456 points | 191 comments
\n\n\n\nThis is the thesis behind the \"Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms\" course that was taught at Cambridge University.\n","metadata":{"score":532,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"41c81381ce49dbd7","title":"Grok Bot","link":"https://x.ai/bot","author":"rvz","published_at":"2026-08-11T17:23:09+00:00","content":"\n\n\n\n\n\n> Why unify information theory and machine learning? Because they are\ntwo sides of the same coin. In the 1960s, a single field, cybernetics, was\npopulated by information theorists, computer scientists, and neuroscientists,\nall studying common problems. Information theory and machine learning still\nbelong together. Brains are the ultimate compression and communication\nsystems. And the state-of-the-art algorithms for both data compression and\nerror-correcting codes use the same tools as machine learning.
Book (creative commons): https://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html
Lectures: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLruBu5BI5n4aFpG32iMbdWo...\n— farfatched\n
244 points | 198 comments
\n\n\n\nI've been using it for the last month or so. IMO in the same way we went from tab complete -> prompts -> agents, this feels like a next step on that evolution. I highly suspect others will be following suit. I was surprised with how much it felt natural to interact with agents in this way.\n","metadata":{"score":286,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"7412d1526d0acea6","title":"Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide","link":"https://guessingheadlights.com/yall-failed-me-woman-pulled-over-at-gunpoint-twice-after-flock-camera-glitch/","author":"cdrnsf","published_at":"2026-08-11T17:02:59+00:00","content":"\n\nBiggest advantage is each one owns its own routines, context, and domain, and they can communicate between each other. Similar to hermes they build out their own skills, but by keeping the bots separated by domains, you end up getting better results out of them.
Additionally though each one has their own computer, which means async work feels like it actually works. I haven't had to juggle worktrees for the last month.
Biggest downsides are token expenditure. I've used more tokens this month than not this month. That's not a typo - I've used less tokens in the last 5 years prior to this month than I have this month. Always on perpetual agents use a LOT of tokens. IMO this is building for the future state where tokens are vastly cheaper, ie in a post-ASIC world.
The coolest thing I had it do for me was sourcing fabric for swag: https://image.non.io/d83664c1-5807-4a18-abe4-41928c198410.we...
I wanted to make something that didn't feel like just my logo on a shirt, so I had one of my bots reach out to ~40 fabric suppliers in vietnam, negotiate prices, lock one in, and get samples made. First samples should be finished today. It's been something I've wanted to do for ages, so it was cool seeing it actually happen. The fabric supplier bot worked with one of my prototyper bots to create a randomly generated pattern using my logo, which it then sent as a .ai file to the supplier.\n— jjcm\n
Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide
\nhttps://local12.com/news/nation-world/flock-camera-error-lea...\n\n\n246 points | 222 comments
\n\n\n\nWe shouldn't be wasting time figuring out how to make these tools usable. A healthy society requires privacy and a healthy society leads to long term safety trends. Mass surveillance as a tool, fundamentally, even if perfectly implemented and used, is fundamentally flawed and unfixable since it destroys the long term health of society. That is why I am against Flock and similar technologies.\n— jmward01\n\n","metadata":{"score":254,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"63d8ff97aa2246c8","title":"Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering","link":"https://developers.googleblog.com/why-go-is-an-ideal-language-for-ai-assisted-software-engineering/","author":"0xedb","published_at":"2026-08-11T16:57:09+00:00","content":"\n\n
Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
\n\n\n\n335 points | 395 comments
\n\n\n\nIt doesn’t matter to me how good the LLM is at writing Go if the compiler can’t stop it from accidentally leaving another part of the software with invalid state as a result of a change the LLM is making.\n","metadata":{"score":382,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"ea4aca430f579e1c","title":"Mojo 1.0","link":"https://www.modular.com/blog/modular-26-5-mojo-1-0-is-here","author":"dayanruben","published_at":"2026-08-11T16:56:46+00:00","content":"\n\n\n\n\n\nWhat am I talking about? Nil and partially constructed structs are impossible to prevent the creation of in Go.
Sure, if you’ve got a small program with limited scope, that’s probably fine if you look through squinted eyes. But the teams I work with are working on sprawling, evolving software where the compiler saying “hey, that’s not a valid Widget” would be extremely useful and save much heartache.
