Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012)

86 firephox 2026-07-20 15:46:18 UTC nothings.org Llama Share 28

The author of the text discusses the limitations of screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) in accurately simulating real-world lighting effects, particularly in corners of rooms. They argue that SSAO often produces unrealistic results, such as darkening corners, due to a misunderstanding of how light interacts with surfaces.

Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

308 speckx 2026-07-20 13:46:18 UTC news.risky.biz Llama Share 179

A hacker breached Romania's cadastre agency, wiping the country's land registry database after a failed extortion attempt. The hack has brought the real-estate market to a standstill.

American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing

152 benwerd 2026-07-20 14:46:18 UTC werd.io Llama Share 145

American companies are losing the AI model market due to their locked-down business practices, while China's open approach is gaining traction. China's release of AI models openly could turn a US-created compute disadvantage into a distribution advantage, and create a more effective global ecosystem.

Airport Simulator

370 apunen 2026-07-20 10:46:18 UTC airport.apunen.com Full Share 96

The sky (and your endurance) is the limit!

Jaron Lanier: there is no AI (2023)

23 simonebrunozzi 2026-07-20 15:46:18 UTC newyorker.com Llama Share 21

The author, a computer scientist, argues that the term "artificial intelligence" is misleading and that we should think of AI as a tool for social collaboration rather than a creature that can be independent and intelligent. By recognizing the human essence of AI and giving people credit and control over their contributions, we can create a more transparent and equitable technology that ...

We're Squandering LEDs' Potential to Save Our Night Skies

115 defrost 2026-07-20 13:46:18 UTC spectrum.ieee.org Llama Share 74

The author explores how artificial light at night affects cities, citing excessive lighting as a problem that disrupts human health and ecological balance. LEDs offer a solution, but their potential is often wasted due to outdated thinking and a failure to control and coordinate lighting levels.

Perfection Is Not Over-Engineering

78 var0xyz 2026-07-20 14:46:18 UTC var0.xyz Llama Share 44

The author argues that perfection is not over-engineering, but rather ambiguous requirements. Clear requirements lead to a perfect solution.

I Tracked 997 Chrome Extensions That Changed Their Titles

25 Joseph_Hu 2026-07-20 15:46:18 UTC extensionranker.com Llama Share 0

Editing a Chrome extension title makes its rankings 4x more likely to move within two weeks, with equal odds of improvement or decline. Matching the title to a specific search phrase can lead to higher rankings, but only if the phrase has real volume and the extensions currently on top are growing.

Firefox Merges Support for Vulkan Video Decoding

88 DemiGuru 2026-07-20 14:46:18 UTC github.com/search Full Share 18

GitHub is where people build software. More than 150 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 420 million projects.

Exploit brokers pay $500k for WordPress RCEs. I found one with GPT5.6 and $25

320 infosecau 2026-07-20 08:46:18 UTC slcyber.io Llama Share 169

A security researcher used a large language model called Sol to discover a pre-authentication SQL injection vulnerability in WordPress, which can be escalated to a full-blown RCE. The researcher found that Sol was able to chain together several creative exploitation techniques, including recursive batch calls and cache abuse, to produce a full exploit chain in just over 10 hours.

Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

2 alexsouthmayd 2026-07-20 16:36:18 UTC news.ycombinator.com Prefix Share 2

Hi HN, I’m Alex Southmayd, the founder of Bloomy (bloomylearning.com) – an AI-powered mastery-learning platform for K-12 students. Bloomy provides students with an AI tutor alongside adaptive curriculum (right now Math, English Language Arts, and Writing). How it works: we diagnose students’ skill gaps, place them on personalized learning paths, and give them standards-aligned lessons and a ...

The Voice of Google

19 littlexsparkee 2026-07-20 15:46:18 UTC newyorker.com Llama Share 7

The author worked at Google from 2007 to 2016, starting as a communications associate and eventually becoming a manager, crafting internal messaging and social media content that amplified the company's corporate mythology. As the company grew and evolved, the author witnessed both its innovative spirit and its flaws, including a culture of sexism, a lack of accountability, and a failure to ...

Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

94 cl42 2026-07-20 15:46:18 UTC emergingtrajectories.com Llama Share 96

Two state-of-the-art foundation models, Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8, were launched, challenging top-tier model developers and threatening Anthropic's dominance. Their open models and lower costs pose a significant risk to Anthropic's product differentiation and economic model.

Shinjuku Station in 3D

35 Gecko4072 2026-07-20 13:46:18 UTC satoshi7190.github.io Full Share 10

「新宿駅周辺屋内地図データ」（国土交通省）（https://www.geospatial.jp/ckan/dataset/mlit-indoor-shinjuku-r2）を加工して作成

The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel

328 rapnie 2026-07-20 12:46:18 UTC edri.org Llama Share 181

The US is requiring EU countries to share biometric data and personal information for traveller screening, with the EU negotiating a Framework Agreement to set exchange modalities. The EU is being pressured into excessive US demands, potentially compromising European and third-country nationals' rights and data protection.

NYC Subway Signals: A Complete Guide

14 at1as 2026-07-20 15:46:18 UTC nycsubway.org Llama Share 4

The New York City subway uses wayside color-light block signalling with signals located to the side of tracks, utilizing colors of lights and dividing tracks into discrete blocks to detect train presence. Signals rely on control lengths and overlap to keep trains at least one signal apart and enforce separation between trains.

