The newest HackerNews stories, desensationalized.

The piece argues that Common Lisp is especially suitable for LLM-assisted programming because its image-based, interactive environment minimizes rebuilds, preserves debugger state, and allows code changes to resume execution. Lisp’s homoiconicity and macros also enable domain-specific languages, which the author believes can preserve product-specific design decisions as users customize software. Concise code may reduce token costs and fit more program context into an LLM’s window, while Common Lisp’s stable standard can limit breakage. The author considers its smaller package ecosystem and hiring difficulty manageable because LLMs can write or port missing components and capable engineers can learn the language. The argument assumes these benefits outweigh concerns about runtime performance, infrastructure, maintainability, and the risks of user-directed changes.

Reflection introduced Beam, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 501 billion total parameters and 23 billion active, aimed at coding, reasoning, and agentic workloads. It was pretrained on 23.8 trillion curated tokens and trained with more than 100 million reinforcement-learning rollouts across 10,500 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs over four weeks. The company reports competitive coding and reasoning results against several large open models, with comparable scores using three to four times less inference compute than GLM-5.2. Beam supports adjustable reasoning effort and reportedly generalizes tool-use skills across browsing, software, research, and other tasks. Reflection describes asynchronous policy-gradient training, nearly one million curated environments, large-scale sandbox infrastructure, stable MoE optimization, long-context midtraining, extensive data filtering, and separate safety alignment. Weights, technical documentation, evaluations, and developer tools are planned under Apache 2.0 later this month, while current access is limited.

A browser-based tool computes San Francisco walking and biking routes over more than 160,000 street segments using 1-meter USGS lidar elevation and Overture/OpenStreetMap data. Its slider exposes the Pareto frontier between distance and cumulative elevation gain, from the shortest route to routes where additional walking is no longer worthwhile for reducing climbs. Walking routes allow stairs, biking routes exclude them, and place search works offline with built-in local data. The project includes source code, datasets, and a detailed analysis. The method is technically useful, but reported results include implausible detours, missed flatter streets, discontinuities, and routes that save little climbing while imposing dangerously steep grades or uncomfortable traffic conditions.

Researchers used AI agents to search materials and run density-functional-theory calculations for Luttinger-compensated magnets, which have zero net magnetism but spin-separated electronic states. They designed YBaMnFeO₅, predicting a 2.35 eV band gap, large spin windows, and magnetic order above room temperature, but its required Mn–Fe ordering may collapse during synthesis. They also identified KV[Cr(CN)₆], a Prussian-blue-related compound synthesized in 1999, as a stronger candidate because its metal sites are chemically fixed. Calculations predict a 2.1 eV band gap and large spin windows, while the historical sample remained magnetically ordered to 376 K. However, water in the sample may reduce performance, and neither its band gap nor spin sorting has been measured. The work provides computational candidates and public reproducibility materials, not experimentally verified devices or newly synthesized compounds.

Example.com is a reserved IANA domain intended for documentation, not dependable testing or monitoring. On September 28, 2026, its page began using JavaScript to rotate English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish explanations every five seconds, with staggered character opacity transitions and an inserted SVG book icon. IANA said the split between basic HTML and optional JavaScript reduces bandwidth because much traffic is automated, while preserving information for human visitors. The page has evolved from an ICANN and IANA domain list in 2002 through simplified wording, RFC 2606 references, redesigns, CDN migrations, Cloudflare hosting, minification, and a data-URI favicon that prevents unnecessary favicon requests. Monitoring data shows occasional failures, reinforcing that operators should use infrastructure they control. The timeline also includes long periods without changes and page-speed analysis based on CrUX data.

Dust is a zeroth-order optimizer that trains transformers without a backward pass by adding independent Gaussian noise to each linear layer’s activations at every token, scoring perturbations through token-level loss changes, and using reward-weighted noise to estimate output errors and weight updates. Because tokens act as virtual population members, one forward pass evaluates thousands of perturbations in parallel, making Dust roughly 1,000 to 10,000 times more efficient than the weight-space EGGROLL baseline in the authors’ extrapolations. On small GPT-style models trained on FineWeb, Dust approaches backpropagation as population size increases and sometimes achieves lower test loss, although it is not currently compute-efficient enough to replace backpropagation. Larger models were generally more population-efficient, with a 243M-parameter model outperforming a model 120 times smaller at most populations, while estimated gradients increasingly aligned with backpropagation across training scales up to 1B tokens. The authors suggest Dust may enable optimization of nondifferentiable or recurrent architectures and may explore directions beyond ordinary gradients, but leave compute efficiency and the mechanism behind any gains unresolved.

