Hacker News Daily — October 6, 2026

29 stories · October 6, 2026

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In this issue

1

Mistral Large 4

mistral.ai · 1373 points · Discussion

https://docs.mistral.ai/models/mistral-large-4-0
2

Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen

nobelprize.org · 464 points · Discussion

Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach Francis Halzen Prize share: 1/1 The Nobel Prize in Physics 2026 was awarded to Francis Halzen "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory…
3

Polars 2.0

pola.rs · 377 points · Discussion

Today we are shipping Polars 2.0. In the earlier announcement post we went through the rationale of the version bump. This post we will discuss what features 2.0 brings. Even though we didn’t intend…
4

Example.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades

debugbear.com · 329 points · Discussion

example.com is a reserved domain name set aside by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for documentation purposes. It has been available as an example URL for developers and writers since…
5

Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend

dbushell.com · 296 points · Discussion

Saturday 3 Oct 2026 It’s finally time I go crawling back to Node! I’ve been using Node heavily this month on a SvelteKit client project. When did Node get so good‽ Deno has been my go-to runtime for…
6

Find the flattest route between any two points in SF

flattensf.com · 296 points · Discussion

Flatten SF flat routes across San Francisco How this works Routes are computed in your browser over 160,000 street segments, using USGS 1 m lidar elevation and the Overture / OpenStreetMap street…
7

Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is overestimated: study

phys.org · 281 points · Discussion

Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
8

Gleam doesn't compile to Erlang source anymore

gleam.run · 265 points · Discussion

Gleam is a type-safe and scalable language for the Erlang virtual machine and JavaScript runtimes. Today Gleam v1.19.0 has been published, so let's go over what's new. A new compilation target Over…
9

Dust: Pretraining Transformers Without Backpropagation

qlabs.sh · 262 points · Discussion

Q Labs Research October 2026 Correspondence to s@qlabs.sh · Code · TL;DR We present the first zeroth-order method that is competitive with backprop at pretraining transformer language models. Dust…
10

Best-selling Zigbee temperature sensors tested and compared

smarthomescene.com · 218 points · Discussion

UPDATED 14.08.2026: Added low-temperature benchmarks in a fridge. Finding the best Zigbee temperature and humidity sensors is not something an individual review can really answer, so I decided to…
11

World's First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months

techcrunch.com · 137 points · Discussion

Geothermal company Fervo Energy announced Thursday morning that it had started selling electricity from its Cape Station power plant to the grid on September 30, one day ahead of schedule. With it,…
12

Tapo (Rust/Python library) now speaks TP-Link's TPAP protocol

mihai.dinculescu.dev · 120 points · Discussion

Your script has been switching a Tapo plug on and off for months. Then the plug quietly updates its firmware, and the next request comes back with 403 Forbidden. Nothing in your code changed. The…
13

Direct retinal projection display for smart glasses using a meta-optic mirror

tdk.com · 114 points · Discussion

Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
14

Benchmark in Milliseconds

matklad.github.io · 109 points · Discussion

Oct 5, 2026 How long should a micro benchmark run? My rule of thumb is to tweak the input size until the benchmark takes about 300ms, for the following reasons: Milliseconds are integers ranging from…
15

The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)

worrydream.com · 88 points · Discussion

original pdf / make corrections Alan C. Kay Apple Computer kay2@apple.com.Internet# Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or…
16

Lawmakers Introduce Multiple Laws to Curb Flock After 404 Media Coverage

404media.co · 85 points · Discussion

Multiple Democrat, Republican, and Independent lawmakers have introduced new pieces of legislation that, if passed, would dramatically curb federal agencies’ access to Flock cameras, with the…
17

Subquadratic 3SUM and Subcubic APSP

arxiv.org · 73 points · Discussion

View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: We give the first polynomial improvements over the textbook algorithms for $3$SUM and All-Pairs Shortest Paths (APSP): we show how to deterministically solve…
18

What's Earth's dominant species by mass?

signoregalilei.com · 70 points · Discussion

You might have heard that all the ants in the world weigh as much combined as all the humans. That isn’t true. We outweigh ants 5 to 1. 1 Termites might have us beat, though. 2 Either way, it’s not…
19

Show HN: Parseable, an open observability datalake, handles 100M time-series/min

parseable.com · 66 points · Discussion

Address high cardinality with columnar design Address high cardinality with columnar design % + Compression on average Cloud native, data lake architecture that scales as you go Deploy on a public or…
20

Mathematics of Geothermal Energy

ebsco.com · 61 points · Discussion

Full article SUMMARY: Geothermal energy can be harnessed for domestic heating or to produce electricity via steam turbine. “Geothermal” refers to heat from the interior of Earth generated from the…
21

EmbeddingGemma 2

blog.google · 54 points · Discussion

EmbeddingGemma 2 is the most capable model for on-device multimodal embeddings, natively mapping combinations of text, images, audio, and video into a unified embedding space. Henrique Schechter Vera…
22

Show HN: I turned my iPhone and a $20 smart plug into an f-stop timer

peterszentkiralyi.eu · 49 points · Discussion

I am a film photographer and do some darkroom printing and always wanted one of the proper, advanced f-stop timers, but never really wanted to spend a couple hundred dollars on one. Eventually I…
23

Erdosproblems.com Succumbs to the AI Onslaught

erdosproblems.com · 48 points · Discussion

By Thomas Bloom on 6 October 2026 AI is changing everything, for better and/or worse, and the rate of change is dizzying; in recent months this has been particularly evident in mathematics, where AI…
24

Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating "Skydance" behemoth

arstechnica.com · 38 points · Discussion

Paramount Skydance completed its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery today, after a last-ditch effort to block the deal was rejected by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. The post-merger…
25

Toronto-Based VPN Provider Plans to Quit Canada over Lawful-Access Bill

citizenlab.ca · 18 points · Discussion

Opens in a new window Opens an external site Opens an external site in a new window Psiphon, a software company spun out of the Citizen Lab that helps internet users living under oppressive regimes…
26

Meta's Muse AI agent is building a dossier on you

time.com · 12 points · Discussion

Muse, the popular new AI personal assistant from Meta, is building continuously updated dossiers on its 4 million users, focusing on who matters to you, what you desire, and what kind of nudges shape…
27

OpenSSH 10.6 Released

openssh.org · 9 points · Discussion

Read via the links — full text wasn’t available.
28

Tumbler Ridge shooter's ChatGPT use "more disturbing" than known: reporter

cbc.ca · 6 points · Discussion

Mother Jones magazine has published new details outlining how the shooter in the Tumbler Ridge tragedy allegedly used OpenAI's ChatGPT program to both plan the attack, and evade OpenAI's own security…
29

System-level ad-blocking in Android

kevinboone.me · 5 points · Discussion

The Internet has become an advertising platform. Users of mobile devices are acutely aware of this, because mobile operating environments and apps force ads on their users, in addition to those that…