Daily issue / 2026-09-13
Useful things that surfaced in Hacker News discussions on 2026-09-13. Open the context to see why each one caught our attention—or jump straight to the original thread.
What we found
Jon Gertner's history of Bell Labs and its foundational inventions.
Source discussion: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
“Awesome book about the history if Bell Labs - virtually all semiconductor tech we use today was created there”
kolinko · recommendation
Direct HN comment
Peter Pomerantsev's book about modern disinformation and the war against reality.
Source discussion: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
“you ought to read Peter Pomerantsev's excellent "This is Not Propaganda"”
squidbeak · recommendation
Direct HN comment
Wilfrid Hodges' accessible introduction to formal logic for beginners.
Source discussion: Navier-Stokes Announcement
“I highly recommend the following two books to study Logic from the beginning (for a layman); Logic: An Introduction to Elementary Logic by Wilfrid Hodges.”
rramadass · recommendation
Direct HN comment
An indie catalog of strange, relatable quirks of the human body.
Source discussion: Show HN: Bodily Oddities
“I love this website. It's fantastic. I don't care if it's AI. The world is better for it existing.”
echelon · recommendation · evaluated
Direct HN comment
A search engine for exploring historical posts from early Usenet archives.
Source discussion: Usenet rewind archive search engine
“Just found some cool old stuff thanks to this:”
msephton · recommendation · first hand use
Direct HN comment
A detailed video walkthrough of the transformer-circuits mathematical framework.
Source discussion: A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits (2021)
“Neal Nanda's walkthrough of it is pretty good.”
robrenaud · recommendation · evaluated
Direct HN comment
A Rust tool that explores permutations of concurrent test executions.
Source discussion: Testing Race Conditions
“Loom is such an amazing project. I was always surprised by the fact that similar tooling for C/C++ is much more cumbersome to use”
mdspan · recommendation · evaluated
Direct HN comment
A technical reference on stable character feet and inverse-kinematics run cycles.
Source discussion: Inverse Kinematics and Foot Locking
“This is one of the best references on this topic I've seen - run cycles and foot locking are annoyingly lacking in documentation outside a few papers.”
mmastrac · recommendation · evaluated
Direct HN comment
A lightweight, self-hosted videoconferencing server that supports standard browsers.
Source discussion: Linux Zoom client proactively reading everything written to X11 clipboard
“Very easy to set up, I run it on obsd(an unsupported platform) and it just works.”
somat · recommendation · first hand use
Direct HN comment
A free, open-source platform for browser-based video meetings.
Source discussion: Linux Zoom client proactively reading everything written to X11 clipboard
“Jitsi is an excellent free and open source alternative.”
rascul · recommendation
Direct HN comment
A build visualizer for understanding where Bun compilation time is spent.
Source discussion: I made a build visualizer to understand Bun's compile times
“I have some rudimentary tooling I threw together myself but nothing that looks as comprehensive and insightfully presented as this, I'll be giving it a try!”
applfanboysbgon · recommendation · evaluated
Direct HN comment
OpenStreetMap's browser editor for quick, approachable map corrections.
Source discussion: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap
“Would highly recommend the web editor -- what's proposed here looks super comprehensive but way more difficult to use for a first timer.”
jkingsman · recommendation · first hand use
Direct HN comment