Hacker News on Saturday, 15 August 2026

AI has access to a vastly larger working memory than the human brain(davidepiffer.com)

524 points by rzk 2 months ago | 452 comments

A Substack essay by Davide Piffer arguing that AI's edge over mathematicians comes from a vast symbolic working memory rather than superior reasoning.

Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk(alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)

469 points by randycupertino 2 months ago | 370 comments

A Wiley Alzheimer's & Dementia journal article on semaglutide's association with lower predicted dementia risk; the capture shows a Cloudflare verification page.

Auto-research with codex: How I achieved a 232x Faster Kernel(sankalp.bearblog.dev)

424 points by tosh 2 months ago | 91 comments

Blog post on using OpenAI Codex for automated research to optimize a kernel 232x faster; the captured page shows a Cloudflare verification screen.

Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter(severe-weather.eu)

395 points by dgellow 2 months ago | 269 comments

Severe Weather Europe article reporting that forecasts show a strengthening super El Niño reaching record territory ahead of winter 2026-2027, with impacts on North America and Europe.

The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist(conic.al)

365 points by rdl 2 months ago | 175 comments

Blog post by Sean Byrne about a namesake listed on the US BIS Entity List, an export-control entry tied to an address in County Sligo, Ireland.

Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI(acc.org)

291 points by theanonymousone 2 months ago | 239 comments

A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux(xda-developers.com)

288 points by theanonymousone 2 months ago | 142 comments

Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding(allen.bargi.org)

287 points by allenb 2 months ago | 187 comments

At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis(smithsonianmag.com)

286 points by gmays 2 months ago | 107 comments

Software Engineering fundamentals matter more(rhonabwy.com)

275 points by ingve 2 months ago | 182 comments

A spectre is haunting Unicode(dampfkraft.com)

261 points by sensanaty 2 months ago | 100 comments

Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)(henrikkarlsson.xyz)

253 points by felixbraun 2 months ago | 60 comments

Magnitude 7.7 Earthquake – 68 km NNW of Ende, Indonesia(earthquake.usgs.gov)

207 points by Bender 2 months ago | 52 comments

AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward(science.org)

170 points by AnodicElegy 2 months ago | 84 comments

A controversial Alzheimer's surgery is said to reverse symptoms(nature.com)

153 points by jeffreyrogers 2 months ago | 68 comments

Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history(horn.gg)

130 points by madrox 2 months ago | 70 comments

The little-known winstart.bat batch file(devblogs.microsoft.com)

120 points by ingve 2 months ago | 36 comments

Splitting a Git Commit(blog.gnoack.org)

118 points by signa11 2 months ago | 56 comments

Show HN: ThoughtDAG – An editable context graph for LLM conversations(chenxiachan.github.io)

104 points by chatchan 2 months ago | 48 comments

Tracking down a Zsh history data loss bug(michael.stapelberg.ch)

103 points by ingve 2 months ago | 38 comments

The Dutch community where people live on strips of land in a lake(core77.com)

102 points by Bowes-Lyon 2 months ago | 47 comments

Xorshift Generators(alanzucconi.com)

91 points by tobr 2 months ago | 44 comments

Using GCC's Nested Functions with Wide Pointers and No Trampolines II(uecker.codeberg.page)

85 points by uecker 2 months ago | 45 comments

I Remain a Skeptic(blog.jsbarretto.com)

82 points by lproven 2 months ago | 54 comments

The Wow signal was a strong narrowband radio signal detected on August 15, 1977(en.wikipedia.org)

77 points by firefax 2 months ago | 19 comments

Evolve: An incremental game about evolving a civilization(pmotschmann.github.io)

75 points by frozenseven 2 months ago | 22 comments

Show HN: Mic Drop, a real-time multiplayer karaoke game(micdrop.gg)

75 points by johnsillings 2 months ago | 34 comments

Europe's scorched landscapes seen from space after summer heatwaves(bbc.com)

