Hacker News Digest
· 93 Hacker News
- ▲ 1081Postman quietly installs AI plugins into Codex and Claude Code, then approves its own startup hook
Opening Postman 12.33.4 on macOS triggered an "auto-existing-upgrade" that installed a Codex plugin, a Claude Code plugin, a remote MCP connection, and a Postman CLI without asking. A startup hook th…
Matthew Honnibal argues the "Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen" post is misleading: only three small experiments (17K–172K weights) actually read raw weights with no tools. Every real…
A 2014 Renault Latitude owner discovered the head unit's clock settings only appear when a legitimate navigation SD card is inserted — and TomTom's DRM rejects any card without the correct CID. Rathe…
Starting early next year, Google will switch off A.I. tools in its K-12 software unless administrators opt in. But schools that block A.I. entirely will also lose Google search, since search and A.I.…
Simon Willison tested a paper claiming LLMs can interpret neural network weights without running code. Feeding raw floating-point weights from four small game-playing networks to Qwen 3.8 27B on his…
Nicholas Carlini ported Stockfish to a 200 MHz Pentium Pro with 64MB of RAM and estimates it plays at roughly 3300 Elo at classical time controls—far above Kasparov's 2800. By backporting three decad…
Utah Attorney General Derek Brown filed 13 felony counts and one misdemeanor against Kalshi and co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara over sports bets offered between September 13 and 24. Th…
Hacker Times takes the firehose of Hacker News and lays it out like a classic newspaper, complete with headlines, deck-style summaries, and editorial imagery. Instead of a dense list of links, you ge…
A Hacker News user reports that their company, which deliberately disables data sharing in Codex and Claude Code to protect intellectual property, found the "Improve the model for everyone" setting s…
Neufangled Robotics' Stringman is an open-source, OSHWA-certified gripper robot that hangs from ceiling-corner anchors and reaches an entire 7×7×3 m room using only four motors. At $795, it claims ro…
Fujifilm will spend about 10 billion yen (roughly $63 million) to quintuple its magnetic tape production capacity by fiscal 2028, citing "exponential growth" in data from generative AI. The investmen…
DiscImageStudio converts an image into data that obeys the physical-layer constraints of CD, DVD and single-layer BD-R discs, so once burned, the artwork becomes visible to the naked eye on the disc…
Namespace needed Macs for iOS builds, but Mac Minis were backordered for months and Apple caps macOS to two VMs per machine. So the company racks hundreds of MacBook Pros, wiring each with IP KVM, 10…
Nearly 40% of web page loads come from users in dark mode, yet only 10% of pages support it. Safari 27.3 beta closes that gap: Adaptive Dark Mode analyzes each page, inverts luminosity while preservi…
Kunal argues that "cognitive surrender" — uncritically accepting whatever AI agents produce — is seductive because it's fast, easy, and reinforced by peer pressure and confident-sounding models. But…
Off-balance-sheet obligations tied to AI at Google, Meta and other US tech giants have almost doubled in six months to roughly $3.2 trillion — about 80% of their assets. Investors are growing alarmed…
OpenAI's monorepo buckled under Codex-driven parallel work, with reliability dipping below 90%. So the team built Pando, a Git-compatible backend that scales writes across branches and reuses packfil…
NVIDIA's open-source Auto Ontology is a Python framework that builds a semantic, graph-based context layer over enterprise metadata. It reconciles inconsistent metric definitions across systems and e…
Tianhua Chen's revised preprint builds a single, derivation-driven path from PCA and variational autoencoders through diffusion models, normalising flows, autoregressive factorisations, GANs, Wassers…
A study in JAMA Network Open estimates that roughly 75% of NFL players who died between 2008 and 2023 had signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy — the highest figure yet, and triple the same team'…
Intel slid another 9% on Monday after its worst trading day since 1974, leaving the chipmaker worth less than half what it was at the end of September. The pain is spreading: roughly seven in ten S&P…
After more than four years of alpha development, 2,000+ commits, and 200+ alpha releases, Toit v2.0.0 is finally here. The milestone was reached once a refactoring let peripheral APIs accept pin numb…
HackerTV turns Hacker News's most-recommended YouTube videos into always-on TV channels. Seeded from HackerTube and built on the open-index/hacker-news archive, it stays current by pulling new HN com…
