Hacker News Digest
· 91 Hacker News
Anthropic's new flagship models, Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2, share one underlying model split by safeguards: Fable for general use, Mythos for vetted cybersecurity and biotech work. In pr…
Foldable Flight is a library of 109 paper airplane designs, each with step-by-step folding tutorials and speed, glide, and accuracy ratings. Standouts include the Firefly 5, a world-record prototype…
- ▲ 757Opus 5.5's reasoning took a sharp turn on November 3, analysis of 1,400 Claude Code sessions finds
Shane Melaugh had Gemini 4 Argon analyze 1,400 Claude Code sessions and found that on November 3, Opus 5.5's reasoning patterns changed sharply even though the model name stayed the same. Reasoning v…
KetchUp is a free, MIT-licensed 3D modeling app for woodworking and furniture design, written in Rust and running in a desktop browser via WebGPU or WebGL2, with native Windows, macOS, and Linux buil…
- ▲ 601Hackers Could Unlock Any Car From a Major Automaker Using Credentials Hidden in a JavaScript Bundle
Security researchers Sam Curry and Shubs chained together exposed admin tools, hardcoded OpenIDM credentials buried in a vendor JavaScript bundle, and a WAF bypass via path traversal to take over cus…
The AI bubble is widely assumed to exist, but the numbers tell a different story. AI companies have committed trillions to data centers, yet those are one-off infrastructure costs, not recurring expe…
The USPS now publishes official ZIP Code boundary polygons built from its own delivery address and location data, refreshed quarterly as delivery areas shift. Available in Internal, Enterprise, and P…
Payments Canada has gone live with the Real-Time Rail, letting banks, credit unions and payment providers clear and settle payments 24/7 with instant settlement and ISO 20022 data-rich messaging. Lau…
As Wikipedia turns 25, The Economist traces how a scrappy Florida startup outgrew the Yongle encyclopedia, the Ming dynasty's 23,000-roll reference work that held the record for roughly 600 years. Th…
Google once promised that personal content from Gmail, Docs, and Drive connected to Gemini "is not seen by human reviewers." That promise is gone: an updated help page and a revised 2023 blog post no…
A self-employed contractor who loved Harvest for its simple time-tracking and invoicing now watches Bending Spoons — the company that gutted Vimeo — raise the price from $13.32 to $133.98 a month by…
Josh Strange used to get real emails from people responding to his blog posts and Hacker News comments — some turned into friendships and even hires. Since 2022, though, pitches have taken over: none…
A national consultation with nearly 6,000 Canadians found that too many men and boys struggle with mental health and isolation without seeking help. Health Minister Marjorie Michel released the What…
Scrolling Hacker News from November 8, 2024 reveals a front page that reads like a different era: mitochondria as living things, multiple new macOS sandbox escapes, a deep dive into Obra Dinn's 1-bit…
Artificial Analysis benchmarked Claude Fable 5.2 (max) at 65 on its Intelligence Index v5.0.1, the top result recorded so far. The index aggregates nine evaluations, including AA-Briefcase, Automatio…
Semi-transparent CdTe panels that pass red and some blue light while harvesting the rest cast a magenta glow over broccoli at a Swedish farm. The plants grew more slowly, needing 25 extra days, but p…
Raspberry Pi has raised prices again, pushing the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 to $385 — an $80 jump since April and more than triple the $120 it launched at less than two years ago. The 16GB Compute Module 5…
e-means swaps Lloyd's full-batch updates for mini-batch exponential moving averages, reaching Lloyd's test loss in 1.2–3 epochs instead of 25. End to end on GPU that is a 10–45× wall-clock speedup ov…
Meta's smallest model yet, Muse Ember, is built for the repetitive work agents do all day: tool calls, coding subtasks, routing, extraction, and long document parsing. On Artificial Analysis's leader…
Watched.earth lets you enter any place on Earth and instantly see every satellite that passed over it in the last 7 days, along with the actual photos they captured. Built by @armaangupt0, this tool…
A hands-on walkthrough of what malloc actually does under glibc: it asks the kernel for memory via brk, grabs a 132 KiB heap chunk on the first call, and serves the next 999 allocations from that poo…
Google's eighth-generation TPU lineup grows to four systems in a single year: TPU 8t for large-scale training, TPU 8i for low-latency reasoning, TPU 8tx for confidential inference on regulated data,…
