The newest HackerNews stories, desensationalized.

OpenAI released a GitHub repository containing a broad set of mathematical manuscripts produced by an internal frontier model, including Lean formalizations for some proofs, revision and citation protocols, reasoning summaries, compute estimates, and statistics on attempted problems. The company says each result used roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro-equivalent reasoning compute and plans workshops, conferences, improved exposition, further formalization, and responsible model release. The results reportedly include claims concerning the Unique Games Conjecture, Barnette’s Conjecture, matrix multiplication, integer multiplication, graph coloring, scheduling, Riemann-related questions, and problems across several mathematical fields. The release follows consultation with an Institute for Advanced Study advisory group, whose recommendations emphasized community review and responsible publication.

Strands Labs released Strands Decider 2B, a 2-billion-parameter open-source model designed to choose among predefined options or assign scores rather than generate text. This narrower design enables fast, deterministic outputs, calibrated reliability estimates, and efficient repeated questions over one prompt, but makes the model unsuitable for coding, chat, summarization, and complex reasoning. Its architecture replaces Qwen3.5-2B’s language-model head with a pointer head that scores option representations, while a rank-16 LoRA adapter fine-tunes the torso. The released v19 model ranks third among 33 comparable 2B models on JevBench accuracy and calibration, and runs locally in about 115 milliseconds on an RTX 3090 or 153 milliseconds for small tasks on an M3 MacBook, with latency increasing roughly linearly with input size. Intended uses include routing, tool selection, evaluations, guardrails, memory, context management, policy classification, and hybrid agents. The release includes weights, training data, scripts, CLI examples, and Strands integration for intercepting and approving, denying, confirming, or guiding tool calls.

OpenAI introduces the Decisions API, a public-beta endpoint for evaluating text, images, or both with typed predicate, choice, and score answers. It currently supports gpt-6-luna through POST /v1/decisions, returns probabilities and confidence data, accepts inline base64 images, and supports multimodal inputs, independent questions, ZDR, HIPAA eligibility, and regional processing. The service targets classification, routing, prioritization, moderation, severity scoring, and similar structured decisions, while OpenAI recommends Responses with Structured Outputs for generated objects and separate requests for dependent decisions. Examples cover multiple SDKs and languages, and pricing is listed at $0.10 per million input tokens with no output-token charges. Commenters highlight the roughly one-million-token context window and image support, but question calibration, missing context-length documentation, lack of caching, subscription access, and whether decision routing should be built into general models. Comparisons with Jev and Mercury Decide commonly describe Decisions as slower, more expensive, or less capable in preliminary tests, although some report sub-200-millisecond latency and note that image input is a meaningful differentiator.

In 1993, the author used a Zilog Z280 homebrew computer with 512 KB of RAM, VGA output, floppy storage, serial and printer ports, and a 2400-baud Hayes modem to access Mexican bulletin-board systems. They wrote a terminal program based on book-learned RS-232C, modem AT commands, and ANSI escape sequences, later adding a 64 KB capture buffer to diagnose incompatibilities between documented and actual BBS behavior. A recovered CUEVA.TXT file preserves a 17-minute La Cueva BBS session, including screen output, a download attempt, line noise, and buffer overflow, but not keystroke timing or downloaded data. The author recreated the session in JavaScript using an adapted jsTerm emulator at 2400 baud and adjusted web-server headers to load its ANSI font. An update adds a redacted 1993 BBS phone list and a second replay from Nopal BBS.

Penguin Mail is a GPL-3.0-or-later Linux desktop client for Gmail, Microsoft, Fastmail, iCloud, Yahoo, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, CalDAV, and CardDAV accounts. It provides unified or per-account mail, calendar and agenda views, contacts, notifications, scheduling, undo-send, provider rules, Gmail-style categories, and disposable Gmail aliases. Optional AI runs locally through LM Studio or Ollama, requires confirmation before sending messages or changing settings, and uses the application’s own mailbox tools. GnuPG signing and encryption use the user’s keys, while accounts connect directly to their providers without Penguin Mail servers, tracking, or advertisements. The project is presented as version 1.0 for x86_64 Linux and includes a short introductory video.

