Front-page articles summarized hourly.
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OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, a fast coding model that runs on Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine 3 chips, delivering over 1,000 tokens per second—about 15x faster than its predecessor. The text-only, speed-optimized Codex-Spark is a research preview for ChatGPT Pro and select partners, with a 128,000-token context window. This marks OpenAI’s move to diversify from Nvidia, leveraging Cerebras and other partners (AMD, AWS) as it tunes for speed over depth; benchmarks show strong speed, though independent validation is limited.
This Dolphin blog post explains the Triforce arcade platform (Sega/Namco/Nintendo) built around a GameCube, its storage (GD-ROM, NAND), saves (magcards/IC cards), JVS I/O, Segaboot, and how arcade hardware differed from home consoles. It reviews Triforce titles (Mario Kart Arcade GP 1 & 2, Star Fox, Gekitou Pro Yakyuu, Virtua Striker 3/4, F-Zero AX, Avalon) and notes their hardware quirks. After years of experimental work, Dolphin has integrated Triforce emulation in builds (2512-395) thanks to crediar, with a roadmap for improvements (input, netplay, Avalon, touchscreen) and plans for hobbyist arcade use.
Forest Diary presents the USFS diaries of Ranger Reuben P. Box (North Butte Protection Unit, Lassen NF) from 1927–1945, detailing forest management, fire suppression, law enforcement, road work, and daily life in northern California. Digitized by Lance Orner, transcribed by Mistral OCR, with summaries/indexes by Anthropic Claude. The collection spans 217 months, 7488 pages, featuring 413 people, 70 places and 50 events. Highlights include the Stirling City and Mud Creek fires (1931), Pearl Harbor watches (1941), and Box’s retirement (1945).
Matthew Schoolfield built a golf-simulation tool that visualizes golf course architecture by computing a strokes-to-hole map for every point on a hole and comparing it with an idealized, distance-only benchmark. The result is heatmaps (Broadie maps and a 'penalty' map) that show how hazards and contours affect difficulty beyond distance. He uses Woking #4 as a case study and discusses limitations (computational complexity, resolution, lack of putting/trees, single skill level). The aim is to help architects communicate design ideas to clients and explore strategic design; future work includes lidar integration and broader datasets.
PascalABC.NET is a free, LGPLv3-licensed, multi-paradigm Pascal for the .NET platform, designed for learning and teaching. It blends classic Pascal simplicity with modern features (generics, interfaces, operator overloading, lambda, LINQ, GC) and Delphi Object Pascal compatibility. It includes an IDE with code completion, plus an educational suite (Robot and Drawman units and a taskbook with over 1,100 tasks and automatic solution checking). It is cross-platform (Windows .NET and Linux Mono) via a CLI compiler, with built-in graphics units and .NET library access. Widely used in Russian education.
DIY Digital-Analog Tape Picture Camera stores photos on audio cassette tapes via SSTV. An ESP32-CAM captures an image, converts to SSTV (Martin M1), and records the signal to tape. Playing back uses a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) to decode SSTV and reconstruct the image. Robustness improvements address tape speed drift (filtering, sync recovery, fewer false detections). Extra: export decoded image over USB serial to a PC. Hardware: ESP32-CAM, RP2040, 2.8" TFT, cassette deck, amp, regulators, 3D-printed enclosure. Created by Jordan Blanchard.
Wildex is a free mobile/desktop app that uses your camera to instantly identify plants, animals, and bugs, building a personal collection with rarity. It shows species near you, tracks where and when you found them on a map, and offers local/global leaderboards, quests, and easy sharing. Each species includes facts to help you learn. The latest update adds improved AI, a larger library and Wildboy wilderness guide. It supports iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision, and visionOS, with data usage privacy noted.
Max Shen argues that human intelligence and consciousness are distributed across the body, not confined to the skull-brain. He highlights that the gut houses about 500 million neurons, the heart ~50,000, and the spinal cord ~15 million, each with its own sensory and motor circuits that influence behavior and even memory. The piece critiques brain-centric models (CBT, neuromatrix, Pain Reprocessing) and suggests “gut feelings” coordinate the body alongside head and heart. He notes organ transplants can alter personality and emphasizes integrating multiple neural centers for well-being.
