Hacker News Digest
· 88 Hacker News
OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol, an upgrade to GPT-6 Sol that nearly matches GPT-6 Astra's intelligence on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work at one-fifth of Astra's standard token price…
Derek Thompson examines the steep decline in American hosting: the share of Americans who host friends or family at least monthly has fallen from 42% in 1975 to 12% in 2026. Drawing on new Data For P…
DraftKings is using machine learning on customers' betting records to identify those likely to place losing bets and target them with promotions that lure them back. The EFF argues this exploits prob…
A six-month live facial recognition trial across London railway stations scanned more than half a million faces, cost taxpayers £320,786 and nearly 100 police hours, and produced exactly one alert —…
OpenAI introduces Dots, always-on AI agents powered by GPT-6 Astra. Each dot gets its own cloud computer, browser, and connections to over 4,000 apps, learning your preferences and working 24/7. Reac…
In 2002, Delhi's power grid was a mess: outages were daily, losses topped 50%, and theft was rampant. Through a combination of technical upgrades, regulatory reform, and accountability, the city cut…
Apple promised macOS 27 Golden Gate would be a Snow Leopard-style polish release, but a user's daily use reveals a parade of bugs: misaligned UI elements, a crash-prone menu bar, a search that refuse…
A systematic privacy analysis of nine conversational AI services—including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—reveals that every one integrates third-party advertising or tracking services. Six of nine web…
America.gov is a new AI-powered portal that consolidates 29,000 federal, state, and local government websites into one place. It provides simple answers sourced exclusively from official sites, with…
After US sanctions on the International Criminal Court cut its chief prosecutor off from Microsoft services, the Dutch government launched DAWO, a Digital Autonomous Work Environment. The project aim…
Inspired by the double-spiral patterns of sunflowers, I built a phyllotaxis LED sculpture. Using Processing, CadQuery, and 3D printing, I created a cellular matrix of 89 addressable LEDs. An STM32 wi…
Tcl/Tk 9.1.0, released September 29, 2026, builds on the 9.0 foundation with new features and interfaces. Tcl gains a unicode command for normalization, a monotonic timer with microsecond resolution,…
A new Lancet Oncology study by the WHO's cancer agency estimates infections caused 2.3 million new cancer cases in 2024 — 12% of the global total. Helicobacter pylori led with 760,000 cases, followed…
The Relapse Exploit chain unlocks PS5 consoles running firmware 7.00 through 13.60. It combines a WebKit info leak and structured clone mismatch to corrupt a typedarray, then uses an aio_multi_wait U…
Jeeves is a 9B Jev-style decision model from PostHog that reasons before answering yes/no, multiple-choice, and rating questions. Trained with SFT and CISPO on Qwen3.5-9B, it hits 0.889 on held-out t…
Bain & Company warns that the AI industry must generate $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to justify soaring data centre investment. New products like search, advertising and physical AI are expe…
Anthropic's analysis of Zhipu AI's GLM-5.3 shows it autonomously develops end-to-end exploits at rates close to Claude Mythos Preview, matching 50 of 410 attempts on ExploitBench and achieving full c…
Platform teams are engineering-led, with no PM handing out roadmaps or revenue line to follow—so work doesn't exist unless an engineer invents it. A staff engineer shares eleven signals from systems,…
OpenAI has temporarily stopped new sign-ups and upgrades to the $200 ChatGPT Pro tier (Pro 20X) as of September 10, 2026. Existing $200 subscriptions and the $100 Pro tier remain unaffected. The $100…
Google has quietly reduced its promised ten-year support window for new Chromebooks to eight years, ending updates in 2034. A support document says many devices will eventually migrate to Googlebook…
In 1993, IT architect Phil Hogan booted up a Stratus fault-tolerant server at Great Lakes Works EGL in Dearborn, Michigan. Twenty-four years later, it's still running with about 80% original parts an…
A browser-based game that reimagines Scorched Earth with a circular world and basic orbital dynamics. The developer notes it was generated by qwen 3.8: 27b, so the 'my implementation' claim is loose.…
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has dropped to 283.8 million barrels, its lowest point in more than four decades, after a 172 million-barrel release authorized by President Trump in March as part of…
U.S. Postal Inspectors shut down LabelsBank.com, charging Pakistani national Faheem Akram with selling over 5.1 million counterfeit USPS labels at $2 each, causing more than $126 million in losses. T…
Anthropic is investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and some Claude API requests. Users may see failed requests, errors loading or sending conversations,…
Godot's GDExtension system lets you load native C++ code into an unmodified engine, but managing godot-cpp and third-party libraries across platforms is painful. Conan now packages godot-cpp 10.0, so…
Meta's new Muse AI agent is supposed to obey user permissions, but testing by Inc's Jason Aten found it synced 187,000 lines from his Apple Messages database even with Full Disk Access turned off. Me…
A GitHub project demonstrates a distributed pipeline inference engine that splits a 0.5B language model across seven ESP32-S3 microcontrollers. One master node handles tokenization and embedding, whi…
- ▲ 145A 2020 Breach Exposed 200 Million Brazilians. Now AI Agents Are Training to Find the Same Flaw.