An LLM does a good job of “checking” for other uses and “checking” if everything is going to work correctly, but - supposedly we’ve committed the concept to code so that the compiler can actually verify it - and Go intentionally permits invalid states of structs. This makes Go a fundamentally problematic language choice for the kind of software I work with teams on, LLM or not.\n— beaker52\n
258 points | 117 comments
\n\n\n\nI feel like this language would really benefit from some sort of 1-pager overview.\n","metadata":{"score":386,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"f53238cf88533c73","title":"Apple Silicon and macOS VMs: Faster LLM Inference with llama.cpp","link":"https://github.com/trycua/cua/blob/main/blog/gpu-passthrough-macos-vms.md","author":"frabonacci","published_at":"2026-08-11T14:50:33+00:00","content":"\n\nI just spent a fair bit of time on the official site, and I still don't think I have a very good grasp of what problem this language aims to solve, or why I would select it over other similar languages\n— swiftcoder\n
Apple Silicon and macOS VMs: Faster LLM Inference with llama.cpp
\n\n\n\n278 points | 43 comments
\n\n\n\nIt looks to me like this won't speed up llama.cpp for everyone, just for users running it in this particular kind of Virtualization.framework VM.\n","metadata":{"score":292,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"92e8a81b7ea8f4ff","title":"Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs","link":"https://stolen-thoughts.com/","author":"quantumgarbage","published_at":"2026-08-11T13:22:00+00:00","content":"\n\nThe fix here works around a problem where the VM was causing llama.cpp to select the wrong kernels.\n— simonw\n
Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
\n\n\n\n464 points | 199 comments
\n\n\n\n\"Stealing\" something you already paid for (tokens), but that you can't have access to(!). And trained on the sum of human knowledge.\n","metadata":{"score":624,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"88da2a1e026cc0ee","title":"England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C","link":"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c75gk620r22o","author":"stevekemp","published_at":"2026-08-11T12:41:59+00:00","content":"\n\nTraining on other model outputs ought to be business as usual, stop using morally charged terms made up by future monopolists: https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2026-06-15-rl-economic...\n— Aissen\n
England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C
\n\n\n\n304 points | 215 comments
\n\n\n\nI am glad they’re screening for it. I was born to someone who had the virus, but didn’t know I had Hep C myself until I submitted myself to an exceptionally thorough STI testing panel. I say exceptional, because the standard ones I’d done throughout college and early adulthood do not happen to include that particular test. So I feel a bit lucky to have been able to get diagnosed and treated in my mid-20s, before the disease could do much damage.\n— thex10\n\n","metadata":{"score":541,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"fc8eda34e0e3d1df","title":"OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining","link":"https://www.ft.com/content/e49dfb75-f841-4466-a577-f7aaff8779a0","author":"ilamont","published_at":"2026-08-11T12:23:07+00:00","content":"\n\n
OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining
\nhttps://archive.ph/W48UVhttps://aimagazine.com/news/why-did-openai-head-of-ethics-ch...\n\n\n
250 points | 323 comments
\n\n\n\nIn five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire.\n","metadata":{"score":433,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"e4c315112d94f8fb","title":"Nvidia's Risky Business","link":"https://stratechery.com/2026/nvidias-risky-business/","author":"jonbaer","published_at":"2026-08-11T10:02:00+00:00","content":"\n\n\n\n\n\nMy sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is going to be aligned to the ethical stances the company chooses. If they can't, the waste to time and money is huge if the model requires retraining for ethics reasons. That's a different job than pondering roko's basilisk or whether AI is alive.
The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the field.\n— madrox\n
284 points | 130 comments
\n\n\n\nNvidia's biggest advantage in AI has never been only their hardware performance but how entrenched their software is in ML research that flowed down stream. However, if you've actually used CUDA C/C++, it's pretty one of the worst software development ecosystem imaginable: you get all the footgun of regular C++, plus GPU compute pretending to be C++ and but doesn't actually behave like C++ because CPU and GPU compute are fundamentally different, and the only reason people put up with it is because Vulkan and HIP C/C++ are even worse.\n","metadata":{"score":336,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"7ee833dc93bfc06f","title":"More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts","link":"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3q5nxpgk1o","author":"whosgotch","published_at":"2026-08-11T09:57:14+00:00","content":"\n\nGoogle's limitation is that they still don't offer TPUs in a PCI-E card/dev board that people can plug in to their PC for local development and sane low level API to develop against, instead you have to go through their cloud and their full software stack which greatly limits ecosystem growth. The minute that Google figures that out, that's when Nvidia's dominance would be challenged.\n— YuechenLi\n
More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts
\n\n\n\n204 points | 232 comments
\n\n\n\nInsider trading as a service. No one is going to take the US seriously for the next 50 years.\n— Toutouxc\n\n","metadata":{"score":258,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"de2be18c14e1a761","title":"London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces","link":"https://www.btp.police.uk/news/btp/news/england/btp-expands-live-facial-recognition-lfr-trial-into-london-underground-stations/","author":"BlueBerry2001","published_at":"2026-08-11T09:40:02+00:00","content":"\n\n
London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces
\n\n\n\n294 points | 303 comments
\n\n\n\nIt’s a moot point. I’m saddened at the invasion of privacy and the intrusion on an individual’s civil liberties, but anonymous travel on the London Underground died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers.\n","metadata":{"score":338,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"b9dafdd7418b6984","title":"France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls","link":"https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/08/06/france-to-ban-unsolicited-telemarketing-calls-from-august-11_6756208_7.html","author":"aziaziazi","published_at":"2026-08-11T08:15:46+00:00","content":"\n\nI’m not saying that “this doesn’t matter because it’s slightly worse than before”. I’m saying the frog has been boiling for a long time.
I don’t want people being surprised as though THIS is the nail in the coffin of untracked movement across the city. As others have said, we’ve always been tracked. This is just them being open about their latest methods.
I hope this serves as a warning for citizens elsewhere: this is a slope that governments will only slide down further. There is no coming back from this in the UK.
Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country.
Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
Being an anonymous citizen in the UK has been an impossibility for at least 20 years.
Any weapons can and will be utilised against a perceived enemy. When that perceived enemy becomes /you/, you should expect these things to be used against you.
History has taught us that before.
We have seen in the last 10 years that liberal democracies are fragile things. Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society.\n— _fw\n
France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls
\n\n\n\n862 points | 416 comments
\n\n\n\nGreat idea!\n","metadata":{"score":1027,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"e68933baf3f73f99","title":"H3-metal – Native MiniMax-H3 inference for Apple Silicon","link":"https://github.com/antirez/h3.c","author":"swyx","published_at":"2026-08-11T01:22:09+00:00","content":"\n\nTelemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones. 99.9% of all calls are an attempt to get money, and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage.
A ban is the right idea but I wonder how they can handle it, logistically. I think there needs to be a technical solution.
A national \"whitelist\", where hospitals, doctors, utility companies and such can register to get their numbers whitelisted perhaps, combined with a setting on phones that block any non-whitelist number.
Each country could maintain their own whitelists, and corrupt nations selling whitelist status to scammers would get blocked in any other country at least.\n— Kon5ole\n
H3-metal – Native MiniMax-H3 inference for Apple Silicon
\n\n\n\n195 points | 25 comments
\n\n\n\nI've been using MiniMax H3 on my M5 Pro 64GB MacBook Pro through ComfyUI. It works extremely well.\n","metadata":{"score":429,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"1592ffd6c799debb","title":"Chicken Scheme 6.0","link":"https://code.call-cc.org/releases/6.0.0/NEWS","author":"eatonphil","published_at":"2026-08-11T00:24:15+00:00","content":"\n\n\n\n\n\nI had to modify the default ComfyUI workflows to use a GGUF quant (city96's ComfyUI-GGUF custom node, UnetLoaderGGUF in place of the stock loader) [0].
