top 50% 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

Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/stop-eating-lady-gagas-oreos

2 months ago

1 change
204 upvotes – 134 comments

How to compromise your system with a job interview

https://www.codedge.de/posts/how-to-compromise-your-system-with-a-job-interview

2 months ago

190 upvotes – 171 comments

ATProto spaces: A new extension to ATProto that enables non-public data

https://atproto.com/blog/atproto-spaces-alpha

2 months ago

1 change
177 upvotes – 33 comments

DiffusionGemma Technical Report

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00146

2 months ago

164 upvotes – 40 comments

Everyone says assembly is untyped—everyone is wrong

https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/08/20/designing-odins-inline-asm/

2 months ago

1 change
160 upvotes – 99 comments

Early-life stress leaves a 'scar' inside brain cells in mice

https://medicine.washu.edu/news/how-early-life-stress-leaves-a-scar-inside-brain-cells/

2 months ago

1 change
156 upvotes – 76 comments

A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/08/look-under-our-trunk/

2 months ago

139 upvotes – 110 comments

Xorg-server 26.1.0 rc1

https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2026-August/003741.html

2 months ago

1 change
139 upvotes – 142 comments

Autolith: A programming agent with a live runtime

https://www.lambda-symbolics.com/autolith

2 months ago

126 upvotes – 60 comments

Every Model Cheats

https://dreadnode.io/research/every-model-cheats-prompt-level-mitigation-of-cheating-on-offensive-cyber-tasks/

2 months ago

1 change
117 upvotes – 97 comments

SpacetimeDB: a short technical review

https://strn.cat/posts/spacetime/

2 months ago

1 change
114 upvotes – 59 comments

Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyq011414eo

2 months ago

112 upvotes – 110 comments

Hacking with Claude on a $27 smart watch

https://www.mikekasberg.com/blog/2026/08/19/hacking-with-claude-on-a-27-smart-watch.html

2 months ago

1 change
109 upvotes – 59 comments

An elliptic curve of rank ≥ 30

https://elliptic-rank.icarm.cloud/curve/273

2 months ago

104 upvotes – 31 comments

Why the Ocean Cleanup hasn't solved the plastic pollution crisis

https://therevelator.org/why-ocean-cleanup-has-not-solved-plastic-pollution/

2 months ago

1 change
97 upvotes – 86 comments

AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it

https://franciscotrindade.me/blog/the-kids-are-really-alright/

2 months ago

91 upvotes – 144 comments

Netherlands lists Israel as a threat to its national security for the first time (2025)

https://www.trtworld.com/article/911b7ff6c075

2 months ago

1 change
87 upvotes – 11 comments

Zuckerberg encouraged growth over child safety, ex-Meta executive testifies

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/former-meta-engineer-resumes-testimony-landmark-trial-over-social-medias-harm-2026-08-19/

2 months ago

87 upvotes – 22 comments

Ameliorate

https://ameliorate.app/

2 months ago

85 upvotes – 25 comments

Show HN: Open-source Stripe Connect alternative

https://zoneless.com

2 months ago

83 upvotes – 36 comments

Tidal Cycles – Live coding music with Algorithmic patterns

https://tidalcycles.org/

2 months ago

81 upvotes – 16 comments

Risk Engineering

https://risk-engineering.org/

2 months ago

81 upvotes – 17 comments

Slack Code

https://www.salesforce.com/introducing-slack-code/?bc=HL

2 months ago

81 upvotes – 110 comments

Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260818-00/?p=112621

2 months ago

78 upvotes – 54 comments

Show HN: Check if any of the $656M in unclaimed royalties at The MLC is yours

https://pub.doub.ly/

2 months ago

77 upvotes – 37 comments

Conway's Game of Life in real life

https://blog.coredump.cx/p/conways-game-of-life-in-real-life

2 months ago

1 change
74 upvotes – 20 comments

Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree

https://nautil.us/why-it-might-be-time-to-rethink-the-human-family-tree-1283985

2 months ago

1 change
73 upvotes – 44 comments

Generic Methods in Go 1.27

https://dominik.info/blog/go-generic-methods

2 months ago

71 upvotes – 47 comments

Guess which of these LLM outputs is watermarked

https://sgoedecke.github.io/watermark-quiz/

2 months ago

1 change
71 upvotes – 85 comments

Project Cybersyn (2022)

https://bactra.org/notebooks/cybersyn.html

2 months ago

1 change
68 upvotes – 55 comments

I spent twenty years becoming good at the wrong game

https://savvynormie.com/i-spent-twenty-years-becoming-good-at-the-wrong-game/

2 months ago

1 change
68 upvotes – 100 comments

Launch HN: Vendo (YC S26) – Let users build features on top of your product

https://github.com/runvendo/vendo

2 months ago

★ 582 TypeScript Apache-2.0
64 upvotes – 22 comments

Browser De-Slop

https://www.sacredheartsc.com/blog/browser-de-slop/

2 months ago

61 upvotes – 47 comments

Show HN: We chased a weather balloon across Montana and never found it

https://radi8.dev/blog/uplink/

2 months ago

60 upvotes – 26 comments

The Citizen Developer

https://www.massdriver.cloud/blogs/the-citizen-developer

2 months ago

1 change
58 upvotes – 88 comments

UK internet age checks have boosted rogue adult sites, says Pornhub

https://www.ft.com/content/295c2eba-da29-434d-84e0-e9de3b0b1cc2

2 months ago

57 upvotes – 61 comments

Show HN: Omacosy – Omarchy-style tiling desktop for macOS, no SIP

https://github.com/paulsp94/omacosy

2 months ago

★ 443 Swift MIT
57 upvotes – 45 comments

Optimizing things in the USSR (2016)

https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-ussr/

2 months ago

55 upvotes – 39 comments

Zellij 0.45.0: nested sessions, Kitty graphics, a fresh UI

https://zellij.dev/news/nested-sessions-kitty-graphics-new-ui/

2 months ago

55 upvotes – 27 comments

Seeing beyond BMI: Estimating cardiometabolic risk with smartphone imagery

https://research.google/blog/seeing-beyond-bmi-estimating-cardiometabolic-risk-with-smartphone-imagery/

2 months ago

54 upvotes – 33 comments

Australia passes law to levy tech giants that fail to pay for local news

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/australia-passes-law-levy-tech-giants-that-fail-pay-local-news-2026-08-20/

2 months ago

54 upvotes – 53 comments

GitHub, autoscaling, and the component substitution fallacy

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/08/19/github-autoscaling-and-the-component-substitution-fallacy/

2 months ago

54 upvotes – 0 comments
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