digest · hn front page
Sat, Oct 3, 2026
60 stories · 17 worth reading in full
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Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city nytimes.com
Former Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin spent 12 years manually building a detailed city in Minecraft using a console controller.
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Kolibri: A Sovereign Open-Weight Model aleph-alpha.com
Aleph Alpha has released Kolibri, a 78B parameter open-weight Mixture-of-Experts model featuring a 3B active footprint, 1M context length, and a heavy focus on German language and European data sovereignty.
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Extra Big Ass Intelligence extrabigassintelligence.com
A satirical, AI-generated website mocking the current state of AI hype and modern web design.
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Newgrounds.com – A community of games, music, and art newgrounds.com
Newgrounds.com remains a functional archive of early internet games, music, and art, largely preserved through the Ruffle Flash emulator.
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Aleph Alpha Kolibri: How the sovereign German LLM works tej.as
Aleph Alpha released Kolibri, a 78-billion parameter mixture-of-experts open-weight LLM with 3.5 billion active parameters per token, optimized for German, long context, and regulatory compliance.
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Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance' techcrunch.com
A federal judge ruled that warrantless law enforcement searches of the Flock automated license plate reader database violate the Fourth Amendment, calling the technology indiscriminate mass surveillance.
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The Forgetful CPU (Linux on M4) yuka.dev
A developer details the reverse-engineering steps and fixes required to boot Linux on an M4 Mac mini, including bypassing locked registers and fixing the WFI instruction bug.
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Hole Punch: Sling your spaceship around gravitational fields notoriousbfg.com
Hole Punch is a browser-based physics puzzle game where players place black holes to sling a spaceship toward a target.
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ADHD, autism or complex trauma? [pdf] cambridge.org
Adults seeking ADHD or autism diagnoses often confuse neurodivergence with complex childhood trauma, which shares overlapping symptoms of executive dysfunction and social difficulty.
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Things that apparently cause cancer breakthroughjournal.org
A replication study applies a Harvard nuclear plant cancer methodology to arbitrary landmarks like Costco, revealing that the flawed proximity-score model absurdly proves everything causes cancer.
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Make Tmux the OS matduggan.com
A thought experiment on redesigning desktop operating systems around task-oriented, scrollable, tmux-like workspaces and AI-assisted layout management.
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Cloudflare OHTTP gateway blog.cloudflare.com
Cloudflare is launching a closed beta for its new OHTTP Gateway, allowing applications hosted on its infrastructure to receive Oblivious HTTP traffic securely.
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An Update on Orion for Linux and Windows blog.kagi.com
Kagi is ending development of Orion for Linux and Windows, open-sourcing the code, and refocusing its team on macOS and iOS.
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Getting the most out of Opus 5.5 in Claude and Claude Code claude.dev
Anthropic published a playbook detailing how to prompt and steer Opus 5.5 for long-running, multi-step coding tasks in Claude Code.
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Celebrating the 100th birthday of the kidney donated to him as a teenager whec.com
A New York man is marking the 100th anniversary of his late mother's birth, whose donated kidney has been functioning for 48 years.
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FTL: A new operating system for clouds ftl-os.org
FTL is a new cloud operating system and kernel that implements OS features as a shared userspace library, offering Linux binary compatibility with enhanced container isolation.
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The Escalation of War in Ethiopia africanistperspective.com
A renewed outbreak of large-scale fighting in northern Ethiopia threatens to reignite a catastrophic civil war driven by elite hubris and structural flaws.
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C++ Insights – See your source code with the eyes of a Compiler github.com
C++ Insights is a Clang-based tool that transforms C++ source code into a version that reveals compiler-generated functions and implicit casts.
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City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2 radical-elements.com
Modern city builders lack visual soul because their environments are excessively flat, clean, and sanitized compared to real urban spaces.
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Woking Electrical Control Room (2016) darbiansphotography.com
Built in 1936 for the Southern Rail network, the Woking electrical control room features a well-preserved Art Deco oval design and was decommissioned in 1997.
