Robots Write Code, Trains Get Sabotaged!

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

Key Points

• Unseen video shows 1980 Battlezone cabinet assembly, finishing, and shipping at Atari’s Sunnyvale facility.
• Battlezone’s vector-driven design, led by Ed Rotberg, pushed Atari’s hardware with lessons from Lunar Lander and Asteroids.
• Industrial design choices included a periscope viewfinder, added acrylic windows, and a removable step; ~13,000 units were produced (Aug 1980–Mar 1981).

Zlob.h 100% POSIX and glibc compatible globbing lib that is faste and better

Key Points

• Claims 100% POSIX/glibc compatibility with expanded pattern support (**, braces, extglob, .gitignore).
• Reports significant performance gains via SIMD and direct getdents64-based traversal.
• Validated against external test suites from glibc, Rust’s glob crate, and Node.js’s fs.glob.

What Is Ruliology?

Key Points

• Ruliology studies the behavior of abstract computational rules as a distinct science.
• Methods emphasize running rules, visualization, and measurement to obtain reproducible results.
• Fundamental limits include computational irreducibility and formal undecidability.

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

Key Points

• Mandelbrot is characterized as a “hedgehog,” unified by the principle of scaling.
• Scaling manifests as self-similarity, power laws, fractals, and multifractals across his work.
• Scale invariance provides a cohesive framework for modeling natural and social phenomena in mathematics, physics, and economics.

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

Key Points

• Master falsetto, mixed voice, and whistle registers with targeted exercises to build control and safe range.
• Belting should be a balanced mix with relaxed setup and strong breath support—avoid pushing or yelling.
• Add effects like grit, distortion, cry, and vibrato safely by engaging false folds, relaxing the throat, and maintaining support.

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

Key Points

• Leadership should prioritize clarity/culture/energy and resource allocation as primary controls.
• Pursue outsized results by allocating resources ahead of conventional wisdom, accepting some risk of failure.
• Maintain intellectual honesty: plausible theory, aligned resources, monitoring, and timely pivots.

Start all of your commands with a comma

Key Points

• Prefix custom commands with a comma to avoid name collisions.
• Debian/Ubuntu systems can have tens of thousands of commands, increasing collision risk.
• Tab completion makes comma-prefixed commands easy to discover and use.

Where did all the starships go?

Key Points

• Sci-fi title keywords declined from 1950s–60s peaks; “Space” dropped from >2.5% to <0.5%.
• Fantasy keywords like “Dragon/s,” “Magic(al),” and “Witch/es” increased, especially after 2000.
• Simple title keyword counts outperformed sparse tagging and LLM-based classification methods.

ga68, the GNU Algol 68 Compiler – FOSDEM 2026 [video]

Key Points

• Introduction to GCC’s new Algol 68 front-end (ga68).
• Scheduled Saturday 13:35–14:00 (UTC+1) in room UD6.215 at FOSDEM 2026.
• Livestream and recordings (AV1/WebM, MP4) with subtitles and feedback options available.

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

Key Points

• Runs Scheme on WebAssembly via a self-contained toolchain built on Guile.
• Includes a Wasm interpreter for in-REPL testing of Hoot binaries.
• Latest release v0.7.0 available with source, signature, and documentation; development hosted on Codeberg.

UK infants ill after drinking contaminated baby formula of Nestle and Danone

Key Points

• 36 suspected infant cases linked to recalled Nestlé and Danone formula in the UK
• Cereulide toxin implicated; FSA identifies contaminated arachidonic acid oil
• Regulators tracing products, advising parents, and monitoring with possible further action

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Key Points

• Explains RLHF foundations and intellectual origins across multiple disciplines.
• Details the RLHF pipeline: instruction tuning, reward modeling, sampling, RL, and direct alignment.
• Addresses advanced topics including synthetic data, evaluation, and open research questions.

Cross-Region MSK Replication: K2K vs. MirrorMaker2

Key Points

• Both solutions were 100% reliable, but K2K outperformed MM2 in latency, throughput, and write times.
• MM2’s offset and policy complexities can cause problematic failovers; K2K aims to simplify these operations.
• EOS scenarios showed K2K’s 5x batching efficiency advantage over MM2.

Software Engineering Is Back

Key Points

• AI coding agents and frontier models now automate substantial coding work when environments are well configured.
• The author emphasizes a workflow they term “automated programming,” prioritizing design and oversight over manual typing.
• The piece argues many frameworks add unnecessary layers and can often be bypassed with AI-driven development.

