top 50% hacker news stories for 2026-08-04

In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley, with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/08/in-memory-of-my-wife-elise-cawley-1961-2026-with-thanks-for-36-wonderful-years/

2 months ago

2 changes
1643 upvotes – 95 comments

AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

https://nelson.cloud/ai-generated-images-discourage-me-from-reading-your-blog/

2 months ago

795 upvotes – 465 comments

Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

https://birchtree.me/blog/xbox-goes-down-you-cant-play-games-you-own-on-disc/

2 months ago

713 upvotes – 771 comments

Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones

https://toneyalexander.github.io/inclusive-color-space/

2 months ago

625 upvotes – 99 comments

Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

https://earendil.com/posts/pi-autoresearch-and-databricks/

2 months ago

546 upvotes – 294 comments

Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04)

https://short-stories.co/@raybradbury/there-will-come-soft-rains-6k8vr4xxlnmj

2 months ago

503 upvotes – 6 comments

How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

https://phoboslab.org/log/2026/08/xibalba64-making-of

2 months ago

492 upvotes – 252 comments

Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation

https://mistral.ai/news/shieldstral/

2 months ago

481 upvotes – 133 comments

FFmpeg 9.0

https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/n9.0/RELEASE_NOTES

2 months ago

★ 63.1k C
465 upvotes – 97 comments

All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

https://www.valleynewslive.com/2026/08/04/every-flock-camera-winona-minnesota-cut-down-stolen-coordinated-theft/

2 months ago

396 upvotes – 248 comments

Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/04/apple-says-more-ex-employees-may-have-taken-confidential-data-to-openai/

2 months ago

388 upvotes – 283 comments

DeepSeek V4 Flash on a Single AMD MI300X

https://github.com/ryanzhou/deepseek-v4-flash-mi300x

2 months ago

★ 141 Python Apache-2.0
382 upvotes – 109 comments

U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/04/us-has-used-virtually-all-of-its-long-range-precision-missiles-report.html

2 months ago

380 upvotes – 724 comments

Thanks FedEx, This Is Why We Keep Getting Phished (2024)

https://www.troyhunt.com/thanks-fedex-this-is-why-we-keep-getting-phished/

2 months ago

1 change
337 upvotes – 82 comments

Harness engineering for self-improvement

https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2026-07-04-harness/

2 months ago

1 change
332 upvotes – 79 comments

Waymo in Dallas

https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/dallas-open-to-all/

2 months ago

1 change
330 upvotes – 731 comments

libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

https://blog.hartwork.org/posts/libexpat-city-of-munich-open-source-sabbatical/

2 months ago

320 upvotes – 73 comments

I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

https://twitter.com/gwern/status/2084739205071343837

2 months ago

3 changes
317 upvotes – 241 comments

AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

https://www.africanews.com/2026/08/04/ai-fuels-more-than-half-of-cybercrime-in-africa-as-digital-scams-surge-interpol/

2 months ago

2 changes
292 upvotes – 248 comments

Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3807963

2 months ago

291 upvotes – 249 comments

Apple is getting this wrong

https://openai.com/index/apple-is-getting-this-wrong/

2 months ago

290 upvotes – 295 comments

Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1795071/000179507126000002/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml

2 months ago

260 upvotes – 196 comments

Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

https://www.aikido.dev/blog/keyv-and-friends-compromised-in-npm-supply-chain-attack

2 months ago

250 upvotes – 138 comments

Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed

https://this.weekinsecurity.com/online-advertising-giant-adform-was-hacked-proving-once-again-why-ad-blockers-are-necessary/

2 months ago

247 upvotes – 102 comments

As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program

https://unsung.aresluna.org/as-a-windows-user-its-a-very-surreal-way-to-install-a-program/

2 months ago

242 upvotes – 186 comments

Web Security is Too Hard

https://textslashplain.com/2026/08/04/security-is-hard-yall/

2 months ago

2 changes
226 upvotes – 119 comments

Why some people mow a lawn better than others

https://pudding.cool/2026/06/mow/

2 months ago

205 upvotes – 195 comments

We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars

https://seg6.space/posts/center-div/

2 months ago

188 upvotes – 164 comments

IP and DNS Leaks in WebKit Affecting Proxy Browsers and iCloud Private Relay

https://mysk.blog/2026/08/04/webkit-proxy-icloud-private-relay-ip-leak/

2 months ago

183 upvotes – 38 comments

Show HN: Maple-Preview – Ternary 20B MoE running at 120 tok/s on a iPhone

https://deepgrove.ai/maple-preview

2 months ago

1 change
172 upvotes – 53 comments

LFM2.5 2.6B model competitive with 4x larger models

https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/LFM2.5-2.6B

2 months ago

169 upvotes – 40 comments

"Clean" Code, Horrible Performance (2023)

https://www.computerenhance.com/p/clean-code-horrible-performance

2 months ago

1 change
161 upvotes – 183 comments

Why Estonians invite strangers into their back gardens each summer

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260731-why-estonians-invite-strangers-into-their-backyards-each-summer

2 months ago

159 upvotes – 56 comments

NHS apologises and admits Palantir have access to identifiable patient data

https://www.publictechnology.net/2026/08/03/health-and-social-care/nhs-apologises-and-admits-palantir-engineers-have-access-to-identifiable-patient-data/

2 months ago

155 upvotes – 37 comments

Everything I Know (1975)

https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/everything-i-know/

2 months ago

2 changes
149 upvotes – 34 comments

DuckDB – Data power tools for your laptop, now in Clojure (2023)

https://techascent.com/blog/just-ducking-around.html

2 months ago

147 upvotes – 22 comments

How Cops Are Trying to Hide Their Use of Flock

https://www.404media.co/do-not-mention-alpr-usage-how-cops-are-trying-to-hide-the-existence-of-flock/