A Hacker News post points out that ChatGPT Desktop forwards your local SSH agent to remote machines, so an agent running remotely can authenticate with your own credentials — for instance, pushing to…
- ▲ 194Ethereum Foundation told staff to sign a suicide pledge, then fired those who refused, lawsuit says
A Boulder woman is suing the Switzerland-based Ethereum Foundation for wrongful termination and discrimination, alleging that leadership circulated a 38-page vision document for the next 1,000 years…
Next-Concept Modeling (NCM) is a two-stage, coarse-to-fine alternative to diffusion language models. A multiscale residual VQ-VAE encodes text into a hierarchy of discrete codes, and a transformer pr…
A data-receipts analysis normalizes on-demand GPU prices to dollars per GPU-hour, comparing only identical chips. For an H100 SXM 80GB, RunPod Community charges $2.69 an hour while Azure's ND96isr_H1…
Twenty years after its release, Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men still cuts deep. Loosely adapted from P.D. James's 1992 novel, the film follows Theo Faron through a Britain that cages refugees and b…
CUI is a native UI toolkit for C99 that ships around 64 complete components — data grids, command palettes, node editors, charts — in a single codebase with no dependencies. It uses an immediate-mode…
For the first time since WG21 formed 36 years ago, C++'s creator is siding with the minority against a proposal the committee overwhelmingly backs. Herb Sutter argues the failed C++26 DIS ballot came…
South Korean startup DeepX has taped out the DX-M2, a second-generation edge AI accelerator built with Samsung's LPDDR5x processor-in-memory technology. It targets 20–100 billion parameter models at…
GPUI and egui are drawing serious attention as native Rust GUI frameworks, but their state models may not scale. Benchmarking a 3,000-row list shows a single label change costs 8.4 ms with caching an…
Flide is a high-performance inference engine built for Jev-style decision models, delivering up to 9.4x faster inference than vLLM and SGLang on a single H200. Using exact state forking, it runs one…
Gleam is a statically typed functional language that compiles to both the BEAM virtual machine and JavaScript. The author, a Rust enthusiast, finds its simple syntax, pipe operator, use pattern, and…
Apple has reportedly cut the daily AI spending limit for some engineers from $300 to $200, a sign that even the world's most valuable company is reining in generative AI costs. The piece argues uncap…
A developer describes what happened after leadership ordered a full AI-coding mandate: agents churn out code faster than anyone can review it, helpers get reimplemented in four places, and the codeba…
Zebkit packages Chromium 157 — Blink, V8, PDFium, FFmpeg and more — as a single library you link into your own C, C++, Rust, Python or JavaScript program. It keeps your process, event loop and toolki…
Infineon has fabricated power silicon carbide devices on 300mm wafers, a world first that moves SiC from the 200mm norm to the larger format used for mainstream silicon. Bigger wafers mean more dies…
Annoyed by clunky digital kitchen timers, the author built his own: a digital countdown with an old-school analog display and a knurled adjustment knob. The dial splits into four linear sections—10-s…
VM/370 Community Edition is the last unrestricted IBM mainframe OS, rebuilt with decades of fixes and packaged as a Docker image. A single command boots it, and a 3270 terminal emulator gets you logg…
DBDelve is an open-source database client built with Rust and GPUI, designed for speed and a pleasant user experience. It tackles the bloat of tools like DBeaver, launching in 1.1 seconds versus 5.2…
A first-person account of building the Jam reinforcement learning framework after Claude Opus 4.5 made a three-month timeline seem realistic — ten months later, it's fast and state of the art. This p…
I work with AI agents every day—coding agents and chat assistants—across several client projects. What costs me the most isn't the work itself but the context: re-explaining past decisions, rules tha…
In 1976, the Bicentennial Wagon Train carried some 917,000 rededication scrolls signed by 22 million Americans toward Valley Forge, bound for an aluminum time capsule meant to be opened in 2076. The…
Psalm 7 ships with taint analysis enabled by default, now up to 10x faster and folded into the same run as type checking and dead code detection. It tracks NoSQL, LLM prompt and URL injection, follow…
Nvidia and its venture arm NVentures appeared in 79 of the 903 startup rounds of $100M or more announced between October 2025 and September 2026 — more than any venture firm, edging out Sequoia's 75…
