| 1. | Don't be a meat proxy(gruhn.me) |
| 746 points by ngruhn 5 hours ago | 325 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Relaying verbatim AI output in Slack, PRs, or chats wastes others' time—they can prompt the LLM themselves with better context, and AI text is verbose, jargon-heavy, and often subtly wrong. Instead, read and validate the output, then respond in your own words. Otherwise, in scenarios like code review, the reviewer ends up doing the actual implementation via their own LLM, with you serving only as a "meat proxy." | |
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| 2. | Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork(qwen.ai) |
| 653 points by ai2027 9 hours ago | 327 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Summary not available | |
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| 3. | Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF(sf.isopolis.city) |
| 240 points by nuwandavek 11 hours ago | 52 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Summary not available | |
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| 4. | Karpathy’s Pelican(twitter.com) |
| 581 points by delichon 1 day ago | 395 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Karpathy tested Opus 5 by giving it the first paragraph of Lord of the Rings, a 1M token budget (~$10), and asking for a Three.js rendering—it spent ~2 hours writing 5,500 lines of procedural animation code. He sees this as a shift from "no one would bother" to "why not, it's free," opening possibilities for hyper-custom on-demand worlds like an ephemeral GTA. The exercise also exposed a key LLM weakness: they can't natively perceive video or play games, forcing Opus to laboriously screenshot to audit its own work. | |
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| 5. | Show HN: Kakehashi – Experimental userspace to run macOS binaries on Linux ARM(github.com) |
| 225 points by vlad_kalinkin 19 hours ago | 56 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Kakehashi is an experimental userspace translation layer that runs macOS ARM64 Mach-O binaries natively on Linux aarch64 by mapping a freestanding libSystem and translating BSD syscalls—no JIT or instruction emulation. It currently works with CLI tools like 7zz, curl, and clang probes, running roughly 5× slower than native Linux on syscall-heavy workloads. The pitched use case is CI: even at 5× slowdown, running Darwin CLI tools on cheap Linux ARM runners can be cheaper than GitHub's macOS runners, which cost ~10–12× more per minute. | |
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| 6. | More German than many Germans(mertbulan.com) |
| 299 points by mertbio 6 hours ago | 244 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: A Turkish software developer recounts moving to Hamburg in 2017 for an internship and staying on, describing a workplace culture of trust, flat hierarchies, and social equality that defied his stereotypes about Germans. After eight years, extensive reading about German history, and learning the language, he embraced the country's rules and values—particularly its reckoning with its Nazi past—and recently obtained citizenship under the streamlined five-year residency rules. | |
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| 7. | Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management(unattributed.cc) |
| 210 points by surprisetalk 5 days ago | 72 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: A rebuttal to Brennan Kenneth Brown's critique of PKM tools like Obsidian, arguing that Brown mischaracterizes Obsidian's marketing, shifts his own thesis questions mid-article, and cites sources that don't actually support his claims. The author suggests Brown's rapid-writing workflow (750 words in 20 minutes with research filled in later) led to weak sourcing, and contends that tools like Obsidian shouldn't be judged by their loudest influencer-users but by whether they enable individuals to build systems that work for them. | |
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| 8. | Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust(stackoverflow.blog) |
| 219 points by HieronymusBosch 4 days ago | 120 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Developers build deep trust in tools like Vim, Emacs, and IDEs through predictability and muscle memory, but agentic AI coding tools break this model—Stack Overflow's survey shows usage rising (76%→84%) while trust falls (40%→29%). AI shifts the bottleneck from writing code to reviewing and validating it, exposing flaws in existing SDLC processes that new tooling alone can't fix. Rebuilding trust requires explicit human ownership (not "human-in-the-loop"), better context/memory systems for agents, enforcing DRY principles, and knowing when deterministic code beats non-deterministic LLMs. | |
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| 9. | How the words we teach English language learners changed(pudding.cool) |