Omarchy First Impressions

Key Points

• Installed Omarchy on a secondary SSD for a first Linux personal-work setup
• Plans to master Hyprland and adopt Neovim for a keyboard-first workflow
• Cites declining macOS quality as a motivator to explore alternatives

Watermark API – $0.01/image, 10x cheaper than Cloudinary

Key Points

• $0.01/image watermarking API positioned as 10x cheaper than Cloudinary
• Endpoints for single and batch watermarking with configurable parameters
• Usage tracking and payments supported via dedicated API endpoints

France's homegrown open source online office suite

Key Points

• La Suite numérique is an open-source collaboration suite built by DINUM and ANCT with European partners.
• Hack Days drew ~300 attendees from 15+ countries and named four project winners.
• The codebase is MIT-licensed, with open invitations to contribute via email and Matrix.

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

Key Points

• Runs Docker Compose YAML on Kubernetes (K3s) using familiar Compose commands.
• Only Docker is required; Kappal bundles kubectl and runs K3s automatically.
• Supports volumes, service discovery, secrets/configs, scaling, networks, and UDP; healthchecks planned.

Google staff call for firm to cut ties with ICE

Key Points

• Nearly 900 Google employees demand transparency and a reassessment of ties to immigration enforcement.
• The appeal follows a broader cross-company worker letter involving Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.
• Google previously withdrew from the Pentagon’s Project Maven in 2018 due to employee pressure.

First Proof

Key Points

• Ten research-level math questions released to assess AI systems.
• Questions were previously unpublished; answers known but temporarily encrypted.
• Problems arose naturally from the authors’ research process.

Show HN: One-click AI employee with its own cloud desktop

Key Points

• Full cloud Ubuntu desktop with an AI agent that controls apps via the screen.
• Preinstalled Chrome, VS Code, LibreOffice, and 100+ AI skills enable diverse tasks.
• BYO Anthropic API key; same features across plans, differing only in hardware specs.

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

Key Points

• A 10-minute HTML demo via View Source and Notepad demystified web pages.
• Early experimentation led to creating personal websites; a .net domain was acquired.
• Jumping to the 8086 reset vector (FFFF:0000) with DEBUG.EXE rebooted the system.

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

Key Points

• 3270’s block‑mode design scaled mainframe user access by reducing I/O interrupts.
• Today, 3270 operates as a protocol over TCP/IP.
• Mainframes use hierarchical architectures with specialized processors and maintain high reliability with features like hot‑swap and live microcode updates.

British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years

Key Points

• Mandatory triennial eye tests for drivers aged 70+ planned in the UK.
• Proposals include lowering England’s drink-driving limit and adding seatbelt penalty points.
• Experts support testing; current self-reporting system deemed inadequate.

Software Factories and the Agentic Moment

Key Points

• Non-interactive development with agents replaces human coding/review, guided by specs and scenarios.
• Validation shifts from tests to external scenarios and a probabilistic satisfaction metric, often using LLM-as-judge.
• A Digital Twin Universe of service clones (e.g., Okta, Jira, Slack, Google Docs/Drive/Sheets) enables robust, less gameable evaluation.

72M Points of Interest

Key Points

• Overture Places includes 72,444,739 POIs in the January release, downloadable via AWS S3.
• Recent schema updates: operating status, confidence, basic category, and taxonomy properties.
• Workflow uses DuckDB v1.4.3 and QGIS 3.44 with plugins for querying and visualization.

Leisure Suit Larry's Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and Disney

Key Points

• Al Lowe details emergency eye treatment in Oslo during a Norway trip.
• He describes a disrupted Hardangervidda-to-Bergen rail journey due to a power outage.
• He outlines skills and methods from a lifelong HO-scale model railroading hobby.

StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code

Key Points

• Agents write and validate code without human authorship or review in StrongDM’s Software Factory.
• Quality is measured via scenario holdouts and a probabilistic satisfaction metric.
• A Digital Twin Universe replicates third‑party services to test integrations at scale.

Vinklu Turns Forgotten Plot in Bucharest into Tiny Coffee Shop

Key Points

• Triangular prism design maximizes a narrow urban plot.
• Triple-glazed glass facade creates daylight-rich, lantern-like presence.
• Off-site fabrication and steel framing enable efficient, low-disruption construction.

What Is Stoicism?

Key Points

• Stoicism prioritizes control over one’s inner faculties and acceptance of externals.
• Zeno shaped Stoicism after Cynic training and taught at Athens’ Stoa Poikile.
• Marcus Aurelius’s life illustrates Stoicism applied to leadership and adversity.

