top 50% hacker news stories for 2026-08-16

Being ambitious and being a dad

https://nicholascharriere.com/blog/being-ambitious-and-being-a-dad/

2 months ago

1 change
954 upvotes – 761 comments

Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text_adulteration_in_claude_is_a_perversion_of_writing

2 months ago

2 changes
823 upvotes – 730 comments

Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/16/qwen-38-27b/

2 months ago

801 upvotes – 384 comments

Claude: System Prompts

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-prompts

2 months ago

761 upvotes – 284 comments

Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-ads-firefox-ios

2 months ago

715 upvotes – 278 comments

Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49322107

2 months ago

660 upvotes – 202 comments

A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

https://rvembedded.com/blog_post/12/

2 months ago

2 changes
625 upvotes – 332 comments

Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/16/stripe-will-reportedly-acquire-ai-gateway-startup-openrouter-for-7b/

2 months ago

2 changes
486 upvotes – 300 comments

Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure"

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22kidney+disappointment%22

2 months ago

437 upvotes – 154 comments

Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose

https://w4g1.dev/blog/models-are-getting-dumber-on-purpose

2 months ago

335 upvotes – 187 comments

The AI Credit Resale Economy

https://vectoral.com/blog/who-are-the-token-brokers

2 months ago

334 upvotes – 130 comments

A faster way to calculate the day of the week

https://www.benjoffe.com/fast-day-of-week

2 months ago

268 upvotes – 89 comments

Nvidia dramatically reduces amount of OpenAI infra financing it may guarantee

https://www.reuters.com/business/nvidia-scales-back-250-billion-openai-data-center-guarantee-wsj-reports-2026-08-14/

2 months ago

254 upvotes – 152 comments

What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?

https://littlelearner-ll.github.io/

2 months ago

245 upvotes – 209 comments

Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

https://reticulum.network/

2 months ago

231 upvotes – 81 comments

The weekend is 100 years old

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/aug/16/the-weekend-is-100-years-old-skiveday-fridays-and-hybrid-working-ruined-it

2 months ago

221 upvotes – 155 comments

Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

https://www.anthropic.com/research/multiagent-systems

2 months ago

198 upvotes – 139 comments

St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core

https://www.wptv.com/news/treasure-coast/region-st-lucie-county/saint-lucie-nuclear-power-plant-unit-1-manually-shut-down-after-3-control-rods-drop-into-reactor-core

2 months ago

196 upvotes – 149 comments

Protobuf has LSP support

https://buf.build/blog/protobuf-lsp

2 months ago

1 change
173 upvotes – 158 comments

NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers

https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-ending-key-grant-budding-clinical-researchers

2 months ago

160 upvotes – 91 comments

Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/young-people-ai-ceos-executives-poll

2 months ago

157 upvotes – 188 comments

ICE Shot a Journalist and Threw Him in Detention. He's Approaching 300 Days

https://theintercept.com/2026/08/16/ricardo-parias-ice-detention-journalist-los-angeles/

2 months ago

142 upvotes – 63 comments

A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4335-1.html

2 months ago

133 upvotes – 95 comments

Banned Words List

https://pen.org/banned-words-list/

2 months ago

130 upvotes – 51 comments

MathCode, Mathematical Coding Agent

https://math-ai-org.github.io/mathcode/

2 months ago

118 upvotes – 29 comments

A True Telnet BBS on a Casio Calculator

https://ei3lh.eu/2026/08/16/a-true-telnet-bbs-on-a-casio-calculator/

2 months ago

117 upvotes – 12 comments

Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49318906

2 months ago

115 upvotes – 125 comments

Guiding Ships with Moire Patterns (2018)

https://tinkerings.org/2018/03/28/guiding-ships-with-moire-patterns/

2 months ago

1 change
114 upvotes – 31 comments

Red queen hypothesis – A new way forward for self-improving AI

https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/news/red-queen-hypothesis-new-way-forward-self-improving-ai

2 months ago

1 change
103 upvotes – 28 comments

GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/gps-and-the-lost-art-of-getting-lost

2 months ago

102 upvotes – 101 comments

AI Coding Without the Vibes

https://peterbloem.nl/blog/craft-coding

2 months ago

99 upvotes – 57 comments

The Iran War Is a Whole New Level of Quagmire for the US

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/08/12/the-us-forgot-the-lessons-of-iraq-now-its-desperate-for-ideas-on-iran-01033217

2 months ago

97 upvotes – 69 comments

The Case Against Formal Verification, 50 Years Later

https://ivan-gavran.github.io/0-social-processes-paper

2 months ago

95 upvotes – 120 comments

Show HN: Mic Drop, a real-time multiplayer karaoke game

https://www.micdrop.gg/

2 months ago

93 upvotes – 42 comments

How I developed an Am29000 C compiler and web browser

https://nanochess.org/am29000_c_compiler_web_browser.html

2 months ago

92 upvotes – 22 comments

Show HN: A public AI whose memory is shared across all users

https://wildstatic.com/

2 months ago

86 upvotes – 75 comments

Wellington second-hand bookstore's mysterious orders

https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/books/wellington-second-hand-book-store-s-mysterious-orders

2 months ago

86 upvotes – 84 comments

Falstad Math and Physics Simulations

https://www.falstad.com/mathphysics.html

2 months ago

83 upvotes – 18 comments

US oil reserves are so low, the caverns holding them could be damaged

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/strategic-petroleum-reserve-trump-iran-war-gas-prices-b3033680.html

2 months ago

77 upvotes – 63 comments

The Two Factions of C++ (2024)

https://herecomesthemoon.net/2024/11/two-factions-of-cpp/

2 months ago

1 change
73 upvotes – 80 comments
show: top 10top 20top 50%
go to date: prev next
sort by: datescorecomments