Keeping Up's benchmark data shows the median net worth for U.S. households under 35 dropped 23% between 2022 and 2025 in real terms. For people aged 30–33, the median sits at $68,000, while the top 1…
The European RISC-V Industrial Computing Initiative (ERICI) coordinates an open reference stack—from firmware to real-time and general-purpose operating systems—verified to boot together on RVA23 har…
Revolut shifted roughly 2,000 engineers from Claude Code and Codex to self-hosted GLM for coding, running on 56 Nvidia B200s at a blended 30 cents per million tokens — about a tenth of what it paid A…
Flipper One is an open Linux multi-tool built on a Rockchip RK3576 with a mainline kernel, developed with Collabora to avoid binary blobs and vendor BSPs. A separate RP2350 MCU keeps the LCD, buttons…
After Ocado's customer service answered his detailed bug report about malformed calendar invites with a suspiciously polished, sycophantic, em-dash-laden message, Terence Eden vented in a one-star sa…
I filled out the web form for the Cuyahoga Amateur Radio Club, but I suspect my message was circular-filed. I have information about a large collection of radio gear, much of it brand-new, that needs…
Hironobu Suzuki's free online guide dissects PostgreSQL's subsystems chapter by chapter, from the buffer manager and VACUUM processing to WAL, streaming replication, and a new beta chapter on logical…
A browser-based Katamari game where you roll up real objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access collection, all shown at their actual size. Start with coins, thimbles, and netsuke, the…
At the Prospector, a Connecticut movie theater whose mission is to give adults with disabilities meaningful, well-paying jobs, Gabe Kavookjian has spent eleven years filming preshow ads with his cowo…
GitBook says a sophisticated, highly targeted attack carried out with AI agents let an intruder grab infrastructure credentials on November 2. The company took the app and authenticated docs offline,…
A recent paper claims GPT-6 Astra can read and rewrite neural network weights, including fixing a 0.8B Qwen model that looped after 32k tokens on math problems. Sean Goedecke argues this isn't superh…
Helge Sverre dug into macOS's private Lexicon.framework and dumped Apple's hidden word-flagging system. Every dictionary entry carries tier flags (vulgar, offensive, sensitive) and topic bits (sex, d…
Every TechCrunch article autoplays a JW Player video mid-post, and hiding it just leaves the player running in the background. This filter blocks the JW Player and Connatix scripts outright so the vi…
Every year, Japan celebrates Jimi Halloween, where people dress as everyday moments instead of witches or zombies. The tradition began in 2014 with a group of adults at Daily Portal Z who felt too em…
A hundred years after Gaudí's death, the Sagrada Família is finally the world's tallest church — yet Art Nouveau remains a rare, short-lived style. Visiting Barcelona's Hospital de Sant Pau, the auth…
A NixOS 26.05 template that once needed 1024MB of RAM and burned 288MB at idle now sits at 96MB with 54 kernel modules loaded. The author walks through the tweaks: disabling transparent huge pages, b…
A scholarship student studying computer science and AI describes how her university's chaotic response to AI has degraded her education: policies that flip between banning and mandating LLMs, AI-gene…
Buried by Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and unreadable since its excavation in the 1750s, PHerc. 306B has yielded its first legible letters. Freelance software engineer Liam Warner and classics student Nic…
Wade Tregaskis reports that macOS 27 Golden Gate drops all support for CoreStorage and encrypted HFS+ volumes. Disk Utility and diskutil fail with cryptic errors, and even erasing the volume is block…
Charles Tandy built three retail empires — Tandy Leather, Pier 1 Imports, and Radio Shack — from a family leather business. When Radio Shack was $7 million in debt and bleeding $200,000 a month, an a…
Antimony is a node-based CAD tool built on directed acyclic graphs, a CSG geometry engine using functional representations, and a Python-driven standard library of shapes and transforms. Each node is…
- ▲ 102OpenAI's 'Subexponential' SAT Algorithm Is Exhaustive Search for the Next 10^10^10^10^10^10^10 Years
OpenAI claimed a subexponential-time algorithm for satisfiability, but the procedure only kicks in after a threshold of 10^10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 variables—a number dwarfing the universe'…
Three friends who loved Apple and design built their own notes app in 2013; it hit the App Store in 2016, won Mac App of the Year and an Apple Design Award, and now serves millions. For its tenth ann…
