Hacker News Deep Dive

Daily deep dive on Hacker News for Wednesday, November 4, 2026, with hosts Alex and Jane. Stories in this episode: (1) Postman silently installs AI plugins into your coding agents — a developer's GitHub issue shows Postman auto-installing plugins into Codex and Claude Code, registering a startup hook that makes Postman the default for ALL API work, and its installer attempting to approve its own hook (1,051 points). Plus thread receipts on request proxying and secrets logging. (2) The Astra fact-check — spaCy creator Matthew Honnibal shows the viral 'AI reads and writes neural weights' post conflates two techniques; only tiny networks were read raw, every language-model expe...

Today's Hacker News deep dive: MIT researchers show GPT-6 'Astra' can read and edit neural network weights directly — fixing a looping bug in a small Qwen model and 6x-ing its math score with no retraining (1,709 points). Ubuntu left a CVSS 9.8 kernel hole unpatched for two weeks while Debian, Arch and Alpine shipped fixes — and only Anthropic claims a working root exploit (1,264 points). Hackers hit supermarket freezers across seven European countries, pushing them to 50°C — the second wave after France's multi-million-euro attack (357 points). Two Georgia Tech students demo glasses that decode silent speech with radio waves through your face (497 points). And Anthrop...

Daily deep dive on Hacker News for Monday, November 2, 2026, with hosts Alex and Jane. Stories in this episode: (1) The HackerTube wave — Andrej Karpathy built a YouTube clone from videos recommended on Hacker News in about two hours of his time using Claude Opus 5.5: 6,454 videos distilled from ~40K HN comments, 2007–2026, across 150 topics. Within days came spin-offs HackerBooks and Wikihack. We dig into why HN's thread lit up with diagnoses of why YouTube recommendations went bad — and HN moderator dang's plan for a proper JSON API. (2) Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault — Robert Haas on how LLM-assisted bug hunting found so many bug...

Daily deep dive on Hacker News for Monday, November 2, 2026, with hosts Alex and Jane. Stories in this episode: (1) The HackerTube wave — Andrej Karpathy built a YouTube clone from videos recommended on Hacker News in about two hours of his time using Claude Opus 5.5: 6,454 videos distilled from ~40K HN comments, 2007–2026, across 150 topics. Within days came spin-offs HackerBooks and Wikihack. We dig into why HN's thread lit up with diagnoses of why YouTube recommendations went bad — and HN moderator dang's plan for a proper JSON API. (2) Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault — Robert Haas on how LLM-assisted bug hunting found so many bug...