Daily News Digest

Morning edition, generated 2026-09-14.

Showing top 30 of 83 distinct stories after deduping (4 appeared in more than one source).

Why is the x86 undefined instruction called ud2? Why 2?

Sources: Hacker News, Lobsters

HN: 235 points, 54 comments (discussion)

The case against JPEG XL

Sources: Hacker News, Lobsters

HN: 76 points, 99 comments (discussion)

Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"

Sources: Bubbles (Evan Hahn), Lobsters

NASA and IBM Open Source Lunar Mapping Tools

Sources: Slashdot, The Register

Also linked: The Register

Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

Sources: Hacker News

HN: 709 points, 328 comments (discussion)

Adsense has been a nightmare for us. They have been putting thousands of scam adverts on our website for some time. Think "you have been looking at xxx and must pay a $100 fine" type popup nonsense. Hosted on the following websites: azurestaticapps.net azurewebsites.net herokuapp.com ondigitalocean....

The death of SaaS and reverting to offline software

Sources: Bubbles (Alex Hyett)

Writing a Guix service from scratch, as a beginner

Sources: Lobsters

220 Million Traveler Records Exposed In Vietnam-Linked APIS Leak

Sources: Slashdot

Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture and calls it ‘Pace the frontier’

Sources: The Register

Dramatically Increasing Usable Closet Space

Sources: Hackaday

Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

Sources: Hacker News

HN: 681 points, 294 comments (discussion)

Prior to the "Elicitation" section, you'd think this article was written by a cryptographer or baroque historian who had been trying to solve this particular puzzle for years - failing embarrassingly until they presented the problem to Claude. However, as far as I can tell (I too am not a baroque hi...

Abolish patents

Sources: Bubbles (Go Make Things)

Can a regex match valid card numbers?

Sources: Lobsters

Ministers rejected NATS reimbursement plan before 2,000 UK flights were cancelled

Sources: The Register

Re-creating NASA’s Heat Shield Problem

Sources: Hackaday

Data collected by cars and sold to third parties

Sources: Hacker News

HN: 360 points, 192 comments (discussion)

I posted a flavor of this comment on an article a few months ago, but it's relevant here: I have a seven year old Volkswagen, not financed. I'm security conscious and made sure to disable all the data collection I could find in the companion app before removing my account, turn off remote access ser...