HN Top 10 — May 16, 2026
Today’s Top 10 on Hacker News
1. Δ-Mem: Efficient Online Memory for Large Language Models
⭐ 32 💬 6 👤 44za12 🔗 Discuss on HN
Simply expanding the context window is costly and often fails to ensure effective context utilization. We propose \delta-mem, a lightweight memory mechanism that augments a frozen full-attention backbone with a compact online state of associative memory. \delta-mem compresses past information into a fixed-size state matrix updated by delta-rule learning, and uses its readout to generate low-rank corrections to the backbone’s attention…
2. Futhark by Example
⭐ 15 💬 2 👤 tosh 🔗 Discuss on HN
The following is a hands-on introduction to Futhark through a collection of commented programs, listed in roughly increasing order of complexity. You can load the programs into the interpreter to experiment with them. For a conventional introduction to the language, Parallel Programming in Futhark may be a better choice.
3. Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
⭐ 960 💬 202 👤 JSeiko 🔗 Discuss on HN
| Free eBooks | Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg is a library of over 75,000 free eBooks Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for you to enjoy. |
4. We’ve made the world too complicated
⭐ 19 💬 14 👤 James72689 🔗 Discuss on HN
| We’ve made the world too complicated | User8 User8 We’ve made the world too complicated 16 May, 2026 !Image 1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Wild_Jungle_%2842249210%29.jpeg We’ve made the world too complicated. I’m writing this with technology I will never fully understand in a building with rooms I… |
5. Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format
⭐ 153 💬 134 👤 frays 🔗 Discuss on HN
Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format. The scoreboard does not measure human skill cleanly anymore, and the old game is not coming back. The author started playing CTFs in 2021 and went on to win top competitions, but found that as AI tools like GPT-4 ramped up, a significant percentage of medium difficulty CTF challenges started becoming solvable with a single prompt.
6. I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
⭐ 1408 💬 701 👤 reasonableklout 🔗 Discuss on HN
A post titled “I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis” on Hacker News. Submitted by reasonableklout. Links to content on twitter.com.
7. Ploopy Bean: a trackpoint for every computer
⭐ 100 💬 46 👤 jibcage 🔗 Discuss on HN
The Ploopy Bean Pointing Stick is a 3D-printed, open-source pointing stick mouse. It adds high-precision pointing stick functionality to any setup, and has four Omron D2LS-21 buttons for snappy, responsive clicks. It runs QMK and supports VIA, which allows for quick and portable customization. It is fully assembled and ready to use immediately.
8. The bird eye was pushed to an evolutionary extreme
⭐ 123 💬 41 👤 sohkamyung 🔗 Discuss on HN
The bird retina is one of the most energetically expensive tissues in the animal kingdom, yet it doesn’t use the energy advantage of oxygen. New research finally explains how this is possible. !Image 1: Close-up of a circular yellow bird eye surrounded by white and red feathers. The eye of a red-and-green macaw, with no blood vessels in sight.
9. Additive Blending on the Nintendo 64
⭐ 120 💬 11 👤 ibobev 🔗 Discuss on HN
PhobosLab Dominic Szablewski, @phoboslab — Monday, May 4th 2026 Additive Blending on the Nintendo 64 Did you ever wonder why explosions and other effects looked so much cooler on the original PlayStation than they did on the Nintendo 64? “Silent Bomber“ for the PSX “Star Fox 64“ for the N64 The reason is additive blending! Or rather, in the N64 case, the lack thereof.
10. EMiX: Emulating Beyond Single-FPGA Limits
⭐ 13 💬 1 👤 PaulHoule 🔗 Discuss on HN
However, emulating large-scale multi-core systems increasingly exceed the hardware resource capacity of a single FPGA, limiting the feasibility of full-system emulation. To address this challenge, we introduce EMiX, a scalable multi-FPGA framework that enables distributed emulation of multi-core RISC-V architectures beyond single-FPGA resource limits. We prototype EMiX with a 64-core architecture across eight interconnected Alveo U55c FPGAs…