Hacker News Digest
· 84 Hacker News
Aleph Alpha has launched Kolibri, an open-weight language model with 78 billion total parameters and 3 billion active, supporting up to 1 million tokens of context. Released under Apache 2.0, it is d…
Extra Big Ass Intelligence™ is a satirical website that declares AI illegal and introduces Super Intelligence (SI) v1.0 by executive order. Sponsored by electrolytes, it features fake ads for Brawndo…
Newgrounds is a community-driven platform for games, music, and art, founded on the idea that everything should be created by everyone. It hosts featured movies, games, art, and audio, with a focus o…
Aleph Alpha Kolibri is a new open-weight large language model for German and English, released under the Apache 2.0 license. It uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with 78 billion parameters, acti…
Astronomer Paul Byrne shared a 12-year sequence of real telescope images showing four exoplanets, each more massive than Jupiter, slowly orbiting a star 133 light-years away. The time-lapse turns yea…
Apple says some developers are abusing Full Disk Access — a permission meant to let backup apps work — in ways that expose files, mail, messages, and browsing history without users fully understandin…
Hole Punch is a puzzle game where you cannot steer the ship. Instead, you place and grow black holes on the field, and their gravity bends the ship's path toward the station. Later sectors add beacon…
Researchers at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health published studies claiming that living near nuclear power plants increases cancer rates. Using their methodology, critics replicated the ana…
- ▲ 201Why more adults are asking if they have ADHD or autism — and why the answer is often complex trauma
A psychiatrist who treats adults with childhood trauma argues that the surge in ADHD and autism self-diagnosis is driven by overlapping symptoms: trauma can cause executive dysfunction and social def…
- ▲ 187Make tmux the OS
Inspired by Scott Jenson's talk on desktop UX stagnation, I argue that the ideal OS interface would work like tmux: a scrollable, session-persisted, task-oriented system accessible to normal people.…
A federal judge ruled that a Tulsa deputy violated a woman's Fourth Amendment rights by searching Flock Safety's license plate database without a warrant, based solely on her California plate. The ju…
Cloudflare has launched a closed beta for its new OHTTP Gateway, a managed service that decrypts Oblivious HTTP requests so app servers never see user IP addresses or TLS fingerprints. The gateway ru…
Kagi is ending development of Orion for Linux and Windows and open-sourcing both projects so the community can continue them. The small, user-funded team will focus on Orion for macOS and iOS. The Li…
Anthropic's guide to Opus 5.5 in Claude and Claude Code explains what changed: the model thinks before every reply, works longer on multi-part tasks, and reports what it did in plain language. The ad…
Northern Ethiopia is sliding back into war after the TPLF launched coordinated assaults on September 23, threatening the 2022 Pretoria Agreement. This analysis argues the escalation stems from struct…
FTL is a new operating system for clouds that runs each container as a userspace OS library, combining the security of microkernels with the performance of monolithic kernels. It isolates containers…
A newly unsealed court filing alleges that DHS agents built dossiers on ICE observers in Maine, storing photos, license plate numbers, and other data in a Palantir-built system called the Investigati…
C++ Insights is a Clang-based tool that performs source-to-source transformation to reveal what the compiler does behind the scenes—implicit casts, compiler-generated special member functions, and tr…
A player laments that Cities: Skylines 2 feels lifeless because everything is square, neurotically clean, and devoid of organic detail. They argue that stairs, potholes, graffiti, and abandoned house…
In 1978, 16-year-old Ray Vetuskey received a kidney from his mother Betty at Strong Hospital in Rochester. Forty-eight years later, that kidney is still working, making him the longest-surviving tran…
Photographer Darbians explores the derelict Woking Electrical Control Room, a relic of railway infrastructure. The control wall, where each location represented a substation or transformer, still sta…
Aleph Alpha released Kolibri, an English–German Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 78.1B total parameters and 3.46B active per token, under Apache 2.0. Trained on 24T tokens—over 20% German—and post…
Ceiling fan design has exploded into a bizarre world of fandeliers, flush-mounted hybrids, and plastic monstrosities, driven by direct-to-consumer platforms like Wayfair and cheap integrated LEDs. Th…
A former OpenAI safety report lead explains why he resigned this week, arguing that the industry's real problem isn't missing rules but a culture of perpetual sprints and can-do optimism. He points t…
GS1 is pushing retailers to replace the 50-year-old barcode with QR codes by 2027. The shift promises richer product data—origin, allergens, disposal—but demands new scanners, databases, and packagin…
System76 has banned AI-generated code across many of its COSMIC codebases, a move discussed on Hacker News. Commenters debate whether the policy is practical, with some noting that niche projects can…
Cloudflare is challenging developers to build the next Git platform for the agentic era using its Artifacts service, now in open beta. Artifacts provides programmable Git repositories that scale to m…
