Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

464 points | 199 comments

"Stealing" something you already paid for (tokens), but that you can't have access to(!). And trained on the sum of human knowledge.

Training 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... — Aissen

England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

304 points | 215 comments

I 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. — thex10

Compression is prediction

456 points | 191 comments

This is the thesis behind the "Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms" course that was taught at Cambridge University.

> Why unify information theory and machine learning? Because they are two sides of the same coin. In the 1960s, a single field, cybernetics, was populated by information theorists, computer scientists, and neuroscientists, all studying common problems. Information theory and machine learning still belong together. Brains are the ultimate compression and communication systems. And the state-of-the-art algorithms for both data compression and error-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... — farfatched

OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

https://archive.ph/W48UV

https://aimagazine.com/news/why-did-openai-head-of-ethics-ch...

250 points | 323 comments

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire.

My 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. — madrox

Mojo 1.0

258 points | 117 comments

I feel like this language would really benefit from some sort of 1-pager overview.

I 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 — swiftcoder

Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

335 points | 395 comments

It 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.

What 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. — beaker52

Nvidia's Risky Business

284 points | 130 comments

Nvidia'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.

Google'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. — YuechenLi

Apple Silicon and macOS VMs: Faster LLM Inference with llama.cpp

278 points | 43 comments

It 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.

The fix here works around a problem where the VM was causing llama.cpp to select the wrong kernels. — simonw

Grok Bot

244 points | 198 comments

I'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.

Biggest 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. — jjcm

Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

https://local12.com/news/nation-world/flock-camera-error-lea...

246 points | 222 comments

We 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. — jmward01

Meta Muse Glimmer – Open weights 30B local coding model

685 points | 384 comments

I lament the comments saying this in any way redeems Meta (the company).

The 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. — avaer

Over 181,000 AI meeting recordings left wide open in note taking app

329 points | 107 comments

It's hilarious how these companies handle security breaches.

I 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. — purplemoonx

Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

https://archive.is/20LOJ

https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/

335 points | 356 comments

I 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.

I'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. — bushido

The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

432 points | 322 comments

> 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).”

How 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. — tangotaylor

Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's

289 points | 446 comments

Shrinkflation 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. — smolder

Show HN: Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots

Hey 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!

288 points | 106 comments

This 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.

With 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). — nater5000

Illinois Just Passed a Law That Puts Linux on the Hook for Age Verification

270 points | 337 comments

Linux distro founder here (stagex)

I 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. — lrvick

As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

299 points | 291 comments

AI 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. — ChiMan

H3-metal – Native MiniMax-H3 inference for Apple Silicon

195 points | 25 comments

I've been using MiniMax H3 on my M5 Pro 64GB MacBook Pro through ComfyUI. It works extremely well.

I 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 — Meleagris

Squeak 6.1

210 points | 109 comments

Just 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.

I 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. — avaer

How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

325 points | 185 comments

I 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.

And 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. — 8bitsout

Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

287 points | 130 comments

On the previous HN posts I got this impression:

The 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. — user43928

Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

333 points | 275 comments

Easy workaround for this:

1. 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.) — SBArbeit

Everything you do is being recorded

https://archive.is/JxaZ7

183 points | 143 comments

The original research project this company looks based on was very cool and way early: https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/jammer/ — jrexilius

Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

262 points | 184 comments

Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years.

General 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. — cortic

Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

233 points | 181 comments

I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.

They 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. — steveBK123

Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone

202 points | 67 comments

Here's a direct link to the video, to avoid the blogspam cruft...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co57SfcT-h0 — sdenton4

What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?

229 points | 787 comments

I'm building the easiest way to start your own high-quality blog: https://github.com/BryanHogan/astro-starter-template

Astro 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 ) — bryanhogan

Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)

224 points | 54 comments

What's funny to me is that Scot Hanselman, an MS employee, wrote about it for a - not so- long time ago as well: - https://www.hanselman.com/blog/urls-are-ui - https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dont-ever-break-a-url-if-you-...

There are people in MS who knows this is an issue. But knowledge is not equal to behaviour. — feldrim

What Happened to HackerOne?

231 points | 103 comments

> 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.

You 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. — Shank

“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

524 points | 344 comments

I believe there are some programming jobs in which the code is absolutely the easier part. Not all of us work in signal processing, integrated systems or have to push upstream to Linux kernel because the company we work for really needs a memory allocation optimization for its data centers.

Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incredibly difficult and frustrating problem to solve. Especially if you need to also oversee the execution of the strategy. So not only you have to predict what they want or know the domain deeply enough to understand what they say they want is not what they really want, you also have to come up with a plan for executing your solution in a corporate environment.

There is a reason that books like "the staff engineer's path" cover topics such as local maximums, communication, establishing support for executing a plan or creating alignment on big efforts. In large corporate environments with multiple international customers, code is most of the time not the hardest problem. — prinny_

Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating

478 points | 227 comments

This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's very apparent to both student and teachers how well a topic is understood. Marks are rarely contested and in my experience most students think the process is fair.

Of course, woe betide those with social phobias.... — azalemeth

Fastmail offers EU data region

299 points | 135 comments

EU data regions are a reflexive action by companies that try to hold on to their EU customers (and more and more are leaving, surprisingly the larger ones seem to be leading here). Realize that as long as you are still hosted on US owned infrastructure or that if there are US (or: five-eyes) owned companies anywhere in the stack your data can still be forcibly pulled and often without you being aware that this happened. There are only very few such stacks that are 100% owned by EU entities. — jacquesm

A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS

327 points | 129 comments

Something I've wondered... if you publicly say that a domain is for sale and someone has a trademark for it would you automatically lose in arbitration?

Around 1998 I registered a domain. Sony registered a trademark with the same name a few years after that. Someone on a Gmail account asked if he could buy it - I later found out he worked for Sony. I told him no - it's for a game I've been working on. I went on a vacation for a month and when I got back there was a fedex package filled with documents from Sony saying I'm violating their trademark and they'll take the domain.

I got a lawyer and he told me that I shouldn't offer it for sale as that would show the arbitration board that I don't need the domain. But he also told me that in order to fight the trademark it would probably cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars. So I could keep the domain but not use it for commerce...

In the end I ended up selling it to Sony but through my lawyer - I never stated it was for sale. But this was early on for domains and I wonder what the process is like now. — comrade1234

Timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face

312 points | 319 comments

Norbert Wiener in 1960:

"As is now generally admitted, over a limited range of operation, machines act far more rapidly than human beings and are far more precise in performing the details of their operations. This being the case, even when machines do not in any way transcend man's intelligence, they very well may, and often do, transcend man in the performance of tasks. An intelligent understanding of their mode of performance may be delayed until long after the task which they have been set has been completed. This means that though machines are theoretically subject to human criticism, such criticism may be ineffective until long after it is relevant. To be effective in warding off disastrous consequences, our understanding of our man-made machines should in general develop _pari passu_ with the performance of the machine. By the very slowness of our human actions, our effective control of our machines may be nullified. By the time we are able to react to information conveyed by our senses and stop the car we are driving, it may already have run head on into a wall."

"In neurophysiological language, ataxia can be quite as much of a deprivation as paralysis. A patient with locomotor ataxia may not suffer from any defect of his muscles or motor nerves, but if his muscles and tendons and organs do not tell him exactly what position he is in, and whether the tensions to which his organs are subjected will or will not lead to his falling, he will be unable to stand up. Similarly, when a machine constructed by us is capable of operating on its incoming data at a pace which we cannot keep, we may not know, until too late, when to turn it off."

Source: https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/moral.pdf — RGS1811

My server is a phone now

256 points | 92 comments

Side comment about the difference between “My server is a phone now” and “My phone is a server now.”

In linguistics, the terms “theme” and “rheme” refer to the status of information in a sentence [1]. The theme of a sentence is something that is known or can be assumed from the context (that is, old information), while the rheme is information that is newly introduced in the sentence, often as a comment on the theme. The tendency in many (most? all?) languages is for the theme to precede the rheme in connected discourse.

Without context, a reader is therefore likely to assume from “my X is a Y now” that X is something the writer had previously and that Y is something new. Because, these days, most people have a phone but few have their own servers, I was initially confused by the title “My server is a phone now.” I had to read the article to realize that the word order is in fact appropriate: for the writer, the server is old information (something he has had for a while) while the phone (as a server, at least) is new.

