Hacker News Digest
· 84 Hacker News
A non-archaeologist used 48 AI agents to comb through public NASA lidar data covering about 1,200 km² of Mexican jungle. The agents flagged a hilltop with straight edges, a plaza, and an 8–12 m pyram…
Tim Peters, who became Python's second real user after Guido van Rossum and served as a PSF director from 2001 to 2014, has died at 74. A former Cray Research compiler writer and Dragon Systems speec…
AWS Emulator is a local program that serves AWS API endpoints, letting you run the AWS CLI or any SDK against emulated resources instead of real ones—no AWS account required. It runs in server mode o…
A systems engineer recalls the night a contractor's dust tripped the smoke alarm at Jane Street's Manhattan datacenter, which automatically killed the CRAC units and pressurized the sprinkler pipes.…
After worrying that SSH keys in ~/.ssh could be copied by any malicious script, I tried macOS's native Secure Enclave support. The private key never leaves the chip, and Touch ID approval is required…
After LG was accused of spying through its TVs, The Verge's John Higgins sent 11 companies — including Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, Roku, and TCL — a set of 17 yes-or-no questions about what their…
Built with WebGL2 and JavaScript, this browser-based sand simulator runs on phones, tablets, and desktops. You can push grains around with your finger, tilt your device to make them slide, or shake i…
United Airlines will block third-party personal AI agents — like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's dots — from booking flights, checking in, or touching MileagePlus accounts, citing credential exposure and ru…
In the 8-bit PC era, a friend's arcade port ran too slowly to play. The code was already tight—loops unrolled, offsets replacing post-increments—yet still too slow. Digging through a Motorola MC6809…
A voltage fault injection attack on the GA100 die lets an operator blow arbitrary fuses, turning a CMP 170HX mining card into a functional A100-80G. The unlocked card runs about 1.2x faster than a re…
The Apple Support Community, a user-to-user troubleshooting forum that dates back to 1998 as the Apple Tech Exchange, is now read-only and will close permanently on November 20th. Apple says it made…
MIT CSAIL's "weight-space programming" let GPT-6 Astra fix Qwen3.5-0.8B's thinking loops by editing 0.016% of its weights, lifting MATH-500 from 7.9% to 48.1%. But Astra found the edit by 8 hours of…
Google DeepMind's new Gemini Decision 1 model powers a Decisions API that evaluates up to 1,000 yes/no, multiple-choice, and rubric-scoring questions against one multimodal input — text, images, audi…
An hour of American work now produces two and a half times what it did in 1973, yet the forty-hour week is unchanged and hours per person are 10 percent higher. The author traces where the freed time…
The author spent over a decade running Klarna's core system on the BEAM, where a 15-millisecond pause could stall millions of peak-shopping payments. He started the book in 2012, survived two cancell…
- ▲ 184Atuin Threads lets you start a Claude Code session on one machine and finish it in Codex on another
Atuin 18.24 adds Threads, a synced, end-to-end encrypted history of your coding agent sessions across every machine. Start a task in Claude Code on a dev server, then resume it in Codex on your lapto…
A survey of failed social interventions—$3 billion in School Improvement Grants that did nothing, Chief Diversity Officers who didn't diversify campuses, One Laptop Per Child's zero effect in Peru, a…
Mozilla analyzed browser fingerprinting data from nearly 25 million Firefox users to find which details — screen size, processor count, fonts — make people uniquely identifiable. Protecting just a ha…
Term Sheet, Please is a browser game by Bo Lau that reimagines the cult classic Papers Please as a venture capital simulator. Set one day after Demo Day, you sit behind a desk as a YC-style investor,…
New U.S. regulations will impose stricter oversight on ordering synthetic DNA, targeting government-funded scientists who synthesize and manipulate sequences. Commenters on Hacker News are skeptical:…
Yogurt is a free, open-source desktop app that records your calls and turns them into AI-powered meeting notes without ever adding a bot to the meeting. Built by Frigade with Electron, TypeScript, an…
bo2-mac takes your own Steam copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops II and converts its x86 machine code into native ARM64 code for your Mac. Using Remill to lift functions to LLVM IR, a hand-written Win32…
Tendrils has closed a $30M round led by Benchmark to design a general-purpose processor free of the backwards-compatibility constraints that have shaped CPUs since the 1970s. Instead of a sequential,…
Apple researchers trained small neural networks on the query distribution to speed up maximum inner product search, the core of RAG retrieval. SupportNet learns each cluster's support function to rou…
Private equity firms now back 25–30% of data center financing, and public pension funds and 401(k) accounts are increasingly funneled into these opaque, lightly regulated funds. With Big Tech project…
Watcher.Guru relayed a Wall Street Journal report that Nvidia is preparing to dismiss its longtime CEO Jensen Huang, sending the news to roughly 389,000 viewers on X. Reply threads quickly fixated on…
Hacker News commenters react to a report that Jensen Huang had a relationship with a female Nvidia executive, with both parties married to other people. Discussion ranges from whether the disclosure…
