| 1. | Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample(chatgpt.com) |
| 940 points by gmays 19 hours ago | 544 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Summary not available | |
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| 2. | Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop(resobscura.substack.com) |
| 403 points by benbreen 22 hours ago | 166 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: The author, inspired by a college job shelving library books, built a free searchable database of ~6,500 award-winning and shortlisted English-language non-fiction books, using Claude and GPT to gather data and enable semantic search for serendipitous discovery. He argues we're in a golden age of non-fiction (peaking roughly 1980s-2000s) enabled by post-war changes like jet travel, broader access to elite institutions, and cataloguing standards like MARC. The post also includes data visualizations of publishers, prizes, and book cover colors, and endorses Pangram as a surprisingly effective AI-writing detector. | |
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| 3. | GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization(github.com) |
| 536 points by syrusakbary 19 hours ago | 113 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Gigatoken is a Rust-based BPE tokenizer that claims ~1000x speedups over HuggingFace tokenizers and tiktoken, hitting 24 GB/s on a 144-core EPYC and ~8 GB/s on an M4 Max, with drop-in compatibility APIs for both libraries. The gains come from hand-optimized SIMD pretokenization (replacing regex engines), aggressive pretoken caching, minimized Python interop, and per-architecture tuning for AVX512/AVX2/NEON. SentencePiece-based tokenizers (Gemma, Mistral, Llama 2) see smaller ~10-20x gains, and WordPiece isn't yet supported. | |
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| 4. | Show HN: Bento - An entire PowerPoint in one HTML file (edit+view+data+collab)(bento.page) |
| 884 points by starfallg 21 hours ago | 199 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Summary not available | |
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| 5. | Everyone should know SIMD(mitchellh.com) |
| 485 points by WadeGrimridge 18 hours ago | 175 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: SIMD isn't as intimidating as its reputation suggests—most "process N values at a time" optimizations follow a five-step pattern: broadcast constants, loop one vector-width at a time, perform the parallel operation, reduce the result, and handle leftovers with a scalar tail. The author demonstrates with a Zig example from Ghostty that achieves a real-world 5x speedup on a simple codepoint-scanning loop. While compilers can sometimes auto-vectorize, they frequently miss opportunities, so explicit SIMD is worth learning for hot loops over large contiguous data. | |
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| 6. | Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?(dylancastillo.co) |
| 581 points by dcastm 19 hours ago | 224 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: To test whether AI labs are gaming Simon Willison's famous "pelican on a bicycle" SVG benchmark, the author generated 1,008 SVGs across 7 frontier models using a grid of 8 animals × 6 vehicles, then scored them with an LLM judge. The results show no evidence of pelicanmaxxing: pelicans rank 6th of 8 animals, bicycles rank 5th of 6 vehicles, and no lab performs disproportionately well on the specific combination. The more likely explanation is broader "SVGmaxxing" (optimizing SVG generation generally), which this methodology can't detect. | |
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| 7. | So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe(cole-k.com) |
| 524 points by montroser 1 day ago | 528 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Reddit now requires login to view old.reddit.com when logged out, citing "safety" and abusive scraping concerns. The author investigates and concludes this is really about preventing LLM-era scraping of Reddit's valuable user content, since Old Reddit serves clean HTML while New Reddit is a JS-heavy bloated mess that's harder to scrape. The author is frustrated less by the change itself than by Reddit's dishonest framing, and worries logged-out New Reddit access will be next. | |
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| 8. | Making(beej.us) |
| 385 points by erikschoster 21 hours ago | 151 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: A Gen-X developer and CS instructor reflects on why AI-generated work—code, art, fiction—feels unfulfilling despite him initiating it: prompting an LLM feels like managing a contractor, not making something himself. He draws a fuzzy line between tools he uses (compilers, hammers) and agents he delegates to, acknowledging the gray area but concluding that the human-like, imprecise nature of LLM interaction puts them in the "asking someone else to make it" category, which robs him of the pride of creation. | |
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| 9. | The startup's Postgres survival guide(hatchet.run) |
| 437 points by abelanger 1 day ago | 198 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: A Hatchet engineer distills two years of production Postgres experience into a practical guide covering schema design, indexing, query planning, and connection pooling, with an emphasis on avoiding sequential scans and keeping transactions short. The doc also digs into intermediate and advanced topics like tuning autovacuum to prevent bloat and transaction ID wraparound, batching writes for ~10x throughput, using FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED for job queues, and partitioning for time-series data. Includes tips on safely migrating large tables using triggers and batched backfills outside transactions. | |
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| 10. | John C. Dvorak has died(twitter.com) |
| 795 points by coleca 17 hours ago | 266 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Summary not available | |
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| 11. | Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns(blog.fiddery.com) |
| 322 points by speckx 23 hours ago | 238 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: A Filipino-American blogger visited a Filipino/Hawaiian restaurant in Austin and was disappointed to find its menu revamped with uncanny AI-generated food images, despite the actual food (a $10 spamsilog plate) tasting great. They argue this trend among small businesses stems from ignorance rather than malice, and say they'd prefer menus in Comic Sans, Papyrus, or Curlz MT over AI slop. | |