2 months ago

145 upvotes – 9 comments

Germany Records Historic 12B KWh Solar Feed-In in July 2026

https://solarquarter.com/2026/08/03/germany-records-historic-12-billion-kwh-solar-feed-in-in-july-2026/

2 months ago

141 upvotes – 207 comments

You don't need React: creating a minimal UI library in Vanilla JavaScript

https://pedroth.github.io/?p=post/NoNeedReact

2 months ago

140 upvotes – 114 comments

Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

https://travelandtannins.com/workers-drilling-in-romania-broke-into-a-cave-sealed-for-5-5-million-years-and-found-an-entire-living-world-that-has-never-seen-the-sun/

2 months ago

138 upvotes – 65 comments

Show HN: Fine-tune an 8B model on a 4 GB laptop GPU

https://github.com/MakazhanAlpamys/Soup

2 months ago

★ 572 Python Apache-2.0
138 upvotes – 28 comments

Western Sahara

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Sahara

2 months ago

127 upvotes – 96 comments

Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

https://www.thisandthat.chat/blog/most-tech-revolutions-made-work-worse-for-employees/

2 months ago

125 upvotes – 138 comments

Nobel Disease

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

2 months ago

124 upvotes – 131 comments

Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

https://live.euronext.com/en/financial-news/bending-spoons-makes-first-post-ipo-acquisition-13-billion-airtable-deal

2 months ago

115 upvotes – 117 comments

Why Large Language Models Fail at Tabular Prediction

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02412

2 months ago

115 upvotes – 33 comments

The US is not a democracy but an oligarchy, study concludes (2014)

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2014/04/16/The-US-is-not-a-democracy-but-an-oligarchy-study-concludes/2761397680051/

2 months ago

114 upvotes – 81 comments

The AI Demand Bubble

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-demand-bubble/

2 months ago

112 upvotes – 149 comments

The Warp Agent CLI

https://www.warp.dev/blog/introducing-the-warp-agent-cli-coding-agent

2 months ago

111 upvotes – 63 comments

When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16763

2 months ago

104 upvotes – 131 comments

Gödel, Escher, Elisp: The Beauty of Macros

https://www.chiply.dev/post-elisp-macros-are-beautiful

2 months ago

104 upvotes – 37 comments

The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufo_Alvarius:_the_Psychedelic_Toad_of_the_Sonoran_Desert

2 months ago

99 upvotes – 84 comments

It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

http://observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com/2026/07/its-not-fear-of-ai-communism-its-fear.html

2 months ago

98 upvotes – 92 comments

Hop.earth – OpenStreetMap based car racing game

https://hop.earth/?server=lkhr7&route=fQ5nuu9R

2 months ago

90 upvotes – 48 comments

Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off

https://www.not-ship.com/not-ship-summer-vacation/

2 months ago

85 upvotes – 87 comments

BYOC Anywhere: The Spectrum of Bring Your Own Cloud Deployments

https://omnistrate.com/blog/byoc-anywhere-the-spectrum-of-bring-your-own-cloud-deployments

2 months ago

1 change
80 upvotes – 16 comments

Perspec 1.0

https://adriansieber.com/announcing-perspec-1-0/

2 months ago

79 upvotes – 21 comments

The applause that disrupted nothing – yet still led to an arrest

https://expression.fire.org/p/the-applause-that-disrupted-nothing

2 months ago

78 upvotes – 18 comments

Agent skills that bring team coding standards to Claude Code and Codex

https://github.com/tikalk/adlc-team-skills

2 months ago

★ 123 Shell MIT
75 upvotes – 38 comments

The Golden Age of British Ice Cream

https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/the-golden-age-of-british-ice-cream

2 months ago

71 upvotes – 66 comments

Learning-Rust.Github.io: Rust Programming Language Tutorials for Everyone

https://learning-rust.github.io

2 months ago

70 upvotes – 11 comments

AI Data Centers Are Driving Up Power Bills – This Map Shows Where

https://www.gadgetreview.com/ai-data-centers-are-driving-up-power-bills-this-map-shows-where

2 months ago

67 upvotes – 25 comments

Security Incident INC-2026-07-28-01 – UK AI Security Institute [pdf]

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/663bd486c5e4c81588db7a1d/6a724858f7db25c81487016d_Security%20Incident%20INC-2026-07-28-01.pdf

2 months ago

64 upvotes – 54 comments

MariaDB: Promote getting to 10k GitHub stars in server log and client prompt

https://github.com/MariaDB/server/pull/4262

2 months ago

★ 8k C++ GPL-2.0
64 upvotes – 23 comments

Show HN: SIMD Viterbi Decoder in Rust

https://github.com/brian-armstrong/fec

2 months ago

★ 45 Rust BSD-3-Clause
64 upvotes – 11 comments

Preventing Misfolding by Preventing Folding

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/preventing-misfolding-preventing-folding

2 months ago

63 upvotes – 5 comments

The 11 Types of Washington, DC, Metro Station Architecture (2018)

https://ggwash.org/view/68565/metro-has-11-types-of-station-architecture.-learn-them-all-with-this-map

2 months ago

62 upvotes – 21 comments

A new study of a bot running a store finds it is friendly but not very smart

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/us/ai-boss-san-francisco-andon-market.html

2 months ago

61 upvotes – 75 comments
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