A longtime Emacs user argues that Claude Code and its successors have erased the editor's core advantages: editing speed, customization, and LISP expressiveness all evaporate once you stop typing and…
Massimo Nocentini has brought the Pharo Smalltalk environment to the web with a WebAssembly-based VM. You can boot Pharo 13.1, 14, or 15 images directly in the browser, drop in your own .st, .zip, or…
Ginux is an experimental Rust-first x86-64 operating system that boots directly through UEFI with its own memory management, scheduler, VFS, networking, and Linux ABI. Unmodified Alpine and Rocky Lin…
A veteran Independent Games Festival judge explains why the uproar over Big Walk, which used LLMs for under 0.1% of its code, misses the point. Rules don't stop cheating; they tell the outside world…
A Hacker News discussion of an All Things Distributed post about an AWS emulator and what happens to the engineer's role once AI agents start writing the code. The thread weighs how an emulator of AW…
Apple has announced that its Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. As of now, the forum no longer accepts new posts and has switched to read-only mode. Users are being direct…
Jensen Huang promised AI would turn everyone into a programmer, yet release velocity hasn't kept pace. This talk rounds up 2026 research — NBER's "Writing Code vs. Shipping Code," interview studies o…
AssemblyForNeovim is a lightweight Lua script that brings Godbolt-style assembly inspection directly into Neovim. It displays the generated assembly for C, C++, and Rust code in a floating window, su…
Sixteen LLMs were given TIS-100 and its manual but no access to the community leaderboard, then told to keep optimizing. They produced 133 new Pareto-frontier points across 18 of 55 puzzles, includin…
A Hacker News thread digs into why Amstrad equipped machines like the PCW 8256 with 3-inch drives instead of the cheaper, higher-capacity 3.5-inch standard. Commenters swap memories of the era: one i…
A JavaScript library that wraps WebRTC with automatic SDP/ICE negotiation, cryptographic peer addresses instead of IPs, and topic-based peer discovery. It works across browsers, Node.js, and React Na…
GitHub is investigating degraded availability across several of its core products. The trouble surfaced first in Webhooks and Actions around 20:48 UTC on November 11, 2026, then spread to Pages and C…
GitHub Actions now supports workflow lockfiles, so you can reference actions by version tag instead of pasting full commit SHAs. Hugo van Kemenade walks through installing the gh-actions-lock extensi…
Wine fraud has gone industrial. Organized gangs now produce more convincing counterfeit bottles than ever, and they're moving into mid-tier wines worth hundreds of euros that cost almost nothing to f…
A photographic tour of forgotten glass forests around the world — from the Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers, abandoned since 1978, to Alton Towers in England and a former commercial rose farm gone…
Klad is a 2D painting and animation app built for collaboration between humans and coding agents. You paint with a pen in the editor, while your agent paints through the `klad` command line using the…
Mamba and other state space models promise lower memory use and faster generation than Transformers, but naively distilling a pretrained Transformer into Mamba loses too much of the teacher's quality…
Before pixels or plotters, MIT professors Parry Moon and Domina Eberle Spencer computed global illumination by hand, then assembled the first radiosity image from cut-out Munsell paper samples ironed…
A growing list of open source projects—including immich, meilisearch, QEMU, Servo, Zig, MonoGame, and Gentoo Linux—now explicitly ban contributions made with LLMs or generative AI tools. Some reject…
A SIGGRAPH 2025 method lets users drop spot lights, point lights, or environmental illumination into an ordinary photo and relight it like a 3D scene. The pipeline infers a colored mesh from monocula…
Dave Billings, 45, spotted a redundant Bmibaby Boeing 737-500 fuselage on Facebook Marketplace, bought it for £4,000, and used a huge crane to lower it into a hole in his lawn in Hilton, Derbyshire.…
Thomas Neumann calls out GenDB-V, an AI-generated, formally verified database that claims 22× to 61× speedups over Umbra and DuckDB on TPC-H. The gains come from per-query precomputation and, in its…
Colin McMillen's SIGBOVIK paper answers a long-standing question: can you smear paint on a wall without creating valid Perl? Using OCR on 100 splatters, he finds 93% parse as valid Perl, with seven c…
New research from the Reuters Institute, surveying audiences across nine countries, finds that 51% now use generative AI weekly and 38% turn to it for information, up from 24% in 2025. Yet only 12% a…
Housing is Europe's largest household expense, yet official data can't answer the simple question of whether you can afford to live somewhere. Eurostat's burden indicator counts mortgage interest but…
The official Utah Teapot page traces the model's evolution from Martin Newell's 28 Bézier patches in 1975 through Jim Blinn's famous 3/4 scaling, Frank Crow's round bottom, and Hank Driskill and Russ…
Drawing on 18 researchers and evidence from bones, rock art, and historical records, two Smithsonian scientists trace tuna fishing back 44,000 years to East Timor. Ancient Mediterranean fisheries tra…
Micron is a systems programming language that combines the modularity, strictness, and simplicity of Oberon with the flexibility of C. It offers a compiler, interpreter, and IDE, enabling development…
A skeptical look at the AI-era boast of "100x developers." The author argues the math is implausible: at 100x, three days of work would equal a full year's 260 working days. He grants big multipliers…