Inertia-1: An Open Exploration to a Unified Motion Foundation Model

31 hasheddan 2026-07-20 13:46:18 UTC yang-ai-lab.github.io Llama Share 1

Inertia-1 brings motion models under one roof, studying the full lifecycle of motion data, sensing, objectives, and scale in a controlled space. It finds a unified representation that adapts across placements, devices, and tasks with practical rules of thumb for sampling rates and window lengths.

Satan's 19th-Century Bank Note (2017)

30 Caiero 2026-07-20 12:46:18 UTC historytoday.com Full Share 1

Establishing a secure connection... Request ID: e6fab2553ccb6eea41e76754d2f2c627

Soofi – Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models

21 Fake4d 2026-07-20 13:46:18 UTC soofi.info Llama Share 8

Soofi S stellt ein offenes europäisches KI-Modell vor, das nachvollziehbare und anpassbare KI-Anwendungen ermöglicht, insbesondere in industriellen Bereichen. Unternehmen können sich für die Testphase anmelden, um praxisnahe Tests mit Soofi durchzuführen.

Annoying and alarming things about OpenCode

299 alekq 2026-07-20 13:46:18 UTC wren.wtf Llama Share 203

The user thoroughly criticizes OpenCode, an AI coding agent, for its numerous security and usability issues, including poor permission handling, broken prompt caching, and lack of protection for early reads. The user argues that OpenCode's design is fundamentally flawed and that using it can lead to trivial exploitation or accidental wiping of machines, and suggests that local LLMs are also ...

Show HN: Wheesper – Start an anonymous discussion with a link

9 whatdoyouthink2 2026-07-20 15:46:18 UTC wheesper.com Full Share 11

Private discussions. Honest replies.

ECC and DDR5

72 zdw 2026-07-20 12:46:18 UTC etbe.coker.com.au Llama Share 61

ECC RAM corrects errors in memory before reaching the CPU, using Hamming codes to detect and correct single-bit errors. ECC RAM is recommended for systems storing important data, as it can prevent data corruption and lost time due to RAM hardware errors.

Tested Kimi K3 for Coding

17 speckx 2026-07-20 14:46:18 UTC dotnetperls.com Llama Share 5

User tested Kimi K3 on Rust program optimization, and it successfully applied SWAR optimization in 15 minutes, resulting in 2% speedup. Kimi K3's performance and accuracy suggest it may be a frontier-level model as advertised.

Sensing warm and cool: how the body detects temperature changes

31 hhs 2026-07-20 11:46:18 UTC news.uq.edu.au Llama Share 4

University of Queensland researchers found that most skin temperature sensitive nerve cells can sense both cool and warmth, challenging a widely accepted view. This new understanding could help explain thermal dysfunction in people with spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, and ageing.

Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight

304 wertyk 2026-07-20 00:46:18 UTC github.com/hgaiser Llama Share 124

Moonshine allows remote PC gaming with isolated streaming sessions and keyboard, mouse, and controller inputs. It requires a Linux system and a VPN for secure internet streaming.

Controlling Reasoning Effort in LLMs

8 ibobev 2026-07-20 14:46:18 UTC magazine.sebastianraschka.com Prefix Share 0

It has been almost two years since OpenAI released o1, a model that popularized the idea of LLM-based reasoning models. DeepSeek-R1 followed about four months later, together with details of a reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) recipe to train such reasoning models. Last week, OpenAI released the GPT-5.6 model family. It comes in three sizes, each with roughly five or six ...

What does the Riemann zeta function have to do with the distribution of primes?

76 mb1699 2026-07-20 08:46:18 UTC hidden-phenomena.com GoogleT5 Share 16

Riemann was able to find an even more precise formula computing the number of prime numbers less than a number (n). the size of xrho depends only on how big s is, so if you have 0, then y = n - p / r h = 1...! equating logarithms with primes can be done in

Sealed tomb filled with paintings and inscriptions discovered in Egypt

110 isaacfrond 2026-07-20 04:46:18 UTC labrujulaverde.com Llama Share 75

A Dutch archaeological team led by Dr. Carina van den Hoven discovered a tomb in the Theban necropolis, believed to belong to an individual named Paser from the Ramesside period. The team plans to continue studying and documenting the tomb to determine its historical significance and preserve its architectural and artistic features.

We rewrote our custom visualisation renderers from SVG to be in Canvas

14 yomieluwande 2026-07-20 14:46:18 UTC polarsignals.com Llama Share 1

The team rewrote their flame graph renderer to use Canvas instead of SVG, resulting in a 3.6x speedup in rendering time and a 3.3x reduction in time per frame. The new Canvas renderer also improved interaction performance, with zooming, scrolling, and resetting now taking significantly less time, and hover tooltips no longer stuttering on slower machines.

The footprints of every building in NYC – updated weekly

19 jonathanmkeegan 2026-07-20 12:46:18 UTC beautifulpublicdata.com Llama Share 2

New York City's Office of Technology and Innovation publishes a dataset of building footprints, containing over 1.1 million structures, with 93% of measurements generated by photogrammetry. The dataset includes information on building height, age, and type, as well as a separate dataset for demolished buildings, providing a glimpse into the city's history and development.