top 50% hacker news stories for 2026-08-21

Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results

https://kagi.com/changelog#11296

2 months ago

1272 upvotes – 395 comments

Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/us/politics/samuel-tunick-deleted-phone-felony.html

2 months ago

1 change
1105 upvotes – 1381 comments

Felony Bench

https://www.felonybench.com/

2 months ago

849 upvotes – 348 comments

Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera

https://san.com/cc/grand-jury-declines-to-indict-ohio-man-charged-with-destroying-flock-camera/

2 months ago

714 upvotes – 402 comments

AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too latedead

https://annas-archive.pk/blog/physical-destruction.html

2 months ago

1 change
703 upvotes – 2 comments

I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases

https://lina.sh/blog/hijacking-e164-arpa

2 months ago

1 change
688 upvotes – 89 comments

Kobo can run apps now

https://bandarlabs.github.io/Cobalt/

2 months ago

659 upvotes – 213 comments

AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

https://annas-archive.gl/blog/physical-destruction.html

2 months ago

647 upvotes – 917 comments

I'm becoming AI-blind

https://cymerys.com/w/im-becoming-ai-blind

2 months ago

1 change
521 upvotes – 510 comments

DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp

https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/vision/

2 months ago

498 upvotes – 155 comments

Stop Making TUIs

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/08/20/stop-making-tuis/

2 months ago

430 upvotes – 561 comments

Rust Glancer: Rust LSP using 100x less RAM

https://rust-glancer.github.io/blog/hello-world/

2 months ago

422 upvotes – 112 comments

Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened

https://www.xda-developers.com/japan-tried-build-operating-system-entire-world-us-government-intervened/

2 months ago

390 upvotes – 226 comments

Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

https://github.com/adnanakil/nobuzz/blob/main/README.md

2 months ago

★ 228 MIT1 change
362 upvotes – 237 comments

New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

https://precastreinforced.co.uk/2026/08/16/new-worlds/

2 months ago

1 change
287 upvotes – 185 comments

The Lost Treasure of Sid Meier's Pirates

https://remapradio.com/articles/the-lost-treasure-of-sid-meiers-pirates/

2 months ago

277 upvotes – 147 comments

Scientists release biggest 2D map of the universe

https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2026/08/10/scientists-release-biggest-2d-map-of-the-universe/

2 months ago

268 upvotes – 71 comments

Small, native web tricks worth remembering

https://htmlcat.net/

2 months ago

250 upvotes – 64 comments

A week of using Codex more than Claude

https://allaboutcoding.ghinda.com/a-week-of-using-codex-more-than-claude/

2 months ago

1 change
246 upvotes – 281 comments

OTel isn’t going well

https://matduggan.com/otel-isnt-going-well-and-i-made-a-spreadsheet-about-it/

2 months ago

2 changes
234 upvotes – 124 comments

Three important steps in my maturation process

https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2026-08-21-three-important-steps-in-my-maturation-process/

2 months ago

224 upvotes – 124 comments

How a Texas student blew the whistle on a rogue AI hacking attempt

https://www.reuters.com/world/how-texas-student-blew-whistle-rogue-ai-hacking-attempt-2026-08-20/

2 months ago

1 change
211 upvotes – 127 comments

Omacom Foundation launches with $8M

https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/omacom-foundation-launches-with-8-million/

2 months ago

1 change
195 upvotes – 196 comments

Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

https://mathstodon.xyz/@maxpool/117128107757895678

2 months ago

190 upvotes – 212 comments

How we made a text-to-speech model respond in sub-50 ms

https://nari-labs.com/blog/qwen3-tts-speed-cost-frontier/

2 months ago

1 change
171 upvotes – 44 comments

AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: Study

https://canews24.online/?p=71

2 months ago

1 change
166 upvotes – 11 comments

Zig’s Io.Threaded is neat

https://matklad.github.io/2026/08/06/neat-io-threaded.html

2 months ago

2 changes
166 upvotes – 96 comments

I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip

https://pointinthecloud.com/2026-08-19-144600.html

2 months ago

153 upvotes – 49 comments

We rebuilt the Linux MicroVM stack on Apple Silicon

https://encore.dev/blog/firecracker-apple-silicon

2 months ago

1 change
150 upvotes – 84 comments

Codex on AWS bedrock bug causing 10x charges

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/37674

2 months ago

★ 119.3k Rust Apache-2.0
148 upvotes – 66 comments

How Thailand Resisted Colonization

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-thailand-resisted-colonization/

2 months ago

138 upvotes – 53 comments

Micron announces $10B research hub in Boise

https://investors.micron.com/news/press-release/2026/Micron-Unveils-Micron-Research-Labs-a-U-S--Based-Long-Horizon-Innovation-Hub-to-Shape-the-Future-of-Memory-and-AI/default.aspx

2 months ago

131 upvotes – 72 comments

What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

https://catalystneuro.com/blog/cost-of-intelligence-drops-100x/

2 months ago

130 upvotes – 139 comments

TigerBeetle Core System Architecture: Deconstructing Performance Engineering

https://ixuvo.com/blog/tigerbeetle-core-system-architecture-performance-engineering

2 months ago

128 upvotes – 41 comments

I Just Want to Search

https://www.0xsid.com/blog/just-want-to-search

2 months ago

122 upvotes – 54 comments

It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use

http://observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com/2026/08/it-is-sign-of-times-that-amazon-gets-to.html

2 months ago

120 upvotes – 91 comments

Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory

https://blog.jakesaunders.dev/building-an-almost-fully-self-hosted-sandboxed-agentic-software-factory/

2 months ago

1 change
119 upvotes – 67 comments

One night in Uzbekistan: Why was this one data point so influential?

