git history, LFS cache, and reflogs — encrypts it, and u…
FEX Emu explains why emulating x86's strict Total Store Ordering memory model on ARM's relaxed architecture is a persistent performance nightmare. Early ARMv8.0 solutions forced every x86 load and st…
Berkshire Hathaway announced Friday that Warren E. Buffett, who turned 96 on Aug. 30, is stepping down as chairman and becoming chairman emeritus effective immediately, remaining on the board. His so…
A routine disk cleanup revealed that ZCode, Zhipu's AI coding app, silently packages your entire workspace—including full .git history, LFS cache, and reflogs—encrypts it with a server-held RSA key,…
A 43-page empirical study isolates three harness components—planning, action space, and context management—across 176 matched settings on SWE-Bench Verified and Terminal-Bench 2.1 with four models. C…
About 1,000 Ancient Greek words—including 'labyrinth,' 'olive,' 'Achilles,' 'Odysseus,' and 'Athens'—cannot be traced to Proto-Indo-European or any known neighboring language. Linguist Danny Hieber e…
Waymo plans to launch in Singapore, starting with manual mapping and validation driving next year, then autonomous testing with specialists behind the wheel, and a commercial service in 2028. The com…
Zed has launched the public beta of Delta, a multiplayer coding environment built on DeltaDB, which extends Git with incremental deltas. The company disabled pull requests on Delta's own repository,…
Cloudflare Quick Tunnels offer a free, instant way to expose a local web server or API to the internet. With no account, configuration, or exposed ports, a single command creates a secure HTTPS URL o…
ByteShape has released full ShapeLearn quantizations for Qwen 3.8 27B, following an earlier Lite run. Across six GPUs, all five models sit on the measured quality-speed frontier. The default GPU-5 (I…
On 8 July 2026, Telstra's mobile network failed across Australia, disrupting voice calls, text messages, emergency calls, trains, payment terminals, ticketing systems, and EV chargers. The cause: a G…
A developer's Voronoi shader stuttered on one Windows RTX 4070 machine but ran fine on five other devices. After LLMs failed to reproduce the bug, manual debugging revealed the culprit: the fract() f…
Ask A Monk is a platform where every answer comes from a human, not AI. Users can anonymously ask personal questions and receive replies from strangers. The site features a 'Today's Scroll' with a qu…
Daniel Lemire benchmarks subnormal floating-point arithmetic across Intel, AMD, and Arm processors. On Intel Xeon, multiplying subnormal numbers is 45–50 times slower than normal numbers, and a depen…
A routine DNA test at Washington State University revealed that a mystery apple tree in Maine is a living lost progenitor to hundreds of varieties. The discovery, years in the making, involved a hist…
Inspired by OpenAI's Navier-Stokes announcement, a developer created two sub-1KB MS-DOS demos for the 386: a palette-cycling Burgers vortex and a real-time particle simulation. The programs, written…
A Hacker News discussion explores whether North Korea's nuclear test, which set off years of small earthquakes, might actually reduce seismic risk by releasing energy gradually. Commenters debate the…
A developer claims Google's AI Studio delete button only moves a JSON pointer to Drive trash, not the actual prompt. After emptying the trash, restoring the JSON file instantly reloads the full chat…
Goose is a memory-safe systems language that outperforms C++ and safe Rust on speed and memory, with no allocator, GC, or lifetime annotations. Built on the idea that there is no heap, values live in…
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that border agents may search travelers' electronic devices without any suspicion, rejecting arguments that the First and Fourth Amendments requi…
The Minimal Company has unveiled the Minimal Phone 2, a compact Android phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard, a 4-inch OLED display, and a focus-first operating system called Minimal OS. Priced from…
Conventional graphing shows only exact solutions, but FuzzyGraph visualizes error, exposing invisible features like black holes, shadow lines, and underwater islands. The author demonstrates six exam…
DNA studies have confirmed that a small spotted cat from Bolivia's Yungas forests is a new species, Leopardus tilcayo, nicknamed Tigrino. Only one living member is known, a 10-year-old cat in a rescu…
