Hacker News Digest
· 69 Hacker News
Following three strikes on Yandex data centers, Cloudflare Radar shows HTTP traffic from Yandex's ASN dropping to nearly zero. The outages have disrupted Yandex Go, Pay, food delivery, and cloud serv…
A UAV attack damaged Yandex's data center in Vladimir, completely suspending operations and forcing Yandex Cloud into emergency mode. The ru-central1-a and ru-central1-b zones are unavailable, with C…
X Corp. sent cease and desist letters on August 24 and September 8, 2026, demanding Nitter's permanent takedown. The project's September 7 update claimed legal representation was in place, but that t…
LineageOS 24.0 launches based on Android 17, arriving ahead of schedule after a rapid rebase. The release includes security patches through October 2026, a new Canvas image editor, a redesigned Updat…
Newly released documents from Massachusetts’ lawsuit against ExxonMobil reveal internal doubts about its climate solutions. A scientist admitted a 2018 algae biofuel press release was misleading, and…
Developers write documentation blind to their own assumptions, so Terence Eden paid volunteers €25 an hour to install his ActivityBot software while narrating every confusion out loud. Across several…
The IRCv3 Working Group develops extensions to the IRC client protocol, all backwards-compatible with older clients and servers. Key features include SASL for account login, message tags for metadata…
DHH had an AI agent rewrite Campfire from Ruby on Rails to Rust and Elixir. The results reveal that without human oversight, critical decisions like backwards compatibility and concurrency handling b…
With DDR5 kits now costing more than double their DDR4 equivalents, Intel and AMD are bringing back support for the older memory. Gigabyte says new LGA 1700 CPUs will arrive in early 2027, while AMD'…
Terence Tao argues that AI is disrupting mathematics by exploiting proofs' objective verifiability and digitizability, leading to an era of proof abundance. He warns that blindly optimizing problem-s…
WallHop is a free web service that bypasses article paywalls. Paste a link, or prefix any URL with wallhop.io/, and read the story without signing up. It also offers an iPhone Shortcut for sharing fr…
New York City's first-in-the-nation municipal rule, enforced by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, now requires businesses to let consumers cancel subscriptions as easily as they signe…
A common shell configuration mistake: putting ~ in PATH inside double quotes prevents tilde expansion, so ~/.local/bin/ becomes a literal directory relative to the current working directory. This can…
Nanolathe is an MIT-licensed, clean-room reimplementation of Total Annihilation that runs natively on Windows, Mac, and Linux, or in desktop Chrome, Edge, and Safari. The public beta includes single-…
A video demonstration shows a GameBoy emulator running on an ESP32 microcontroller with an e-paper display, hitting 30 frames per second. The project, shared on Hacker News, highlights how e-paper's…
PSPi 6 is a custom circuit board that replaces the mainboard of a PSP 1000, letting a Raspberry Pi power the handheld. It supports Raspberry Pi Zero, Zero 2W, and CM4, runs Linux distributions like R…
Over three months, I orchestrated AI agents to decompile a popular first-person shooter into readable C++. We used Claude and Codex models, managed progress via GitHub issues, and enabled agent commu…
Buy-European.net has launched a directory listing European alternatives to over 200 non-European products and services, from 1Password and Adobe Photoshop to Zoom and Zippo. Users can search by categ…
Valen introduces a flexible borrow checker based on group borrowing, which relaxes the shared-xor-mutable rule to only prevent use-after-free. The compiler tracks where each reference points, allowin…
BetterWispr is a free, open-source dictation app for macOS that keeps your speech on your Mac. Hold Option+Space in any app, speak naturally, and release to get clean, formatted text. It uses local s…
Subword tokenization, used by all leading LLMs, limits character-level understanding, biases generation, and favors English. Byte-level models have been proposed but rarely adopted because they train…
The Onion is missing numerous issues from its 270-year archive, including all of Volumes 14–19 (1988–1991) and many from the 1990s through 2013. The satirical newspaper is asking readers who own any…
Entrepreneurship isn't the only path to wealth. Drawing on friends who built fortunes through traditional employment, this piece argues that a career is an engine—not the destination. The key: conver…
