Top 29 stories from Hacker News. Top 10 include comment highlights. Compiled at 20:10 UTC.
958 points by john-doe · 653 comments
Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users
What HN said:
jbub: https://archive.ph/vhTfm
crazygringo: Framing this as needing "consent" is deeply misguided. It's as silly as claiming that Microsoft Word installed an English language spellcheck dictionary without your consent. It's just part of the software. You consented to installing the software and having it autoupdate.
scriptsmith: If Chrome has the #optimization-guide-on-device-model and #prompt-api-for-gemini-nano flags enabled, either because it's part of some Origin Trial / Early Stable Release or something, then web pages will have access to the new Prompt API which allows any webpage to initiate the (...
ben_w: > Energy intensity of network data transfer: 0.06 kWh per GB, the mid-band of Pärssinen et al. (2018) "Environmental impact assessment of online advertising", Science of The Total Environment [14]. The paper reports a 0.04-0.
396 points by pjmlp · 217 comments
I've previously explained async bloat and some work-arounds for it, but would much prefer to solve the issue at the root, in the compiler. I've submitted a Project Goal, and am looking for help to ...
What HN said:
ignoreusernames: Agree with the other commenters that the title is a bit too dramatic. The content was well written and got the point across. I still don’t have enough experience to have a strong opinion on Rust async, but some things did standout.
hmry: Great article! Love these types of deep dives into optimizations. Hope the project goal works out! I've felt before that compilers often don't put much effort into optimizing the "trivial" cases. Overly dramatic title for the content, though.
J_Shelby_J: I don’t understand why Rust even has panics if its primary goal is safety. We should be able to prove that the code has no paths that may panic ever. I’ve been looking at this all week. It’s very difficult to make a program that is guaranteed not to panic.
groundzeros2015: Async seems like an underbaked idea across the board. Regular code was already async. When you need to wait for an async operation, the thread sleeps until ready and the kernel abstracts it away.
330 points by alentodorov · 263 comments
Apple is letting users build their own Wallet passes in iOS 27. After 14 years of PassKit, the supply-side problem is finally being solved from the demand side.
What HN said:
kilian: The wallet app UI is the peak of Apple's 'single 20y/o in sf' design. Anyone that has multiple card from the same bank (because, say, you have a personal account and a shared account with your partner) has to do the "pick between the two identical looking top 20px of cards" dance...
DrewADesign: While the author does mention the barriers to adoption, the premise— Apple was waiting for people to do something, but people weren’t doing it— subtly casts Apple as a passive entity in this scenario.
noio: 15 years ago, a friend of mine built an app to do this — "Pass Creator" — then Apple yanked the functionality. He paid me to create the icon for it, which was my first paid graphic design job: https://www.noio.nl/2012/10/pass-creator-app-icon/ Thanks Paul.. good times!
randusername: What a relief. My awful workaround was photos of all my membership barcodes labeled with a sharpie so that I can search "Gym" or "Library" or whatever to pull them up from OCR indexing.
296 points by pmig · 220 comments
Yes, plain Docker Compose can still run production workloads in 2026—if you close the operational gaps it leaves: cleanup, healing, image pinning, socket security, and updates.
What HN said:
nickjj: Docker Compose was production ready in 2015 and it still is today. I've lost track of how many projects I've deployed with it and never really ran into a single issue where Docker Compose was at fault. It's super solid.
2ndorderthought: Should you have a turkey sandwich for lunch in 2026? I don't know buddy just do whatever. There are ten thousand other sandwiches you could eat surely, but does turkey sound good for you?
noodlesUK: I think many of these issues are also solved by Podman and systemd depending on what kind of "production" you're building for. If you're building a linux-y appliance and you need to run a few containers I think Podman is a much better and more ergonomic way of doing so.
stackskipton: SRE here, my thought is "Sure, Docker Compose is great for production assuming your needs are light and Docker Compose works well for you." K8s as small time is overkill for sure but make sure you don't fall into this trap. https://www.macchaffee.
293 points by MrBuddyCasino · 245 comments
What HN said:
fishywang: A lot of years ago, while living in Beijing, I once bought ticket to a morning (9:30 or so) show in a theatre. Then came that day, it rained unexpectedly, so I ended up getting there 10min late. When I get into the theatre, I found out that it's completely dark.
blintz: This is cool. Something about dropping everything to go see a movie in an empty theater is sort of tempting.
dec0dedab0de: This is not just an awesome concept, but blazingly fast. Well done! I would love to see an article about the tech stack.
kleiba2: When I lived in Germany, I had an apartment in the vicinity of three tiny arthouse theaters. I used to go there all the time by myself because you could basically walk to all three of them.