MeowDisplay is a free, open-source app that flips iPhone Mirroring on its head: instead of viewing your iPhone on your Mac, it turns your iPhone, iPad, or Android device into a second display for you…
The Center for Law and Social Policy built an interactive, sortable spreadsheet documenting proposed and enacted funding reductions to federal programs under DOGE review. Each entry pairs agency layo…
A from-scratch LLM inference engine in C++17 and CUDA that runs Llama 3.2 1B end to end: SafeTensor loading, a BPE tokenizer, RMSNorm, RoPE, grouped-query attention, SwiGLU, a paged KV cache, and con…
PixelOS is an AOSP-based custom ROM that ships with Google apps and all the Pixel extras, aiming to replicate the Google Pixel phone experience on other devices. Alongside the Pixel look and feel, it…
Pigshell, a 2015 project, puts a Unix-style shell on the web with 9p file access. Commenters praise the "9p life" and imagine apps and systems that interoperate through small, fine-grained files, let…
Forrest Welborn was 15 when he and three friends were arrested for the 1991 yogurt shop murders in Austin. Charges were dropped, but the stigma stuck for decades. Last year, police identified the rea…
Someone Was Here is a free Mac App Store app that snaps a photo of anyone who uses your Mac while you're away and sends it to your iPhone. It learns your face in a two-minute setup and checks photos…
France has formally blamed Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps for a cyber-attack that seized control of digital thermostats in up to 700 supermarkets, driving freezer temperatures from -27C to…
A survey of pay-by-phone parking fees across 312 places in 43 states and DC finds the median per-session charge is $0.35, the most common fee by far. ParkMobile runs the app in 289 of those places, w…
STE80 Humanizer is an agent skill that rewrites AI-generated text so it reads like a careful human wrote it, without changing the meaning. It runs two passes: first it strips the 26 known AI tells fr…
Researchers have engineered silicon wafers drilled with tiny air holes that act as flat, reflective metasurfaces for focusing ultraviolet light. The approach, detailed in a 2026 paper on UV Mie-void…
Ur-Nammu, ruler of Ur around 2112–2094 BCE, launched the Sumerian Renaissance and left behind the oldest extant law code, predating Hammurabi's by roughly three centuries. Rather than demanding an ey…
With HDD, SSD, and NVMe prices climbing and Hetzner raising rates multiple times in 2026, the author argues hosting providers, Mastodon, Bluesky, and phone makers should embrace AVIF and WebP for ima…
In recent years C++ has received a lot of backlash due to its complexity and perceived feature creep. However, since C++11 I've really enjoyed writing C++ with its strict type system (including const…
A new preprint reports that neutering male mice in adulthood—around age 30 in human terms—extends their lifespan by about 33%, more than castration before or shortly after puberty. The finding challe…
A software engineer vents that some colleagues now act as pure "meat proxies" for AI: they prompt an agent, paste the raw output back with no review or disclosure, and sometimes dodge responsibility…
- ▲ 46Researcher boots custom OS on locked-down corporate laptops by borrowing Microsoft's signed shim
Secure Boot only checks that the bootloader carries an accepted signature, not that the OS is trusted. Leo Smith shows how to grab a Microsoft-signed shim from distro packages like Ubuntu or Fedora,…
Exact is a pre-1.0 cross-platform runtime from the Expo team. You describe the interface in Contract, a small declarative language, and write data logic in TypeScript or Rust. On the web the compiled…
Uniform is a lightweight UI toolkit for building responsive, beautiful interfaces with pixel-perfect control. It replaces native UI tools with a C core that compiles to WASM on the web and native cod…
Rubyist Yusuke Endoh built a quine that prints its own source code as a rotating ASCII globe. Each execution turns the Qlobe 45 degrees, so after eight runs it returns to its starting orientation. Pa…
Writing under the pseudonym Coral Hart, a South African author has released more than 370 titles since February 2025 by combining ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok with her own outlines, developmental edits,…
Engineers keep handing off more work to AI agents—code, writing, even debugging and architecture—yet great engineers still outperform average ones by a wider margin than before. Using proof by contra…
A walkthrough of how an email actually travels: from the sender's MUA through the MSA, MTA, and LDA to the recipient's inbox. The piece explains why the store-and-forward design exists (1980s servers…