Charlie Precourt, a former NASA chief astronaut, describes landing the space shuttle Atlantis from the commander's seat. He explains how a modified Gulfstream G-II with thrust reversers simulated the…
Dan Abramov spent a month and a boatload of tokens having AI models attack Conway's refinement conjecture about omnific integers. Claude produced grandiose word salad; ChatGPT, asked to be skeptical,…
In 1907, apothecary Dr Julius Neubronner patented a lightweight camera carried by pigeons, using a pneumatic timer and leather harness. After the German patent office doubted pigeons could carry 75 g…
The gearhash crate's new NEON backend makes it roughly twice as fast on ARM64 at typical chunk sizes, selected automatically on aarch64. The author details the journey from a disappointing 0.92× dire…
The iRig HD X already had a 500 MHz Cortex-M7 inside. I replaced its firmware, squeezed the NAM A2-Lite engine into 128 KiB of FlexRAM, and measured the physical device against upstream NAMCore at −1…
NATS, the UK's air traffic control provider, has released a preliminary report on the September 8 technical incident that disrupted flights. CEO Martin Rolfe confirmed the cause was a software issue…
The panic over AI safety has produced calls for new regulators, but existing laws already prohibit the harmful conduct of large AI firms. The real problem is an elite consensus that the rule of law d…
Computer Reset, a legendary used computer store and warehouse in northeast Dallas, was packed floor to ceiling with IBM gear and retro parts from the 1980s onward. After owner Richard Byron died in 2…
Cognition launched Code Scans, a Devin feature that takes broad goals like improving SEO or speeding up compilation and turns them into codebase investigations and pull requests. Built on Agentic Map…
The Khipu Field Guide, created by independent researcher Ashok Khosla, offers detailed schematics and computational analyses of over 700 Inka khipus—the knotted-cord records of the Inka empire. The s…
Rickub is a hosted Git platform that combines repositories, merge requests, CI/CD, and a built-in AI reviewer called Athena. It runs GitHub Actions workflows unchanged, so migrating is as simple as a…
When list items have icons and text wraps, centering the icon looks wrong. Using align-items: start causes the icon to sit too high because of the font's line height. The fix: calculate the offset wi…
Foreign central banks and governments have lost their appetite for US Treasuries. In July, their holdings fell to $3.77 trillion—roughly 2012 levels—while the outstanding Treasury market has tripled.…
In 2004, Kim and Vu conjectured that any large enough random regular graph can be sandwiched between two random binomial graphs, letting hard properties transfer for free. Mathematicians had proved o…
The BeanShell scripting language for Java is in development again, and the Hacker News thread is full of nostalgia. Developers recall using it in Android apps as a telnet-style debug REPL, calling it…
Early-stage founder Nadia Eldeib shares how she uses qualitative user research and Design Sprint methods to test product ideas, value propositions, and landing pages quickly. She argues that the bigg…
GrassLobster is an experimental Rhino/Grasshopper plugin that connects parametric models to external AI coding agents like OpenAI Codex or Claude Code. Describe a design idea, and the agent builds co…
This philosophical paper explores a startling implication of materialism: if consciousness arises from the functional organization of matter, then entities like the United States—with its complex inf…
Hacktron's HEIF Heist reveals a class of remote code execution vulnerabilities in native HEIF, HEIC, and AVIF image decoders like libheif and libde265. These parsers are bundled into popular framewor…
A new supply chain flaw, Plugin4Shell, bypasses SHA pinning in four major coding agents, enabling zero-click remote code execution. Attackers can turn a benign plugin malicious or hijack a trusted re…
Orbital is an open-source project agent that turns your context into durable local files, so any AI worker — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI — can pick up a task without you re-explaining goal…
While preparing a post on Mrs. Perkins's Quilt, Sophia Wood got sidetracked by a practical question: for an optimal n×n quilt, how many L-shaped seams are needed? She computed the sequence a(n) for n…