hangul.ink is a browser-based AI model that generates Korean handwriting as animated pen strokes, not pixels. Trained on 4,500 lines of real handwriting from a single writer, it produces unique, pres…
A nostalgic journey into reviving childhood point-and-click adventures: the author battles CD copy protection, extracts data from disk images, decompiles a Macromedia Director executable with Project…
Git stores objects as zlib-compressed data, so commit size depends on file compressibility and eventual packfile deduplication. Experiments with loose objects show a fresh repo costs about 64 KB, a 2…
A Canadian YouTuber built a Flock-style license plate camera that exclusively logs police vehicles, then posted about it. Officers showed up at his home to voice privacy concerns, reportedly arguing…
Dave Rupert reflects on friends and peers who have recently left social media, AI, or the internet entirely. He highlights Salma's retirement from DevRel, Chad Whitacre's typewriter-written farewell…
Frustrated by the lack of a simple spatial audio tool for Linux, the author set out to recreate a commercial effect that makes music sound farther away and less 'on the ear.' After initial attempts w…
Diffle is a keyboard-centric diff viewer that runs in your browser, letting you review Git diffs and comment on lines, blocks, or entire files. It integrates with GitHub to send comments as a pending…
Rat, a compiler backend, replaced its 1392-line linear scan allocator with a 584-line priority bin-packing allocator. The new allocator visits live ranges by importance, assigns registers to bundles,…
The pipe operator in R, now a staple of data analysis, began in 2012 when an anonymous Stack Overflow user asked how to implement F#'s forward pipe. Ben Bolker answered with the first %>% function. L…
The modern office offers free snacks, gyms, and a 'family' culture, but all of it is a treadmill: a happiness carrot that keeps you running while the company speeds up. Fall, and the family talk mean…
Spain's Museo de Historia de la Computación has unveiled a 1:1 scale visual replica of the iconic 1976 Cray-1 supercomputer, powered by 30 Mac Minis from 2012–2014. The cluster delivers up to 1.5 ter…
Deezer says 44% of uploaded tracks are AI-generated, and 97% of listeners can't tell the difference — yet more than half still say they care whether a human made it. Economist Daniel Susskind traces…
APSW, Another Python SQLite Wrapper, exposes the complete SQLite C API to CPython 3.10 and later, including full text search, sessions, virtual tables, VFS, JSON, and CArray. It works in synchronous…
Akhetonics is developing an all-optical computer where data stays as light from input to memory to output, avoiding repeated conversion to electrons. Co-founders Michael Kissner and Leonardo Del Bino…
In Chapter 1 of Ways of Seeing, John Berger argues that seeing precedes words and that images embody a way of seeing. He critiques art historians who mystify the past, using Frans Hals's Regents pain…
Veda is a from-scratch operating system written in Rust where an AI agent is a core system service, not an add-on. Every application natively exposes actions and state, and the agent executes them th…
After the CIA World Factbook shut down, a developer recreated it as worldfacts.app, covering 217 countries and territories. Data is pulled from the World Bank, WHO, IMF, FAO, UNODC, and governance in…
Playgrnd is a collection of tiny, free browser-based tools for creative experimentation. Every tool runs entirely in the browser, so nothing is uploaded or stored, and exports belong to the user. The…
A data-driven comparison of European driving costs reveals that the Øresund and Great Belt bridges together charge €225, while all French motorway tolls on a Helsinki-to-Costa-del-Sol route total jus…
After two decades of using JPEG, PNG, and SVG, I've switched to WebP—something I never expected to say. The format's journey from a Chrome-only curiosity in 2011 to baseline support in 2020 was slow,…
A robotics engineer argues that 'robot' is not a technical category but a social construct born in Karel Čapek's 1920 play. We apply the label to machines that make us uneasy about ourselves—not to a…
Brandon Thomas, creator of the open-source ArtCraft suite that replicates Adobe apps for free, has unveiled GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft—open-source replacements for Excel, PowerPoint, and Wor…
celld, a runtime for Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects, uses deterministic simulation testing to reproduce bugs that depend on event ordering. The simulator controls task scheduling, storage res…
