Wednesday, 17 June 2026
76 stories filed.
AMD's Mext buy shows how AI could solve the RAM shortage it created
Running low on memory, can't afford more? The House of Zen's latest acquisition puts an AI spin on flash-based memory expansion
Cockroaches scurry around with thousands of pieces of bacterial genomes
Transferring genes across species doesn't just happen in microbes.
Linux Enacts Guidance To Tighten Acceptance Of New File-Systems Into The Kernel
There is no shortage of different file-systems available for Linux. New file-systems continue to come about in the open-source world but ultimately many of them end up not being well maintained or having very limited users and not necessarily innovating enough to make them worthwhile over other alternatives. Given the continued increase in file-systems looking to get into the Linux kernel, such…
Among the large new rockets Amazon was counting on, only Europe has delivered
"As for Arianespace, they have definitely stepped up."
Anthropic "pauses" token-based billing for its Claude Agent SDK
Move originally planned for Monday would have heavily increased power users' costs.
The new Siri makes one of Apple's most convenient OS features a cumbersome mess
Goodbye, useful Spotlight; hello force-fed Apple intelligence bloatware that feels distressingly like Google AI Overviews
GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17 and official releases are coming soon
Article URL: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36469-grapheneos-has-been-ported-to-android-17-and-official-releases-are-coming-soon Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48561654 Points: 109 # Comments: 31
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
KDE Plasma 6 Desktop Finally Comes To Slackware
It's been a while since there has been any Slackware news to pass along, but this week they've finally landed the KDE Plasma 6 desktop in this legendary Linux distribution...
Btrfs Now Enables Large Folios By Default, Lands Huge Folios With Linux 7.2
The Btrfs file-system feature updates have been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel with a few noteworthy changes for this copy-on-write file-system...
Python dev saved from disaster by intuition...and AI
I'm sorry, Dave. I can't install that repo that will totally hose your system.
Intel-born networking tech resurfaces as InfiniBand alternative for DoE supers
Omni-Path lights up Lawrence Livermore system at 400 Gbps
US approval of Paramount/Warner Bros. deal surprised DOJ lawyers, report says
Trump admin green-lighting $111B deal "reeks of corruption," Sen. Warren says.
AI and brain-computer interface allow speechless ALS patient to work a full-time job
The hardware isn't new, but a UC Davis research team's machine learning-powered method of translating brain activity in an ALS patient into sentences with 92% accuracy is
Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless
Article URL: https://arseniyshestakov.com/2026/06/16/apple-is-about-to-make-hide-my-email-useless/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48559935 Points: 291 # Comments: 170
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Three critical Fortinet sandbox bugs splattered by unknown attackers
All have patches, so make sure you upgrade to a fixed version
Pentagon boasts of using AI to write reports mandated by Congress
Pentagon also claims 1.5 million personnel are using generative AI tools.
Commodore gets into the phone biz with Sailfish-powered retro 'Callback'
Ships sans email, web, or socials, but with plenty of beige plastic
Android 17 starts hitting Pixel phones and watches today
Pixels will get their OTA in the coming weeks, but don't expect monumental changes.
GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
Article URL: https://www.tno.nl/en/digital/artificial-intelligence/gpt-nl/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48559188 Points: 105 # Comments: 90
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Wayland's Weston 16 Alpha Brings HDR Improvements, Vulkan Renderer Fixes
Wayland developers have prepared the release of Weston 16.0 Alpha 1 for this reference Wayland compositor with new features...
Linux 7.2 Improves Anonymous/Unnamed Pipe Performance For Shell Pipelines & More
Yet another performance optimization merged for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel is improving the speed of anon_pipe_write, the kernel function used for writing data into anonymous/unnamed pipes such as when using shell pipelines or standard streams from applications...
'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York
Article URL: https://www.fastcompany.com/91558427/ghost-jobs-could-soon-be-illegal-in-new-york Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48558338 Points: 151 # Comments: 83
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Stop Using JWTs
Article URL: https://gist.github.com/samsch/0d1f3d3b4745d778f78b230cf6061452 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48558147 Points: 161 # Comments: 96
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Trump admin abandons fight against wind energy as clean energy output surges
Legal victories have dampened the Trump admin’s efforts to halt wind and solar power.
Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
Article URL: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-engineering Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48558045 Points: 299 # Comments: 257
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
Article URL: https://mareksuppa.com/til/bash-dev-tcp-http-without-curl/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48558018 Points: 189 # Comments: 107
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
SpaceX to acquire AI coding platform Cursor for $60 billion
Separately, neither could compete. Now they hope they can.
Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year
Audited accounting shows growing revenues being dwarfed by R&D, other expenses.
Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness
Article URL: https://www.theverge.com/tech/942854/apple-vehicle-motion-cues-review-really-work Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557530 Points: 455 # Comments: 140
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
There's no such thing as an agentic CPU
AI agents are a general-purpose workload no different from any other
Firefox 152 understands 'Sssh!'
As Google continues crippling Chrome ad-blockers, it's a good time to try Firefox
Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity
Article URL: https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/calvin-and-hobbes-and-the-price-of Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557079 Points: 178 # Comments: 66
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Intel Compute Runtime Now Advertises Early Support For Nova Lake, Introduces Experimental "LEO"
Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero on their graphics processors has been bringing up Nova Lake support since January. With today's release of the Intel Compute Runtime 26.22.38646.4, the Nova Lake Xe3P support has matured to the state of it being advertised now as under an "early support" status...
Linux 7.2 Can Significantly Lower Container Exit/Unmount Latency
A patch series merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel addresses a race condition that can occur when a container is exiting yielding "VFS: Busy inodes after unmount" messages and a possible user-after-free condition. But the patch series also goes further and delivers a very nice optimization to lower the container unmounting latency for environments with heavy I/O load...
Microsoft faces down sueball, capacity problems in series of challenges
Misleading statements about Copilot and AI? Surely not!
Crooks found a new way to collaborate using Teams – by hiding command-and-control traffic
Custom malware routed communications through legitimate Microsoft services, making malicious activity look like routine corporate collaboration
Running local models is good now
Article URL: https://vickiboykis.com/2026/06/15/running-local-models-is-good-now/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48555993 Points: 867 # Comments: 368
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
But yak shaving is fun (2019)
Article URL: https://parksb.github.io/en/article/32.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48555838 Points: 173 # Comments: 47
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Mobileye is entering the US robotaxi market with standalone service
The service will leverage its Moovit platform to launch in an a US city in 2027.
Linux kernel 7.1 sends Intel 486 support to silicon heaven
More than 140,000 lines of code bite the dust as ancient CPUs, bus mice, and other legacy leftovers face the chop
Linux 7.2 Adds Ability To Limit Programs To Only Open Regular Files, Avoid Being Tricked Or Doing Silly Things
Merged as part of the many VFS changes for Linux 7.2 is the new OPENAT2_REGULAR flag for the openat2 system call. This can be used to limit programs to only open regular file-systems and avoid accidentally or intentionally opening up device files or other non-conventional data files on the file-system...
The Ars Technica 2026 Reader Survey: Let your voice be heard!
Tell us how you read Ars, and what you'd like to see more (or less!) of on the front page.
Non-x86 servers now nearly half the market, IDC says
Demand for AI systems plus the shortage of DRAM and NAND are shaping the global market
Wine Wayland Lands Fractional Scaling Support
Following last week's Wine 11.11 release that brought alpha modifier support for opacity handling with the Wine Wayland driver, merged this week to Wine is support for fractional scaling with the Wine Wayland driver...
Qwen-Robot Suite: A Foundation Model Suite for Physical World Intelligence
Article URL: https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-robotsuite Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48554814 Points: 100 # Comments: 15
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
NHS Palantir claims face scrutiny after data suggests uneven results
Campaign group says FOI figures show some trusts carried out fewer procedures than before
Linux 7.2 Continues Removing Old i486 Code Remnants, Adds Rugged Panther Lake
The x86/cpu changes have been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel with an interesting span of changes covering 36 years from the Intel 486 days up to adding the new "rugged" Panther Lake variant...
NASA said nyet to Roscosmos plan to cut into leaky ISS segment
Crew sheltered in SpaceX Dragon as aging Zvezda segment's cracks continue to test orbital nerve
Cardiac monitor maker's security skips a beat as data thieves go for the jugular
Attackers used social engineering to access third-party business apps and steal patient information
Mechanical Watch (2022)
Article URL: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553550 Points: 588 # Comments: 112
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Critical Copilot vulnerability allowed hackers to steal 2FA code from users
SearchLeak exploit shows why the industry's approach to LLM security fails over and over.
Qualcomm said to be circling AI chip biz Tenstorrent in $10B RISC-V power play
Potential takeover would represent significant commitment to the open instruction set architecture
Scammers keep scoring: Brits fleeced for £1.3B as Americans lose $3.5B to impersonators
More reasons to love social media and AI
SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/spacex-buy-anysphere-60-billion-2026-06-16/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553224 Points: 758 # Comments: 1172
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
XFS Zone Allocator No Longer Experimental With Linux 7.2
The XFS file-system updates for the Linux 7.2 kernel aren't too notable with the exception of its zone allocator being promoted from behind its previously-experimental flag...