Robert X. Cringely, the pseudonym of technology writer Mark Stephens, built a respected career before launching a 2015 Kickstarter for inexpensive Minecraft servers. The project raised $35,452 from 388 backers, but repeated shipping promises failed as costs reached about $90,000, software and supply problems persisted, and the project ran out of money. Over several years, Cringely attributed delays to technical issues, investors, blindness, a wildfire, insurance, and hostile commenters, while continuing to promise delivery. In 2020, he claimed a new company had bought every Mach 2.2-plus aircraft for satellite launches, but the image appeared digitally altered and the aircraft owner said discussions involved only a preliminary partnership. The account argues that escalating efforts to conceal failure destroyed Cringely’s credibility.

Mistral presents Large 4, a roughly 1-trillion-parameter open-weight model trained from scratch on 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in European datacenters. Reported results indicate strong vision, visual grounding, cybersecurity, data-analysis, and programming performance, with some comparisons near leading proprietary and Chinese models. The model is positioned as a sovereign European option, offering European training and inference that may matter for organizations with regulatory or data-location requirements. Mistral says post-training remains in progress and plans a final release with model weights and additional technical details. Pricing is reported as substantially lower than several competing large models, although it remains more expensive than some Chinese alternatives. The available material provides limited architectural and methodological detail, and the page emphasizes product access more than scientific disclosure.

EmbeddingGemma 2 is a 740-million-parameter Apache 2.0 model that embeds text, code, images, video, and audio in one shared space for local search, routing, and retrieval. Its modular design supports text-only use with 270 million parameters and optional vision and audio encoders, while Matryoshka Representation Learning allows 768-dimensional vectors to be reduced to 512, 256, or 128 dimensions, potentially cutting vector storage by up to six times. Google reports leading quality among sub-billion-parameter multimodal models, including a code benchmark increase from 68.76 to 78.68, an 8K-token context window, and quantized memory use of about 191 MB for text-only inference or 567 MB for the full model on a Pixel 11 Pro. The model is intended for privacy-preserving, low-latency, offline applications and can share components with Gemma 4 in local RAG pipelines. Weights and deployment support are available through Hugging Face, Kaggle, LiteRT, MediaPipe, WebGPU, and several inference tools.

Pi 1.0 adds Codemode, allowing an LLM to write JavaScript that orchestrates tools inside a restricted QuickJS/WebAssembly sandbox on the trusted harness host, while Bash and other tools run in a separate execution environment with different filesystems and trust boundaries. This preserves CLI composition for ordinary programs but handles capabilities such as image inputs, subagents, image generation, classifiers, and MCP calls that cannot be represented cleanly through Bash alone. Codemode can process structured outputs without flooding the model context, run concurrent workflows, retain state in the transcript, and expose internal AI SDK APIs. Examples include generating images, classifying GitHub issues with Jev, controlling a game through repeated classifier decisions, and discovering or invoking Sentry and other MCP tools. MCP benefits from this model, especially when servers provide schemas and structured outputs, but nested Codemode implementations create awkward double-encoded JavaScript and prevent inner code from directly using outer tools. The approach does not replace CLI guidance; it extends code-based composition into the harness. Open issues include reliable recovery after interruption, durable workflow snapshots, deterministic composition languages, binary data, images, and weaker performance with smaller models.

