Sunday, 20 September 2026
77 stories filed.
Almost Never Use AI to Write Anything Substantive
Article URL: https://erichgrunewald.substack.com/p/why-you-should-almost-never-use-ai Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767937 Points: 110 # Comments: 70
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Simple Optimization For Linux 7.4 Can Open Files For Reading ~39% Faster
More than two years in the making, Linux 7.4 is poised to introduce a patch that amounts to a rather simple optimization to avoid unnecessary/duplicative work that can net some nice gains when opening files for reading...
Agentic security is the billion-dollar challenge for some clever startup to solve
High time to stop kicking the security can down the road, investor tells The Reg
A graphical desktop for the ZX Spectrum
Article URL: https://github.com/mindbox77/zxdesk Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49766676 Points: 119 # Comments: 89
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
Article URL: https://besok.github.io/posts/what-zig-felt-like-coming-from-rust/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49766637 Points: 149 # Comments: 174
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Tin: full-text search for Postgres
Article URL: https://planetscale.com/blog/introducing-tin Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49766611 Points: 143 # Comments: 62
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
AI boom could leave an e-waste trail that wraps 6 times around Earth
Report says estimates focused on GPUs miss the mountains of power, cooling, and networking gear destined for scrap
Wine-Staging 11.18 Adds New Patches To Further Improve WoW64
Building off yesterday's Wine 11.18 bi-weekly development release is now Wine-Staging 11.18. This experimental flavor of Wine is presently carrying 273 extra patches over that upstream Git state, including some new patches for helping enhance the WoW64 support...
Learning another language may be one of the best ways to keep your brain healthy
Research suggests that bilingualism can offer cognitive benefits.
I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago
Article URL: https://laya.convaiinnovations.com/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765348 Points: 854 # Comments: 210
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
GNOME OS Turns To Zswap To Deal With OOM Issues, Progress On Geary Email Client Fork
In addition to this week's GNOME 51 release were several other exciting developments in the GNOME desktop space...
Intel Xe Driver For Linux 7.4 Adds vRAM Health Check, Degraded Memory Handling
Sent out this week were more Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle. The theme this week was around dealing with video memory health and also being able to better deal with hardware degraded video RAM...
KDE Plasma 6.8 Seeing More Polishing & Fixes, Plasma 6.9 Begins Seeing More Activity
Following last week's Plasma 6.8 beta release, KDE desktop developers have spent this week mostly working on bug fixes as well as some early changes toward Plasma 6.9...
Rings around a tiny body have changed over the past decade
Chariklo is only about 250 km across, but it has two rings, and they're changing.
AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
Article URL: https://john.hartnup.uk/2026/06/07/ai-event-posters.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49764791 Points: 1090 # Comments: 612
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Firefox 156 arrives with a forest of forks in its wake
From Waterfox to LibreWolf and Pale Moon, there's a browser for almost every Mozilla dissenter
GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher
Article URL: https://www.prinzai.com/p/gpt-6-astra-solves-a-wwi-german-radio Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763987 Points: 310 # Comments: 152
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it
Article URL: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/18/if-math-is-more-than-proof-we-need-to-better-celebrate-the-rest-of-it/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763928 Points: 266 # Comments: 223
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763697 Points: 576 # Comments: 209
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
San Francisco Onion Futures Company
Article URL: https://onionfutures.com/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763296 Points: 333 # Comments: 141
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
SDCC – Small Device C Compiler
Article URL: https://sdcc.sourceforge.net/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762744 Points: 119 # Comments: 28
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Help Linux Hardware Testing & Reviews Continue While Enjoying Phoronix Without Ads
If you missed out on the Phoronix Premium special back during the 22nd birthday of Phoronix.com in June, there is another promotion now active for helping to support the site and allow for continued daily original content and relentless Linux performance benchmarking and other open-sourced focused hardware testing...
Ubuntu 26.10 Switches To The Linux 7.3 Kernel
As a very pleasant surprise, the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release will now be powered by the Linux 7.3 kernel rather than their original plans and switch over to the Linux 7.2 kernel...
Anthropic decides to support OpenAI's markdown instructions spec
Devs cheer relief from compatibility headache
Wine 11.18 Continues Building Out Its NTOSKRNL Implementation
Wine 11.18 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and apps on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...
Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K
The Rust compiler remains unperturbed by the antics of the LLM
AI hallucination of Chinese nuclear components almost led to US military attack
But the military's overall use of AI seems to be accelerating.
