How well do coding agents use your library?
How StackBench Works StackBench simulates how coding agents actually use your library documentation. We extract real use cases, then test if agents can implement them successfully.
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How StackBench Works StackBench simulates how coding agents actually use your library documentation. We extract real use cases, then test if agents can implement them successfully.
Several years ago, an optics expert developed a technique for turning shiny metals pitch black. The trick resulted in a material perfectly suited for absorbing sunlight—so much so that generators built with it produced 15 times more power than comparable devices. The team used black metal to develop a new design for solar thermoelectric generators. Known as STEGs, they can convert various types of thermal energy into electricity. However, technological limitations significantly curbed their pot
How Stock Options Work Employee stock-option programs are typically authorized by a company's board of directors (and have historically been approved by the shareholders) and give the company discretion to award options to employees equal to a certain percentage of the company's shares outstanding. Options give employees the right to buy a certain number of their company's shares at a fixed price for a certain period of time, usually 10 years. That price, usually the market price of the
Black holes are dark, menacing objects with gravity so intense that not even light can escape, so you don’t want to mess with them. A recent discovery of one of the strangest supernovas ever observed reveals the tragic story of a star that tried to defy the powerful pull of a nearby black hole but later conceded in an explosive death. A team of astronomers discovered the unusual supernova, dubbed SN 2023zkd, while digging through observations of particularly interesting targets gathered by tele
President Donald Trump was asked on Wednesday about the recent hack of a computer system that holds highly sensitive federal court documents. Russia is suspected to be behind the attack, as the New York Times first reported on Tuesday. But Trump doesn’t seem to think it was a big deal, even as the president prepares to meet with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Trump was asked by a reporter if he would bring up the hack when he meets Putin in Alaska on Friday. “I guess I could,” Trump replied
I'm lucky to call the high desert home -- a place where warm days practically demand we head out to explore the lakes, rivers and mountains in every direction, ideally before the crowds catch on. And when I'm gearing up for a hike, there's a handful of tech I always toss in my pack. If you've got a hiking or camping trip on the calendar, check out the gadgets and essentials I swear by. They can turn a quick afternoon trek or a full weekend adventure into something smoother, safer and more fun.
United Launch Alliance delivered multiple US military satellites into a high-altitude orbit after a prime-time launch Tuesday night, marking an important transition from development to operations for the company's new Vulcan rocket. This mission, officially designated USSF-106 by the US Space Force, was the first flight of ULA's Vulcan rocket to carry national security payloads. Two test flights of the Vulcan rocket last year gave military officials enough confidence to certify it for launching
Instagram is working on a feature called “Picks” that aims to help users find common interests. The Meta-owned social network confirmed to TechCrunch that Picks is an internal prototype and isn’t being tested externally. The feature was first spotted by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, who often finds unreleased features while they’re still under development. According to screenshots shared by Paluzzi, people select their favorite movies, books, TV shows, games, and music, or their “Picks.
India-based audio series platform maker Pocket FM aims to be the Netflix of audio. That is, the company intends to match its audio series with hundreds of episodes to its users’ tastes. For that to work, it needs to release content rapidly — something it’s now turning to AI to help with. The Lightspeed-backed startup is giving its writers an AI tool set that can do things like suggest better endings to an episode or make the narrative more engaging. The hope is that the tools will speed up the
How StackBench Works StackBench simulates how coding agents actually use your library documentation. We extract real use cases, then test if agents can implement them successfully.
is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Carrera, a German company that has been making slot car toys since the ‘60s, has announced a new scaled racing experience that does away with the slots altogether. Carrera Hybrid still has you racing 1:50-scale cars around a reconfigurable track, but you cont
Apple is making a major U-turn with CarPlay after a decade of not allowing video playback. Starting with iOS 26, Apple will allow apps to display video through the CarPlay screen while parked. Support, however, is a big question mark for now. The new capability falls under the name ‘video in the car’ and is mentioned on Apple’s developer website for CarPlay: AirPlay video in the car enables people to watch their favorite videos from iPhone right on their CarPlay display when they aren’t drivin
Yes, summer might be coming to a close sooner than any of us would like, but that doesn't mean the outdoor fun has to end. Currently, Ultimate Ears' Wonderboom 4 Bluetooth speaker is down to $60 from $100 in blue and black. The 40 percent discount brings the speaker to a record-low price. It's one of our picks for best portable Bluetooth speakers for 2025 thanks to features like its 14 hours of battery life and its IP67 dust and waterproof rating. There are a few other great sales on UE speake
maciek905/Getty Images ZDNET's key takeaways Wall Street fears AI models will replace all packaged software. AI models' coding ability is still very mixed. Software executives are positioning their firms to be survivors. The modern software industry has existed for 50 years, since the founding of Microsoft in 1975. "Bill built the first software company in the industry," said late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs in 2007, referring to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. "Bill was really fo
Lance Whitney / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Windows has a hidden backup tool in Windows 10 and 11. It can save files to discs, drives, or network locations. Deprecated by Microsoft, so expect occasional errors. Regularly backing up your files is always a good idea, just in case any important or irreplaceable ones go missing. For that, you can turn to a variety of programs. But Windows itself has a built-in backup tool that's simple and flexible. The catch is that you
