Hacker News Digest
· 74 Hacker News
Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto says Discover-Tech's Controlium platform turns programmatic ads into a spyware delivery pipeline: a benign-looking ad harvests a target's identity and IP addr…
Meta released the weights for Muse Spark Open, an 816B-parameter (42B active) natively multimodal model with a 1M-token context window, calling it the most capable US open-weight model to date. It ru…
DEsk is a new Wayland desktop environment for Linux that goes all‑in on realistic skeuomorphism. Windows are sheets of paper on a walnut desk, the dock is a drawer, apps are filed in binders on a boo…
After months studying neurons in image and language models, a researcher concludes that polysemanticity and superposition were misread. What looked like arbitrary packing is mostly recursive generali…
Catch a Bird is an anonymous experiment from Hungary where you write one sentence about what made you happy, and it becomes a bird on a shared tree. Visitors can catch birds to read a stranger's sent…
My TP-Link EAP770 v1 corrupted large downloads over Wi-Fi, and TP-Link end-of-lifed it before I even unboxed it. The fix was two sysfs writes to disable Qualcomm's SFE/PPE offload, but the shell runs…
Citizen Lab exposes AdFection, the first technical proof of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered via targeted ads. Israeli firm Discover-Tech, posing as a legitimate ad company, used its Controlium…
OpenAI's recent release of hundreds of mathematical proofs has left the math community reeling. Fields Medalist Hugo Duminil-Copin said he cried and felt his field was annihilated; Cornell's Steven S…
Liquid AI released LFM2.5-24B-A2B, a 24B-parameter reasoning model with only 2B active parameters per token, built for fast on-device agents. It matches or beats Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on five of eight agen…
Unfenced is a platform that helps you find properties for sale that directly border public lands such as national forests, game lands, and wilderness areas. Unlike typical listings that rely on vague…
When his pitbull Billie was diagnosed with a sun-sensitive nose condition, Omri Hillel designed a 3D-printed nose guard called Doguard. He shared the files for free, but demand led him to launch Snou…
Epic launched a preview of its vibe-coded launcher, claiming faster startup than Steam. Valve responded within a day with a small update that cut Steam's cold boot time to 5.23 seconds, edging out Ep…
Libreboot 26.10 “Ominous Olive” replaces proprietary BIOS/UEFI with open firmware and now includes full UEFI via the MrChromebox EDK2 payload. This means Windows 10/11, modern Linux distros, FreeBSD,…
Researchers at Citizen Lab and Confiant have uncovered the first technical evidence of a zero-click attack delivered through targeted advertising. The Israeli ad tech firm Discover-Tech allegedly ope…
After his first post on Anthropic's Scion copying Mononoke, the author received private confirmation that the ripoff was deliberate and involved overlapping personnel. The resemblance goes beyond der…
Krea 3 is a production-focused image editing model that changes only what you specify. It completes edits in under 8 seconds at roughly $0.06 per image, compared to Nano Banana Pro's 26.8 seconds and…
Current Affairs has adopted one of publishing's strictest anti-AI policies, barring all AI-generated text and illustrations from its magazine. The unionized, nonprofit outlet argues that for-profit m…
The Simons Foundation is committing $15 million in combined funding and resources with Anthropic and OpenAI to help the mathematics community adapt to AI. The initiative includes an open call for pro…
The first Fortran manual was published on October 15, 1956, making the language a cornerstone of scientific computing for seven decades. It has supported critical infrastructure in nuclear engineerin…
Zach Landes ran the Trolley Problem past Jev, OpenAI's Luna, and eleven other decision models. Most models saved five people over one stranger, but when the choice was twenty people versus the model'…
In 2017, modchipping an Xbox 360 demanded a glitcher chip, a NAND programmer, and a JTAG programmer — the author's homemade printer-port dumper never worked, and the project was shelved. Returning in…
In a guest post on Terry Tao's blog, theoretical physicist Rikab Gambhir skewers the AI hype in mathematics and physics. He argues that tools like OpenAI's latest are generating thousands of papers t…
In Argentina's remote Patagonia, AM radio stations broadcast "Mensajes al Poblador Rural"—personal messages for isolated gauchos and settlers. With no internet or cell service, they rely on these rad…
A satirical essay by a former Jane Street quant who sells fentanyl in Kensington and donates $1.80 per bag to the Against Malaria Foundation. He calculates each bag nets +0.00008 lives, and in 2025 h…
A physics student at Oxford describes how ChatGPT helped them master four advanced courses in six weeks after months of procrastination. Initially skeptical, they found the AI useful for re-explainin…