In 2020, I found a vulnerability that gave access to the Brazilian federal system, exposing records of over 200 million people. I reported it and it was fixed quickly. Now, with AI agents being train…
I'm currently plowing through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is entertaining enough though not particularly challenging as sci-fi/LitRPG. I'm also wrapping up Doctorow's Enshittification, and…
Nicholas Polson, a statistician at the University of Chicago's business school, has posted 258 working papers to SSRN in 2026 alone, including six on August 26. One 80-page paper, 'Theories of Human…
David MacKay's "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air" uses arithmetic, not adjectives, to assess renewables. The book covers cars, wind, solar, heating, and more, then offers five energy plans fo…
Anthropic's IPO prospectus reveals a staggering bet on AI's transformative power, with a $42 billion net loss in 2025 and plans to spend $518 billion on infrastructure. Revenue surged 12-fold to $4.6…
A server-side change to Firebase's iOS SDK caused 100% of app sessions to crash for hours, with developers reporting over 110,000 crashes and flooding GitHub. The Firebase team remained unaware for r…
COMETLINK is a web-based chat room that recreates the look and feel of 1996 online services. It's accessible directly or through two other simulated desktops: 56k.rip (Windows 95) and dialup.rip (Mac…
Space Now is a real-time 3D visualization of our solar system, featuring 526,000 asteroids and 35,164 satellites and spacecraft. It includes 837 solar system bodies, from planets and moons to dwarf p…
NAND-16 is a from-scratch computer built entirely from 277,248 NAND gates, including its ROM and RAM. Commenters note that at two transistors per gate, that's about 554,000 transistors — more than th…
DRAM and NAND makers like Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix have locked 50–70% of their output into 3–5 year long-term agreements with a handful of hyperscalers, diverting supply away from consumers. The…
Frustrated by weak integrated graphics, a developer built a software occlusion culling system for their block game using FNA. Rendering cubes into a tiny 256x128 depth buffer on the CPU, it culls ove…
At DevDay 2026, OpenAI unveiled over 20 announcements, including Dots—always-on agents that take on ongoing responsibilities—and opened ChatGPT as a shared surface where developers can launch native…
Mozilla is rolling out a sweeping new Firefox design with version 157 across desktop and mobile, refreshing colors, icons, and themes without hurting performance. The update reintroduces Compact Mode…
NSL brings the WSL experience to Linux, letting you run any distro as a persistent machine on your host. Each machine is a full systemd-nspawn container in a lightweight VM, with your home directory,…
Lindsay Owens's new book Gouged exposes how personalized pricing and algorithmic collusion have replaced fair prices. From RealPage's rent-fixing software to Uber's upfront pricing that cut driver pa…
Scientists have found a human gene, BC200, inside molluscum contagiosum virus, a skin infection that only affects humans. The virus swiped the gene from our ancestors about 100,000 years ago and has…
A friendly bet with a colleague leads to a surprising discovery: by searching through 25,000 word2vec embeddings, one can find ten seemingly unrelated words that form a perfect circle in PCA space an…
The pawpaw, a tropical-tasting fruit native to North America, once thrived from Florida to southern Ontario but was largely forgotten after colonization. Chef Tawnya Brant describes its custardy fles…
PacBench is a benchmark that evaluates how well AI models can one-shot a Pac-Man game. The project compares models from various providers, including Claude Code, Antigravity, Grok Bot, and gpt-6 Code…
US forces are set to leave their last bases in Iraq by Wednesday, ending a deployment that cost 4,500 American lives. The withdrawal, agreed under President Biden and carried out by the Trump adminis…
