Hacker News Digest
· 78 Hacker News
Court filings in the Minnesota 15 case expose ICE's Homeland Security Investigations running sweeping domestic surveillance on left-wing organizers. Under Operation Keyhole and Project Whipple Shield…
Apple was notified of the eMudhra certificate compromise on October 17, but git, curl, and python3 shipped with macOS still trust the affected roots as of October 28. macOS 27.2, released October 26,…
A security researcher crawled 10,000 sites to catalog canvas fingerprinting scripts, then reverse-engineered one from servicepipe.tech that packed its code with deliberately alarming function names l…
Google's newest frontier model, Gemini 4 Carbon, tops the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 59 and posts state-of-the-art cybersecurity scores: 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilit…
Start Doing Graph Theory is an introductory textbook that uses puzzles and theorem-proving to teach graph theory. Released under a Creative Commons license, it is free to read online or download as a…
Apple's new MacBook Pro pairs a PROLED XDR tandem OLED display with on-panel Touch, hitting up to 2,000 nits peak HDR and SDR brightness, a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and P3 plus Adobe RGB coverage…
LexiFina has built a Git-like system for the US Code that tracks every amendment, effective date, and textual change across nine titles. By replaying public laws between release points, it reproduced…
A Kentucky man has become the first humanist granted a religious exemption from using AI at work, and the Hacker News thread digs into what that actually means. Commenters push back on strawman argum…
Emacs began in 1976 at MIT's AI Lab, where Richard Stallman built on Carl Mikkelsen's Control-R and Guy Steele's push for a standard command set. Stallman distributed it to anyone who sent a tape and…
CircuitHub has spent five years quietly running The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that assembles circuit boards on demand. Instead of a fixed line, levitating movers carry each board b…
The Carmelite Monks of Wyoming are building a Gothic church using CNC stone-carving machines from Prussiani Engineering. Ornate pieces that once took months now take days, and the machines can run un…
Ole Bielfeldt, a 25-year-old experimental photographer from Germany, took the 2026 Nikon Small World prize with a microscopic view of an inkjet printer laying ink onto paper. He beat 1,802 entries fr…
A scrolling visualization stacks US household wealth in $100 bills, one pixel per $5,000, to show how far the climb really goes. The median household holds $211,292; the average top-1% household hold…
CVE-2026-97631 is a memory-corruption flaw in the ICMP parser of EDK2, the open source codebase behind UEFI firmware used by AMI, Insyde, Phoenix, Microsoft's Project Mu, and most server vendors. Rat…
A massive leak of Department of Homeland Security records has exposed details on more than 41,000 employees and contractors, including the identities of undercover ICE agents. The archive, dubbed "Ic…
On October 17, Meta suspended the No Kings Coalition's Instagram account as nearly 3,000 get-out-the-vote events were underway. Meta first blamed excessive posting, then a day later said a Claude AI…
Amazon has signed an $11.57 billion deal to acquire satellite operator Globalstar, a move aimed squarely at challenging SpaceX's Starlink. The Hacker News submission drew little discussion, with comm…
Surge AI's DAYJOB: Tax benchmark puts AI agents through 50 realistic tax assignments across eight practice areas, complete with messy client files, handwritten receipts, and conflicting records. Clau…
A moderator on r/Seattle discovered that an article archived by archive.today had malware links injected into it. To protect the community, the mod team is now using AutoModerator to automatically re…
- ▲ 191A developer decompiles Fast Food Tycoon 2 and uncovers the secret logic behind its isometric city
Using GPT-6.1 and Ghidra, a developer decompiled all 4,046 functions of the 2001 business sim Fast Food Tycoon 2 and reverse-engineered its renderer. The game paints cities as a static image plus spr…
A RENFE train carrying 397 passengers struck the rear of an IRYO service with 147 people aboard that had stopped on the same track between Urda and Los Yébenes in Toledo province. Two carriages derai…
AlpineBSD pairs the NetBSD kernel with an Alpine Linux-inspired userspace, aiming to keep AI-generated software out of the base system and main package repository. It ships apk-tools, busybox, and a…
A Wall Street Journal analysis argues that the earnings boom behind recent US stock market gains rests on just a handful of companies, with Nvidia and Micron alone accounting for 34% of the growth. T…
Apple is blocking certificates from eight compromised eMudhra intermediate CAs after their private keys leaked. Six of them issue TLS certificates, meaning anyone holding those keys could mint certif…
Asked who won the 2020 presidential election, Google's AI Mode dodges, telling users to consult the Federal Election Commission instead of naming Joe Biden. The same evasiveness hit questions about t…
A vintage computing enthusiast has released a first-cut extensions pack that makes Mac OS 9.1 run on the Apple Network Server using its preproduction ROM. The software fixes the on-board MACE Etherne…
