Hacker News Daily — June 20, 2026
30 stories · June 20, 2026
In this issue
- 1
GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2
arrowtsx.dev · 473 points · Discussion
A shift is happening among major AI labs, who are becoming increasingly skeptical of endless parameter count and training data scaling. The limits of this paradigm were put on the world’s stage when…
- 2
Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You
moultano.wordpress.com · 401 points · Discussion
There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture…
- 3
- 4
Can you see three trees?
not-ship.com · 299 points · Discussion
Me again! I'm so happy you're all here. Thanks for letting me nerd out in your inbox week after week. 💙 Amanda Look out your window. Can you see three trees? That's the first question of the 3-30-300…
- 5
I Stored a Website in a Favicon
timwehrle.de · 277 points · Discussion
A while ago I wrote about storing two bytes inside my mouse's DPI register. It wasn't useful. It wasn't practical. But it did something unfortunate to my brain. Once you've successfully hidden data…
- 6
The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows
waxy.org · 256 points · Discussion
Last week, a MetaFilter member posted a link to what appeared to be a new website for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig’s decade-long project to make a “dictionary of made-up words for…
- 7
Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
extremetech.com · 202 points · Discussion
Microsoft's new Media Player for Windows 11 is drawing criticism now that tests have found it to use far more memory than the classic Windows Media Player. Moreover, the new player hides some popular…
- 8
SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
smpte.org · 143 points · Discussion
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — June 17, 2026 — SMPTE ®, the home of media professionals, technologists and engineers, has announced that its entire Standards catalog is now freely available to the global media…
- 9
DOS Game "F-15 Strike Eagle II" reversing project needs DOS test pilots
neuviemeporte.github.io · 141 points · Discussion
( This post is part of a series on the subject of my hobby project, which is recreating the C source code for the 1989 game F-15 Strike Eagle II by reverse engineering the original binaries. ) I must…
- 10
Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents
blog.cloudflare.com · 115 points · Discussion
2026-06-19 4 min read Everyone's writing code with AI agents today. But the moment an agent needs to deploy something — and needs to sign up and create an account — it slams face-first into a wall…
- 11
Show HN: StartupWiki – A Free Alternative to Crunchbase
startupwiki.tech · 98 points · Discussion
I've been building StartupWiki, a free startup database designed to make it easier to discover and research companies. The original motivation was frustration with how difficult it can be to find…
- 12
UHF X11: X11 Built for VisionOS and Apple Vision Pro
lispm.net · 98 points · Discussion
L:>PROJECTS>CONFIDENTIAL>SPATIAL-UNIX>*.*.* X11 built for VisionOS and Apple Vision Pro. A modern X11 built for basking in the past. Send your favorite Xlib clients to spatial windows, and live out…
- 13
Bootimus – A Self-Contained PXE and HTTP Boot Server
bootimus.com · 93 points · Discussion
v1.x · apache 2.0 go · iPXE · sqlite/postgres PXE boot, without the pain. Self-contained PXE and HTTP boot server. One binary. Zero config. Built-in proxyDHCP so you never touch your router. 50+…
- 14
The ability to regrow body parts is dormant in mammals, not lost
sciencedaily.com · 91 points · Discussion
For generations, scientists have viewed the inability to regrow lost body parts as one of the fundamental limitations of humans and other mammals. While creatures such as salamanders can regenerate…
- 15
Bun has an open PR adding shared-memory threads to JavaScriptCore
github.com · 78 points · Discussion
added 21 commits June 5, 2026 08:09 Design specs for shared-heap Thread support in JSC: heap server and per-thread allocators, shared VM state, TID/SW-tagged and segmented butterflies, JIT tiers under…
- 16
Ember, a native iOS Hacker News reader I built around accessibility
github.com · 73 points · Discussion
A native Hacker News reader for iPhone, iPad, and Mac — calm, fast, and built for everyone. Ember is a SwiftUI app that reads Hacker News the way a native app should: threaded comments rendered…
- 17
The rise of South Korea’s weapons business
politico.com · 56 points · Discussion
“Warsaw’s turn towards South Korean defense procurement stems partly from a profound disappointment with Germany’s initial response to the war in Ukraine — a feeling echoed across NATO’s eastern…
- 18
Vacation With An Artist – Mini-Apprenticeships with Artists in Their Studios
vawaa.com · 50 points · Discussion
Featured Artists A new way to travel VAWAA is a mini-apprenticeship with a curated master artist or craftsman, tailored to your skill level. How it Works A lifelong souvenir Whether it’s honing a…
- 19
Show HN: We post-trained a model that pen tests instead of refusing
argusred.com · 49 points · Discussion
Anthropic and OpenAI's publicly available models are explicitly guard-railed so that they refuse offensive tasks. And their cyber-focussed models are gated for enterprises. This leaves SMEs and mid…
- 20
Show HN: Microcrad – Micrograd Reimplemented in C
github.com · 46 points · Discussion
microcrad is a tiny scalar-valued automatic differentiation engine for C, with a small neural network implementation built on top of it. It is a re-implementation of Andrej Karpathy's micrograd in C,…
- 21
AMD will reinstate memory encryption on Ryzen 9000 CPUs via BIOS update in July
tomshardware.com · 44 points · Discussion
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware) AMD has told Tom's Hardware that it will reinstate Transparent Secure Memory Encryption (TSME) on desktop Ryzen 9000 processors in July (we have the full statement…
- 22
Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
github.com · 40 points · Discussion
A CLI that takes a PDF and degrades it to look like a physical scan of a printout — skew, grayscale, warm paper tone, scanner grain, defocus, edge shadow, and JPEG compression artifacts. Also runs…
- 23
Web Browsers on PDAS
vale.rocks · 39 points · Discussion
From the moment the technology arrived to allow personal digital assistants ( PDA s) 1 a connection to the internet, people started connecting them to the internet, as is the natural order of things.…
- 24
Why has the pointe shoe been so resistant to change?
dancemagazine.com · 30 points · Discussion
Pointe shoes have looked and functioned about the same since the early 20th century: typically satin-covered, with fortified insoles and boxes made from fabric, paper, and paste. Few designs have…
- 25
PostgresBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Postgres Services
clickhouse.com · 29 points · Discussion
For years, we have focused on building fast systems. ClickHouse is an example of that focus. Performance is not a feature we add later. It is a core design goal from the start. We applied a similar…
- 26
Show HN: My Windows XP portfolio with working Game Boy and iPod
mitchivin.com · 28 points · Discussion
I posted my portfolio here about a year ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45154609 ) and while there was a big response, it was very mixed! It'll probably be similar this time, but regardless…
- 27
Mencius (2016)
scholarworks.iu.edu · 21 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 28
How to organize 3 acquired companies into one coherent website
littlelanguagemodels.com · 13 points · Discussion
Company A has acquired Company B, C, and D. How do we organize their sites, for multiple products with different audiences, while making it easy to find relevant product information and quickly…
- 29
Now You Don't: When Espionage Meets Magic
politicshome.com · 12 points · Discussion
17 min read 19 January Spies and magicians have plundered one another’s box of tricks throughout history but, as Alan White reports, these practised deceivers can’t be trusted to tell the truth about…
- 30
Conway's Game of Life, in real life
lcamtuf.coredump.cx · 12 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.