Selection Rather Than Prediction

Key Points

• Best-of-N with human arbitration converts prediction into optimization and boosts success rates.
• Rankings via Bradley–Terry/Elo show top-tier overlap; top-two models aren’t statistically separable.
• Cohorts outperform single agents: top-1 24%, top-3 51%, top-7 91%, with diminishing returns after seven.

We Mourn Our Craft

Key Points

• AI coding tools are portrayed as already effective and poised to surpass human programmers.
• Younger developers widely use Warp, Cursor, Claude, and ChatGPT to increase output.
• The author urges reluctant mid-career engineers to adopt AI tools despite moral reservations.

Speed up responses with fast mode

Key Points

• Fast mode prioritizes speed for Opus 4.6 with higher per-token costs and identical quality.
• Available via /fast in Claude Code tools; requires extra usage and admin enablement for Teams/Enterprise.
• Pricing tiers include $30/$150 (<200K) and $60/$225 (>200K) with a temporary 50% discount.

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC Concludes 25-Year Run with Final Collisions

Key Points

• RHIC ended operations with final oxygen-ion collisions and a record dataset.
• DOE plans the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), reusing RHIC components.
• sPHENIX captured over 200 petabytes of data, including 40 billion event snapshots.

I Write Games in C (yes, C)

Key Points

• C chosen for reliability, simplicity, portability, and fast compilation.
• C++ meets needs but fails wants due to complexity and compile time.
• Go’s stop-the-world GC and limited libraries make it unsuitable for games.

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

Key Points

• Boot-sector-sized C compiler in x86‑16 assembly supporting a practical C subset.
• Example sine-wave program demonstrates VGA graphics and control flow within constraints.
• Tokenization and integer parsing are highlighted as key space-consuming challenges.

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

Key Points

• CSS-only menu reveal using clip-paths
• Circular clip-path sized via calc(1.42 * 100vmax) at top-left
• Polygon ray effect currently hardcoded; JS could make it dynamic

Microsoft Account bugs locked me out of Notepad – are Thin Clients ruining PCs?

Key Points

• Notepad failed to open on Windows 11 due to Microsoft Store licensing error 0x803f8001.
• The author attributes the lockout to Microsoft Account-related issues.
• The article questions cloud-dependent design that can block access to core system tools.

The F Word

Key Points

• Reimbursement moved from a secretary-managed process to self-service via Concur with added auditing.
• Frequent returns for minor issues increased friction and degraded user experience.
• The author highlights intention alignment as key to reducing organizational and personal friction.

Show HN: A luma dependent chroma compression algorithm (image compression)

Key Points

• Chroma is modeled from luma per block using a linear fit.
• Only two chroma endpoint values (C1, C2) are stored per block.
• Targets <0.5 bits/pixel average for chroma without visible artifacts.

Italy Railways Sabotaged

Key Points

• Three suspected sabotage incidents disrupted northern Italy’s rail network as the Winter Olympics began.
• A fire and later discoveries of severed cables and a rudimentary explosive device near Bologna caused major delays and temporary closures.
• Authorities called it “serious sabotage,” with comparisons to similar incidents during the Paris 2024 Olympics.

Tiny C Compiler

Key Points

• TCC integrates preprocessor, compiler, assembler, and linker in a very small x86 executable.
• Supports direct execution of C source and provides libtcc for dynamic code generation.
• Benchmark shows TCC 0.9.22 compiling roughly nine times faster than GCC 3.2 -O0 on the tested workload.

You Are Here

Key Points

• Routine coding and integration costs are near-zero, but robust end-to-end systems remain hard.
• Two career paths: niche craft persistence or leveraging new tools for faster building and competition.
• Historical analog vs. digital shift illustrates risks and opportunities in technological transitions.

FDA intends to take action against non-FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs

Key Points

• FDA will restrict GLP-1 APIs in non-FDA-approved compounded drugs marketed as alternatives.
• Companies cannot claim compounded products are generics, equivalent, use the same active ingredient, or are clinically proven.
• Noncompliance may lead to legal action, including seizure and injunction.

LLMs as the new high level language

Key Points

• LLM agents are framed as a new high-level programming language enabling parallel, autonomous development.
• Productivity should be measured by functional output, targeting a potential 10x increase with agent use.
• Quality and understandability are proposed as core goals for LLM-driven development frameworks.

GitBlack: Tracing America's Foundation

Key Points

• 28 repositories will be released, one per day.
• History is framed using software concepts like commit histories and repos.
• Focus is on history described as “commented out” of America’s code.