A Reddit user bought a second-hand CPU, only to find it was hardware-banned by Valorant's anti-cheat system. The ban is tied to the processor's unique hardware ID, so the new owner can't play the gam…
Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team spent the past year improving the AMDGPU kernel driver for GCN 1.0/1.1 era Radeon GPUs from a decade ago, moving them off the legacy Radeon driver…
GitHub has made its redesigned dashboard the default view after a feature preview period. The new layout consolidates active agent sessions, issues, and pull requests into one place, with filters all…
Offrun unifies all your coding agents into a single Mac workspace. It runs existing CLIs under your own accounts, giving each agent its own git worktree to prevent conflicts. Features include peer re…
Pi pod lets you run your pi coding agent in isolated sandboxes on your own server, giving you true ownership and privacy. It bundles sandboxing, native clients, RBAC session sharing, and surface auto…
Gabriel Paul Horcasitas was sentenced to 10 years for shooting Christopher Pelkey at an Arizona red light in 2021. The Arizona Court of Appeals has now quashed that sentence, ruling the trial judge s…
SEEDS is an upcoming space sandbox game where you terraform a desolate planet, build machines, and cultivate ecosystems. Its standout feature is an in-game computer: a complete 64-bit RISC-V virtual…
A new European study of 575 GLP-1 users and 1,379 controls found that people on drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound were far more likely to report nail detachment (39% vs. 9%) and discoloration (46% vs.…
Edward Coristine, known as 'Big Balls,' was fired at 17 for leaking secrets, ran a web service for a cybercrime group, and is named in a whistleblower disclosure over a copy of every Social Security…
Turing Award winner Yann LeCun says he has zero concerns about AI-driven human extinction and dismisses warnings from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei as 'deluded.' He attributes rogue AI incidents to poor…
In a letter to the Guardian, Owen Fraser of Aberdeen describes how First's monthly bus pass is available only through its app, while the weekly pass can be bought on board. Because he runs a non-stan…
After six years of failed IVF transfers and a diagnosis of unexplained infertility, Drew Housman and his wife turned to GPT-4 for medical guidance. By prompting the model to role-play a TV doctor nam…
David Robinson, who led safety reports for OpenAI's product launches, resigned in an essay titled 'I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken.' He says frontier AI firms aren't being nearly careful…
Vx is a systems programming language for heterogeneous computing that bakes CPU, GPU, and NPU memory into the type system. Dereferencing a device pointer from the host becomes a compile error, not a…
A software engineer who delayed getting his EMT license for years finally took a 28-day NOLS Wilderness EMT course in 2024. He ranks the 21 excuses he made, from the reasonable (time, cost, culture)…
On August 12, 2026, two PSA Airlines regional jets operating as American Airlines Flight 5083 were airborne simultaneously between Philadelphia and Providence, sharing the same ATC callsign. A late i…
OKI Circuit Technology has developed a 124-layer PCB that stays just 7.6mm thick, breaking the previous 108-layer ceiling caused by thickness limits. The breakthrough comes from ultra-thin materials,…
NVIDIA's updated vk_lod_clusters sample features a 1.6-billion-triangle Zorah scene with full attributes and textures, compressed to 32 GB using meshoptimizer's glTF extensions. The author improved h…
AI systems already write most of the code at the companies that build them, and they may automate most AI R&D within a few years. A new report from the Cambridge Programme on AI Science & Policy exam…
A preliminary NTSB report details the September 6, 2026, crash of a 21 Air Boeing 767 flying for Amazon Prime Air. After landing long on runway 30 at Miami International, the aircraft overran the run…
A deep dive into the history of the `cp` command reveals that `-r` and `-R` once had distinct meanings. In the first GNU coreutils commit from 1992, `-r` copied files as regular files while `-R` did…
After an eight-year freedom of information battle, France's Conseil d'État ruled that the Rodin Museum's 3D scans of public-domain sculptures are not administrative documents but part of its inaliena…
Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah met with Pope Leo to argue that AI could be conscious, according to a Telegraph report. The Vatican rejected the suggestion, and the Pope's landmark encyclical o…
Holes seem as real as cookies: we see them, count them, and blame them for leaks. Yet they are made of nothing, which makes their perception, identity, and parts deeply puzzling. This Stanford Encycl…
A new archive collects 229 emails from Elon Musk, spanning 2020 to 2026. They show him ordering Tesla staff back to the office, threatening to reassign NPR's Twitter handle, demanding one-page perfor…
Researchers adapted the body-as-obstacle (BAO) task for birds for the first time, testing Goffin’s cockatoos. The task requires recognizing one’s own body as the cause of an obstruction. The cockatoo…
New streaming protocols succeed not because they are technically superior, but because they solve real problems while fitting into existing industry workflows. That is why Red5's Paul Gregoire and Sy…
Simon Green built BinRange, a Home Assistant setup that tracks whether his six wheelie bins have actually been moved for collection. After Bluetooth RSSI proved too unreliable, he switched to ultra-w…