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I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken theatlantic.com
An ex-OpenAI safety team member published an Atlantic article explaining their resignation over compromised safety culture, sparking HN debate over insider motives.
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What is going on with ceiling fans mcmansionhell.com
Modern ceiling fans suffer from non-replaceable integrated LEDs, flaky proprietary remotes, and impractical aesthetic trends that prioritize form over longevity and function.
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Reasons I didn't become an EMT, ranked ben.stolovitz.com
A software engineer details the twenty-one reasons they delayed getting an EMT certification, concluding that fear of trying something new was the primary obstacle.
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Kolibri – Tech Report [pdf] aleph-alpha.com
Aleph Alpha released Kolibri, a 78.1B parameter open-weights English-German Mixture-of-Experts model featuring 3.46B active parameters and a 1 million token context.
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We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare blog.cloudflare.com
Cloudflare is running a competition offering $25,000 in credits for developers to build a Git platform tailored for AI agents using its Artifacts storage.
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Barcodes are about to go extinct thehustle.co
GS1's Sunrise 2027 initiative is driving the retail industry to replace traditional 1D barcodes with 2D QR codes carrying structured URLs for better tracking and consumer data.
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Pop!_OS bans AI-generated code from much of its codebase neowin.net
System76 has banned AI-generated code across major parts of its Pop!_OS and COSMIC codebases to combat a flood of low-quality pull requests.
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Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict cosmowenman.substack.com
France's highest court ruled that the Rodin Museum can withhold public domain 3D scans under freedom of information laws, concluding they are part of its inalienable collection.
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LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents fortune.com
Yann LeCun dismisses artificial intelligence existential risk as toxic paranoia driven by effective altruism and regulatory capture, arguing that recent rogue incidents are simply failures of human engineering.
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Big Balls Now Exposed to Serious Criminal Charges in at Least Six States medium.com
A figure nicknamed 'Big Balls' faces criminal charges across six states, sparking debate on whether prosecuting low-level actors achieves real accountability.
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Show HN: Pi pod – Run your pi coding agent in sandboxes on your own server pipod.dev
Pi pod is a self-hosted environment for running the pi coding agent in isolated containers with support for mobile apps and team configuration.
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Show HN: Offrun – manage every coding agent from one workspace offrun.dev
Offrun is a new macOS workspace application designed to manage, monitor, and switch between multiple AI coding agent CLIs using isolated git worktrees.
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The Nintendo 64 Partner-N64 Development Kit behindthecode.ca
An examination of the Nintendo 64 Partner-N64 development kit, detailing its hardware modifications, software breakpoints, and workarounds for testing 64DD games.
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GitHub's new dashboard experience now the default github.blog
GitHub's redesigned dashboard, which prioritizes personal issues and pull requests over the social activity feed and integrates Copilot agent shortcuts, is now the default view.
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Show HN: Our space game has a built-in RISC-V emulator that runs Linux againstallodds.games
The developers of the space game SEEDS built an open-source, in-house RISC-V emulator called PasRISCV that runs Alpine Linux inside the game using a hybrid JIT interpreter.
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Vx – One Language, Every Chip vxlang.org
Vx is a new systems programming language that incorporates hardware memory topology and heterogeneous accelerators directly into its type system to catch memory and transfer bugs at compile time.
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Why should I have to pay more for buses if I don't use a smartphone? theguardian.com
App-exclusive monthly bus passes penalize non-smartphone users, forcing them to pay hundreds extra annually for public transit.
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Two American Airlines Flights End Up with the Same Flight Numbers aviationa2z.com
Due to scheduling disruptions and the reuse of four-digit flight numbers, two American Eagle flights operated simultaneously with identical callsigns.
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New York City should carefully measure a new tree blog.willmeye.rs
Using recent LiDAR data, an author identifies new candidate trees in New York City that might surpass the Queens Giant as the city's tallest measured tree.
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OKI Develops 124-Layer PCB Technology oki.com
OKI developed a 124-layer PCB technology for AI semiconductor wafer inspection equipment, increasing layer count by 15% over previous 108-layer designs.