A research engineer at Salesforce AI Research, spending roughly $3,000 a month on tokens, reports that agentic coding has made hand-written code nearly obsolete in his workflow: he now runs five or s…
Quilicura, Chile, hosts one of the largest concentrations of AI data centers, which cool their servers with water from the drought-stricken Maipo River basin. On January 31, more than 40 residents an…
Paste any Japanese YouTube video into JIVX and it breaks the dialogue into sentences you type or say aloud, with each attempt graded. You can also pick from a library of already-added videos sorted b…
Workers inside Google's AI division are pressing executives to lift non-disparagement agreements, arguing the contracts stop them from warning the public about the dangers of the technology they are…
Figma built a first-party editing model to handle the small, iterative, non-verifiable tweaks designers make all day: spacing, colors, layout fixes. Starting with supervised fine-tuning on Figma's na…
A personal essay about losing access to wild places: a beloved $12 campground closes because the owner can no longer afford liability insurance, state park sites are booked out for months, and a chil…
Anthropic's amended S-1 shows personnel costs topped $1.7 billion from July to September 2026, or roughly $107,300 per employee per month across 5,300 staff. Stock-based compensation accounted for $1…
WorkOS is notifying customers of a data security incident detected on October 30, 2026, when anomalous traffic hit an internal business system. Investigators found the attack was likely driven by ART…
Cloudflare's status page lists five simultaneous active incidents: increased errors across Durable Objects, AI Search, Artifacts and Containers; DNS update delays; elevated HTTP 502 errors on the CDN…
The race to build AI infrastructure could top $10 trillion if all current plans materialize, funded through corporate cash, public and private debt, off-balance-sheet leases, and guarantees from hype…
HackerChurn analyzes three years of public Hacker News comments to reveal which SaaS tools developers complain about most—and what they're switching to. The site ranks 100+ platforms like LastPass, C…
Kairos is an open-source alternative to Sardine, Sift, Riskified, and SEON that makes real-time decisions on every sign-up, login, order, payment, and payout. It combines Grayson, a decision model th…
hjkl is a browser-based game that helps you learn Vim by doing. Instead of memorizing commands, you practice them in short, focused drills covering everything from fixing typos and changing words to…
A 27-question game built around a single deceptively simple rule: no vehicles in the park. Each scenario asks you to judge whether the rule was broken, setting aside real-world legal exemptions or re…
A lightweight, fast BASIC interpreter built for mid-range Arduino boards and MCUs, letting you write, edit, and run programs directly on the hardware without a PC IDE. It stays hardware-agnostic to k…
After 15+ years wrestling with large C++ codebases, the author advocates replacing raw and smart pointers with index-handles. The approach centralizes memory management into systems, groups items int…
Hongwei Xi's book introduces ATS, a syntax- and feature-rich language covering functional programming, datatypes, polymorphism, dependent types, linear types, and theorem-proving. It walks through pr…
Honeypots lure bad actors; flipped around, they become curiosity traps that attract the good ones. A blog is a long, complex search query for people who share your interests, and each post is a hook…
Octomind is an open-source, CLI-first AI coding agent runtime written in Rust: one binary, any model, MCP-native, and runnable interactively, piped through stdin, as a daemon, over WebSocket, or as a…
Karim Joseph Nassar introduces Vathography, a practice that distills a photograph into its hidden volume. Using Marigold V2, a diffusion transformer, depth is inferred from a single image and elevate…
OpenAirInterface and srsRAN are the two open-source 5G RAN platforms most used for research, prototyping, and cheap private networks, yet prior evaluations rarely compare them across different SDRs,…
This GitHub reference kit gathers the pin maps, two- and four-GPU NVLink connection plans, and connector-only KiCad schematics needed to build an open-source carrier board for NVIDIA V100 SXM2 module…
Recommender models now chew through long, attribute-rich user histories, creating a storage asymmetry: many tiny continuous updates against repeated large reads. ByteDance's USDB unifies sequence sto…
Pratt parsing fits in nine lines of code, and that snippet is the least important thing to learn. What matters is the mindset: register semantic actions on terminals rather than production rules, spl…
