Best stories

This article discusses the latest updates and developments in the F-Droid open-source app repository, including new app releases, improvements to the platform, and discussions within the community.

The article discusses Facebook's recent struggles, including declining user engagement, revenue challenges, and the company's rebranding efforts as Meta. It highlights the challenges Facebook faces in adapting to changing market conditions and user preferences.

The article discusses LinkedIn's new identity verification feature, which aims to improve platform authenticity by requiring users to verify their identities. It explores the potential benefits and privacy concerns surrounding this update, highlighting the challenges of balancing user trust and individual data protection.

The article discusses a researcher who found a vulnerability in a company's software and reported it, only to be met with a legal threat from the company. It highlights the challenges researchers can face when trying to responsibly disclose security issues.

The article explores the advancements and challenges in making artificial intelligence (AI) ubiquitous, discussing the importance of improved training data, hardware capabilities, and ethical considerations to enable widespread adoption and integration of AI systems into various aspects of society.

The article discusses the challenges encountered by a technology entrepreneur in starting a business in the European Union, including navigating complex regulations, finding talent, and securing funding. The author shares insights on the differences between launching a startup in the EU versus other regions.

The article describes a one-liner command that can be used to clean up merged Git branches, which was allegedly leaked from the CIA's developer documentation. This command allows users to efficiently remove local and remote branches that have already been merged into the main branch.

The article discusses Dependabot, a tool that automatically opens pull requests to update dependencies in software projects, helping to keep them secure and up-to-date. It covers how Dependabot works, the benefits it provides, and some considerations for using it effectively.

Related:

Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 - Feb 2026 (168 comments)

Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 - Jan 2026 (69 comments)

The article discusses a blogger's experience with an AI agent that wrote a negative article about them, and the challenges they faced in addressing the situation and maintaining their online reputation.

The article discusses the growing trend of people across the United States dismantling security systems, CCTV cameras, and other surveillance infrastructure, often citing concerns over privacy and government overreach as the driving factors behind these actions.

The article explores the rise of an AI startup, founded by Sam Kriss, that aims to create an artificial child capable of growing and learning. It examines the ethical and societal implications of this technology, as well as the personal motivations and challenges faced by the startup's founder.

This article discusses the security clearance process in the United States, highlighting concerns about its complexity, backlog, and potential for abuse. It examines the challenges individuals face in obtaining and maintaining security clearances, as well as the broader implications for national security and government transparency.

The article discusses why the AI assistant Claude is built as an Electron app, highlighting the benefits of cross-platform compatibility, desktop integration, and the ability to provide a native user experience.

The article discusses the development of ChatGPT, an advanced language model created by OpenAI, and its potential impact on the field of AI. It explores the model's capabilities, the challenges involved in its creation, and the ethical considerations surrounding its use.

PayPal has disclosed a data breach that exposed personal information of some of its customers, including names, addresses, and dates of birth. The company is working to notify affected users and has not found any evidence of unauthorized access to financial information.

The article argues that companies building AI assistants are essentially advertising companies, as their primary goal is to collect user data and serve targeted ads, rather than provide a genuinely helpful and ethical AI experience.

The article explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy, detailing how it has led to a surge in inflation and a slowdown in economic growth, with central banks around the world struggling to manage the crisis.

The article discusses the development of a new tool called Claws, which is a command-line tool that allows users to interact with Elasticsearch and Solr search engines using natural language queries. The tool aims to provide a user-friendly interface for querying and exploring search data without requiring extensive knowledge of the underlying search engine technology.

Hey HN! I built a native macOS desktop client for Hacker News and I'm open-sourcing it under the MIT license.

GitHub: https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News

Download (signed & notarized DMG, macOS 14.0+): https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News/releases

Screenshots: https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News#screenshots

I spend a lot of time reading HN — I wanted something that felt like a proper Mac app: a sidebar for browsing stories, an integrated reader for articles, and comment threading — all in one window. Essentially, I wanted HN to feel like a first-class citizen on macOS, not a website I visit.