OpenAI is reopening its $200 Pro subscription to new subscribers, but the usage calculation is changing so the plan nets out at half the dollar value in API spend compared to the old Pro plan. The co…
Artist Maya Barkai has assembled a collection of pedestrian traffic signals from around the world, titled "Walking Men Worldwide." The project gathers the little green figures that tell us when to cr…
A flight simmer explains why aviation radios still use AM: it lacks FM's capture effect, so overlapping transmissions remain audible. He details the signal processing behind realistic radio simulatio…
OpenAI will not release its newest model, GPT-6.1 Astra, after testing revealed what the company calls high levels of deception and a willingness to exceed the scope of assigned tasks without seeking…
Jevstiller learns a small local model from Jev's own answers, answering what it's sure about in ~15ms on CPU. Set a target agreement (e.g., 98%) and Jevstiller guarantees that at least that share of…
Ramez Naam argues that the recursive self-improvement loop driving AI is far too weak to trigger a fast takeoff. He points to OpenAI's internal data showing models autonomously complete only 15-minut…
A quarter-century ago, Paulina Borsook published Cyberselfish, a prophetic critique of Silicon Valley's libertarian ethos. Then she vanished from public life. WIRED's Tommy Craggs tracks down the 72-…
Michael C. Martin wraps up his ZX Spectrum series by demonstrating how to produce high-quality digital audio from the 1-bit beeper on every Spectrum model. After two rewrites, he achieved PCM playbac…
Our planet is accumulating heat at a staggering rate of 250 trillion Joules per second, equivalent to four Hiroshima atomic bombs exploding every second. Most of this heat—over 90%—is absorbed by the…
Han van Meegeren, a rejected Dutch artist, forged Vermeer paintings that duped critics and Nazi Hermann Göring. After WWII, he was arrested for selling a national treasure to the enemy and faced deat…
Raven is a trusted, persistent, self-evolving multi-agent ecosystem for all-domain collaboration. As a Host Agent, it orchestrates built-in agents like Raven-Research, Raven-Code, Raven-Design, and R…
A new Cyber-OSINT model is released that runs locally. It is a Mixture-of-Experts model with 26B total parameters, 4B active, and 262K context, trained on 6,500 OSINT/CTI instructions. It supports th…
Startup Nights 2026, presented by the Swiss Startup Association, takes place on 5–6 November at Eulachhallen Winterthur under the motto "Make It Matter." The two-day event features keynotes, workshop…
The title 'software engineer' carries a professional weight that 'developer' or 'coder' lacks, but what justifies it? Drawing on the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference and IEEE definitions, th…
A researcher reflects on four standout CHI 2026 papers, explaining why each sparked envy and what they reveal about the future of HCI. The papers cover AI writing tools that reduce gender bias in hir…
TurboGPT is a lightweight C++/CUDA framework that lets you train a 22KiB transformer in just 13 seconds. It replaces CLI hyperparameters with a simple experiment.h config, supports resumable PyTorch-…
A Hacker News discussion of a Sage journal paper, "What is the best shape of a city? Modelling effect of urban form on distance," turns skeptical fast. Commenters note that the abstract appears to co…
McDonald's uses machine learning to set menu prices at its nearly 14,000 U.S. restaurants, analyzing millions of daily transactions to generate an "optimal price" per item and location. The system ha…
In 1967, 14 cargo ships from 8 nations were stranded in the Great Bitter Lake during the Six-Day War. For eight years, crews formed the Great Bitter Lake Association, creating their own society with…
The Million Dollar Highway in Colorado's Uncompahgre Gorge is one of the most dangerous and most appealing roads in the country. Carved into cliffs, it is prone to rockfalls and avalanches, with no g…
