top 50% hacker news stories for 2026-08-15

AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

https://davidepiffer.com/p/ai-isnt-outthinking-mathematicians

2 months ago

2 changes
632 upvotes – 521 comments

Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk

https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dad2.70432

2 months ago

2 changes
502 upvotes – 400 comments

Auto-research with codex: How I achieved a 232x Faster Kernel

https://sankalp.bearblog.dev/autoresearch/

2 months ago

457 upvotes – 93 comments

Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

https://www.severe-weather.eu/long-range-2/super-el-nino-growth-accelerating-to-record-strength-fall-winter-2026-2027-forecast-impact-united-states-canada-europe-fa/

2 months ago

451 upvotes – 371 comments

The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

https://conic.al/writing/the-other-sean-byrne-doesnt-exist/

2 months ago

391 upvotes – 189 comments

Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI

https://www.acc.org/about-acc/press-releases/2026/08/11/14/59/abdominal-fat-predicts-heart-disease-risk-better-than-bmi

2 months ago

2 changes
342 upvotes – 329 comments

Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding

https://allen.bargi.org/notes/working-with-ai-feels-like-leadership/

2 months ago

1 change
338 upvotes – 203 comments

Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

https://rhonabwy.com/2026/08/15/software-engineering-fundamentals-matter-more-than-ever/

2 months ago

322 upvotes – 247 comments

A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

https://www.xda-developers.com/25-year-old-brazilian-video-patent-expired-legal-headache-linux/

2 months ago

318 upvotes – 178 comments

At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/the-first-at-home-test-for-infected-ticks-could-improve-lyme-disease-diagnosis-180989235/

2 months ago

1 change
297 upvotes – 128 comments

A spectre is haunting Unicode

https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html

2 months ago

1 change
281 upvotes – 123 comments

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

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/good-ideas

2 months ago

1 change
276 upvotes – 69 comments

Supersonic Trebuchet [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co57SfcT-h0

2 months ago

256 upvotes – 116 comments

Magnitude 7.7 Earthquake – 68 km NNW of Ende, Indonesia

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000tkt2/executive

2 months ago

224 upvotes – 56 comments

A controversial Alzheimer's surgery is said to reverse symptoms

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02448-x

2 months ago

197 upvotes – 85 comments

AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/so-how-ai-drug-discovery-doing-really

2 months ago

5 changes
187 upvotes – 93 comments

Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

https://horn.gg/blog/engineers-will-do-anything-to-avoid-learning-from-history/

2 months ago

176 upvotes – 115 comments

The Ploopy A+ Trackball Is Here

https://blog.ploopy.co/the-aplus-is-finally-here-499

2 months ago

149 upvotes – 70 comments

Simplifying and Refactoring Introductory Calculus (2018)

https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03459

2 months ago

1 change
145 upvotes – 81 comments

The Dutch community where people live on strips of land in a lake

https://www.core77.com/posts/144869

2 months ago

1 change
142 upvotes – 62 comments

The little-known winstart.bat batch file

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260811-00/?p=112605

2 months ago

137 upvotes – 40 comments

Show HN: ThoughtDAG – An editable context graph for LLM conversations

https://chenxiachan.github.io/thoughtdag/

2 months ago

136 upvotes – 63 comments

Splitting a Git Commit

https://blog.gnoack.org/post/git-history-split

2 months ago

136 upvotes – 71 comments

The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts

https://www.404media.co/the-government-is-monitoring-anti-flock-tiktok-and-instagram-accounts/

2 months ago

134 upvotes – 85 comments

I Remain a Skeptic

https://blog.jsbarretto.com/post/i-remain-a-skeptic

2 months ago

129 upvotes – 130 comments

Tracking down a Zsh history data loss bug

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-08-09-zsh-history-truncation-bug/

2 months ago

123 upvotes – 38 comments

Europe's scorched landscapes seen from space after summer heatwaves

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gxy0wqqd9o

2 months ago

121 upvotes – 137 comments

Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

https://opensauce.it/cloudflare-ai-psychosis/

2 months ago

119 upvotes – 101 comments

Using GCC's Nested Functions with Wide Pointers and No Trampolines II

https://uecker.codeberg.page/2026-07-14.html

2 months ago

103 upvotes – 47 comments

Xorshift Generators

https://www.alanzucconi.com/2026/08/15/xorshift-generators/

2 months ago

97 upvotes – 50 comments

Printytron – Describe a part, get a printable STL

https://printytron.com

2 months ago

1 change
94 upvotes – 48 comments

The Wow signal was a strong narrowband radio signal detected on August 15, 1977

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal

2 months ago

93 upvotes – 28 comments

Israeli PR wants to answer your ChatGPT questions

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-influence/2026/08/14/israeli-pr-wants-to-answer-your-chatgpt-questions-01038138