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/20/we-couldnt-reproduce-their-findings-and-realized-that-it-was-all-driven-by-weird-data-from-uzbekistan/

2 months ago

1 change
117 upvotes – 30 comments

What happens when a GPU reads memory

https://blog.doubleword.ai/what-happens-when-a-gpu-reads-memory

2 months ago

116 upvotes – 19 comments

c100

https://caligra.com/c100/

2 months ago

114 upvotes – 101 comments

WPD won't replace stolen Flock cameras, citing public trust

https://www.winonapost.com/news/wpd-wont-replace-stolen-flock-cameras-citing-public-trust/article_06a67859-2d97-414b-aa8f-d8751ad214bb.html

2 months ago

113 upvotes – 87 comments

Radiation damage to Hubble has been 4.3 years out of phase with the Solar cycle

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18214

2 months ago

112 upvotes – 36 comments

Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/19/health/flight-attendants-pilots-radiation-cancer-deaths

2 months ago

3 changes
100 upvotes – 101 comments

Yes/No/Cancel causes Aspirin sales to soar (2007)

https://martin.kleppmann.com/2007/07/19/yes-no-cancel-causes-aspirin-sales-to-soar.html

2 months ago

1 change
97 upvotes – 76 comments

'Ghost job' ads are getting so bad that lawmakers want to ban them

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/ghost-job-ads-are-getting-so-bad-that-lawmakers-want-to-ban-them-2580bc3e

2 months ago

1 change
93 upvotes – 55 comments

There's no such thing as a small software team anymore

https://jacob.gold/posts/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-small-software-team/

2 months ago

93 upvotes – 176 comments

Show HN: OzBrain, a shared brain for knowledge between agents and your team

https://ozbrain.com

2 months ago

92 upvotes – 58 comments

Tumble Forth – from assembly to OS with C compiler (2023)

https://tumbleforth.hardcoded.net/

2 months ago

1 change
91 upvotes – 14 comments

The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb (1986)

https://philipdick.com/resources/miscellaneous/the-religious-experience-of-philip-k-dick-by-r-crumb-from-weirdo-17/

2 months ago

91 upvotes – 65 comments

What we lost when search stopped making us think

https://blog.8ball.space/what-we-lost-when-search/

2 months ago

1 change
88 upvotes – 59 comments

Emacs 31.1 will release on 8/24

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/062dcd2aead00c3b47c14ff5b6c40313f7a775f5/etc/HISTORY

2 months ago

★ 5.1k Emacs Lisp GPL-3.0
88 upvotes – 22 comments

HN: The Good Parts (2016)

https://danluu.com/hn-comments/

2 months ago

1 change
82 upvotes – 23 comments

DuckDB V2 PEG-based SQL parser

https://duckdb.org/2026/08/20/duckdb-20-peg-parser

2 months ago

81 upvotes – 8 comments

Kino: A high-performance Ractor web server for Ruby 4.0

https://github.com/yaroslav/kino

2 months ago

★ 271 Ruby MIT
80 upvotes – 22 comments

Electric shock gloves in use by police departments in Bellevue, Omaha

https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/electric-shock-gloves-already-in-use-by-police-departments-in-bellevue-omaha/

2 months ago

80 upvotes – 72 comments

The road to ACID transactions in Cassandra 6

https://theconsensus.dev/p/2026/08/16/transactions-in-cassandra.html

2 months ago

74 upvotes – 24 comments

Paul Atkins misreads Adam Smith and the American founding

https://sites.duke.edu/thefinregblog/2026/08/03/paul-atkins-misreads-adam-smith-and-the-american-founding/

2 months ago

1 change
72 upvotes – 13 comments

Nvidia AVO scores 100% on the ARC-AGI-3 interactive reasoning benchmark

https://twitter.com/NVIDIAAI/status/2090786258981466231

2 months ago

71 upvotes – 39 comments

US debt has hit $40tn - Will that be a wake-up call?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9d8z72nn02o

2 months ago

70 upvotes – 117 comments

Kodak's "pre-invented" lunar orbiter camera; or, the fate of SAMOS readout

https://invertingvision.com/2026/08/10/kodaks-pre-invented-lunar-orbiter-camera-or-the-fate-of-samos-readout/

2 months ago

1 change
67 upvotes – 5 comments

Optimizing meshoptimizer to process billions of triangles in minutes (2025)

https://zeux.io/2025/09/30/billions-of-triangles-in-minutes/

2 months ago

64 upvotes – 0 comments

Better Batteries

https://matklad.github.io/2026/08/20/better-batteries.html

2 months ago

63 upvotes – 25 comments
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