Capita is about to sail past deadline to fix civil service pensions scheme
Union says outsourcer will miss June 30 target after portal meltdown and mounting complaints
Linux 7.2 Power Management Adds New Hardware Support While Dropping AMD Elan
The power management changes merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel are aplenty as usual. New hardware support, dropping obsolete hardware support, and various bug fixes and other enhancements throughout this important area of the kernel...
ZTE Day 2026 in Almaty Showcases Innovations Shaping Kazakhstan's Intelligent Telecom Future
PARTNER CONTENT: Empowering Kazakhstan’s "Year of Digitalization and AI" with Next-Gen Connectivity and Supercomputing Solutions
KDE Plasma 6.7 Released With Per-Screen Virtual Desktops, Wayland Improvements
Today's the day! KDE developers have just released Plasma 6.7 as the newest version of this leading open-source desktop environment...
Correlated randomness in Slay the Spire 2
Article URL: https://tck.mn/blog/correlated-randomness-sts2/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552844 Points: 259 # Comments: 83
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Linux 7.2 Drops Driver For The 40+ Year Old Hercules Monochrome ISA Graphics Card
After Linux 7.1 dropped support for old i486 CPUs and also began removing some old ISA and PCMCIA device drivers, there is some additional old hardware relics being cleared out of the in-development Linux 7.2 driver... The frame-buffer device driver for the old Hercules Monochrome ISA graphics card is now removed from the Linux kernel after decades at play...
Commodore’s newest gadget is a flip phone that blocks social media and browsers
Commodore's Callback 8020 is a phone “where the customer is not the product."
Linux 7.2 Optimization Shows +5% IOPS For EXT4 & XFS After Moving Around Two Lines Of Code
In addition to the surprising impact of /proc/filesystems read optimizations for Linux 7.2, another one of the VFS pull requests for this next kernel version is delivering some nice improvements for EXT4 and XFS around IOmap, the framework that maps file data offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage...
FreeBSD 15.1 Released With Updated WiFi Drivers, Better C23 Support & Other Improvements
After some last minute delays pushing the 15.1-RELEASE back by two weeks, FreeBSD 15.1 is now shipping as the newest stable release of this BSD operating system...
Key mission for Europe's commercial space enterprise scrubbed again
Isar Aerospace is not hurting for money, but it is sorely lacking in the currency of flight experience.
Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 Beta Now Properly Handles Notches & Rounded Corners
The community of developers continuing to maintain Ubuntu Touch for smartphones has released the Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 beta ahead of the planned stable release in mid-July...
Heart protection from COVID shots remains amid updates, study finds
Despite continued benefits, anti-vaccine rhetoric has driven down vaccination.
Intel Performance Skills: New Open-Source Project Leveraging AI For Linux Performance Optimizations
The newest open-source project out of Intel is the Intel Performance Skills project that is providing AI agent skills to help with CPU performance analysis and performance optimizations on Linux...
UK to ban social media for kids under 16, may impose overnight curfews
Critics say bans push kids to riskier alternatives and can be beaten with VPNs.
FreeBSD Receives Funding To Launch AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery
The FreeBSD Project announced today the launch of an AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery Project with grant funding provided by the Linux Foundation backed Alpha-Omega project. Alpha-Mega has sponsors including Microsoft, AWS, Google, Anthrophic, OpenAI, and others who will now be helping with FreeBSD uncovering new vulnerabilities by leveraging AI...
Chipmaker Nvidia seeks to raise over $25B in first bond deal since 2021
Debt sale set to test investor appetite for further exposure to AI sector amid a deluge of borrowing.
A Chinese rocket breaks apart dangerously close to the Starlink constellation
The rocket's breakup likely generated 100 to 150 new pieces of space junk.
GCC Steering Committee Supports Inclusion Of WebAssembly Backend
Last month a new GCC back-end was proposed for WebAssembly to allow C/C++ code to be compiled to WASM with this GNU compiler toolchain. The GCC Steering Committee has evaluated it and approves the notion of WebAssembly back-end for GCC...
Fox’s $22B Roku acquisition aims to expand its reach into smart TVs, advertising
Fox plans to take over Roku's streaming hardware, OS, and FAST services.
Users cry foul after AMD stripped memory crypto from its consumer CPUs
AMD's stripping of TSME from consumer CPUs appears to be a deliberate, covert move.
Getting Creative with Perlin Noise Fields
Article URL: https://sighack.com/post/getting-creative-with-perlin-noise-fields Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48522316 Points: 162 # Comments: 23
Discussion: Hacker News thread →