| 226 points by c-oreills 20 hours ago | 171 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Comparing the 1953 General Service List to its 2023 update reveals that ~600 essential English words were dropped and ~1,100 added, with concrete, tangible vocabulary (apple, fork, wheat, bake) largely replaced by abstract terms tied to institutions and systems (mortgage, legislation, analysis). The share of highly concrete words fell from 21% to 14%, while adverbs qualifying degree and certainty (approximately, definitely, relatively) proliferated. The author argues this shift mirrors the move from manual to white-collar life, reflecting a world less about physical surroundings and more about navigating abstract systems. | |
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| 10. | 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout(ft.com) |
| 241 points by JumpCrisscross 16 hours ago | 122 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Summary not available | |
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| 11. | EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation(linuxiac.com) |
| 209 points by RobotToaster 15 hours ago | 145 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: The EU's open-source age-verification project has confirmed that hardware-bound attestation (via Android TEE, StrongBox, or Apple Secure Enclave) is a mandatory requirement, effectively locking out Linux, custom Android ROMs, and self-compiled apps from native support. Compounding this, Proof of Age providers will only issue credentials to apps on an EU-maintained compliance list, meaning open source code doesn't guarantee a community build can access the actual service. Critics argue this undermines the "open" nature of the system by tying access to approved hardware, OSes, and vendors. | |
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| 12. | Running Kimi K3 on MI355X at Better Performance per Dollar Than B300(wafer.ai) |
| 208 points by ilreb 1 day ago | 102 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Wafer ran the 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 model on AMD MI355X (TP8), hitting 952 tok/s/node and 118 tok/s single-stream — worse absolute throughput than a B300 but ~1.5× better performance per dollar given the MI355X's ~2.4× lower price. Getting there required two fixes: implementing a missing top-k renorm function in sglang's ROCm sampling path to enable speculative decoding, and zero-padding attention heads from 12 to 16 to unlock AITER's fast MLA prefill kernel (~2–3× faster TTFT). No custom kernels were needed. | |
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| 13. | Go 1.27 Interactive Tour(victoriametrics.com) |
| 355 points by Hixon10 1 day ago | 188 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Go 1.27's headline feature is generic methods, allowing method declarations to have their own type parameters independent of the receiver (though interfaces still can't declare them). Other notable additions include a standard library `uuid` package, `encoding/json/v2` graduating from experimental status (with v1 now backed by v2), post-quantum ML-DSA signatures, an experimental portable `simd` package, promoted-field struct literal selectors, and generalized function type inference. Performance improvements include size-specialized memory allocation (~30% faster for small allocations) and three new compiler optimizations enabled by default. | |
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| 14. | Show HN: I'm a 15 Year Old Wannabe Engineer, This Is a Cycloidal Gearbox I Built(github.com) |
| 324 points by tomilan 1 day ago | 109 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: A 15-year-old built a 3D-printed cycloidal gearbox driven by a NEMA 17 stepper motor, along with a Python script for Fusion 360 that parametrically generates the geometry. The third iteration achieves a 1:9 reduction, 1.3 N·m output torque (up from the motor's 0.21 N·m), and 66% efficiency in a 90mm PLA housing. Planned improvements include swapping housing pins for MR128 bearings and output pins for metal-covered M2 screws to reduce friction and boost torque. | |
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| 15. | Show HN: Elevators(john.fun) |
| 1641 points by Jrh0203 2 days ago | 401 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Elevator scheduling has evolved from the simple SCAN/LOOK algorithms to Otis' RSR, which scores cars based on ETA, load, direction-matching, and anti-bunching, re-optimizing every 5 seconds. Benchmarks show RSR beats LOOK in most cases, but LOOK wins at high traffic or in small buildings. Counterintuitively, Destination Dispatch kiosks generally produce worse wait times than traditional up/down buttons because locking passengers to a specific car sacrifices the flexibility of continuous re-optimization. | |
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| 16. | Diátaxis(diataxis.fr) |
| 543 points by ryanseys 1 day ago | 59 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Diátaxis is a documentation framework that organizes content into four distinct types based on user needs: tutorials, how-to guides, reference, and explanation. It addresses what to write, how to write it, and how to structure it, and has been adopted by projects like Cloudflare, Gatsby, and Vonage to improve documentation clarity for both readers and contributors. | |
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