news.ycombinator.com
Are you good at AI, or just using it?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378057We’re working on a ladder for individual AI proficiency and would love feedback on both the levels and the definitions.L0 New: brand new to AI, or has not yet used it.L1 Chat: simple prompt-and-response use. Work is serial: ask, wait for an answer, then ask again.L2 Contextual Work: gives AI relevant documents, data, or workspace context so it can work within the actual artifact and produce a more useful result.L3 Orchestrate: coordinates multiple agents or AI roles across independent workstreams, with work that may review, challenge, compare, or build on other work. This is not just for engineering.L4 Automate: creates workflows that are triggered by business events and run without someone sitting at a laptop directing each step.L5 Loop: feeds the output of those workflows back into shared knowledge or a company brain, so future workflows improve over time.A few things I’d love your perspective on:Are these the right levels? Are any of the names unclear or overlapping? What observableAug 20, 2026 6:04 PM
foundera.app
Show HN: AI-Native Accelerator that helps builders make something people wanthttps://foundera.app/Most people are not validating their ideas before start building it! I am a 5th time tech founder, gaming included and I built & managed startup accelerator programs. I know lot of things about early stage founders and their pains as I have been there. That is why I am building Foundera. It’s an AI-Native Accelerator for tech builders. Today the problem is; most of the AI coding tools opens with a chat and asking “type your idea and start building”. This is wrong! I want to reduce the time and money spent on ideas that nobody asked for. Try it at https://foundera.app and give me your feedback so that I can help more people.Aug 20, 2026 5:16 PM
bing.com
Watch: Colo. Police Officer Uses Body Camera to Translate Mandarin During Traffic Stophttp://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=6a891e213b914dd98fc3f6e65803f1cb&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.officer.com%2Fon-the-street%2Fbody-cameras%2Fnews%2F55399890%2Fvideo-shows-parker-police-officer-using-body-camera-translation-feature-with-mandarin-speaking-driver&c=1734999827354688948&mkt=en-usA body camera's AI-powered, built-in translation tool helped a Parker police officer overcome a language barrier and communicate with a Mandarin-speaking driver during a ...Aug 20, 2026 5:00 PM
bing.com
Video: Okla. Police Deploy Drone to Help Save Victim During Dog Attackhttp://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=6a891e213b914dd98fc3f6e65803f1cb&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.officer.com%2Fcommand-hq%2Ftechnology%2Fsecurity-surveillance%2Fuav-uas%2Fnews%2F55399863%2Foklahoma-city-police-drone-helps-save-victim-during-attack-by-multiple-dogs&c=2494814048466445191&mkt=en-usOklahoma City police used a drone's high-intensity spotlight to disrupt an attack by multiple dogs before tracking the animals to a nearby home where officers made arrests.Aug 20, 2026 5:00 PM
outbid.to
Show HN: Outbid.to, a pay-to-win leaderboard for websiteshttps://www.outbid.to/I built outbid.to as a simple experiment in transparent paid discovery.Submit a website, place a whole-dollar bid, and your bid determines your rank. The highest bidder takes #1. If someone outbids you, your listing moves down but stays live.There are no hidden ranking factors or editorial decisions. The minimum bid is $2, payments are handled through Stripe, and each listing shows the traffic it receives.I’m curious whether an openly pay-to-win leaderboard can be more useful and entertaining than traditional ads or sponsored directories.Would appreciate feedback on the ranking mechanics, pricing, and anything that feels unclear.Aug 20, 2026 4:52 PM
tablecanon.app
Show HN: Building Table Canon, an AI Campaign Memory Engine for TTRPGshttps://tablecanon.app/Hey HN! I built Table Canon to solve a problem my playgroup kept running into: 3-4 hour tabletop gaming sessions leave behind massive audio recordings, but standard meeting note-takers treat every session as an isolated island, butcher fantasy terms, and don't know who is speaking.I wanted an engine that tracks long-term state across months of games, so I built a pipeline to extract entity updates, open quest hooks, and character promises across sessions.The Tech Stack:* Transcription: whisper-large-v3-turbo * Diarization: pyannote for speaker embeddings & voice profile matching Extraction & Memory: OpenAI API with Structured Outputs (JSON Schema enforcement for state updates) * TTS & Audio Recaps: Kokoro / Chatterbox Turbo Music Generation: ACE-Step-v1.5-XL-Turbo for rendering session summaries into lyrics/balladsA Few Engineering Lessons & Challenges:* State Delta Extraction vs. Context Explosions: Feeding 20 prior session transcripts into context windows quickly becomes cost-prohibiAug 20, 2026 4:40 PM