C++26 contracts let you attach preconditions and postconditions directly to function declarations, making requirements visible in the API instead of buried in implementation. The article walks throug…
A Reddit post titled "Siri is so bad at everything" sparked a Hacker News discussion about Apple's voice assistant. The thread drew immediate attention from the HN community, with users weighing in o…
A detailed list of incompatibilities between standard C and real-world C as implemented by GCC/Clang with glibc/musl. Highlights include GCC's `asm` keyword extension breaking conforming code, `FLT_R…
Indigene helps you discover which native plants thrive in your specific spot, supporting local wildlife like caterpillars and songbirds. Most yards are filled with lawn and imported shrubs that offer…
Flipflop is a cross-platform file-sharing tool that creates a trusted, persistent tunnel between your devices. Built on Iroh, it works over Bluetooth, LAN, or the open internet, letting you send file…
At Blizzard, James Anhalt introduced me to the double-headed stack allocator: two bump allocators growing toward each other from opposite ends of a single memory block. One side handles level geometr…
A sticky alpine flower has vindicated a prediction Darwin made 150 years ago about carnivorous plants. Commenters note that Saxifrage, a favorite subject for macro photography, shows the same glandul…
A fake South Park episode—a 118 KB .exe padded with 886 MB of junk—landed on public trackers with 2,392 seeders and got grabbed by Sonarr. I tore it apart: ChaCha20-encrypted payload, AES-CTR strings…
I'm a hobbyist woodworker and I manually design simple things in Shapr3D with a lot of patience. I wonder if there's an effective way to accelerate 3D model design using AI in the time of LLMs. Has a…
The 28th CGPM has decided that continuous UTC will take effect on 20 May 2027, with the maximum difference |UT1-UTC| allowed to reach 3600 seconds. This eliminates leap seconds, which pose high risks…
E Ink has unveiled Kaleido 4, its latest color ePaper platform, debuting in Hanvon Technology's M10C II smart notebook. The new generation doubles color gamut volume to over 40K, boosts white reflect…
Epic Games is rebuilding its Easy Anti-Cheat Linux implementation as EAC Linux v2, aiming to match Windows-level protection without a kernel driver. The new version leverages existing Linux security…
The Donaldson Futuro House in Idyllwild, California, is one of fewer than 100 space-age Futuros built by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in the late 1960s and early '70s. Extensively restored inside…
A scan of 217 million web responses from Common Crawl found 7,959 sites sending headers aimed at AI agents. Most point to resources like llms.txt, but 30 carry injection attempts. Whether those heade…
In this 1991 essay, updated in 1999, Phil Zimmermann explains his motivation for creating PGP: to protect private communication from government surveillance. He argues that email is inherently insecu…
Elevation Lab has pulled its AirTag silencing tool after realizing it could help stalkers track victims who wouldn't get phone alerts. The company, which originally built the device for its own bikes…
Proa is an extremely performant, batteries-included Rust web framework that introduces a new programming model for composable, multi-target rendering. From a single typed component, you can render HT…
After a Plustek 8200i scanner's chipset changed and broke Linux support, the author used Claude and a Windows VM to capture USB traffic, then diffed it against Linux traces. Within hours, a working S…
Ito is a Lua library for creating interactive terminal user interfaces with minimal code. It provides reactive state management and a declarative component system, enabling developers to build everyt…
Hannah Ritchie compiled data on the age and tenure of leaders across more than 140 countries. She finds that three-quarters of the world lives under a leader over 65, and two-thirds under one over 70…
In 1980, That's Incredible aired a segment on a haunted Toys R Us in Sunnyvale, California. Employees reported moving merchandise, strange noises, and a talking doll that only spoke inside its box. P…
Frustrated by Garmin's lack of an official MCP, Jack Antico built a custom wrapper around an unofficial Garmin API and Anthropic's API. The tool lets him query workout and health data, like "how has…
Withings will require new accounts created after October 13, 2026, to pay for a $99.99/year Withings+ subscription to sync data to Apple Health. Existing accounts are grandfathered. Users argue the s…
- ▲ 49Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" lands with Rust-based coreutils and post-quantum package signing
Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed "Stonking Stingray", has been released. It builds on 26.04 LTS with full adoption of Rust-based coreutils, post-quantum-ready package signing, and expanded TPM-backed full-dis…