This project implements a Pi-hole-style DNS sinkhole on a roughly $2 ESP32-C3 without PSRAM by storing sorted 40-bit FNV-1a domain hashes in flash and binary-searching them. It supports more than 140,000 domains in about 0.7 MB, uses roughly 50 KB of RAM, and checks parent suffixes before either returning 0.0.0.0 or forwarding the query upstream. The design balances flash use, lookup latency, and false-positive risk: the author reports no collisions at 141,000 domains and estimates one at 537,000, while 32-bit hashes would produce substantially more collisions. Features include a web dashboard, custom blocking, statistics, captive-portal Wi-Fi setup, mDNS, OTA firmware and blocklist updates, scheduled downloads, and compatibility with several ESP32 boards. Firmware OTA requires a dual-app partition that limits blocklist capacity, while larger lists require single-app partitions. Recent security changes protect state-changing endpoints and network OTA with credentials and a custom request header, escape dashboard input, and warn about public default passwords, but the service remains plain HTTP and the initial setup access point is intentionally open. Installation requires current PlatformIO, careful USB power, and occasional Linux serial-device fixes.

A longtime Server Fault moderator elected in early 2011 plans to leave at the end of the year after more than 15 years of service. Early moderation involved severe international conflicts, especially differing escalation norms among British, Russian-speaking, and US users, which helped establish overnight moderator coverage and post-locking as a cooling-off mechanism. Server Fault peaked in question volume around 2011–2012, lost substantial traffic after a 2013 Google algorithm change, and has declined steadily since 2016 to roughly two or three questions per day. Moderator work now consists largely of spam handling, while suggested edits have become sparse. Coordinated Stack Exchange spam campaigns required extensive manual intervention, but newer technical defenses have made them much harder to execute. The site has also seen little recent policy debate, leaving the community to decide whether replacing the departing moderator is worthwhile.

AnyPS5 is a GPLv2 research and preservation project that automatically ports PS5 executables to Linux and Windows by relinking them into native formats and providing dynamically linked implementations of required system PRX libraries, without emulation or a separate runtime process. It supports SPIR-V shader recompilation, SDL-mapped controllers, configurable keyboard and mouse input, and strict termination on unsupported states. Dreaming Sarah reportedly runs at 60 fps on modest PC hardware, but compatibility remains limited and documented through a game list. The project does not distribute copyrighted software, firmware, keys, or proprietary libraries, leaving users responsible for lawful acquisition and use.

A developer with years of keyboard- and piano-related repetitive strain injury found that severe forearm pain became much less frequent after improving ergonomics, taking breaks, exercising, retraining typing technique, and advancing into more senior work. The worst symptoms were associated less with typing volume than with prolonged coding sessions requiring awkward reaches for brackets, function keys, modifiers, navigation keys, and other special characters, especially given the developer’s small hands. In 2026, coding agents increasingly handled mechanical refactors and substantial features, reducing hours of manual typing and debugging to prompts plus review. The developer now spends more time writing specifications, reviewing code, attending meetings, and typing ordinary prose on the home row, while still shipping substantial amounts of software. They acknowledge that career progression, lifestyle changes, or chance may also explain the improvement, but consider AI a possible health benefit despite mixed feelings about its effect on the satisfaction of programming.

openTPU is an open-source AI-assisted accelerator project whose monorepo includes SystemVerilog hardware, an instruction set, a bit-exact simulator, a kernel language and compiler, profiling tools, and host software. On an Inspur YPCB-00338 Kintex-7 FPGA with two DDR3 channels, it runs ten modern language models and matches simulator-generated tokens exactly. Depending on model size and quantization, measured decode speeds range from 59 tok/s for LFM2.5-230M to 3.78 tok/s for Gemma 4 E4B, with 4-bit weights generally improving decode speed by 40–45% while reducing memory traffic at some perplexity cost. Decode is primarily DRAM-bound at 82–94% of the 17.1 GB/s peak, while the newer four-column matrix unit substantially improves prefill. Models larger than the card’s 4 GiB can stream mixture-of-experts weights from host storage, but PCIe traffic becomes a major limitation. The project emphasizes transparent instruction-level scheduling, simulator-to-RTL verification, and reproducible measurements, while identifying DRAM efficiency, timing margin, area, and prefill throughput as remaining bottlenecks.

