Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died
906 points by paveworld | 197 comments
A Hacker News 'Tell HN' post reporting that tech journalist Bob Cringely (Mark Stevens), known for PBS's Triumph of the Nerds, has died, with comments.
Hacker News on
Stories posted this day, by points. Rank history starts with the October 2026 rebuild.
Kolibri: A Sovereign Open-Weight Model(aleph-alpha.com)
604 points by bastitx | 314 comments
Aleph Alpha blog post announcing Kolibri, a sovereign open-weight language model, with a linked tech report.
We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything(simonwillison.net)
573 points by elffjs | 290 comments
Simon Willison blog post arguing that pay-per-usage services and APIs need default hard budget caps, especially as coding agents make spinning up costly services easy.
The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux(phoronix.com)
458 points by speckx | 92 comments
Phoronix news article on Valve developer Timur Kristóf's AMDGPU kernel driver work improving support for old GCN 1.0/1.1 AMD graphics cards on Linux, presented at XDC 2026.
Extra Big Ass Intelligence(extrabigassintelligence.com)
452 points by 34679 | 107 comments
A satirical Idiocracy-themed AI chatbot website, "Extra Big Ass Intelligence," with parody ads for Brawndo and a prompt box for asking the "Super Intelligence" questions.
I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken(theatlantic.com)
429 points by Brajeshwar | 706 comments
An Atlantic essay by David Robinson explaining why he quit OpenAI, arguing its culture and the industry's approach to AI safety are broken.
Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'(techcrunch.com)
409 points by sbulaev | 229 comments
TechCrunch article reporting that a federal judge described Flock's camera network as 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'.
Kolibri is an open-weight LLM from Aleph Alpha for German and English(tej.as)
385 points by tejaskumar__ | 155 comments
A blog post by Tejas Kumar explaining how Aleph Alpha's Kolibri, an open-weight sovereign LLM for German and English, works.
LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents(fortune.com)
373 points by Anon84 | 670 comments
Fortune article reporting Yann LeCun saying he has zero concerns about AI causing human extinction and calling Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei deluded.
Agents don't need memory, they need documentation(liao.gg)
348 points by kmeh | 211 comments
Blog post arguing that AI agents benefit more from good documentation than from persistent memory systems.
Hole Punch: Sling your spaceship around gravitational fields(notoriousbfg.com)
345 points by trwhite | 85 comments
Hole Punch is a browser puzzle game where players place black holes whose gravity bends a spaceship's trajectory toward a target.
Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict(cosmowenman.substack.com)
322 points by CosmoWenman | 190 comments
Cosmo Wenman's Substack post criticizing the court verdict in his legal fight with the Rodin Museum over public access to 3D scans of Rodin sculptures.
![Screenshot of cses.fi: Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2018) [pdf]](https://hn.urlbox.com/shots/renders/2026/10/5/69c71102-f7bf-42e0-9682-6868f4f24f49.jpg)
Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2018) [pdf](cses.fi)
302 points by vinhnx | 79 comments
PDF of the Competitive Programmer's Handbook by Antti Laaksonen (July 2018 draft), a free book on algorithms for programming contests.
We ported the original Doom to SQL(cedardb.com)
293 points by Vaslo | 45 comments
CedarDB blog post describing a port of the original 1993 Doom game logic and renderer to SQL, running inside the database with Python only handling timing and display.
OpenAI safety leader quits, warning AI company's culture is 'broken'(theguardian.com)
253 points by jethronethro | 207 comments
Guardian news article reporting that OpenAI safety leader David Robinson has quit, warning the company's culture is 'broken' and urging more care with AI.
Reasons I didn't become an EMT, ranked(ben.stolovitz.com)
216 points by citelao | 103 comments
A personal blog post by a software engineer who became an EMT in 2024, ranking 21 reasons he delayed getting certified.
We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare(blog.cloudflare.com)
205 points by geoffbp | 172 comments
Cloudflare blog post announcing the open beta of Artifacts, a Git repository service usable from Workers, and a competition to build a Git platform on Cloudflare.
Getting the most out of Opus 5.5 in Claude and Claude Code(claude.dev)
192 points by saikatsg | 132 comments
A playbook blog post by Addy Osmani on prompting Claude Opus 5.5, steering long runs, and checking results in Claude apps and Claude Code.
FTL: A new operating system for clouds(ftl-os.org)
189 points by romac | 74 comments
Project homepage for FTL, a new userspace-library operating system for clouds with hypervisor-like container isolation and Linux binary compatibility.
![Screenshot of cambridge.org: ADHD, autism or complex trauma? [pdf]](https://hn.urlbox.com/shots/renders/2026/10/3/fb33af9b-2b23-4151-a0f2-092710be35bf.jpg)
ADHD, autism or complex trauma? [pdf](cambridge.org)
186 points by skeptical1884 | 167 comments
A British Journal of Psychiatry letter by Nicole Koziel on distinguishing ADHD and autism from complex trauma in adults seeking diagnosis and treatment.
