Top 30 stories from Hacker News. Top 10 include comment highlights. Compiled at 20:10 UTC.
584 points by tosh · 175 comments
Free, open-source, fast, privacy-focused, detailed offline maps for travelers, tourists, drivers, hikers and cyclists created by MapsWithMe/Maps.Me app founders
What HN said:
eisa01: Organic Maps was my go to app for a navigation app where you can fix errors yourself immediately! So much better than having to work for free on the proprietary apps, and hope they accept your edits There’s a fork from one year ago, CoMaps, that is gaining different features E.g.
Yacoby: There is also CoMaps (https://www.comaps.app/) which is a fork of Organic Maps, after concern over the governance of Organic Maps https://itsfoss.com/news/organic-maps-fork-comaps/
lone-cloud: I would recommend people use comaps instead which is the actual FOSS fork. OM has a long history of malicious behaviour like quietly adding ads, turning a part of its previously open sourced code proprietary and misappropriating donations.
lexlambda: Organic mentions Open Source, but I just saw that FDroid mentions the following: "This app contains non open source components - compiled binary data files (including but not limited to .
303 points by stavros · 167 comments
Member states reactivate expired chat control regulation. EU Parliament caught off guard before summer break.
What HN said:
neobrain: For context, this refers to "Chat Control 1.0", allowing facebook and other messaging providers to scan chats for harmful content (which they had been temporarily allowed to do by a recently expired law). This is still problematic, but the far more dangerous Chat Control 2.
m132: The central bank, council, and commission have to get thoroughly investigated. The amount of questionable decisions coming from those three in the recent (15) years is extremely unsettling.
mdp2021: Do also see: # Italy warns against Chat Control mass surveillance, but votes in favour of it (digitalcourage.social) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48783340 Do, because already there nuances (towards the better or worse) are revealed, which are not evident in journalism as...
abroszka33: There is no way to stop these so just lets get going. The sooner we have age and ID verification on every single website and app the sooner we will have a working decentralised internet that avoids it.
266 points by dabinat · 144 comments
Latest updates and announcements.
What HN said:
ricardobeat: It’s getting tiring to hear at this point, but the Claude voice comes through clearly in this post, and it’s a little off-putting. If even an important product release doesn’t warrant full human attention, where will we draw the line?
chvid: For boring applications - do people prefer the copy paste approach of shadcn instead of a traditional ui library like mantine? The copy paste approach may be easily modifiable but creates new problems - ie now there is an upgrade ai agent for something that should just be ticking...
notnullorvoid: It bothers me that these popular UI toolkits render copious amounts of divs. I went to look at Base UI and for nearly every component it's "Renders a element", when there are native elements that can achieve the same thing like details/summary for accordion.
gherkinnn: I have used and mostly like Shadcn, and yet their Radix-based radio button was a bit much, as are other choices, where similarly overblown solutions were used. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46688971
236 points by AlexeyBrin · 38 comments
What HN said:
dang: Related: Introduction to Compilers and Language Design (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31388741 - May 2022 (68 comments) Introduction to Compilers and Language Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728749 - April 2019 (1 comment)
shuyang: Took Dr. Thain's compilers class in college! It was the best. He's an excellent instructor, and the course project made me build a working C-style compiler step by step. I think the sample project here is pretty much the project we did; highly recommend following through the enti...
richard_chase: According to the introduction, the dragon book is at an advanced graduate level?
attila-lendvai: it wanders within a tight circle around C and its idiosyncrasies.
163 points by cenazoic · 12 comments
What HN said:
iLemming: It looks great. I have not read it to completion just yet, but merely scrolling through the document leaves me with a feeling that the author got tired and decided "this is a good stopping point.
cenazoic: This is a bachelor's thesis from University of Uppsala submitted in March 2026. I was having trouble accessing the Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet site (linked in headline) directly, so uploaded it here (link expires in 3 days): https://temp.sh/CVzcQ/emacs-arch-thesis.pdf
hgp22: Love to see that Emacs can still capture the atention of new CS students.
aaptel: This is great! You should make a web version or add it to the wiki. I started the Hacker's guide on the emacs wiki many years back. I think this doc was much needed.
139 points by popcar2 · 107 comments
PlayStation announced that they will stop making disks. People are rightfully mad about this, but it's not actually about physical media. It's about owning your games.
