Top 28 stories from Hacker News. Top 10 include comment highlights. Compiled at 20:10 UTC.
1217 points by maltalex · 422 comments
SpaceX won’t get easy access to billions of dollars from passive investors.
What HN said:
mattbrewsbytes: Letting new stocks marinate in the market and get 4 quarters of SEC filings along with following all the GAAP accounting practices will definitely help evaluate them before inclusion.
zhivota: Big relief for me. As a passive investor, I want the indices to follow the same passive strategy they always have, and specifically not make exceptions for specific companies like SpaceX wanted.
zippyman55: Yep!! Respect to them. I was planning to move to an equal weight index but this gives me a little more time to evaluate options.
wg0: This is very smart of these folks because for just three companies, they can't ruin the trust and impeccable reputation they have built over the years. This decision alone is worth several trillion dollars.
752 points by 0xkato · 207 comments
A from-the-ground-up walkthrough of how modern LLMs work, from tokens to transformer blocks to the next-token loop
What HN said:
malwrar: Back when ChatGPT came out, I was so shocked by how good it was for an “AI” product that I simply had to know how it worked. Over the next month I ended up drawing out a block diagram on a whiteboard I have in my office, with the math involved next to each step in the blackboar...
miki123211: There's one thing I wish people understood about LLMs, and it doesn't really have anything to do with what's inside the neural network part. It's the fact that LLMs can only write in one direction — forward.
helloplanets: The part about positional encoding is not correct. > The intuition: instead of adding position info to each token’s vector, RoPE rotates the vector by an angle that depends on its position You can't rotate the token's entire vector (or all three vectors, whatever is being implied...
10GBps: I learned TCP/IP by watching and reading raw packets over packet radio at 1200 baud. I've noticed the same thing is possible if you watch the output of a slow LLM. Eventually you start to see the machinery. input tokens = output tokens, it's math.
491 points by andrehacker · 874 comments
What HN said:
jzemeocala: I bought an Alesis QS8.1 super cheap in perfect condition (was a top grade digital piano/synth in the 90s). and then i realized that ALL of the software (which i collected from defunct websites and archived on github) related to it was ancient and after a while of getting tired o...
rclabs: I was working on a 3D CAD software called OpenSCAD, there is this quirk I hated, which is when it's rendering all UI stops responding, there is no cancel button too. So I asked it to "implement the renderer in a separate thread with feedback and the ability to cancel".
shreddude: I could go on and on, but Claude recently decompiled the firmware of my camper van, documented all the CAN interfaces, then programmed an ESP32 module to talk to the van’s integrated systems (power, HVAC, lighting, tanks).
andrewthornton: My furnace went out during the 2025 holiday and I couldn't get an appointment with a repair person for 2 days. It was getting very cold in my house so I went into my attic and made several videos of the furnace attempting to start and gave it to gemini.
324 points by ramanan · 473 comments
In a statement, a Google representative described the deal as a result of unexpected demand for its recently launched AI products.
What HN said:
tristanj: This is a masterful piece of financial engineering by Google and SpaceX. Google purchased 10% of SpaceX over a decade ago. After dilution they probably own around 5%. SpaceX is valued at a whopping 94x revenue. This deal increases SpaceX's revenue by $11 billion per year.
runako: Since the S-1 filing, xAI has taken over and is likely the largest share of revenue. I would estimate that ~95%+ of xAI revenue, and 100% of its profit, is from renting their datacenters.
BLKNSLVR: And SpaceX will spend $800M per month on Nvidia hardware purchase contacts, and Nvidia will spend $700M per month on Google services. I'm picturing a teenager blowing a bubble gum bubble bigger and bigger. I assume it can go on forever!
comboy: Google renting infra from xAI, I did not see that coming. My understanding of what computers are doing, what companies are doing and what governments are doing seems to be getting worse day by day.
284 points by Ekami · 491 comments
What HN said:
dang: It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from this megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment wit...
vbezhenar: Because I enjoy writing code. I enjoy being paid for writing code. And I don't enjoy writing prompts for AI. Code is not just a means to an end. Code is a means to my happiness. Users might not care, but I do care. I love good code. I feel great when I can write good code.
oleg_antonyan: I call these AI tools "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet". They belong to american companies which can cut off your access if american government doesn't like your country's government.
whoami4041: I actually hold both extremes inside of me simultaneously. The speed at which you can ship when you have a strong vision of the end product and the architecture is extraordinary (the part of me that loves AI-assistance).
