Delhi Cut Electricity Loss from 50 to 5 Percent

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The author recounts a common scene in 2002 Delhi where frequent power outages plagued the city, causing chaos and economic losses. However, over the past quarter century, Delhi's grid has transformed into a reliable system with minimal power losses.

AI companies leak data to advertisers [pdf]

Conversational AI services are increasingly adopting advertising-based business models, which raises concerns about user privacy. A systematic analysis of nine prominent conversational AI services found that they expose sensitive information to third-party tracking services, including conversation-derived artifacts such as titles, prompts, and screenshots. These disclosures can be linked to ...

You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner

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Americans have seen a significant decline in socializing over the past few decades, with hosting dinner parties and attending community events decreasing by 70% since 1975. This decline is attributed to various factors, including increased busyness due to work and parenting responsibilities, decreased leisure time, and the rise of solo activities like watching TV or exercising.

Jeeves. Reasoning improves Jev-like decision models

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A Jeeves model with a Qwen3.5-9B decision model, LoRA, and pointer head outperforms Kev-9B and Jev on test data without thinking, achieving 0.889 accuracy on unseen data. The model can be sped up by truncating chain length or using a drafter to reason before deciding.

Without the Hot Air

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500k facial scans at UK stations yield no arrests, 1 false positive

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A 6-month trial of live facial recognition in London's railway stations cost £320,000 and led to only one incorrect alert. The technology aimed to catch offenders but failed to make any arrests during the trial period.

Using any C++ library in Godot

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Godot is a free, open-source game engine that allows developers to create 2D and 3D games using GDScript or C++. It can load native code through GDExtension and godot-cpp bindings.

What makes software development engineering

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The article explores the evolving perception of software development as engineering, highlighting its systematic approach and the challenges in applying engineering principles. It argues that while software engineering is not inherently different from other engineering disciplines, its practical implementation often lacks the structured methodologies seen in traditional fields.

US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS

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The Dutch government is replacing its reliance on US-based software and services with a new system called DAWO, built around NixOS. The goal is to ensure the government's systems are not vulnerable to being shut down by foreign countries like the US.

Digital Audio on the ZX Spectrum's 1-Bit Beeper

The author successfully implemented a 1-bit digital audio system on the ZX Spectrum, producing high-quality digital audio. The technique uses a loop that turns the speaker on and off with variable-length delays to create a precise timing constraint.

Phyllotaxis: An audio-reactive LED display

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The author created a cellular LED matrix inspired by phyllotaxis, a pattern found in nature, and programmed it to react dynamically to sound using an STM32 board. The project evolved into an interactive installation at Recurse Center, featuring a website for attendees to upload sketches and games.

Show HN: Raven – The harness of harnesses, built for RSI

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Raven is a harness of harnesses that generates DAGs and orchestrates multiple specialized agents for complex tasks, enabling recursive self-improvement. It brings together built-in and third-party agents to carry out complex tasks with its modular architecture supporting iterative improvement.

1 in 8 cancer cases worldwide are caused by infections, study finds

Researchers found that 1 in 8 cancers worldwide are caused by infections, with Helicobacter pylori and human papillomavirus being the top two causes. The study highlights vast regional differences in cancer risk factors, with high-income countries doing better than lower- and medium-resourced countries.

The systems that no one will test

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The author found a vulnerability in a system during the pandemic, allowing access to Brazilian federal records of 200+ million people. This experience has led them to worry about the growing capabilities of AI models and their potential for misuse by nation-states.

Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)

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A 1993 Stratus server, still operational after 24 years, has been maintained by Phil Hogan at Great Lakes Works in Michigan. The server will be retired in April after a planned upgrade, marking the end of its nearly three-decade run.

California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops

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California wine growers are struggling to sell their grapes due to declining demand, forcing some to tear out vineyards that have been in their families for generations. The industry is facing significant losses as prices paid for grapes drop and many growers are left with unsold crops.

Pirating the Pirates

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The author and his roommate hacked together a restored version of Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly after MGM altered it for profit. They collaborated with other preservationists to create an official release that closely matched their work.

Software occlusion culling in Block Game

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The author developed a software-rendered occlusion culling solution for their game Block Game, which runs on a weak GPU. The solution uses depth buffers and frustum culling to reduce the number of chunks that need to be rendered, resulting in significant performance improvements.

Show HN: Jevstiller – Distill Jev into a local model, with a disagreement bound

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September 2026. Every number here is from the benchmarks, and bash experiments/bench.sh --no-record reruns them without an API key. If you classify text with Jev, every answer is a network call to one vendor and comes back in about 300 ms, at any load. For a batch job that is fine. For an agent loop that decides, acts, and decides again, or a game tick, or anything that classifies then acts, ...

Optimizing x264 settings and per-title ladders

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The article discusses optimizing H.264 video encoding to save bandwidth costs and deliver a higher quality experience to viewers. Optimizing x264 boosts VMAF by 0.66 points while reducing bandwidth from 4.9 Mbps to 3.27 Mbps, or 33%.

Four CHI '26 papers I wish I wrote

The author reflects on four CHI 2026 papers that sparked their interest, exploring potential research directions and collaborations. They consider how these papers might have been written by them if they had pursued similar ideas earlier in their career. The author now seeks to proceed with next steps discussed above or engage in slower reading and journaling to gain further insight into what ...

The Beatles have permeated research papers across academic disciplines

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Startup Nights 2026 is comming up on 5-6 Nov. in Switzerland

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The Startup Nights 2026 event connects entrepreneurs, investors, and industry leaders for networking opportunities and insightful talks. Attendees can pitch their ideas, showcase solutions, or learn from successful founders in a space designed to spark meaningful conversations.

Climate is accumulating 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs worth of heat per second

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The Earth has warmed rapidly over the past century due to human activity, with 90% of heat absorbed going into oceans. The rate of warming is equivalent to exploding eight Big Ben towers filled with dynamite every second.

Tank Body Problem

↑↓ Elevate │ ←→ Power │ A/D Move │ J/L Weapon │ SPACE Fire │ SPACE AGAIN = Laser/Plumage │ Cheese bounces 3x │ Poison drops bubbles │ Moon gravity

MicroLLM Lab – Try 7 tiny LLM's in the browser

The model is evaluated based on objective checks, not writing quality. The 135M model's performance is measured by speed and accuracy metrics from runs in the browser.

ESP32S3 cluster running 1.58-bit (BitNet) Language model

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This project runs a sliced 0.5B LLM across a cluster of 7 ESP32s3. One act as master and others are node. The master node runs the tokenizer and embeding and the other attention layer and MLP ran on the nodes. The master and node communicate through high speed SPI Daisy-Chain. This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

12,000-year-old Göbeklitepe burials explain scattered bones

Jeff – Jev-compatible 0.8B decision models, trained at home, ~30 ms

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This text describes a new model called Jeff, which is a small, fast decision-making system for zero-shot classification tasks. It can be fine-tuned on specific examples to improve its accuracy.

Evan Doorbell's Phone Tapes – Brought to You by Telephone World

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Evan Doorbell's "phone tapes" document the old phone network in the 1970s, available for free redistribution. His copyrighted material includes narrated and raw unedited recordings of telephone sounds.