In English, theme and rheme might be inferred not only from the position in a sentence but also from how a noun is marked. Possessives like “my” are generally used before nouns referring to things that are previously known or assumed; the definite article “the” is similar. In contrast, the indefinite article “a” (or “an”) usually marks information being newly introduced, so it is more common with rhemes.

I worked as a Japanese-to-English translator for many years. Because the grammatical structure of Japanese sentences is very different from that of English, sentence-by-sentence translation often ends up with paragraphs where the information flow is awkward and unnatural. I gradually learned that I could produce smoother translations by reorganizing my English sentences into an old-to-new information sequence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment — tkgally

US Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide

https://archive.ph/W2tpE

215 points | 355 comments

I suspect the Cold War of cyber warfare that is happening is orders of magnitude bigger than the public knows.

Imagine knowing this and not being able to get emotional support from your friends and family. — YesThatTom2

Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country

220 points | 145 comments

Let's add as well "SpaceX’s Terafab will rely on natural gas power plants, not Tesla solar panels" to the mix :o(

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/spacexs-terafab-will-rely-... — zepearl

New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

216 points | 276 comments

Those in power seem to think that a compute advantage is necessary to maintain economic advantage. Despite this, the voters universally hate data centers, so much so that both NY and TX have data center construction moratoriums.

Despite this, those in power refuse any environmentally aware energy policy nor water policy. Despite this, companies have been trying to be environmentally aware for either moral or marketing purposes to get social permission to build DCs. Despite this, companies are “forced” to build their own “dirty” power sources since political power is disrupting green energy build out. Despite this, demand is still high so that compute costs are continuing to rise. Despite this, our economy is increasingly predicated on a few companies using more compute than geopolitical rivals with cheaper electricity. Despite this, those in power are, again, unwilling to create a compromising policy (aka clean energy) that voters actually would demand before tolerating more DCs.

What’s going to lose first? Voters/environment, politicians/the oil lobby, big tech, or the overall american economy? — vineyardmike

US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

777 points | 744 comments

> Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement posted on X that Americans deserve an energy system built on common sense and not one dependent on "costly subsidies".

I agree. This is why we are building offshore wind and not subsidizing fossil fuels, right? — saagarjha

What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

359 points | 495 comments

Addressing the question in the title, "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers", look at what happened to printers. That was a good skilled trade for centuries. Then it just went away. Phototypesetting took the high volume end. Desktop publishing took the low end. Computer-controlled presses took press operators. And then the newspaper business died.

I've heard homeless former printers talking about the good days at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market. They thought they had careers. Now they're struggling to survive.

Knitting is not the answer. This is a survival issue. Somehow I suspect the author inherited money. — Animats

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731

404 points | 243 comments

I've been using it extensively since the release and the best summary I can give is that it's good enough to use it for (almost) everything and cheap enough that the cost are irrelevant. I'm running it in Oh My Pi with a second instance running as "advisor" and even with 5-6 active sessions (effectively 12 streams) I'm struggling to spend more than 5 bucks per day.

OpenCode Go even has double limits temporarily so for 10 USD you effectively get 140 USD of tokens to spend. It would impress me if someone could burn that amount with "normal" usage. Even when running multiple sessions.

I have a Claude Max subscription but I've barely touched it, it just feels like a step back to have to think about limits and usage even though the models are stronger.

The beauty of intelligence at this cost (even if it's not SOTA) is that it opens a whole bunch of new use cases. Test failure in CI? Have the bot automatically propose a fix, its cheap enough that you can discard it w/h issues. Test coverage too low? Auto generate tests on CI for every pull-requests! Monitoring server logs, continuous security audits and investigating every received exception now becomes possible.

I'm thinking about having it automatically filter and re-rank my social media feeds so I can steer the algorithm instead of the other way around.

Perhaps other people (with enormous budgets) were already doing all of the above but for us this is a really exciting release! — LaurensBER

Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

356 points | 243 comments

Oracle, the law firm with a tech business attached, probably wants to retain the option to sue other people for AI-washing their proprietary code, and that doesn't work if they're also publicly accepting AI contributions to their code with no apparent concern for the provenance of it. The tech business would probably tell them this isn't going to be a needle they are going to be able to successfully thread, but the law firm is in the driver's seat. — jerf

A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

358 points | 340 comments

The worrying thing here is that so many people accepted outsourcing the decision on who can see their website to a large company (Cloudflare). If the company decides that a certain user should not see the website, the user will not see the website, and no one will know about it, and the user will have no recourse. That is not the open web that I would like to see.

