What's moving through AI, ranked by lead time.
Radar is an hourly index of what's moving through the AI ecosystem, ranked by where each story sits on the lead-time gradient: papers become repos become community threads become analysis. The earlier a story is caught, the more head start you have before the crowd. Every row carries its receipts — which source saw it first, how many independent sources have it, how long ago — so the ranking explains itself. It's the public face of the same pipeline that feeds Vlad's Newsletter.
snapshot 10 Jul 2026, 04:18 UTC · 67/78 feeds live · 12,017 tracked since 12 Jun
- 1 Show HN: R3 – A Local Code Review Tool for You and Your AI Agent github.com · 6m
- 2 Show HN: AppleWalls – free 4K wallpapers for Apple devices applewalls.com · 24m
- 3 Cpp2Rust: Automatic Translation of C++ to Safe Rust github.com · 54m
- 4 Show HN: Bring All Your Context Together news.ycombinator.com · 1h
- 5 Show HN: Free open-world zombie survival sandbox game smartlydressedgames.com · 2h
489 stories entered the watched feeds in the last 24 hours — 173 in papers, 14 in repos, 262 in community, 40 in analysis. The scored board skews to Community (30 of 40). 1 story is heating across independent sources, and the median lead across the ledger's 13 observed fires is 3h — measured, not estimated. Freshest receipt, 8h ago: caught in Hacker News best 2h before OpenAI News carried it. The oldest survivor has held the board for 4d.
- Community → Analysis +2h lead Hacker News best first · then OpenAI News 8h agoGPT-5.6
- Community → Analysis +2h lead Hacker News front first · then OpenAI News 8h agoChatGPT Work
- Papers → Community +11d lead arXiv cs.AI first · then Hacker News front 4d agoThe Hitchhiker's Guide to Agentic AI: From Foundations to Systems
- 1Show HN: R3 – A Local Code Review Tool for You and Your AI Agentgithub.comLive Signal Community · 6m old · via Show HN
- 2Show HN: AppleWalls – free 4K wallpapers for Apple devicesapplewalls.comLive Signal Community · 24m old · via Show HN
- 3Cpp2Rust: Automatic Translation of C++ to Safe Rustgithub.comLive Signal Community · 54m old · via Lobsters
- 4Show HN: Bring All Your Context Togethernews.ycombinator.comLive Signal Community · 1h old · via Show HN
- 5Show HN: Free open-world zombie survival sandbox gamesmartlydressedgames.comLive Signal Community · 2h old · via Show HN
- 6
- 7Show HN: TensorSharp: Open-Source Local LLM Inference Enginetensorsharp.aiLive Signal Community · 2h old · via Show HN
- 8Show HN: Even Keel – free, no-signup freelance pricing calculatorsevenkeelhq.comLive Signal Community · 2h old · via Show HN
- 9Ben Bernanke Joins Anthropic Oversight Trustanthropic.comLive Signal Community · 2h old · via Hacker News front
- 10Show HN: BrowserBox over SSH – The KRNL Browserwin9-5.comLive Signal Community · 2h old · via Show HN
- 11Show HN: Resultant Engineering Student Tools Websiteresultant.toolsLive Signal Community · 2h old · via Show HN
- 12Fast Image & Video Fidelity Metrics in C, Ziggithub.comLive Signal Community · 2h old · via Lobsters
- 13Show HN: Free AI transcription with faster-whisper on Colab T4 GPUgithub.comLive Signal Community · 2h old · via Show HN
- 14Show HN: Debloat Slack – Get rid of Slackbot, AI upsells and other annoyancesgithub.comLive Signal Community · 2h old · via Show HN
- 15Show HN: We beat Gemini Embedding 2 by training only 16M params (open weights)huggingface.coLive Signal Community · 2h old · via Show HN
- 16
- 17Build your own vulnerability harnessblog.cloudflare.comLive Signal Community · 3h old · via Hacker News front
- 18Star Just Ate a Planet, and It's Not Done Yetnytimes.comLive Signal Community · 3h old · via Hacker News front
- 19Show HN: Selvedge – long-term memory for AI-coded codebasesselvedge.shLive Signal Community · 3h old · via Show HN
- 20Show HN: Fortress – Give your agents unlimited access to the webnews.ycombinator.comLive Signal Community · 3h old · via Show HN
- 21Reading into VLM hallucinations using the Jacobian lenslesswrong.comLive Signal Community · 4h old · via LessWrong
- 22Are We Guarding Against Backdoors Or Failing To Notice Them? (Part 1 / 6)lesswrong.comLive Signal Community · 4h old · via LessWrong
- 23A genealogy of AI safety: how directions are born, and how they die (2005-2026)lesswrong.comLive Signal Community · 4h old · via LessWrong
- 24How robust are natural language autoencoders to initialization?lesswrong.comLive Signal Community · 4h old · seen in 2 sources
- 25
- 26Toward A Public Science of Model Behaviorlesswrong.comLive Signal Community · 4h old · via LessWrong
- 27Study: "Mommy, do you love your phone more than me?"frontiersin.orgLive Signal Community · 4h old · via Hacker News front
- 28Show HN: I built a free app for New Yorkers to save money on groceriessbnyc.appLive Signal Community · 4h old · via Show HN
- 29AI Safety Policy Needs to train Legal Practitionerslesswrong.comLive Signal Community · 4h old · via LessWrong
- 30What would it take for AI to discover penicillin?lesswrong.comLive Signal Community · 4h old · via LessWrong
- 31Show HN: Fortress – stealth Chromium + MCP so agents don't get blockedtilion.devLive Signal Community · 4h old · via Show HN
- 32Repo-Local Documentation System for Humans & Agentsgist.github.comLive Signal Community · 5h old · via Lobsters
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How Radar works
The gradient. Stories travel through the AI ecosystem in a rough sequence: they appear first in papers (arXiv, Hugging Face) or repos (GitHub), then surface in community discussion (Hacker News, Lobsters, LessWrong), then get interpreted in analysis (operator newsletters and essays). Radar ranks by where a story sits on that gradient. The earlier it is caught, the more lead time you have before it reaches consensus. The spectrum at the top of the page shows the last 24 hours of that flow — every story that entered the watched feeds, counted at the station where it first appeared.
