Hacker News Digest
· 11 Hacker News
A new CNBC poll of Americans aged 18 to 34 reveals that the vast majority distrust nine prominent AI executives, including Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. Even dat…
Simon Willison tests Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 27B, a 17GB local LLM that impresses with vision, coding, and bounding box tasks, but its default 'xhigh' reasoning effort makes it overthink even simple promp…
Court documents from a lawsuit filed by University of California researchers reveal that federal agencies, including the NIH, NSF, Department of Defense, and NEH, used keyword searches to terminate b…
A UC Berkeley case study chronicles the rise and fall of Direct File, the IRS's first free online tax filing service. Launched in 2024 after a rapid build by a cross-agency team, it won over 400,000…
Reticulum is a cryptography-based networking stack that enables anyone to build local or wide-area networks using readily available hardware, even under adverse conditions with high latency and extre…
Rhombus 1.1 is now available, adding new `annot` and `annot.def` forms for defining annotations without macro code, and an `as` binding form for clearer naming. The release also updates `class` to bi…
A playful experiment turns 1,000 particles into dancers, each with a randomly chosen friend and enemy, moving closer to the center, toward friends, and away from enemies. The simple rules produce mes…
In 1990, Amit Patel created Solar Realms Elite, a BBS door game that became a classic. In this interview, Patel discusses his early programming experiences, from TRS-80 to Commodore 64, and how he le…
Researchers at the University of Cambridge propose applying the Red Queen hypothesis to AI, suggesting that self-improving systems must continuously adapt and evolve to keep pace with ever-changing c…
In this manifesto, Brennan Day argues that the webmaster—the one-person web professional who builds, designs, and advocates for the web—is not dead, but waiting for a comeback. He traces the role fro…
A solo developer audits 22 repositories and finds over 2,000 tests, yet only one repository runs them in CI. The tests excel at static invariants—like preventing unscoped database reads or accidental…