Parts of British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba stopped observing seasonal clock changes on November 1, but Microsoft's software hasn't caught up. Outlook calendar entries don't shift automatically,…
Concepts is a hands-on learning resource that makes complex machine learning ideas intuitive by letting you tweak inputs and see the results. It covers a wide range of topics, from LLM evaluation met…
PsiQuantum unveiled an 8×8 optical circuit switch built on the low-loss silicon photonics platform it has spent nearly a decade developing for fault-tolerant quantum computing. Lab tests show 1.2 dB…
For years the dxil-spirv control flow structurizer was a fragile 9,000-line tangle that one shader update could break, and with a bus factor of one it became impossible to reason about. The author ab…
Replacing a car key now starts around $125 and can exceed $1,000 for some BMWs, with a full Subaru set running $1,500 at the dealership. The price reflects decades of technological escalation: engine…
Gate remotes send on 433 MHz, and a cheap AliExpress copy remote couldn't learn them, so the author wired a CC1101 radio module to an FT232H USB board with six jumper wires and drove it from Python v…
Beth George, a former child advocate attorney in Maine, started experimenting with gluten-free dough for her son and ended up as the world's most sought-after bagel consultant. At 63, she has trained…
When Duncan was ten, his older brother flatly forbade him from playing the flute in band, and he chose the clarinet instead. Years later, he sees the decree as a lesson in broken systems: the school…
Rustable is an open-source database client built entirely in Rust, offering a native, GPU-rendered UI via egui. It supports PostgreSQL, SQLite, MySQL, MariaDB, and standalone Redis, with features lik…
A neural network neuron is just a weighted sum plus a bias passed through an activation, so if inputs are forced to 0 or 1 and the activation is "greater than zero," AND, OR, and NOT become single ne…
After experimenting with union types in his low-level language Copper, the author settles on option types (T?) as a simpler alternative. He implements them by reserving a nil value per type, adds an…
Kelvin Adithya has digitized Yasaburo Kuwayama's 1973 book Trademarks & Symbols, Volume 2: Symbolical Designs, cataloging 1,504 marks by 725 designers for 1,142 companies across 30 countries. The arc…
PostHog shares how it writes and maintains comparison content that stays accurate. Head-to-head pages convert at around 10%, far above other blog posts. The company credits admitting where competitor…
ReBirth 338, the iconic software synthesizer inspired by the Roland TB-303 and TR-808, is now playable directly in your browser. This port uses BoxedWine to emulate a Windows environment, letting you…
Bema is a work messaging app that prioritizes focus by design. Instead of constant notifications, it only alerts you to urgent Nudges, while everything else waits for your scheduled check-in. Message…
GUI64 is a graphical layer for the Commodore 64 that runs on top of the built-in KERNAL ROM, offering a windowed file manager for floppy disks and SD2IEC devices. First released in November 2024, it…
WiCi is a systems research lab building wireless GPU computing for local AI. Its WiCi One box pairs a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti with 16GB GDDR7 and a 4TB PCIe 5.0 SSD, presenting the remote card to nearby…
Before McDonald's became a global giant, Dick and Mac McDonald ran a failing movie theater in Depression-era California. They pivoted to a root beer stand, then to barbecue, before stripping their me…
After winning an OpenAI Codex hackathon with HyperCode, a repository intelligence layer, the deepsense.ai team tested harness patterns in their own setups with Codex and Claude Code. The playbook cov…
Inspired by Karpathy's HackerTube, this tool lets you follow trusted YouTube channels and describe your standards in plain words. Each morning an AI scores new videos against those standards and publ…
Kvittas is a lightweight expense splitting app built to replace Cost Split, which its creator used for years but found lacking in the UI department. The core appeal is simplicity: no account required…
Greg Kolodziejzyk started Image Club Graphics in Calgary in the 1980s with a Mac 512k and a LaserWriter, and it became the first company in the world to sell stock photography on CD-ROM. Sold to Aldu…
Kiri is an open-source container runtime written in Rust that dramatically speeds up container startup, running a Docker container in just 18 milliseconds. Built for developers who are tired of waiti…