A second side effect of a knee-jerk reaction to bots crawling websites is that if you try to fight all bots, you also end up hurting real users that use "bots". If I run a local script or an LLM that needs to fetch a web page from your site and you block that script or LLM as being a bot, you hurt me, the user. I wanted the information and I have no way of getting at it without investing my own time and effort in going to your website. That might or might not be what you expected, but it's worth taking into account.

And finally, something worth noting is that there are so many websites whose owners complain about bots, but the real problem is that the website is poorly built and should be improved anyway. Bot traffic is not necessarily bad. — jwr

Assembly Hall of Shame

226 points | 48 comments

Related, and linked in the readme: https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/smiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii (using the slow instructions to break SMI) — Retr0id

U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

314 points | 305 comments

As a data scientist it is very frustrating to see a consistent lack of error bars on these numbers or any discussion about the magnitude of uncertainty around them by all news reports every time these numbers get released — astro1234

App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours

254 points | 151 comments

> But that’s not what happened at all. Godier proceeded through a series of escalations up to the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.”

> It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.

I have dealt with the Byzantine App Store bureaucracy before. What you do here, is you submit a new version, pretty much identical to the previous one, with the comment “tarot function removed”. — DrJokepu

The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

261 points | 114 comments

For anyone reading this and jumping to a broader conclusion: the Nixpkgs core team disbanding does not mean Nixpkgs or Nix is dying. It does mean that this particular structure was not sustainable, very important contributors burnt out and we need to do better, faster. We need to continue learning from this and continue building a stronger ecosystem that prioritizes the contributors who are the only reason any of this is possible.

Personally, I'm sorry and grateful. Sorry that it ended in core folks being burnt out. Grateful since they did some of the most amazing work, more than anyone can imagine two people doing. — ronef

Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD

229 points | 107 comments

Author here. Let me know if you have any questions about the post or about pgrust.

Let me take a shot at answering what I think will be the most common question: how can I trust pgrust? Our #1 priority right now is correctness. Over the past two weeks, I've done a mix of formal verification and differential fuzz testing. We've been able to prove over 1000 user facing functions have the exact same logic in both pgrust and postgres (see the proofs directory if you're curious). For cases where formal verification is not easy, we've taken the c implementation of a function and the rust implementation of a function and ran millions of inputs through each of them and confirmed they gave the same results every time.

We've only covered about 15% of the surface area so far, but in the process, we've discovered ~100 bugs in pgrust and ~20 bugs in Postgres itself. My favorite postgres bug we found is this one[0]. Postgres has a quadtree implementation. Due to floating point rounding, it was possible for a point to be neither above, nor below, nor even with the center point of the quadtree.

We've also entered engagements with Antithesis[1] to do Jepsen style fault testing and Aretta[2] to do more serious formal verification.

If you want to support the project, the easiest way is to give us a star on GitHub[3]

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/19597-39c532e61d78dff6...

[1] https://antithesis.com/

[2] https://aretta.ai/

[3] https://github.com/malisper/pgrust — malisper

Mario Meets Pareto

503 points | 101 comments

This is a really important concept for developers.

One aspect for developers that I see quite often is the assertion that "We can't have X without giving up more Y", most commonly "we can't have more security without giving up on user experience". With the Pareto idea in mind, we can see that that statement is true, if and only if you are in fact on the Pareto frontier of security and user experience already.

However, many times these confident pronouncements are being made when the system under question is quite evidently not on the Pareto frontier in the first place and indeed you can get more of one without giving up the other.

Making it more tricky is that in business, you can never discard "money" as a dimension, so unless you're taking "money" as one of the dimensions in the original comparison you want to do, it sneaks its way in. Or, a composite time/money, or "cost to business", or some other similar concept, time & money aren't orthogonal and don't need to be treated as two separate dimensions in general, though you can if you want. Which puts you into the 3D case, and as the page says, that grows the frontier quite a lot, which is good in some ways and bad in others. Nevertheless, in my opinion it is still often the case that even in that space we are often making "tradeoffs" without checking that we're on the Pareto frontier in the first place. — jerf

AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon

https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1296/am...

https://chatjimmy.ai/

295 points | 230 comments

What I like about this, is that it significantly increases the probability of a sci-fi scenario where you're picking up a hot chip on the black market; rumor has it, Mythos 9 weights baked in... — mNovak

Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index

399 points | 258 comments

China has caught up is the main takeaway here. The SOTA models are so close that it's really hard to compare them intelligence wise - you have to get a feel for them yourself and what works for you.