A deterministic ballot-labeling algorithm in some Dominion scanners can be reversed to recover ballot-cast order, undermining secrecy when combined with public early-voting lists, cast-vote records, check-in data, poll watchers, or other timing information. Using public Georgia records and a coding agent costing about $20, the author reconstructed the order of 1.52 million in-person ballots, or 98.9% of those examined, across 114 of 139 counties in the May 2026 primary. Public files alone uniquely matched about 1% of early in-person voters; audit logs and check-in timestamps enabled much broader voter-to-ballot matching in counties including Heard and Cherokee. The vulnerability was disclosed in 2022 and fixed software was certified in 2023, but adoption remained incomplete. The author recommends installing Dominion software version 5.17 or newer before the next election and reassessing disclosure timelines because AI agents greatly reduce the expertise needed to exploit known flaws.

After returning to Node.js for a SvelteKit project, the author found modern ECMAScript support, improved APIs, built-in TypeScript execution, and package-management options such as FNM and PNPM substantially better than remembered. PNPM settings were used to delay dependency updates and restrict install behavior, while TypeScript packages still require compilation before publication because Node.js does not strip types inside node_modules. Migrating a Deno static-site generator required replacing Deno filesystem, server, and path APIs, yet builds became about 15% faster. The author attributes leaving Deno to broken shell integration, JSR rate limits, and concurrent-request bugs, and argues that Node has caught up or surpassed it. The discussion highlights Deno’s integrated test, lint, type-checking, and publishing workflow, while others cite Node’s stability, Bun’s appeal, Deno’s desktop support, portability concerns, and the growing influence of AI-assisted development on runtime choices.

Cloudflare launched Web Search API in beta for agents and applications needing live internet results, with Ceramic.ai, Exa, and Linkup available at launch. The service runs through AI Gateway, exposes requests in gateway logs, charges provider list prices without markup, and supports customer-supplied provider keys. Cloudflare says the providers support zero data retention and verified bot-crawling standards, but the discussion questions whether those claims apply consistently, especially because provider documentation appears contradictory and gateway logs may retain query data. The offering provides convenient Worker integration and centralized billing, but it is primarily a proxy over existing providers rather than a new search index. Its practical value depends on provider quality, pricing, latency, and whether protected sites become selectively accessible to approved crawlers.

Photoc is a command-line toolkit for reviewing, organizing, and preparing JPEG photos, with metadata-only support for Sony ARW files. It provides read-only commands for metadata inspection, statistics, timelines, metadata queries, duplicate detection, sharpness-based focus review, and JPEG integrity checks. It can preview and optionally apply metadata-based renames and sorting, while creating compressed copies, contact sheets, and privacy-scrubbed copies without altering originals by default. Operations avoid overwriting existing files, validate complete rename and sort plans, and report blocked or unsupported files. Compression preserves selected metadata but may reduce quality, while scrubbing removes supported location and identifying fields without recompressing image data. JSON output, shell scripting, Homebrew installation, checksum-verified binaries, and documented exit codes support automation. Windows, HEIC, and most RAW formats are not supported, and ARW files cannot be decoded, compressed, or GPS-rewritten.

A Florida woman, Carli Michelle Heller, was charged under Statute 836.10 after Claude flagged a diary-style entry saying she planned to attack a sheriff's office, and a human reviewer judged it credible and alerted law enforcement. Anthropic says it may disclose information during limited emergencies involving potential death or serious injury. The case highlights that cloud AI chats can be monitored and are not equivalent to private diaries, while related reports show human reviewers may also see prompts, images, and generated content on other platforms. It follows criticism of OpenAI for not reporting a separate suspected shooter and lawsuits alleging AI companies failed to prevent real-world violence. The legal question is whether a private message to a chatbot satisfies Florida's requirement that a threat be transmitted where another person may view it, particularly when the writing may represent roleplay, anger, or private thought rather than an communicated intent.

A hobbyist and a collaborator restored Internet audio and video calls in iChat AV on OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard. They found that iChat first fetched an SNATMAP server address from configuration.apple.com, but an HTTPS redirect exceeded the systems’ obsolete TLS support; without the lookup, peers exchanged private LAN addresses and could not establish RTP connections. Network captures and later LLM-assisted reverse engineering identified a UDP protocol on port 5678 that returns the public IP address and source port observed for each request. The author implemented a Python 3 SNATMAP server, tested it in a lab using two OpenWrt NAT routers, Proxmox, two Macs, Jabber, and a web server, and made a hosted service available through an /etc/hosts override. The workaround requires port-preserving NAT and may fail behind carrier-grade NAT, while a Logitech C920 can substitute for an iSight.

A developer explains and recreates the maze-generation algorithm from Atari 2600’s Entombed, whose 128-byte RAM required generating one scrolling row at a time. Each cell uses two left neighbors and three cells from the previous row to index a 32-entry table that outputs a wall, passage, or random choice. The approach uses limited local state, makes no guarantees of solvability, and applies correction passes to reduce repetitions and sealed sections. The developer implemented a wider, non-scrolling-memory version in C for a Wolfenstein-style raycaster, added wall destruction and enemy behavior, fixed movement edge cases, and later adapted it into a Backrooms-inspired game. A Claude-generated Three.js version makes the result playable in a browser.

