Size of Life

https://neal.fun/size-of-life/animals/stickers/corpse-flower.webp
Explore the scale of living things, from an amoeba to a blue whale.

DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

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DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, used smuggled Nvidia chips to develop an AI model. Nvidia denies any involvement in the smuggling operation, but is investigating the claims.

Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

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Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/karpathy/hnhero.webp
User created a project to analyze Hacker News front pages from 10 years ago using LLM ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking, grading comments for prescience and accuracy. The project aims to train forward future predictors and raise awareness about the potential for future LLMs to scrutinize current actions.

Qwen3-Omni-Flash-2025-12-01:a next-generation native multimodal large model

https://qianwen-res.oss-accelerate-overseas.aliyuncs.com/Qwen3-Omni-Flash-2025-12-01/q3o251201.png#center
Qwen3-Omni is a next-generation AI model that processes multiple inputs and generates text and speech outputs. It has been enhanced for improved performance, efficiency, and natural interactions in 119 languages.

Why the Sanitizer API is just `setHTML()`

Sanitizing HTML involves removing unwanted elements and attributes to prevent XSS bugs, but traditional methods can cause Mutated XSS (mXSS) due to context sensitivity. A better approach is to use a context-sensitive sanitizer with a method like Sanitizer.sanitize(input, context) to ensure safe HTML parsing.

Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

You like Gundam and Jane Austen because they both explore tensions between personal desires and institutional logic. Both often feature characters with privilege but limited power, navigating rigid social structures and making choices between duty and personal feelings.

Factor 0.101 now available

Developers made UI changes and fixed scaling issues on Linux and Windows. They also updated Factor, a stack-based programming language, with new features and tools.

9 Mothers (YC X26) Is Hiring

Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux

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Valve's Steam Machine supports HDMI 2.0 due to software limitations, not hardware. HDMI 2.1 support is still a work-in-progress due to the HDMI Forum's unwillingness to disclose the 2.1 specification.

Launch HN: InspectMind (YC W24) – AI agent for reviewing construction drawings

InspectMind is an AI plan checker that finds errors in construction drawings, details, and specs to prevent delays and rework. It reviews full drawing sets in minutes, catching issues that cause rework before construction begins.

COM Like a Bomb: Rust Outlook Add-in

https://tritium.legal/static/images/open-with-tritium.png
The user is implementing a Tritium add-in for Outlook using Rust and the windows-rs crate, which provides a COM interface to interact with Outlook's attachment context menu. They encountered memory corruption issues due to incorrect COM interface signatures and had to use an LLM to generate the correct signatures, highlighting the importance of careful interface implementation when working with COM.

Typewriter Plotters (2022)

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Typewriter plotters used ballpoint pens to draw text and graphics, with some models connecting to computers for custom printing. Panasonic, Brother, and other brands produced these pen typewriters in the 1980s, with prices ranging up to $350 for the Panasonic RK-P400C.

Golang's big miss on memory arenas

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Go's middle ground between performance and ease of use is being squeezed by faster interpreted languages and simpler systems languages. If Go refuses to add complexity to gain performance, it risks becoming outdated and losing its position as a popular choice for cloud native infrastructure.

RoboCrop: Teaching robots how to pick tomatoes

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Volcanic eruptions set off a chain of events that brought Black Death to Europe

https://www.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/shorthand/251968/RecB8QP39p/assets/n0KQyiu8tA/eastern-mediterranean-atlas-catalan-1375-ls.jpg
Researchers from the University of Cambridge and Leibniz Institute found a link between a 1345 volcanic eruption and the Black Death. The eruption led to crop failures, famine, and the introduction of the deadly bacterium Yersinia pestis to Europe via trade routes.

Deprecations via warnings don't work for Python libraries

https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/18519037?v=4
urllib3 removed deprecated APIs in v2.6.0 but users were still caught off guard. DeprecationWarning may not be effective for deprecating APIs in Python libraries.

Super-Flat ASTs

https://jhwlr.io/super-flat-ast/0_loc.png
The user is optimizing the memory usage of a recursive descent parser by implementing string interning, bump allocation, and a super flat representation of the abstract syntax tree (AST) to reduce memory usage and page faults. The optimizations result in a 20% reduction in memory usage and a significant decrease in page faults, making the parser more efficient and scalable.

Revisiting "Let's Build a Compiler"

A programmer translated a 35-year-old compiler tutorial from Pascal to Python, emitting WebAssembly code. The tutorial's effectiveness lies in its step-by-step recursive-descent parser and direct code generation approach.

Is it a bubble?

https://www.oaktreecapital.com/images/oaktreecaplibraries/insights/memos/commentary/is-it-a-bubble-exhibit7.jpg?sfvrsn=d6aa2866_2
The author discusses the possibility of a bubble in the artificial intelligence industry, citing parallels with past technological revolutions and market manias. He argues that while AI has the potential to bring about significant change, its impact on investors and the market is uncertain and may lead to losses for some.

Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon

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Israel used Palantir's AI software in attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing 37 and injuring 3,400. Palantir's involvement in these attacks raises concerns about its role in Israel's use of force and potential war crimes.

Map of all the buildings in the world

https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2025/12/gizmodo-scrnshot-globalbuildingatlas-1280x824.jpg
Researchers at TUM created a high-resolution 3D map of all buildings worldwide, called the GlobalBuildingAtlas, with 2.75 billion models. The map offers detailed information on urbanization, poverty, and climate studies, and can be accessed interactively.

England Historic Aerial Photo Explorer

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Historic aerial photos show England's landscape changes and hidden archaeology. They can be viewed and analyzed with various tools and base maps.

Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

Rust in the Linux kernel is no longer experimental and will be a core part of the kernel. The 'experimental' tag will be removed due to its successful integration.

Show HN: MCPShark – Traffic Inspector for Model Context Protocol

https://github.com/mcp-shark/mcp-shark Site: https://mcpshark.sh/ It sits between your editor/LLM client and MCP servers so you can: • See all MCP traffic (requests, responses, tools, resources) in one place • Debug sessions when tools don’t behave as expected • Optionally run “Smart Scan” checks to flag risky tools / configs

Cloth Simulation

New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care

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Sword Health developed MindEval, a framework to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in mental health conversations. MindEval assesses LLMs on clinical skills, providing a reliable yardstick to measure and improve mental health capabilities of future models.

In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution

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A new study found a 22 percent decline in particulate pollution in New York City after congestion pricing was implemented. The decline was greater than in other cities with congestion pricing and extended beyond Lower Manhattan to the greater metropolitan area.

Bruno Simon – 3D Portfolio

https://bruno-simon.com/ui/previews/home.webp
This user's portfolio is a 3D world built with Three.js library, showcasing their skills and work. It includes devlogs on their YouTube channel and open-source code on GitHub.

When a video codec wins an Emmy

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The AV1 video codec won a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for its impact on video content delivery. AV1 is an open standard under a royalty-free patent policy, widely deployed across the streaming ecosystem.