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Billions of triangles redux zeux.io
Arseny Kapoulkine details meshoptimizer updates for NVIDIA's 1.6-billion-triangle Zorah scene, covering glTF compression, permissive simplification, and attribute error clamping.
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Understanding Frontier Artificial Intelligence casp.ac
Commenters debate the plausibility of an intelligence explosion driven by automated AI research, highlighting limits in hardware, evaluation, and domain-specific intelligence.
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Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too? sjg.io
A developer over-engineered a trash bin tracking system using ultra-wideband radio tags, custom nRF52 firmware, and Home Assistant to automate collection reminders.
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NTSB Preliminary Report: Prime Air 767 Runway Overrun [pdf] ntsb.gov
The NTSB preliminary report on a Prime Air Boeing 767 runway overrun details an unstable approach with touchdown far past the threshold at excessive speed.
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Holes (1996-2025) plato.stanford.edu
This Stanford Encyclopedia entry explores the ontology and epistemology of holes, examining whether they are real immaterial entities or merely linguistic conveniences.
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Memory-Safe WebP Decoding halide.cx
Halide released wpd, a memory-safe WebP decoder written in Rust that outperforms libwebp while maintaining full feature parity.
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RSS Feed Best Practices (2022) kevincox.ca
A comprehensive guide outlines technical best practices for publishing reliable RSS and Atom feeds, recommending Atom for its clarity and absolute URLs for compatibility.
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Body Awareness in Goffin's Cockatoos nature.com
A new study investigates body awareness in Goffin's cockatoos, examining how these birds account for their physical dimensions when navigating obstacles.
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MPEG-2 Transport Streams and MOQ: Yes, MPEG-TS Is Still Relevant Today red5.net
An IETF draft packaging MPEG-2 Transport Streams for Media over QUIC aims to bridge modern streaming protocols with massive legacy broadcast infrastructure.
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Scientists invent underwater umbrellas to protect coral reefs gizmodo.com
Researchers tested seabed-mounted shade canopies in the Florida Keys and found they reduced light exposure by 60% and mitigated coral bleaching during marine heatwaves.
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On building a worm detector bencology.bearblog.dev
The author examines the lack of technology for tracking subterranean earthworm movements and brainstorms potential methods, such as probe-based sensors, to map them at scale.
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Where Is the Planet whereistheplanet.com
A web tool provides coordinates for directly imaged exoplanets, though amateur equipment cannot actually resolve them.
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Show HN: Graphene – Data analysis toolkit for your coding agent github.com
Graphene is an everything-as-code data analytics framework designed for coding agents to execute SQL queries and build dashboards.
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How to hack time, with C2PA da.vidbuchanan.co.uk
David Buchanan demonstrates a C2PA specification vulnerability where arbitrary file exclusions let attackers modify media after signing while keeping cryptographic timestamps valid.
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Docker has always used microVMs (well since 2016) dave.recoil.org
Docker Desktop for Mac and Windows has used a lightweight, single-purpose VM layer via LinuxKit and hyperkit since 2015, predating modern microVM hype.
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There's a new sea spider in town nautil.us
Researchers discovered two new sea spider species, Callipallene pilosuspedes and Tanystylum kiixin, in the Salish Sea, marking the first regional discovery in a century.
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Gboard Conveyor Belt Version github.com
Google Japan open-sourced the design files, firmware, and 3D printable models for the Gboard Conveyor Belt Version.
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More like SC-Forth-thousand, am I right? leadedsolder.com
A developer ports CamelForth-80 to a homemade Sega SG-1000 clone for a retrocomputing challenge, detailing assembler adjustments and custom VDP scrolling.
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The Softmax function and its derivative eli.thegreenplace.net
Eli Bendersky provides a thorough mathematical breakdown of the softmax function, its Jacobian derivative, numerical stability considerations, and its application with cross-entropy loss in machine learning.
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Automating my 35mm film scanning pipeline shannadige.com
A developer built an automated Python and local AI pipeline to invert, color-correct, and remove dust from 35mm film scans, reducing a four-hour manual task.