top 10 hacker news stories for 2026-08-20

Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

https://blog.curiousquail.com/im-upset-again-about-a-co-creator-of-rss-being-prosecuted-for-something-meta-is-doing-with-little-consequence/

2 months ago

1697 upvotes – 400 comments

AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint

https://blog.laserphile.com/2026/08/aliexpress-webpage-keeping-multipoint.html

2 months ago

1058 upvotes – 337 comments

Don't paste the AI, please

https://dontpastetheai.com/

2 months ago

1 change
1055 upvotes – 581 comments

The August 17 outage

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead/

2 months ago

1 change
642 upvotes – 756 comments

Show HN: I trained a 125M model to autocomplete piano on-device

https://simedw.com/2026/08/20/midi-autocomplete/

2 months ago

598 upvotes – 118 comments

Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload

https://safedep.io/arrayref-proc-macro1-rust-build-time-malware/

2 months ago

2 changes
553 upvotes – 510 comments

CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s

https://www.wsj.com/tech/steve-jobs-apple-next-cia-161b65f9?st=NWWds1&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

2 months ago

3 changes
450 upvotes – 272 comments

Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

https://www.danielvaughn.dev/posts/huzzah/

2 months ago

384 upvotes – 210 comments

Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone (2003)

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030825-00/?p=42803

2 months ago

1 change
357 upvotes – 138 comments

Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study

https://www.rathbiotaclan.com/tiktok-videos-deactivate-key-cognitive-brain-regions/

2 months ago

1 change
356 upvotes – 120 comments
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