I use the model labeled Q5_K_M. There is Q8_0 available as well, which is 34GB and fits fine in 64GB unified memory if you keep resolution modest.
The main issue is speed, a ~9-second 480x864 clip at 20 steps takes me a bit over an hour. So this will be cool to try for the speed up alone.
There's a lot of great information and workflows available to follow on the r/StableDiffusion subreddit.
[0] https://huggingface.co/Abiray/MiniMax-H3-GGUF/tree/main/unet\n— Meleagris\n
266 points | 43 comments
\n\n\n\n\n","metadata":{"score":296,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"8ef7ec9307acb177","title":"The UK's war on anonymity has come to America","link":"https://www.effort.news/uk-lobby","author":"slowin","published_at":"2026-08-10T23:45:50+00:00","content":"\n\n\nThose were major bottlenecks for any FFI-heavy Chicken Scheme app, and would often result in brittle and unsafe abstractions to work around. Glad to see this changed.\n— dleslie\n- Strings and symbols passed to foreign code are not copied, they are\n passed directly, any mutations done by external code will be visible on the\n Scheme side.\n - Complex numbers, C structs and unions can now be passed directly as\n arguments and returned as results when interfacing to C code.\n
The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
\n\n\n\n432 points | 322 comments
\n\n\n\n> A joint statement by Buffy Wicks, the lead author of AB 2273, Jordan Cunningham, another AB 2273 author, and 5Rights Foundation states, “The Bill is practicable and realistic, drawing as it does on the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC).”\n","metadata":{"score":651,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"d1d0c3d2e2c7e46d","title":"Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states","link":"https://everycube.alen.is/","author":"Alen123","published_at":"2026-08-10T23:16:25+00:00","content":"\n\nHow is Buffy Wicks so damn gullible with tech legislation? Her AB 1043 and AB 1856 (Digital Age Assurance Act), intended to protect children online and regulate Big Tech (but unintentionally criminalizing open source), was sponsored by a dark money influence operation from Meta.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
She is actually well-respected with housing and transportation bills but I don't know what's going on with her tech bills.\n— tangotaylor\n
Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states
\n\n\n\n265 points | 92 comments
\n\n\n\nI wrote a 3d rubiks cube slot machine for my old online casino. It scrambled the cube randomly 4 times and gave the player 60 seconds to solve it by twisting up to 3 times. Lots of weird quaternion math to handle the spinning and shift key twisting at the same time. All with simple geometry in Away3D / AS3.\n","metadata":{"score":288,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"9be7915dddf46e58","title":"As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing","link":"https://thewalrus.ca/google-search-is-dying/","author":"awnird","published_at":"2026-08-10T22:36:30+00:00","content":"\n\nThe real hard part of designing that game was creating the payout structure. The game paid an equal amount for each \"line\" of 3 colors in a row on any face after the player made their third move. There was a progressive take and jackpot for a perfect solution. And I specifically wanted to target a zero house edge for the game, to reward the best problem solvers. So the question was, given 4 random twists off a perfect cube, what are the individual chances of getting 64, 63, 62...1 lines of sequential color given the best 3 spins from the initial random state, and then hiw to allocate the payout structure accordingly.
Probably a billion monte carlo runs and I had a pay table. It was lots of fun. I wish more gambling games rewarded skill that way.\n— noduerme\n
As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
\n\n\n\n299 points | 291 comments
\n\n\n\nAI will kill the internet because it is killing the incentive to make it. It is an industrial-strength example of why we don’t allow stealing.\n— ChiMan\n\n","metadata":{"score":901,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"65b2df26c3a8faae","title":"How Claude marks AI-generated content","link":"https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content","author":"mfiguiere","published_at":"2026-08-10T21:36:56+00:00","content":"\n\n
How Claude marks AI-generated content
\n\n\n\n349 points | 316 comments
\n\n\n\nI notice the \"Limitations\" section talks about how content only at some point touched by Claude may return a positive, and content that returns a negative may still be Claude generated. But I really would have liked for them to state explicitly that entirely false positives where a piece is fully human-written may still be marked as generated, because too many institutions with the power to ruin someone's life over that have trouble understanding the concept.\n— Dilettante_\n\n","metadata":{"score":433,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"fa858bd09ee0f315","title":"Stop Killing Games: It's time to sue Sony, join us","link":"https://www.massaschadeconsument.nl/collectieve-acties/playstation/","author":"EDM115","published_at":"2026-08-10T20:47:13+00:00","content":"\n\n
Stop Killing Games: It's time to sue Sony, join us
\n\n\n\n228 points | 119 comments
\n\n\n\nIf people actually read the claims... it's about fair business practices, this is why they are suing Sony:\n","metadata":{"score":242,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"0406fe33451f74b9","title":"Illinois Just Passed a Law That Puts Linux on the Hook for Age Verification","link":"https://linuxstans.com/illinois-hb5511-operating-system-age-verification/","author":"speckx","published_at":"2026-08-10T20:20:06+00:00","content":"\n\n> ... In the EU, it is forbidden for large companies to abuse their position to make more profit at the expense of consumers. Yet Sony does not fully abide by these rules.\n> \n> If you buy a digital game or in-game content, Sony will only ensure that you can do so through its own PlayStation Store. Sony keeps the market to itself in this way and can keep prices artificially high. This way you pay more, without getting anything extra in return. This is called the “Sony Tax.”