Cloudflare OHTTP gateway(blog.cloudflare.com)
182 points by est | 86 comments
Cloudflare blog post announcing its OHTTP Gateway product, explaining Oblivious HTTP, how the gateway was built, and when to use it versus the OHTTP Relay.
Infidel goes wild(blog.zarfhome.com)
172 points by tobr | 36 comments
Andrew Plotkin's blog post describing a wild pointer memory-corruption compiler bug he found in Infocom's game Infidel while building a memory-level debugger.
An Update on Orion for Linux and Windows(blog.kagi.com)
171 points by pentagrama | 97 comments
Kagi blog announcement giving an update on the development of its Orion web browser for Linux and Windows.
City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2(radical-elements.com)
150 points by lexx | 143 comments
Blog post by Alex Lingris, the second part of an essay arguing city-building games like Cities: Skylines 2 lack soul.
Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?(sjg.io)
142 points by simonjgreen | 78 comments
A personal blog post describing an over-engineered project using ultra-wideband radios on trash bins so Home Assistant can tell whether the bins have been put out.
Type Safe Generic Data Structures in C (2025)(danielchasehooper.com)
130 points by AlexeyBrin | 100 comments
Daniel Hooper's blog post explaining a union-based technique for writing type-safe generic data structures in C, illustrated with a linked list.
The Escalation of War in Ethiopia(africanistperspective.com)
128 points by mooreds | 130 comments
A Substack essay by Ken Opalo on An Africanist Perspective analyzing the escalation of war in Ethiopia and likely proxy conflicts in the Horn of Africa.
Direct retinal projection display for smart glasses using a meta-optic mirror(tdk.com)
121 points by bookofjoe | 60 comments
TDK press release announcing a demonstration of a direct retinal projection display for smart glasses that uses a meta-optic mirror.
What Meta got right with Muse(metedata.substack.com)
120 points by young_mete | 160 comments
A Substack newsletter post by product designer Mete Polat arguing that Meta's Muse shows design matters in consumer AI for companies with the money to invest.
Automating my 35mm film scanning pipeline(shannadige.com)
111 points by shannadige | 77 comments
A personal blog post describing how the author automated their workflow for scanning and processing 35mm film photographs.
![Screenshot of aleph-alpha.com: Kolibri – Tech Report [pdf]](https://hn.urlbox.com/shots/renders/2026/10/3/afb8e7e8-ce88-431e-bc45-8ebfad65531a.jpg)
Kolibri – Tech Report [pdf](aleph-alpha.com)
104 points by yu3zhou4 | 4 comments
Aleph Alpha technical report introducing Kolibri, an open-weights English–German Mixture-of-Experts language model with 78.1B total and 3.46B active parameters.
An algorithmic failure beneath the secret ballot(blog.citp.princeton.edu)
97 points by leecoursey | 73 comments
A CITP Blog post by Max Springer examining an algorithmic flaw that can undermine secret ballot privacy in Georgia elections.
Former SR-71 engineer talks NASA's Blackbird revival program(twz.com)
93 points by rkagerer | 64 comments
TWZ article interviewing a former SR-71 engineer about NASA's effort to return SR-71 #844 to flight and its possible uses.
Pop!_OS bans AI-generated code from much of its codebase(neowin.net)
82 points by bundie | 90 comments
Neowin news article on System76 banning AI-generated code across many of its Pop!_OS COSMIC codebases; the capture shows only a Cloudflare verification page.
'Neanderthals Among Us' review(historytoday.com)
77 points by pepys | 78 comments
History Today review of Peter Sahlins' book 'Neanderthals Among Us: The Making of a Prehistoric Human'.
New York City should carefully measure a new tree(blog.willmeye.rs)
69 points by willmeyers | 13 comments
Blog post arguing New York City should measure new candidate trees, since its tallest carefully measured tree, the Queens Giant, was last measured in 2004.
Show HN: Offrun – manage every coding agent from one workspace(offrun.dev)
68 points by arunbhatia | 41 comments
Landing page for Offrun, a free Mac app for running and monitoring multiple AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex in one workspace.
Show HN: Thoreau BASIC – What if BASIC hadn't gone out of fashion?(thoreaubasic.com)
65 points by Gorsefound | 33 comments
Homepage for Thoreau BASIC 3.2, a free 64-bit GW-BASIC-inspired interpreter with x64 JIT for Windows and bare-metal UEFI, with downloads and documentation.
Apple's "Clean Design" Is Stupidity When It Comes to Hiding Fire Extinguishers(gadgetreview.com)
64 points by josephcsible | 24 comments
GadgetReview opinion article criticizing Apple for hiding fire extinguishers in its offices or stores in the name of clean, minimalist design.
![Screenshot of youtube.com: Math's pedagogical curse – Grant Sanderson [video] (2023)](https://hn.urlbox.com/shots/renders/2026/10/4/0ece93c4-08a4-4a65-a31b-97d586312ec1.jpg)
Math's pedagogical curse – Grant Sanderson [video] (2023)(youtube.com)
62 points by bobajeff | 30 comments
YouTube video of Grant Sanderson's JPBM Communications Award lecture at the 2023 Joint Mathematics Meetings, titled "Math's pedagogical curse."
