Monday, 17 August 2026
72 stories filed.
GIMP Making Progress On New Project File Format After Nearly 30 Years With XCF
The GIMP project has published their latest development update to highlight the interesting work that's ongoing toward GIMP 3.4 and future releases...
Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers
A few hours ago I switched my nameservers to Cloudflare in order to enable R2 bucket serving through my own subdomain, and I found out that it silently had injected a JS analytics snippet in my HTML-only JS-free site textlog.cc — I had to go to the Analytics dashboard, Add the site to the analytics and then disable the snippet. I find this approach entirely invasive, you should opt-in to…
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
A 3rd World Embedded Engineer Responds to "RISC-V They Should Have Known Better"
Article URL: https://rvembedded.com/blog_post/12/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49321717 Points: 177 # Comments: 95
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
tlbi= Boot Option Submitted Ahead Of Linux 7.2 Kernel Release
Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel stable release expected to occur in the coming hours, a last minute "x86/urgent" pull request was submitted with one patch for adding the new tlbi= boot option...
The weekend is 100 years old
Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/aug/16/the-weekend-is-100-years-old-skiveday-fridays-and-hybrid-working-ruined-it Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49320984 Points: 132 # Comments: 75
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core
Article URL: https://www.wptv.com/news/treasure-coast/region-st-lucie-county/saint-lucie-nuclear-power-plant-unit-1-manually-shut-down-after-3-control-rods-drop-into-reactor-core Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49320856 Points: 114 # Comments: 82
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
The AI Credit Resale Economy
Article URL: https://vectoral.com/blog/who-are-the-token-brokers Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49320611 Points: 174 # Comments: 64
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Debian Marks 33rd Birthday As One Of The Oldest Maintained Linux Distros
Today marks thirty three years since the Debian Linux distribution was started by the late Ian Murdock...
Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker
Article URL: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-ads-firefox-ios Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319633 Points: 414 # Comments: 179
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Claude: System Prompts
Article URL: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-prompts Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319556 Points: 416 # Comments: 182
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure"
Article URL: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22kidney+disappointment%22 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319389 Points: 299 # Comments: 111
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
AVX-512 xor_gen Continues To Look Exciting For Helping Linux RAID With Modern CPUs
Google engineer Eric Biggers back in June posted an AVX-512 optimization for Linux RAID yielding up to a 41% improvement on a modern AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) processor. A revised patch then put it as much as a 43% improvement for this AVX-512 optimized xor_gen() function. The code hasn't yet been merged to mainline but an updated version of it is now available...
Linux 7.3 binfmt_misc To Allow BPF Programs To Dynamically Choose Execution Environments
The Linux kernel's binfmt_misc functionality allows non-native/custom files to ne run directly such as for Windows EXE files to be handled by Wine or JAR files to be handled by the Java runtime. For the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window, the miscellaneous binary formats support is being extended so a binary type can be matched programmatically and the interpreter determined on a per-exec basis.…
New Linux Driver Enables 12VHPWR Monitoring For ASUS ROG Astral Graphics Cards
For those concerned about current imbalance or voltage changes with the 12VHPWR power connectors and having an ASUS ROG Astral graphics card, there is now an open-source driver for Linux available that integrates with the hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem for 12VHPWR reporting on these ASUS graphics cards...
Stopping a cyberattack while walking your dog - defensive AI security CEO says it's not ruff to do
Corma CEO tells The Reg it's building 'One ring to rule them all, for the defenders to have this power'
Wildfire smoke now bigger prenatal threat than human sources of air pollution
Regulations reduced prenatal exposure to harmful emissions, but wildfire smoke is erasing gains.
The what, why, and how of pull requests and source comments
Microsoft veteran on knowing the difference and convincing approvers to accept a change
Marek Olšák's 19 Latest Patches Further Optimizing RADV & ACO
Legendary Mesa Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák who was a longtime AMD employee and then joined Valve's Linux graphics driver team earlier this year has continued his focus now on perfecting his art around the RADV Vulkan driver and ACO shader compiler...
VisionQuest trailer kicks off Disney's D23 fan event
Also: Ahsoka S2 teaser, Doomsday trailer, news about MCU's X-Men and Star Wars: Starfighter
GNOME 51 Beta Released With Many Minor Improvements
The beta release of GNOME 51 is now available for testing. This cycle for the beta milestone is mostly a wide collection of minor improvements throughout the vast package set...
Ukraine strikes major Russian rocket factory with cruise missiles
"Flamingo missiles were used. A good achievement."