Virginia governor wakes up to fact datacenters have become political cancer
Executive order puts the kibosh on NDAs, limits permitting, and calls for stiffer environmental protections
Steam Frame Making Use Of Zink For OpenGL On Vulkan
Valve's Steam Frame VR headset that makes use of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC with Adreno graphics is using the open-source "Turnip" Vulkan driver from Mesa as reported last year. For OpenGL it turns out that the Mesa Zink driver is being used on the Steam Frame for OpenGL atop the Vulkan API...
Compsci grads facing recession-like job prospects thanks to AI
Slinging coffee and waiting tables ain't just for liberal arts grads any more, say Census Bureau economists
FAA tees up $875M AI tool to help manage air traffic congestion
FAA plans for AI tool to help manage DC air traffic before a nationwide rollout.
Claude Code revamps projects so you can work and pay in parallel
Running multiple Claude sessions at once means less waiting around to hit your usage limit
Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP
Article URL: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49758736 Points: 1062 # Comments: 620
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Saving another 100TB of RAM
Article URL: https://blog.cloudflare.com/saving-100-tb-of-ram-with-math/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49758580 Points: 444 # Comments: 99
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
FCC lets Paramount sell 49.5% equity stake to Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar
FCC rejects concerns about repressive governments buying influence over CBS owner.
Finding the cells that put our brain to sleep
Rare cells with widespread connectivity seem to be able to trigger sleep.
US government website used Chinese model the FBI called "malicious"
The Federal Register website briefly used an open source Chinese AI search tool.
Researchers used Claude to hack OpenAI employees' ChatGPT accounts
Agentic exploits for the win (again)
North Korea's fake job interviews infected 30,000 devices
WaterPlum recruiters used bogus coding tests to backdoor jobseekers and raid more than 7,000 crypto wallets
Google's "Painful To Maintain" Binder C Linux Driver Being Removed In Favor Of Rust
Google's Binder driver written in the C programming language has long been part of the mainline kernel as the inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism used on Android. The past few years the Binder driver was rewritten in Rust as one of the first "real" drivers in the Rust programming language. The Rust Binder driver was upstreamed in Linux 6.18 and now for the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel…
FBI: Fake cop and government impersonation scams cost victims $1.6B
AI, fake uniforms, and mock offices help crooks sell the con
Apple Video Decode Driver Posted For Upstream Linux Kernel Review
The latest Apple Silicon enablement code working its way from the Asahi Linux project toward the upstream Linux kernel is the AVD driver used for accelerated video playback across Apple M1 / M2 / M3 SoCs...
Admins, you've been warned: The clock is ticking on Edge's IE Mode
Legacy web apps have guaranteed shelter only through 2029, and Redmond warns modernization can take years
KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal
Akademy talk imagines Plasma assembling itself around a personal model of each user
Cloudflare Quick Tunnels
Article URL: https://try.cloudflare.com/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754785 Points: 797 # Comments: 304
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
AMD Strix Halo Enjoys Some Performance Gains On Ubuntu 26.10, Especially With amd64v3
Ahead of next week's Ubuntu 26.10 beta release I have been testing the "Stonking Stingray" on a variety of systems. Ubuntu 26.10 is performing well overall with some nice upgrades over Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, especially if opting to use the new snapshot/daily ISOs of Ubuntu 26.10 in amd64v3 form for x86_64-v3 packages. In today's tests are a look at the performance benefits of Ubuntu 26.10 on an AMD…
Meet the winner of Nikon's Small World in Motion video contest
Ning Xu of Tsinghua University captured tiny cilia beating in airways of a child with rare respiratory disorder.
Researchers used Claude to hack OpenAI
Researchers used Claude to reach an OpenAI employee account and sensitive GitHub data.
Microsoft fixes the fix that broke Excel paste – partly
Hotfix covers only Excel 2016 and may still come unstuck around conditional formatting
Linux Ready With Fix For Intel's FRED Crashing Some Games Under Wine / Steam Play
Recently there have been some bug reports to Mesa around Intel Panther Lake graphics crashing with some games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Elden Ring crashing or freezing quite quickly. This turns out not to be an Intel Xe3 Arc Graphics B390 driver bug with Panther Lake but rather due to a kernel issue with the new Flexible and Return Event Delivery "FRED" that debuted with the Core Ultra…
The ideal database for AI agents doesn't exist yet, says Percona CEO
Iterative workloads caught vendors off guard, but requirements for a clean-slate solution remain unclear
Former Labour deputy Tom Watson joins Palantir as £330M NHS deal nears break point
US spy-tech firm insists its new UK senior vice president is there to 'build things, not to open doors'
Rocket Report: China wants a Raptor 3 engine; SpaceX set for big Starship test
“I can tell you SpaceX has already gone captive."
