Hacker Newsroom for 17 July: Kimi K3, Thinking Machines Inkling, Music Piracy Nostalgia, Sony Deletes Movies

Welcome to Hacker Newsroom, your daily digest of the hot topics in the Hacker News community. Today we're covering Kimi K3, Open Frontier Intelligence, Inkling, our open weights model, the lost joy of music piracy, and Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who bought them. Let's get into it. The next story is Kimi K3, Open Frontier Intelligence,

a launch post for Kimi's new 2.8 trillion parameter model with native vision, a 1 million token context window, and claims of frontier-level performance that still trails the very top proprietary systems. The article positions K3 as the first open 3T class model, and points to long horizon coding, compiler building, game creation, chip design, and research automation

as proof that it can handle bigger autonomous workloads, with full weights promised by July 27, 2026. Hacker News reacted with a mix of interest and skepticism, especially around the pricing, the thin benchmark detail at launch, and the awkward claim that the model is second only to two other models. In the comments, the main debate was whether token pricing means much at

all without accounting for tokenizer differences, reasoning token bloat, caching, and the total cost of finishing a real task, with several readers arguing cheaper rivals may still be better value in practice.

Among the comments we can read, one dry line was, so it ranks third. And another recurring point was that if a model needs far more reasoning tokens to get the same result,

headline price comparisons stop being very meaningful. The next story is a Thinking Machines post introducing Inkling, an open-weights, multi-modal model with 975 billion total parameters, 41 billion active, a 1 million token context window, and a pitch centered more on customization than on claiming best-in-class raw performance. The post says Inkling was trained across text, images, audio, and video, supports controllable reasoning effort, comes with a smaller companion model, and is tied to the company's Tinker platform for fine-tuning, including a demo where the model fine-tunes itself. Hacker News reacted with interest, but also immediate scorekeeping, with many commenters

asking whether this is the credible American OpenWeights contender people have been waiting for, or just an impressive first release that still trails leaders like GLM 5.2. In the comments, the biggest threads were about the business model for OpenWeight Labs, whether hosted fine-tuning is enough of a moat, how easily customers could switch providers,

and whether Meta's move away from Llama leaves room for new entrants. Among the comments we can read, one line was that competition is going to be ruthless because switching costs are so low, while another framed the core question more bluntly. What is the business model for an open-weight model? The next story is The Lost Joy of Music Piracy, an article that looks back at Oink and WhatCD and argues that the real loss was not just free music, but the culture of discovery, curation, and ownership that streaming never replaced.

Through Nine Inch Nails creative director Rob Sheridan, the piece says those private communities gave fans better access to music, pushed artists to rethink release strategies, and exposed how badly the old industry model fit the internet. Hacker News reacted with a mix of nostalgia and frustration, with plenty of readers saying streaming solved convenience, but created new problems around disappearing tracks, weak portability, and the feeling that your library is never really yours. In the comments, people swapped notes on soul-seek, bandcamp loopholes, private trackers, audio quality, and the ethics debate over whether piracy mostly hurts artists or mostly routes around labels and licensing failures.

Among the comments we can read, one person said shutting down what CD was like they burned the Library of Alexandria, while another captured the broader mood more simply. The internet just is not what it was anymore. The next story is about Sony deleting more movies from PlayStation accounts, years after

customers were told they had bought them, with a TechDirt article arguing this is yet another reminder that many digital purchases are really just fragile licenses. The article says a new Studio Canal licensing fallout will remove 551 films and TV titles on September 1, 2026, after similar pullbacks in 2022 and 2023.

And once again, customers are not being refunded. Hacker News was angry, but not especially surprised, with many commenters saying this is exactly why people pirate, rip media to home servers, or avoid all digital libraries altogether.

In the comments, people debated whether Sony's use of a buy button could weaken its legal position, whether the law should force full refunds when access is revoked, and whether physical media is actually much safer once DRM is involved.

Among the sharper reactions were, piracy is not theft, and pick one, aimed at companies that market access like ownership and then take it back. The next story is Microsoft Comic Chat going open source,

with Microsoft releasing the 1996 IRC client that turned chat into comic panels, helped popularize Comic Sans, and even included rough modernization experiments to get the old C++ code running on modern Windows again. The news story presents it as a software time capsule,

and a reminder that online communication once made room for much stranger, more playful ideas than today's standard messaging apps. Hacker News mostly reacted with delight and nostalgia, with plenty of people saying Comic Chat was their first taste of IRC or even the internet itself.

In the comments, people shared memories, linked the GitHub repo and old research papers, and debated whether Comic Chat was visionary or infamous for stuffing IRC messages with noisy metadata that annoyed everyone not using the client. There was also a side discussion about Microsoft's old version control tools,

and some skepticism about the AI-flavored framing of the release.