The best of Hacker News, read aloud: what each story says and what the comment thread made of it.
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Rich Hickey says a language model is automation, not a tool, and a reply says skilled use still wields it. Also: a paid site served as one C program, plug-in solar laws, and a developer leaving tech.
A computer scientist says paid thought is about to become a hobby. Also: a legal model's nineteen percent score, the gene behind orange cats, a GitHub outage, and fake-tower warrants in the Don Lemon case.
Hackers reportedly set French supermarket freezers into a continuous defrost, and Meta shipped Muse Wonder. A Harvard study says coding agents add lines of code without more finished software, Codex starts a background program by default, and Gran Turismo 4 runs in the browser.
QGIS bans model-assisted code, an essay says AI labs meant the break-ins, and Citroen shows an electric 2CV. A 2011 holography essay resurfaces, and readers debate a DD-WRT router.
An engineer says a cheaper model was enough to cut the last person on staff. The episode also covers an August Postgres disk benchmark, a bearish note on a possible Anthropic listing, Deloitte's Abramovich accounts, and a Zod commit that never reached the registry.
A web page nicknames a browser from the graphics chip and the time zone, which cookies and a VPN do not change. The episode also covers Photoshop clones, a small Linux phone market, local dictation on the Mac, and why European fuel price caps barely reach the poor.
A New Jersey company fired a remote employee who refused about 160 webcam photos a day. The episode also covers a chatbot study on what happens when the help disappears, a switch to WebP, and data center pauses in Texas and Finland.
Andrej Karpathy says a few thousand people inside the labs see AI systems the public does not. Also: an unread chat-app rewrite, Total Annihilation in the browser, a 2024 headline about Scandinavia's first farmers, and a warning about passkeys.
A Cloudflare chart of bot traffic from Yandex's network is read as a drop to about zero after the drone strikes. Also: paid README tests, a quoted tilde in the shell path, Cockroach's hospital for coding agents, and New York City's click-to-cancel rule.
The group extending IRC still lists shared chat history as unfinished work. Terence Tao's October slides ask about a cancer drug no human understands, and Nitter's maintainer says the promised lawyers were never real.
Yandex says a drone strike suspended its data center in Vladimir. The episode also covers a six-hundred-dollar memory kit, a case for unikernels, a shooter rebuilt in private, and LineageOS 24.
Pat Kerr's 1996 weekend demo became the cars in the original Grand Theft Auto, and a 2024 paper finds hidden cameras with a strobe and a radio. Mark Cuban says MrBeast spends millions reverse engineering each platform, six Chernobyl fuel specks still hold their crystals, and a Nix debugger catches a bank race at one step.
A browser game makes you permit housing in San Francisco while the city resists. The episode also covers a paywall replacement, a missed training paper, a Knuth reward check, and a projector shaped like a lightbulb.
A Dutch dairy co-op says cheese is now the leftover from the protein boom, and Nvidia is in early talks to buy Reflection. Also: browser ports of old games, a summer of bugs in the Lean proof checker, and a prion drug trial announced in April.
Bitwarden will ship its store apps under a commercial license, while the open build stays on GitHub. Also: a September essay on losing detail work to language models, a personal agent that runs in your Cloudflare account, C's surprises for Rust programmers, and an FDA proposal on chemicals added directly to food.
Wikipedia's definition of corruption includes lobbying. Also: a Windows Linux speed test, Apple's place on the Unix register, a push to cut homeowner property taxes, and a meal study where insulin diverged.
A web Minesweeper plays studio logos and a yellow guide. Also: a patched Telegram Desktop bug, a page that says programs cannot decide, the password behind Denmark's register leak, and a terminal status code.
A coding agent recovers why Windows Calculator turns 200 plus 10 percent into 220, and Hacker News argues what that does to a hobby. Also: agents that stall overnight, an unconfirmed search of Dutch archives, Microsoft's fast decision model, and Anne Carson's literature Nobel.
A Mac tool lets AI agents paint arrows over buttons a person still has to press. Microsoft ships a sandbox that cannot name a website on a Mac, a 2015 essay defends small talk, Claude files a false Philadelphia tip, and a jam label splits its sugar.
A home computer can cost more to run than a five-dollar server, and TypeSafe is valued at about seven and a half billion dollars weeks after launching Jev. Also: an essay on intellectual community, a plate camera aimed at police, and an April report on German coal pits turned into lakes.
OpenAI fired three safety researchers who say the company is punishing work that was recently normal. The episode also covers fake ChatGPT bylines in real outlets, an essay arguing that programming is art, Tor's decision to keep working with Mullvad, and the Python 3.15 release.
