Hacker News: Newest

Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices.

We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention is the right primitive for this, and FFN parameters are wasted at this scale.

Simple Attention Networks: the entire model is just attention and gating, no MLPs anywhere. Needle is an experimental run for single-shot function calling for consumer devices (phones, watches, glasses...).

Training: - Pretrained on 200B tokens across 16 TPU v6e (27 hours) - Post-trained on 2B tokens of synthesized function-calling data (45 minutes) - Dataset synthesized via Gemini with 15 tool categories (timers, messaging, navigation, smart home, etc.)

You can test it right now and finetune on your Mac/PC: https://github.com/cactus-compute/needle

The full writeup on the architecture is here: https://github.com/cactus-compute/needle/blob/main/docs/simp...

We found that the "no FFN" finding generalizes beyond function calling to any task where the model has access to external structured knowledge (RAG, tool use, retrieval-augmented generation). The model doesn't need to memorize facts in FFN weights if the facts are provided in the input. Experimental results to published.

While it beats FunctionGemma-270M, Qwen-0.6B, Granite-350M, LFM2.5-350M on single-shot function calling, those models have more scope/capacity and excel in conversational settings. We encourage you to test on your own tools via the playground and finetune accordingly.

This is part of our broader work on Cactus (https://github.com/cactus-compute/cactus), an inference engine built from scratch for mobile, wearables and custom hardware. We wrote about Cactus here previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44524544

Everything is MIT licensed. Weights: https://huggingface.co/Cactus-Compute/needle GitHub: https://github.com/cactus-compute/needle

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111896

Points: 760

# Comments: 210

Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era

devhouse — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:40:13 +0000

Article URL: https://deepmind.google/blog/ai-pointer/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111581

Points: 251

# Comments: 213

Googlebook

tambourine_man — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:37:36 +0000

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb8xls/introducin...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111545

Points: 929

# Comments: 1559

Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

Bender — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:29:21 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/amazon-employees-are-tokenmaxxing-due-to-pressure-to-use-ai-tools/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110529

Points: 248

# Comments: 253

eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible

voisin — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:49:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-12/ebay-rejects-gamestop-s-56-billion-takeover-as-not-credible

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110021

Points: 234

# Comments: 239

Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

nilirl — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:08:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nair.sh/guides-and-opinions/communicating-your-expertise/why-senior-developers-fail-to-communicate-their-expertise

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109460

Points: 815

# Comments: 329

Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

rubenbe — Tue, 12 May 2026 14:54:41 +0000

Article URL: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/bambu-lab-abusing-open-source-social-contract/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109224

Points: 1397

# Comments: 427

Int a = 5; a = a++ + ++a; a =? (2011)

e-topy — Tue, 12 May 2026 14:14:04 +0000

Article URL: https://gynvael.coldwind.pl/?id=372

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48108621

Points: 136

# Comments: 235

US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war

tartoran — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:51:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c202pgxx89lo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48108313

Points: 260

# Comments: 439

EU to crack down on TikTok, Instagram's 'addictive design' targeting kids

thm — Tue, 12 May 2026 11:00:07 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/12/tiktok-instagram-social-media-addictive-eu-crack-down.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106534

Points: 514

# Comments: 468

Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

adunk — Tue, 12 May 2026 05:11:24 +0000

Article URL: http://www.typewritten.org/Media/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104428

Points: 707

# Comments: 393

Instructure pays ransom to Canvas hackers

Cider9986 — Tue, 12 May 2026 02:56:31 +0000

https://www.instructure.com/incident_update#:~:text=STATUS%2...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/us/canvas-instructure-hac..., https://archive.ph/HIkdn

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48103668

Points: 272

# Comments: 248

Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise

varunsharma07 — Mon, 11 May 2026 21:08:25 +0000

https://github.com/TanStack/router/issues/7383

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100706

Points: 1094

# Comments: 464

I let AI build a tool to help me figure out what was waking me up at night

showmypost — Mon, 11 May 2026 21:04:10 +0000

Article URL: https://martin.sh/i-let-ai-build-a-tool-to-help-me-figure-out-what-was-waking-me-up-at-night/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100662

Points: 275

# Comments: 285

GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

AnonGitLabEmpl — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:51:57 +0000

Article URL: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100500

Points: 699

# Comments: 679

If AI writes your code, why use Python?

indigodaddy — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:45:55 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@NMitchem/if-ai-writes-your-code-why-use-python-bf8c4ba1a055

