HN Top 10 — October 15, 2026
Today’s Top 10 on Hacker News
1. Things to know when you get cancer
⭐ 1420 💬 351 👤 jjmaxwell4 🔗 Discuss on HN
Following a mouth cancer diagnosis, the author shares practical lessons for navigating treatment, emphasizing persistent scheduling, pushing for timely genetic testing, and using standard-of-care guidelines to understand options. They recommend seeking a second opinion, speaking with patients who have had similar surgeries, and keeping organized AI-assisted notes of appointments. The article also advises considering a major cancer center for faster, more coordinated care.
2. Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit
⭐ 116 💬 59 👤 0xdeafbeef 🔗 Discuss on HN
A TP-Link EAP770 v1 access point repeatedly corrupted large Wi-Fi downloads, and the vendor had ended firmware support for the device. After tracing the issue to a firmware bug, the author wrote a kernel exploit to gain root access and write two required sysfs values, fixing the problem.
3. OpenCode 2.0
⭐ 636 💬 254 👤 gmays 🔗 Discuss on HN
OpenCode 2.0 is a major update that makes its client/server architecture run automatically as a local background service, unifying the TUI, web, desktop, and programmatic clients. It introduces a rebuilt API and new client package, plus Code Mode, which lets agents call MCP and OpenAPI tools through simple JavaScript scripts. The release also adds background subagents and asynchronous shell commands so long-running work does not block the main agent.
4. Tiny Little Office
⭐ 465 💬 78 👤 donohoe 🔗 Discuss on HN
Tiny Little Office is a collection of lightweight productivity tools for creating and organizing work. It includes templates and apps for writing, outlining, presentations, spreadsheets, calculations, drawing, diagrams, animation, calendars, and trip planning.
5. Show HN: Indigene – Native plants for where you stand
⭐ 34 💬 5 👤 olivierlacan 🔗 Discuss on HN
Indigene is a privacy-focused tool that recommends native plants suited to your location, helping support local ecosystems without requiring an account or tracking. It highlights how native plants provide essential food for local caterpillars, which in turn sustain songbirds and other wildlife. The app works offline and can be used without sharing location data.
6. Do dentists know what they’re doing?
⭐ 730 💬 528 👤 doitLP 🔗 Discuss on HN
A first-person account questions whether dentists truly know what they are doing after the narrator undergoes a series of dubious dental procedures. A dentist’s tooth reshaping worsens jaw pain, and a later splint is prescribed for suspected nighttime grinding. The story leaves the narrator skeptical of dental expertise and the reliability of professional diagnoses.
7. LFM2.5-24B-A2B: Built for fast on-device agents
⭐ 220 💬 51 👤 gmays 🔗 Discuss on HN
LFM2.5-24B-A2B is a 24-billion-parameter reasoning model with only 2 billion active parameters, designed for fast, private on-device agents. It extends the LFM2.5 family with a larger context window, expanded vocabulary, and agentic post-training, and it performs competitively with larger models on tool-use and agentic benchmarks. The model is released as open weights for local deployment and fine-tuning.
8. The First Social Network: In rural Argentina residents send messages w AM radio
⭐ 29 💬 10 👤 bookofjoe 🔗 Discuss on HN
In rural Argentina, isolated residents use AM radio programs to exchange short personal messages with family and neighbors, functioning as a primitive social network. These broadcasts read aloud handwritten notes, phone calls, or texts sent to local stations, allowing people without internet or reliable phone service to share updates, lost items, and simple well-wishes.
9. Catch a Bird – I made it for my own sanity
⭐ 198 💬 53 👤 eduardsik 🔗 Discuss on HN
Catch a Bird is an anonymous online experiment inspired by the Hungarian saying that a very happy person could catch birds. Visitors post short sentences about what made them happy, which appear as birds on a shared tree that others can catch, feed to keep them longer, and eventually let go. The site is free and public, with no sign-up, and each person can keep a personal bird book of sentences that touched them.
10. Americans’ social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years
⭐ 417 💬 388 👤 hubraumhugo 🔗 Discuss on HN
A new survey of U.S. adults finds that participation in many traditional social activities has fallen sharply over recent decades, with double-digit declines in hosting guests, attending club meetings, going to worship services, picnics, card games, and volunteering. In contrast, some activities have grown, especially internet use, home video gaming, exercise classes, and attending concerts. The findings add to evidence that Americans are becoming less socially connected in everyday life.