Top Hacker News Stories – Week 2026-W40

In the latest Hacker News week 2026-W40, discussions centered around Google's evolving culture, with users questioning when the company became "so weird," garnering 830 points and 442 comments. The debate about AI continued, with a notable post asserting that there are no "rogue" AI agents, which received 189 points. Additionally, OpenAI's potential "Optics" drew significant attention, accumulating 93 points and 567 comments, reflecting ongoing concerns about AI transparency and safety. Other topics included technical updates on Rust's SIMD capabilities and historical insights from Alan Kay regarding the ENIAC, highlighting the diverse range of discussions on technology and history.

#10

"They had no concept of a duty of care to their users."

75 pts, 31 comments

75 points · 31 comments · Add your take →

#11

What I did at Recurse Center

74 pts, 18 comments

74 points · 18 comments · Add your take →

#12

Self-Hosting on the Dark Web

72 pts, 23 comments

72 points · 23 comments · Add your take →

#13

There is more to code review than (automatable) detection

70 pts, 33 comments

70 points · 33 comments · Add your take →

#14

C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake

64 pts, 103 comments

64 points · 103 comments · Add your take →

#15

S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past

55 pts, 51 comments

55 points · 51 comments · Add your take →

#16

Oral history of John Chowning, inventor of FM synthesis [video]

54 pts, 10 comments

54 points · 10 comments · Add your take →

#17

Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

54 pts, 290 comments

54 points · 290 comments · Add your take →

#18

Imp is a full port of DSPy to the BEAM

52 pts, 5 comments

52 points · 5 comments · Add your take →

#19

TinyAIArena watch AI agents battle it out

52 pts, 29 comments

52 points · 29 comments · Add your take →

#20

Microsoft drops Copilot+ branding from its new laptops

49 pts, 21 comments

49 points · 21 comments · Add your take →

#21

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Top Hacker News Stories – Week 2026-W40

When did Google get so weird?

Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock

There are no "rogue" AI agents

Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers

Musk, the Movie

The state of SIMD in Rust in 2026

OpenAI Feared "Optics" of what might appear on Hacker News

Alan Kay's answer to “Did the ENIAC have a BIOS”?

Ember-1

"They had no concept of a duty of care to their users."

What I did at Recurse Center

Self-Hosting on the Dark Web

There is more to code review than (automatable) detection

C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake

S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past

Oral history of John Chowning, inventor of FM synthesis [video]

Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

Imp is a full port of DSPy to the BEAM

TinyAIArena watch AI agents battle it out

Microsoft drops Copilot+ branding from its new laptops

Thinking Fast and Slow in AI: The Role of Metacognition

Lunar Terminator Paradox

Replacing the old battery on rechargeable bike lights

Have an LLC

In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life

Finally, A True Blue Rose Exists

Research finds 485 chemicals in US pesticide products linked to breast cancer

Prompting Claude Opus 5.5

Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain

Rusty thoughts on "Parse, don't validate"

Armada: Encrypted, Open-Source, Discord Alternative (Built on Nostr)

Self-parking car using genetic algorithm (2021)

Was Silent Reading Unusual During Augustine's Time?

KICKI: a DECsystem1060

Calling the AI bluff: Adding "Do not guess" cut made-up claims from 71% to 20%

Jev Plays Pokémon Red

Maybe don't let Muse run your Facebook Marketplace account

Every Household in This Rural Town Receives $10k If a Data Center Gets Built

Fragment of oldest known peace treaty found in Turkey

Minecraft beat Minecraft after 2B years

As A.I. Makes Law Firms More Efficient, Clients Ask: 'Where's My Discount?'

Don't couple your Go code to GitHub

Deterministic Concurrency [video]

John Coltrane Centenary's – Impulse Records Release the Legendary Tiberi Tapes

European industry is doing better than you may think

Cartopolis, interactive globe-sized 3D world

TabPFN and TabICL vs. tuned XGBoost: the model that doesn't train won 14/14

Improving site performance by shipping more CSS

You are a 1000x maker, and you can't think of how to make your stack 10x better?

Footguns with Postgres "at time zone 'UTC'"

A New Experiment Meta-Strategy

The Cartesian Hand: In-Hand Manipulation with All-Linear Fingers

An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot

Made by Mechanical Means

Video CDs Break Windows Explorer

"The refrigerator is dead": Samsung's AI fridges shut down after update

OpenAI pauses training of latest models after agents probed US Government sites

YouTube has a Propaganda Problem [video]

Writing Efficient C++ Code

Quantized Reasoning Models Think They Need to Think Longer, but They Do Not

Klassik Revives the KDE 3 Desktop on Modern Plasma 6

Fool's Expertise

42x faster prompt lookup drafting in llama.cpp

The Normalization of Inexplicable Failures

Luarocks.org remote code execution exploit

postmarketOS Rebrand: Nura

Exploding variance of means of exponentials: least-squares to the rescue

The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore

Ten Lines of Code That Changed My World

Reverse-engineering the Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC

Russia hits Ukraine's largest mobile provider, strikes data centres

Panda, the world's first personal AI computer

Why are the artists still starving?

Management is forcing us to use AI

Reading’s Bayeux Tapestry

Fakecloud: Local AWS cloud emulator for integration tests

Cambrian Explosion of AI

LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on Earth

Rust for C# and .NET developers guide by Microsoft