Top 29 stories from Hacker News. Top 10 include comment highlights. Compiled at 20:10 UTC.
382 points by ranger_danger · 176 comments
GhostLock (CVE-2026-43499) is a Linux kernel vulnerability found by VEGA that exists in every major distribution since 2011. Triggering the bug does not require any special kernel config or privilege.
What HN said:
reorder9695: Could this be used to unlock bootloaders on typically non unlockable phones? If so this could be one of the best things to happen to Android.
goodburb: Tested on three Android devices (version 9, 13, 16) with different Firefox versions under 150 (had to modify for older). Two boot looped, I had to enter recovery and the other just powered off [0]. The demo modifies the wallpaper on supported Pixel devices.
password4321: Forgot to include "LPE" (local...) in the title so most of us can get back to weekending.
0x1ceb00da: Does that mean any android app can use ndk native code execution to become root? Does selinux help here?
349 points by forks · 253 comments
The LAPD, one of Flock's biggest government customers, is ending its contract with the company citing civil liberties concerns.
What HN said:
etdznots: The best part is that flock owns the cameras and the poles so even when the contract expires the cameras keep running and recording data that flock can sell to e.g. CHP, LASD, FBI, Palantir; and LAPD can just call them and access the data the flock scam was engineered to be resil...
declan_roberts: I don't understand flock cameras in high crime areas. Every time somebody commits a heinous crime it's always like "they were arrested 72 times and were well known by the police" What's the point in helping the police catch criminals when they don't do anything after the fact!
AbrahamParangi: it needs to be illegal for the government to buy data or intelligence that it could not otherwise legally collect itself.
dude741: I'm not defending flock, and have mixed feelings on the matter due to having personal experience with flock. My neighborhood was being hit by sophisticated robberies one after another. Police could not catch the guys. The police confirmed that it was a Tren de Aruagua operation.
303 points by get-inscribe · 131 comments
SpeechAnalyzer vs SFSpeechRecognizer vs Whisper on 5,559 LibriSpeech utterances. Apple never published accuracy numbers. Here they are, with raw transcripts you can rescore.
What HN said:
satvikpendem: Whisper is the wrong model to benchmark against, or rather, there are better models that are state of the art now like Nemotron and Parakeet both by Nvidia, as well as Mistral's Voxtral and Cohere Transcribe.
mchusma: I will plug Willow for mac recording. IMO it's basically to me a "better than perfect transcription" as it cleans things up and is almost instant. I liked Superwhisper but switched to Willow as it was a big difference.
ashivkum: Just ran it against Whisper-Large-V2 on a math lecture (my primary use case for ASR is subtitling math lectures), and it was substantially faster and only slightly worse.
wgm: Is this the new dictation engine that I'm not allowed to run on my 1-YEAR-OLD IPHONE 17 because it's not Pro?
289 points by momentmaker · 50 comments
Ride the Yamanote line through a voxel Tokyo synced to Japan's real clock, weather, and seasons. A lofi bed plays while N5 sentences are read aloud and drift by as subtitles — an ambient Japanese study room you just press play into.
What HN said:
zelphirkalt: Meanwhile I am sitting in an InterCity"Express" train in Germany, which already started 14 minutes late, and somehow managed to drive so slowly, that at every stop another ~2 minutes were lost.
socalgal2: The voice does not sound like a native speaker. I don't mean it sounds like a non-human character, I mean something is subtly off. Timing or something. Is that intentional? Maybe pick a different TTS solution?
bentograd: This looks very cool, but I find it very hard to read the text against the moving background. The lights in the "windows" of the voxel building do not provide good contrast.
johngossman: Fun. I studied Japanese for two years, let it slide and now every Kanji is like "Hmmm, I've seen that before but..." I can still read kana though, which is nice to know.
256 points by thepasch · 63 comments
What HN said:
mrkeen: This game was so good, it's as if the developer was given a team of PhD-level experts to work on it.
goldenarm: Funny idea but wow the gameplay is terrible and full of bugs. Bad hitboxes, shells that bounce in front of holes, bad physics. AI still cannot oneshot 2D platformers, the most documented videogame genre with so much source code available.
jake_and_fatman: Absolute fire. Love how Deepseek tortoise shell can only be slowed, not killed.
neural_thing: If you like tech-themed games, I made Good Til Canceled for GTC - check it out - https://goodtilcanceled.com/
231 points by dmit · 106 comments
Making English more enjoyable to write.
