1741
Gateway 2000's hilariously bad ads in the 90s (Part II)
What started as endearingly bootstrapped marketing descended into soulless corporate sales.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,795 posts.
1742
Timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face
OpenAI gave a last-minute presentation at the Black Hat security on Wednesday about “the Hugging Face Incident” (previously on this blog). The video was published yesterday. It’s short and information …
1743
Making an AI bid writer refuse to lie
A year of failure postmortems from building document AI for public tenders: phantom partners, silent coverage collapses, broken truth-meters, and why the refusal became the product.
1744
DeepMind's WeatherNext model achieves breakthrough forecasting cyclones
WeatherNext enables accurate cyclone forecasts that can give an extra day of warning. Now we are open sourcing the model.
1745
Super Mario Derivations
One of the most surprising aspects of the Nix language is that it is lazy, especially if you have never used a lazy language before. This laziness is what makes much of Nixpkgs possible, and its complexity.
1746
App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours
My disdain for astrology is so utter, and my esteem for Godier’s previous work so high, that it simply never occurred to me that he might have actually made and submitted to the App Store an astrology app, let alone that he’d then feign surprise and frustration that an astrology app was rejected for being an astrology…
1747
Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale
AI coding tools deliver immense value: at Databricks, agentic coding has measurably improved every velocity metric we track and, in some teams, driven an order-of-magnitude gains in output. But nearly every company deploying AI tools at scale has hit the same wall: exponentially growing costs.
1748
Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
Trickle-down economic policies are destined to fail, research suggests. David Hope explains why the issue is so controversial.
1749
Responding to the next frontier of critical cyber capabilities
OpenAI is sharing preliminary cybersecurity evaluations for Astra and the steps we’re taking to strengthen safeguards and security controls.
1750
Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word
The Akihabara institution that every Japanese maker knows — run on cash, instinct, and one founder’s restless curiosity
1751
An all-sky map of half a million supermassive black holes
The Black Hole Mapper reaches a milestone with its first southern hemisphere optical observations, coordinated eROSITA X-ray identification, and multi-epoch tracking of accreting black holes across the universe.
1752
A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website
A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website. What I tried, how I failed, and what's working now.
1753
Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD
Last week we released version 0.2 of pgrust. This release was all about performance. It’s 10x faster than the previous version of pgrust. On OLTP benchmarks, pgrust is 30% faster than Postgres, and on Clickbench, Clickhouse’s benchmark for analytical databases, pgrust is 300x faster than Postgres. It’s even ahead of…
1754
Kitesurf: Agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates
We should be giving all agents tools that excel at what’s important for an AI model. Kitesurf is Cloudflare’s new stateless, highly scalable, and cost-effective web browser that runs entirely on top of Workers and was designed specifically for the Agentic Cloud.
1755
Welcoming the Nepalese Government to Have I Been Pwned
Today, we welcome the 47th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Nepal. Their National Cyber Security Centre now has access to monitor Nepalese government domains against the data in HIBP. This gives the NCSC the ability to identify exposure across government email addresses and respond
1756
Inside vLLM: Anatomy of a High-Throughput LLM Inference System (2025)
From paged attention, continuous batching, prefix caching, specdec, etc. to multi-GPU, multi-node dynamic serving at scale.
1757
What is a product?
It is far too easy to create software these days, but what is the difference between a side project and a real product?
1758
Quake – 30th Anniversary Update
To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Quake, we have collaborated with MachineGames to create a new episode, Dawn of the Machine, now available as a free update to Quake.
1759
xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout
An artisanal, free range blog. GMO-free. Sincere always, expect for the rare occasion. No AI was used in the making of this site or its content.
1760
Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open
Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime is Apache-2.0 and stays open, and here is what the funding is actually for.
1761
Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
Earlier this year we published a puzzle that handed you a complete neural network and asked you to figure out what it did. The response was great, so we’ve made another one! This time, we’re going much deeper down the tech stack.
1762
Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users
ChatGPT introduces improved GPT-5.6 Sol with better accuracy and consistency, plus expanded access for free users and unlimited everyday chats with GPT-5.6 Luna.
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1764
Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak
Why AI can make software development faster without replacing the judgment and understanding needed to build consistently good software.
1765
A shell exclamation mark is not for yelling. Be lazy
Event designators have been hiding in not-so-plain-sight since the late 1970s — so powerful that forgetting might be part of a massive conspiracy to wear out developer keyboards faster than otherwise.
1766
Faster floating point math with Rust's new API
Compilers have a hard time optimizing floating point math. Rust has a new API to fix this.
1767
Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs
Results from AI agent permission game: which attacks beat human reviewers, and which safe commands got blocked instead.
1768
What I love about Django
The best parts of Django are the ones you stop noticing — a tour of the abstractions that have given Buttondown the most leverage over the years.
1769
Let's all meet up in the Y2K
Back in 2024 I posted a few of these on Twitter (thread reader) after digging out old photos from the dot-com boom. I was working in London at a digital agen...
1770
The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing
Appreciating typography is a study in paradox. The primary goal of well-designed typography is to help you read the words, not appreciate how the words are comp