Top 30 stories from Hacker News. Top 10 include comment highlights. Compiled at 20:10 UTC.
612 points by benwerd · 516 comments
China's open-weights AI strategy is winning: its companies are taking the lead. America's closed-first, locked-down strategy is doomed to failure - and it could take the US economy down with it.
What HN said:
geophile: The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to.
overgard: I do think open-weights models are going to "win" in the sense that they're probably going to be dominant when the hardware to run them becomes affordable. (which might be a while). Although I guess you could probably rent the GPU's yourself to hypothetically save on costs.
tyleo: I’m suspicious of some quotes here, “80% of startups using Chinese models,” doesn’t seem quite right to me. I just interviewed at several startups and they were all using the US models.
postalcoder: This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta. Also, enterprises don't give a rip if models are open.
540 points by apunen · 112 comments
The sky (and your endurance) is the limit!
What HN said:
sarreph: I was only thinking about Flight Control[0] the other day and how I wish there were more modern takes on it! There was Mini Metro[1], but that was released over a decade ago. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Control [1] - https://en.wikipedia.
thanzex: This was really fun to play with, I have a few suggestions: - As the airspace gets more congested, it becomes difficult to click the airplanes as you can also grab an existing path, messing everything up.
rob74: Nice! But whatever happened to "Show HN"? I see more and more people posting their own projects here (which is completely ok!) but avoiding (or unaware of?) the "Show" option.
wjdp: Took me far too long to work how to get a plane to land, was drawing lines along the runway rather than dropping them on the coloured spot at the end and they were overflying.
474 points by speckx · 260 comments
In other news: Graykey maker sues former employee for leaking exploit; Hugging Face was hacked using AI; unauth RCE finally found in WordPress.
What HN said:
skinfaxi: > Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten real...
lrvick: Centralized tech is an evolutionary dead end and all who attempt it will continue to learn the same lessons.
cbg0: An update from the land registry (the truthfulness of this remains to be seen depending on how fast this comes back online): ANCPI announced that it had begun migrating its applications to Romania’s Government Cloud.
alexpotato: Romanian friends have told me that this is really due to corruption. Specifically: - government gives IT/data contracts to cronies - cronies don't actually do any real security work to protect the data - things like this happen
428 points by rapnie · 243 comments
The leaked draft text suggests that the Commission significantly caved in to US’s excessive demands for unfettered information access.
What HN said:
maratc: The point missing in the article is that, in order to enter the US, one needs to give the US Govt their photo and fingerprints ("biometric data") anyway. There are two options: visa-free with the biometric data passing on the wire (no hassle), or visa (a major hassle) and biometr...
speak_plainly: This is a good thing for travellers. In border security there are generally two camps, one that uses data and intelligence to go after the worst, large-scale criminal operations and networks, and generally makes travelling easy for the average person, and the other is like tradit...
Vinnl: It's not clear to me if this would allow access to all biometric data, or "just" to that of people crossing the US border? And for the latter, what data are we talking about? If it's mostly fingerprints, don't those already get collected upon crossing the border? And can't they a...
cm2187: I fail to understand the distinction between an ESTA and a visa to be honest. You need to do the paperwork in advance, pay, provide all sort of personal information, and it can be denied, and if approved only for a limited amount of time.
352 points by infosecau · 199 comments
What HN said:
Zsfe510asG: There is no evidence that $500k has been paid or would be paid for an exploit like this one. Given that the article says that prompts are modified like they are holy scripture, perhaps sell the prompt for $500k. The author works for https://www.assetnote.
progbits: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/commit/3a640e1c5e39aa... String concatenation SQL injection in the year 2026.
hmokiguess: I am so done with FOMO writing. Sure man, you found one with $25. With $25 plus your entire industry domain specific knowledge of where to look, of how to probe, of what else you may have accumulated and collected over the years of working within this industry.
ahartmetz: The surprising (and possibly untrue) thing is the high price of canned vulnerabilities. WordPress is known as the remote root shell with a blogging feature.
203 points by cl42 · 216 comments
Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 prove open models can reach the frontier. Why the economics of frontier labs favor infrastructure owners — and why Anthropic's model-only position risks unravelling." name="description" /> <meta content="Kimi K3, Qwen 3.