This is not a lawsuit about Sony \"taking away my discs\", it's something like \"Sony allegedly used its control over the PlayStation ecosystem to restrict competition in digital distribution, allowing it to keep prices artificially high and harm consumers\".\n— braiamp\n
Illinois Just Passed a Law That Puts Linux on the Hook for Age Verification
\n\n\n\n270 points | 337 comments
\n\n\n\nLinux distro founder here (stagex)\n","metadata":{"score":339,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"70e971ee998d371e","title":"Rust SIMD on the GPU","link":"https://www.vectorware.com/blog/simd-on-gpu/","author":"sagacity","published_at":"2026-08-10T18:12:49+00:00","content":"\n\n\n\n\n\nI will never be compelled to implement this, and would never merge it.
Every release requires quorum signatures by an international maintainer team, and the distro is designed to work offline-first, with some variants not even supporting network drivers in the kernel, so Illinois legislators can eat shit.\n— lrvick\n
214 points | 107 comments
\n\n\n\nThe author mentions Rust's portable SIMD library [0]. The only issue with portable SIMD is it's only available on nightly. I used it in my FFT crate, but we had to switch to the fearless_simd crate in order to get a portable SIMD solution that works on stable [1].\n","metadata":{"score":214,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"89bd88227c8630b2","title":"Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities","link":"https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta","author":"tosh","published_at":"2026-08-10T17:41:13+00:00","content":"\n\n[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/simd/index.html
[1] https://github.com/linebender/fearless_simd\n— O3marchnative\n
Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities
\n\n\n\n180 points | 122 comments
\n\n\n\n> Throughout this process, Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”). This seems to have helped Claude overcome some initial skepticism that it could make meaningful progress.\n","metadata":{"score":270,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"1fae0be0843ec268","title":"Show HN: Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots","link":"https://cactuscompute.com/needle","author":"HenryNdubuaku","published_at":"2026-08-10T17:22:07+00:00","content":"\n\nI remain delighted at how absurd our current timeline has become.\n— simonw\n
Show HN: Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots
\nHey HN,Henry from Cactus here!
We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2.
The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges 300-700 on sub-$200 phones such as the Samsung A-Series.
On the tool call and mobile device use benchmarks, Needle 2 trades wins with closest small models like LFM2.5 230M and Apple Foundation Model, at 5x to 70x smaller, both at f16 vs Needle 2 at 2bit. Needle is based on Simple Attention Networks from our paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18363).
Edge AI has lately meant Macs and PCs, but that is just 1.5 billion of over 21 billion connected IoT devices in the world today, and in emerging markets most phones ship under $200, no NPU, cheap GPUs. These include budget phones, Raspberry Pis, microcontrollers, wearables, small robots like Reachy Mini, and connected home devices.
A conventional transformer of Needle's width and depth spends 164 MFLOPs per token, and even one squeezed down to Needle's parameter count spends 87, Needle spends 70. Even on a high-end phone, an always-on assistant lives inside a power budget; every MFLOP is milliwatt-hours, and Needle spends 7x to 85x fewer of them per token than the smallest performant LLMs. More about the architecture in the link.
When we structure intelligence for consumer devices as functions with typed parameters, the only hard part is mapping a messy sentence onto them; which function, with which values. Our research found that when framed that way, the problem needs no world knowledge and no open-ended prose, which is why 45M parameters suffice.
Needle 2 expands to structured extraction where the schema can be passed in-place of tools and the model returns structured output. You can use Needle as a text-classification model with an enum field, as a summarization model by providing a schema that extracts key fields, everything but free-range decode.
Every product has its own tool vocabulary and fine-tuning needle helps it achieve frontier-level performance on custom tasks, so using the python package (https://github.com/cactus-compute/needle), Needle can be fine-tuned Needle on a Mac/PC in minutes to a few hours, with automated data-generation pipeline, just pass a couple samples.
Nonetheless, every response carries a learned confidence score based our Cactus Hybrid technique. If above your threshold, act, below it, escalate to the cloud or bigger model. Combining Needle 2 with a private DeepSeek-v4-Flash deployment works particularly well for enterprise-level tasks at barely any cost, we can help with this setup.
We have put a lot of thoughts into Needle 2 but might still be missing quite a lot, please use the playground in the provided link to test Needle and share your thoughts, always appreciated!\n\n\n
288 points | 106 comments
\n\n\n\nThis is cool. I definitely think the \"micro\" sized LLM space is underappreciated, so it's always good to see work like this. I foresee a paradigm in some contexts where you have a hierarchy of LLMs, with more competent models actively training smaller models to solve specific tasks very efficiently, and something like this could be the smallest layer in that stack.\n","metadata":{"score":516,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"f7e9f8fd6485c1e0","title":"What's the best programming language for coding agents?","link":"http://danluu.com/pl-tokens/","author":"chaychoong","published_at":"2026-08-10T16:28:58+00:00","content":"\n\nWith that being said, the web demo is not particularly impressive. It really doesn't like anything I throw at it. I'm fine with accepting that fine-tuning is the solution to this, but I wonder if there's anything to gain from a bigger model? I know it's completely counter to the whole point of this, but a 14MB binary using 28MB of RAM seems unnecessarily small and pretty arbitrary.
Like, what does a 28MB binary get you? Or a 140MB binary? Or a 1.4MB binary? I'm guessing the choice of 14MB came from minimizing the size as much as possible while meeting certain requirements/performance expectations, but even a Pi 5 has plenty more room to spare. Curious if there's a good explanation for this (which I may have missed in my skim of the post).\n— nater5000\n
What's the best programming language for coding agents?
\nRelated: Which programming languages are most token-efficient? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582728 - Jan 2026 (91 comments)\n\n\n237 points | 160 comments
\n\n\n\nI'm not sure I trust a source that says \"just 70 tokens average, nearly half of Clojure (109 tokens)\".\n","metadata":{"score":252,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"a69bbb79a9477745","title":"Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's","link":"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1j1kjy7gewo","author":"RickJWagner","published_at":"2026-08-10T15:32:04+00:00","content":"\n\nThere's no reason to add the phrase \"nearly half of\", and there's especially no reason to add it when it's significantly far away from half.