Intel's Jay Graphics Shader Compiler Now Passing Vulkan CTS With Xe2/Xe3 Hardware
Last year Alyssa Rosenzweig joined Intel to work on their Linux graphics drivers after previously serving as a contractor for Valve on their graphics stack and also previously leading the Mesa driver work for the Asahi Linux Apple Silicon graphics support. Since joining Intel, she has been leading the development of Jay as a new SSA-based shader compiler for Intel graphics hardware to be used by…
RustConn 0.20 Continues Further Polishing This GTK4/libadwaita-Based Connection Manager
RustConn has been in development for a while now as a modern GTK4 connection manager supporting a variety of protocols like SSH, RDP, VNC, Telnet, and more. RustConn 0.20 was released this week as the latest major step forward to this Rust-based connection manager leveraging the GTK4 toolkit and libadwaita...
So much solar: Digging into the list of every US power plant that went online this year
Utility-scale solar leads by a mile, followed by batteries. Fossil fuels, not so much.
Late Sound Fixes For Linux 7.2 Bring More Device Quirks, Intel Nova Lake HDMI-In Capture
Ahead of the presumed Linux 7.2 stable kernel release tomorrow, some last minute sound fixes/quirks have been merged for this next kernel version...
KDE Plasma 6.8 To Allow Fine-Tuning Mouse/Touchpad Speeds
KDE developers continue to be quite busy this summer baking improvements for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop release. This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue to outline all of these interesting enhancements...
Debian Developers Begin Voting Over LLM Usage Within The Project
Debian developers have been considering a general resolution over LLM usage within the project. After collecting a variety of proposals, voting has now commenced for Debian developers to decide how comfortable they are with AI / Large Language Model contributions in the project or not...
ChainDrop worm crawls into npm supply chain, evades standard defenses
Shai-Hulud variant poisons 444 packages, spreads via tarballs and dev-tool hooks
Lego's supersized Hubble deserves a little more shine
Excellent internal detail cannot entirely disguise some penny-pinching choices
AMD Posts Massive 109 Patch Series For GFX 12.1 RAS Support On Friday Evening
AMD has a tendency to send out large feature patch series for their open-source Linux drivers on Friday afternoons/evenings. Today we were greeted by a set of 109 patches working on RAS support for the upcoming AMD GFX12.1 target...
Anthropic says text watermarking scheme relies on inconsequential words
'Shall I compare thee to a summer's afternoon' is the sort of thing this will make, and others look likely to adopt it
D7VK 2.1 Brings Faster Load Times, More Performance Tweaks
D7VK as the open-source implementation of the Direct3D 7 / 6 / 5/ 3 APIs atop the Vulkan API for Linux/Wine usage is out with another feature update. D7VK continues to mature quite well for further enhancing these older Direct3D API versions that cover the span prior to DXVK's focus of Direct3D 8 to Direct3D 11 or VKD3D-Proton's Direct3D 12...
DeepSeek's innovative harness treats everything as a plug-in
Chinese AI labs keep moving forward while US labs play defense
Lemonade 11.6 Integrates Muse-Glimmer 30B, Experimental TheNoise ROCm Image Generation
For those dabbling with generative AI on the weekends, the AMD-led Lemonade SDK 11.6 is out today with its newest feature release of this open-source software for running local AI apps with optimized LLMs across CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs...
Vulnerability giving attackers full control of Macs is under active exploitation
Screen-sharing bug lets remote hackers log in without a password.
Omarchy 4.0 Linux Distro Released With Desktop Shell Now Implemented Via Quickshell
Omarchy as the Arch Linux distribution developed by David Heinemeier Hansson "DHH" / Basecamp is out today with Omarchy 4.0 as the distro's biggest release to date...
First test flight of largest all-electric aircraft used just $5 of electricity
Airline-backed venture aims to develop a hybrid-electric commercial aircraft.
1.6M RingCentral accounts' data dumped after ShinyHunters extortion attack
Another one bites the dust
Suspecting court of using AI, man injected prompts in filings to try to win case
Judge warns pro se litigants are using chatbots wrong and getting desperate.
State judge orders Kalshi to stop offering sports bets and other wagers
Kalshi ordered to stop offering bets in Washington, must implement geofencing.
PBS station fears losing 50TB of data after being ghosted by cloud storage provider
"We don't have access to the data on the hardware/servers," Iron Mountain told Ars.
Russian missile uses Nvidia AI chip to help target Ukraine
Kyiv wants tighter controls to keep foreign silicon out of Moscow's weapons
Policy experts: Europe stuck between "rock and a hard place" on launch
It turns out that the economics of rocket reuse are pretty, pretty good.
Trump sends the US Navy back to the steam age
Troublesome electromagnetic catapults look set to be replaced with old-fashioned technology
Ars Live recap: How can we stop publishers from killing their own games?