What I'm really excited for is the 27B model. 3.6 is still the king of local, and if 3.8 makes the same improvements it could really legitimately make local viable as a default. I'd love to run a perpetual agent on 3.8 that's locally driven. — jjcm

Taste Is All That's Left

348 points | 263 comments

On the topic of taste, I think of this quote in Susan Sontag's "Notes On 'Camp'" often:

“For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)

Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea..." — hellojomp

GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime/br0l2tvcx85d

300 points | 254 comments

All of the outages make sense to me as scaling issues. Each month, GitHub is getting the amount of commits they’d normally get in a year. And it’s growing

> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.) GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week. So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub’s core features. And as a fine purveyor of hand-crafted shit code for many years, I'm not gonna weigh in on that.

x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 — __initbrian__

Almost no skill required to cook a steak

259 points | 300 comments

I take the point, but I think the author picked a poor analogy. Cooking even an excellent steak is actually not that hard. In fact, I'd argue that it's among the easiest things to master/make at a top level quality at home. Does it require some modicum of attention and understanding? Sure. But starting with a high quality cut, owning a meat-thermometer, and knowing about reverse searing is about all it takes to reliably and easily get a near perfect steak every time.

There are far, far better cooking examples out there. — MostlyStable

Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

270 points | 140 comments

Quake is 30 years old. I can't believe I'm still alive. I love this game so dearly. The mods were just incredible, KQP and Girobot in particular.

Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back. As in I had friends bringing over their big ass CRT monitors and PCs for a single occasion and also had ludicrously long network cables. My parents didn't mind, they somehow understood, even with LAN wires running across the kitchen floor. Priceless.

Edit: typo: lab -> LAN — karim79

Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs

239 points | 186 comments

I remember when this game was posted here, and there was a lot of discussion at the time that some of the prompts were misleading about whether or not they were risky, some people were debating about how some of the prompts flagged as bad weren’t bad, and others flagged as not bad were. This is a fundamental flaw in the test, that makes the analysis of results meaningless.

Also the game was on a timer, and maybe there are some very abusive workplaces where you feel that kind of pressure, but I think most of us actually take the time to understand what a being asked before approving it. — VladVladikoff

New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

https://www.reuters.com/world/new-mexico-court-orders-meta-p...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/06/new-mexic...

https://www.kob.com/new-mexico/nm-court-orders-meta-to-pay-5...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd7lz3wr2rlo

https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-ordered-to-pay-942-million-to-...

278 points | 178 comments

A lot of people on this story are making the usual snarky remarks that, oh, this is just a slap on the wrist—some trivial proportion of Meta’s global revenue. And that is true, but unlike the EU, for example, New Mexico is a tiny jurisdiction. It only has a little bit more than 2 million people.

So actually, a fine—or a judgment—of $942 million that applies just to New Mexico is enormous. If you look at Meta’s revenue from the U.S. and Canada and assign it proportionally by population, you find that Meta only earned about $1.5 billion to $2 billion total from New Mexico over the past five years. The exact figure depends on whether you allocate purely by population or account for purchasing power, which makes the estimate a little lower because New Mexico is a poorer state than the U.S. average.

Given that, the judgment is a half to two-thirds of what Meta could have obtained from New Mexico. So it is actually a serious deterrent, assuming Meta thinks New Mexico would continue to impose fines of that size.

I also think that there’s a good chance this judgment gets overturned or significantly reduced on appeal, but even if the fine drops to half its current level, it would be proportionately larger than almost any fine against any company, let alone tech, that I’ve heard of. — tmp10423288442

Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard

Hi HN, today I’m revealing Altar II, an ultra-low profile (4.75mm) mechanical keyboard designed to replace your Magic Keyboard. It’s the keyboard I wish Apple made.

Altar II has fully mechanical switches, plus a magnetically detachable dial, haptic feedback, a red backlight, and a native macOS companion app.