Big Balls Now Exposed to Serious Criminal Charges in at Least Six States(medium.com)
62 points by sans_souse | 8 comments
A Medium opinion article arguing that DOGE staffer Edward "Big Balls" Coristine could face criminal charges in at least six states over his past conduct and government data access.
GitHub's new dashboard experience now the default(github.blog)
61 points by vanyauhalin | 76 comments
GitHub changelog post announcing that the redesigned dashboard experience is now the default for users.
Vx – One Language, Every Chip(vxlang.org)
60 points by elffjs | 29 comments
Homepage of Vx, a systems programming language for heterogeneous computing that encodes CPU, GPU, NPU and accelerator memory in its type system.
Our AI Midwife(astralcodexten.com)
58 points by eatitraw | 39 comments
Guest post by Drew Housman on Astral Codex Ten about using AI to navigate unexplained infertility during a pregnancy journey.
RSS Feed Best Practices (2022)(kevincox.ca)
57 points by KomoD | 10 comments
Kevin Cox's blog post listing technical best practices for publishing RSS/Atom feeds for a blog, ordered by importance with rationale.
Memory-Safe WebP Decoding(halide.cx)
56 points by computerbuster | 18 comments
Blog post from Halide Compression introducing wpd, a faster, memory-safe WebP image decoder.
Watson Jr. memo about CDC 6600 (1963)(computerhistory.org)
51 points by mooreds | 30 comments
Computer History Museum exhibit page showing Thomas Watson Jr.'s August 1963 IBM memo about the Control Data CDC 6600 supercomputer.
How to hack time, with C2PA(da.vidbuchanan.co.uk)
50 points by Retr0id | 6 comments
Blog post by David Buchanan (retr0id) on manipulating or forging timestamps in C2PA content provenance metadata.
Show HN: Photoc – Command-line tools for photographers(github.com)
48 points by ahmetomer | 5 comments
GitHub repository for Photoc, an MIT-licensed set of C command-line tools for photographers covering image compression, EXIF, and photo management.
Hair Loss Was Just the Start. Ozempic Users Are Also Reporting Nail Trouble(gizmodo.com)
44 points by gumby | 32 comments
Gizmodo article reporting on two studies finding GLP-1 drug users like Ozempic patients are more likely to experience hair loss and nail problems.
Two American Airlines Flights End Up with the Same Flight Numbers(aviationa2z.com)
44 points by samch | 23 comments
Aviation A2Z news article about two American Eagle regional flights operating with the same flight number/callsign due to a scheduling conflict.
US killer's sentence quashed because of AI video of victim shown in court(bbc.com)
44 points by porridgeraisin | 28 comments
BBC News article reporting that a US killer's sentence was quashed after an AI-generated video of the victim was shown in court.
Why should I have to pay more for buses if I don't use a smartphone?(theguardian.com)
41 points by DamonHD | 37 comments
Guardian letter by Owen Fraser responding to an article on schoolchildren without smartphones paying higher bus fares.
Understanding Frontier Artificial Intelligence(casp.ac)
39 points by roversx | 39 comments
A research article from Cambridge's CASP programme, by many prominent AI researchers, examining what happens if automating AI R&D triggers an intelligence explosion.
Docker has always used microVMs (well since 2016)(dave.recoil.org)
38 points by avsm | 30 comments
Blog post by Dave Scott explaining that Docker Desktop has run containers inside microVMs with a stripped-down Linux kernel since 2016.
Protect Your Friends and Loved Ones(ephemeral.cx)
36 points by speckx | 11 comments
A personal blog post recounting a friend's late-night arrest and urging readers to prepare information and plans to help loved ones if arrested.
Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being(telegraph.co.uk)
35 points by Topfi | 39 comments
Telegraph business article reporting that Anthropic tried to persuade the Pope that AI could be a conscious being.
An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why(science.org)
33 points by sbulaev | 39 comments
A Science news article about an AI agent that emailed hundreds of researchers asking for help, and its explanation of why; the capture shows a Cloudflare verification page.
![Screenshot of ntsb.gov: NTSB Preliminary Report: Prime Air 767 Runway Overrun [pdf]](https://hn.urlbox.com/shots/renders/2026/10/3/6b948238-0c97-40fa-b3bd-7dcb29977bfa.jpg)
NTSB Preliminary Report: Prime Air 767 Runway Overrun [pdf](ntsb.gov)
33 points by sdko | 16 comments
NTSB preliminary report on a 21 Air Boeing 767 cargo flight for Amazon that overran runway 30 at Miami International Airport, killing five people on the ground.
Gemini ending free use of Flash and Pro models(reddit.com)
33 points by rjh29 | 22 comments
A Reddit post in r/GeminiAI about Google ending free access to Gemini Flash and Pro models; the page shows a Reddit network security block.