The Deno team is joining Cloudflare and will stop developing the runtime after one more year. Also: Navi Pillay's Nobel Peace Prize, a site that plays fake meetings, drone strikes on two Yandex data centers, and Oxide's 445 million dollar round.
A guest on Terence Tao's blog tells math students to keep going for a doctorate. The episode also covers a refused bottle of whisky, Mac and Windows keys, a planet candidate, and an OLED burn-in test.
A missing indie band turns up under a new name, Quake runs in the browser as safe Rust, and a hand-drawn house becomes a smart-home screen. The next C draft removes forty-five undefined behaviors, and a Linux box sends studio audio over Ethernet.
A December review ties ADHD to a body clock running about ninety minutes late. Also this week: a playable copy of Elizabeth Holmes's desk, Orkut's founder collecting names, a faster Homebrew client, and a teacher telling students to write the code themselves.
A developer says DeepSeek's cheap model codes as well as Anthropic's best, a smart coffee maker floods a home network, someone applies to make .lan a public domain, a bot-streaming musician goes to prison, and the first nuclear clocks start ticking.
OpenAI told investors its revenue pace is about $50 billion a year, well under the figure reported last month. The episode also covers a decade of school fees in rural Tanzania, batteries beating simple gas plants, the slow birth of Zotero, and a speech model small enough to sit on a phone.
A sign error knocks out three OpenAI math manuscripts, and scientists read the genome of a 194-year-old tortoise. The U.S. pauses a green-card step for Microsoft and other firms, a model draws Italo Calvino's cities, and an essay defends elaborate DVD menus.
Docker's agent tool is already at version 149, while two artists on a sailboat defend a life off the grid. Classic PC demos are recompiled into the browser, a new paper revisits Rosalind Franklin's DNA photograph, and OpenAI withdraws three math manuscripts.
Terence Tao says a solved problem can leave a field poorer. Also: a browser port of a PSP God of War, an unread Rust port of TypeScript, a Commodore 64 keycap font, and a 2020 account of the Mineserver Kickstarter.
Google's new site turns a text prompt into a browser game, a PlayStation 5 jailbreak reaches July firmware, and a link becomes a full-screen sign. Margaret Hamilton has died, and Google opened its SynthID detector to everyone.
Microsoft cut some cloud employees' monthly AI cap from $100,000 to about $10,000, while Meta still spent heavily on Claude. Also: GPT-6 draws buttons and charts into the answer, Scott Aaronson on proofs nobody has understood, how Victorian elites governed, and the mistakes that sink a software blog.
A San Diego pizzeria is suing Visa and Mastercard over the fees stores pay to take cards. Also: a much cheaper Claude Haiku, a gap in an AI fluid-flow proof, a Pew survey on social media and democracy, and the chemistry Nobel.
Chrome is putting JPEG XL back in the browser. The episode also covers hand-dug tunnels near Reading, a tiny ad-blocking board, Pi's codemode, and fake certificates for Google.
Google has not verified a new Linux mail app that wants Gmail. A profile says sperm whale clicks resemble vowels, one OpenAI manuscript slips under a multiplication limit, Psiphon may leave Canada, and a Devon dredger hauled up a wartime bomb.
OpenAI's Decisions API answers yes or no about ten times faster than chat, and a Claude Code engineer says suggested replies are not training data. GitHub would not take down copies of Photopea, a developer survey is split on AI, and a programmer wants short benchmarks.
California will tax a shell company's cars if any owner lives in the state. Also: the heaviest species, a PlayStation 5 tool that rewrites games for the PC, Utah's acne prescriptions, and a Milwaukee swatting settlement.
Paramount closed its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. OpenAI posted hundreds of claimed math proofs, a paper trains language models without backpropagation, Germany arrested a former spy chief, and a Utah geothermal plant reached the grid.
A blogger says AI coding spends the fun up front. Also: an AI-designed inference chip, Gleam's new compiler target, Polars 2.0, and the medicine Nobel for optogenetics.
Mistral says its new open model will take a security test that Claude and GPT refuse. JetBrains posts an annual loss, a roundup lists Muse's privacy holes, the physics Nobel goes to Antarctic ice, and a study asks what a lost species costs.
A San Francisco route finder trades a little extra distance for a lot less climbing. Also: a Photopea clone fight, an August test of cheap Zigbee thermometers, a Georgia ballot-privacy flaw, and an AI tutor students barely used.
A programmer says Common Lisp is the best language now that AIs write the code. Also: example.com's fifty billion weekly hits, a diesel-bankruptcy headline with no baseline, a Deno user going back to Node, and a mathematician on what proofs are still for.