I’m a heavy Mac user and I feel that Apple hasn’t given its keyboards the attention they deserve, in terms of hardware, software, and features, so I set out to try and change that.

It was a massive undertaking and it has taken almost 2 years to get to this stage. One of the main obstacles was fitting a reasonably sized battery into the chassis, and aggressive power profiling without messing with the user experience. Another issue was we couldn’t fit any components on the underside of the PCB because there was literally no space to do so (and there are a lot of components).

Around 4 years ago I posted my first keyboard to HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507172). Its response blew me away and ultimately led to me quitting my job and making and selling keyboards full time. I’ve taken some of the feedback from that original post and incorporated it into Altar II (e.g. the detachable dial).

I’ll be around to answer any questions. Please let me know what you think, I’d love to get some feedback.

255 points | 212 comments

To everyone who is about to pile on regarding the lack of a fingerprint sensor: you know it's not possible, we all know it's not possible, the creator of this project knows it's not possible.

What are you adding to the conversation when you complain about it? So it's a dealbreaker for you, don't buy it.

To @aemerson_: Congratulations on taking a risk. On first look this is great work. The attention to detail on both the keyboard and the website is really impressive. — ary

Discovery Loop

528 points | 326 comments

From Jeff's twitter post:

> Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen <at>NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise in machine learning as well as large-scale systems.

See also: https://www.nae.edu/20782/grand-challenges-project

Those 14 are:

NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering

1. Make Solar Energy Economical

2. Provide Energy from Fusion

3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods

4. Manage the Nitrogen Cycle

5. Provide Access to Clean Water

6. Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure

7. Advance Health Informatics

8. Engineer Better Medicines

9. Reverse Engineer the Brain

10. Prevent Nuclear Terror

11. Secure Cyberspace

12. Enhance Virtual Reality

13. Advance Personalized Learning

14. Engineer the Tools of Scientific Discovery — cjbarber

Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/05/google-deepmind-demis-hassa...

https://www.reuters.com/business/google-shakes-up-ai-leaders...

https://www.discoveryloop.com/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184960

https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724, https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724

418 points | 544 comments

Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era.

There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around". — gandalfgeek

Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

282 points | 158 comments

I liked Kenton's take on this: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572?s=20

Text from tweet:

Today we are releasing Cloudflare OS, a chatbot with connectors, just like every other tech company is doing.

Except actually, it's different. This is a remake of Sandstorm[.]io, my startup from 10 years ago, except this time built on Cloudflare Workers (the platform I've spent the last 9 years building) and deeply leveraging AI. This is more or less the culmination of my secret 10-year master plan.

This is a full-on personal app vibe coding platform, in which the sandbox is so secure that you can pretty much go wild -- the AI cannot introduce a significant security bug. We believe a company's security team can feel comfortable giving non-technical users permission to vibe code and then sleep soundly at night.

How is that possible? It's the Sandstorm security model, revisited. A "Gadget" is the same thing as a Sandstorm "Grain": a fine-grained app instance. For example, if you have a document editor app, each document runs as a separate instance of the app, in a separate sandbox (one "Gadget").

This means two things, both of which I think are Big Deals: 1. The platform can manage all access control, by controlling who can access the Gadget at all. There is no way the Gadget can accidentally leak itself to an attacker -- even an attacker who has access to other Gadgets based on the same app. 2. Since everyone is running their own copy of the code, everyone can freely modify their copy of the code.

Think about #2 a bit more.

What if, when you wanted a new feature in the software you are using, you could just prompt your agent to add it?

This doesn't work in the cloud Software-as-a-Service model, because you are not running your own copy of the app.

Sandstorm tried to change that 10 years ago, but the world wasn't ready, because not enough people had the skills or patience to actually modify their software. AI has changed that. Now you just ask the agent -- the same agent that you are using to help you interact with the Gadget can also modify the code of the Gadget.

And it is so fun. — rozenmd

Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

330 points | 163 comments

When I used to fly in Florida in the 2005-2015ish timeframe, NOTAMs for GPS interference (it didn't say that exactly but that's what it meant) were an everyday occurrence along my path, it became boilerplate. I experienced it a few times. One moment the GPS thinks you're plodding along next to Ocala, next moment it thinks I've teleported a thousand miles away, and then it'd just quit.