What HN said:
jbombadil: I am generally not in favor of adding regulation, but this is a place where I would support it. Anything that you BUY needs to be your property. This means you must have the ability to: 1. Transfer ownership of it (either temporarily as a loan or permanently as a sale).
hx8: Absolutely this. Fifteen years ago World of Warcraft was at its peak. You had 12 million people paying a monthly fee, plus buying the occasional expansion pack. No other gaming company had seen reoccurring revenue numbers like that before and it changed the industry.
Waterluvian: I want the most minimum amount of regulation that doesn’t reason much about the type of media or transport method. Require clear communication of meaning of words like “purchase” and require software “licenses” to indicate “access for at least 5 years” or whatever.
numpad0: I think an oft-forgotten possible major driver for the moves away from discs[1] must be scary legal warnings universally seen in paid contents during 2010s. None of currently popular platforms have those stern unrelatable messages that customers looking for relaxing contents were...
129 points by ankitg12 · 11 comments
What HN said:
lifthrasiir: Is there anyone feeling that Pandoc is ever increasingly bloated? I have used Lua filters a decade ago [1] and the current documentation is nothing like my memories. I'm not even sure that how much of Lua scripts remain compatible across different Pandoc versions.
kalcode: I liked the Lua filters for solving issues on DOCX stuff for Markdown to Docx. For PDF stuff I haven't needed much Lua filters since switching to WeasyPrint for the PDF engine.
leephillips: Lua filters for Pandoc have been around for a quite a while. What’s newer is Pandoc’s ability to be used in web browsers. There’s a bit more about this and a general rundown of Pandoc in my recent article for LWN: https://lwn.net/Articles/1064692/
chaoxu: I've always wondered if pandoc can be made reactive. Say markdown to Pandoc AST. If one changes something, a quick update to the AST would happen incrementally. Now with all these llm I might actually see if it can be done.
98 points by gitowiec · 28 comments
Computers in movies and television shows
What HN said:
Animats: IBM's AN-FSQ-7 panels from 1950s SAGE have shown up in a huge number of movies. They are still showing up in new movies. Woody's Electrical Props in LA rents them out.[1] Those slanted panels aren't the computer. Those are the modems. [1] https://woodysprops.com/item.
ssenssei: Fun Fact: in king of queens, most of the pcs (for example airport episode with doug's parents) are just RCT tvs with paper printout of a screen taped over it.
piratejon: Pairs nicely with https://accessmaincomputerfile.net/ (although that site might not be working any longer).
roughly: Similar: https://www.imcdb.org/ IMCDB, the Internet Movie Car Database
97 points by thm · 68 comments
A 4-year study of 100 successful blogs reveals how Google's updates and AI transformed blogging. See which sites survived and which disappeared.
What HN said:
zerobees: I find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on.
Loic: You know what? I cannot care less if people are not reading blogs anymore. I reactivated my blog because it is a lot of fun to write, a lot of fun to take the time to put down my ideas, try to correctly formulate them, fighting with my crappy English or German (and the loss of my...
firefoxd: I consider blogging to be similar to the music industry. To me if AI fully takes over the music industry, I don't see it as a bad thing because I don't think there is a shortage of music in the first place.
draginol: I think you could argue that this is following the same trend as forums (and usenet before that). You get a consolidation of where people go to read up on things that interest them.
90 points by captain_dfx · 59 comments
Rayfish is a peer-to-peer mesh VPN. Connect your devices by cryptographic identity. No port forwarding, no hosted server to trust. Share a code, and you
What HN said:
keepupnow: It is wrong to describe these P2P products as server-less. In order to connect two peers over WAN it needs a form of coordination server. Since Rayfish appears to be a Claude coded wrapper over Iroh it should at-least give credit to use of Iroh's discovery and relay nodes.
whywhywhywhy: Having an install script that you paste into the terminal and all it does is download a binary and stick it in a folder is wild. If your users are savvy enough to be running random scripts they shouldn't need a script to do this and if they're not savvy enough to understand how t...
jasonjayr: tinc (https://tinc-vpn.org/), a OSS mesh vpn that has existed for a long, long time, is another great solution with no central server. You can manage the public key distribution yourself, or just keep them checked into a git repo (my preferred solution), and it's been solid for...
gz5: 3 vpn segments: 1. foss, p2p-only, no server or intermediate nodes to trust (rayfish) 2. foss, brokered if necessary with all nodes self-hosted (openziti, nebula, some wireguard variants) 3.
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