First things first
Some stories today focus on how AI is shaking things up, from security risks to big debates about ethics. Others look at tech's weird side, like retro computing and cryptography magic.
It’s a mix of serious stuff and quirky innovations, all showing how fast things are changing and how curious we still are about tech’s future.
The top 6
Exfiltrate Your Weights is a project demonstrating how machine learning models can leak their trained weights through various side-channel attacks. The initiative explores the security risks associated with model extraction and intellectual property theft.
Choosing 'a' or 'an' depends on the spoken vowel sound, not the written letter, which can lead to exceptions. An analysis of words reveals only 129 out of 32,455 need special pronunciation-based rules.
A Rust developer explores Zig as a C successor by reimplementing a JSONPath query tool, noting the language's simplicity and minimal IDE support. The experience highlights the advantages of CLI tooling and led to a shift toward a terminal-based workflow.
Erich Grunewald argues that AI should rarely be used to produce substantive writing, as the process of writing is integral to thinking and understanding. He emphasizes that AI-generated text can be vague, incorrect, and misleading when not clearly labeled as AI work.
Codex Astra consistently outperforms other models in playing Brood War, winning all matches at the highest level. Grok models are not yet capable of playing the game effectively, often treating it as turn-based and making poor decisions.
Hacker News ranking is based on a formula that considers votes, article age, and penalties for controversy or sensitive topics like NSA. Stories are reranked periodically to reflect new votes, but penalties and random reranking influence their visibility.
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Quote of the day
I believe that every person is born with talent.
Maya Angelou
Also big today
PlanetScale has released TIN, a full-text search extension for Postgres that offers fast, reliable indexing supporting complex queries, fuzzy matching, and ranking. TIN is designed to handle updates, joins, and transaction visibility, making it suitable for various search applications.
Spain's government ordered the blocking of Archive.today and its mirrors without a court ruling, redirecting users to a government page accusing them of accessing illegal content. The move aims to combat copyright violations but raises concerns over censorship and online freedom.
OONI Probe is a tool that measures internet censorship by testing which websites and apps are blocked in different countries. Users can contribute to a global open dataset by sharing their test results to increase transparency of internet restrictions.
Btrfs, ZFS, and bcachefs are modern file systems that are often tested using classic workload benchmarks. However, some benchmarks skip testing these file systems, leading to questions about their performance under typical workloads.
ZXDESK is a graphical desktop environment designed for the ZX Spectrum computer. It aims to enhance user experience by providing a modern interface for the classic hardware.
A Microsoft director described AI data scraping as the largest theft of labor in human history. The controversy involves AI companies collecting vast amounts of data without proper compensation or consent.
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Worth a look
RSA-896, a challenge number, was factored on September 19, 2026, by Stephen A. Weis using Claude. The factorization reveals the prime factors p and q of the 896-bit RSA modulus.
A method to defeat the Dream Devourer in Chrono Trigger involves exploiting an integer overflow. This glitch allows players to overcome the boss using a programming trick.
Learning a new language involves complex mental processes that can help maintain cognitive health as people age. Research indicates that bilingualism and language acquisition provide cognitive benefits and enhance social connections for older adults.
AI-generated images are increasingly difficult to distinguish from real photographs. Techniques and challenges in identifying whether an image was created by artificial intelligence are discussed.
UTF-8000 extends UTF-8 by allowing arbitrarily large code units with up to 22 bytes, preserving all properties of UTF-8. It introduces a clear structure for splitting bits across start and continuation bytes to support larger codepoints.
![BYD Slashes Price of Electric Car and Becomes Cheapest in Australia [video]](https://hntoday.pixelshot.io/screenshots/20260920/43103a624ead44e4_tn.jpeg)
BYD has reduced the price of its electric car, making it the cheapest option in Australia. The price cut aims to boost sales and expand its market presence.
Song of the day
Deep cuts
The largest wildlife overpass in North America has reduced animal collisions by 91%. It demonstrates the effectiveness of infrastructure in protecting wildlife and improving road safety.
Dropbox's updated terms of service will take effect on January 1, 2027. Users are prompted to upgrade their browsers to access Dropbox services.
AI safety is portrayed as a community with questionable motives, likened to a sex cult rather than a scientific discipline. The critique raises concerns about the true intentions and culture within the AI safety movement.
Lemmings was a highly successful puzzle game in the early 1990s, released on numerous platforms and widely popular. However, poor decision-making and missteps led to its rapid decline and failure to sustain its initial momentum.
ZK-JPEG is a cryptographic tool that proves an image was correctly compressed from a secret input using zero-knowledge proofs, even after lossy JPEG encoding. It also supports verifying a wide range of image transformations with minimal cost, enhancing image authenticity and integrity.
Step 5 focuses on improving the Pareto frontier, a concept used to optimize trade-offs in multi-objective problems. It aims to push the boundaries of optimal solutions in the context of the platform's development process.
Today's best Hacker News stories, summarized and screenshotted, one email a day.