spacenews.com
Rocket Lab launches 9th satellite for iQPShttps://spacenews.com/rocket-lab-launches-9th-satellite-for-iqps/Rocket Lab launched another satellite for Japanese radar-imaging company iQPS on Aug. 20. The post Rocket Lab launches 9th satellite for iQPS appeared first on SpaceNews.Aug 20, 2026 4:38 PM
drillerdb.com
Show HN: The First 3D Map of North America's Underground Geologyhttps://drillerdb.com/undergroundOver the past year, we've been running OCR on over 13 million handwritten and typed well logs across North America. After that we standardized the unique terms used by drillers across America into one format, which we've based on the USGS's lithologic standards.Before this project, underground data was fragmented by state or county jurisdictions and had different standards for reporting and terminology. This is the first nationwide lithological grid ever made at this scale.Most regions have pretty good coverage. However, be aware some areas like the southeast of the US especially has some pretty significant gaps due to the reporting standards in those regions.We also have a research program! https://drillerdb.com/researchAug 20, 2026 4:32 PM
epho.io
Show HN: Epho – run Claude Code with a curlhttps://epho.ioHey folks, Burak here.Epho is an API that allows running Claude Code, Codex or Opencode in a sandbox in the cloud. It abstracts away sandboxes, and allows running coding agents with a single HTTP request.Epho came out of our own struggles with building our own AI analyst: - Sandboxes give you bare machines; you need to configure them for agentic workloads. - Each agent behaves differently, and you need to build integrations with each of them. - Sandbox providers are not very reliable, which means you need to figure out a multi-provider strategy to avoid failures. - Logging, artifacts, input/output, event streaming, and all of the other operational aspects need to be figured out.We had to go through the pain ourselves. We got to a point where things got quite reliable, and it became more obvious to us that this should be a primitive on its own: send a POST request, get the events streaming back to you.Epho is an agents-as-an-API product: you send a request, it spins up a sandbox, configAug 20, 2026 3:45 PM
news.ycombinator.com
Ask HN: No Path from Techie to Management?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49376072When I was a much more junior techie I would apply for management roles in my company only to be told that I needed more experience and to upgrade my credentials. Years later I have certifications, a graduate degree and have advanced through the technical ranks. Now when I apply to management roles I am told that they are looking for a fresh perspective after hiring junior to intermediate applicants into the roles.I am not an isolated example at my work and as a result we have lost some excellent talent. Is this happening at other companies or is mine an outlier?Outside of this problem I really like where I work and the people that I work with but I feel that I may need to move on if I want to advance my career. I can't think of a way to address this problem with the higher ups without torching my future further.Aug 20, 2026 3:32 PM
github.com
Launch HN: Vendo (YC S26) – Let users build features on top of your producthttps://github.com/runvendo/vendoHi HN, we’re Yousef & Nour, founders of Vendo (https://vendo.run). Vendo lets users create new features inside the software they already use. A user describes the dashboard, workflow, or small app they need, and Vendo builds it on top of the product’s existing data, API, and interface.Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdpHehY64lsWe built Vendo because every SaaS eventually faces the same problem: every customer needs something slightly different. One wants a new report and another needs a workflow that only makes sense for their team. These requests either sit on the roadmap, become one-off engineering work, or force the customer into spreadsheets and external tools. We wanted the user to be able to create the missing feature themselves, without leaving the product.Here is how it works:- npx vendo init reads the product's API surface, theme, routes, and more. These are used so that the apps Vendo creates (1) look on-brand and native and (2) have the ability to read data and performAug 20, 2026 3:29 PM

bbc.com
Battle for Mali base has killed dozens of militants, army sayshttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly8j7ygwvloThe army says it was involved in fierce fighting but disputes that Islamists took control of the garrison.Aug 20, 2026 3:24 PM

nasa.gov
Artemis Mission Patcheshttps://www.nasa.gov/image-article/artemis-mission-patches/A jacket decorated with Artemis I and II mission patches, along with other NASA patches hangs on the back of a chair on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026, inside the Rocco A. Petrone Launch Control Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a terminal countdown simulation for the Artemis III mission. NASA’s Exploration Ground […]Aug 20, 2026 3:13 PM

