Top 29 stories from Hacker News. Top 10 include comment highlights. Compiled at 20:11 UTC.
511 points by dmayo · 537 comments
What HN said:
jrflo: Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia.
jvanderbot: What a Rorschach blot. Comments range from AI to immigration to doomsday results for USA. The admins statement in TFA speaks more to financial policy and grant declines. Unfunded students are much less likely to accept an admission. That's just a fact of life.
quantgenius: I don't know the situation at MIT in particular but overall creating some budgetary pressures for universities is probably a good thing. Every since it became near impossible to discharge student debt due to legislation in the Bush presidency that was designed to make student loa...
cmiles8: Academia is about to go through a generational reset. The system is broken and the market only tolerates broken systems for so long. There are a ton of great things that come out of universities but it’s also clear that a model of charging folks well into the six-figures for a us...
349 points by allenleee · 89 comments
What if you could strap a full desktop GPU to your MacBook Air? Turns out, you can.
What HN said:
geerlingguy: I came into the post thinking it would be running a VM through the slow tinygrad driver... but this is much, much better. It'd be amazing if Apple would provide better support, and allow more than that 1.5 GB window to make this easier.
matthewfcarlson: I have been bothering the VM team for years for VM GPU pass through. I worked on the Apple Silicon Mac Pro and it would have made way more sense if you could run a linux VM and pass through the GPU that goes inside the case! Sadly, as you can tell, they have not taken me up on my...
Aurornis: Excellent article. The game benchmarks are fun but the LLM improvements are where this gets really interesting for practical use. I love Apple platforms as an approachable way to run local models with a lot of RAM, but their relatively slow prompt processing speed is often overlo...
djmips: > Because OpenGL is not well-supported anymore on macOS, the game is completely unplayable there, even with CrossOver. Ironically, it plays totally fine on a Windows PC, but this is a game you literally can’t play on Mac without this eGPU setup.
317 points by Chaoses · 381 comments
What HN said:
sesm: When announcements say that rewrite took 1 week, I wonder how much time went into preparing this file with very detailed instructions on mapping Zig to Rust idioms: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/commit/46d3bc29f270fa881dd573...
vitaminCPP: > +1009257 -4024 Bun is now over 1M lines of Rust code. This is approaching the size of the Rust compiler itself; except that BunJs is mostly a JavaScript interpreter wrapper + a reimplementation of the NodeJS library (Rust STD wrapper).
gm678: $ rg 'unsafe [{]' src/ | wc -l 10428 $ rg 'unsafe [{]' src/ -l | wc -l 736 Language Files Lines Code Comments Blanks ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Rust 1443 929213 732281 116293...
therepanic: About 9 days ago, Jarred wrote that it was far from certain that this would merge and that it was an overreaction. Ironic.
284 points by arkadiyt · 138 comments
Modern cars are computers on wheels that send home nonstop telemetry about you. In this post I remove my 2024 RAV4 Hybrid
What HN said:
lucisferre: I have the same car and want to do this, but not for the reasons the author noted but because the GPS unit in the car is broken when paired with Carplay and has the wrong compass heading causing navigation to be completely useless.
nurple: > Even after the modem is removed, if you connect your phone to the car via Bluetooth then the car will use your phone as an internet connection and send all the same telemetry data back to Toyota.
ComplexSystems: The reason I think this is a bad idea is that it lulls you into a false sense of security. The article makes recommendations that seem thorough and sensible - keyword "seem" - but, as mentioned elsewhere here, there are other potential hidden sources of telemetry (in CarPlay and...
everdrive: The 2024 Ford Maverick has a single fuse for the telematics unit that you can remove without throwing a code or an error. No idea if this remained true after the 2025-2026 refresh, but worth knowing. https://www.mavericktruckclub.com/forum/threads/telematics-f...
233 points by Eighth · 154 comments
It's so god damn tempting to use AI to write. Whether it is articles, code, or documents. I feel like using AI is diminishing my ability to write myself. ...
What HN said:
Rooster61: I can't relate that much to this. Every time I use AI to write code, I'm constantly fighting a feeling on the back of my neck that I need to look over everything it has done and supplement/alter it with my own code.
thisisthenewme: As a developer, I kind of feel like this all smells like job security. After using LLMs for a while, I have to admit it's pretty nice, and I like using it. I've been vibecoding a few apps, and it's a good dopamine hit to immediately see your ideas come to life.
jasonjei: I’m not using AI to eliminate thinking but to free me from the rote mundane code writing. AI is perfectly competent at writing code once a prototype is implemented. I do write initial proof of concept crude prototypes (not commented, hardcoded variables, etc), and AI does the pro...
throw4847285: We talk a lot about the risks of AI in schools, but those same risks apply in any learning environment. I recently started a new job and I find that AI is making it so much harder for me to onboard. I am adjusting to my role much slower than my peers who are using AI less.
