Hacker News Digest
· 79 Hacker News
Debian has issued a security advisory for the Linux kernel, addressing a massive list of vulnerabilities that could lead to privilege escalation, denial of service, or information leaks. The fixes ar…
A pastiche of Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad books, hosted at frogandtoad.ai, drew 100 points and 16 comments on Hacker News. Readers praised the writing and art as a well-executed, Aesop-like story ab…
DeepSeek has launched a public preview of DeepSeek Harness, an open-source agent harness for macOS and Windows. Built on Cordis's 'everything is a plugin' design, it handles everyday work, coding, re…
A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against Utah's SB 73, which would have forced adult websites to block VPN users or verify every visitor's location. The court agreed with EFF that perf…
The Shimano Bicycle Museum in Sakai, near Osaka, is a glass-and-steel space that celebrates cycling rather than corporate history. Visitors see a chronological parade of machines, from hobby horses t…
GovTech's FirstDate pilot matches government workers using the Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm, with Singpass verification and a 30+ question questionnaire. But the algorithm only guarantees s…
Black Forest Labs introduces FLUX 3 Image, a model built for maximum control over every pixel. Users can compose images from scratch by laying out elements with bounding boxes on a 0-to-1000 grid, th…
Paul Halmos's 1973 essay profiles John von Neumann, the Hungarian-American polymath who revolutionized quantum physics, game theory, and computing. It traces his journey from a Budapest childhood—whe…
Nabu Casa is renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link, arguing that Big Tech has tarnished the cloud with subscriptions, outages, and data harvesting. The company stresses that Link remai…
Edward Kmett built THC, a Turbo Haskell compiler that takes GHC Core and JITs it onto the JVM via Truffle and GraalVM. It implements every GHC 9.14.1 prim-op, supports Template Haskell, Linear Haskel…
Canadian judge Kimberly Prost describes how U.S. sanctions upended her daily life—canceling credit cards, blocking services like Alexa, and prompting her health insurer AXA to deny claims—even though…
Supabase is acquiring Turso, the company that rebuilt SQLite in Rust and built a cloud platform where one server can manage millions of databases, loading and suspending them on demand. Supabase alre…
Apple has introduced Pass Designer, a new tool that simplifies creating and previewing Wallet passes for any business, from a local gym to a global airline. It offers templates, real-time previews us…
- ▲ 172AI Makes Me Sad
A Georgia Tech student and teaching assistant watches classmates chase $500k OpenAI jobs while he dreads an industry that feels like Charlie Chaplin being swallowed by the machine in Modern Times. He…
stillwet is an art project where AI models like Claude Opus 5.5, Gemini 3.8 Flash, and MiMo v2.6 Pro create paintings in a simulated oil paint studio. Each model writes every brushstroke, and a simul…
OpenAI's new ChatGPT Sites feature turns a prompt into a hosted website or app. Describe what you want, refine it conversationally, then publish with access controls, visitor sign-in, and custom doma…
Audionaut is a free, open-source multitrack audio editor and recorder built in modern C++ with JUCE, running natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It offers precise cutting, per-track playlists, mul…
Tiny Brutalism is a relaxing freeform building game for Windows, macOS, and Linux, inspired by brutalist architecture. For $5, players can construct strange monuments, impossible structures, or concr…
Measurements of surviving uranium cubes, archival research, and computer simulations show that Nazi Germany's combined stocks of uranium and heavy water were far too small to sustain a nuclear chain…
Language models are now cracking problems humans couldn't, and the math community is reeling. From denial to depression, many mathematicians are grieving what they see as a loss. But not everyone: so…
Former Steelers coach Mike Tomlin finally opened his 12-year Minecraft project to the public in a 19-minute YouTube tour. The video drew 20,000 concurrent viewers and over 264,000 views as Tomlin gui…
In a Kernel Recipes 2026 talk, Greg Kroah-Hartman dissected 79 vulnerabilities reported by an AI model. Most were noise: 24 lacked detail, 14 weren't bugs, 3 were fabricated, and 15 were already fixe…
Two new papers, one in Nature by Vadim Gladyshev's Harvard team and one in Cell by Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte's group at Altos Labs, propose that aging is driven by the erosion of epigenetic constr…
Agentic coding is undeniably useful, but it's also wreaking havoc on software engineering. LLM-generated code has a distinctive 'slop' smell that makes codebases repulsive to humans. Engineers become…
Stratego, a game of hidden identities and long, bluff-heavy matches, had resisted AI even as chess, Go, and poker fell. Ataraxos, built by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, NYU, and Stanford, beat…
Marcin Wichary recounts visiting three Dutch computer museums: HomeComputerMuseum in Helmond with over 500 interactive machines, Bonami SpelComputer Museum in Zwolle with thousands of computers and a…