What HN said:
NoGravitas: As a USAian and an Old, I learned the Zaner-Bloser script in school - a cursive script that tries to minimize pen lifts, but still has "backtracks" as this article calls them, for j, i, and x.
JoshTriplett: This is the kind of thing that makes cursive painful to read. The
iandjin this script are harder to quickly lex, and thet(especially in thettligature) with the added loop flourish diverges sufficiently from a standardtto make it hard to decipher in running text...
saghm: Using the term "backtracking" feels somewhat confusing, because it seems like most of the "fixed" letters they propose use what I would find more intuitively described as backtracking: having to trace back the exact path used to get to a given point in order to get back to a prev...
vanderZwan: Huh, I just indirectly learned from this article that the way I write a lower-case "t" in cursive is a Dutch way of doing so (edit: sollniss' comment implies it was a common style in Germany too).
226 points by david927 · 842 comments
What HN said:
amotinga: https://vorbim.org/ - free AI generated website for russian speaking folks in Moldova to learn romanian. AI to generate lessons, excercises AI text to speech to make pronounciations AI to code cards open sources words dbs. fun 1 month project. gets like 100ppl daily.
hephaes7us: I've started playing with Zork-Bench.[1] I've been making tweaks to the runtime/harness and to the prompting. Currently, I have Qwen3.6-27b scoring up to ~50 points, which, according to the original paper [2], is comparable to the performance Claude Opus 4.
scoofy: I’m building a model that illustrates the golf course architecture strategic elements of a golf hole using a golf simulator. General thesis here on my blog: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/i-spent-the-last-month...
yboris: Video Hub App - 8th year update: browse, search, tag, rate, enjoy your large video collection! https://videohubapp.com/en/ & https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/ Simplest File Renamer - just ported from Electron (130m install) to Tauri (3mb install) - https://github.
164 points by ibobev · 32 comments
What HN said:
jonhohle: The Sega CD is my favorite console and I was fortunate enough to have one growing up. Silpheed was unlike anything else. Unlike most FMV games, Silpheed actually felt like controlling a movie.
chromadon: If you've never seen Overdrive 2 by Titan (a demo scene group), it's unbelievable what the MegaDrive can do stock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWVmPtr9O0g I'm reasonably familiar with the hardware, I've written some games from scratch and I still have absolutely no idea how t...
bantunes: This was submitted by a bot :D I subscribe to Fabien's RSS and he must have changed something in the server because I got this post on my RSS reader (again, as it's an old post), and here it is submitted to HN (again)
bbminner: https://youtu.be/IehwV2K60r8?is=WWZU3R1PMAQksHhj How they fit the Sonic 3D intro onto a sega mega drive cartridge!
114 points by fishbone · 28 comments
Convert semantic HTML fragments to native, editable Word documents (OOXML) - floodtide/dom-docx
What HN said:
fishbone: Hey HN, author here. I do a lot of backend document (docx file) generation work, and updating our templates and backend code is one of my least favorite development tasks. Cryptic errors, minute-plus rebuild loops. I’d much prefer building these reports in JS rendered HTML (e.g.
ape4: Just adding, since I don't see it mentioned in the readme, that its written in Typescript. That's what makes this interesting. I imagine Pandoc can do this but its not Typescript (its Haskell).
conwy: Awesome, thanks so much for open-sourcing! Will use it to generate my C.V. in Word format.
jkwang: The screenshot-to-docx scoring loop is a clever way to verify layout fidelity. Very useful for anyone generating reports from HTML.
100 points by austinallegro · 59 comments
Clubs of amateur radio fanatics can contact people thousands of miles away, without a phone.
What HN said:
wolvoleo: In ham radio it's still used a lot for shortwave stuff too. It's not really something used for real communication though. Most people I've seen just swap call signs and give a bogus "5 9" signal report.
halb: Ten years ago, I made a very stupid website: a public chat that anyone can join, where you can communicate only in morse code, by tapping a single button. Since then, I've been surprised to see a large community grow around it.
isoprophlex: Ha! What a timely article. Wanting to recapture the magic of the early internet ive been getting into ham radio; i got a low-powered but portable radio & built my own software for SSTV (images) and FT8 (long range pings without much meaningful content beyond "i am here, who reads...
ventana: I never practiced Morse code, but I read enough about it to quickly realize that the nice sound a friend's cool new Nokia phone made on incoming SMS messages is actually ... -- ..., literally "SMS". The year was 2002 or so.
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