Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Fun with clip-path is a small CSS-only code exploration showing a menu revealed by a growing circle clip-path and a hardcoded polygon ray. The circle uses clip-path: circle(calc(1.42 * 100vmax) at 0 0), with 1.42 as sqrt(2) to scale to viewport. The second clip-path creates a ray. No JavaScript; the polygon could be dynamic with JS for responsive dimensions. MIT licensed; readme describes the approach.
A Cloudflare security block prevents access to hpcwire.com, indicating the site protects against online attacks and that the block can be triggered by certain inputs. To resolve, contact the site owner with details of what you were doing and include the Cloudflare Ray ID (9ca5864f99c7fb38) and your IP address.
SectorC is a C compiler written in 16-bit x86 assembly that fits in a 512-byte boot sector. It supports a fairly large subset of C: global vars, functions, if/while, many operators, pointers, inline machine-code, comments, and recursion. The project introduces Barely C, which tokenizes via space-delimited tokens and uses atoi as a hash, with a small code generator and a 64K hash-based symbol lookup. The author reduces the implementation from 468 to 303 bytes, leaving ~207 bytes for more features. It includes a runtime (rt/) and examples like hello, sine-wave animation, and PC-speaker tunes.
Whiting argues that vanilla C is the best fit for his solo games due to reliability, portability, and long-term tool support. He values a simple, memorizable language with strict typing, strong warnings, fast compilation, and robust debugging. He rejects C++/Java/C# for complexity and OOP rigidity, and notes Go (GC) and web risks. While he appreciates other options like Haxe or making his own language, he sticks with C for its speed, portability, and established ecosystem.
Nolan Lawson laments AI-driven code generation transforming programming, arguing tools may outpace humans and redefine the programmer’s role. He speaks to seasoned developers who may bow out while juniors advance, notes the practical costs for those with mortgages, and admits nostalgia for handcrafting code and the personal pride in a GitHub project. He neither celebrates nor resists the change, urging readers to mourn the craft as a potentially relic-like practice, even as AI‑assisted review and debt-payer roles emerge in the field.
Could not summarize article.
Selection Rather Than Prediction: generate many candidate solutions from multiple agents and pick the best. Their workflow: specify a task, run 18 agents in parallel, and humans review diffs to patch the winner. Across 211 tasks, they rate agent strengths with a Bradley-Terry/Elo-like model. Top-tier exists but is noisy. Cohort value: top-1 wins 24%; top-3 51%; top-7 91%. Gains plateau after seven. Conclusion: use a top-tier cohort rather than a single agent; run a few more for robustness when time and cost allow.
A concise guide to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for language models. It covers origins and interdisciplinary roots, defines problems, data collection, and common mathematics, then details optimization stages: instruction tuning, reward modeling, rejection sampling, RL, and direct alignment. It concludes with advanced topics in synthetic data, evaluation, and open questions. The document includes a detailed changelog (2025–2026), acknowledgments, and a citation, presenting a practitioner-friendly update on RLHF methods and post-training workflows.
Stoicism is a practical system for living well by focusing on what you can control. Rooted in Greece and refined in Rome, it values inner virtue over external outcomes. Core figures: Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca. Central ideas: Dichotomy of Control (impulses and judgments vs. events); Living According to Nature (reason and reality); Virtue as the only true good (wisdom, justice, courage, self-discipline); Emotional mastery through reinterpretation; Amor Fati (loving one’s fate). The guide aims to start understanding and applying these ideas.
Vinklu transformed a slender residual plot on Bazilescu Street in Bucharest into The Chapel, a tiny coffee shop by architect Stefan Pavaluta. The triangular prism maximizes a 463-square-foot footprint, with almost full-height triple-glazed glass and an off-site prefabricated steel frame. The design uses daylight to create a luminous, lantern-like presence by night, and tames a nearby mature tree as a natural canopy. Inside, light wood and the roof's acute angle make the space feel larger and intimate. The project shows how smart small-scale interventions can redefine urban space.
StrongDM’s AI team built a Software Factory—non-interactive development where specs and scenarios drive agents to write code, run harnesses, and converge without human review. They mitigate unreviewed-code risk with Scenario testing and a Digital Twin Universe, cloning services like Okta, Jira, Slack, and Google Docs/Drive/Sheets to validate at scale. They released Attractor, a spec-driven coding agent with no code in its repo, and CXDB, an immutable DAG AI context store. This points to a future where engineers design and monitor autonomous code pipelines.
