GoKawiil
Tech News
A writer analyzed years of emails received in response to blog posts and Hacker News comments and found that what used to be genuine, thoughtful outreach has shifted mostly to disguised sales pitches. He describes a recurring pattern where senders open with a personalized compliment and an innocent-seeming question, only to pivot into promoting their own product once he replies at length.
A newly launched site called HackerChurn analyzes public Hacker News comments from the past three years to identify which software products users criticize most often. It lists 101 platforms that met a threshold of at least three complaints across two separate threads, totaling 1,551 negative comments, and notes 139 instances where commenters said they built their own replacement. Each complaint is linked back to its original Hacker News comment, with counts updated nightly using AI labeling.
A new Show HN project called Hacker Times reskins Hacker News content in a New York Times-style layout. Among the stories surfaced is a guest essay on Terence Tao's blog by Karthik C. S., Amit Sahai and Jie Xue, arguing mathematicians should value understanding over competition with peers or AI systems.
A new Show HN project called HackerTV streams a continuous, synchronized broadcast of YouTube videos that have been frequently recommended in Hacker News comments, so every viewer sees the same program at the same time. The catalog is seeded from the HackerTube dataset and refreshed weekly using the HN Search API, with Claude used to label and filter entries, though video durations are estimates until YouTube metadata loads.
Hacker News posted its monthly 'Who is hiring?' thread for November 2026, where companies can list open positions directly as comments. The guidelines ask posters to specify location and remote policy, represent only companies they personally work for, and commit to responding to applicants. A companion thread, 'Who wants to be hired?', was also linked for job seekers.
A developer launched HackerBooks, a site modeled on HackerTube that aggregates and ranks books referenced in Hacker News discussions. The interface includes navigation shortcuts for browsing top, rising, and personalized book lists, similar to keyboard controls used on HN itself.
A developer used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 model to build HackerTube.org, a YouTube-style site populated only with videos that commenters recommended on Hacker News. The project scraped HN comments from 2007-2026, filtered roughly 40,000 video recommendations down to 6,454 videos across 150 topics using Claude Sonnet, then wrapped the results in a YouTube-like interface with custom recommendations stored locally rather than via user accounts.
A poster on Hacker News announced plans to go on strike in November and invited others to join by informing their employers they are also striking, citing grievances to be detailed in comments due to character limits. The post encourages participants to share the thread with employers and frames the action as a collective, decentralized effort rather than a formally organized labor action.
Nathan Alspaugh, an MIT freshman, created an open-source keyboard project called Keybytes, where each key is its own circuit board with a Cherry MX switch and a CH32V003 microcontroller. The keys snap together magnetically and connect via pogo pins to a central hub called the Keyword, which handles Bluetooth and charging, letting users build keyboards in arbitrary shapes rather than fixed layouts.
A Hacker News user named petecooper publicly apologized after posting details of two critical PHP vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, ahead of a coordinated disclosure embargo. They said contacts had told them no embargo existed, and that they only wanted to warn others following PHP's four-week release cycle. The PHP Foundation had to move up its official announcement after multiple leaks, including one from Chainguard, surfaced before the planned release.
A blogger shared that after their post was submitted to Hacker News, their website experienced a flood of traffic attributed to AI bots rather than human readers. The author noted the spike coincided with the HN submission but consisted largely of automated crawler activity.
Hacker News has posted its monthly 'Ask HN: Who is hiring?' thread for October 2026, inviting companies to list open roles directly rather than through recruiters or job boards. Posting rules require location details, remote-work status, and a brief company description for lesser-known firms, with posters expected to actively respond to applicants.