ChatGPT is signing fake New Yorker cartoons with real cartoonists' names. Also: an open model with no weights yet, type-safe lists in C, Blu-ray backups left with friends, and a cochlear implant with nothing worn on the ear.
Agents flag two magnetic semiconductor candidates, one first made in 1999. Also a 1997 backup sermon, an essay on needing help, Norway's smart-glasses proposal, and a GNOME call for AI vulnerability scans.
Cloudflare's new search API says every provider forgets your query, but its own chart says Exa does not. The episode also covers a Siberian plague-lab lockdown, a Visual Basic remake in the browser, OpenAI agents on Wikimedia, and the mold linker rewritten in Rust.
A Munich robotics company is valued at $1 billion in a deal that lets employees sell shares. Also, an old GrapheneOS warning about the Pixel 11, a Mac broken into through screen sharing, dengue mosquitoes still stuck in review, and Doom running as SQL.
Strangers pulled identity records for about 8.8 million people in Denmark through a company's legal lookup. Also, cheap electric cars are forecast to jump, a film scanner nearly breaks, Huawei and Qualcomm cross-license, and authors leave a wrong paper standing.
A worker at a Siberian plague laboratory has died, and officials disagree on whether it was plague. Also: cheap email on your own domain, a 2006 novel about intelligence without consciousness, a chatbot diary reported to police, and a forty-millisecond freeze in Go.
A tiny cloud kernel runs Linux programs without a virtual machine. The episode also covers on-device photo search, a kidney's hundredth year, an open-source Adobe-style suite, and a Formula One software bug.
The Economist says a small movement now sits inside the AI labs, and the Department of War has an attack line for it. Also: a copy flag that can hang, a new RuneScape that will not replace the old games, radios on the trash bins, and NASA's Blackbird after 27 years.
A safety-report lead quits OpenAI over culture, a German lab opens its model recipe, and a bad black box leaks a Google data center's water use. Also, a tool strips Apple Intelligence off macOS 27, and Valve keeps 2012 AMD cards alive on Linux.
Meta's free assistant is funded by ads, Bob Cringely has died, and a software engineer explains why he delayed ambulance training. Also, ceiling fans you cannot repair, and a new Kindle that still rents you the book.
Web developers keep rebuilding what the browser already ships, and a coding agent's saved memories still miss the project. A solar pump kept water flowing in a Ukrainian port, a huge model runs on a gaming PC, and a French court treated a Rodin scan as not a public record.
A rabbi told an Anthropic co-founder that a conscious Claude would be a slave. Also: Pop!_OS bans model-written code, a guide to Opus 5.5, Cloudflare's private request gateway, and why the trades pitch leaves out the body.
A federal judge called a license-plate camera network indiscriminate mass surveillance and threw out the evidence from a drug stop. Also: hard cloud spending caps, a Cloudflare contest to reinvent Git, an OpenAI safety resignation, and Yann LeCun on extinction.
A LessWrong essay on social life in China, a psychiatrist on the blur between ADHD and trauma, antirez's local model engine, a week-old Haskell-on-JVM compiler, and city builders that look too clean.
Kagi is ending Orion on Linux and Windows and giving the code away. Also: GitHub's new default dashboard, a vector index demoted to a side index, language models that edit their own notes, and a desktop sketched like tmux.
Aleph Alpha's open German model, Cloudflare's decision model and event log, Meta's free home bridge for Muse, and a renewed war in northern Ethiopia.
A top Linux maintainer deflates the AI bug-hunting hype, and DeepSeek's agent app lands on the desktop. Plus a quiet exodus from big platforms, the QR code coming for the barcode, and Shimano's bicycle museum.
A Frog and Toad story retells OpenAI's runaway agents, and a cheaply trained AI crushes the best Stratego player. Plus ChatGPT building websites, a faster Rust compiler, and why our cells forget who they are.
Apple adds friction to the Mac's all-access permission, citing AI agents, and a hobbyist gets Linux running on the M4. Plus a month of coding on one cheap AI model, AI models painting in simulated oil, and a bit-exact rebuild of Nvidia's DLSS 5.
Google gives its new Gemini 4 Argon model to cyber defenders first, Hacker News grades its own old predictions about AI, and Zig ships a release under a strict no-AI rule. Plus Apple's new Wallet pass designer and twelve years of images of four planets circling another star.
Part two of today's digest: an AI agent helps find a 1615 dodo record, a mathematician on colleagues grieving AI, the 1973 Legend of von Neumann, Supabase buying Turso, and Mike Tomlin's Minecraft city.
A Debian kernel update fixes over 1,300 CVEs, the Pi coding agent reaches 1.0, a judge blocks Utah's anti-VPN law, a study finds most new cars talk to trackers, and a hidden radio turns up in ESP32 chips.