But that's what we train for. That's why aircraft and pilots have redundancy to work around any single possible point of failure and why you practice it until it becomes natural. Because of the NOTAM I'd already have a VOR tuned in, and once the GPS went inop I just fine tuned it to get a radial fix on the VOR. Also tried to never lose my bearings with my MK I Eyeballs either. No big deal.

I feel bad for everyone that lost their lives here, but this is why competence is critical. There's a litany of errors the pilots made. And the article tries to pin a bit on the controller, but no, ultimate responsibility is on the pilot in command, FAR/AIM is clear on that.

If these allegedly instrument rated pilots had been properly drilled by their CFI's and properly grilled during reviews and such this should've been an easy flight.

Also, "just ask Kennedy". Wired bringing that into the conversation is perhaps relevant but not in the way I think they intended. JFK Jr lacked basic airmanship skills. His aircraft was 100% functional until the moment it impacted the ocean.

Some professions simply can't be go-along-to-get-along social clubs. Safety culture centered on competence and performance is key. — mrngld

Zed DeltaDB

267 points | 135 comments

Zed should focus on basics. When it focuses on basics Zed is good.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 failing to show newly created files and declining to provide a refresh button, instead adding a polling backend, breaks Zed on WSL.

Why a new version control system? Why not git, jj, or another existing system? — NoDodgeQuestion

Demis Hassabis is moving from CEO to Chairman at Google DeepMind

369 points | 1 comments

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184755. — tomhow

I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux

281 points | 263 comments

There are too few apps on Linux phones, otherwise I would have migrated there — nc55g3g

Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models

284 points | 73 comments

I (and I imagine many others) would love to use something like this, but can't, because my data is too sensitive to be uploaded to a cloud of which I have no gaurantees of privacy/security.

Is there any way we do this using rented GPUs and open-source software stacks? Paying for the service isn't the issue, I don't care if it's free or if a cut is taken in some capacity, I just don't want the provider to have access to my data. — nullbio

Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines for a Pretextual Weed Search

299 points | 183 comments

This is the big problem with mass surveillance as a whole. With enough time, they'll find some pretext to bring you in, even if the original crime they want you for is weak.

This will ruin lives, even if they're eventually let go. Jobs lost, evicted from homes, cars towed, pets surrendered and put down.

Lives will be completely derailed, police and judges will not be held accountable. The wrongful arrestees will still be in debt to the local jail and court for various fees they racked up. Trust in the justice system will continue to degrade and more and more violence will be used against people to maintain order.

We hold police to high standards for search/arrest because they have the monopoly on violence. Even if they're wrong, you can't shoot back. Even if they're slamming your loved ones into the pavement, breaking their teeth, you cannot kick the cop in the head or else they have permission to murder you both.

Mass surveillance is a loophole to this contract. — MSFT_Edging

Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

286 points | 216 comments

https://archive.ph/4LhoU

I didn't realize the original was behind a paywall. — malshe

In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley, with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years

789 points | 44 comments

An amazingly detailed tribute, you'd have to think this was taken from a journal, in which case it's impressive to keep such a record of their life, or maybe Stephen just has a fantastic memory.

Even through that detail you can really feel how much he loved and admired her.

> Somehow in the shock of what has happened it feels as if I just met Elise, and now she is gone.

A reminder that time's cruelty is making the wonderful feel shorter than the painful.

> My only solace in this tragedy is that the end came instantly, after a day filled with nothing but joy.

Hopefully we're all lucky enough to be allowed to rest without suffering while surrounded by loved ones. — cube00

AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

620 points | 369 comments

To me there are different motivations to include imagery and some of them are just fine with AI generation. If the imagery actually goes to the substance of helping to illustrate or explain the actual content then it seems very superficial to reject it based on how it was generated. In fact it is kind of stupid to insist someone slavishly draw something by hand that could have been done an easier way.

The problem comes when the imagery is placed as a false value signal. If it is designed to send a signal of "this content took a lot of effort to produce because an image that would be hard for a human to make is attached to it" - but the image was generated without that effort, then it's basically a lie and insult to the reader. — zmmmmm

Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

389 points | 439 comments

I wanted to show my gf the halo 1 campaign, so I downloaded the 30GB Masterchief Collection via steam. When I launched it, I was greeted with a black box. After 1 Minute it was a microsoft login screen that looked eerily like a browser inside the game. Since I couldn't do anything else, the game was stuck at a sub 720p resolution. I said fine Ill just create an account. Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me.

