Hacker News Daily — August 20, 2026
30 stories · August 20, 2026
In this issue
- 1
AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint
blog.laserphile.com · 776 points · Discussion
Recently I ran into a strange problem with my Bluetooth headphones. They support multipoint Bluetooth audio, so they can be connected to my PC and phone at the same time. Normally the PC takes…
- 2
HTML Can Do That
chrisburnell.com · 456 points · Discussion
HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript’s remit. This page lists a bunch of dynamic functionality that we can now achieve with just HTML. Update 2026-08-20: I originally built…
- 3
I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
experimental-history.com · 440 points · Discussion
photo cred: my dad I owe an apology to every English teacher I ever had. I always assumed that so-called “great” literature was a hoax, a punishment inflicted upon adolescents for the crime of being…
- 4
Show HN: I trained a 125M model to autocomplete piano on-device
simedw.com · 435 points · Discussion
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it…
- 5
Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
safedep.io · 321 points · Discussion
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/08/20/supply-chain-attack-on... https://github.com/rustsec/advisory-db/issues/3161
- 6
Mojo is now open source
modular.com · 299 points · Discussion
We are happy to announce that the Mojo🔥 language is now fully open source under the Apache 2.0 license (with LLVM exceptions)! The source code for the Mojo compiler, tooling, and everything else you…
- 7
CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s
wsj.com · 274 points · Discussion
https://archive.is/JfB5V
- 8
Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study
rathbiotaclan.com · 239 points · Discussion
Millions of people finish short video after short video every day; a new brain-scan study shows that the very act of finishing a clip they like temporarily quiets the brain regions that normally help…
- 9
Linux 7.2
igalia.com · 148 points · Discussion
Linux 7.2 was tagged and released this week, on the regular schedule. This cycle was one of the busiest ever, only been beaten by 6.7. This is considered the “new normal”, given that the last 3 or 4…
- 10
I should have loved biology (2020)
jsomers.net · 139 points · Discussion
By James Somers I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA. In the textbooks,…
- 11
Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM
github.com · 127 points · Discussion
Vomit converts Claude's token vomit into English by piping it through a local LLM. It's fully local (no telemetry) and has no external dependencies. I wrote a small blog post about this project:…
- 12
Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos
experimental-history.com · 124 points · Discussion
photo cred: my dad Here’s a story from 30 years ago that would make no sense today. It’s 1992. Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten is selling well. But then MTV puts the music video for their song “Jeremy” in…
- 13
DiffusionGemma Technical Report
arxiv.org · 120 points · Discussion
Authors: DiffusionGemma Team: Adrien Ali Taïga, James Assiene, Daniele Calandriello, Rahma Chaabouni, João Gante, Tamara von Glehn, Nate Keating, Chris Knutsen, Martin Kukla, Tianlin Liu, Ivan Lobov,…
- 14
Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
blog.curiousquail.com · 100 points · Discussion
Also here's a cool unrelated photo of a chipmunk Look at this little guy. They don't know what an AI model is and they're so much better off It’s nothing short of an indictment of our society at large…
- 15
How to compromise your system with a job interview
codedge.de · 95 points · Discussion
Table of contents How it begins A closer look: second stage loader Some precaution for next time What now The current situation on the IT job market is hard. So you are lucky when a recruiter on…
- 16
Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI
danielvaughn.dev · 81 points · Discussion
Hello everyone. I've been working on this experimental editor called Huzzah. I've been working almost exclusively with coding agents since January of this year, and over the past few months I began to…
- 17
Consumer Rights Wiki
consumerrights.wiki · 78 points · Discussion
📣 Announcements Update 24.07.2026 Another update! Editor changes: The article feedback interface now also posts the feedback as a new section on the article's talk page. We've added a toggleable…
- 18
Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
blog.yaros.ae · 71 points · Discussion
11 Aug, 2026 Making “anti-ai” fonts that obfuscate or scramble text is a fools errand. For fonts that scramble text, it's an accessibility problem, since the scrambled text is what screen readers and…
- 19
The August 17 outage, and the work ahead
github.blog · 68 points · Discussion
An update on the August 17 outage and the steps we’re taking to improve reliability. Share: On August 17, GitHub experienced an outage that lasted 7 hours and 47 minutes. It disrupted github.com,…
- 20
Hacking with Claude on a $27 smart watch
mikekasberg.com · 66 points · Discussion
The Pine Time is a $27 smart watch that runs open source firmware. I’ve had one sitting in the back of a drawer for a year or two. When I saw @steveruizok ’s Tweet about hacking on ESP32 devices with…
- 21
- 22
Show HN: We chased a weather balloon across Montana and never found it
radi8.dev · 44 points · Discussion
Since April, I have been working with Sam Flynn ( https://drook.dev ) to make this balloon payload, UpLink. We did a similar launch last year with Hack Club but this was our first independent launch.…
- 23
Project Cybersyn (2022)
bactra.org · 39 points · Discussion
Last update: 01 Aug 2026 00:32 First version: 30 January 2022 Initial notes, January 2022 An early attempt at using networked computers for economic management in Allende's Chile, with the involvement…
- 24
Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)
experimental-history.com · 32 points · Discussion
Photo cred: my dad Here’s a definition of intelligence that lots of psychologists can get behind: Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to…
- 25
SpacetimeDB: A Short Technical Review
strn.cat · 21 points · Discussion
2026-02-26 The database market is harsh, particularly for newcomers. It’s very hard to launch a new product and differentiate yourself from the incumbents. Even harder to gain any long term traction.…
- 26
Tidal Cycles – Live coding music with Algorithmic patterns
tidalcycles.org · 21 points · Discussion
Free/open-source software Tidal Cycles (or 'Tidal' for short) is a free/open source live coding environment for algorithmic patterns, written in Haskell. Tidal is using SuperCollider, another…
- 27
Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain
dl.acm.org · 15 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 28
GitHub, autoscaling, and the component substitution fallacy
surfingcomplexity.blog · 14 points · Discussion
In yesterday’s post about the recent GitHub outage, there was a detail in the writeup that I didn’t say anything about: the autoscaling policy on the service with the saturated Istio sidecar.…
- 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.