FFF.nvim is a fast fuzzy file finder for Neovim with a Rust backend that indexes files for sub-10ms search across large repos. It offers typo-resistant search, Git status integration, lazy initialization, and image previews. It requires Neovim 0.10+, Rust nightly, and Rustup. Install via lazy.nvim with an optional prebuilt binary. Key commands: :FFFFind, :FFFScan, :FFFRefreshGit, :FFFClearCache, :FFFHealth, :FFFOpenLog; and keys: ff, fg, fz. Features include configurable layout/preview, multi-mode search (plain, regex, fuzzy) with cross-mode suggestions, and Git text highlights. MIT licensed; repository: dmtrKovalenko/fff.nvim.
Josh Collinsworth argues that AI optimism is a class privilege: enthusiasts benefit from the tech while ignoring its costs to others. He recalls a personal encounter with a cruel, personalized AI roast that hurt him and made him consider how AI could enable bullying, deepfakes, and violence for vulnerable people. He critiques optimists’ focus on productivity gains and “eventual” benevolence, highlighting layoffs, insecure junior workers, data-center energy use, environmental harm, fraud, and biased justice systems. He acknowledges limited accessibility benefits but insists they don’t justify widespread harms. He urges acknowledging privilege and weighing costs over hype.
Chiplets are moving toward an open, standards-driven multi-die future, converging with MCM heritage but enabling mix-and-match silicon from an open marketplace. Cadence’s Physical AI Chiplet Platform offers a configurable, multi-die system (Arm compute, Cadence AI, System and Domain-Specific Chiplets) linked by UCIe and NoC, with a unified boot/security/debug flow. They’re forming an ecosystem with Arm, Arteris, eMemory, M31, Silicon Creations, Trilinear, proteanTecs, and Samsung Foundry on SF5A, plus Invecas and Custom Silicon Services for end-to-end realization. The goal: faster time-to-market for edge AI, data-center, and HPC.
An essay on grammar as power in professional life. The author recalls polishing emails to bosses only to receive blunt replies, emojis, or “sent from iPhone” typos in return. Citing Epstein–era emails with Musk, Gates, and Branson and the sloppy Sony Pictures hacks, the piece argues that grammar can be a privilege: once you reach power, you may drop careful prose, using informal language to signal status rather than necessity.
Progress on Snowboard Kids 2 decompilation with LLM-assisted methods stalled after reaching ~75%. Shifts in workflow: moved from difficulty-based function ordering (logistic regression) to similarity-based prioritization using function embeddings and exact similarity (Coddog vs Levenshtein). Found simpler similarity approach often as good as, or better than, engineered features. Specialized Claude skills (gfxdis.f3dex2, decomp-permuter) helped, but permuter largely dropped due to noise. Cleanups and documentation improved references. Scaling with worktrees, Claude hooks, and Nigel the Cat for orchestration; GLM-based Glaude used for cheaper tokens. Remaining challenges: large, macro-heavy, or math functions; 124 functions left; awaiting frontier models.
FreeFlow is a free, open‑source macOS transcription app (MIT) offering a privacy‑focused alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue. It runs without a FreeFlow server; transcription and post‑processing go through Groq APIs, with only those API calls leaving your computer. Activate recording by pressing Fn to paste text into the current app, and it’s context‑aware (names, emails, terminals). The project by zachlatta/freeflow is Swift‑based, has 52 commits, and 15 stars as of Feb 16, 2026.
State of Show HN 2025 analyzes every Show HN post with topic modeling to reveal what Hacker News readers find engaging and how behavior shifts over time. A treemap shows 2025 posts are large but lower-scoring; top topics include DIY Hardware IoT Projects, Open Source, Debugging, Interpreters, and Life Narratives. The author notes a 2025 performance drop vs 2022–2024 and cites theories: the remote job market and AI-driven content that inflates volume but muddies signal. AI topics underperform, while DIY hardware remains highly resonant. The piece hints at voting-ring signals and a future HN heatmap.
Without race-condition tests, concurrent writes can lose updates. The article uses a balance-credit example to show two reads of a stale balance followed by writes causing underpayment. It presents synchronization barriers to deterministically force read-before-write interleaving, then tests bare queries, transactions, and FOR UPDATE locks, showing how barriers reveal or deadlock with locks and how barrier placement matters. It recommends injecting barriers via test hooks (not in production) and running against real Postgres. Barrier tests catch regressions, prevent flaky failures, and help ensure concurrency bugs don’t ship.
Suicide Linux, a qntm concept, would auto-convert any mis-typed command into rm -rf /, wiping data as a game to see how long you can work before loss. The post notes later real-world builds: a Debian package (2011) with a demo video, and a Docker image (2017) by others, though reactions are underwhelming. It suggests variations like immediate warnings or deleting a single file for educational testing. Updates (2015, 2020) clarify the author didn’t create those builds.
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