The score. Each story gets a recency-decayed signal score. Every source tier carries a weight and a half-life, so live signal moves fast and fades fast while analysis sources move slowly and stay relevant longer. A story scores higher when two or more independent source families carry it — corroboration, not popularity, which is why five feeds of the same site count once. A small bonus applies when a story has visibly climbed the gradient. Stories past their tier's maximum age expire from the board.
Heating and lead time. A story is heating when it has surfaced in two or more independent source families. When the same story is observed first at an earlier stage and later at a higher one, Radar records the gap in hours — for example, seen on arXiv fourteen hours before it reached the Hacker News front page. That gap is the reader's lead time, and it is a measured span, never an estimate.
The honesty rule. Every value on this page is an observed fact from the feed log — which source carried a story, when, and how many. Radar makes no claim about what a story means; that is the newsletter's job. When a reading does not exist yet — no stories heating, nothing upstream — the page says so rather than inventing one.
Questions
- What is the lead-time gradient?
- The path a story travels through the AI ecosystem: it appears first in papers (arXiv, Hugging Face) or repos (GitHub), then surfaces in community discussion (Hacker News, Lobsters, LessWrong), then gets interpreted in analysis (operator newsletters, essays). Radar ranks by where a story sits on that path and how far it has travelled.
- What does the lead-time spectrum show?
- Every story that entered Radar’s watched feeds in the last 24 hours, bucketed by the gradient station where it first appeared — papers, repos, community, or analysis. It is the day’s flow through the whole watched ecosystem, not the composition of the scored top 40 below it: a paper counts in the flow the moment it is observed, even while its signal score is still too low to earn a board row.
- How is Radar ranked?
- By a recency-decayed signal score: each source tier has a weight and a half-life, a story scores higher when independent source families corroborate it, and a small bonus applies when a story has visibly climbed the gradient. Stories past their tier max age expire from the board. Popularity on a single site is not corroboration.
- How often does Radar update?
- Hourly. The page is server-rendered and a frozen snapshot is archived at a dated permalink each day, so the record is both current and citable.
- What does "heating" mean?
- A story has surfaced in two or more independent source families — not two feeds of the same site. It is corroboration, not popularity.
- What is the lead time reading?
- When the same story is observed first at an earlier gradient stage and later at a higher one, Radar records the gap in hours — for example, seen on arXiv 14 hours before it reached the Hacker News front page. That gap is your lead time. The fires ledger is rolling: a fire ages out with its story, roughly 45 days after the story’s last sighting, so the median lead always describes recent motion.
- What sources does Radar watch?
- Around 78 verified feeds across five tiers: live signal (Hacker News, Lobsters, GitHub trending, arXiv, Hugging Face papers), AI labs and firehose blogs, operator newsletters, contrarian essayists, and primary analysis. The registry is curated; aggregators are used only to corroborate a story, never to be the first to report it.
- Is Radar the newsletter?
- No. Radar shows what is moving; the newsletter tells you what to do about it. Radar is the free, public funnel; Vlad’s Newsletter is the weekly operator read.
- The spectrum band
- A filled flame tick is an early, lead-time-rich stage; a hollow tick is a later stage; a hollow ring on an empty span is a station with nothing on it yet.
- Signal class
- The tier chip: Live Signal moves fast and decays fast; analysis sources stay relevant longer. The ranker weights each accordingly.
- heating
- The same story in two or more independent source families — not two feeds of one site.
- seen in / via
- How many families carried it, or the single source that did.
Once a week, the operator read on what actually changed and the move it calls for. No digest, no hype.
Read the newsletter →