Brendan Gregg, a veteran performance engineer, distinguishes passive benchmarking—running a tool and trusting the bar chart—from active benchmarking, where you monitor the system with tools like vmst…
Gregory Kurtzer of CIQ presents Ginux, a research prototype that tests Human-Directed Agentic Engineering: humans set the architecture, constraints, milestones, and stopping points, while an autonomo…
Swapping hydrogen for deuterium in OLED materials boosts brightness, efficiency, and durability. Deuterated blue emitters solved the power-hungry blue pixel problem, and the approach has spread to re…
The author walks through liveness analysis for register allocation in purple-garden, a language whose SSA IR uses block parameters instead of phi nodes. He shows how to compute each virtual register'…
A 2018 video on the French spit cake sparks a Hacker News thread tracing its relatives across Europe — Spettekaka, Trdelník, Baumkuchen, Šakotis and more. Commenters debate whether the gradual layeri…
Built in Sydney by the CSIR in 1949, CSIRAC was the world's fourth digital computer and the first to play music. Mathematician Geoff Hill, who had perfect pitch, worked around mercury delay-line memo…
HaCI (Harmonic Contour Integration) is a compact, fully distributed algorithm that extracts clean edges from RGB images in four biologically inspired stages: pixel-level harmonic contrast, oriented p…
Pointer provenance is the hidden compiler bookkeeping that tracks which allocation a pointer came from, and it's why Clang can optimize away a reload of a local even when an opaque function receives…
Leonardo da Vinci's rule of trees—that the total cross-sectional area of branches at any height equals that of the trunk—has guided artists and botanists for five centuries. Modern research has chipp…
Recalc reimagines the spreadsheet for the agentic AI era: every cell can hold a value, a formula, a terminal command, or a full Claude Code or Codex agent. Watch agents fill cells in real time, open…
Nick Popovich is a super repo man: when banks need a Gulfstream or a 747 back from a deadbeat millionaire, they call him. He has repossessed 1,300 jets solo and 2,000 with his crew, charging up to $9…
Novelist Cormac McCarthy, a research colleague at the Santa Fe Institute, argues that the unconscious is a biological machine for operating an animal, one that understands language perfectly yet refu…
A satirical advisory, SSH2RCE-0022, presents the exec channel in RFC 4254 §6.5 as a critical remote code execution flaw. Any user with valid credentials can run arbitrary commands on port 22, with ou…
On Isla de los Estados, a windswept island off Tierra del Fuego, archaeologists have uncovered 19th-century artifacts — glass beads, a bottle, metal sheets, ceramic buttons, a deck prism and a rudder…
Researchers built a 536,870,946-byte HEIC file whose final decoded picture spells out the file's own SHA-256 hash. They turned HEVC's intra prediction, residuals, PCM and motion compensation into a f…
Sentra traced a supply chain attack in under 24 hours: a stolen Qubole credential opened roles at over a dozen organizations that still trusted the dormant big-data vendor. The attacker read roughly…
TACO is a compiler that generates optimized kernels for sparse and dense linear and tensor algebra, from sparse matrix-vector multiplication to MTTKRP on higher-order tensors. It supports formats lik…
To mark the November 9, 2026 launch of Claude Fable 5.2, Anthropic is giving eligible paid subscribers extra Fable usage. Max, Ultra, and premium Team or Enterprise seats earn one to three Fable limi…
Every robot joint motor depends on neodymium-iron-boron magnets, the strongest available for their weight. This learning path walks through what goes into a magnet, how it travels from mine to refine…
Loopt lets you author GitHub Actions workflows in TypeScript, Python, Go, or Rust instead of YAML, then generates standard .github/workflows/*.yml files from your source. It ships with first-party la…
WindyMapy is a free, ad-free Czech hiking app that combines a terrain map with contour lines, a route planner for walking, cycling, and driving, and its own weather forecast drawn from ČHMÚ ALADIN an…
Big problems aren't unsolvable because of their size, argues Paul Taylor — they become unsolvable because of the scaffolding we build around them. Los Angeles's Skid Row is his case study: a 1975 urb…
Jointter is a daily word puzzle where the same board hides multiple words, challenging players to think beyond the obvious. After receiving feedback on the initial version, the creator added a tutori…