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| 12. | Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth(ciphertalk.substack.com) |
| 249 points by rbanffy 8 days ago | 224 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Tens of billions in AI infrastructure debt is now collateralized by GPU clusters whose real value depends on operational tacit knowledge, failure rates (~50/day at 200k GPUs), and volatile rental prices that swung 60% down then 40% up in 18 months. Unlike aircraft or ships, GPUs lack appraisers, registries, futures markets, or standardized depreciation—CoreWeave uses 6 years, Nebius 4—leaving lenders charging 6-7 points above benchmark as the price of guessing. Smart money like KKR is buying the underlying data centers instead, while Thiel dumped NVIDIA, betting the chips themselves aren't the durable asset the financing pretends they are. | |
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| 13. | Back to Kagi(blog.melashri.net) |
| 287 points by speckx 23 hours ago | 220 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: After a couple months trying alternatives (Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Qwant, and a self-hosted SearxNG), the author returned to Kagi, finding none matched its result quality, privacy focus, or features like summarize/translate and CSS customization. Google was particularly disappointing due to its push of AI, video, and image results over plain text. | |
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| 14. | LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps(krebsonsecurity.com) |
| 442 points by DemiGuru 1 day ago | 452 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: LG will suspend webOS smart TV apps that embed residential proxy SDKs, following Spur research showing 42% of LG apps (and 25% of Samsung Tizen apps) turn TVs into proxy nodes for third-party traffic, with Bright Data being the dominant provider. Spur argues that one-time consent prompts buried in TV apps—often tapped by household members like minors—don't constitute meaningful transparency for devices consumers can't easily audit. | |
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| 15. | Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects(codeberg.org) |
| 305 points by intunderflow 11 hours ago | 496 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Codeberg e.V. members voted to amend their Terms of Use to prohibit cryptocurrency-related projects, categorizing them as "content that harms the reputation of Codeberg" alongside hate speech. The vague wording sparked significant backlash from developers concerned it could sweep up cryptography libraries, privacy tools, or legitimate projects, while others praised the ethical stance. Moderators eventually locked the discussion thread citing brigading, clarifying that enforcement will be case-by-case rather than a blanket ban on anything cryptography-adjacent. | |
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| 16. | Introduction to Formal Verification with Lean Part 1(hashcloak.com) |
| 233 points by badcryptobitch 3 days ago | 51 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: A hands-on tutorial introducing formal verification in Lean 4 for cryptography engineers, using the One-Time Pad as a worked example. It walks through defining bitstrings and XOR over ℤ₂, proving XOR's commutativity, associativity, identity, and self-inverse properties using tactics like `Vector.ext`, `simp`, and `intro`, then defines a Shannon cipher as a Lean `structure` and proves OTP satisfies its correctness property. Based on Boneh & Shoup's textbook, it's aimed at beginners and serves as a stepping stone to more advanced formalizations like VCV-io. | |
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| 17. | Intel Starts Shipping High-NA EUV Silicon(morethanmoore.substack.com) |
| 242 points by zdw 4 days ago | 111 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Intel has begun high-volume manufacturing using ASML's $380M High-NA EUV scanners, patterning select layers on its 18A-based Panther Lake laptop chips with yields matching existing Low-NA tools. The layers are dual-qualified on both tools, letting Intel build process expertise ahead of 14A/10A where High-NA becomes more essential, while TSMC has opted to skip the technology through at least its A16 node. Analysts remain split on economics—a High-NA exposure costs ~2.5x a Low-NA one and only pays off when replacing three or more multi-patterning steps. | |
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| 18. | I Inspected My Take-Home Interview Project. It Was a Whole Operation(citizendot.github.io) |
| 397 points by CITIZENDOT 16 hours ago | 110 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: A developer received a suspicious "take-home interview" from a fake recruiter offering an inflated salary, and found the provided FastAPI project contained malicious Git hooks that fetched OS-specific payloads from a remote IP. The multi-stage attack ultimately installed Node.js and ran an obfuscated parser.js with dependencies like clipboardy and Hardhat, suggesting crypto wallet theft, with unique IDs per victim for tracking. Variants of the scam also use .vscode launch configs to trigger execution just by opening the folder, targeting developers via LinkedIn with cloned legitimate repos as cover. | |
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| 19. | OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation(openai.com) |
| 1587 points by mfiguiere 1 day ago | 1109 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Summary not available | |
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| 20. | Does creatine make you smarter?(dynomight.net) |
| 301 points by surprisetalk 21 hours ago | 249 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Creatine reliably boosts strength by ~5-15% by acting as a rapid energy reservoir, and it's clearly important for brain function (deficiencies cause intellectual disability), but evidence that supplementation makes healthy people smarter is weak. The famous 2003 Rae et al. study showing huge IQ gains failed to replicate, and recent meta-analyses and the EFSA find no consistent cognitive benefit. If there's any effect, it's likely small (1-3 IQ points), possibly concentrated in vegetarians or stressed individuals. | |
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