Hacker News Digest
· 52 Hacker News
Iosevka is a free, open-source typeface family designed for code, terminals, and technical documents. It offers monospace and quasi-proportional variants, with 146 configurable characters and 19 styl…
On Android 17 builds from September 2026, wcscspn() and wcspbrk() incorrectly treat every wchar_t >= 0x100 as a match when the reject set contains two or more characters all below 0x100. The bug, int…
Amazon charges sellers close to half of each sale in fees, and its Fair Pricing Policy prevents them from offering lower prices elsewhere. This means the high prices we pay on Amazon follow us across…
Christopher Phiri's talk explores recreational programming—coding for pure joy, not work or money. He defines it, contrasts it with side hustles or career grinding, and identifies five styles: Live E…
Felix Rieseberg works on Claude at Anthropic and is a co-maintainer of Electron. His career spans engineering leadership at Notion, Stripe, Slack, and Microsoft. He has built popular open-source proj…
In 1692, artist A. Boogert created a single handwritten copy of a 900-page manual on watercolor mixing, now housed at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence. Over 700 pages of color swatches dra…
AnitaB.org has cancelled this year's Grace Hopper Celebration in Anaheim, citing registration and sponsorship revenue far below what was needed to cover operating expenses. The organization apologize…
In this interactive article, Bartosz Ciechanowski explains what sound is and how it travels. Starting with air molecules, he shows how collisions create pressure, then demonstrates how a moving plate…
The Federal Council has reviewed consultation results on a new law covering communication platforms and search engines, and directed DETEC to prepare a dispatch by the end of 2027. The draft will be…
SpaceX has imposed a speed limit on StarShield terminals used by Ukraine, causing connectivity failures above roughly 160 km/h and, according to later reports, possibly as low as 60–70 km/h. This dis…
Pulse Local is a complete budgeting app for Mac that keeps your ledger and your questions on your machine. Unlike other apps that store your data on their servers or send your queries to a hosted mod…
Timescale's pg_vectorsearch introduces PRISM, a PostgreSQL-native index for approximate nearest neighbor search. It uses RaBitQ quantization with error bounds and SIMD-optimized distance computation…
The Netherlands' Tax and Customs Administration has abandoned its Microsoft 365 public-cloud rollout after about 5,000 employees had already migrated. An ICT assessment flagged information security,…
Craig Hickman recounts how his son Ben's frustration with MacPaint led him to create Kid Pix in 1988. Guided by principles like extreme ease of use and surprising, satisfying interactions, Hickman de…
Hardware implants that steal crypto seed phrases have been discovered in Ledger wallets sold not only by a Malaysian reseller but also by MediaMarkt, a major European electronics chain. The implants,…
Strafe is a new open-source, end-to-end encrypted, and federated alternative to Discord. It promises no trackers, no ads, and full self-hosting under the MIT license. Features include default E2E enc…
Blumify collects transcripts from any YouTube video or podcast URL and organizes them by person, so you can see what AI leaders have said and how their positions shift. The site already tracks figure…
TV4 has postponed the fall season of its reality show The Challenge until 2027 after a technical failure erased the edited footage. Aftonbladet reported that an AI agent deleted the material, costing…
Derek Sivers argues that calling someone stupid is itself an act of stupidity, because it means you've stopped thinking and jumped to a conclusion. Being smart is about thinking things through, not t…
A viral post claims passkeys are a trap due to hidden attestation. Scott Helme, who built a passkeys library, explains that synced passkeys don't attest, attestation only reveals authenticator model,…
Arena allocators group memory with similar lifetimes into a single large chunk, then free it all at once. This guide walks through a complete C implementation, covering allocation, reallocation, and…
kcgi is a minimal, secure CGI and FastCGI library for C/C++. Its standout feature: parsing and validation of untrusted network data happen in a sandboxed child process, so exploitable bugs can't touc…
Matt Mullenweg pays tribute to Eric Binnion, the 21st recipient of Automattic's Distinguished Janitor Award. For 30 days, a few billion users will see an extra header in his honor, and Automattic.com…
At ESUG 2026, Esteban Lorenzano presented Pulsar, a new coding-first IDE for Pharo. The talk argues that programming tools should help developers understand, navigate, and change the system while sta…
Leaked audio from a tense CBS News meeting reveals foreign editor Shayndi Raice, handpicked by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, warning staffers that defying the hierarchy is insubordination and legal gro…
Museum of Ages is a digital museum that rebuilds historical spaces in 3D, letting you walk through them. The Leonardo da Vinci exhibition offers a guided tour of his world, with instruments and envir…