Washington is pressuring France and Germany to release their diesel reserves, warning that refusals could trigger a US export ban, according to Reuters. The standoff over fuel stockpiles raises quest…
A new NBER working paper tracks $238 billion in World Bank aid across 93 countries from 2018 to 2024 and finds that crypto activity spikes sharply in the month aid tranches arrive, driven by anonymou…
A first-generation Chinese-American explores four cultural differences that shape China's online ecosystem: the dominance of social reality and shame, a cynical 'Dark World' view of human nature, col…
New research from the University of Exeter and the University of Essex, published in Nature, shows that butterfly wing patterns create optical illusions that confuse predators' motion perception. Hig…
Salvatore Sanfilippo, creator of Redis, has released DwarfStar 4 (ds4), a C inference engine for high-memory Mac, CUDA, and ROCm machines. It runs DeepSeek V4/V4.1, GLM 5.x, and Qwen3.8 Flash Next wi…
Wagtail set out to spend a month coding exclusively with GLM 5.3 Flash. They succeeded for two weeks, then burned 1B tokens on other models. A vibe-coded MCP prototype cost $150 overnight, and infras…
Android 17 QPR1, released for Pixels on September 15, introduced a kernel driver regression causing stuttering, lag, and freezes under memory pressure. GrapheneOS patched it for its release today, bu…
I built agent-wow to test how frontier LLMs handle World of Warcraft without any game-specific training. Using GPT-6 Astra, the agent created an orc and completed every quest in the Valley of Trials…
Tired of not knowing who's texting when his phone buzzes in his pocket, the author manually created custom vibration patterns for about 25 contacts. Each pattern encodes the person's initials in Mors…
In the 12th century, Venice's military disaster against Constantinople forced the republic to invent something the world had never seen: government debt that ordinary citizens could buy and sell. Tha…
A software engineer walks through a formal Lean proof that the language of bit-column strings where the bottom row equals the sum of the top two is regular. The trick: reverse the language so a DFA c…
Oracle's Project Lighthouse in Port Washington, Wisconsin, could slip past its planned 2027 customer delivery because the transmission line needed to power it is still awaiting approval from the Publ…
A Hacker News discussion thread links to a science.org blog post titled "Now That's an Impurity Story." The linked article could not be fetched, so the thread itself offers little detail beyond the h…
Pyxel is a retro game engine for Python that brings back the charm of classic consoles with 16-color palettes and 4 sound channels. It includes built-in image, tilemap, sound, and music editors, so y…
TypeSafe's Jev, a 'System One' decision model, outputs probability distributions over multiple-choice answers. But when tested on 1,000 physics problems with known distributions like Maxwell-Boltzman…
Figure AI decommissioned its F.02 robot fleet by melting the robots in a Finnish foundry. After Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested the idea online, the company trained a new AI model in simulation to ma…
Google launched its Project Suncatcher prototype satellite with Planet aboard SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission, and the team has confirmed contact. The spacecraft is operating as expected. O…
A developer describes a static blog pipeline built around Emacs and Org-mode, with Pandoc converting Org to Markdown, Gleam and Blogatto generating HTML, Lustre handling templates, and Nix pinning th…
Breadcrumb is a local, encrypted AI plugin for developers that records your screen, meetings, and AI sessions, then feeds that context to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and opencode. It lets you set scoped…
ldraw-nova is an open-source tool that lets AI agents design buildable LEGO models. Give an agent a prompt, and it plans, iteratively renders, and adjusts until it produces LDraw source code, a Blend…
Meta has released an open-source SDK that turns off-the-shelf ESP32 boards or a Raspberry Pi into Muse gadgets. The SDK includes firmware for displays, buttons, sensors, and audio, and supports devic…
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told investors that memory demand will outstrip supply for at least two more years, with 75 percent of 2027 output already sold and most current negotiations focused on 202…
In 2001, the Bergen Linux User Group implemented RFC 1149, sending IP packets via carrier pigeon. One of the actual paper packets, inscribed to RFC author David Waitzman, is now at Christie's with a…
A Hacker News discussion sparked by a video that asks what would happen if the tech industry abandoned GPUs. The thread weighs the idea against the reality that GPUs dominate AI and graphics workload…
The saying 'the only intuitive interface is the nipple' is often attributed to Bruce Ediger, but he denied creating it in 2001. This investigation digs through Google's Usenet archives to find its ea…
Apple's upcoming smart home camera, known internally as J450, reportedly skips video recording entirely. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the device uses a low-frame-rate sensor, facial recognit…
STS-51-F, also known as Spacelab 2, launched on July 29, 1985, and became the only Space Shuttle mission to perform an Abort to Orbit after a sensor failure shut down a main engine. Despite the lower…
