Hacker News Daily — July 10, 2026
30 stories · July 10, 2026
In this issue
- 1
QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall
jeffgeerling.com · 335 points · Discussion
The QuadRF (pictured above) a phased-array radio built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and an FPGA board with picosecond-level timing. It does advanced signal processing and beamforming. It can see WiFi…
- 2
Write code like a human will maintain it
unstack.io · 299 points · Discussion
One of the best things about LLMs is that they'll write code for you, all day long. Who cares about DRY? You don't have to be the one updating the same long conditional in four different files - the…
- 3
Good Tools Are Invisible
gingerbill.org · 287 points · Discussion
2026-07-10 TL;DR: A good tool is and ought to be invisible—striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker. One habit I see a lot, and have to push back on, is taking a tool’s shortcomings and…
- 4
Late Bronze Age Collapse
acoup.blog · 275 points · Discussion
This week, by order of the ACOUP Senate, we’re talking about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (commonly abbreviated ‘LBAC’), the shocking collapse of the Late Bronze Age state system across the Eastern…
- 5
New York City to become first in US to ban deceptive subscription practices
theguardian.com · 207 points · Discussion
New York City has adopted a new rule that bans companies from using deceptive subscriptions to trap customers into paying for gym memberships, streaming services and other recurring charges, the…
- 6
GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]
cdn.openai.com · 185 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 7
In Emacs, Everything Looks Like a Service
yummymelon.com · 156 points · Discussion
A common refrain is that Emacs is an operating system (OS). This isn’t true, but what invites comparison to an OS is its ability to orchestrate applications and utilities above the OS kernel level.…
- 8
Successful Companies Go Blind
ianreppel.org · 156 points · Discussion
The Mexican cavefish kept its eye genes for over a million years after the eyes themselves disappeared. Something similar happens to companies once they achieve success. The cave is the variable The…
- 9
Mayor Mamdani Announces Landmark "Click-to-Cancel" Consumer Protection Rules
nyc.gov · 151 points · Discussion
NEW YORK – Today, Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) Commissioner Samuel A.A. Levine announced sweeping new consumer protections that will…
- 10
Snails' teeth beats spider silk as nature's strongest material (2015)
smithsonianmag.com · 121 points · Discussion
The discovery makes sense: Mollusks use these teeth to excavate rocks while they feed Brandon Tabiolo/Design Pics/Corbis Marine snails, commonly called limpets, cling tenaciously to rocks as waves…
- 11
Lost city discovered beneath Egypt's desert with ancient church
dailymail.com · 118 points · Discussion
A remarkably well preserved 1,600-year-old city complete with a church, watchtowers and bustling streets has been unearthed beneath Egypt ’s Western Desert. Archaeologists have announced the discovery…
- 12
The mathematical secrets of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia
mappingignorance.org · 111 points · Discussion
Authors: Sergi Muria Maldonado, Professor de Didàctica de les Matemàtiques, Universitat de Barcelona; Anton Aubanell Pou, Professor de l’Institut de Formació Continuada i professor jubilat de…
- 13
The tech of 'Terminator 2' – an oral history (2017)
vfxblog.com · 110 points · Discussion
Illustration by Aidan Roberts. Ever since James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1991, I’ve been reading about the many ways ILM, led by visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, had…
- 14
A Love Letter to Flashcards
lesleylai.info · 108 points · Discussion
Created: May 5, 2026 Last Modified: May 5, 2026 Opinion Learning This piece is a submission for IndieWeb Carnival May 2026: Write a love letter. For a long time, flashcards were not on my radar for…
- 15
Show HN: Reverse-engineering web apps into agent tools
74 points · Discussion
Hey HN! We built a browser-based agent that runs inside an authenticated web app, watches how the app calls its own APIs, and automatically turns those into agent tools. You can think of it as an…
- 16
How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI
casp.ac · 69 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 17
Combustion Engine Web-Based Simulator
combustionlab.net · 65 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 18
War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history
waratlas.org · 61 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 19
Computation as a universal and fundamental concept
ergo.org · 52 points · Discussion
Tim Roughgarden begins with a deceptively simple question: is there anything computers cannot do? To answer it, he takes us back to 1936, when Alan Turing, a decade before actual computers existed,…
- 20
45% of Enthusiasts 'Seriously Considering' Leaving Sony for PC
pushsquare.com · 44 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 21
Show HN: Reviving my 2001 college band with AI
fadingmaize.com · 41 points · Discussion
25 years ago, I joined a band called Fading Maize at Ripon College in Wisconsin. We did what we could with what we had. We recorded 3 albums over the next 3 years and played at as many bars and coffee…
- 22
Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?
39 points · Discussion
It’s been 10 years since we had the last leap second and it looks like we will get the first negative one soonish. Are systems ready for that?
- 23
Hands-On with the AMD Ryzen AI Halo
microcenter.com · 34 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 24
Show HN: Wyrm – Solve algebra by touch, built on an open-source soundness engine
github.com · 22 points · Discussion
There is a mobile game called DragonBox. It sort of tricks you into learning algebra by starting with very abstract manipulations of a puzzle that must follow rules... gradually the game teaches you…
- 25
Don't discontinue Gemini 2.5 Flash
discuss.ai.google.dev · 17 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 26
An Update on the scraper situation
lwn.net · 16 points · Discussion
[LWN subscriber-only content] Welcome to LWN.net The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news…
- 27
Materials innovation has a scale-up problem, not discovery
atomscale.ai · 14 points · Discussion
The Promise and the Gap In December 1959, Richard Feynman stood before the American Physical Society at Caltech and told a room of physicists there was "plenty of room at the bottom." He was inviting…
- 28
The Clouds of Hiroshima
doomsdaymachines.net · 13 points · Discussion
The mushroom cloud is an iconic symbol of the nuclear age, and photographs of the clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki are frequently used as a short-hand for gesturing at the terrible power unleashed…
- 29
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…
- 30
Conway's Game of Life, in real life
lcamtuf.coredump.cx · 12 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.