Hacker News Daily — August 4, 2026
30 stories · August 4, 2026
In this issue
- 1
Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
birchtree.me · 502 points · Discussion
Jay Peters: Xbox’s huge outage even blocked games on disc An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t just caused issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from…
- 2
Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones
toneyalexander.github.io · 376 points · Discussion
Hello HN! I found that picking out plausible but diverse skin tones for my digital art and game development projects was kind of difficult, and I got curious about if there was a way to define a color…
- 3
DeepSeek V4 Flash on a Single AMD MI300X
github.com · 338 points · Discussion
DeepSeek V4 Flash on a single AMD MI300X This repository contains the configuration and patches I use to run deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 on one AMD MI300X in production. It includes the Docker…
- 4
There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
users.wpi.edu · 321 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 5
In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley, with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years
writings.stephenwolfram.com · 304 points · Discussion
Something terrible just happened. My wife, Elise Cawley, was recovering from heart surgery and had just attended virtually a celebration for one of our children when she had a freak, vast…
- 6
Harness engineering for self-improvement
lilianweng.github.io · 274 points · Discussion
The concept of recursive self-improvement (RSI) dates back to I. J. Good (1965), where he defined an “ultraintelligent machine” as a system that can surpass humans in all intellectual activities and…
- 7
Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
techcrunch.com · 263 points · Discussion
Apple is now seeking a preliminary injunction in its trade secrets case against OpenAI, which aims to stop the AI model maker from moving forward with developing an AI device or other products based…
- 8
Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack
aikido.dev · 210 points · Discussion
On August 4, 2026, attackers compromised the GitHub account of the maintainer behind keyv, a key-value storage library with roughly 127 million weekly npm downloads, and used that access to inject a…
- 9
Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
this.weekinsecurity.com · 194 points · Discussion
Online ads provider Adform was hacked. On July 27, the company began serving ads containing malicious code. The company says in its latest annual report that its serves 1.5 billion ads to people's…
- 10
Web security is too hard
textslashplain.com · 148 points · Discussion
It started innocently enough. I saw a tweet about a new product offering from one of my favorite companies, Cloudflare. Neat! I clicked through to the site and there it is: And huzzah!, my preferred…
- 11
Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation
mistral.ai · 143 points · Discussion
Shieldstral introduces a 3B open-weights multimodal safety classifier that outperforms models up to 7x its size by framing content moderation as a policy-adaptive question-answering task. Unlike…
- 12
Waymo – Dallas Open to All
waymo.com · 129 points · Discussion
Starting today, anyone in Dallas can download the Waymo app and hail a fully autonomous ride. Since opening our service in February, we’ve welcomed nearly 150,000 riders in Dallas from our interest…
- 13
Everything I Know (1975)
bfi.org · 118 points · Discussion
Introduction These thinking out loud lectures span 42 hours and examine in depth all of Fuller’s major inventions and discoveries from the 1927 Dymaxion house, car and bathroom, through the Wichita…
- 14
Why some people mow a lawn better than others
pudding.cool · 114 points · Discussion
You skipped the game, so here is just the optimal path. Is this what you would’ve done? A few weeks ago, 30,954 people mowed the same lawn. This is what their paths looked like. Many came close to the…
- 15
"Clean" Code, Horrible Performance (2023)
computerenhance.com · 109 points · Discussion
This is a free bonus video from the Performance-Aware Programming series. It shows the real-world performance costs of following “clean code” guidelines. For more information about the course, please…
- 16
Dates That Don't Exist (2015)
blog.yossarian.net · 101 points · Discussion
ENOSUCHBLOG Programming, philosophy, pedaling. Home Tags Series Favorites Archive Main Site TILs Jun 9, 2015     Tags: programming     This post is at least a year old. Calendars…
- 17
Nobel Disease
en.wikipedia.org · 89 points · Discussion
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Nobel disease or Nobelitis is an informal term for the embrace of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. [ 1…
- 18
The Warp Agent CLI
warp.dev · 77 points · Discussion
Highlights: The Warp Agent is now available as a standalone CLI that you can use anywhere – Ghostty, iTerm 2, VS Code, built-in Windows and Mac Terminals – and provides a superior experience for…
- 19
When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation
arxiv.org · 55 points · Discussion
Authors: Mubashara Akhtar, Anka Reuel, Prajna Soni, Sanchit Ahuja, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Ruchit Rawal, Vilém Zouhar, Srishti Yadav, Chenxi Whitehouse, Dayeon Ki, Jennifer Mickel, Leshem Choshen,…
- 20
Hop.earth – OpenStreetMap based car racing game
hop.earth · 52 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 21
Vlt 1.0 and Hosted Package Registries
vlt.io · 44 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 22
Perspec 1.0
adriansieber.com · 42 points · Discussion
2026-07-29 — 3020 Words — 16 min I'm very excited to announce the 1.0 release of Perspec! Perspec is a desktop app for correcting the perspective of images. This is primarily useful for photos of…
- 23
MariaDB: Promote getting to 10k GitHub stars in server log and client prompt
github.com · 32 points · Discussion
svoj added the External Contribution All PRs from entities outside of MariaDB Foundation, Corporation, Codership agreements. label Aug 27, 2025 gkodinov changed the title Promote getting to 10k GitHub…
- 24
Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees
thisandthat.chat · 28 points · Discussion
People are panicking about AI, yet racing to adopt it anyway. Fear of the robot apocalypse may be real, but it’s abstract and hard to prepare for. Believing AI will make your job worse is concrete,…
- 25
Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)
sec.gov · 22 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 26
Launch HN: EdotEnv (YC S26) – Quant Trading RL Envs to Teach LLMs Research
edotenv.com · 19 points · Discussion
We are Rui and Michael and we’re building EdotEnv ( https://edotenv.com ): self-improving RL environments from Quant Trading workflows. With all the benchmaxxing around, evals saturate and become…
- 27
Rebuilding and analysing 4 years of Wordle stats from WhatsApp chat logs
blog.omgmog.net · 18 points · Discussion
Yes, I’m still playing Wordle in 2026. According to Wordle, I’ve played 1,559 games, I win 99% of the time, my current streak is 107 days and my longest is 278. Four numbers, and they’re mostly…
- 28
Blackmail Fail (2013)
gwern.net · 18 points · Discussion
In which the author receives surprising offers from kind strangers In September 2012 14ya, I was extorted for $48.76 $32 2012 for being gwern; I declined to pay. In November 2013 13ya, I called an…
- 29
Don't stop early: Case-folding source code at memory speed
github.blog · 14 points · Discussion
How a branch-free loop and byte-space arithmetic let GitHub case-fold every byte of code search at >45 GiB/s on a single core. Share: Suppose a user searches for café and your corpus contains CAFÉ, or…
- 30
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…