Well I turned off MCC and gave up.

I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware — mawadev

Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones

Hello HN!

I found that picking out plausible but diverse skin tones for my digital art and game development projects was kind of difficult, and I got curious about if there was a way to define a color space that made it easy.

I've built a color picker and procedural generation algorithm based on the space as well as a bunch of other fun js features and demos throughout the page that use the equations. If you find it interesting, I have lots of explanations of how I built it and what properties the space has.

The methodology might be a bit shaky, but hopefully the result is as helpful for others as I have found it! There's lots of room for improvements (see the Future Work section), but I'm really happy with how it turned out.

448 points | 87 comments

This is beautiful work! First, I thought this would involve using PCA to go from 3D to 2D, which would result in an easier selector to use, but at the expense of representing every person.

Then, I thought this would stop at using the U-space vectors (the ones that form the basis of the PCA image) and their corresponding ellipse to form our color space, but no, the function fitting is a very slick idea, even if it was executed by hand.

Lastly, I love the presentation of sampling from different r values. Whether you sample from a fixed r value or a range of r values, I bet this has great applications in game design or animation.

I still don't quite get the manual data labeling process at the beginning? It seems like it would encode some bias, but the consistency of the first point cloud and the results certainly speak for themselves. — vermarish

Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04)

436 points | 197 comments

I imagined one of those automatic lawn mowers on a very sunny day, going about its own business cutting the grass. Until it arrived on the non-shielded side, and it kinda sags a bit and keels over into the black-charred ground on that side. A clean shadow between the un-touched grass, and the ground in directly in the path of the blast. Or maybe the charred ground is for later. We need to see the nice, automated kitchen first. And only then the rest of the world. Would be a very interesting short film, I think. — kebman

Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation

284 points | 69 comments

I would be curious if this can do moderation with an arbitrary ruleset, or if it's just "that one moderation style" we already know from current big tech platforms.

The kind where malicious intent is okay if the words are nice.

___

Or, rephrased: How big is the space in which you can tune this model without retraining.

Is it just "we hate sex"/"we don't hate sex" "We hate violence"/"we don't hate violence" or is it _truly_ as flexible as claimed?

__

Maybe something like "Is this guy a corporate fraud that is going to waste my time with performative nonsense?"

That would be the true test for a moderation model and I would be immensely impressed if it could manage to pull that off.

___

Edit: Looking at the paper though.. probably not.

I suppose this is useful for B2B, which seems to be mistrals whole thing. Question is just if it is also useful for society to hand the SV prefab morals down like that. Kinda like cultural imperialism but with an ethical spin.

Maybe opinions on those base datasets could occasionally differ more than the model can be steered. — hypfer

All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

342 points | 205 comments

> Police use the technology to investigate crimes such as hit-and-runs and to locate missing persons. > No suspects have been identified.

Yeah, that tracks.

> Camera data is owned by the police department and permanently deleted after 30 days.

I assume this means that the police department deletes one local copy? — jeremyberemy

DeepSeek V4 Flash on a Single AMD MI300X

275 points | 61 comments

I don't think you can buy a single "MI300X" unit, right? Only the box with x8 of these at a cost of ~250K EUR. — majke

Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

369 points | 146 comments

Lots of praise for Pi in this thread, so I'll offer up a diverging opinion. Given all the hype, I was a bit underwhelmed by Pi. It definitely has some good ideas around customization, but it annoyed me in many little ways.

For a program that's minimal it sure takes a long time to start up, the standard C-p and C-n bindings don't work, it doesn't follow the XDG Base Directory Specification and just pollutes my $HOME directory.

I think there's still space for another harness that's 1/ open-source, 2/ written in a fast compiled language (Rust, Go, etc.) and scriptable in a simple (aka non-JS) scripting language (Lua, etc.), 3/ less opinionated and more sensible so things like XDG isn't a WONTFIX. — paldepind2

U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war

335 points | 600 comments

>The U.S. Army has used up much of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during its five-month war with Iran, according to three people familiar with the data, raising concerns about the military’s readiness for future conflicts.

>The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources.

That quite a bit less of an issue than the headline implies. — laughing_man