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Saturday, September 12, 2026

Hey buddy, What's up? Just wanted to give you the quick rundown on some of the interesting stuff from Hacker News today, Saturday, September 12, 2026. Saw a few things that made me go "hmm."

Google's Making Scraping a Nightmare

First off, Google's apparently making it even harder to scrape their search results. There's this new thing called google.com/goto links. Basically, they're funneling clicks through their own domain before sending you to the actual site. People in the comments are saying this is just the latest move, that Google's been slowly ratcheting up the anti-scraping efforts for a while now, even forcing JavaScript for search to track clicks. Someone even mentioned Google suing companies that do scraping, which, yikes!

Anthropic CEO on Pacing AI

Then there's this piece from Dario Amodei, the Anthropic CEO, talking about "pacing the frontier" of AI. He's basically saying we need to slow down AI development, which is pretty interesting coming from a big AI company. But a lot of people in the comments are calling BS, saying musicians are already using AI everywhere and most people are fine with it. Others are seriously worried about the risks of building something smarter than us, which, fair point.

"Fuck It, Make It Anyway" – But AI Art is a Hot Mess?

There was a post called "Fuck it, make it anyway", all about just getting things built instead of overthinking. Good advice, right? But the comments section turned into a huge debate about AI art and creation. A lot of people are super frustrated, saying it's mostly "slop" and making it impossible for human artists to get work. One guy said the rotten barrel of AI apples spoils the few good ones. Sounds like a lot of anger brewing there.

Nvidia: The Central Bank of AI?

Here's a wild one: The Economist published an article saying Nvidia is the central bank of AI. The idea is that because they control all the GPUs, they effectively control the flow of "money" (compute power) in the AI economy. People are deep in the comments debating the economics of it, like how Nvidia extending credit for GPUs is similar to how banks create money. Pretty high-level financial stuff for a tech forum!

Navier-Stokes and LLMs

Remember those million-dollar Clay Mathematics Institute problems? Well, there was an announcement about Navier-Stokes. Turns out, it's not a solution, but more about encouraging research, maybe even using LLMs for it. What's cool is some comments are talking about how LLMs might be good at understanding these super complex math problems, but also the risk of them "proving" things that have hidden bugs, like what happened with the Collatz conjecture before. Imagine an AI "proving" a math problem, but it's actually just exploiting a glitch!

Zoom on Linux: Clipboard Spyware?

This one's a bit alarming: The Linux Zoom client is proactively reading everything you write to your X11 clipboard. That's a huge privacy invasion! People in the comments are understandably upset, and some are sharing their own bad experiences, like how resource-intensive the browser version is or how it tried to auto-install itself after being removed. Just goes to show you gotta be careful with what software you trust.

LG TVs Still Spying?

And finally, there was a video about LG saying "we're fake news" regarding allegations of their smart TVs spying. This came up before, and it looks like it's still an issue. The comments are full of people saying that even if you pay a premium for these devices, companies still spy on you, and that a lot of those "smart" features are totally useless or forced. One person said they'd rather have an ODB port to plug in their own stuff than mandatory, proprietary apps that spy.

Anyway, that's the gist of it. Lot of AI talk, some privacy scares. Hit me back when you get a chance!

All Stories from Today

google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update (www.autom.dev)

We must pace the frontier (darioamodei.com)

Fuck it, make it anyway (www.joelotter.com)

Nvidia is the central bank of AI (www.economist.com)

Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap (high5apps.github.io)

Navier-Stokes Announcement (www.claymath.org)

An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, open the weights (jacob.gold)

Linux Zoom client proactively reading everything written to X11 clipboard (hachyderm.io)

LG Says We're Fake News [video] (www.youtube.com)

Real-SWE: Benchmarking AI models on private, real-world, enterprise codebases (withspecific.com)

Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine (eiln.github.io)

Pandas Should Go Extinct (eddie.codes)

Starlink Signal Leakage Threatens Radio Astronomy's Most Critical Frequencies (www.gadgetreview.com)

How to buy a good car for $1000 (abio.substack.com)

Google stole open source code without crediting the authors (Artemis/Minitap) (www.minitap.ai)

Usenet rewind archive search engine (www.usenet-rewind.com)

We've followed their lives for six decades; now the stars of 7 Up are bowing out (www.bbc.co.uk)

Waymo pulls over, calls cops on juvenile riders who had 'ghost gun" (www.latimes.com)

I made a build visualizer to understand Bun's compile times (lalitm.com)

The worst spam emails: iLands AI agent hustle (tedium.co)

Microcode in Intel's 8087 floating-point chip: the scale instruction (www.righto.com)

Europe's "Less" Is Doing More Than Anyone Gives It Credit For (oilprice.com)

LG responds to TV spying allegations (www.theverge.com)

Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master (twitter.com)

A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits (2021) (transformer-circuits.pub)

Will there be a 7G? (arxiv.org)

A few good ideas in programming languages (prydt.xyz)

OpenAI's Sam Altman says it would be 'ill-advised' to go public in 2026 (techcrunch.com)

I refuse to let SPICE die (github.com)

Financial Times' 404 Page not Found (www.ft.com)