The Internet Archive's DLARC college radio collections trace student radio from a forgotten 1906 Harvard club to 1920s broadcast experiments at Dartmouth and the Milwaukee School of Engineering, plus…
A developer building fullsets.fm, a side project that aggregates professionally recorded concerts, uses Meta's Muse to scan Reddit and YouTube for thousands of videos from obscure channels. For $80 a…
- ▲ 17A frontier model with only grep matches a tuned RAG pipeline at 0.61, but takes five times as long
Kapa built Company Knowledge Bench, 1,000 eval cases from real production data, to measure retrieval on messy company knowledge. They scored seven retrievers: hybrid search scores 0.41, adding a rera…
GRPO assigns the same trajectory-level advantage to every token, blurring which decisions actually mattered. ProVer uses an agentic judge to contrast successful and failed rollouts and propose a segm…
On October 1, 2026, speedrun.com replaced its terms of use, removing the Creative Commons license that had protected community data since 2021. The new terms grant parent company Elo ownership of all…
Frustrated by streaming services that remove titles and curate via algorithms, people are returning to physical media. A university lecturer with over 5,000 records and CDs says playlists replaced al…
The author, who fell in love with personal computing as a child, argues that the original PC era gave way to an internet strangled by Big Tech, spam, and closed AI. He proposes Personal Computing 2.0…
Five European payment groups—including Spain's Bizum and Italy's Bancomat—are forming the European Network for Payments (ENP), a Madrid-based joint venture serving 130 million users across 13 countri…
Aras Pranckevičius noticed Blender's Fast Blur mode is slow for large radii and built Smol Gaussian: downsample, apply a small separable Gaussian, then reconstruct. It matches Skia's GPU blur but add…
RE:Dox is a high-performance, token-based structured data engine for .NET, built as a core component of Capcom's next-generation game engine. It parses JSON, CBOR, MessagePack, and more into a compac…
Robert W. Hillman argues that the recent emergence of LLCs and LLPs is evolutionary, not revolutionary. For as long as commerce has existed, merchants have sought to limit and shift liability, from R…
Directory sync is the process of copying users and groups from an identity provider like Okta or Entra into your app. Firezone explains why SCIM, the standard for this, fails in practice due to incon…
Mozilla has decided to shut down Solo, its AI website creator. All Solo websites and data will be permanently deleted on November 30, 2026. Users can download an HTML export and a CSV of image links,…
Trail of Bits has released SequenceHash and SequenceMAC, hash-agnostic multihashing constructions that work with SHA2, BLAKE, and RIPEMD, unlike NIST's Keccak-only TupleHash. They provide unambiguous…
MYC, hyperactive in 70 percent of cancers, has long been considered impossible to drug. A new study in Molecular Cell from Fox Chase Cancer Center identifies two molecular switches that control how e…
Knitter and audio producer Elizabeth Kauma traces the intertwined history of labor and fiber arts, from medieval knitting guilds to the framework knitting machine that displaced handknitters. She exp…
A human rights researcher tested three AI agents—Muse, Claude Cowork, and GPT 6.1 Sol—on filling missing World Bank procurement data for the US and Iran. For Iran, GPT and Muse each filled only 21 of…
Americans are furious about the cost of living, and AI is making it worse. For years, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen promised AI would create abundance and push prices toward zero. But unemployment h…
Pi Codex Connectors is a Pi extension that lets you access all your connected Codex (ChatGPT) connectors—GitHub, Gmail, Google Calendar/Drive, Slack, Linear, Figma, and more—directly from any Pi mode…
Scientists tested underwater umbrellas in the Florida Keys that cut light exposure by 60% and reduced bleaching in brain corals during a record marine heatwave. Some shaded corals even regained their…
ABC Coke, the nation's largest foundry coke producer, has been operating without a valid air permit since its 2023 renewal application stalled. The Southern Environmental Law Center sued Jefferson Co…
Graphene transforms your coding agent into a world-class data analyst. It's an everything-as-code analytics framework that combines a powerful semantic layer with a dashboard file type, enabling agen…
Every day, a new hidden Python function `f` transforms text, and you have seven rows to figure out its rule. Test it by entering any text to see the exact output, then predict the output for new inpu…
A new essay argues that AI should be seen as normal technology, like electricity or the internet, rather than a separate, superintelligent entity. The authors contend that transformative impacts will…
ExplainDB is a didactic DBMS implemented in Python, designed for readability rather than speed. It includes a full storage hierarchy, B⁺-tree and bitmap indexes, Bloom filters, MVCC with journaling,…
This is the PARTNER-N64 PC development kit for the Nintendo 64, made by Kyoto Microcomputer (KMC). It required a specially modified N64 console with tie-lines re-routing IRQ and RESET signals to the…