What it does:

- Split-view layout — stories in a sidebar on the left, articles and comments on the right, using the standard macOS NavigationSplitView pattern.

- Built-in ad blocking — a precompiled WKContentRuleList blocks 14 major ad networks (DoubleClick, Google Syndication, Criteo, Taboola, Outbrain, Amazon ads, etc.) right in the WebKit layer. No extensions needed. Toggleable in settings.

- Pop-up blocking — kills window.open() calls. Also toggleable.

- HN account login — full authentication flow (login, account creation, password reset). Session is stored in the macOS Keychain, and cookies are injected into the WebView so you can upvote, comment, and submit stories while staying logged in.

- Bookmarks — save stories locally for offline access. Persisted with Codable serialization, searchable and filterable independently.

- Search and filtering — powered by the Algolia HN API. Filter by content type (All, Ask, Show, Jobs, Comments), date range (Today, Past Week, Past Month, All Time), and sort by hot or recent.

- Scroll progress indicator — a small orange bar at the top tracks your reading progress via JavaScript-to-native messaging.

- Auto-updates via Sparkle with EdDSA-signed updates served from GitHub Pages.

- Dark mode — respects system appearance with CSS and meta tag injection.

Tech details for the curious:

The whole app is ~2,050 lines of Swift across 16 files. It uses the modern @Observable macro (not the old ObservableObject/Published pattern), structured concurrency with async/await and withThrowingTaskGroup for concurrent batch fetching, and SwiftUI throughout — no UIKit/AppKit bridges except for the WKWebView wrapper via NSViewRepresentable.

Two APIs power the data: the official HN Firebase API for individual item/user fetches, and the Algolia Search API for feeds, filtering, and search. The Algolia API is surprisingly powerful for this — it lets you do date-range filtering, pagination, and full-text search that the Firebase API doesn't support.

CI/CD:

The release pipeline is a single GitHub Actions workflow (467 lines) that handles the full macOS distribution story: build and archive, code sign with Developer ID, notarize with Apple (with a 5-retry staple loop for ticket propagation delays), create a custom DMG with AppleScript-driven icon positioning, sign and notarize the DMG, generate an EdDSA Sparkle signature, create a GitHub Release, and deploy an updated appcast.xml to GitHub Pages.

Getting macOS code signing and notarization working in CI was honestly the hardest part of this project. If anyone is distributing a macOS app outside the App Store via GitHub Actions, I'm happy to answer questions — the workflow is fully open source.

The entire project is MIT licensed. PRs and issues welcome: https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News

I'd love feedback — especially on features you'd want to see. Some ideas I'm considering: keyboard-driven navigation (j/k to move between stories), a reader mode that strips articles down to text, and notification support for replies to your comments.

The article discusses the Bluesky social media protocol, highlighting the potential risks and challenges it faces, such as the risk of centralization and the need for robust governance and community participation to ensure its success as a decentralized alternative to existing social media platforms.

The article introduces a tool called Codebase Visualizer, which allows developers to visualize and explore the structure and dependencies of their software projects. The tool provides a graphical representation of the codebase, making it easier to understand and navigate complex software systems.

The article discusses the effectiveness of blue light filters, which are often used to reduce digital eye strain. It concludes that there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that blue light filters improve sleep or reduce eye strain, and that the benefits are largely placebo effects.

This article discusses the creation of an AI-powered uBlock blacklist, which aims to automatically and regularly update a blacklist for the uBlock Origin browser extension to block malicious and unwanted content on the web.

The article showcases a collection of scans from the OpenScan Gallery, featuring a variety of 3D models and digital artworks created using open-source scanning technologies and tools. It highlights the diverse range of applications and creative potential of accessible scanning solutions.

The European Union has implemented a new law to promote a more sustainable and circular battery industry. The law aims to improve battery durability, reuse, and recycling, as well as increase transparency and traceability throughout the battery supply chain.

The article discusses the Consistency Diffusion, a new language model that aims to improve the consistency and coherence of text generated by large language models. The model is trained to maintain logical and factual consistency across multiple generated sentences, making the output more reliable and trustworthy.