What HN said:
LarsDu88: The open weight, open architecture releases of the past several days has me more convinced that ultimately, the winner will be whoever burns their models to ASICs fastest. The LLMs themselves are capable of doing some aspects of chip design as evinced by the K3 press release.
overgard: I keep thinking about the Figma thing. If you're unaware, here's the google summary: ---- The Board Departure: Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s CPO and a co-founder of Instagram, sat on Figma’s board of directors. He resigned on April 14, just days before news of Claude Design broke.
bko: I think the risk is overstated. For one, on the margin people are willing to pay a lot for slightly better models. I know personally the value the LLM adds to my workflow is considerably more than the $200/m I pay the frontier labs.
port3000: It's amazing how quickly Fable went from 'Game-changing model that needs to be banned' to 'Yeah it's alright, but OpenAI is also just as good and there are a couple of good open weight alternatives that are equivalent for almost everything' The hype cycles are shortening, perhaps...
194 points by DemiGuru · 47 comments
GitHub is where people build software. More than 150 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 420 million projects.
What HN said:
robtherobber: Was there a link to the project on Github? I think that you've mistakenly shared Github's search tool/path
temp0826: Cool, have been using vulkan video decoding via mpv for a while now and it seems fine with little or no performance hits. Glad it's made its way here as getting hardware decoding to actually work in ff has felt like a house of cards (more options are welcome).
Havoc: Interesting - will see if I can toy with it. Word of caution though. I’ve found that on my machine (Linux/nvidia) unaccelerated video is way more power efficient. The second video is playing it kept the GPU in a high power state and that uses incrementally more power than the cpu...
ChrisArchitect: Previously: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Vulkan-Video-Merged (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48439348)
171 points by defrost · 123 comments
What HN said:
uv-depression: Greenhouses here in the lower mainland of British Columbia have been devastating to the night sky. It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky, something that's been an important part of every human culture for longer than recorded history.
Loic: Where I live, we have a small park, 500m away. You need to walk through it if you want to get to the city center from the small neighborhood we live in. To protect the wildlife, the lighting system has presence sensors, so as you walk or bicycle through the park, the way/street l...
michael1999: We need much better engineering standards if we are going to fix night lighting. A simplistic lux-on-the-ground measure combined with cost minimization produces a few lights, with bare bulbs, up hight, with brutal intensity.
michaelt: I once lived in a city that had replaced street lights that cast light in a circle with modernised ones that cast a sharply delimited rectangle of light on the road, and didn't waste light in other directions.
160 points by dopamine_daddy · 114 comments
We scored the full text of 12,750 arXiv papers and found that about a third of new ones read as machine-written. Here is the method, the results, and an honest account of the limitations.
What HN said:
pbui: I'm not sure what to think... I uploaded a PyHPC workshop paper I wrote in 2011 and it said 27% machine. I also uploaded my PhD dissertation from 2012 and got back 40% machine, which is just barely below the 42% threshold. I don't publish anymore...
ryandvm: There some real game theory mechanics at play when it comes to LLM usage in corporations. Devs are cranking out superficially superior code and documentation by just aiming the Claude Code fire hose at everything they can.
dopamine_daddy: I scored the full text of 12,750 arXiv papers from 2021 through 2026 to find out how many of these get flagged as machine written and how much it increased since the release of chatGPT. I purposely tuned the detector to avoid false positives.
pkage: As with all text-only AI detection schemes, I am concerned about the accuracy of the detection. I'm skeptical of the methodology, specifically the final join of the three detector scores---how can you be sure that that final step does not introduce any biases? There's no source a...
144 points by baldvinmar · 53 comments
Jelly UI is a dependency-free Web Components library for tactile product interfaces: soft-body physics, real form controls, dark mode, RTL and WCAG AA accessibility.
What HN said:
chrismorgan: Please never use scroll-snap as is done on this demo page (unrelated to the soft-body physics). It leads to an awful experience for a large fraction of users. It improves things in one or two scenarios, but at the cost of far more common great frustration.
jlukic: Saw the window was a bit laggy so thought I'd delve deeper to figure out what was going on. This lib runs a a RAF animation loop every 8ms across every component on the page that causes the entire document to repaint.
TurkTurkleton: Cute (and I mean that sincerely, not sarcastically), and I appreciate that it appears to gracefully degrade for
@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce), but for the demo site, it would probably be a good idea to allow the user to override that without having to change their sys...
tiohijazi: I dont get why people are so mad at this? Looks fun, will I ever use it? Probably not, but it looks fun
AI/ML
Business/Tech
Other
Science
Stories and comments sourced from Hacker News public API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator or Hacker News.