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100433

Points: 914

# Comments: 980

Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

cdrnsf — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:53:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.404media.co/ucf-ai-commencement-speaker-booed/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674

Points: 175

# Comments: 216

Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

movis — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:34:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.seangoedecke.com/software-engineering-may-no-longer-be-a-lifetime-career/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48095550

Points: 488

# Comments: 761

Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

orhunp_ — Mon, 11 May 2026 10:13:04 +0000

Article URL: https://ratty-term.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48093100

Points: 674

# Comments: 243

Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

negura — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:26:54 +0000

Article URL: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/google-account-registration-now-requires-sending-an-sms-via-phone-instead-of-receiving-an-sms/36082

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48092028

Points: 634

# Comments: 515

Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability

TangerineDream — Mon, 11 May 2026 06:39:08 +0000

Article URL: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-vulnerability/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48091737

Points: 701

# Comments: 282

I'm going back to writing code by hand

dropbox_miner — Mon, 11 May 2026 01:23:51 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.k10s.dev/im-going-back-to-writing-code-by-hand/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48090029

Points: 1020

# Comments: 614

Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan

cmbailey — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:02:43 +0000

Article URL: https://cyber.netsecops.io/articles/obsidian-plugin-abused-in-campaign-to-deploy-phantom-pulse-rat/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48088576

Points: 365

# Comments: 229

Maryland citizens hit with $2B power grid upgrade for out-of-state AI

lemonberry — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:16:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/maryland-citizens-slapped-with-usd2-billion-grid-upgrade-bill-for-out-of-state-ai-data-centers-state-complains-to-federal-energy-regulators-says-additional-cost-breaks-ratepayer-protection-pledge-promises

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48088151

Points: 318

# Comments: 201

Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

haunter — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:54:06 +0000

Article URL: https://www.xda-developers.com/linux-gaming-is-getting-faster-because-windows-apis-are-becoming-linux-kernel-features/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48087887

Points: 973

# Comments: 636

Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

ChuckMcM — Sun, 10 May 2026 17:54:02 +0000

Article URL: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116550899908879585

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086190

Points: 2179

# Comments: 755

Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

david927 — Sun, 10 May 2026 17:34:41 +0000

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48085993

Points: 285

# Comments: 1098

Local AI needs to be the norm

cylo — Sun, 10 May 2026 17:19:28 +0000

Article URL: https://unix.foo/posts/local-ai-needs-to-be-norm/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48085821

Points: 1889

# Comments: 747

Scientists warn Atlantic current at risk of shutting down

ambigious7777 — Sun, 10 May 2026 15:39:53 +0000

Article URL: https://e360.yale.edu/features/amoc-climate-change

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084836

Points: 171

# Comments: 230

Louis Rossmann offers to pay legal fees for a threatened OrcaSlicer developer

iancmceachern — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:47:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/louis-rossmann-tells-3d-printer-maker-bambu-lab-to-go-bleep-yourself-over-its-lawsuit-against-enthusiast-right-to-repair-advocate-offers-to-pay-the-legal-fees-for-a-threatened-orcaslicer-developer

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084432

Points: 626

# Comments: 334

Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

imtomt — Sun, 10 May 2026 03:01:44 +0000

This is ymawky, a static file web server for MacOS written entirely in ARM64 assembly. It supports GET, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, and OPTIONS requests, and supports Range: bytes=X-Y headers (which allows scrubbing for video streaming). It decodes percent-encoded URLs, strictly enforces docroot, serves custom error pages for any HTTP error response, supports directory listing, and has (some) mitigations against slowloris-like attacks.

I’ve also written a more detailed writeup here: https://imtomt.github.io/ymawky/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48080587

Points: 427

# Comments: 228

Getting arrested in Japan

bane — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:56:19 +0000

Article URL: https://sundaicity.com/blogs/getting-arrested-in-japan

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48078647

Points: 258

# Comments: 320

Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

JumpCrisscross — Sat, 09 May 2026 18:33:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/technology/meta-ai-employees-miserable.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077126

Points: 461

# Comments: 526

I’ve banned query strings

susam — Sat, 09 May 2026 16:28:36 +0000

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076173

Points: 575

# Comments: 297

Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels

LorenDB — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:40:58 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/apple-is-increasing-my-cortisol-levels