Aircad brings professional CAD to your browser with no installs—combining precision 2D drafting and NURBS-based 3D solid modeling in one fast workspace, complete with a familiar command line. It open…
Huawei's research team open-sourced MACaQ, a model-agnostic calibrated quantizer that produces high-quality GGUF and W4A4 checkpoints for text, image, video, and audio models. It runs across llama.cp…
Over three years and 275,170 data points from the Find the Notes game, one pattern stands out: the upper middle of the neck is where players stumble most. The G string at frets 6 to 9 is the red zone…
OpenTSLM's TimeNet is an open-source data infrastructure project for Temporal Foundation Models, letting researchers download and explore time-series datasets through a single standardized format. Th…
IBM's Nighthawk r2 quantum processor has already run 34 billion circuits for partners like E.ON and Algorithmiq, delivering speedups up to 19x over earlier IBM hardware. The next chip, Nighthawk r3,…
Alan and Akshay, formerly of McKinsey and Scale AI, built Pomerado so agents can reach airlines, banks, and legacy portals that have no APIs. An agent explores a site once, records the steps, and gen…
EventSourcingDB 1.3.0 brings a v2 API that returns every accepted request's outcome in the body, with each error carrying a code that links to its own documentation page. The release also makes writi…
As AI reshapes research and education, historian Benjamin Breen argues that language models excel at memorization and brute-force archival work but remain stuck in a median, clichéd perspective—lacki…
A work-in-progress compiler and virtual machine, written in C and Prolog, that targets the ZIP abstract machine from Clocksin's 1984 paper on sequential Prolog. The compiler, running on Scryer Prolog…
In 2003, Virginia Tech assembled 1,100 Power Mac G5 towers into System X, a cluster that hit 10 teraflops and ranked third-fastest on Earth — and fastest at any university — for just $5.2 million, ag…
When Reddit began charging for API access in June 2023, users flocked to Lemmy, the open-source federated alternative. A mixed-methods study of 48,272 comments, 354 survey responses, and 16 interview…
Espen J. Aarseth coined "ergodic literature" for texts that demand nontrivial effort to traverse, borrowing the Greek ergon (work) and hodos (path). His book Cybertext maps every text across seven va…
blqsort is a new C++ quicksort that outperforms std::sort on random data, sorting 50 million doubles in 0.68s versus 1.33s on an Apple M1. It combines branchless partitioning, sorting networks for sm…
Neil Chen shares two DIY projects from 2026: an aluminum extrusion standing desk frame that doubles as a bike repair stand and arm-wrestling trainer, and a neon acrylic picture frame he CAD-designed…
A solar-powered BlūMorpho tag, glued to a monarch's thorax with eyelash glue, weighs about three grains of rice and pings every second on 2.4 GHz. Any nearby phone with Bluetooth on relays the signal…
Two farmers from Illinois and Nebraska explain why they switched to drones for seeding cover crops into standing corn. Aerial seeding lets them plant weeks before harvest without soil compaction, rea…
ML compilers are being rethought as AI agents take over kernel optimization. TVM argues a minimal, stable IR foundation still matters for verification and shared abstractions, while Together's TKCC f…
TinyGPT Visualizer is an open-source tool that lets you peer inside a real, small-scale language model as it generates text. Built to make mechanistic interpretability hands-on, it shows the numeric…
When the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs hit 66 million years ago, ants seized the moment and became one of Earth's most successful animal families. A University of Münster-led team compared the ge…
The DRAM interface splits into a shared command/address bus and per-byte-lane data paths with source-synchronous strobes. Fly-by routing skews the clock across chips, so write leveling, DQ-DQS traini…
After French supermarket attacks, researchers spent just one hour manually probing the latest Danfoss AK-SM800A firmware (5.3.2) and found six pre-authentication stack-based buffer overflows. The cod…
In a small wraparound grid of cellular automata, where each cell's next state depends only on how many of its eight neighbors are alive, how long can you go before a pattern repeats? The author prove…
flatpoints applies geometry images to point clouds, turning each 3D point into a pixel on a square grid. Neighboring pixels hold neighboring points, so the resulting image is a continuous picture of…
The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is one of the flagship scholarly series published by the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago, which now offers 900 publications fo…
Git's files backend rewrites the entire packed-refs file on every deletion, which can be gigabytes in large monorepos. While benchmarking a Rust rewrite of the backend against the C original, the aut…
High-altitude cooking slows everything: water boils around 203°F at 5,000 feet, so stovetop beans that finish in 90 minutes at sea level can stretch past three hours. Pressure cookers restore the hea…
Thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, its legacy still divides Germans. The barrier was built in 1961 to stop mass defections, and around 100 people died trying to cross it. It came down on 9 Nove…
In July 1996, Ed and Sam set off from Austin, Texas, in a 1970 Volkswagen bus for an 11,455-mile journey across northwestern North America. This site collects their trip reports with embedded thumbna…