GoKawiil
Tech News
A developer launched a free, self-paced Python course on Hacker News aimed at absolute beginners. Learners progress through exercises like drawing a robot, repeating a pattern, and responding to a mouse click, using a visual canvas to teach core concepts such as function calls, values, variables, and loops.
The iPhone 18 Pro's 48-megapixel main camera reportedly includes a variable aperture with six physical blades, offering four settings: f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8 and f/4. Users can adjust aperture through a six-dot control in the Camera app, though it only applies to the main lens in 1x and 2x modes, while other lenses keep a fixed aperture.
V-Sync is a graphics setting that forces a GPU to hold back frames until a monitor's refresh cycle is ready, rather than sending frames as fast as it can render them. This prevents screen tearing, a visual glitch where a frame appears split horizontally because the display updates mid-render. With V-Sync on, frame output is generally capped to match the monitor's refresh rate, such as 60 FPS on a 60Hz screen or 144 FPS on a 144Hz screen.
Physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory's RHIC facility analyzed about 1 billion gold-nuclei collisions and found that particle momentum variations, instead of changing smoothly with collision energy, dipped before rising again. The STAR collaboration published the results on Sept. 22 in Physical Review Letters, noting the signal is statistically robust but not yet proof of a long-theorized transition point in nuclear matter.
The US saw dengue cases jump to nearly 4,000 in 2024, a 360 percent rise over the prior decade's average, with local transmission in Florida, California, Texas and a public health emergency declared in Puerto Rico. Ten locally acquired malaria cases appeared in 2023, the first in twenty years, even as yellow fever-carrying mosquitoes remain present. Genetic engineering that makes male mosquitoes' offspring unable to survive, collapsing local populations, has existed since 2000 but has been stuck in regulatory limbo for roughly fifteen years.
Jagex revealed RS4 at RuneFest, a new RuneScape MMO built with Unreal Engine, alongside a short trailer showing dragon riding and combat. The game is set in the Sixth Age, years after RuneScape: Dragonwilds, starting players in the Ashenfall region, and Jagex says it will complement rather than replace existing RuneScape titles. Jagex also announced a RuneScape animated series in early development with Lyrical Animation and YouTuber MoistCr1TiKaL.
Screen tearing occurs when a GPU sends a new frame to the frame buffer before the monitor finishes scanning the previous one, causing two frames to appear on screen simultaneously. This happens because GPUs render frames at variable rates while most monitors refresh on a fixed schedule measured in hertz, such as 60Hz, 144Hz or higher.
Citrix has released emergency firmware updates for NetScaler ADC and Gateway appliances to fix CVE-2026-88779, a memory buffer vulnerability in SAML authentication with a CVSS score of 8.7. The company confirmed the bug has already been exploited in targeted attacks against unpatched devices, causing denial-of-service outages, and said it has found no evidence of customer data being compromised. Fixed versions include 14.1-73.41 and 13.1-64.28, with separate builds for FIPS and NDcPP customers.
An opinion piece recounts the author's experience challenging authors of a widely cited paper over known evaluation errors, with one author declining to retract the work and instead asking whether the error affected the author's own publishing plans. The piece argues that academic incentive structures reward publication and promotion over correcting or retracting flawed results, undermining honesty and scientific integrity.
A commentary piece describes a demo in which a coordinated group of cheap AI agents rebuilt a website for about $8, with one agent fabricating quotes and another independently catching and correcting more than a dozen fabrications at negligible extra cost. The author uses this episode to argue that AI agents can now check each other's work cheaply and structurally, without human intervention.
Images posted by Android Headlines show the previously rumored Fitbit Edge, which appears to succeed the Charge line. The device reportedly features a small widget-capable screen, a seven-day battery, built-in GPS, an altimeter, and limited app support including Google Maps and YouTube Music.
Soulog has released the Sense, an AI-powered voice recorder paired with the Soulog app that records, transcribes and organizes conversations by topic and decision. The app recognizes up to ten speakers, transcribes in over 120 languages, and can summarize conversations in a different language than they were held in. It also generates structured records of decisions and action items, plus a semantic map and timeline linking related discussions across time.