Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

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You're attending Babashka Conf on May 8 and Dutch Clojure Days on May 9. You're considering building a tool for semantic diffing in Emacs, after being dissatisfied with difftastic.

Different Language Models Learn Similar Number Representations

https://arxiv.org/static/browse/0.3.4/images/arxiv-logo-fb.png
Language models learn periodic features with dominant periods at T=2, 5, 10. Models acquire geometrically separable features from complementary co-occurrence signals or multi-token addition problems.

Norway Set to Become Latest Country to Ban Social Media for Under 16s

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Refuse to let your doctor record you

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At a recent appointment, Emily’s physical therapist (who knows some about her research) said, “Before we get started, there’s something I want to ask you about.” The something was an automatic “scribing” system their office is trialling for two weeks and deciding whether to purchase. These systems take in a (presumably audio-only) recording of the patient encounter and then output a draft ...

Why I'm Done Making Desktop Applications

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Breaking up has always been difficult for me. I tend to fall in love with being in love, and continue a relationship well past the point of futility. And so it is with my oldest love, writing desktop software. I’m sorry, desktop apps. We just don’t have a future together anymore. Its not you, its me. A bit of background: for the last three years I’ve sold Bingo Card Creator, a desktop app ...

Spinel: Ruby AOT Native Compiler

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Spinel compiles Ruby into native executables with significant speedups. It uses whole-program type inference and generates optimized C code.

Hear your agent suffer through your code

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To use Endless Toil, install it from the marketplace, restart Codex if needed, and invoke the plugin in a new thread. It plays escalating human groans as it scans code, printing results if an audio player is unavailable.

Mounting tar archives as a filesystem in WebAssembly

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We can mount a tarball directly in memory without copying by generating a metadata file that lists file sizes and offsets, then using Emscripten's WORKERFS. This approach avoids unnecessary copying and improves performance, especially in memory-constrained environments.

US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid

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US soldier Master Sgt Gannon Ken Van Dyke was arrested and charged with stealing and misusing classified information after allegedly betting $32,000 on Venezuelan President Maduro's capture and winning $400,000. He faces five criminal charges and a related civil complaint from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

DeepSeek v4

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The DeepSeek API uses OpenAI/Anthropic compatible format and can be accessed with an API key. Model names will be deprecated on July 24, 2026.

Show HN: How LLMs Work – Interactive visual guide based on Karpathy's lecture

Large language models like ChatGPT are built by collecting and filtering vast amounts of internet text, then training neural networks to predict the next token in a sequence. The final model learns conversations through imitation and reinforcement learning, allowing it to generate helpful and coherent responses, but it still has limitations and can hallucinate or refuse to answer certain questions.

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

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Claude's responses worsened for some users due to three separate changes affecting Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK, and Claude Cowork. We've fixed the issues and will implement changes to prevent similar problems in the future.

Bitwarden CLI compromised in ongoing Checkmarx supply chain campaign

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Bitwarden CLI 2026.4.0 was compromised through a GitHub Action in its CI/CD pipeline as part of the Checkmarx supply chain campaign. Users are advised to review CI logs and rotate exposed secrets.

Why I Write (1946)

The author's early life influenced his writing, with a desire to escape loneliness and create a private world through words. He developed a habit of making up stories and describing scenes, which continued into adulthood.

GPT-5.5

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OpenAI releases GPT-5.5, a more intelligent and efficient model that can handle complex tasks. GPT-5.5 excels at coding, research, and everyday work on a computer, providing better results with fewer tokens.

8087 Emulation on 8086 Systems

Intel released the E8087 software emulation package in 1980 to allow developers to write 8087 software without requiring 8087 hardware, and Microsoft later adopted and modified this mechanism for their own use. The emulation mechanism involves language translators emitting special fix-ups for floating-point instructions, which are then replaced with software interrupts by the linker, allowing ...

Show HN: Gova – The declarative GUI framework for Go

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Gova is a declarative GUI framework for Go that builds native desktop apps from a single codebase. It uses typed components, reactive state, and real platform dialogs with a single static binary.

Machine Learning Reveals Unknown Transient Phenomena in Historic Images

https://arxiv.org/static/browse/0.3.4/images/arxiv-logo-fb.png
Transient, star-like point sources that appear and vanish over short timescales are described in astronomical images prior to launch of Sputnik. We have reported that transient numbers diminish significantly in Earth's shadow (shadow deficit) and are more likely within (plus/minus) one day of nuclear testing (nuclear window). These findings remain debated with some arguing that transients ...

Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support

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Linux 7.1 kernel removes old hardware drivers due to obsolescence, including bus mice and portable device drivers from the 1990s and early 2000s. The removals total 3,374 deletions in the input subsystem.

South Korea police arrest man for posting AI photo of runaway wolf

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A 40-year-old man in South Korea was arrested for sharing an AI-generated image of a missing wolf, misleading authorities and prompting a nationwide search. He faces up to 5 years in prison for disrupting government work by deception.

Show HN: Atomic – Local-first, AI-augmented personal knowledge base

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Atomic organizes knowledge automatically with semantic search and tagging. It generates summaries, wiki articles, and visualizes knowledge as a graph with AI-augmented chat.

Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

Meta plans to cut 10% of its workforce, around 8,000 employees, to boost efficiency and offset AI spending. Layoffs will occur on May 20, with 6,000 open roles left unfilled.

MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

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A team member, Andy Kirby, secretly used AI-generated code to take over the MeshCore ecosystem, sparking a dispute over ownership and control. The core team has now separated from Andy and will continue to develop and release MeshCore firmware and app updates on their official website, meshcore.io.

How to be anti-social – a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences

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Assume others' intentions are malicious or ignorant, trust intuition, and pivot conversations to avoid weakness. Exploit your network, present curated details, and dismiss detractors' credentials unless agreeing with them.

Affirm Retooled for Agentic Software Development in One Week

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Affirm's engineering team used agentic AI to automate 60% of pull requests in 4 months, increasing merged PR volume by 58% year over year.

Using the internet like it's 1999

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The author believes the internet has become a controlled echochamber where people are fed algorithmically generated content, and suggests using older technologies like RSS feeds, IRC, and email to reclaim agency over attention and information.

UK Biobank health data keeps ending up on GitHub

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UK Biobank has used copyright takedown notices to remove health data from GitHub, targeting 110 requests since July 2025. The notices mostly target Jupyter or R notebooks, genetic and genomic data files, and tabular datasets containing participant health records.

Show HN: leaf – a terminal Markdown previewer with a GUI-like experience

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leaf updates and installs the latest release, verifying it with SHA256 checksums. It also offers watch mode, syntax highlighting, and LaTeX math rendering.

TorchTPU: Running PyTorch Natively on TPUs at Google Scale

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Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) require a software stack that meets demands for performance, hardware portability, and reliability, leading to the development of TorchTPU, a PyTorch integration for native and efficient TPU usage. TorchTPU achieves this through its "Eager First" philosophy, Fused Eager mode, and native support for custom kernels, ensuring a seamless and ...

Familiarity is the enemy: On why Enterprise systems have failed for 60 years

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Enterprise knowledge management systems have failed for sixty years due to buyers selecting on the wrong axis, prioritizing familiarity over correctness, and vendors selling on the perception of safety rather than actual product value. The industry's repeated failures, including the current trend of adding AI to existing systems, demonstrate a pattern of buying the same shape of thing one ...