Hacker News Daily — September 16, 2026
29 stories · September 16, 2026
In this issue
- 1
Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing
mistral.ai · 486 points · Discussion
Today, we are announcing a partnership with Mozilla to bring privacy, control and choice to people using AI to browse online. Firefox Smart Window (beta), Mozilla’s AI browsing assistant, is now…
- 2
Show HN: I made a flight simulator, except you're just a passenger
inflightsimulator.com · 410 points · Discussion
Buckle your seatbelt, secure your tray table, and open your window shade. Now you can simulate flying anywhere in the world as a commercial passenger, from takeoff to touchdown. Terrain, weather, and…
- 3
Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera
wired.com · 391 points · Discussion
Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock…
- 4
The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week
gultsch.social · 325 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 5
Small programming tricks
will-keleher.com · 271 points · Discussion
Day to day, I think a surprising amount of engineering productivity comes from small nuggets of knowledge: being aware that a language feature exists; knowing that an unexplained tcp delay is probably…
- 6
Tell the speakers that you liked their talks
ohhelloana.blog · 243 points · Discussion
I spent a great chunk of last week at SmashingConf Freiburg and it was lovely as usual. It was great to meet some people I've only ever seen online and see old friends. And I am not going to lie - it…
- 7
Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
blog.ploeh.dk · 218 points · Discussion
Open answers to a reader's letter. A reader recently wrote me a long letter with lots of questions about learning programming in this age of LLMs. After a bit of back-and-forth, I got permission to…
- 8
Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres
rohanbansal.com · 176 points · Discussion
How good are query optimizers, really? Leis et al. asked this exact question in 2015. Then, they asked it again 10 years later. Despite an enormous body of research spanning a decade since their…
- 9
Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude
claude.com · 170 points · Discussion
You don’t have to choose where a task goes. Claude does more of the work. Share Copy link https://claude.com/blog/cowork-is-now-claude Starting today, Claude Cowork and chat are merging into one…
- 10
Dream-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through Evolving Worlds
arxiv.org · 160 points · Discussion
Authors: Tong Zheng, Xidong Wu, Zheng Zhang, Zhankui He, Chaoyi Zhang, Benjamin Coleman, Ruoqiao Wei, Di Bai, Haolin Liu, Rui Liu, Xue Wang, Yue Zhuan, Wang-Cheng Kang, Renkai Xiang, Heng Huang, Xinwu…
- 11
Vectorized and performance-portable Quicksort (2022)
opensource.googleblog.com · 147 points · Discussion
Today we're sharing open source code that can sort arrays of numbers about ten times as fast as the C++ std::sort, and outperforms state of the art architecture-specific algorithms, while being…
- 12
A warning about 'model welfare'
mustafa-suleyman.ai · 143 points · Discussion
AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness. And we must not train them to act as though they do. Introduction AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have…
- 13
Can we stop with the uptime percentages?
blog.jim-nielsen.com · 120 points · Discussion
I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says: the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as hard as it was to get to 90%. And from 99% to…
- 14
The DeepMind Institute
institute.deepmind.com · 97 points · Discussion
Bold thinking on AGI from the lab that pioneered the field. Introducing the DeepMind Institute As we near AGI, we urgently need interdisciplinary thinking to better understand its profound…
- 15
How big are factorials?
eli.thegreenplace.net · 68 points · Discussion
The other day, I found myself wondering how big 52! (52 factorial) is, and that led me to ponder how these could be estimated without a calculator or a computer. It turns out there’s some fairly…
- 16
Show HN: How Stale Is Your AI? Release age and training cutoff for 20 models
stale.jock.pl · 65 points · Discussion
How stale is your AI? Data checked 2026-09-16 How stale is your AI? Release age and training cutoff for 20 models Two dates decide how current an AI model really is. The release date is when the lab…
- 17
Xiami Mimo 2.6 Live Post-Training Dashboard
mimo.xiaomi.com · 54 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 18
Reversing Factorio's RNG
gegell.github.io · 39 points · Discussion
Broken in Factorio 2.1 – Version 2.0 only! Factorio 2.1 changes the way the RNG is used. This breaks my in-game implementations. The theoretical aspects of how the RNG works still apply, as they still…
- 19
Accurate Models of AMD Matrix Cores
arxiv.org · 36 points · Discussion
View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: Matrix multipliers available on recent GPUs do not conform with the IEEE 754 floating point standard. Features of matrix multipliers differ across vendors and…
- 20
Why a fast-growing German AI startup is moving its parent company from the US
euronews.com · 35 points · Discussion
Published on 16/09/2026 - 16:37 GMT+2 Berlin-based Langdock has reversed the usual path taken by European start-ups by moving its parent company from the US to Germany. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT The…
- 21
The Siberian Ice Maiden and the Scythian World
patrickwyman.substack.com · 35 points · Discussion
Asana lay on her back outside her tent, looking up. The grass beneath her was smashed flat and shorn by the grazing teeth and hooves of the herds: horses, sheep, and cattle. Above her, wisps of cloud…
- 22
How good are frontier models at physics?
arxiv.org · 32 points · Discussion
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2609.13009 (cs) Authors: Ali Ansari, Haoran Sun, Andy Zeyi Liu, Mark Jabbour, Yongshan Ding, Steven Girvin, Yu He, Sohrab Ismail-Beigi, Aleksander…
- 23
macOS 27 Golden Gate: The Ars Technica Review
arstechnica.com · 21 points · Discussion
It’s both a “Snow Leopard update” and a major leap for Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence is back, baby! That’s right: Two years after its initial launch, Apple is giving its generative AI…
- 24
Tell HN: An inside view of Montana's new biotech law
17 points · Discussion
Montana passed a law called SB535. It builds on right-to-try (pre-approval access with informed consent, Phase 1 safety data etc.) but goes much further, fixing problems with those laws. Alex Tabarrok…
- 25
Reverse-engineered Jev-like model
github.com · 8 points · Discussion
Train a small model that chooses among a changing list of text options. A Jev-like model takes a piece of text and a list of N text options. It returns one probability for each option. It does this in…
- 26
Show HN: Restarted – a 2026 remake of the classic 2015 startup generator
restarted.io · 7 points · Discussion
The original startup website generator by Tiff Zhang and Mike Bradley landed on Hacker News in April 2015 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9427856 ) and has been one of my favorite little…
- 27
Training Text-to-Image Models 3.6× Faster
linum.ai · 6 points · Discussion
TL;DR Linum v2 was bottlenecked by the enormous size of its attention context window. A 720p, 5 second clip cost a whopping 110K tokens. To put that in perspective, LLMs see samples with fewer than 8K…
- 28
WalShadow: Sub-second Postgres replication to ClickHouse from physical WAL
clickhouse.com · 6 points · Discussion
Today, we’re announcing WalShadow, an open-source engine that replicates Postgres data to ClickHouse directly from physical WAL. In our benchmarks, transactions committed in Postgres became visible in…
- 29
Kyber (YC W23) Is Hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer
ycombinator.com · Discussion
Instantly draft, review, and send complex regulatory notices. Forward Deployed Engineer $110K - $150K • 0.05% - 0.15% • New York, NY, US Role Engineering, Full stack Skills JavaScript, Python, SQL…