top 50% hacker news stories for 2026-07-20

American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing

https://werd.io/american-ai-is-locked-down-and-proprietary-its-losing/

3 months ago

Who's Afraid of Chinese Models?

https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/

3 months ago

Airport Simulator

https://airport.apunen.com/

3 months ago

Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

https://xcancel.com/__alpoge__/status/2079028340955197566

3 months ago

Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

https://news.risky.biz/risky-bulletin-hacker-wipes-romanias-entire-land-registry-database/

3 months ago

India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on dramatic debut launch

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/indias-first-privately-developed-rocket-reaches-orbit-on-dramatic-debut-launch/

3 months ago

Kimi Work

https://www.kimi.com/products/kimi-work

3 months ago

Stolen Buttons

https://anatolyzenkov.com/stolen-buttons

3 months ago

Jelly UI: Soft-body physics for native HTML form controls

https://jelly-ui.com/

3 months ago

The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel

https://edri.org/our-work/the-eu-is-about-to-sell-our-most-sensitive-data-to-the-us-for-visa-free-travel/

3 months ago

Xiaomi-Robotics-1

https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html

3 months ago

Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled

https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2026/07/20/human-mathematicians-are-being-outcounterexampled/

3 months ago

Stop Using OpenCode

https://wren.wtf/shower-thoughts/stop-using-opencode/

3 months ago

Exploit brokers pay $500k for WordPress RCEs. I found one with GPT5.6 and $25

https://slcyber.io/research-center/exploit-brokers-pay-500000-for-a-wordpress-rce-i-found-one-with-gpt5-6/

3 months ago

Nativ: Run frontier open models locally on your Mac

https://blaizzy.github.io/nativ/

3 months ago

Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight

https://github.com/hgaiser/moonshine

3 months ago

★ 966 Rust BSD-2-Clause

Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

https://www.emergingtrajectories.com/lh/frontier-lab-economics/

3 months ago

Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-project-leadership-changes

3 months ago

I Stopped "Creating Content"

https://refactoringenglish.com/blog/why-i-stopped-creating-content/

3 months ago

Firefox Merges Support for Vulkan Video Decoding

https://github.com/search

3 months ago

Perfection Is Not Over-Engineering

https://var0.xyz/posts/perfection-is-not-over-engineering.html

3 months ago

Shinjuku Station in 3D

https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/

3 months ago

My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault

https://rootkitlabs.com/2026/06/22/I%27m-Building-a-Secure-USB-Drive/

3 months ago

Agent swarms and the new model economics

https://cursor.com/blog/agent-swarm-model-economics

3 months ago

Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat tour of grace cathedral, San Francisco

https://vincentwoo.com/3d/grace_cathedral/

3 months ago

Designing an Ethernet Switch ASIC

https://essenceia.github.io/projects/ethernet_switch_asic/

3 months ago

We're Squandering LEDs' Potential to Save Our Night Skies

https://spectrum.ieee.org/led-light-pollution

3 months ago

Over 30% of new ArXiv submissions now read as AI-written

https://unslop.run/blog/measuring-ai-writing-on-arxiv

3 months ago

The Voice of Google

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-voice-of-google

3 months ago

Airbus Takes Flight from AWS

https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/07/20/airbus-takes-flight-from-aws-what-happens-next-is-critical/5274109

3 months ago

I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs

https://numerlab.org/2025/07/20/bashumerate-enumerator/

3 months ago

NYC Apartment Aquaponics

https://erinmurphy.dev/projects/project-2/

3 months ago

Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion

https://nothings.org/gamedev/ssao/

3 months ago

Power companies are using eminent domain to seize land for data centers

https://fortune.com/2026/07/19/data-center-eminent-domain-public-use/

3 months ago

The Power of Awareness: Overcoming Surveillance Capitalism

https://www.scottrlarson.com/presentations/overcoming-surveillance-capitalism-with-awareness/

3 months ago

How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/07/17/microsofts-main-tool-for-lock-in/

3 months ago

Czechia moves to ban mobile phones in schools from September 2027

https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/czech-news-in-brief-for-july-20-2026-monday-top-afternoon-headlines

3 months ago

That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2026/05/05/404/

3 months ago

GC and Exceptions in Wasmtime

https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/wasmtime-gc

3 months ago

My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry

https://www.statnews.com/2026/07/20/psychiatric-insurance-coverage-suicide-denial-personal-essay/

3 months ago

LoRA Speedrun – a public wall-clock leaderboard for fine-tuning techniques

https://github.com/Saivineeth147/lora-speedrun

3 months ago

★ 144 Python MIT

Hyprland 0.55 announced the switch to Lua for its config files

https://hypr.land/news/update55/

3 months ago

Making ASCII Art in Vim

https://alexyang.dev/vim-ascii-art/

3 months ago

Cross sectioning insects in an electron microscope with a femtosecond laser [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwhVJ7cv9B4

3 months ago

Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981136

3 months ago

The creepiest 'sales demo' of all time

https://www.appenmedia.com/opinion/letter-to-the-editor-the-creepiest-sales-demo-of-all-time/article_a8f0cc6c-29d3-41f7-8668-8a855f760efb.html

3 months ago

The drivers behind software delivery inefficiency

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3800646.3800650

3 months ago

My falling-out with the rationalist community

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist

3 months ago

The Trump administration's Threat to Scientific Research

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/the-trump-administrations-threat-to-scientific-research.html

3 months ago

Controlling Reasoning Effort in LLMs

https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/controlling-reasoning-effort-in-llms

3 months ago

Introduce a memory safe compilation mode inspired by Fil-C

https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/36237

3 months ago

★ 6.1k Zig

Ziggity – A terminal UI for Git, written in Zig

https://github.com/simoarpe/ziggity

3 months ago

★ 202 Zig MIT

The Anti-Palantir Manifesto

https://nonogra.ph/the-anti-palantir-manifesto-07-20-2026

3 months ago

DeKalb deputy charged with Flock camera misuse; more Georgia officers fired

https://www.ajc.com/news/2026/07/3-more-georgia-police-officers-fired-over-alleged-flock-camera-misuse/

3 months ago

Firefox 153.0 Beta

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/153.0beta/releasenotes/

3 months ago

Jaron Lanier: there is no AI (2023)

https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/there-is-no-ai

3 months ago

I'm Done with Mullvad

https://moonwriting.blog/i-m-done-with-mullvad

3 months ago

Meta Garbage Collection: Using OCaml's GC to GC Rust

https://soteria-tools.com/blog/meta-garbage-collection

3 months ago

The footprints of every building in NYC – updated weekly

https://www.beautifulpublicdata.com/the-footprints-of-every-building-in-nyc/

3 months ago

US gas prices hit an average of $4 a gallon again

https://apnews.com/article/gas-prices-iran-war-4-gallon-4b82825734ec3ded192351e53a4be69e

3 months ago

Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day

https://readthetape.cc/

3 months ago