226 points by transistor-man · 83 comments
I stumbled across a broken Sigma 45mm f/2.8 Art lens for a very cool $58.65 USD that I simply could not resist. I
What HN said:
exmadscientist: The TPS62140's 30ns propagation delay is not enough to blow a fuse. The first rule of fuses (which many modern engineers do not understand!), is that fuses are not there to save your parts, and they simply will not do that. Fuses exist to prevent fires.
makeitdouble: For those who haven't followed the camera world for a while, at this point a lens for a mirrorless camera will have a USB-C port to receive firmware updates. Tamron lenses for instance will allow a wired control or a wireless dongle to communicate with an app/computer and change...
omoikane: Placing disassembled screws on double sided tape is such a great idea, I am going to try that next time I disassemble my electronics (as opposed dropping everything in a container and spend time finding the original size screws during reassembly).
CarVac: The author says PH screwdrivers may be used on JIS screws, but in my experience they strip every single time. This is incredible work, though.
196 points by tripplyons · 59 comments
What HN said:
astlouis44: Really exciting to see more games ported to WASM. For anyone interested, I just did a HN post detailing a port I spent the last 5 days on - Xonotic, an arena FPS. Includes a technical writeup too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48428133
wis: Cool! I like the speeding up feature. I suggest making the UI indicate that you can press the keys
zandxon the keyboard to trigger the A and B buttons respectively, I figured that out by pressing on my keyboard the A and B keys and then all the letter keys.
theowaway213456: Certain entities seem to be displayed as numbers for me, like "You received a 6" etc when getting my first potion. Anyone else seeing this bug?
hawkice: Confirming that saving genuinely works. Interesting stuff. Wonder if we can get trades working too.
191 points by jwilk · 191 comments
Since the earliest days of Unix, two of the core process-oriented system calls have been fork() [...]
What HN said:
rom1v: Related to the discussion: "A fork() in the road": https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... > ABSTRACT > The received wisdom suggests that Unix’s unusual combination of fork() and exec() for process creation was an inspired design.
sanderjd: I just ran into this recently, where I had an obscure bug caused by needing to close more file descriptors in the forked process. "I want a clone of the current process" is just way less common in my experience than "I want a completely new process".
mrkeen: > fork() is a relatively expensive system call; it must copy the entire process state (including memory) for the child process. Many optimizations have been made over the years, but a fork is still a fundamentally costly operation.
uecker: The elegance of the fork() + exec() model is that every kind of configuration can be done after the fork using all the usual APIs. Every attempt to replace it with a combined call that I have seen so far seemed fundamentally poorer because it needs to add all configuration opti...
177 points by MilnerRoute · 106 comments
The counterintelligence threat level was raised by the Defense Intelligence Agency in recent weeks after growing concerns that Israeli espionage had become more aggressive than usual, sources say.
What HN said:
Sam6late: This could be 'curiosity' about negotiation with Iran, as there is what could be considered an AI merger between the 2 countries ; the FY2027 NDAA (H.R. 8800) bill text was officially released by Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-WA) on May 26, 2026.
basilgohar: "Government suddenly and confusingly starts acting accordingly to what everyone's already know for a long time." This is really quite scary when you think about it. Why now all of a sudden?
9x39: Don't miss the attempt of the removal of Section 224 of the US NDAA at the same time, a polarizing development in discussions on Israel, to put it mildly. https://www.aipac.org/memos/america-israel-defense-ndaa-224 https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/06...
mentalgear: > Top U.S. officials often take extra care when traveling to Israel, sometimes using burner phones and computers and taking extreme caution when speaking in hotel rooms during official trips, the current and former U.S. officials and experts said.
159 points by gostsamo · 46 comments
What HN said:
vishnugupta: "I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield." Interesting to see Conway's law show up here. Companies tend to ship their org structure in a product.
jhbadger: "it is very hard to square the circle whereby coexisting in alliance with the Klingon Empire as we see it is the right and moral thing for the Federation to do." You have to understand that the Klingons in TOS were a metaphor for the Soviets/Russians and TNG was reflecting the 19...
Morromist: One of my favorite dynamics: Warrior class that really kicks butt, takes control over the state and then slowly becomes obsolete but is so embedded in the social structure that it just sticks around sucking up vast resources for hundreds of years.
Simon_O_Rourke: Another great post by one of the nations best public intellectuals.
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