541
Pointing AI at archives found a forgotten meteorite, lost rhinos, and more
How I used AI to investigate millions of historical records and surfaced a forgotten meteorite report, three lost rhinos, and unrecorded volcano eruptions.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,787 posts.
542
Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navanethem Pillay
The Nobel Peace Prize 2026 was awarded to Navanethem Pillay "for her efforts to promote peace and international law"
543
Programming Isn't Special
Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?
544
Nix wrote half of my debugger
A few days ago I wrote about Rewind VM, a deterministic VM where every run of a Nix build is a pure function of its inputs, thread schedule included! I have been using it to find, reproduce and solve numerous race conditions in Nix builds, but it’s been making me feel a little crazy. What is this superpower, and why…
545
Mxc: Microsoft Execution Containers version 1.0.0
Agents are unlocking enormous productivity gains for customers, but their ability to work across files, networks, and applications can introduce new security risks. This can leave customers feeling like they only have two choices: give agents unrestr
546
Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
A blog about software craft and quality
547
What should we tell our students?
[This is a guest post by Álvaro Lozano-Robledo. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] TL;DR: Keep calm and carry on studying math. I wo…
548
OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics
By the time I got out of bed yesterday, I had three people ask me if I'd seen the OpenAI announcement that the Partition Principle does not (...)
549
Bevy 0.20
Thanks to 227 contributors, 817 pull requests, community reviewers, and our generous donors, we're happy to announce the Bevy 0.20 release on crates.i…
550
AI-ready biological data: $1.8B global commitment
Biohub, DOE, NIH, and partners will generate open, standardized data to train AI models that predict how cells respond to interventions.
551
The value of not getting to the point (2015)
I read somewhere recently, I forget where, that the purpose of people getting together for a conversation over a beer or coffee or lunch or dinner is that it the food and drink spare us from the burden of needing to have something to say throughout the whole conversation.
552
Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB
An open speech recognition model that runs on the same CPU engine as Needle. It transcribes seven languages, reaches the first token in 11 ms, and loads beside Needle so one binary turns a clip straight into tool calls.
553
Step 5 Preview, a 1M-context MoE from StepFun, shows up on OpenRouter
Step 5 Preview is StepFun's flagship model for agentic work, built on a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture (27B active / 600B total parameters).
554
C for Rust programmers
Interesting and unexpected details for Rust programmers learning the C programming language.
555
Beauty in DVD Menus
The best part of digital video disc isn't the video.
556
I gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities
Claude Opus 5.5 vs GPT-6 Astra one-shot Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino in Three.js: AI design, UX, data visualization and explorable explanations.
557
Yes, and
In this essay, Carson Gross discusses his advice to young people interested in computer science worried about the future given the advancements in AI.
558
The people holding up the internet
Four billion phones ask one text file what time it is, kept by a UCLA lecturer in his spare time. We counted who maintains the code under your phone.
559
Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?
thoughts, talks, docs and unpopular opinions
560
Margaret Hamilton has died
Margaret H. Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died at age 90.
561
WSL3 Performance is about 5-60% faster than WSL2 depending on the workload
With the release of the WSL 3.x stack, Microsoft bumped the default virtualization runtime and advanced the shipped guest kernel from the 6.6 LTS branch up to 6.18. WSL upgrades often claim generalized performance gains, but marketing bullet points rarely translate directly to developer workloads. To see what actually…
562
The Mathocalypse
More Updates (Oct. 12): Jeffrey Ketchersid has used Claude Code agents to show that BusyBeaver(10) exceeds Graham’s number, beating the previous best result that BB(13) does so. In response t…
563
Eye of Sauron: Long-Range Hidden Spy Camera Detection (2024)
Qibo Zhang and Daibo Liu, Hunan University; Xinyu Zhang, University of California San Diego; Zhichao Cao, Michigan State University; Fanzi Zeng, Hongbo Jiang, and Wenqiang Jin, Hunan University
564
Push ifs up and fors down: The idiom, its algebra, and its limits
Tiger Style and matklad recommend pushing ifs up and fors down. This post looks at what the idiom actually says, where it shows up in query optimization and in the algebra of functional programs, and where the analogy stops paying for itself.
565
Claude Haiku 5.5
Claude Haiku 5.5 is our fastest, most capable small model. Built for high-volume work like summarization, subagents, and browser use.
566
GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone
GPT‑6 is rolling out globally in ChatGPT with Intelligent UI, delivering faster responses with visuals and interactive experiences you can explore and use directly.
567
Across the Globe, People Increasingly Say Social Media Is Harming Democracy
Most think social media leads to manipulation and division, but they also say it informs people and gives them a voice in politics.
568
Anti-patterns in software blogging
Effective writing for software developers
569
2D Vehicles
Explore my 1996 vehicle physics prototype, recreated for the web as Motion Lab.
570
Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome
JPEG XL offers better compression than JPEG, built-in HDR support, lossless JPEG transcoding, and more.