273 points by blenderob · 175 comments
What HN said:
miyoji: I strongly disagree with this framing. It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines, and it simply won't work in the majority of cases.
ACCount37: You're not anthropomorphizing AI systems nearly enough. Language data is among the most rich and direct reflections of human cognitive processes that we have available. LLMs are designed to capture short range and long range structure of human language, and pre-trained on vast bo...
nyyp: With regard to my personal use of LLMs, I strongly agree with this framing. But to each point: Anthropomorphism: As we are all aware, providers are incentivized to post-train anthropomorphic behavior in their models - it increases engagement.
jgeada: Any set of rules that makes humans responsible and starts with "don't anthropomorphize " is a broken set of rules. Humans will anthropomorphize anything and everything.
267 points by amrrs · 100 comments
An overview of how Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) drafters are making Gemma 4 models up to 3x faster at inference.
What HN said:
WarmWash: I don't see it talked about much, but Gemma (and gemini) use enormously less tokens per output than other models, while still staying within arms reach of top benchmark performance.
zdw: MTP support is being addedto llama.cpp, at least for the Qwen models ( https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/20533) and I'd imagine Gemma 4 will come soon. The performance uplift on local/self-hosted models in both quality and speed has been amazing in the last few months.
msp26: Google is singlehandedly carrying western open source models. Gemma 4 31B is fantastic. However, it is a little painful to try to fit the best possible version into 24GB vram with vision + this drafter soon.
skybrian: Watching the computer write text sort of reminds me of using a modem to call a BBS in the old days. This seems like going from 300 baud to 1200 - a significant improvement, but still pretty slow, and someday we will wonder how we put up with it.
247 points by youngbrioche · 176 comments
Are people using AI, or is the organization learning from it? What changed because we spent those tokens? And who moves discoveries from individuals to teams to organizational capabilities?
What HN said:
pards: In my large enterprise world, AI adoption hasn't made it outside of the development teams - only developers have access to Github Copilot. Code takes 6-12 months to make it from commit to production.
dakiol: If you're a regular engineer like me, there's no real upside to using AI in a company setting. They're boiling us. Of course, the HN elite (investors, execs, celebrities, and top-tier engineers) will say otherwise because "how can you be against innovation man?" AI/LLMs aren't in...
olsondv: The post hits the nail on the head with the messy middle. There is simply no motivation to develop this sort of intelligence loop as a dev who has their own responsibilities which their job depend on.
alaudet: As a 3 year retired Systems Analyst I feel bad for my younger colleagues. In 2023 I was one of the first in my team to use AI to untangle some legacy code that did something mission critical with Perl and whose original author had long ago left and apparently didn't understand a...
207 points by ingve · 201 comments
Guidelines for programming when code is cheap.
What HN said:
spicyusername: A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip.
lionkor: If writing code was the only part of the job, and it was easy, these jobs wouldn't pay so well. Engineering is hard. It's always going to be hard. I'm glad that AI makes some parts of it easier, and we (software engineers) can focus on engineering, that's nice.
noelwelsh: Certain types of code are cheap. Proof of concept is cheap. Adding small features that fit within the existing architecture is cheap. Otherwise, I'm not so sure. Coding agents are fantastic at minutiae, but have no taste.
torben-friis: I came here exactly to point out what I'm glad to see is 10. "Free as in puppies" is a wonderful way to put it. Every time I open linkedin I'm scared of how many big heads have taken the wrong lesson that coding almost free == free engineering.
197 points by SeenNotHeard · 113 comments
What HN said:
ch_123: I find this story odd because IBM was consistent with their keyboard nomenclature across multiple products, and the 3270 series mainframe terminals used the Tab key, located in the same place where you would find a tab key on a modern keyboard, to move the cursor to the next fiel...
xenadu02: IBM is also the reason MS-DOS doesn't support "-" for options and why it doesn't have devices in the "\DEV" directory on all drives. Support for "/" as path separator survived though! Many MS folks used Xenix and were fans of Unix and very early DOS had SWITCHCHAR and AVAILDEV co...
donatj: As someone who prefers tabs (I'm not looking to argue), I once asked Brendan Eich on Twitter why he prefers spaces. His answer was more thoughtful than I'd expected. The tab key itself is hijacked by modern OS/UI behavior.
connorboyle: A great read, although I'd still like to know what IBM's reasoning for opposing this use of the Tab key was. Is it because they didn't want Tab to be both an input and a control character? I.e.
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