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48075366

Points: 396

# Comments: 284

The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

ColinWright — Sat, 09 May 2026 13:48:32 +0000

Article URL: https://matduggan.com/the-intolerable-hypocrisy-of-cyberlibertarianism/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48074952

Points: 425

# Comments: 399

A History of IDEs at Google

laurentlb — Sat, 09 May 2026 11:14:18 +0000

Article URL: https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/a-history-of-ides-at-google

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073979

Points: 467

# Comments: 312

Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc

heldrida — Sat, 09 May 2026 10:12:55 +0000

https://xunroll.com/thread/2053047748191232310

Recent and related: Zig → Rust porting guide - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48016880 - May 2026 (540 comments)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073680

Points: 718

# Comments: 697

LLMs corrupt your documents when you delegate

rbanffy — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:44:34 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15597

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073246

Points: 479

# Comments: 201

I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

andrewstuart — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:37:41 +0000

Article URL: http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com/2026/05/i-returned-to-aws-and-was-reminded-hard.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073201

Points: 853

# Comments: 644

EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"

muse900 — Sat, 09 May 2026 05:52:12 +0000

Article URL: https://cyberinsider.com/eu-calls-vpns-a-loophole-that-needs-closing-in-age-verification-push/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072190

Points: 661

# Comments: 446

Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

pretext — Sat, 09 May 2026 04:53:52 +0000

Examples: https://thariqs.github.io/html-effectiveness/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48071940

Points: 527

# Comments: 274

A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

_alternator_ — Sat, 09 May 2026 02:41:42 +0000

https://twitter.com/wtgowers/status/2052830948685676605

https://xcancel.com/wtgowers/status/2052830948685676605

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48071262

Points: 727

# Comments: 535

Meta Shuts Down End-to-End Encryption for Instagram Messaging

tcp_handshaker — Fri, 08 May 2026 21:47:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-shuts-down-end-to-end-encryption-for-instagram-dms-messaging

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48069192

Points: 334

# Comments: 222

Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house

bryan0 — Fri, 08 May 2026 18:51:35 +0000

Article URL: https://abc7chicago.com/post/top-cop-driver-accused-dui-tracks-missing-laptop-illinois-state-police-trooper-kevin-bradleys-house/19060850/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067184

Points: 447

# Comments: 380

Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users

anonymousiam — Fri, 08 May 2026 18:45:58 +0000

Related: Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039362

also: Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063199

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067119

Points: 1559

# Comments: 591

Tesla is recalling its cheaper Cybertruck because the wheels might fall off

droidjj — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:58:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theverge.com/transportation/926741/tesla-cybertruck-cheaper-recall

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063240

Points: 218

# Comments: 276

Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged

ribtoks — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:56:10 +0000

Article URL: https://privatecaptcha.com/blog/google-cloud-fraud-defence-wei/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063199

Points: 705

# Comments: 365

Just Use Go

xngbuilds — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:40:22 +0000

Article URL: https://blainsmith.com/articles/just-fucking-use-go/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062997

Points: 226

# Comments: 218

A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

mwheelz — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:37:05 +0000

Article URL: https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062178

Points: 624

# Comments: 294

Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

surprisetalk — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:30:05 +0000

Article URL: https://apnews.com/article/poland-economy-growth-g20-gdp-26fe06e120398410f8d773ba5661e7aa

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062117

Points: 1061

# Comments: 873

US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos

david-gpu — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:10:25 +0000

https://apnews.com/article/trump-ufos-uap-aliens-pentagon-re...

https://www.war.gov/UFO/#release

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48061938

Points: 335

# Comments: 544

Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision...

mittermayr — Fri, 08 May 2026 07:57:14 +0000

I know what you're thinking... and I still can't believe it, but...

This morning, our database flagged a duplicate UUID (v4). I checked, thinking it may have been a double-insert bug or something, but no.

The original UUID was from a record added in 2025 (about a year ago), and today the system inserted a new document with a fresh UUIDv4 and it came up with the exact same one:

b6133fd6-70fe-4fe3-bed6-8ca8fc9386cd

We're using this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/uuid

I thought this is technically impossible, and it will never happen, and since we're not modifying the UUIDs in any way, I really wonder how that.... is possible!? We're literally only calling:

import { v4 as uuidv4 } from "uuid";

const document_id = uuidv4();

... and then insert into the database, that's it.

Additionally, the database only has about 15.000 records, and now one collision. Statistically... impossible.

Has that ever happened to anyone?! What in the...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060054

Points: 474

# Comments: 342