europeanspaceflight.com
ESA Confirms Ariane 6 Block 3 Upgrades Have Been Shelvedhttps://europeanspaceflight.com/esa-confirms-ariane-6-block-3-upgrades-have-been-shelved/The European Space Agency has confirmed to European Spaceflight that it is no longer considering the Ariane 6 Block 3 evolution, saying there is “no programme need or justification” for the evolution at this time. Questions regarding the scrapping of the Block 3 upgrades arose earlier this month after SpaceScout reported that an ESA study […] The post ESA Confirms Ariane 6 Block 3 Upgrades Have Been Shelved appeared first on European Spaceflight.Aug 20, 2026 2:58 PM
pub.doub.ly
Show HN: Check if any of the $656M in unclaimed royalties at The MLC is yourshttps://pub.doub.ly/Hi HN, I built this. Quick background on why it exists:When music is streamed on digital streaming platforms (think Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora), there are two separate royalty streams: one for the recording, paid through your distributor (DistroKid, TuneCore, CDBaby), and one for the underlying work (generally known as publishing). The work side's mechanical royalties are collected by The MLC, a nonprofit that was created by the 2018 Music Modernization Act (MMA). If you haven't registered your songs with The MLC, there are issues with your metadata, or about half a dozen other reasons, that money will never reach you, it just collects in a big pile we call the "black box".That pile is big. The MLC's own dashboard currently shows over $656M is held (themlc.com/blanket-royalties), and the biggest problem is the MMA dictates that The MLC cannot hold that money indefinitely. At some point, by law, The MLC must distribute this big pile of cash, and since they don't know who it's supposeAug 20, 2026 2:38 PM

arstechnica.com
Genesis joins the giant electric SUV club with new GV90https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/genesis-joins-the-giant-electric-suv-club-with-new-gv90/A retractable screen, a huge heads-up display, and an optional 4-seat VIP interior.Aug 20, 2026 2:35 PM

nasa.gov
The View from Above: The Gemini Visual Acuity Experimentshttps://www.nasa.gov/history/the-view-from-above-the-gemini-visual-acuity-experiments/NASA astronaut L. Gordon Cooper, Jr. took 29 color photographs of the Earth with a 70mm camera as he orbited our planet during the Mercury-Atlas 9 mission in May 1963. Cooper’s view from the window of his Faith 7 spacecraft was spectacular, and he reported that he could see vehicles motoring on dirt roads, smoke-belching trains, […]Aug 20, 2026 2:30 PM
bisecto.com
Show HN: Bisecto – A minimalist game about cutting shapes into 50/50 halveshttps://bisecto.com/Hey HN,I built Bisecto (https://bisecto.com), a minimalist browser game with one simple mechanic, cutting (bisecting) a procedural 2D shape into two exact 50/50 halves with a single straight line.Confession: I got completely hooked watching those viral reels of people trying to cut fruits and vegetables into perfectly equal halves, and that was my inspiration for this game :D I've been writing code for 12+ years, but for this project I leaned heavily on LLMs to quickly spin up this game, I thought it's going to be quick, but it took me some time (around 2 weeks) to make the game the way I want it to be.A few game modes to try: - Classic: Endless run, you get to choose difficulty and line cutting mode- Arcade mode: You get 3 lives, you have to keep accuracy above 95%.- Daily challenge: A shared daily seed, 10 identical shapes for everyone, see how you rank.- Friends challenges: Create a challenge and send it to your friends and see who is better at cutting shapes in half.Under the hood:Aug 20, 2026 2:15 PM
github.com
Show HN: Omacosy – Omarchy-style tiling desktop for macOS, no SIPhttps://github.com/paulsp94/omacosyI have been using omarchy on my tower since nearly a year now, shortly after it was released first. I really love the experience I am having with it but I still use my macbook for daly work, so I wanted to recreate a similar experience on it. Thats why I created omacosy, a setup for tiling windows, custom menu bar, some themes from omarchy, focus follows mouse, focus rings around windwos, some mac flavors with trackpad events and a custom mission control overview for your workspaces.I used AeroSpace over yabai for the tiling window manager because I didnt wanted to compromise on SIP which is a mac security feature. It is supposed to be keyboard first like omarchy to move windows organize workspaces etc The setup runs around 157mb of ram and consists of AeroSpace, Karabiner (for the super key), and five small self build swift binaries.I am running it daily on my M1 max macbook, currently on macOS26. I havent tested it much on other macbooks or macOS versions. The install script creates Aug 20, 2026 2:12 PM
bing.com
Barcelona or Real Madrid? As La Liga kicks off, the eternal question once again dominates debatehttp://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=6a89b9337c2c4f7786b27d4051680ca3&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.msn.com%2Fen-us%2Fsports%2Fother%2Fbarcelona-or-real-madrid-as-la-liga-kicks-off-the-eternal-question-once-again-dominates-debate%2Far-AA2aAhwP&c=11190619975588867194&mkt=en-usFC Barcelona great Carles Puyol and former Real Madrid forward Steve McManaman believe this year's La Liga race will come down to the usual suspects.Aug 20, 2026 2:12 PM