Hacker News Daily — September 19, 2026
26 stories · September 19, 2026
In this issue
- 1
AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
john.hartnup.uk · 1153 points · Discussion
The problem A now famous Facebook post shows us the scourge of identikit posters generated by AI. Here’s an article on the subject from the Independent. A collage of AI-generated village fayre posters…
- 2
I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago
laya.convaiinnovations.com · 913 points · Discussion
Everyone in AI right now is talking about a new kind of model: an architecture that is not autoregressive, does not generate text, and gives lightning-fast probability predictions over structured…
- 3
Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain
med.stanford.edu · 583 points · Discussion
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7
- 4
San Francisco Onion Futures Company
onionfutures.com · 342 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 5
GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher
prinzai.com · 321 points · Discussion
Scienceblogs.de, a German science blogging portal, includes a relatively famous list of 50 unsolved ciphers, which range from cryptograms published by serial killers to the famous Voynich manuscript.…
- 6
If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it
terrytao.wordpress.com · 273 points · Discussion
[This is a guest post by Grant Sanderson. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] A sentiment echoing throughout the mathematics community right…
- 7
The Secret Life of Circuits
blog.coredump.cx · 257 points · Discussion
I try to keep marketing in check: I’ve been working on my latest book for more than a year but only posted about it once. At the time, the book was still going through layout and editing, so I didn’t…
- 8
What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
besok.github.io · 158 points · Discussion
Intro I’ve spent the last 7 years as a Rust developer, working mostly on open source projects, and I’d like to think I’ve built a solid feel for the language and its ecosystem along the way. I…
- 9
Tin: full-text search for Postgres
planetscale.com · 152 points · Discussion
One of the Postgres features our customers ask us for the most is full-text search. Today, we are excited to announce TIN: a fast, full-featured, reliable full-text search extension for Postgres. TIN…
- 10
I think you should almost never use AI to write
erichgrunewald.substack.com · 136 points · Discussion
I think you should almost never use AI to write -- that is, to do the thing you’re doing when you type words on a page -- whether for a blog post, a research report, a memo, a thoughtful email, a…
- 11
You can run Git on object storage if you re-make packfiles
tigrisdata.com · 129 points · Discussion
It sure seems that a bunch of companies are trying to ship a git product of some kind as of late. Wonder why that is. Either way, I’m building a Git server backed by object storage as an open-source…
- 12
SDCC – Small Device C Compiler
sdcc.sourceforge.net · 121 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 13
Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar over 'Little Red Dots'
quantamagazine.org · 80 points · Discussion
Introduction Astronomers built the James Webb Space Telescope to pick up faint light from the first billion years after the Big Bang, a chaotic era when vast swaths of hydrogen and helium gas gathered…
- 14
New evidence for hidden chambers beyond Tutankhamun's tomb
nature.com · 74 points · Discussion
Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings has long puzzled archaeologists. Might hidden chambers — suspected to hold the remains of Nefertiti — lie beyond its walls? Now, researchers say they…
- 15
Btrfs/ZFS/bcachefs under workloads classic benchmarks skip
bartosz.fenski.pl · 68 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 16
Communication by means of modulated Johnson noise
pnas.org · 53 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 17
Brood War Bench
bw.swerdlow.dev · 50 points · Discussion
Which model wins at Brood War? Key takeaways None of the models played beyond a beginner level. Codex Astra is the clear leader beating all other models consistently. Grok models are not smart enough…
- 18
Microsoft director: AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
tomshardware.com · 33 points · Discussion
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement in late 2023, with the case apparently still ongoing almost three years later. Now, the publication’s legal team has asked the…
- 19
Suzanne Ciani's Buchla Cookbook
echo.orpheusinstituut.be · 31 points · Discussion
Issues Current call Search About In cooking, we take many fundamental ingredients and combine them in different ways and amounts and produce endless creations. A little randomness here, a pinch of FM…
- 20
Show HN: CUA-S1 – A System One Model for Computer Use
github.com · 29 points · Discussion
Hello HN! We're Dillon and Francesco from Cua. We were wondering how many computer use tasks actually need a full general purpose LLM (e.g. gpt-6-astra, claude-opus-5 etc.) to think through all their…
- 21
Adventures in Microcontroller Circuit Debugging
bigmessowires.com · 25 points · Discussion
How do you go about troubleshooting a misbehaving microcontroller circuit? A few months ago I manufactured a new batch of Floppy Emu disk emulators. A number of them failed QA at the factory, with a…
- 22
UFO Series Home Page: "UFO" TV Series from 1970
ufoseries.com · 22 points · Discussion
Welcome to the UFO Series Home Page, devoted to the 1970 British science fiction television series UFO, created by Gerry & Sylvia Anderson and starring Ed Bishop as Commander Straker what's new?…
- 23
ZK-JPEG: Zero-Knowledge Image Editing and Compression
eprint.iacr.org · 22 points · Discussion
Paper 2026/2039 ZK-JPEG: Zero-knowledge Image Editing and Compression Steve Lu, Stealth Software Technologies, Inc. Kimberlee Model, Stealth Software Technologies, Inc. Joseph Near, University of…
- 24
Measure internet censorship. Contribute to the largest open dataset
ooni.org · 18 points · Discussion
Measure internet censorship Contribute to the world's largest open dataset on internet censorship Download OONI Probe Command line Linux & macOS What OONI Probe measures Discover which websites are…
- 25
Deodands put a price on objects that caused death
daily.jstor.org · 11 points · Discussion
The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. In 1829, hundreds of spinners and weavers had gathered at the Norfolk Arms Hotel when the floor collapsed under them. In the tumble, the…
- 26
Supabase (YC S20) Is Hiring for OrioleDB
supabase.link · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.