Nearly 900 Google employees signed an open letter demanding greater transparency about the company’s work for the US government and urging Google to sever or limit ties with immigration-enforcement agencies such as DHS, ICE and CBP. The move follows broader tech-worker activism after the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and past Google decisions like Maven. Workers say leadership has not addressed concerns and urge pulling Google tech from DHS/ICE/CBP, protecting staff from enforcement, and an all-hands meeting. Google has cloud contracts with federal agencies and partnerships with Lockheed Martin and Palantir tied to government work.
StrongDM envisions a Software Factory—non‑interactive development where specs and end‑to‑end scenarios drive autonomous agents to write code, run harnesses, and converge without human review. Since 2024, long‑horizon coding (Claude 3.5, YOLO mode) shifted practice toward agentic automation, with a charter: Hands off. They replace traditional tests with scenarios and a probabilistic 'satisfaction' metric. To scale validation, they built a Digital Twin Universe—behavioral clones of Okta, Jira, Slack, Docs/Drive/Sheets—testing thousands of scenarios per hour without live service limits. A token‑cost rule flags room for improvement.
Mark Litwintschik analyzes Overture’s Places dataset, a worldwide POI collection with 72.44M records (as of Jan 2026). The post details data updates (operating_status, basic_category, taxonomy) and shows how to load the data with DuckDB/Python on Ubuntu, using Parquet files (~7.2 GB). He explores distributions by basic_category (e.g., restaurant, specialty_store, beauty_salon, clothing_store), operating_status (mostly open), and taxonomy hierarchies, and maps brands. He also assesses maritime POIs, estimating ~29.6M in oceans using Marine Regions, and discusses confidence scores (majority 0.6). Concludes with consulting services and a LinkedIn contact.
Spillhistorie.no interviews Al Lowe, the Sierra and Leisure Suit Larry creator, focusing on his other passions. He discusses lifelong model railroading—N-scale layouts, NMRA leadership, and the shift to computer-controlled models—and his saxophone music life. He recalls Disney educational games like Donald Duck’s Playground and his pragmatic approach to collaboration there. He recounts his Sierra years, the move to contract work after Ken Williams’s layoff, the hostile takeovers, and the loss of archives. He muses on humor, puzzle solving, and the early move toward point-and-click interfaces.
Britain's road safety strategy would require drivers over 70 to have eye tests every three years to keep their licence, alongside potential moves to lower England's drink-drive limit and add penalties for not wearing seatbelts. About a quarter of drivers killed in 2024 were 70+. Vision checks are not currently mandated; DVLA relies on self-reporting. NHS eye tests are free for over-60s; Scotland offers free tests for all ages. Experts approve tests but warn more safeguards may be needed to protect safety and independence for older drivers.
An overview of IBM's 3270 Information Display System, a mainframe terminal family that buffered data to reduce I/O interrupts and let a single mainframe serve thousands of users. Mainframes use a hierarchical design with a central CPC and specialized I/O processors. 3270 terminals manipulate screen addresses; updates are sent only when the user issues a command (Enter, PF keys). Interfaces ranged from RS-232 to long coax, up to 3 km at 2.3587 Mb/s; tn3270 streams over TCP/IP. Displays like 3279/3179 and controllers like 3174 supported multi-session and file transfer; emulation and open hardware projects connect vintage gear to modern platforms.
With Hacktoberfest driving many low-effort contributions, the post argues for optional reputation controls on GitHub-like repos to curb spam without excluding newcomers. Proposals include account age restrictions, PRs tied to assigned issues, social labeling, a synthetic reputation score, and escrow deposits. These measures are easily gamed and risk abuse or centralization, potentially harming new contributors. The piece advocates optional reputation controls across code-forges, while noting uncertainty about what GitHub will implement.
An autobiographical, people-centered tour of Susam Pal’s 25 years in software. The tales span childhood curiosity, a university HTML quickstart that sparked a lifelong web interest, an 8086 reset-vector experiment, and a first job in architecture involving PKI and digital signatures for a banking product. He recalls debugging spaghetti code with a senior who could spot the error in minutes, and later championing animated widgets on a set-top box only to face hardware limits. A pivotal RSA moment, and a 2019 CTF win that underscored how experience shapes skill and perception.
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