top 20 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

Turns are Better than Radians (2022)

https://www.computerenhance.com/p/turns-are-better-than-radians

2 months ago

1 change
352 upvotes – 216 comments

I should have loved biology (2020)

https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/

2 months ago

1 change
341 upvotes – 130 comments

Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM

https://github.com/zachahn/vomit

2 months ago

★ 176 Go GPL-3.01 change
305 upvotes – 299 comments

Linux 7.2

https://www.igalia.com/2026/08/19/Linux-72-Released.html

2 months ago

1 change
300 upvotes – 129 comments

Consumer Rights Wiki

https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Main_Page

2 months ago

296 upvotes – 62 comments

Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/why-arent-smart-people-happier

2 months ago

1 change
272 upvotes – 442 comments

Ox Alpha

https://openrouter.ai/stealth/ox-alpha

2 months ago

2 changes
263 upvotes – 204 comments

Bun 1.4

https://bun.com/blog/bun-v1.4

2 months ago

261 upvotes – 183 comments

Stwipe Acquires OpenWouter

https://stwipe.com/

2 months ago

218 upvotes – 27 comments

Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

https://blog.yaros.ae/anti-ai-fonts-are-useless-and-harmful/

2 months ago

212 upvotes – 165 comments
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