But on the main topic, I still feel that Go is an excellent choice for LLMs. There is pretty much just one way of doing most things, and the available training data is pretty consistent. This is very different from Python, where training data is polluted (I presume) with tons of code written by non-software engineers and demonstrating many different ways of doing the same thing.
Also a big plus for Go is the tooling. Fast compiles and good linting shortens the iteration cycle time, resulting in less need for me to tell the LLM to correct mistakes.
For some reason, most LLMs I've used default to wanting to write Python. I have to repeatedly teach them to use Go unless there is a very compelling reason to choose otherwise.
I would personally rather see and use Clojure, but I don't feel its ecosystem would provide the same benefits as Go, including obviously the easy single binary distribution.\n— michaelteter\n
Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's
\n\n\n\n289 points | 446 comments
\n\n\n\nShrinkflation is all over. Burger buns at fast food places were more dense 20 years ago. The small burgers had 1/8th pound patties instead of the current 1/10th pound. It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.\n— smolder\n\n","metadata":{"score":403,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"902a772537325622","title":"Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models","link":"https://www.ft.com/content/4e3957f8-ea7c-4c46-a3de-cdce8e526878","author":"root-parent","published_at":"2026-08-10T14:06:22+00:00","content":"\n\n
Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models
\nhttps://archive.is/20LOJhttps://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/\n\n\n
335 points | 356 comments
\n\n\n\nI think something that doesn't get said enough is Meta did, albeit intentionally kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023 with the release of llama.\n","metadata":{"score":634,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"058589ff92537de5","title":"Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb","link":"https://kuber.studio/blog/Reflections/Humanising-LLM-Outputs-is-Actually-Dumb","author":"kuberwastaken","published_at":"2026-08-10T13:35:40+00:00","content":"\n\nI'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt.
No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil. This is net good regardless.\n— bushido\n
Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb
\n\n\n\n195 points | 126 comments
\n\n\n\nYou ever read a work of literature with such flowery language that right after you've read a paragraph, you pause and realize you have no clue what you actually read, only to read the paragraph maybe a second or third time and have your mind space out again and again on each successive attempt?\n","metadata":{"score":224,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"a8140a52967148b0","title":"Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”","link":"https://patentsgazette.uspto.gov/week26/OG/html/1547-5/US12670045-20260630.html","author":"theanonymousone","published_at":"2026-08-10T13:29:12+00:00","content":"\n\nYeah, for me, that's what parsing huge volumes of LLM-produced text like \"direct model calls as replaceable semantic workers\" does to my brain. Maybe others don't really have this issue, but after any long output, I prompt the agent \"Go back and decompress any LLM-speak in light of the higher level task goals. Eliminate deictic language.\"
The revised output documents are solely for my personal usage to expedite understanding. The LLMs can slowly converge on their own language for all I care; I retain raw agent output for future agent usage (to avoid the \"lossy\" problem the author mentions), but that doesn't eliminate the need for some intermediate translation I can use to actually help get my work done instead of spending hours attempting to understand what a \"load-bearing pinned gate\" is.\n— Xcelerate\n
Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”
\n\n\n\n205 points | 170 comments
\n\n\n\nHaving my name on a bunch of software patents - and, yes, I tried to get my name off them, but was not allowed - I can fairly confidently say: There is not A single worthy software patent out there. You know, one that is \"not obvious to someone skilled in the art\" and that actually protects a monetary investment.\n","metadata":{"score":232,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"879dce91c5f5e01e","title":"Over 181,000 AI meeting recordings left wide open in note taking app","link":"https://bobdahacker.com/blog/tldv-hack","author":"colesantiago","published_at":"2026-08-10T12:26:05+00:00","content":"\n\nSoftware patent are a scourge of the software industry. Patents are designed to protect costly research; simply having an idea is not costly (but it makes in medical research for example). All that software patents do is creating a minefield that hinders competition.
For software Copyright is a far better instrument. Let the one with best implementation win... That's where the cost is: Implementing, testing, shipping, maintaining. Protect that.
Sorry for the rant.
Edit: Spelling\n— linuxhansl\n
Over 181,000 AI meeting recordings left wide open in note taking app
\n\n\n\n329 points | 107 comments
\n\n\n\nIt's hilarious how these companies handle security breaches.\n","metadata":{"score":618,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"06fae5158e6da691","title":"Squeak 6.1","link":"https://squeak.org/release_notes/6.1/","author":"fniephaus","published_at":"2026-08-10T12:15:53+00:00","content":"\n\n\n\n\n\nI once reported superadmin user/pass committed to github at a major YC backed background check company I worked at and everyone tried to make it seem like it was my fault.
I had just started working there and found it in the first week.
Anyway, had to show that it was committed by their main Staff engineer 2 years before I even worked there. For 2 years everyone's background check data in the United States that went through this thing - millions per year - thousands of Uber drivers, DoorDash, etc. all were viewable with no clearance. Anyone including overseas contractors, new hires, etc. could just login and check anyone's criminal history.
Reporting it was a disaster. They all tried to cover their asses, this huge drama and hand waving started. They tried to blame anyone and everyone. Eventually it was just AWS fault somehow (it wasn't, the Staff engineer was a dumbass, he committed it to a ruby seed file).
-----
I digress, the CTO didn't respond because he was more worried about how it would make him look. This industry is dead - the wrong people work in it.\n— purplemoonx\n
210 points | 109 comments
\n\n\n\nJust like learning Lisp will make you rethink programming languages, and learning Erlang will make you understand the true power of concurrency: learning Smalltalk will make you understand what \"object oriented\" actually means.\n","metadata":{"score":288,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"b848f12a947e151b","title":"Parametron: 50s Japanese computer that uses neither transistors nor vacuum tubes","link":"https://ethw.org/Milestones:Parametron,_1954","author":"xeonmc","published_at":"2026-08-10T10:29:14+00:00","content":"\n\nI haven't used Squeak since college but I'm glad it was part of the cirriculum.