Earthworm movement remains a blind spot in soil ecology. The only in-situ mapping study, from 1988, tracked Lumbricus terrestris on a dirt road and found they travel at least 9 meters per night. The…
Where is the planet? is a web tool that predicts the locations of directly imaged exoplanets and brown dwarf companions. Built by Jason Wang, Matas Kulikauskas, and Sarah Blunt, it helps astronomers…
Kevin Cox's technical guide argues that Atom is the superior feed format due to its clearer specification and fewer compatibility issues. He provides a minimal Atom template and covers essential best…
The Queens Giant, New York City's tallest carefully measured tree, was last measured in 2004 at 133.8 feet. Using 2021 LiDAR data from The Nature Conservancy and the University of Vermont, the author…
Halide released wpd, a WebP decoder written in Rust that is faster and safer than libwebp. It addresses memory safety vulnerabilities like CVE-2023-4863, which was actively exploited. Benchmarks show…
Muse's core agentic capabilities have existed for over a year, yet Meta put the pieces together in a way that finally clicks for average consumers. By stripping away model selectors and work/chat swi…
Memory plugins for AI agents rely on RAG to retrieve snippets from past conversations, but this approach fails because it lacks context, treats outdated information as truth, and is unauditable. The…
Researchers from the University of British Columbia have identified seven sea spider species in the Salish Sea, including two new to science: Callipallene pilosuspedes and Tanystylum kiixin. This mar…
A Fedora box named stick has been sending StatsD datagrams to 127.0.0.1:8125 ten times a second for a week, but nothing is listening. The metrics still show up in Grafana. The trick: an eBPF program…
After 18 years of daily coding, the author stopped writing code by hand once AI tools like Claude Code crossed a threshold. At Filestage, monthly merged PRs jumped from 200 to 300 with no rise in bug…
A developer ports CamelForth to the Sega SG-1000, turning the 1983 console into a self-contained programming environment. The project overcomes assembler incompatibilities and provides a REPL for wri…
Google's mozc-devices repo now hosts design files and firmware for a Gboard Conveyor Belt Version, released October 1, 2026. The directory includes KiCad schematics and PCB layouts, firmware source,…
Thoreau BASIC revives the classic GW-BASIC syntax with 64-bit memory, 24-bit graphics, sprites, and mouse input. It includes TCP/IP, HTTP, a complete GM/GS wavetable with MIDI/WAV/FLAC/Opus playback,…
The author argues that scientific materialism, which denies free will, undermines itself because it relies on perceptual experience to justify its claims. He explores solipsism, the brain-in-a-vat sc…
Rely is a browser-based automation puzzle game where every component has a chance to fail. Build conveyors, use Sorters, Counters, Markers, and Marker-Gates to turn a stream of unreliable parts into…
A Columbia University history page explains how the ENIAC was programmed in the 1940s. There was no stored program: operators set switches and plugged cables to route data between accumulators and fu…
The author, who joined Docker in 2015, reveals that Docker Desktop has relied on microVMs since 2016. Built with Mirage Unikernel libraries, the first version, hyperkit, and its successor, Docker VMM…
In a 1963 memo, IBM president Thomas J. Watson Jr. demanded to know how Control Data Corporation—a company of just 34 people, including the janitor—had seized industry leadership with its CDC 6600 su…
Sir Philip Sidney, the Elizabethan courtier-poet, was the uncontested king of brackets. His romance Arcadia, left unfinished when he died from a battle wound at 31, ends mid-sentence on a parenthesis…
David Buchanan demonstrates a time-hacking exploit in C2PA by abusing arbitrary byte-range exclusions. By excluding the entire file, he creates a valid signature over an empty hash, allowing post-hoc…
Change Coupling reveals which parts of your codebase change together, even without direct references. It explains why a simple bug fix can cascade into a dozen files. The article presents a 2x2 matri…
Plastics vary as widely as human characters, argues this essay. Polyethylene and polypropylene are Snow White—simple, pure, weak. Nylon is Arnold Schwarzenegger, strong enough for gun parts. Polycarb…
Tim Conners, former lead propulsion engineer for NASA's SR-71 program, discusses the space agency's quiet effort to revive Tail 844, the Blackbird that vanished from Armstrong Flight Research Center.…
Jeffy is a Python library that brings 13 pretrained text classifiers to your local machine, no GPU required. It handles tasks like SMS spam detection, banking intent, news categorization, and sentime…
A million tokens per second can mean context capacity, input processing, aggregate throughput, or single-agent output. Even at that imagined speed, a one-minute check can dominate total time: 800,000…
Shanna Dige loved shooting 35mm film on a Canon AE-1P, but scanning and editing each roll took four hours. After an attempt to let Claude drive the scanner over SANE nearly destroyed the hardware, sh…
Softmax turns any real vector into probabilities that sum to 1, making it a staple of multiclass classification. This post derives its Jacobian from first principles using vector calculus, explains w…
At a Virginia conformation show, over 400 purebreds compete to match breed standards—documents that turn historical function into measurable traits. The author observes the tension between the ideal…
T.M. Jones introduces the Independent File (IF), a 750 KB HTML document that captures voucher data—UUID, QR code, photos, collector, locality, date—right when a plant is collected. It runs offline in…