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Top stories from https://news.ycombinator.com (with 100+ score) Contribute to the development here: https://github.com/phil-r/hackernewsbot Also check https://t.me/designer_news Contacts: @philr
Phrack 72 (Score: 150+ in 18 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zWb6
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zWb6
How to Build a Medieval Castle (Score: 150+ in 10 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zX3a
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zX3a
Lab-grown salmon hits the menu (Score: 150+ in 15 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zWgr
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zWgr
Prime Number Grid (Score: 152+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zXhC
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zXhC
Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator (❄️ Score: 151+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zNNe
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zNNe
Shamelessness as a strategy (2019) (Score: 152+ in 9 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zWg9
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zWg9
Croatian freediver held breath for 29 minutes (Score: 151+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zWwL
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zWwL
Typechecker Zoo (❄️ Score: 150+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zLPv
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zLPv
Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims (🔥 Score: 151+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zWfP
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zWfP
GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire (Score: 156+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zVQw
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zVQw
When you're asking AI chatbots for answers, they're data-mining you (Score: 150+ in 10 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zUfW
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zUfW
Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room (Score: 150+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zUNt
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zUNt
Who Invented Backpropagation? (Score: 151+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zUZ5
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zUZ5
95% of AI Pilots Failing (Score: 150+ in 6 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zUHY
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zUHY
LLMs and coding agents are a security nightmare (Score: 150+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zUa5
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zUa5
X-ray scans reveal Buddhist prayers inside tiny Tibetan scrolls (❄️ Score: 153+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zQbh
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zQbh
Custom telescope mount using harmonic drives and ESP32 (Score: 150+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zXwH
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zXwH
UK drops demand for backdoor into Apple encryption (🔥 Score: 153+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zXKi
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zXKi
Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing (Score: 151+ in 12 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zWwY
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zWwY
Lazy-brush – smooth drawing with mouse or finger (❄️ Score: 153+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zLFB
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zLFB
Tiny-tpu: A minimal tensor processing unit (TPU), inspired by Google's TPU (Score: 152+ in 10 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zVXs
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zVXs
OpenMower – An open source lawn mower (Score: 153+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zWAW
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zWAW
Show HN: Fractional jobs – part-time roles for engineers (Score: 154+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zW65
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zW65
I'm Taylor, I spent about a year as a Fractional Head of Product. It was my first time not in a full-time W2 role, and I quickly learned that the hardest part of the job wasn't doing the Product work (I was a PM for 10+ years), it was finding good clients to work with.
So I built Fractional Jobs.
The goal is to help more people break out of W2 life and into their own independent careers by helping them find great clients to work with.
We find and vet the clients, and then engineers can request intros to any that seem like a good fit. We'll make the intro assuming the client opts in after seeing your profile.
We have 9 open engineering roles right now:
- 2x Fractional CTO
- 2x AI engineers
- 3x full-stack
- 1x staff frontend
- 1x mobile
AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers (Score: 150+ in 10 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zUES
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zUES
Paper:
https://nanda.media.mit.edu/ai_report_2025.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20250818145714/https://nanda.media.mit.edu/ai_report_2025.pdf
Obsidian Bases (🔥 Score: 164+ in 1 hour)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zW8N
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zW8N
Left to Right Programming (Score: 152+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zVis
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zVis
T-Mobile claimed selling location data without consent is legal–judges disagree (🔥 Score: 153+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zVJD
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zVJD
Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust (Score: 151+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zVeM
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zVeM
Hey HN! Braden here, creator of Whispering, an open-source speech-to-text app.
I really like dictation. For years, I relied on transcription tools that were almost good, but they were all closed-source. Even a lot of them that claimed to be “local” or “on-device” were still black boxes that left me wondering where my audio really went.
So I built Whispering. It’s open-source, local-first, and most importantly, transparent with your data. All your data is stored locally on your device. For me, the features were good enough that I left my paid tools behind (I used Superwhisper and Wispr Flow before).
Productivity apps should be open-source and transparent with your data, but they also need to match the UX of paid, closed-software alternatives. I hope Whispering is near that point. I use it for several hours a day, from coding to thinking out loud while carrying pizza boxes back from the office.
Here’s an overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jYgBMrfVZs, and here’s how I personally am using it with Claude Code these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpix588SeiQ.
There are plenty of transcription apps out there, but I hope Whispering adds some extra competition from the OSS ecosystem (one of my other OSS favorites is Handy https://github.com/cjpais/Handy). Whispering has a few tricks up its sleeve, like a voice-activated mode for hands-free operation (no button holding), and customizable AI transformations with any prompt/model.
Whispering used to be in my personal GH repo, but I recently moved it as part of a larger project called Epicenter (https://github.com/epicenter-so/epicenter), which I should explain a bit...
I’m basically obsessed with local-first open-source software. I think there should be an open-source, local-first version of every app, and I would like them all to work together. The idea of Epicenter is to store your data in a folder of plaintext and SQLite, and build a suite of interoperable, local-first tools on top of this shared memory. Everything is totally transparent, so you can trust it.
Whispering is the first app in this effort. It’s not there yet regarding memory, but it’s getting there. I’ll probably write more about the bigger picture soon, but mainly I just want to make software and let it speak for itself (no pun intended in this case!), so this is my Show HN for now.
I just finished college and was about to move back with my parents and work on this instead of getting a job…and then I somehow got into YC. So my current plan is to cover my living expenses and use the YC funding to support maintainers, our dependencies, and people working on their own open-source local-first projects. More on that soon.
Would love your feedback, ideas, and roasts. If you would like to support the project, star it on GitHub here (https://github.com/epicenter-so/epicenter) and join the Discord here (https://go.epicenter.so/discord). Everything’s MIT licensed, so fork it, break it, ship your own version, copy whatever you want!
Vibe coding tips and tricks (Score: 150+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zUpB
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zUpB
Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team (🔥 Score: 160+ in 58 minutes)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6zVaF
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6zVaF