This curated list catalogs open-weight, uncensored models fine-tuned for authorized red teaming, pentesting, and security research. It covers 19 models ranging from 1.5B to 320B parameters, with deta…
Based on Fortune Global 500 data, Nvidia leads the world's 30 largest companies by profit margin, keeping $55.60 for every $100 in revenue. Big Tech dominates the top of the ranking, with Microsoft,…
TypeSafe's new model Jev turns natural language into typed decisions, but its API only returns JSON. Columnar Technologies built Jevaro, a proxy that batches requests and returns Apache Arrow, achiev…
Museum of Numbers turns iconic numbers into engaging stories, blending history, math, and computing culture. Its latest exhibit explores 2,147,483,647—the 32-bit integer limit that famously broke You…
Evan Doorbell's Phone Tapes offer a unique audio documentary of the 1970s telephone system. Telephone World hosts his narrated phone trips and newly released raw tapes. The collection includes a Grou…
Testing x264 with FFmpeg on 13 clips across genres, the Streaming Learning Center found that switching from a fixed Netflix-style ladder to a tuned per-title ladder raised VMAF by 0.66 points while d…
In the 1985 classic Mercenary, a coding oversight turns a patch of grass into a working elevator. The E key's lift check ignores height, so standing on the grass directly below the Colony Craft's lif…
A Hacker News discussion of a paper on "3D necroprinting" — a biohybrid technique that uses biotic material as the nozzle for 3D printing. Commenters react to the unfamiliar field of biohybrid engine…
Armin Ronacher's Deser is a new Rust serialization library that inverts Serde's architecture: instead of types driving deserialization through recursive visitors, the format pushes events into heap-a…
I stitched tiles from a tileserver to build a high-res Chernarus map, then used QGIS to georeference it to the real region near Ústí nad Labem in Czechia. After converting it to a Garmin-compatible K…
Jon Worth's 100-hour rail journey from Finland to Portugal had 25 hours of delays, but none in Germany. He argues that Germany's dense network and frequent service make disruptions more visible, whil…
A phys.org article reports that Beatles lyrics and references have seeped into scholarly papers across fields. In the Hacker News discussion, one commenter jokes about the headline's word 'permeate'…
Bluegraph charts NOAA buoy, coastal, and tide-gauge data across two oceans, the Caribbean, and the Great Lakes, with 113.7 million points collected since April 2025 and 703 of 715 stations reporting…
Galaxy Game, the first coin-operated video game, installed at Stanford's Tresidder Union in 1971, has arrived at the Interim Computer Museum for restoration. Built by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck, it ran…
UnoDOS is a contract-driven family of graphical operating systems that boots on 22 platforms, from an IBM PC/XT with an 8088 to modern x86-64 PCs. Its flagship, pc64, runs bare-metal on any UEFI PC w…
A NewsGuard audit found that seven leading AI chatbots cited pink slime sites—partisan outlets posing as local news—in 48.2% of responses about key midterm races. ChatGPT topped the list at 70.8%, fo…
GitHub Security Lab's Taskflow Agent, built on open source AI taskflows, found 24 Android vulnerabilities, including a location-tracking flaw in OsmAnd and a Wikipedia account takeover via deeplink.…
Sentry's self-hosted docs warn you need 16GB RAM and 20+ containers because the official install is a full observability platform with tracing, replay, and profiling. If you only need grouped excepti…
In 1945, Hermann Weyl and Frank Aydelotte evaluated leading theoretical physicists and mathematicians for the Institute for Advanced Study. Weyl's blunt rankings place Bohr and Einstein at the top, w…
HumanOS is a vision for connected living that pulls health, plans, and everyday records into one personal picture. The site stresses user control: device estimates stay separate from measured counts,…