2 months ago

93 upvotes – 31 comments

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49308059

2 months ago

93 upvotes – 147 comments

Evolve: An incremental game about evolving a civilization

https://pmotschmann.github.io/Evolve/

2 months ago

91 upvotes – 30 comments

Could a computer scientist build a brain?

https://stankerstjens.github.io/could-a-computer-scientist-build-a-brain/

2 months ago

88 upvotes – 67 comments

Tess's Android Wayland Compositor

https://github.com/wmww/tawc

2 months ago

★ 209 C GPL-3.0
86 upvotes – 17 comments

Plastic mechanical computer from 1963: The Digi-Comp 1 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y8bGBE71yw

2 months ago

84 upvotes – 20 comments

Rewriting in Rust

https://blog.jetbrains.com/rust/2026/08/10/rewriting-in-rust/

2 months ago

84 upvotes – 61 comments

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

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

2 months ago

84 upvotes – 49 comments

Suspecting court of using AI, man injected prompts in filings to try to win case

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/suspecting-court-of-using-ai-man-injected-prompts-in-filings-to-try-to-win-case/

2 months ago

81 upvotes – 60 comments

2D Gaussian Splatting for Bézier Spline Line Art Vectorization

https://studios.disneyresearch.com/2026/07/16/2d-gaussian-splatting-for-bezier-spline-line-art-vectorization/

2 months ago

80 upvotes – 6 comments

Bede Liu, a digital signal processing pioneer, has died

https://spectrum.ieee.org/digital-signal-processing

2 months ago

74 upvotes – 4 comments

Thunderbird's Desktop Calendar Visual Redesign

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2026/08/desktop-calendar-a-design-journey/

2 months ago

73 upvotes – 27 comments

The price of a Costco hot dog has gone up

https://sina.bio/posts/costco-hotdog.html

2 months ago

70 upvotes – 68 comments

Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o

2 months ago

69 upvotes – 73 comments

destruction-certificate.txt

https://stallman.org/articles/destruction-certificate.txt

2 months ago

68 upvotes – 2 comments

Debian has begun voting on the future of AI/LLM contributions

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2026/08/msg00002.html

2 months ago

67 upvotes – 54 comments

Yadda 3.0.0: BDD in the Age of AI Agents

http://www.stephen-cresswell.com/2026/08/15/Yadda-3.0.0-BDD-in-the-Age-of-AI-Agents.html

2 months ago

66 upvotes – 28 comments

South Korea proposes talks to officially end war with North

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8en2z9jp2xo

2 months ago

65 upvotes – 73 comments

Ranking the Most Brilliantly Colored Birds with Data

https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/08/14/fairly-ranking-the-most-brilliant-birds/

2 months ago

64 upvotes – 8 comments

Credit card debt rises to $1.26T, nearing all-time record

https://abc7.com/story/credit-card-debt-rises-126-trillion-nearing-time-record/19667289/

2 months ago

64 upvotes – 95 comments

TreasuryDirect: Prepare for ID.me – Your New Way to Log In

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/savings-bonds/idme-one-month/

2 months ago

63 upvotes – 67 comments

AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-designed-virus

2 months ago

61 upvotes – 141 comments

Tea5767-Radio-Tuner

https://github.com/turtushig22-blip/tea5767-radio-tuner

2 months ago

★ 43 MIT
59 upvotes – 4 comments

AI-Assisted GPU Porting of a 250k Line Legacy Weather Simulation Code

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13122

2 months ago

57 upvotes – 7 comments

SugarTrack – an offline Android logbook for blood sugar (no account, no cloud)

https://sugartrack-beta.vercel.app/

2 months ago

56 upvotes – 26 comments

Show HN: Bribes.fyi – Compare bribes statistics department wise

https://bribes.fyi/compare

2 months ago

55 upvotes – 39 comments

Show HN: Deltix – AI Driven Testing

https://app.deltix.ai

2 months ago

1 change
54 upvotes – 12 comments
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