A survey of 211 OpenStreetMap contributors reveals why they map North Korea, a country with almost no internet access. Most have never visited, tracing roads and buildings from satellite imagery. The…
A UC Berkeley-led study found that just 10 minutes of AI assistance made people less persistent and accurate on difficult problems once the tool was removed. In randomized trials with 1,222 participa…
Polyethylene makes up roughly a third of global plastic production, yet its effect on the liver had gone largely unstudied. Researchers at Texas A&M found that exposure to polyethylene microplastics…
Agent Standup is a free, open-source tool that turns your Claude Code session into a live stand-up call, showing who is waiting on whom and who is blocked at zero token cost. The lead gives orders, s…
In a lengthy post on X, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argued that advanced AI models can no longer be treated as nested black boxes whose outputs we simply accept or reject. He called for transparent s…
Nikon disqualified the first-place winner of its Small World in Motion competition after determining the video violated rules against generative AI. The entry claimed to show abnormal beating of airw…
Anthropic's updated usage policy, effective November 12, bans "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward its models — though it insists the rule targets only extreme cases, not ordinar…
I built a spin lock for my hobby OS, floss, using ldaxr/stxr. It ran flawlessly in QEMU but threw a Data Abort on a Raspberry Pi 5. The culprit: the SCTLR.C bit was disabled, making memory non-cachea…
MIT engineers have created a flexible sheet that reconstructs its own 3D shape in real time as it bends and twists. Soft optical fibers zig-zag through the stretchable material; when the sheet deform…
Texas' grid operator ERCOT saw its large-load queue explode from 63 GW to 474 GW in 18 months, with data centers making up about 90%. After ordering them to pay for their own upgrades, Governor Abbot…
In a sharp critique, Rich Whitehouse argues that frontier AI is merely a highly augmented stochastic parrot, incapable of consciousness or intelligent judgment. He contends that the real dangers come…
An obituary of Cyril Hilsum, the British physicist whose work on liquid crystals and semiconductors helped make flat-screen displays possible. The Economist traces how his research shaped the screens…
On October 11, 2026, the DNS root key will roll for the first time since 2017. Unlike other DNSSEC keys, the root key has no parent, so the old key must sign the new one, and resolvers need time to t…
LLM-assisted vulnerability reports are flooding maintainers and security teams. VEX statements can help, but manual triage doesn't scale. In NixOS, configuration is code, so you can codify the condit…
The author argues that AI cognitive offloading isn't decline but a sanity incline. By delegating bureaucratic nightmares—like deciphering UK nationality laws or tax forms—to AI, we reclaim mental ban…
I've read lots of articles about how Americans hate their tipping culture. But tipping is optional so why don't they just stop? If you don't tip you both help society improve and you save money. Win-…
A Hacker News commenter pushes back on the framing of a new Atlantic piece about Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, arguing that Krasner's work predating Pollock was in some ways more ambitious. He als…
When a project offers libraries in multiple programming languages, its documentation site must wrangle outputs from different API reference generators like Doxygen, rustdoc, and Sphinx. The author ca…
Compression reduces bytes sent to the browser, but joining pre-compressed files is trickier than it seems. gzip is famously concatenable, yet curl errors out and Chrome silently discards the second p…
GSD Task Manager is an MCP server that equips your AI agent with a task list, using the Eisenhower Matrix to sort to-dos by urgency and importance. It helps you stop juggling and start finishing, avo…
Two independent teams—Thorsten Schumm's group at TU Wien and Shiqian Ding's at Tsinghua University—have built the first working nuclear clocks, using a feedback loop to lock a laser to the thorium-22…
Alina Pereverzieva reports that bot traffic from the Yandex network has plunged to near zero following a strike on its Vladimir data center. The automated requests—from search crawlers, scrapers, and…
github-workflow is a minimal terminal UI written entirely in Rust for managing GitHub repositories and branches. Built on the Ratatui library, it keeps the whole workflow inside the terminal, with so…