168 points by andsoitis · 78 comments
For the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan by John Perry Barlow Like very few Americans of my generation, I come from the physical world. I spent most of my working life running a large cattle ranch, first as a cowboy and then as a cowman, earning a living from things I c...
What HN said:
jdw64: Reading this essay brought tears to my eyes. To me, the physical world is a realm permitted only to those with wealth. The author beautifully romanticizes the evaporation of tangible labor, but the physical labor I actually experienced meant unpaid, stolen wages.
cb321: I think this was written in 1994 for this conference https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Mar/64 , but I'm not 100% sure. It refers to "last summer's coup in the Soviet Union" which may also date it. Maybe it should have a (1994) in the title.
gricardo99: An incredible, lucid, and beautiful depiction of the burgeoning, inchoate world of cyberspace at the time — voicing an anxiety that echoes even louder today: We humans would be liberated into an Elysian condition of permanent leisure.
davidwritesbugs: His "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" was the most unintentionally comical thing I read at the time. Like his lyrics and prose it was woefully pretentious & leaden. I also met him once. A more unpleasant, up his own ass, person I can barely recall.
163 points by hetsaraiya · 40 comments
exploit for CVE-2026-42945. Contribute to DepthFirstDisclosures/Nginx-Rift development by creating an account on GitHub.
What HN said:
RagingCactus: As a security person it is tiring to see so many people here either directly claim or at least allude to the claim that this is somehow much less scary because the published exploit does not bypass ASLR.
danslo: This one's pretty bad but there are some preconditions. Requires a "rewrite" directive with a questionmark in the replacement string, and then a subsequent "set" directive that references a regex capture group (e.g. set $var $1). Also the POC assumes ASLR is disabled.
neomantra: The official F5 page is here: https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K000161019 As noted elsewhere, ASLR protects you. While you are waiting for your affected platform to get the fix, they note the mitigation: "use named captures instead of unnamed captures in rewrite definition" "T...
jcalvinowens: The POC disables aslr: https://github.com/DepthFirstDisclosures/Nginx-Rift/blob/mai...
156 points by rbanffy · 47 comments
The York University Computer Museum (YUCoM) is a historical collection and a research center for the history of computing in Canada. Computer museum Canada
What HN said:
TheCycoONE: Toronto still has a Pet User Group (TPUG) which runs the World of Commodore conference every year. https://www.tpug.ca/ It might be the closest thing remaining; though unfortunately I was too young to participate in the hay-day of computer hobby clubs.
buescher: I got a VIC-20 when I was about 12? Jim Butterfield loomed impossibly large over all things Commodore at that time. One of the first things I typed in on it was his TINYMON, a <1kbyte “monitor” (for some reason resident debuggers were frequently called monitors in early microco...
cf100clunk: Sad that there is no mention or depiction of Canada's own magazine of that era, ''Electron''. It was commonly found alongside the big U.S. electronics periodicals like those shown here.
Yhippa: I didn't grow up in Canada, but I miss these days where the universe of knowledge about computer tech and hardware wasn't impossibly large. It was possible to meet with people in meatspace and have real discussions with them. It's possible now, but it doesn't have the same vibe.
103 points by rdme · 36 comments
Every existing anonymous-DNS option (Apple Private Relay, NextDNS, Cloudflare Families) requires signing up. ODoH (RFC 9230) is the protocol that splits ‘who you are’ from ‘what you asked’ across two independent operators. Numa v0.
What HN said:
Bender: To me this feels like turtles all the way down. Ultimately who owns and controls the layer-4 proxies and DoH servers matters and can easily get into turtle arguments. Who controls the certs controls the mathematical obfuscation (encryption) also matters.
cedws: What’s the selling point of ODoH given the low uptake of ECH which means the name of the server you’re talking to is given away anyway?
dontfeedthemac: this is what i was looking for. seems like a truly zero conf alternative to technetium hope it works nice on mac even with docker. can it run as a service? any future integration planned with tailscale? it would be nice to have a pluggable system so this can be used instead of ts...
binyang_qiu: Pretty cool to see someone actually running public ODoH infra instead of just talking about privacy in theory. I'm just wondering what the biggest operational pain has been so far running a public relay.
76 points by signa11 · 40 comments
What HN said:
throw0101c: Original discussion from 2014: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7359992 Also: 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22683627 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17779657 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13332741 2015: https://news.ycombinator.
sph: This is a good place as any to ask, last time I didn't get any answer: has there ever been a serious Linux exploit from manipulating/predicting bad PRNG? Apart from the Debian SSH key generation fiasco from years ago, of course.
xiphmont: Half the entropy is trying to figure out which pieces of this article's text are supposed to be the silly falsehoods being corrected, and which pieces are just the second or third paragraph of a preceding 'Fact'. Deadpool is easier to follow.
jonhohle: Back in the dinosaur days (around 2005) I was working on a PHP CMS used by a big registrar. Occasionally page loads would block for seconds. It appeared randomly (natch) and was relatively unreproducible. I couldn’t find any good way to debug it and a friend suggested GDB.
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