A hiring manager at Anthropic has stopped giving traditional coding interviews, arguing Claude now outperforms candidates on small React and assembly challenges alike. His advice for engineers withou…
Nvidia's Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe is an open-weight, promptable speech model that handles transcription in 40 languages, translation in 31, and speaker attribution in 13, all from a single checkpoint.…
Formlabs' Form Studio 1 is a $699 MSLA resin printer aimed at anyone who wants professional-grade output at home. It prints most parts in under two hours with fine detail, includes Open Material Mode…
President Trump says he will officially ban the term 'AI/Artificial Intelligence' from all relevant documents, calling it inaccurate, and wants everyone to say 'Super Intelligence' (SI) instead. He s…
- ▲ 101Magnopus engineer admits his 'unlimited' Gaussian splat renderer had a hidden 16-million-splat cap
After claiming his Unreal renderer could handle unlimited Gaussian splats, the author discovered a hard 16-million-instance limit baked into Unreal's GPU Scene. He rebuilt the pipeline around indirec…
A high-speed train accident in Toledo province, on the line linking Madrid to southern Andalusia, has killed at least 10 people and injured scores more. Passengers evacuated a derailed train near Urd…
Cursor released the Agent SDK, the framework it uses to build its own managed agents like Bugbot, Security Reviewer, and Rollouts. Agents are defined as code: prompts in Markdown, tools as TypeScript…
SDF began in 1987 as a one-modem Apple IIe bulletin board named after the anime Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Today it's a member-funded NetBSD system offering shell accounts, web and Gopher host…
Moxnox is a 130,000-line C++ hobby operating system that mimics Windows NT's syscalls and low-level interfaces while running a full GNU userland on btrfs. It self-hosts on amd64 and aarch64, implemen…
Artificial Analysis overhauled its flagship Intelligence Index, with 60% of v5 now built on private or held-out test sets. Claude Opus 5.5 (max) leads at 58, ahead of GPT-6 Astra (max, 57) and GPT-6.…
A Tesla Semi caught fire in the southbound lanes of I-880 near Hayward, California, on Tuesday evening, and there was no crash. The truck's lithium-ion battery burned long enough to keep the freeway…
Newly unsealed internal Meta documents, released through an ongoing lawsuit over adolescent addiction, reveal explicit plans to discredit psychologist Jonathan Haidt, frustration among company resear…
Craig Hockenberry recounts a brutal year of lymphoma treatment — lumbar punctures, spinal headaches, Bendamustine and Rituximab infusions, a 50-pound weight loss, pneumonia, and atrial fibrillation —…
- ▲ 76Barcelona's TikTok 'protest' was fabricated — and 130 arrests later, the chaos is doing the talking
Around 20 TikTok accounts linked to the anonymous Blocus platform called young people to Plaça Catalunya on October 24, then redirected them to private chats about looting. The night ended with 130 a…
Several PDF tools generate their AES-256 file keys from tiny, enumerable state spaces. MuPDF before 1.28.5 seeded a 48-bit LCG with the current time in seconds, and only 9 bits of that timestamp ever…
Alphabet's third-quarter 2026 results show revenue up 25% to $127.6 billion, with Google Cloud surging 103% to $30.7 billion on enterprise AI infrastructure and TPU system sales. Search query growth…
After bedtime stories, I fire up a 2007 Asus eeePC 701 running Alpine Linux and port Richard WM Jones's JonesForth from GAS to NASM. Progress is slow—some macros took weeks—but the distraction-free r…
CaseCite is a source-available, self-hosted legal research platform that runs on infrastructure you control. It bundles document research with inline citations, contract review and redlining, long-fo…
A leak website has released data on tens of thousands of employees at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to Reuters. The disclosure raises immediate concerns about the exposure of fe…
At Steam Indie Connect in Busan, Valve's Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson addressed developers' fears of AI-generated clones and extortion emails. Their answer: Valve won't police which tools develope…
Bar-headed geese migrate over the Himalayas at 28,000 feet, crossing Mount Everest, because birds inherited super-efficient lungs from dinosaurs. Unlike mammals, birds have one-way airflow through ai…
Eleanor Lutz's Tabletop Whale closes out its Atlas of Space series with a geologic map of the Moon, built from six USGS and NASA datasets that used inconsistent category names and fuzzy timescales. R…
Wedgewood Polls admitted on October 20 that its numbers were fabricated, calling the whole thing a social experiment exposing how little scrutiny political polling gets. Within hours, the confession…
SlideBySide revolutionizes presentations by letting you share slides via a link instead of sharing your screen. Upload a PDF or PowerPoint, and your audience joins instantly in any browser—no sign-up…
A self-described tech worker has posted an open call on Hacker News for a strike during the third week of November 2026, inviting colleagues to pick their own days. The argument: AI is a symptom, not…
A University of Chicago study in NEJM Evidence found that after two decades of decline, the overall colorectal cancer incidence rate reversed course, rising from 36.7 per 100,000 in 2022 to 38.3 in 2…