TCL D1 Pro ZDNET's key takeaways The TCL D1 Pro smart lock is available for $170. This smart lock features some of the most reliable and fastest palm recognition technology I've tested, and it has a rechargeable battery instead of the standard replaceable batteries. The TCL D1 Pro's biggest downfall is the app, which is not user-friendly for customizing settings and feels outdated. $125.98 at Amazon Palm vein recognition is becoming quite popular among smart lock manufacturers, and the TCL D1
The Rock Art of Serrania De La Lindosa Within Southeast Colombia's Orinoco River basin, a series of massive rocky sandstone mesas, called tepuis, rise up from the dense humid jungle. Since ancient times the cliffs of these mountains were important cultural sites. They served as shelters, navigational way points, communal gathering sites, and as giant canvases for their rock art, for early inhabitants to communicate their mythologies, histories, and exploits. One such stretch of these tepuis, La
Astronomers have identified what could be a new supermassive black hole, and with an estimated mass 36 billion times that of the sun, it is about 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. This would make it among the most massive objects ever detected. The finding, published in the Monthly Notice of the Royal Astronomical Society, was made by researchers from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth in the UK in collaboration with
A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering Here's the situation: it's 1984, and you're assigned to write the spellchecker for a new MS-DOS word processor. Some users, but not many, will have 640K of memory in their PCs. You need to support systems with as little as 256K. That's a quarter megabyte to contain the word processor, the document being edited, and the memory needed by the operating system. Oh, and the spellchecker. For reference, on my MacBook, the standard dictio
Hackers have released stolen data belonging to US insurance giant Allianz Life, exposing 2.8 million records with sensitive information on business partners and customers in ongoing Salesforce data theft attacks. Last month, Allianz Life disclosed that it suffered a data breach when the personal information for the "majority" of its 1.4 million customers was stolen from a third-party, cloud-based CRM system on July 16th. While the company did not name the provider, BleepingComputer first repor
Introduction to Go 1.25 The latest Go release, version 1.25, arrives in August 2025, six months after Go 1.24. Most of its changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. As always, the release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility. We expect almost all Go programs to continue to compile and run as before. Changes to the language There are no languages changes that affect Go programs in Go 1.25. However, in the language specification the notion of core types
Astronomers have discovered what could be the largest black hole ever detected. With a mass of 36 billion times that of our Sun, its gravity is so powerful that it bends the light of an entire galaxy behind it into a near-perfect circle called an Einstein ring, effectively reducing a realm with trillions of stars of its own into an astrophysical fashion accessory. It's 10,000 times as heavy as our Milky Way's own central black hole, and is nigh unto breaking the universe's theoretical upper limi
The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know I want a new protocol, tentatively called “Let Me Know” (LMK). The purpose is to provide someone an anonymous way to get notified when a singular, specific event occurs. Here’s a basic use case: Some random blog author has published Parts 1 and 2 of a series. You enjoyed it, and you want to know when Part 3 is published. You don’t want to give away any personal information, you don’t want to subscribe to an RSS feed of other content, you don’t want to follow
Databases used by US federal courts for sharing and managing case documents have been hacked. Politico first reported on the hack last week on August 6; today, an investigation from The New York Times states that Russia is suspected to be involved in the attack. The Administrative Office of the US Courts initially identified the severity of the cyberattack in July, although the extent of the breach by "persistent and sophisticated cyber threat actors" has not been disclosed and may still not be
After more than a decade of development and testing, US military officials are finally ready to entrust United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket to haul a batch of national security satellites into space. An experimental military navigation satellite, also more than 10 years in the making, will ride ULA's Vulcan rocket into geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. There are additional payloads buttoned up inside the Vulcan rocket's nose cone, but of
The Russian government is allegedly behind the data breach affecting the U.S. court filing system known as PACER, according to The New York Times. Citing anonymous sources, the newspaper said Russia “is at least in part responsible” for the cyberattack, without saying what part of the Russian government is behind the hack. The hackers searched for “midlevel criminal cases in the New York City area and several other jurisdictions, with some cases involving people with Russian and Eastern Europe
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET ZDNET's takeaways Pebblebee announces a new safety feature for Clip trackers. Alert Live sends your real-time location to up to five contacts. The feature costs $2.99 a month or $24.99 a year. Days after announcing that its Clip would be the first tracker to be able to use both Google's and Apple's Find My networks, Pebblebee just revealed another major upgrade for the Clip -- a potentially life-saving one. In July, Clip trackers (which made ZDNET's list of the
The XZ-Utils backdoor, first discovered in March 2024, is still present in at least 35 Linux images on Docker Hub, potentially putting users, organizations, and their data at risk. Docker Hub is the official public container image registry operated by Docker, allowing developers and organizations to upload or download prebuilt images and share them with the community. Many CI/CD pipelines, developers, and production systems pull images directly from Docker Hub as base layers for their own cont
When Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chipmaker Nvidia, met with Donald Trump in the White House last week, he had reason to be cheerful. Most of Nvidia’s chips, which are widely used to train generative artificial-intelligence models, are manufactured in Asia. Earlier this year, it pledged to increase production in the United States, and on Wednesday Trump announced that chip companies that promise to build products in the United States would be exempt from some hefty new tariffs on sem
Elon Musk has always wanted the Cybertruck to be the vehicle everyone talks about. After a bizarre video went viral over the weekend, he got his wish, just not in the way he intended. The rumor grew so outlandish and spread so far that Tesla, a company that famously doesn’t have a public relations department, was forced to do something it rarely does: publicly deny it. The incident highlights the Cybertruck’s strange and precarious position. It’s a vehicle so polarizing and so relentlessly hype