Oct 24, 2026, 5:53 PMOur next winner could not join us this time. This special #YH4F 2026 award goes to his project Pianove, a piano learning app that anyone can use, study, share, and improve. 🎹
It allows to load any piece from a MusicXML file and practice it on your MIDI keyboard, fully offline, with no account and no subscription.
An alternative to commercial learning apps that everyone can use, study, share and improve: https://mariusangermann08.github.io/Pianove/
Oct 24, 2026, 6:04 PMThe #YH4F 2026 Awesome Hacker Award went to SmartFoodSave, an #AI platform that helps schools cut food waste by predicting leftovers before the food is even cooked. 🍽️
Under an #MITlicense, users can log menus, attendance, and portions, and a machine learning model estimates leftovers. A donation finder points surplus food to people who can use it. 🥕
https://www.smartfoodsave.xyz/
Oct 24, 2026, 6:13 PMFindMyWeb, developed by @misom@social.techncs.de, won the 2026 Elite Hacker Award! 🏆
A #FreeSoftware project that lets you build your own location trackers instead of buying a sealed commercial one. You build the tag, run the software yourself, and benefit from the huge crowd of phones that already rely on infrastructure like Find My signals. 📍
No lock-in. No vendor device or app. Your firmware, your server, your location data and history. Control your tech. 🔓
Oct 24, 2026, 6:23 PM#YH4F 2026 first prize, the Ultimate Hacker Award, goes to NumOs! 🥇
It’s a #FreeSoftware (#OpenSource) operating system for a graphing scientific calculator that anyone can study, compile, and modify. You can inspect how each calculation is performed, so “Is this calculator reliable?” is no longer a matter of trust: you can verify it.
Next stop: the NeoCalculator, a Free Software physical calculator with a custom PCB.
Oct 24, 2026, 9:08 PMThank you!! :underheart:
To ALL teenagers who took part in #YH4F: we hope to see some of you in next editions;
To our jury members who evaluate the submitted projects and have the hard task of choosing the winners;
To our sponsors who believe in this initiative;
To our amazing team, who support and help participants through the whole competition and make this award weekend happen.
Registrations for the 2027 edition are open: https://yh4f.org
Who will be the 2027 winners?!!
@fsfe that one’s not even free software, it’s full-on vibecoded, over 185 vommits by commercial fashtech slop extruders based on stolen works
Oct 24, 2026, 7:50 PMReally sad to see #YH4F discredit itself so unnecessarily that way. The prize has lost any value by granting it to a fraudulent project that betrays all free software values.
@mirabilos @fsfe Thx for info.
@Beachbum @fsfe you’re welcome.
Looking at it a bit closer…
Nascondiamo vecchi errori e blocchiamo il bottone to We hide old mistakes and block the button is what Google Translate spits out and is odd, as the context is hiding old error messages, not mistakes…Not sure whether the FSFE even has an “AI” policy. I tried finding anything other than blogposts, but even their ALL AWARENESS ACTIVITIES and ALL POLICY ACTIVITIES pages give 404… the ALL LEGAL ACTIVITIES list nothing related. I’ve no idea.
By the way, https://mastodon.social/@ryanprior/117496914743525428 from just today explains that LLM-containing software cannot be Free software from another angle.
@fsfe was it clear from the beginning that creating code with llms is allowed?
Oct 24, 2026, 9:18 PM@fsfe Good on them!!
@fsfe wtaf, even the documentation reads like vibecoded slop