Anthropic is expanding its GSA partnership with a 40% discount on Claude Enterprise, Claude for Government, and the Claude API for federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies. The deal, e…
A new four-lane highway, Avenida Liberdade, is being carved through more than 13km of protected Amazon rainforest to ease traffic for the COP30 summit in Belém this November. Pará's state government…
Regent Craft's Viceroy, a 16.8-meter wing-in-ground craft, flew 596 meters over Narragansett Bay in September, carrying two captains — the largest electric WIG ever to fly with people aboard. Skimmin…
Spider silk is tougher than Kevlar and stronger than steel, yet scientists have struggled to replicate it because no one knew exactly how a liquid blend of proteins, water, and salt turns into solid…
Training the LLM behind the first ChatGPT took an estimated 185,000 gallons of water, and a single hyperscale data center can swallow up to 5 million gallons a day — as much as a city of 10,000 to 50…
A soap film thinner than a micrometer reflects light as a single cosine in wavenumber, so its color is simply white minus the cosine transform of the CIE color-matching functions evaluated at the opt…
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 scores language models across four equally weighted categories—Knowledge Work, Coding, Science, and General—using nine evaluations including AA-Briefcase,…
A New York Times science piece on the fate of the Neanderthals, posted to Hacker News, where it drew a small but curious discussion. The linked article itself could not be retrieved, so the thread st…
- ▲ 36Spain's high-speed rail disaster: 68 dead after control centre let a train run into a stopped one
At least 68 people died when a Renfe AVE train struck a stationary Iryo train on the Madrid-Seville line near Urda. Transport Minister Óscar Puente says a computer failure halted six trains, then the…
- ▲ 34Obsidian Canvas draws lines that never become links; Heptabase's lines are remembered everywhere
Both tools offer infinite 2D canvases, but their data models are opposites. Obsidian Canvas stores visual arrangements in open JSON Canvas files, so arrows are portable but invisible to the vault's g…
Kevin Wu trained Qwen3-1.7B to write lipograms — everyday answers that avoid the letter 'e' — on a single 16 GB GPU. Prompting alone failed completely, and a token mask that blocks 'e' got usable ans…
While running a security audit with Claude Code on a MacBook backup of his iPhone, the author discovered a PhotoData/Thumbnails directory holding 145,763 files — photos, videos, and screenshots he ha…
An independent security researcher scanned 7,256,531 public repositories on Gitee, China's largest Git platform, using TruffleHog and Kingfisher together. The dual-scanner pipeline surfaced 26,400 un…
Cartesia scales its hierarchical networks (H-Nets), which replace hand-designed tokenizers with learned, end-to-end chunking of raw bytes. A controlled scaling ladder shows a one-stage H-Net gains 3-…
Thirty California billionaires put up $293 million to defeat Proposition 40, a one-time 5% tax on their fortunes that would have raised at least $107 billion. In a satirical manifesto, the venture fi…
Every day, Wikipedia volunteers nominate and delete biographies of living people judged insufficiently notable, from a NASA analog astronaut to a nonprofit CEO. Editors say the standard is verifiabil…
Naval strategists have always studied the past, and four ancient Mediterranean sieges still speak to modern blockade problems: Samos in 440–439 BCE, Syracuse in 413 BCE, Rhodes in 305–304 BCE, and Li…
Nasscad is a free 3D CAD tool that runs directly in your browser or as a Windows desktop app, with no cloud dependency. It handles STEP AP203/AP214/AP242 import and export, IFC support, assembly brow…
Two early programs that modeled how people write code have been brought back to life by running their original source. Herbert Simon's Heuristic Compiler (1961) applied General Problem Solver means-e…
During testing of the Ranger Super Duty, a Ford engineer decided to count the sand dunes crossed on a 590 km route from Birdsville to Mount Dare. The task proved harder than expected: many crests are…
A free, machine-readable feed collects roughly 150 grant, subsidy, and policy notices from nine official Shanghai sources, including the science and technology commission, commerce commission, and IP…
Found in 1904 inside the remarkably well-preserved Oseberg ship burial in Norway, this fragmentary tapestry dates to around 834 AD and is made of wool, silk, and flax. Its largest surviving panels sh…
A developer reflects on how AI has evolved from a rubber duck for debugging to a code generator, and warns that juniors who lean on it too early skip the struggle that builds real understanding. Seni…
Tracy Daugherty's biography, the first life of Cormac McCarthy, traces how the novelist's work answered the problem of his own upbringing. The son of a Tennessee Valley Authority lawyer, McCarthy reb…
Puget Systems' benchmark launcher has been fully ARM-native since version 1.4.30, yet host applications like Premiere and After Effects still lack full ARM support. Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve work…
WikiCity maps the 100,000 most-viewed Wikipedia articles onto a navigable 3D city, where you can fly through the skyline and even shoot it up with missiles. The project comes from the makers of Gilde…