Hacker News Digest
· 56 Hacker News
libghostty-vt 1.0 ships a stable C ABI for the terminal emulator at the heart of Ghostty. JetBrains IDEs already run it for over 12.5 million active users, Neovim has an approved PR to replace libvte…
A fan project recompiles the original PC code of Need for Speed Underground 2 to run in Chrome and Firefox at up to 120 fps in widescreen, with free roam, online races, and support for controllers, w…
Since 2022, macOS has shipped two undocumented daemons, knowledgeconstructiond and intelligenceplatformd, that cross-reference Contacts, Photos, Calendar, Messages, Mail, location, and Screen Time to…
A satirical site takes aim at Sam Altman's argument that keeping RAM in our own computers is inefficient. Since already-purchased RAM can't be un-bought, the page offers a "revolutionary RAM upload t…
Asahi Linux's Linux 7.3 progress report covers upstreaming macaudio and the 13,000-line AVD driver, M3 support going GA, and Thunderbolt patches finally reaching the mailing list. The headline: borro…
GitHub's "Project Rubicon" rebuilds the Git data plane so a single repository can absorb thousands of writes per second. In internal tests it handled 5,000 concurrent agents and 7,200 pushes per seco…
CATL's sodium-ion battery is set to reach cost parity with LFP in 2026, offering 15,000 cycles and a 30-year lifespan. Hacker News commenters welcome the prospect of cheaper, cold-tolerant home stora…
On Santorini, the Thera volcano erupted in the 17th or 16th century B.C.E., burying the seafaring settlement of Akrotiri under some 200 feet of ash and pumice. Unlike Pompeii, no human remains have b…
New genetic evidence backs up the long-dismissed Gothic claim that their people came from Scandinavia, challenging decades of scholarship that downplayed migration in favor of cultural exchange. Hist…
A federal judge in Nashville approved settlements totaling close to $360 million in the RealPage antitrust litigation, resolving claims that the software let landlords collude to push rents above fre…
Neil Brown, who runs the small English tech-law firm decoded.legal, gives his 2026 update on going fully free-software. On the client side: Debian with GNOME on a ThinkPad, Thunderbird and mutt, Libr…
After touring Unitree's Hangzhou factory, the author found that China's robot production still relies on manual labor: the company's machinery was worth only about $50 per robot in 2025, and labor ma…
San Marino claims to be the world's oldest continuously operating republic, yet no one knows exactly how or when it began. The author spent three days in the landlocked microstate, finding a rural, q…
Pine64's $8 Ox64 is a RISC-V single-board computer with three different cores, and it can run real Linux rather than a stripped-down kernel without an MMU. Getting there is another matter: at launch,…
Anthropic explains how it builds memory for Claude agents: quick in-session notes, offline "dreaming" to consolidate and correct them, and letting the model judge what's worth saving. In Pokémon Red,…
Microsoft is winding down an arrangement to rent AI cloud capacity from Oracle, according to a Bloomberg report carried by Reuters. The move signals a shift in how Microsoft sources compute for its A…
Pivot found a novel optimization for GROUP BY queries that rank the top K groups by aggregate value. Standard engines merge every partition, even though the top 10 results can touch only a handful of…
A sweep of ClinicalTrials.gov finds at least 1,800 registered human trials of GLP-1 and incretin drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro. Fifteen years ago roughly one in fourteen new trials targeted…
A Hacker News discussion of The Flash C Compiler, a small C compiler that brings back the feel of Turbo C. Commenters nostalgic for QuickBASIC, Turbo Pascal, and Turbo C are intrigued, though one not…
Kevin Boone recalls building medical imaging software with Borland Turbo Pascal 7 under Windows 3.1. A compiler born on CP/M, optimized in assembly to run in 32kB of RAM, flew once given megabytes an…
Egor Rogov's PostgreSQL 14 Internals, translated from Russian by Liudmila Mantrova and published by Postgres Professional, is a 548-page book that dissects the database's inner workings. It covers is…
On May 3, 1991, a forklift battery malfunction sparked a blaze at Madison's Central Storage & Warehouse, a 500,000-square-foot facility holding 20 million pounds of government surplus butter, cheese,…
ToothPaste is an open-source ESP32-S3 gadget that acts as a wireless USB keyboard, letting you paste passwords and commands into BIOS screens, air-gapped machines, or sketchy computers without instal…
Trixter explains how he pulled off 8088 Domination, full-motion video on a 1981 IBM PC, after years of calling it impossible. The trick: only update screen memory where pixels actually change, use st…
I love open-source software and open protocols, but my family and friends primarily communicate through SMS for the reasons in xkcd.com/2365/. Whenever XMPP or Matrix threads pop up on HN, several co…
- ▲ 51Discord's Rust rebuild loads your friends list before the old Electron app even finishes booting
Discord co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy posted a side-by-side cold-start clip: the new Rust client, built on the GPUI framework from Zed, fades in within a second and shows the friends list while th…
Nearly 4,000 emoji are crammed into our phones, yet every year brings more requests for burritos, hedgehogs, and microscopes. Jennifer Daniel traces a 5,000-year pattern from Sumerian clay tokens to…
OpenAI's Telephony and SIP guide now lets all organizations place outbound calls through the API, connecting voice agents to ordinary phone networks over SIP. The docs cover setup, server-side contro…