Photopea’s creator says people are using AI or copied JavaScript from the browser-based editor to publish ad-free alternatives on GitHub, causing user confusion and reputational harm. GitHub rejected a reported violation under 17 U.S.C. §1201, which concerns circumvention of technological protection measures. Commenters explain that publicly delivered JavaScript, even if obfuscated, may not qualify and suggest a conventional §512(c) copyright takedown if repositories reproduce protected code. They also note that functionally similar clean-room implementations may be lawful, while exact code copying could support infringement claims. Several recommend consulting an intellectual-property attorney and considering trademark or other branding protections. Others argue that client-side software is difficult to protect, question whether specific projects copied code or merely functionality, and warn that future models may reproduce software without violating current copyright law.

A programmatic Kubernetes diagnosis pipeline collects cluster objects, events, logs, resource usage, and component summaries, then uses Jev’s multiple-choice judgments to select candidate causes and supporting evidence without an LLM agent. Across 105 diagnoses covering 21 SREGym-Lite faults, it passed 80 cases, or 76.2%, with a 14.6-second median runtime, 2.4 Jev calls per attempt, and an estimated inference cost of $0.15 per diagnosis. Results were highly consistent: 16 faults passed every attempt and five failed every attempt. The pipeline handled isolated configuration and resource faults well, including a mutating webhook that changed pod memory limits, but failed when Jev selected a plausible secondary clue or when the collector omitted decisive telemetry. Failures involved an expensive regex mistaken for a CPU-limit problem, a retry-and-queue interaction spanning services, DNS resolution, Kafka poison-pill handling, and Valkey authentication. The main design challenge is choosing evidence granularity and supporting multi-service, time-dependent explanations. Jev is presented as a fast first-line tool that could defer harder cases to an LLM agent, but its lower flexibility depends heavily on collector coverage and answer design.

A Google Summer of Code project modernized NetBSD’s racoon2 IPsec and IKE daemon for reliable VPN use on NetBSD and Linux. It implemented RFC 7383 IKE fragmentation for IKEv1 and IKEv2, RFC 3947 NAT original-address payloads, and RFC 7296 NAT-T address substitution, removing workaround selectors for peers behind NAT. Address macros were unified, diagnostics improved, IPv6 matching and prefix handling were fixed, and IPv6 became enabled by default. Policy generation now uses configured SA addresses and peer-proposed IPsec proposals, improving compatibility with built-in Windows, iOS, and Android clients. A dependency-free unit-test framework with sanitizer support and four new test programs was added, with all five test programs passing. Documentation and samples were updated, while graceful shutdown control, broader daemon coverage, and end-to-end IPv6 testing remain incomplete.

Human biomass is about 350 million metric tons, exceeding ants but falling below cattle at roughly 650 million tons and Antarctic krill at about 379 million tons. Using carbon mass, animals total about 2 billion tons, compared with 0.2 billion for viruses, 4 billion for protists, 7 billion for archaea, 12 billion for fungi, 70 billion for bacteria, and 450 billion for plants. Sugar cane is the largest major crop, with 2023 harvests exceeding 2 billion tons, and its persistent roots likely make its living biomass greater than annual crops such as maize. Among wild plants, boreal trees may dominate: black spruce exceeds 11 billion tons in Canada, while Dahurian larch may total at least 8.4 billion tons in Russia. These estimates are uncertain, especially for poorly sampled underground microbes, but they show that several plant species contain far more carbon than all animals combined.

Over two years, a $200 four-core ThinkServer evolved into two used Dell R730 servers with 256GB of ECC RAM, two NVIDIA GPUs, 10G networking, four VLANs, 73 OpenTofu-managed containers, and a Home Assistant VM. The system supports media, surveillance, local AI, document processing, monitoring, and backups, but averages only about 13% CPU usage and 430W of rack power, costing roughly $47 monthly. The GPUs enable local language models, Frigate, transcoding, and speech recognition, while VLANs improve isolation and OpenTofu reduces configuration drift. The build cost about $7,440 in hardware, and claimed subscription savings imply a 4.6-year break-even only when including an $80 monthly security-monitoring replacement; without it, payback exceeds 11 years. Measurements showed that 10G networking is underused because the NAS and clients remain behind a 1G uplink, night mode saves about 5W rather than 175W, and a power sensor silently froze for three weeks. The author concludes that mini PCs would be more efficient for ordinary containers, while the rack is justified mainly by GPUs, ECC, iDRAC, expansion, learning, and hobby value.

