Hacker News Digest
· 12 Hacker News
livenerf is a 30-day, pre-registered benchmark that tracks whether Claude Opus 5.5 degrades after its 2026-09-22 launch. Using a frozen panel of 78 questions that the model only sometimes answers cor…
Green Mountain Power has installed batteries in over 5,500 Vermont homes, linking them into a virtual power plant that now provides 110MW—the state's largest power source. The program has replaced ag…
Backblaze's Q2 2026 Drive Stats report shows an annualized failure rate of 1.73% across 354,415 drives, the highest in recent quarters. Three drives exceeded the 6.95% outlier threshold, including a…
Yakko Majuri, founder of Railcode, explains how coding agents helped him realize a playful, Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired website. He shares his iterative process: generating multiple design options,…
- ▲ 59The night sky is getting 10% brighter every year — and we're forgetting what darkness feels like
Light pollution is growing 10% annually, and 80% of people now live under washed-out skies. In this first-person essay, Tove Danovich describes lying under the Milky Way in Oregon's outback and argue…
NASA has quietly removed SR-71A Tail No. 844 from its display at Armstrong Flight Research Center and offered jobs to retired SR-71 engineers to help return the Blackbird to flight after nearly 27 ye…
Oil prices jumped from $66 to $101 a barrel after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran. Energy economists explain that the windfall goes mainly to oil companies, but who benefits depends on ownership an…
Enigma is an interactive 3D model that brings the legendary WWII encryption machine to life. Explore its inner workings through 16 detailed lessons, from setting rotor dials to understanding the doub…
A simple data structures assignment to evaluate 1+1+1 with a binary tree spiraled into building a full functional language in C. The author implemented closures, a garbage collector, a custom arena a…
Sebastian Raschka traces text classification from bag-of-words and logistic regression through RNNs and ULMFiT to the newly released Jev model. Initially skeptical that Jev was 'just a classifier,' h…
Corral is a Linux tool that runs a command with a time limit and guarantees no leftover processes when it returns. It solves a common problem for AI coding agents and CI jobs: processes that daemoniz…
A friend gave me a DIRECTV HR54-700 Genie DVR. I exploited a boot-plugin bug to get persistent root, removed the satellite blocker, and reused the Broadcom decoder and WebKit UI. The final box boots…