News

Mark Stephens, a.k.a. Robert X. Cringely, Died at 73

Mary Alyce Stephens (née Neader), posting on Cringely’s Facebook account: Hello, this is Mary Alyce, Bob’s wife. I am coming to you with immense sadness to let you know that Bob passed away. His obituary follows. His family is not requesting anything, however, if you would like t…

AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models

When Keelan Miskell began winding down his crypto startup this year, he didn’t think its data was worth much: the users were anonymous, the company just a few years old. But he’s since turned the firm’s digital archives into real money. He’s netted roughly $25,000 for his code ba…

MIT Technology Review

Character.AI Files for Bankruptcy Weeks After Disney Hired Its Former CEO

The AI company is now seeking a buyer, with Disney already offering $20 million for rights to some of its assets.

Apple Newsroom: Apple today introduced Apple HomeView, designed to be central to the home and personal to everyone in it. With a stunning 7-inch Liquid Retina display, HomeView brings entertainment, connection, and smart home management together in one place, from playing music a…

Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace On Why The Best Proptech Bets May Not Look Like Proptech

In a recent interview with Crunchbase News, Brendan Wallace, founder, CEO and chief investment officer of Fifth Wall, discussed the AI shift, why proptech funding totals may overlook some of the sector’s biggest investments, what it all means for founders, and the housing problem…

news.crunchbase.com

Bumble agrees to a $1.3B acquisition deal as online dating faces a reset

After years of declining subscriber numbers and falling revenue, Bumble just agreed to a $1.3 billion acquisition.

International tech

Build, Buy, Or Rent? How Indian CTOs Are Rethinking The AI Stack

For Indian enterprises adopting AI, choosing the technology is only part of the challenge. Deciding what to own, how much…

Huawei grows as China’s smartphone shipments fall 15.4% in third quarter

China’s smartphone shipments fell 15.4% year on year to 57.9 million units in the third quarter of 2026, according to preliminary IDC data released on October 13. Huawei was the only major vendor to record double-digit annual growth, shipping 12.2 million phones and leading the m…

Open-Source WeChatBridge Arrives on Windows in Beta, Sending WeChat Chats to Codex and Other Agents

WeChatBridge, a third-party open-source tool, now has a Windows beta that forwards selected WeChat chat records to AI agents such as Codex and Claude Code, or saves them to Obsidian.

China’s five-ton-payload robot debuts at Shanghai’s CIIF, but real-world performance is what counts

Industrial robots have traditionally competed on precision, speed and repeatability. But as the rated payload of a single robot exceeds five tons, a new set of technical challenges emerges: how to handle and process large industrial components reliably and consistently. The 26th …

Alibaba Opens Sign-Ups for Qwen Go!, a Personal Agent That Files Flight-Delay Claims and Refunds

Alibaba's Qwen app is preparing Qwen Go!, a personal agent that files flight-delay claims, requests price-protection refunds and books services. Access is opening in phases.

Freshworks To Acquire Torii To Expand AI Spend Governance Offerings

Nasdaq-listed SaaS major Freshworks has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Torii, a SaaS management platform, to extend its IT…

Meet the Anthropic Engineer Keeping Its AI Agent Trustworthy

If you’ve ever wondered how Claude and similar AI agents can answer complex questions in seconds and where they get the information, you’re not alone. Gurmeet Saran works to find that answer every day as an engineer at Anthropic in San Francisco, the AI research company behind Cl…

spectrum.ieee.org

The Download: open model trade-offs and geothermal power’s promise

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Open models have real benefits. Do they outweigh the risks? Anthropic recently released a report arguing that a powerful new model released by…

MIT Technology Review

Open models have real benefits. Do they outweigh the risks?

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. Late last month, Anthropic released a report arguing that the model GLM-5.3 poses a major…

MIT Technology Review

Trending

How to Build Models Without Language, with Logical Intelligence

Something unusual happened in a public Sudoku experiment early this year.

How the Math Used in 19th-Century Heat Physics Helps LLMs Understand Sentences

In this article, we are going to understand how this connection works and why a model needs help understanding the order of the words even when the words already arrive in an ordered list.

"You didn't do it right"

Four sincere attempts at OKRs, four failures, and every time: "you didn't do it right." Maybe the framework doesn't fit you -- so how do you find one that does?

longform.asmartbear.com

Counting the PET Bottles Needed to Make 1 Kg of Printer Filament

In countries where PET bottles do not get slapped with an additional fee that induces you to return it for recycling and said fee back, the resulting piles of discarded …read more

Open Firmware Fixes Dead Onkyo AV Receivers

If you’ve been reading Hackaday for any length of time, you’ll know we love seeing hackers replacing the stock firmware on their devices with open source alternatives. Usually this is …read more

The FPGA Chronicles: Ready to Probe

In the last few installments, we looked at using the Tang Nano 20K with both the GOWIN tools and some open-source tools. The open-source tools certainly had the advantage of …read more

Mozilla Introduces Firefox Enterprise

Article URL: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/enterprise/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50070302 Points: 322 # Comments: 151

CFTC Staff Were Told to Retract Analysis of Suspicious Oil Trades

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-10-13/cftc-staff-told-to-retract-analysis-of-suspicious-oil-trades-on-iran Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50069329 Points: 356 # Comments: 171

Emulating a Floppy Drive By Emulating The Drive Itself

The Commodore 1541 is famously the floppy drive for the Commodore 64 series of 8-bit computers, and can be found with relative ease. Not so well known is its 1551 …read more