Developers reported substantial career and financial uncertainty: nearly half experienced job insecurity or insufficient wages, one quarter had been laid off during their careers, nearly one in ten had been laid off within nine months, and more than one quarter expected to change careers within five years. Mental well-being also appeared strained, with roughly two thirds reporting lower motivation and greater cynicism, while about half reported poorer focus, more procrastination, unusual exhaustion, and reduced feelings of accomplishment or effectiveness. AI use was widespread but opinion divided, with 49% positive and 42% negative, amid concerns about its effects on work and outlook. Women remained more likely to face discrimination and respond by avoiding colleagues, changing behavior or appearance, or leaving the field. LGBT+, ADHD, and autistic respondents also reported pressure to conceal or mask their identities, increasing burnout risks.

Informal benchmarks on an Intel i5 Linux laptop compared Python 3.10–3.15, standard, JIT, and free-threaded interpreters, PyPy, Node.js, and Rust using recursive Fibonacci and bubble sort in single- and four-threaded versions. Standard Python 3.15 was only marginally faster than 3.14, with occasional small regressions, while Python 3.11 and 3.14 showed the largest earlier gains. The experimental 3.15 JIT was 20–28% faster than standard Python in single-threaded tests and remained faster with four threads. Free-threaded Python 3.15 was roughly 4.5 times faster than standard Python for multithreaded Fibonacci and 1.74 times faster for multithreaded bubble sort, but offered little benefit in single-threaded runs. PyPy, Node.js, and especially Rust remained substantially faster on these workloads. The author considers 3.15 a minor performance upgrade, recommends waiting before production migration, and plans to use it personally for other new features.

Modulo reduction does not generally preserve a uniform distribution: mapping ten equally likely inputs to three choices yields probabilities of 40%, 30%, and 30%. With 64-bit inputs the bias may be extremely small, but it is still avoidable through rejection sampling, which discards values outside a uniformly divisible range, or through unbiased bounded-integer methods. The broader recommendation is to expose APIs for bounded selection and discrete weighted choices rather than requiring callers to manipulate raw random integers. Relative integer weights avoid floating-point issues and map naturally onto an interval. In deterministic fuzzing, explicit weights can emphasize rare or important execution paths, and the authors replaced raw random-integer calls with weighted choices for this reason. The underlying conceptual error is treating a random value as the object of interest instead of preserving the distribution of a random variable through a transformation.

Two unexploded Second World War bombs were discovered in Devon on 14 January 2026: a 50kg German bomb at a Plymouth construction site and a 250kg bomb brought up by dredging at Exmouth Marina. The simultaneous discoveries briefly confused the responding bomb-disposal regiment and required police evacuations, military teams, specialist X-rays, divers, cranes and naval transport. Experts explained that Britain still handles about 2,500 bomb-disposal incidents annually, roughly 2,000 involving wartime munitions, whose corroded and sometimes unidentified fuzes can remain dangerous decades later. The Plymouth bomb was found to have no mechanical or anti-handling fuze and was detonated four miles offshore after a careful overnight convoy. The Exmouth bomb could not be safely examined or protected on the fuel-laden dredger, so it was lifted into the water, towed out and detonated without injury, damage or significant disruption beyond the evacuation. The operations illustrate how modern teams balance uncertain technical evidence, environmental risks, liability, public safety and pressure to restore access to homes and businesses. Rising construction activity and repeated discoveries suggest unexploded wartime ordnance remains a persistent operational problem.