The Stop Killing Games movement faces an uphill battle.
Judge gives Google one week to fix "anticompetitive" app store download in Google Play
Third-party app stores are about to become more visible in Google Play.
R-rated director's cut of X-Files film restores Chris Carter's original horror vision
Chris Carter chats with Ars about the film he originally wanted to make—and why it's more relevant than ever.
Linux 7.1, Linux 7.2 Performance On The Intel Xeon 600 Series
With Linux 7.2 expected for its stable release this weekend, today's testing has some additional testing of the Linux 7.2 Git kernel as well as Linux 7.1 stable compared to Linux 7.0 as used by default on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Phoronix testing previously conducted of Linux 7.2 have shown benefits for Intel Arc B390 Xe3 in some configurations, faster poll performance on AMD Ryzen Threadripper and…
Taylor Farms' connections to Trump admin spurs probe into Cyclospora response
Senator Warren questions whether Taylor Farms' influence swayed Trump admin.
OpenAI and Anthropic in price war as Chinese AI rivals gain ground
US groups release cheaper models after new challenges to their trillion-dollar ambitions.
French tax authority admits data heist after crook touts 2M records
Government disputes claims of continued access as investigators measure damage
Virgin Galactic flights stay grounded while ticket prices head for the Moon
Turns out this space thing really is hard
Autonomous AI attacks pose 'clear and present danger' to critical infrastructure
Weaponized agents could turn digital intrusions into kinetic disasters, experts warn
Less than a year on, Microsoft tells Mico to pipe down
Copilot's gurning blob is leaving Voice for a new career in education
TalkTalk Business and ARO to borg into UK tech services giant
70,000 customers will join the collective, whose name and leader remain unknown
Rocket Report: Rocket Lab shows off its flexibility; Blue Origin's two-pad plan
"We’ve never seen launch capacity so constrained."
Features Coming For Linux 7.3 From Optimizing Intel Hybrid CPUs To Old AMD Athlon XPs
With Linux 7.2 expected to see its stable debut Sunday, here is a look at what I have been monitoring as changes expected to be submitted during the Linux 7.3 merge window that will open on Monday...
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra review: The ultra foldable with an ultra price
Samsung didn't have to change much this year because its hardware is just that good.
Crypto wallet maker Trezor confirms 13,000 customers' details exposed in logistics breach
Even if your hardware is secure, quantum-ready, encrypted, and future-proof, no one is immune to a supplier letting the side down
Patches Posted For Fixing The Linux DRM Scheduler's Fair Policy
Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected out on Sunday, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem was forced to revert their "fair" scheduler policy default new for this kernel. Due to a last minute user-reported regression, FIFO returns as the default DRM scheduler policy for Linux 7.2. But patches are now available for addressing that regression and thus hopefully for Linux 7.3 there…
BOFH: How our Covid ransomware protocol's Y2K blockchain lowered uptime
Diary of an excuse hound: Pie charts make us hungry for pizza
Scottish prosecutors cast eye over leaky supplier after staff data exposed
Unnamed third party spotted suspicious activity, with names, roles, and email addresses potentially affected
Claude Code returns blank thinking blocks, but reasoning still costs you
Developers report model thinking blocks being returned empty or truncated
Organic-looking brake assemblies debut on new Czinger 21C Spyder
Czinger used topological design and additive manufacturing to make the brakes.
Five years after quitting a job, developer’s former boss asked for rapid tech support
Connecting a single power cord turned into a lucrative all-nighter
New Zealand says China tried using space investments to spy on local affairs
Intelligence Service says finding domestic threats is harder due to proliferation of toxic content online
US wait times for cancer surgeries are getting longer and longer
Study finds wait times for cancer surgeries hit 10-year high.
Chestnut – eGPU dock with open-source firmware
Article URL: https://hwbusters.com/news/comma-ai-egpu-dock-runs-open-source-firmware-249-bare-799-with-an-rx-9060/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292385 Points: 121 # Comments: 32
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Private security firms will soon be allowed to hack overseas cybercriminals
Trump memo is first time gov't has authorized private sector to perform cyberattacks.
Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
Article URL: https://brandur.org/fragments/postgres-without-pgbouncer Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277952 Points: 122 # Comments: 79
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Asus Bike Booster
Article URL: https://www.asus.com/accessories/bike-booster/asus-oxiis/oxiis-intelligent-bike-booster/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49268580 Points: 577 # Comments: 404
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Asynchronous I/O in DuckDB: Work, Thread, Work
Article URL: https://duckdb.org/2026/07/31/asynchronous-io Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49243061 Points: 259 # Comments: 28
Discussion: Hacker News thread →