Show HN: Browser based state machine simulator and visualizer

Key Points

• Example: “Coffee Machine Simulator” starts at idle with tracked context (water, beans, cups, revenue).
• Event SELECT_ESPRESSO moves to brewing and updates resources and revenue.
• Additional operations include Latte, Refill All, and “Coffee Ready!” labels indicating more actions.

Washington Post CEO Will Lewis Steps Down After Stormy Tenure

Key Points

• Will Lewis resigned days after The Washington Post cut 30% of staff.
• CFO Jeff D’Onofrio was appointed acting CEO.
• Jeff Bezos emphasized The Post’s mission without addressing the cost-cutting.

The silent death of Good Code

Key Points

• Agent-assisted C-to-Rust translation yielded acceptable but hard-to-maintain code.
• A human-led Rust rewrite, grounded in subsystem understanding, produced superior results.
• AI agents increase productivity but rarely produce the level of quality defined as “Good Code.”

Eigen: Building a Workspace

Key Points

• Eigen delivers a minimal, functional suite (mail, drive, docs, contacts, kanban) with real-time collaboration.
• Architecture centers on per-user directories and per-user SQLite databases with file-based content storage.
• Major gaps remain: encryption, calendar, office tools, org features, protocol support, and backup/migration.

Show HN: Craftplan – Elixir-based micro-ERP for small-scale manufacturers

Key Points

• Open-source micro-ERP consolidating manufacturing operations into one platform.
• Feature set spans catalog/BOMs, inventory, orders, production planning/batching, purchasing, and CRM.
• Self-hosting with Git, OpenSSL, Docker Compose; built with Elixir, Ash Framework, Phoenix LiveView.

Show HN: LocalGPT – A local-first AI assistant in Rust with persistent memory

Key Points

• Local-only Rust-based assistant with markdown memory indexed by SQLite FTS5.
• Supports OpenAI, Anthropic, and Ollama, plus heartbeat runner and REST API.
• Configured via TOML; includes CLI and daemon with HTTP endpoints.

IBM Beam Spring: The Ultimate Retro Keyboard

Key Points

• Beam spring mechanisms deliver pronounced tactile feedback but are larger and more costly than buckling springs.
• The IBM 3278 keyboard features beam spring switches, die-cast aluminum construction, and SLT electronics within the 3270 system context.
• Modern enthusiasts can adapt these keyboards using capacitive controllers like the xwhatsit for current computers.

Haskell for all: Beyond agentic coding

Key Points

• Agentic coding often disrupts developer flow and doesn’t improve fixed-outcome productivity.
• Research (Becker, Shen) indicates increased idle time and, at times, worse outcomes with agentic tools.
• Calm technology principles and features like IDE inlay hints offer a non-intrusive path to AI-assisted development.

Vouch

Key Points

• Blocks unvouched users and allows explicit denouncements to prevent contributions.
• Integrates via GitHub Actions; actions can be triggered through issues, discussions, or CLI.
• Stores decisions in a single flat file for zero-dependency, POSIX-friendly parsing.

Show HN: Axiomeer – An open marketplace for AI agents

Key Points

• Production-ready marketplace consolidates RAGs, datasets, MCP servers, documents, tools, and APIs.
• Reports 91/91 products tested, enterprise security, and authentication via JWT, API keys, bcrypt, and rate limiting.
• Docker-based stack with PostgreSQL, FastAPI, and FAISS; quick start and automated health checks provided.

Total Surface Area Required to Fuel the World with Solar (2009)

Key Points

• Projected 2030 global energy demand converts to ~198.7 trillion kW•h/year.
• Estimated PV yield: ~400 kW•h per m² per year under stated assumptions.
• Total required solar area: ~496,805 km²—about Spain’s size.

Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users

Key Points

• Leaked USBP bulletin monitors a Reddit protest call near Edinburg, Texas.
• No specific violence reported; proximity to facilities prompts continued monitoring.
• Surveillance justified under “Force Protection” with trend analysis of social mobilization.

Bye Bye Humanity: The Potential AMOC Collapse

Key Points

• AMOC is at its weakest in over 1,000 years, per a 2021 Nature Geosciences study.
• Abyssal limb weakening (~12% since 2000) is linked to deep Western Atlantic warming and sea-level rise.
• Long-term models show substantial collapse risk under all emissions scenarios, higher with rising emissions.

Wood Gas Vehicles: Firewood in the Fuel Tank (2010)

Key Points

• WWII fuel rationing drove widespread conversion to wood gas, exceeding one million vehicles globally.
• Georges Imbert’s generator enabled practical mobile use and was mass-produced from 1931.
• Post-war gasoline availability led to a rapid decline of wood gas vehicles.