California enacted State Bill 1406 on September 30, 2026, expanding its vehicle, vessel, and aircraft use-tax rules to partnerships, limited partnerships, and limited liability partnerships. Previously, an out-of-state business could generally avoid California use tax if more than half its business was outside the state, enabling California residents to use Montana LLCs for vehicles because Montana has no sales tax and limited inspection requirements. The new law treats a shell company as a California resident if any shareholder, partner, member, or beneficial owner resides there, eliminating the 50% test. Officers, managers, partners, beneficial owners, and members can be personally liable for unpaid taxes, interest, and penalties, which may constitute a crime.

Treg is an OpenRouter-like service for agent tools: agents use one base URL and token to discover and call thousands of curated endpoints from providers covering enrichment, SEO, social data, scraping, advertising, and media generation. Calls can use Treg’s prepaid provider accounts, verified free routes, or a team’s own credentials, with per-call pricing, server-side secret injection, and no provider signup for catalog access. Teams can register APIs, OAuth connections, vendor CLIs, and SKILL.md bundles so credentials remain on the server and shared tools are available to teammates. The proxy relays requests without modeling upstream behavior, supports strict schemas, audit logs, health checks, OAuth refresh, organization roles, access controls, async providers, and agent-readable billing errors. A CLI, MCP surfaces, hosted dashboard, self-hosting option, and ready-made skills support onboarding. The project also includes enrichment and web-provider comparison arenas, telemetry controls, local development tooling, encrypted secret storage, and an Apache 2.0 license with restrictions on competing hosted redistribution.

Microsoft says it has secured rights to stream Grand Theft Auto VI through Xbox Cloud Gaming when the game launches in November, although the arrangement is not exclusive and will not support PC streaming. The deal appears focused on Xbox console streaming, while Microsoft’s new pay-as-you-go option could let people without an Xbox rent access by purchasing streaming hours. This coincides with monthly limits of 15 hours for Game Pass Ultimate, 10 for Premium, and five for Essential subscribers. Microsoft also described its next-generation Project Helix as a family of devices that will include hardware built with outside partners. Rockstar has not announced a PC version of GTA VI.

The author recommends tuning microbenchmark inputs to run for about 300 milliseconds. This duration keeps results readable in integer milliseconds, reduces distortion from fixed overheads, remains perceptible to humans, and allows rapid repeated testing. The goal is practical intuition rather than laboratory-grade absolute measurement. The discussion notes that this rule depends heavily on the workload: JVM, browser, database, GPU, rendering, and long-running system behavior require warmups, representative datasets, longer runs, or specialized tools. Reliable comparisons generally need interleaved controls, repeated measurements, variance or confidence intervals, and established frameworks such as Tachometer, Criterion, JMH, and BenchmarkDotNet. Hardware frequency changes, interrupts, garbage collection, JIT compilation, timer resolution, and other environmental effects can overwhelm small differences. Short benchmarks remain useful for finding large improvements, while steady-state and full-system tests are needed for subtle optimizations and scalability problems.

Paramount Skydance completed its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, creating a company named Skydance that combines Paramount+ and HBO Max, CBS, CNN, major film studios, live-sports networks, and extensive media franchises. The transaction followed a lawsuit by California and 11 other states, after a federal judge found that it would likely substantially reduce competition and violate antitrust law. California and the other states later accepted a settlement, despite objections from free-speech and media groups. The settlement requires minimum investment and domestic releases for films and separate negotiations over distribution of the companies’ basic-cable channels. The judge approved the compromise, emphasizing that settlements need not fully remedy every alleged violation or satisfy all public concerns. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan rejected a final effort to block the merger.

Francis Halzen received the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos from astrophysical sources. The announcement also promotes the Nobel Prize schedule and information about other prizes and laureates. IceCube uses roughly 5,000 optical sensors embedded up to about 2.5 kilometers deep in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice. When neutrinos rarely collide with atoms, the resulting charged particles produce Cherenkov radiation, a faint blue light caused by particles moving faster than light travels through ice, though not faster than light in vacuum. The observatory detected neutrinos originating beyond the solar system, established sources of high-energy cosmic radiation, and helped open neutrino astronomy.