A head-to-head test of 12 battery-powered Zigbee temperature and humidity sensors found that all tracked environmental trends, paired reliably with Zigbee2MQTT, and could be calibrated in software, making small accuracy errors manageable. SONOFF SNZB-02P performed best overall because of accurate readings, adjustable reporting, a CR2477 battery, and a claimed four-year life; Moes ZSS-S01-TH was the preferred compact Tuya-based option, and SONOFF SNZB-02B was the best AAA model. Aqara was the smallest and accurate, but its reporting interval was fixed and the tested older model had connectivity concerns. Tuya TH09Z was the only IP65 device and therefore the only reasonable damp-location choice. Livia, Richie, Adriana, Furio, and several other models showed larger deviations or inconsistent reporting, especially in the refrigerator test. The low-temperature results were a stress test rather than evidence of long-term refrigerator suitability because condensation can damage the devices.

ChatGPT generated New Yorker-style cartoons that sometimes included the real signatures of more than 15 current and former New Yorker cartoonists, including Brendan Loper, whose signature appeared on a viral cartoon he did not create. Tests found recurring house-style features, occasional nonsensical jokes, gibberish signatures, magazine logos, and recognizable names likely learned from online or archival examples. OpenAI added a warning about similarity to third-party content after being notified, but the system continued producing some real signatures. Condé Nast licensed other content to OpenAI but says it never authorized training on cartoons or use of its logo; cartoonists’ contracts generally retain their copyrights. Legal experts distinguish possible copyright claims over style from potential right-of-publicity or false-impersonation claims involving names. The story also links the issue to AI-driven displacement of professional cartoonists, citing newspapers that have begun publishing generated cartoons.

David Gruber, a marine biologist and Project CETI founder, is applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to study sperm whale communication and test whether their vocal patterns can be meaningfully decoded. The effort is presented as either an ambitious scientific advance or an unlikely endeavor, while Gruber regards it as a logical extension of his long-standing interest in animal behavior. His curiosity began in childhood, when he closely observed small creatures and felt more connected to them than to other children. His academic work later covered microbiology, biological oceanography, microorganism interactions, fish, sharks, sea turtles, and visual communication before turning toward whales.

Deda is Python software for detecting, decoding, extracting, creating, and anonymising Document Colour Tracking Dots, which commercial colour laser printers commonly embed in printouts to identify the printer and sometimes its serial number. It supports a GUI and command-line tools for parsing scanned pages, comparing prints, extracting dot patterns, adding custom patterns to PDFs, cleaning scans, and generating printer-specific anonymisation masks. Reliable analysis requires lossless scans at 300 dpi with neutral contrast, while monochrome and inkjet prints may lack tracking dots. Anonymisation involves printing and scanning a calibration page, generating mask.json, applying it to a PDF, and checking coverage microscopically; Wand is needed for white or light graphics. The documentation also covers installation, PATH and GUI dependency issues, and ImageMagick PDF security policies.

Daniel Lemire presents ephemeral testing as a way to guide AI programming: have a coding agent build temporary downstream projects against a draft library or API, then use the resulting friction and abstractions to refine the design before committing to it. Agents can quickly exercise several API shapes, reimplement representative notebooks for a draft DSL, and reveal usage patterns that designers might miss. The approach can also support read-only, GitOps-style development and selective test execution in monorepos, such as running only affected end-to-end tests. However, it does not replace regression tests, source-level analysis, edge cases, limits, or checks between implementation methods; simulated usage may produce sloppiness or recommend unsuitable trade-offs. Agent reports and downstream rollouts can provide additional signals, including token usage after refactoring, but results are noisy and agents may falsely report passing tests.

Cities are quoting anti-surveillance groups and news organizations extreme fees for records about Flock, an AI-enabled vehicle-camera system. North Richland Hills, Texas, estimated that reviewing about a terabyte of communications would require 14 years of labor and charged $2.3 million, while other agencies have provided hundreds of thousands of pages free or quoted fees up to $121,000. Requesters argue that inconsistent pricing can suppress oversight of a system linked to improper police searches, stalking, arrests, audits, and policy changes. Public-records disclosures helped expose former Texas officer Zachary Anthony Klein’s extensive misuse of Flock-related information, contributing to Governor Greg Abbott’s decision to halt state funding and permits for the cameras. Flock has not introduced reforms that adequately address misuse by officers.

