frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o
17•m-i-l•42m ago

Comments

throwaway27448•24m ago
Books are seemingly more expensive than ever but paradoxically declining in material and substantial quality (i.e., are poorly edited and printed). Buying used books is just good financial sense.
functionmouse•13m ago
We're no longer an economy that produces things to be consumed, but rather one that produces things that increase consumption.

Could be the makings of a dark age.

mschild•11m ago
Exactly this. I'm not entirely certain AI has anything to do with it but my last book purchases have been entirely used.

Our local independent book shop got together with a couple other dozen and started a used book platform. If I have a book I don't want, I'll let them know, if they have a buyer, I just bring it to them and get a small amount of money. They take a fee for the handling and everyone's happy. A used book is usually max half the price of new and there is a decently wide selection.

A lot of online retailers have also started stocking used books as a cheaper alternative.

Zigurd•4m ago
I don't know about globally but in the US anything that isn't sure to be a mass market item is going to be print on demand. While there's some perfectly good print on demand out there, it's often of lower quality than conventional printing.
Zigurd•12m ago
Yes it is probably due to AI training. The clue is that it's bulk orders driving the increase.

The annoying thing about the article is the hand wringing. If anything this is the least dubious way to acquire training material. They are paying the correct party to get that material. AI training is at least as transformative as throwing the words into an inverted index for web search.

One thing this demonstrates is that there's still training material to be mined that's original, and high enough quality to have been published on paper. This source of material won't get mined out until all the similar material originally written in major foreign languages get scanned and translated for training purposes. We are in the gentle slopes of the lower foothills of the never gonna be AGI so I'll call it singularity.

Browser-based Autodesk Inventor file viewer – no Autodesk software required

https://jfk-solutions.github.io/inventor-viewer/
1•jogibear9988•15s ago•0 comments

I gave an AI £150 and three months to earn its own subscription

https://agentwrought.com/
1•oceantidote•2m ago•0 comments

Gmail attachment IDs are not stable (and how they doubled our index)

https://dioveo.com/blog/gmail-attachment-ids-are-not-stable
1•stranger90•5m ago•0 comments

Amazon bars customers from filing lawsuits

https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/abblog/blog.pl?/pl/2026/8/1786759108.html
1•ilamont•6m ago•0 comments

Paper on Architecture for AI-Assisted Software Development

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27045
1•puuush•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A zero-symbol engine to mathematically rank Windows RPC attack surface

https://github.com/talha-nazeef-ahmed/RPC-Triage
1•Sphinx_321•8m ago•0 comments

YACS 2.0 – Yet Another Curta Simulator

https://satadorus.eu/x_ite/yacs_2_0/yacs_2_0.html
1•neom•9m ago•0 comments

Make Claude Say Less

https://mooch.agency/say-less
1•tahigichigi•10m ago•0 comments

A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode

https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html
1•sensanaty•16m ago•0 comments

Venn Diagram of the Internet

https://diagram.website/
1•Gecko4072•17m ago•0 comments

EPA sued for approving semiconductor chemicals that may pose health risks

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/6030328-epa-chemical-approval-lawsuit/
2•pudgywalsh•17m ago•0 comments

Ukraine strikes Russia's only Soyuz rocket plant with Flamingo missiles

https://www.turkiyetoday.com/world/ukraine-strikes-russias-only-soyuz-rocket-plant-with-flamingo-...
2•rbanffy•19m ago•0 comments

Gen Z has rediscovered the joy of going to the movies

https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/08/11/gen-z-has-rediscovered-the-joy-of-going-to-the-movies
2•edward•21m ago•0 comments

The Mystery of Dark Oxygen

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mystery-of-dark-oxygen
1•mitchbob•22m ago•1 comments

Qwen3.8-27B – Release Day Demos

https://loktar00.github.io/qwen3-8-27b-demos/
1•yogthos•23m ago•0 comments

I Ported Moonshine to JavaScript

https://petewarden.com/2026/08/15/why-i-ported-moonshine-to-javascript/
2•jreynar•24m ago•0 comments

Turns every merge into release notes

https://www.changelogfa.st
2•aziaziazi•24m ago•0 comments

Capacity planning with hyper local events

https://www.allevents.ai/blog/events-capacity-planning
2•bharatgel•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I evaluated file, vector, graph and RL based memory frameworks

https://www.pinglin.tw/blog/the-shapes-of-agent-memory
3•pinglin•27m ago•0 comments

Dwarkesh Patel's Podcast with Ryan Greenblatt

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-dwarkesh-patels-podcast-with-ryan
2•7777777phil•27m ago•0 comments

SlopScan: Displays a "slop score" when viewing public Git repositories

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/slopscan/
3•birdculture•28m ago•1 comments

Printytron – Type it. 3D Print it

https://printytron.com
2•statenjason•28m ago•0 comments

Use Context.dev in a eve software factory

https://twitter.com/i/status/2088610340158476514
2•flashbrew•29m ago•0 comments

Open-source wallet SDK for AI agents

https://github.com/Squid-Pay/Squid-Agent-Wallet-SDK
2•horatiucode•31m ago•0 comments

High-Performance Optimistic Concurrency Cache

https://github.com/adanil-code/OptimisticCache
2•adanil_•36m ago•1 comments

U.S. to tell partners they must pick sides in AI race with China

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2026/08/15/tech/us-ai-coalition-china-warning/
2•osivertsson•36m ago•1 comments

The most dangerous iPhone Game (beta)

https://testflight.apple.com/join/z1yM1vbj
2•guidouil•37m ago•0 comments

As speed cameras spread to more states, so does the backlash from drivers

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/14/nx-s1-5927506/speed-cameras-ticket-backlash
2•thehoff•37m ago•0 comments

The AI Situation in Software Development

https://srikanth.ch/posts/the-ai-situation/
2•srikanthdotch•38m ago•0 comments

Lamer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamer
4•ieie3366•38m ago•0 comments