Designer David Rudnick and Arsenal Creative Studio lead Johnnie Campbell discuss Rocastle, a bespoke three-weight blackletter type family four years in the making. Named for the late Arsenal legend D…
An impulse buy of a Toftwood Male Voice Choir LP at a crate-digging session turns into a detective story. Using only sleeve notes, a green stained-glass cross, and Google Maps, the author tries to re…
Climate breakdown, inequality, and technological disruption are no longer separate problems—they reinforce each other. Hamish Campbell argues that exit culture, from private bunkers to AI transcenden…
Articulated buses are a common sight, but their inner workings are surprisingly clever. From early vertical-only joints to modern rear-engine pushers, the articulation joint is a marvel of engineerin…
The Sijbrandij Foundation's Future of Cancer Care Today (FCCT) offers a free, PhD-led service that helps cancer patients and families navigate options beyond standard of care. It curates vetted suppl…
New research reveals that Haast's eagle, the world's largest eagle, combined eagle-like talons with a vulture-like beak to take down moa, birds that could weigh over 250 kilograms. The 15-kilogram pr…
X says it has removed over 13,000 accounts tied to three suspected foreign influence operations targeting US political debate. The platform attributed the networks to Iran, Russia, and China, but pro…
GridSnap is a free, open-source alternative to Divvy for macOS. Press a shortcut, drag across a grid overlay, and the window snaps into place. It supports presets with global shortcuts, undo, configu…
A market selloff and rising rates are testing the AI data centre deal boom, and Hacker News commenters see echoes of the dot-com era. Analyst Gil Luria calls CoreWeave "the subprime tranche" of AI, w…
When a model training run slowed down, HRT engineers discovered that unknown traffic was saturating their WAN link. They built a system that combines service telemetry, eBPF kernel tracing, and netwo…
A Hacker News submission points to a browser-based take on Conway's Game of Life that adds multiplayer support and is built with Python and hypermedia. The project, hosted at stario.dev, drew a handf…
A long-time self-hoster explains why he cut the cord on streaming services and now runs over 20 services on a Beelink S12 Pro with an Intel N100, 16 GB RAM, and a 6 TB drive. He shares his rules: no…
After 15 years, the popular iTerm2-Color-Schemes GitHub repo is now a full web app at terminalthemes.com. Browse over 800 themes with live terminal and code previews, then download in nearly 40 forma…
Sygal converts PDFs, Word, Excel, images, scans, web pages, and YouTube links into clean Markdown and structured JSON entirely on your machine. It solves the problem of messy, token-heavy documents t…
A video shows how abrasive sand wears down hydropower turbine components, and the engineering fixes that keep the machine alive. The Hacker News discussion digs into sediment erosion in hydro plants,…
Anthropic has granted METR, a nonprofit evaluator, employee-like access to its internal systems, hardware, and tools to assess risks in its frontier models. METR can publish its findings, with Anthro…
Muse Spark Open is a natively multimodal 816B-parameter model (42B active) with a 1M-token context window, built for coding and agentic work. It is the first model in its class to run on a desktop us…
Travel clocks were once essential companions for globetrotters, blending practicality with elegance. This piece explores their golden age, from folding pocket watches to Art Deco desk clocks, and exp…
AI-DLC is an open-source methodology from AWS Labs that gives AI coding assistants a structured, verifiable software-delivery lifecycle. One harness-neutral core runs natively in Claude Code, Kiro CL…
bookofjoe's favorite pill splitter is the Equadose, a heavy metal cutter that holds pills between precisely aligned hard blades. He bought his in 2016 and it still works as well as the day it arrived…
Put an old phone inside a pumpkin and it talks to trick-or-treaters, hears them, answers out loud in character, and glows as it speaks. Pick a pumpkin, tap Start, and place the phone inside. A $4.99…
MiniMax and Hao AI Lab launched FastH3 Omni, an open-source video model hosted on Reactor that generates footage faster than realtime from text, audio, and image inputs. Priced at $0.75 per minute, i…
A newly promoted Head of Engineering at a startup confronts a hidden cost in hiring: candidates are expected to use LLMs during technical challenges, but they must pay for subscriptions or API credit…
npad is a custom 3D configurator for Aurora macropads from momokai, created by an ngrok employee after the company distributed macropads for a hackathon. It lets you visualize and customize your macr…
The 2026 State of the Climate Report reveals that key planetary vital signs—sea level, ocean heat, glacier thickness, and greenhouse gas concentrations—are at record extremes. Global warming has roug…