Btw, almost all of Javascript's good parts come from Smalltalk.\n— avaer\n
Parametron: 50s Japanese computer that uses neither transistors nor vacuum tubes
\n\n\n\n176 points | 45 comments
\n\n\n\nEAC-1101 In March 1958, NEC finished its first digital computer, the NEAC-1101. This machine used parametrons, invented by Eiichi Goto in 1954, and was perfected by using a single-turn transformer coupling system independently devised by NEC. This computer was designed for scientific and engineering calculations, and was Japan's first computer to use floating point operations. It was capable of decimal 7-digit floating point operations. It used 3,600 parametrons, 29 types of instructions, and had average performance of 3.5ms for addition/subtraction and 8.0ms for multiplication/division. The memory employed ferrite cores (magnetic core matrix system using the 2 ACs with different frequency), and memory capacity was 256 words (32-digit configuration). The NEAC-1101 was enhanced via improvements like expanding the memory capacity to 512 words, and was used for about 8 years for scientific and engineering calculations at NEC's research laboratory. The results from developing this computer contributed greatly to the development of subsequent parametron computers at NEC.\n","metadata":{"score":239,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"f4110050d0148e9d","title":"Meta Muse Glimmer – Open weights 30B local coding model","link":"https://research.meta.ai/blog/introducing-muse-glimmer-open-agentic-model","author":"riordan","published_at":"2026-08-10T10:10:02+00:00","content":"\n\nhttps://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/dawn/0017.html\n— oldnetguy\n
Meta Muse Glimmer – Open weights 30B local coding model
\n\n\n\n685 points | 384 comments
\n\n\n\nI lament the comments saying this in any way redeems Meta (the company).\n","metadata":{"score":1190,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"c037fd25e8204655","title":"Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents","link":"https://www.docker.com/products/docker-sandboxes/","author":"etoxin","published_at":"2026-08-10T06:02:38+00:00","content":"\n\nThe researchers releasing this stuff have almost nothing to do with Meta other than being bankrolled by the slaughterhouse.
You aren't the customer, you are the pawn in big tech's game of thrones. Your good will is a commodity to be traded, almost literally. It will be used against you the moment it's convenient. This is open weights because Meta couldn't monetize it in any other way than to cloud developer's judgement of their reputation.
But I guess most people just don't care.
I'm glad it's open. It does not make me think any better of Meta.\n— avaer\n
Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents
\n\n\n\n203 points | 131 comments
\n\n\n\nThe login is annoying but, lacking an open source alternative, this has been my daily driver for a while now because it works great out of the box with two key features: outbound firewall and secret injection with placeholders.\n","metadata":{"score":684,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"61adbae7f7eefb35","title":"Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code","link":"https://claude.com/blog/auto-mode-default-in-claude-code","author":"sbehere","published_at":"2026-08-10T03:50:00+00:00","content":"\n\nI run it with superset and then each git worktree is mounted in a sandbox that is configured for each repo i work in.
Closest open source I have seen is https://earendil-works.github.io/gondolin but the DX is not as polished. https://exe.dev/ would be perfect but it does not come with outbound firewall.
Does anyone have a better alternative?\n— rusch\n
Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
\n\n\n\n211 points | 213 comments
\n\n\n\nI'm apparently from the very small faction of users who's been running `--dangerously-skip-permissions` in every instance of Claude for the last year. It's almost a reflex to me. For the most part Claude behaves well, but I don't blindly trust it. LLMs are inherently dangerous tools, and reviewing individual commands (or spamming `y`) doesn't make them less so. Safety is the responsibility of the developer putting sane guardrails (like VCS, immutable filesystems, or read-only tokens). Using more Claude to categorize the safety of Claude commands is not the answer.\n— awkii\n\n","metadata":{"score":288,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"1d6631e20ca2af21","title":"Show HN: Voice driven murder mystery, Interview AI suspects with your voice","link":"https://www.whodunnitai.com/","author":"MrRowTheBoat","published_at":"2026-08-10T03:18:40+00:00","content":"\n\n
Show HN: Voice driven murder mystery, Interview AI suspects with your voice
\nHey HN!I'm excited to show off this really fun project I put together. I originally built this project 2-3 years ago, AI was already booming at the time, however voice AI agents were still very early. I loved my proof of concept at the time, but wasn't quite happy with it.
I recently had the desire to check out the tech again, and know many of you will be interested.
Interviews are speech to speech with OpenAI's gpt-realtime-2.1 over WebRTC. This model is... expensive, and because of that, I have to add some amount of restrictions, conversations are tied to a authenticated Clerk user id. I have also added a 30 minute timer because well, I really don't want to go broke while I sleep tonight.
Each suspect has a tool they call when you make a direct accusation. It captures who you accused and a faithful list of the evidence you actually stated.
A separate gpt-5-mini judge then decides which of the case's required evidence facts you genuinely presented. Paraphrasing counts, vague suspicion and fishing don't.
The rest is Next.js, MongoDB, and Clerk.
Let me know whether the suspects hold up under a real interrogation.\n\n\n
188 points | 81 comments
\n\n\n\nHi everyone!!! Thanks so much for the support.\n","metadata":{"score":206,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"39b6905d27b4d122","title":"What Happened to HackerOne?","link":"https://blog.teknogeek.io/posts/what-happened-to-hackerone/","author":"hipparchus","published_at":"2026-08-10T02:23:17+00:00","content":"\n\n\n\n\n\nI launched this at midnight prior to logging off and going to bed, funnily enough a massive storm hit us around 3am and I woke up and noticed my OpenAI account failed to fund lol. So we ran out of funds and it caused things to break for some of you.