A former ZipRecruiter engineer describes how deployment tags bloated their Git monorepo, slowing down daily operations. His 2019 proposal replaces thousands of refs with a single ref per app and tier…
In 2014, Dzmitry Bahdanau, a 23-year-old intern at the University of Montreal, invented a mathematical operation called attention to help neural networks translate long sentences. It let a network fo…
In 2026, with agentic programming and vibe coding on the rise, does the web framework you choose still matter? Brooks Lybrand, who has worked on open source frameworks full-time for three years, exam…
As someone who has made a career of programming language design, I have moments of existential dread about LLMs. But I believe there will still be a role for humans in programming, and that programmi…
Alex Wennerberg argues that rationalist bloggers like Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky write excessively long posts, mistaking verbosity for thoroughness. He points to Gwern's 9,000-word essay c…
After five years running analytics on InnoDB, the author switched to an Iceberg-on-MinIO lakehouse for one key optimization: columnar reads. The post explains InnoDB's three guarantees and why they h…
For a week, I handed my one-man startup over to a team of AI bots: a support bot answering emails, an engineer bot writing code, a security bot watching Cloudflare logs, and a marketing bot pushing P…
Researchers at Macquarie University filmed detached honey bee stingers pumping venom into artificial gel, capturing the motion frame by frame with stereomicroscopy and high-speed color videography. T…
In the early 1950s, David Hagelbarger and Claude Shannon built relay machines to play matching pennies. Shannon's simpler machine, which tracked your patterns, beat Hagelbarger's more elaborate one 5…
Sweden was predicted to become fully cashless by 2030, but Russia's invasion of Ukraine prompted the Riksbank to urge citizens to keep 1,000 kronor in cash and require essential shops to accept physi…
The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose 0.6% in September, with gasoline jumping 9.1% and accounting for more than half of the monthly increase. Over the past year, the all items index…
In middle school in India, I read Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Gold-Bug,' a story that sparked my interest in cryptography. Poe wrote it in 1843 to demystify secret writing, showing that substitution ciphe…
I've been thinking about when the need for a human in the design loop ceases. Given that LLMs are RL'd to the max with everything that can be given a wrong/right answer (code/maths), what's stopping…
QuEra's quantum computers depend on lasers locked to exact frequencies, and when a lock breaks, an expert has historically had to drive to the lab and fix it. This spring QuEra deployed the Model Har…
Node-LLM is a hands-on guide that teaches you how large language models work by building one from scratch in Node.js and TypeScript. No black boxes: you'll implement every layer, from attention mecha…
After OpenAI released over 700 mathematical manuscripts produced by an internal AI system, a former FOCS program chair recalls the excitement of receiving 400 human submissions—and the disconnect he…
Anthropic published research claiming self-replicating AI worms could soon spread across IoT devices, but the study's own details undermine the alarm: the exploit step was ignored, the test nodes wer…
John Wolff's Web Museum offers a detailed step-by-step guide to completely disassembling and reassembling the Original-Odhner Model 127 mechanical calculator. The Odhner 127 is a relatively simple ma…
Researchers at Columbia University have engineered the first transgenic cuttlefish, inserting foreign genes into its DNA and passing them to future generations. The goal is to make neurons flash when…
HUMXN Research Labs is offering $50 million for data from skilled trades, farming, and manufacturing to train AI and robotics systems. The AP press release highlights the growing demand for real-worl…
ELIZAGen applies phylogenetic tools to 27 ELIZA implementations from 1965–2025, scoring each on 13 binary features like keyword priority and backtracking. The resulting tree shows Weizenbaum's origin…
Wendle Whiting marks the 50th anniversary of Amory Lovins' 1976 Foreign Affairs essay that steered America away from nuclear power. He argues the soft path cost the U.S. 65 billion tons of CO2 and th…
The People's Bookshelf at the National Library of Latvia in Riga holds nearly 8,000 books in 50 languages, each donated by an individual with a personal inscription on the title page. The project beg…
Socolar and Taylor asked for a single, simply connected 3D tile that forces nonperiodicity by shape alone. The new rational polyhedral 3-ball, Chair44 (R44), is a seven-cube chair whose exposed panel…
FCSS 2 is a utility CSS library where every class name is a real CSS property and value, so `padding--24` compiles to `padding: 24px`. Hover, ARIA, and breakpoint variants are part of the class name,…
A self-funded independent scientist shares a practical method for ranking experiment ideas. List all experiments, score them on factors like cost, feasibility, interestingness, uncertainty, moral exp…