EJ Fox recounts building the NBC News Big Board, the touchscreen map Steve Kornacki uses live on election night before roughly 10 million viewers. What began as a January prototype demoed to producer…
Spindle is a full-featured web framework built for OCaml 5, bringing type safety to every layer of server development. It generates OpenAPI specs, Zod-style validation, and typed clients directly fro…
How long can an organism stay inert and still come back to life? Experiments on the International Space Station show that Deinococcus radiodurans shielded from ultraviolet light can survive years of…
Frustrated by contentEditable's quirks, Hamza built Tasfer, a text editor that measures and paints every letter, cursor, selection, and line break onto an HTML5 canvas, with a hidden input only to ca…
The S&P 500 sits 6% below its record, a modest dip given that only 16 of 56 such drops since 1928 ever passed 15%. Tech absorbed far more damage: the Nasdaq is down 11% and US chip stocks 36%, matchi…
Port 0 is reserved, ignored by browsers, and rejected by most tools, so nobody looks there. The author redirected an IRC network onto port 0 with a single iptables rule, then used masscan to SYN-scan…
- ▲ 39The British Library's web archive is back online, but only captures the UK web up to December 2022
The UK Web Archive has been restored after 2023 disruption, but only sites archived before December 2022 are searchable, and most can only be viewed inside a Legal Deposit Library reading room. Each…
Ever rebooted and lost a dozen tmux windows, along with the agent conversations running in them? tmux-restore saves everything every minute and right before shutdown, then puts it all back when tmux…
Text.js is a framework for building full-stack React 19 apps that display entirely in the browser console. It uses a custom reconciler, Yoga layout, and a cell buffer to repaint only damaged rows, th…
Ampere has released Panthera, a cycle-accurate performance model its architecture team uses to explore CPU features and microarchitectural tradeoffs. Built over eight years and 6,000 commits by 45 pe…
Independent researcher Derik Kauffman dug a hidden "grey list" out of Apple's operating system: more than 100,000 words and phrases its predictive text refuses to complete. Alongside drugs and sexual…
This Show HN project by nuwandavek puts prediction markets to the test against traditional polling and Nate Silver's FLIPR model for the midterms. Hosted on ArtifactBin, the analysis compares how wel…
Andrew W. Lo of MIT Sloan examines how corporate culture spreads like an epidemic, using the fictional Gordon Gekko from Oliver Stone's Wall Street as a case study. Though Gekko is the film's villain…
Coldframe is a low-interaction honeypot that impersonates supermarket refrigeration controllers like the Danfoss AK-SM 800A and Dixell XWEB 500. It mimics real devices' web fingerprints, including he…
A satirical plea from a burnt-out sysadmin who has patched, re-patched, and hot-fixed all week: Monday's patch, Tuesday's Patch Tuesday, Wednesday's Exploit Wednesday, and Thursday's out-of-band fix…
Searchlights, from the 1870 Siege of Paris to the 1903 US Navy exercise, proved to be more than just illumination—they were weapons that blinded gunners and exposed positions. This history traces the…
Bong recreates DuckDuckGo's bang shortcuts as an open-source, self-hostable service. Type a short code after a query — .gh for GitHub, .hn for Hacker News, .yt for YouTube — and jump straight to that…
- ▲ 14A testing researcher filed 500+ bug reports and now wonders if bug finding does more harm than good
After filing over 500 bug reports in a month, a property-based testing researcher questions whether finding every bug is worth it. Bug identification is cheap and verifiable, while fixes are costly,…
AmpUp's Enterprise Brain gives coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor a shared, versioned memory that learns from graded outcomes. On ORCA-bench, root-cause accuracy jumped from 6.3% to 35.2%; CRM…
Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux speaks out on the French government's response to student protests, calling the police violence a 'fascist method' and warning that democracy is slipping away. She also re…
A father-and-daughter Jenga habit turned into an optimization problem: with 54 standard blocks, the theoretical max is 4.05m, but that tower collapses at a 0.21° floor tilt. The author had Codex and…
A foundation chaired by Randy Evans is promoting a triumphal arch at Memorial Circle near Arlington National Cemetery, reviving a century-old plan for columns that stalled during the Great Depression…
Mediabunny's creator discovered that WebCodecs audio encoders add an uncompensated priming delay—44 ms on macOS with AAC—that breaks AV sync after repeated transcodes. Since the WebCodecs spec and br…
HyperFlow H3 Flash from Video Rebirth compresses the ~31B MiniMax-H3 model down to 13.7B, generating video with synchronized stereo audio in just 4 to 8 sampling steps and no classifier-free guidance…
Google's Agent Compute Engine gives every AI agent session its own checkpointed microVM, but it isn't available yet and ships no numbers. So I rebuilt the pattern on Firecracker in about 2,200 lines…
ZeBridge is a bidirectional, local-first sync engine that puts a real database on each device—SQLite, PGlite, DuckDB, or PostgreSQL—and syncs writes through NATS when connectivity returns. PostgreSQL…
An independent position paper argues that prompts, responses, and context should stay private during AI inference, using hardware-backed trusted execution environments and remote attestation on GPUs.…
Owen Lacey's three-year-old keeps demanding new train tracks, so he wrote software to generate Rail Cube layouts — roughly 27 million so far, out of an estimated 28 billion that use every piece. The…