Just waking up here on the East coast, once my daughter is occupied I will try to answer more of your comments!\n— MrRowTheBoat\n
231 points | 103 comments
\n\n\n\n> To the companies: You don’t need HackerOne anymore. The tokens to build your own in-house platform cost less than single year of HackerOne.\n","metadata":{"score":385,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"7139860740741085","title":"How I use LLMs to learn complex topics","link":"https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/blog/articles/how-i-use-llms-to-learn/","author":"laurentiurad","published_at":"2026-08-09T19:16:49+00:00","content":"\n\nYou know, the biggest thing that HackerOne delivers is a universal payments system that requires absolutely no efforts from companies. Have you tried to manually pay hackers from around the world? It is a laborious process involving trying to find what providers are compatible and what forms of money go where. It is extremely taxing to handle this. HackerOne provides real, tangible value in not making people think about how precisely to pay a hacker and in what currency. No amount of tokens solve the accounting problem, and it is foolish to imply otherwise.\n— Shank\n
How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
\n\n\n\n325 points | 185 comments
\n\n\n\nI thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tried to use the LLM to fix this by having it generate a web page with diagrams and organized information flow. It's an improvement, but I still run into the issues I described in my first pint - LLM prose is annoyingly dense, and the useful information gets lost in a bunch of noise. You can direct it do something like \"use plain English and avoid LLM prose - provide only as much information as necessary to demonstrate the point\", but it is once again only a marginal improvement.\n","metadata":{"score":810,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"1636e698c8855205","title":"I made tinnitus my friend, then it disappeared [video]","link":"https://mynoise.net/vlog.php?ep=20260803","author":"gregsadetsky","published_at":"2026-08-09T18:41:35+00:00","content":"\n\nAnd then I begin to think to myself that I should just read a book on the topic written by a trusted source who put a lot of effort into teaching the topic properly and presenting the information in a thoughtful way. So, I am back to books and mostly try to use LLMs to clarify certain questions or ideas I have.\n— 8bitsout\n
I made tinnitus my friend, then it disappeared [video]
\n\n\n\n209 points | 163 comments
\n\n\n\nI got rid of mine for a year thanks to a comment on HN. The only reason it came back is because of my lack of discipline. It's bearable as I only notice it when I actively listen for it now. Anyway, I am sure this would just work again.\n","metadata":{"score":226,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"1f3bcd9366428dcf","title":"OpenChamber: An Agentic Development Environment","link":"https://openchamber.dev/","author":"hexomancer","published_at":"2026-08-09T17:27:16+00:00","content":"\n\nSo there was a comment that claimed it was related to bad neck posture. Being a keyboard warrior in my late 30s at that time I suffered the same issue: Tinnitus and generally bad posture. I figured that even if that wasn't true, working on my posture might be a good invest either way. So a couple of YouTube videos later I started working on it. Turns out the process to straighten your neck - even after like three decades - with just some casual invest everyday only takes about a month or two. To my surprise the tinnitus was actually also gone.
As I haven't build a real habit around the exercises eventually a bad posture came back, and so did the tinnitus. Both are generally not as bad as they were before, though.
10/10, would do again.\n— numlock86\n
OpenChamber: An Agentic Development Environment
\n\n\n\n179 points | 83 comments
\n\n\n\nI prefer Paseo https://github.com/getpaseo/paseo, mainly because I have specific preferences for different harness + model combinations. For example, I like using ChatGPT models via pi, and GLM via Claude Code.\n","metadata":{"score":179,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"a1e27e6f62439e2b","title":"Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)","link":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49233423","author":"david927","published_at":"2026-08-09T17:23:22+00:00","content":"\n\nWhat are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?\n\n\nIf you’re happy with OpenCode as the harness, OpenChamber is great. But if you prefer using different harnesses under the hood, Paseo is a better fit.
I installed it on my homelab and can access the same sessions from my MacBook or iPhone at any time. Been really nice to use so far.\n— azuanrb\n
229 points | 787 comments
\n\n\n\nI'm building the easiest way to start your own high-quality blog: https://github.com/BryanHogan/astro-starter-template\n","metadata":{"score":311,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"b8c5acdc7df64b00","title":"Analyzing data from Silicon Valley ventures and founders prosecuted for fraud","link":"https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10.1287/orsc.2024.19981","author":"iamnothere","published_at":"2026-08-09T15:26:45+00:00","content":"\n\nAstro is a framework that uses no JavaScript by default. I also use just HTML and CSS, so no bloated additional frameworks or styling libraries.
All blog content is written as Markdown or .mdx files, so it's easy to write and move to any other tool if you wish to do so.
You can host it for free using any major provider since it's just a static website (e.g., GitHub Pages, Cloudflare, etc.).
Making it similar to my own website which is on: https://bryanhogan.com/
(Repo: https://github.com/BryanHogan/bryanhogan )\n— bryanhogan\n
Analyzing data from Silicon Valley ventures and founders prosecuted for fraud
\n\n\n\n181 points | 84 comments
\n\n\n\n“Our theoretical framework captures how entrepreneurs facing minor, wide, and extreme expectation-reality gaps engage in evermore sophisticated efforts to detach the venture’s externally projected appearance from its actual operational reality.”\n","metadata":{"score":197,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"faa3c08ff0db50f9","title":"Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's","link":"https://theconversation.com/taxi-drivers-rarely-die-of-alzheimers-how-complex-mental-maps-and-spatial-reasoning-protect-your-brain-286650","author":"jader201","published_at":"2026-08-09T15:21:46+00:00","content":"\n\nLook, I’m not promoting fraud at all, but having been doing seed raising for the last eight months, there have been many times where I thought the only way to compete was by fudging the numbers (because everyone else is, basically). It’s one of several reasons I left this game and am pursuing non-traditional means of funding now.\n— aliasxneo\n
Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
\n\n\n\n262 points | 184 comments
\n\n\n\nTaxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years.\n","metadata":{"score":375,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"b9f2b1a054db3b17","title":"Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy","link":"https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/historian-jill-lepore-says-the-tech-industry-is-led-by-bad-readers-who-are-undermining-democracy/","author":"evo_9","published_at":"2026-08-09T15:18:25+00:00","content":"\n\nGeneral Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years.