The tutorial begins a Haskell desktop application using GTK 4, libadwaita, and haskell-gi, which generates Haskell bindings that remain close to GTK’s C API. It creates an Adwaita application window and introduces The Elm Architecture through a model, view, update function, messages, and effects. The todo model stores tasks in a map with numeric identifiers, while Add and SetDoneStatus messages update state and trigger a Save effect only when data changes. The view combines EntryRow, ActionRow, ListBox, Box, Clamp, ScrolledWindow, ToolbarView, and related widgets to build an input area, task list, header, and count footer. A runtime connects GTK signals to dispatch and step functions, stores the model in an IORef, schedules updates through GLib’s event loop, and rebuilds the view after each message. The complete project is available in the referenced repository, with further features deferred to a later installment.

Sixteen U.S. freight operators filed for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late August and early September, with sources attributing the failures partly to diesel prices that reduced already thin margins. The affected businesses ranged from single-truck operators to fleets with dozens of vehicles, including a Florida Amazon delivery contractor, while four were based in Texas. Texas temporarily eased restrictions on untaxed diesel use to support agricultural transport, but high fuel costs also affect inflation and other freight customers. Northern heating demand and ongoing Middle East instability could keep diesel prices elevated through the holidays. The comments add that trucking may be underpriced relative to road damage and fossil-fuel externalities, while others note that 16 failures are difficult to interpret among roughly 500,000 mostly small trucking companies. Historical comparisons suggest similar or larger waves have occurred, so the figure may reflect timing rather than a sustained increase; longer-term data is needed. Commenters also cite fuel surcharges, regional tax differences, higher shipping costs, weak planning, and concern that distressed carriers could attract consolidation.

The collection centers on expensive but personally meaningful designer lamps, while acknowledging that attractive, functional alternatives cost far less and that many vintage pieces are affordable secondhand. It includes iconic task lights such as the Artemide Tolomeo, Richard Sapper’s wire-free Tizio, Arne Jacobsen’s adjustable AJ, and reading-focused fixtures, alongside Isamu Noguchi’s handmade washi Akari sculptures in several sizes. Other highlights include Poul Henningsen’s multi-shade PH lamps, Jean Prouvé’s engineered steel Lampe de Bureau, a rechargeable outdoor-capable Chispa, a Soviet-glass-block Kismas lamp, the revived Tokio lamp, and HAY Apex fixtures. The collection also reflects the owner’s practical modifications, including desk and shelving mounts, and concludes with a self-designed, rotatable 3D-printed Block Lamp that may later receive battery power or different materials.

The author proposes distributing sealed, tamper-evident cases containing Blu-ray M-Disc backups to trusted friends as decentralized, geographically separate protection against disasters. Each case holds three or four discs containing digitized documents, selected music and photos, and files needed to rebuild a digital life; critical data is encrypted, with password inclusion optionally supporting digital inheritance. The chosen B&W Outdoor Case Type 500 is padded with non-degrading polyethylene foam, labeled, sealed with numbered breakable plastic seals, and periodically replaced after visual inspection against photographs and seal identifiers. Silica gel is included for moisture control or detection. The design prioritizes physical durability, privacy, and long-term human custody, while acknowledging that the seal is not cryptographically secure.

An always-on Mac Mini running Claude and Codex was compromised through an actively exploited macOS Screen Sharing vulnerability, CVE-2026-65400, after port 5900 was exposed to the Internet. Attackers obtained root access and installed a Monero miner, but the persistent Claude agent detected abnormal behavior, halted commands, helped identify the intrusion window, and supported remediation before the system was wiped. The incident exposed weaknesses in macOS for headless agent hosts: TCC prompts are invisible to agents, permissions apply to spawned programs rather than the supervising agent, and Apple’s automatic security-update wording does not ensure prompt installation of point-release CVE fixes. The author argues that Apple’s proposed Full Disk Access restrictions may further hinder legitimate power users, while Apple’s app-centered ecosystem and planned smart-home products could become less relevant as agents operate across websites, software, and user-built devices. AI agents make advanced computing accessible to more people, but they also make disciplined isolation, network security, permissions, testing, and data boundaries essential.

Researchers used smartphone accelerometers and gyroscopes at 100 Hz to reconstruct three-dimensional motion on a roller coaster and pendulum ship. Quaternion-based orientation tracking, gravity removal, zero-velocity updates, spherical linear interpolation, and drift corrections converted phone measurements into trajectories, velocities, and specific energies. On the Formule X coaster, the reconstructed path matched satellite imagery within about 5 m, measured roughly 62 km/h after launch versus the advertised 70 km/h, and captured loop accelerations, weightlessness, and energy exchange between height and speed. Residual energy fluctuations likely reflected rotational motion, the phone’s offset from the vehicle’s center of mass, and integration drift. For De Piraat, repeated lowest points enabled polynomial correction of intermediate vertical drift, producing a swing radius near 12.3 m and periods around 7.6 seconds, consistent with a pendulum model. The openly shared data and Python code support accessible, project-based mechanics education.