Ubuntu 26.10 Desktop Adjusting Its Behavior Under Memory Pressure
The Ubuntu 26.10 desktop is adjusting its default out-of-memory (OOM) daemon behavior when dealing with memory pressure on the system...
KPMG tech cuts come with a severance sum some staff call insulting
AI, Cyber, SAP and Testing teams caught in latest reshaping of Big Four consultancy's Advisory arm
Linux Kernel Build Times Ready To Be Significantly Reduced With Latest Patches
The past few weeks we have eagerly been following a Linux kernel patch series after AI found some major bottlenecks in the Linux kernel build code. With AI helping to address these bottlenecks, Linux kernel build times are substantially reduced. These optimizations might be ready in time for Linux 7.4 for reducing incremental kernel build times as much as around 70%.
AMD Sends In More HDMI FRL Updates For Linux 7.4, Fixes For Upcoming Hardware
Linux 7.4 is set to be a very exciting holiday gift for AMD Radeon graphics customers. As covered last week on Phoronix, with this next kernel AMD Is enabling HDMI 2.1 support by default now that FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM support is included too. This week another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were sent out ahead of the Linux 7.4 merge window in October...
Intel Appears To End Its Bug Bounty Program
Amid a boom of bug reporting in general due to AI/LLMs across the entire software ecosystem, Intel this week appears to have ended its paid bug bounty program. They have (re)launched a new bug reporting program but with the bounties removed...
British Army spends £16M on 1,000 pocket-sized eyes in the sky
Surveillance and training drone systems will come through three UK suppliers, though some are built overseas
Royal Society slams UK.gov science shake-up
Whitehall changes a 'big mistake' as anything going in with Business department gets squeezed
Techie fixed Wi-Fi dead zone with a drill
When wires and wireless mix, the combination can be electric
OpenCL 3.1.2 Released With cl_khr_command_buffer Promoted
The Khronos Group today released the newest revision of the OpenCL specification with a handful of changes...
Jemalloc 5.4 Released With Portability Improvements, Code Cleanups
Earlier this year Meta announced a renewed investment into the jemalloc memory allocator that's been popular for server and HPC use among various desktop use-cases too. After stagnating a bit in recent years, Jemalloc has been off to seeing new developments since Meta's announcement and out today is Jemalloc 5.4 as the latest step forward...
RFK Jr. names 8 new members to influential preventive medicine task force
The USPSTF sets insurance coverage for preventive services, like colonoscopies.
Small AI models let drones autonomously identify and attack battlefield targets
Scaleout deploys decentralized AI-driven learning to military bases and drones.
How to Write with an LLM
Article URL: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/17/how-to-write-with-an-llm/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747070 Points: 592 # Comments: 368
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Google announces new experimental "CC" AI agent for families
Multiple family members can share data to help the agent make plans and complete tasks.
Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”
Microsoft, OpenAI emails reveal fear of AI “doom loop” killing news orgs.
Intel Granite Rapids WS vs. AMD Threadripper Zen 5 SMT Performance
As a follow-up to the article earlier this month of the Intel Xeon 600 workstation performance against AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series in over 400 benchmarks -- including when carried out at the same core count and memory configuration -- today's article is exploring the Hyper Threading / SMT impact on both the Intel Redwood Cove and AMD Zen 5 cores for workstations.
Republican bill would order ISPs, DNS providers, and VPNs to block piracy sites
Bill would help rightsholders obtain court orders to block foreign piracy sites.
LLMs respond differently to harmful prompts when AI watermarking is used
SynthID can cause models to follow harmful instructions they would otherwise refuse.
IV drips used for "detoxification" actually filled with toxins; dozens poisoned
The IV drips included glutathione, which was not made to be injected.
2026 Hyundai Ioniq 5: Here's what we still like, here's what annoys us
It’s spacious, efficient, and charges very quickly. But what about reliability concerns?
Covert uploads and megalomania: OpenAI details new "misaligned" agent incidents
Model maker commits to new framework for reporting misaligned models.
EPA immediately sued over plans to repeal climate rules for power plants
Public health groups warn EPA rule will cost Americans billions in health bills.
You can run Git on object storage if you re-make packfiles
Article URL: https://www.tigrisdata.com/blog/objgit-packfiles/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49730069 Points: 123 # Comments: 30
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
The Secret Life of Circuits
Article URL: https://blog.coredump.cx/p/the-secret-life-of-circuits-is-here Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49720143 Points: 244 # Comments: 63
Discussion: Hacker News thread →