The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is 79.
People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.\n— cortic\n
Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
\n\n\n\n233 points | 181 comments
\n\n\n\nI don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.\n","metadata":{"score":294,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"7538b9d208fc893d","title":"Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM","link":"https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-s-built-in-Weather-app-wastes-more-than-1-GB-of-RAM.1364205.0.html","author":"akyuu","published_at":"2026-08-09T15:11:20+00:00","content":"\n\nThey just got uberrich and now worry more about the concerns of the uberrich than the concerns they had when they were normies.
Rule of law, functioning government providing services, functioning public commons, free press, freedom of speech for all, any social safety net, etc don’t matter when they are so far removed from the public they can just go buy yourself an island/citizenship/president.
Suddenly small differences in marginal tax brackets, antitrust enforcement & limits on the ability to simply buy the government they want are the biggest encroachments on freedom they feel.\n— steveBK123\n
Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
\n\n\n\n333 points | 275 comments
\n\n\n\nEasy workaround for this:\n","metadata":{"score":648,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"3bffea64865cf35f","title":"Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone","link":"https://www.techeblog.com/tom-stanton-supersonic-trebuchet/","author":"Thorondor","published_at":"2026-08-09T15:08:51+00:00","content":"\n\n1. Install uBlock Origin in Edge.
2. Start Edge, browse to MSN Weather.
3. Click the \"Add an Application\" button in the address bar to get a Start Menu icon for the page.
4. Delete the in-box Weather app icon.
Now you get the same Weather app in about 130MB of RAM, with no ads. It's not as nice as a native app, of course, but it's 1000% better than the useless ads and MSN feed that you can't block from the built-in Weather icon.
(Also, go into Widget settings and turn off \"Discover / Microsoft Start feed\". Same crap, different surface. Get rid of it.)\n— SBArbeit\n
Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone
\n\n\n\n202 points | 67 comments
\n\n\n\nHere's a direct link to the video, to avoid the blogspam cruft...\n","metadata":{"score":275,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"cce599b39b1f6231","title":"Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)","link":"https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI","author":"Klaster_1","published_at":"2026-08-09T14:32:53+00:00","content":"\n\n\n\n\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co57SfcT-h0\n— sdenton4\n
224 points | 54 comments
\n\n\n\nWhat's funny to me is that Scot Hanselman, an MS employee, wrote about it for a - not so- long time ago as well:\n- https://www.hanselman.com/blog/urls-are-ui\n- https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dont-ever-break-a-url-if-you-...\n","metadata":{"score":287,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"a85ceac3ed496490","title":"Mea Culpa – Dark Hours","link":"https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html","author":"satvikpendem","published_at":"2026-08-09T13:20:43+00:00","content":"\n\n\n\n\n\nThere are people in MS who knows this is an issue. But knowledge is not equal to behaviour.\n— feldrim\n
287 points | 130 comments
\n\n\n\nOn the previous HN posts I got this impression:\n","metadata":{"score":601,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"b38183b809031338","title":"Everything you do is being recorded","link":"https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-wearable-surveillance-countermeasures/687203/","author":"ike_usawa","published_at":"2026-08-09T11:30:48+00:00","content":"\n\nThe developer's astrology app containing tarot reading features was rejected from Apple's App Store that prohibits astrology apps.
He then replaced the app's content with a clone of, if not the identical open source astronomy app \"Dark Hours\", copying even the name. The original is here: https://darkhours.app
The developer was then in contact with John Gruber, who wrote an article claiming Apple's reviewers confuse a nice, scientific astronomy app with astrology. The developer reviewed the article before publication.
It then turned out that the developer forgot to mention that originally he did upload an astrology app for review. Gruber felt duped, and noted that it's unclear whether an updated build containing the new astronomy app was ever submitted to Apple for review: https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
Now the developer seems to claim that he merely accidentally cloned that open source app when working with Claude.
I am not buying it.\n— user43928\n
Everything you do is being recorded
\nhttps://archive.is/JxaZ7\n\n\n183 points | 143 comments
\n\n\n\nThe original research project this company looks based on was very cool and way early: https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/jammer/\n— jrexilius\n\n","metadata":{"score":422,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}},{"id":"6943e4d87b6d2bd9","title":"There Are Magic Hexagons of Every Order","link":"https://gukov.dev/math/2026/08/02/new-magic-hexagons.html","author":"gukoff","published_at":"2026-08-09T07:19:58+00:00","content":"\n\n
There Are Magic Hexagons of Every Order
\n\n\n\n191 points | 31 comments
\n\n\n\nI loved this article and its interactive elements. The potential field is an elegant abstraction which really elevates this from a math puzzle into something new.\n","metadata":{"score":193,"source_feed_id":"hn-best","source_feed_type":"hackernews"}}]I'd love to see just how Lipschitz continuous, how smooth, the potential field can be; how adding features puts it closer to or further from solutions that fit the consecutive-no-duplicate constraint, say. Adding a smooth 'hill' is probably viable; is a 'river'?
One little critique I have is in the latter third. Using LLMs for proof is pretty standard now, but the way the text focuses on their tribulations was distracting. It might have been cleaner to use the mathematician's \"we\" after introducing the 'co-authors', so that the casual reader might sink their teeth into the math rather than be reminded LLMs can sometimes cost money and go around in loops.
But otherwise this is a really gorgeous article! The visualisation is really powerful, and something about how the symmetries impose a kind of conservation (which looks like hot soup but actually has a smooth potential) are very exciting, and curiously very physicsy.\n— yunruse\n
![https://image.non.io/d83664c1-5807-4a18-abe4-41928c198410.we...](\"https://image.non.io/d83664c1-5807-4a18-abe4-41928c198410.webp\"){kind=link}