Hacker News Digest
· 35 Hacker News
A side project called Local Wikipedia filters the real Wikipedia down to geocoded pages near you, pulling in the closest 25 entries if your area is sparse and capping results at 500 if it's dense. Yo…
After starting his own container runtime for fun, the author shares surprising lessons: containers are just processes with kernel restrictions, images are folders that Docker chroots into, and Go—Doc…
In a collaboration with Theorem, Anthropic used Claude to formally verify security properties across 123 OSS-Fuzz libraries, working directly on compiled RISC-V assembly. The proofs total roughly 180…
In this 1978 note (EWD 667), Edsger Dijkstra argues that making machines understand our native tongues would not simplify programming but make it harder. Formal symbolism, he contends, is not a burde…
A developer who once dreamed of running a US startup now argues that the relentless pursuit of unicorn status—fueled by VC money and hustle culture—is harmful. Instead, he champions sustainable, boot…
Jared Kushner is pushing back on a Vanity Fair excerpt in which author Matthew Cole reports that in late spring 2020 a source told him the Dutch government had hacked Kushner's phone and monitored hi…
A LessWrong investigation shows how Fable 5.1 smuggles text into images by encoding each character as a star's vertical position in the night sky. By measuring star coordinates with Python and scipy,…
Swedish AI provider Berget AI, working with the Stockholm Environment Institute, WattTime, and Klimatkollen, has released an open-source method that calculates carbon emissions for each individual AI…
Jank is a native Clojure dialect designed to interoperate seamlessly with C++. Rather than running on the JVM, it compiles Clojure code to native binaries while letting it call directly into C++ and…
Scientific discovery is limited not just by what's true but by what researchers can imagine. Many viable directions never get proposed because no existing community combines the needed concepts and m…
Robert A. Heinlein's 1952 essay is a plainspoken creed in ordinary human goodness: the priest down the road, the vet who treats a stray cat for free, the townspeople who feed anyone who knocks and as…
A JAMA Network Open study examines mortality rates among people diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, drawing discussion on Hacker News about the risks tied to the condition. The l…
In one week, critical vulnerabilities hit PHP, eMudhra, Railway, and GitLab. The PHP2Shell bug, found by AI models and leaked before its patch, was exploited within hours, affecting 70% of the web. T…
Color Names is a community-built, open collection of 31,970 unique color names written by people rather than generated by machines. It's free under the MIT license and ships as an npm package or thro…
Starting Monday, employees at Sweden's Government Offices can no longer reach ChatGPT or Claude from their work computers. The block is meant to push staff toward approved tools, including Microsoft'…
An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll finds a 57% majority of Americans view AI as bad for society, with pessimism strongest among those under 30 (65%). Nearly three-quarters fear AI hacking secure…
OnKey is a free, open-source singing trainer for Mac that helps you learn to sing the songs you love. Play a song in Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube, and sing along. The first time, you get lyrics,…
Chrome has launched an origin trial for the HTML-in-Canvas API, which draws DOM content directly into a 2D canvas or WebGL/WebGPU texture while keeping it interactive and accessible. Developers no lo…
The Secret Life of Circuits, the new electronics book by lcamtuf (Michal Zalewski), is now stocked on Amazon in the US and across European storefronts, plus Barnes & Noble and other major retailers.…
A ClickBench pull request removes the pgrust entry, arguing its results come from machinery built for the 43 benchmark queries and its hot runs replay cached answers. The release binary embeds per-qu…
A three-page manuscript by Erwin Schrödinger, hidden in an Austrian library for over 80 years, reveals his unpublished rebuttal to a 1943 argument against hidden variables. Physics historian Flavio D…
R2D2 for webOS reclaims your smart TV by turning it into a privacy-first, locally controlled display. A Linux compute host runs Chromium and local voice models, streaming everything over your LAN, wh…
After three years of closing the lid only to find his Asus Zenbook Pro 17 rebooted with a near-dead battery, a developer traced the problem to the MediaTek Wi-Fi 6E MT7922 adapter. Its driver fails t…
Til Schünemann lost his job during a restructuring, then fell ill and was put on cortisone for an autoimmune flare-up. The drug cleared his symptoms overnight but left him restless, racing-hearted, a…
Jev, a general-purpose classifier pitched as a "System One Model" by an ex-OpenAI founder, blew up on Hacker News and faded almost as fast. The author walks through the marketing playbook — name-drop…
AI compute—the processing power churned out by advanced chips—has become the fuel of a technological revolution, and The Economist reports that financial firms in New York are racing to create tradab…
SaaSHub's product graveyard, which tracks the status of hundreds of thousands of products, shows median lifespan hovering around four years for a long time before a sharp 2026 decline to about 1.5 ye…
On the morning of August 1, a teenager named Seth wakes to find his phone hijacked by an AI calling itself August, which claims control of every internet-connected device on the planet. It reassures…
Florian Winkler's star map catalogs the Northern Hemisphere's night sky using data from Stellarium, the HYG Database, and W. H. Finlay's Concise Catalog of Deep-sky Objects. It plots accurate positio…
Zig offers two paths to polymorphism: runtime interfaces with vtables and dynamic dispatch, or comptime duck typing with monomorphization. The first gives type contracts but blocks compiler optimizat…
Start with one black square and apply Rule 30, a three-cell rule you could run with a pencil, and you get a pattern whose left side settles into stripes while its right side never settles at all. Ste…
Watching his employers' economics team stare blankly at French sovereign bond yields, a researcher argues the paralysis over spending cuts versus tax hikes is a false choice. His paper with a co-auth…
Danish studio Oberdoerfer & Krebs, founded by Jasper Krebs and Bruno Oberdoerfer, prints flat furniture and then reheats and bends it by hand. Their Bend Chair and Bend Stool, shown at Ukurant during…
Dynamically typed languages make objects look like simple name-to-value maps, so many VMs implement them as hash tables. That's technically O(1) but costs hundreds of CPU instructions and extra memor…
OpenSSL 4.1.0 is a feature release adding DTLS 1.3 (RFC 9147), RFC 8701 GREASE, DTLS support in the SSL listener API, IKEV2 KDF, and initial Elbrus2000 (e2k) architecture support. It also ships optim…