Top Hacker News Stories – Week 2026-W26

This week on Hacker News, the launch of the Steam Machine garnered significant attention with 1,917 points and 1,720 comments, highlighting strong community interest. The tech community also mourned the passing of Om Malik, which received 1,345 points. Meanwhile, discussions around AI advancements included a preview of GPT-5.6 Sol, a next-generation model, and a benchmark comparison where GLM 5.2 outperformed Claude, drawing 977 votes. Additionally, the U.S. government's decision on who can access GPT-5.6 sparked nearly 1,000 comments, reflecting ongoing debates about AI regulation and privacy concerns.

#10

OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

814 pts, 468 comments

814 points · 468 comments · Add your take →

#11

Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

813 pts, 1324 comments

813 points · 1324 comments · Add your take →

#12

I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments

792 pts, 156 comments

792 points · 156 comments · Add your take →

#13

Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

786 pts, 295 comments

786 points · 295 comments · Add your take →

#14

DSpark: Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference [pdf]

783 pts, 361 comments

783 points · 361 comments · Add your take →

#15

30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech

720 pts, 488 comments

720 points · 488 comments · Add your take →

#16

Never Give Them Your Face

714 pts, 451 comments

714 points · 451 comments · Add your take →

#17

Half-Life 2 in a Browser

684 pts, 272 comments

684 points · 272 comments · Add your take →

#18

Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

682 pts, 431 comments

682 points · 431 comments · Add your take →

#19

Free the Icons

680 pts, 257 comments

680 points · 257 comments · Add your take →

#20

An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

675 pts, 369 comments

675 points · 369 comments · Add your take →

#21

Get weekly best stories

One email with the best technology stories and topic pages. No spam.

Top Hacker News Stories – Week 2026-W26

Steam Machine launches today

Om Malik has died

Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model

The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

Deno Desktop

GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks

U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments

Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

DSpark: Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference [pdf]

30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech

Never Give Them Your Face

Half-Life 2 in a Browser

Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

Free the Icons

An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

Open Source Low Tech

F3

Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online

Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed

GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model

Incident CVE-2026-LGTM

Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040

Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

Israel targeted Gaza children resulting in genocide, UN inquiry says

Om

Jerry's Map

We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme

GLM 5.2 vs. Opus

There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

Mistral OCR 4

Codex logging bug may write TBs to local SSDs

Unlimited OCR: One-shot long-horizon parsing

45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

Librepods: AirPods liberated

In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

Blogging can just be stating the obvious

We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach

RubyLLM: A Ruby framework for all major AI providers

Danish privacy activist Lars Andersen raided by police

The Coming Loop

Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

Extreme Heat conference cancelled due to extreme heat warning

Krea 2: SOTA open-weights 12B image model

One million passports leaked online

Zanagrams

Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck

Historical memory prices 1960-2026

IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology

5k menus from the New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection (1880-1920)

Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

OAuth for all

VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO

What happened after 2k people tried to hack my AI assistant

A game where you're an OS and have to manage processes, memory and I/O events

We're making Bunny DNS free: because a faster internet won't build itself

AI's Affordability Crisis

U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations

PlayStation Is Deleting 551 Movies from Customers' Accounts

The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

Framework's 10G Ethernet module exposes USB-C's complexity

Madison Square Garden compiled a list of activists against facial recognition

Ultrasound imaging of the brain

Will It Mythos?

Jobs and Software Is Fucked

Vulnerability reports are not special anymore