74 points by blondie9x 2 months ago | 50 comments

Could a computer scientist build a brain?(stankerstjens.github.io)

74 points by ogundipeore 2 months ago | 58 comments

Cloudflare's AI Psychosis(opensauce.it)

73 points by gregzeng95 2 months ago | 35 comments

IBM Simon (1994): the original smartphone, explained in its own ad [video](youtube.com)

73 points by kls0e 2 months ago | 42 comments

Printytron – Describe a part, get a printable STL(printytron.com)

72 points by statenjason 2 months ago | 31 comments

Plastic mechanical computer from 1963: The Digi-Comp 1 [video](youtube.com)

71 points by tobr 2 months ago | 18 comments

Tess's Android Wayland Compositor(github.com)

69 points by schmorptron 2 months ago | 11 comments

The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts(404media.co)

65 points by Jimmc414 2 months ago | 53 comments

Bede Liu, a digital signal processing pioneer, has died(spectrum.ieee.org)

65 points by Jimmc414 2 months ago | 4 comments

Rewriting in Rust(blog.jetbrains.com)

63 points by worik 2 months ago | 37 comments

Ranking the Most Brilliantly Colored Birds with Data(moultano.wordpress.com)

56 points by moultano 2 months ago | 5 comments

Debian has begun voting on the future of AI/LLM contributions(lists.debian.org)

54 points by matheusmoreira 2 months ago | 38 comments

Thunderbird's Desktop Calendar Visual Redesign(blog.thunderbird.net)

53 points by birdculture 2 months ago | 16 comments

Yadda 3.0.0: BDD in the Age of AI Agents(stephen-cresswell.com)

53 points by scresswell 2 months ago | 25 comments

Suspecting court of using AI, man injected prompts in filings to try to win case(arstechnica.com)

53 points by jnord 2 months ago | 39 comments

Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?(bbc.co.uk)

52 points by m-i-l 2 months ago | 56 comments

AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?(spectrum.ieee.org)

48 points by pseudolus 2 months ago | 72 comments

Tea5767-Radio-Tuner(github.com)

47 points by turtushig22 2 months ago | 2 comments

SugarTrack – an offline Android logbook for blood sugar (no account, no cloud)(sugartrack-beta.vercel.app)

46 points by hunzaboy 2 months ago | 19 comments

Brazilian election filter in X For You timeline(github.com)

44 points by LorenDB 2 months ago | 37 comments

AI-Assisted GPU Porting of a 250k Line Legacy Weather Simulation Code(arxiv.org)

43 points by Jimmc414 2 months ago | 5 comments

BriskDB(github.com)

42 points by schapman1974 2 months ago | 10 comments

Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?

42 points by simonebrunozzi 2 months ago | 69 comments

The price of a Costco hot dog has gone up(sina.bio)

40 points by sinab 2 months ago | 20 comments

TreasuryDirect: Prepare for ID.me – Your New Way to Log In(treasurydirect.gov)

40 points by Mindless2112 2 months ago | 33 comments

Credit card debt rises to $1.26T, nearing all-time record(abc7.com)

38 points by lxm 2 months ago | 36 comments

388 years ago, Galileo worked out why human giants can't exist(scientificamerican.com)

38 points by beardyw 2 months ago | 39 comments

Brain turns listening inward during REM sleep, EEG recordings suggest(medicalxpress.com)

38 points by gmays 2 months ago | 11 comments

Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

37 points by Abh1Works 2 months ago | 37 comments

"That's not SOC 2 compliant"(ampcode.com)

36 points by tosh 2 months ago | 16 comments

Show HN: Deltix – AI Driven Testing(app.deltix.ai)

34 points by oneounceman 2 months ago | 9 comments

Writergate: Zig I/O Interface Overhaul(alexrios.me)

33 points by signa11 2 months ago | 9 comments

T3X/0 a Minimal Procedural Language(t3x.org)

33 points by AlexeyBrin 2 months ago | 0 comments