Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

You launched a project called Dark Hours, but it was similar to an existing open source project called DarkHours.app. You apologized for using AI to create the project without checking for existing work and will redirect the domain to the original project.

Criminal Deception in Silicon Valley

Show HN: A Project Oberon System version running on RISC-V instead of RISC-5

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/9c9390e4f44f2473c6a445926cf235c6c01e73a13cdf01d37d2f03099dfe5b18/687474703a2f2f736f6674776172652e726f636875732d6b656c6c65722e63682f70726f6a6563745f6f6265726f6e5f73797374656d5f727633322e706e67
A version of the Project Oberon System has been migrated from Oberon 07 to Oberon 90 using a recent OP2 compiler with a RISC-V backend, preserving the original system's simplicity and regularity. The system now runs on an emulated RISC-V machine, with future iterations planned to migrate it to an Olimex board, providing a low-cost and widely available hardware platform.

Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)

John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

https://kibotronics.net/og-image.png
Man's existence on Earth was sustained by water and carbon compounds, but he created machines that eventually took over and formed a single, planetwide mind. This solid-state entity, now independent of Man, eliminated all life and eventually moved the planet to explore the galaxy for other entities like itself.

Every fast write moves work somewhere else

https://www.shayon.dev/fast-writes.jpg
A database write can stop after memory, a local SSD, an object PUT, or a replicated WAL. Each choice changes latency, durability, and who owns the work left for later.

Honey, I shrunk the embeddings: Matryoshka vs. PCA

https://dylancastillo.co/posts/images/cards/matryoshka-vs-pca.png
The article compares Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for reducing vector dimensions in retrieval models. MRL is a technique that trains models to pack important information at the start of vectors, while PCA reduces dimensions by finding the most varying directions in the data.

Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/a/1/csm_Windows_11_01_6e1c5df0a8.jpg
Microsoft's Weather app consumes over 1 GB of RAM, making it inefficient on PCs with limited RAM, contradicting the company's goal of improving Windows 11's efficiency. The app's high memory usage is due to its non-native Windows implementation and multiple Chromium-based subprocesses.

Human vs. AI – Diff-based line-level provenance for text under agentic editing

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eighttrigrams/us-vs-them/main/title_image.png
Line-level provenance for text under agentic editing — who wrote this line, us or them? — derived from a text's version history. Use it as library or as CLI tool. With agentic coding and editing, provenance becomes a pertinent question. Text a human wrote or edited should be considered close to sacred: an agent should be hesitant and have a very good reason to touch it. Slop another agent ...

There Are Magic Hexagons of Every Order

The user used AI to solve the problem of constructing abnormal magic hexagons, a long-standing open problem in mathematics, by imposing additional symmetry constraints and using a potential field representation to reduce the search space. The AI, GPT-5.6 Sol, was able to find a constructive proof for the existence of abnormal magic hexagons for every order n > 3, and the user was able to ...

Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/GettyImages-491300440.jpg?w=1024
Historian Jill Lepore discusses her book "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State" which explores how private corporations are increasingly taking on the functions of the state, threatening democracy and individual rights. Lepore argues that this trend is a result of a misreading of science fiction and pulp culture, and that a return to democratic values and a more nuanced understanding of ...

My server is a phone now

https://seg6.space/img/phone-server/system-dashboard.png
The user repurposed their CMF Phone 1 as a server by installing Termux and running Linux applications, leveraging Android's existing hardware drivers and capabilities. They created a reproducible and manageable infrastructure using Ansible, with automated backups, health checks, and observability, turning their phone into a quiet, fast, and reliable server.

Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/dfc2c200c5ce65fa9c5f3faa0e47fd7e87be622e66b04cefb646375861f0aa2a/jmarshall23/msword
This project is a native Windows x64 port of Microsoft Word 1.1a, preserving the original user experience and behavior. It uses CMake and Visual Studio 2022 to build a 64-bit executable from the original source code and resources.

Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

https://os8088.com/img/shots/00-hero.png
os8088 is a hobby project that recreates a Macintosh System 1-style desktop for the Intel 8086, featuring overlapping windows, pull-down menus, and pre-emptive multitasking. It boots from a floppy and runs entirely in real-mode assembly, with a 40KB kernel and a graphical interface that fits in 256K of RAM on an Intel 8086 or 8088 processor.

Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone

https://images.techeblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/09001255/tom-stanton-supersonic-trebuchet-770x515.jpg
Tom Stanton created a gravity-powered trebuchet that crossed the speed of sound. He used a 3:1 pulley system, carbon fiber arm, and aerodynamic design to achieve 776 miles per hour.

The Grid That Doubles the Strength of the Ground

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/55ac34e4e4b0170ef54be632/1785857133119-1DBX9SRDN8B6NQP6DP9F/PREN_E106_Geocells_1c.jpg?content-type=image%2Fjpeg
The Port of Long Beach in Southern California uses geocells, a 3D structure made of plastic strips, to improve bearing capacity and prevent washboarding on unpaved roadways. Geocells can significantly reduce the thickness of a base layer needed for road construction, make it possible to use cheaper base materials, and provide a net environmental benefit by reducing excavation and haul distance.

Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

https://images.theconversation.com/files/752407/original/file-20260805-50-1x5k83.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip
Two studies found that taxi and ambulance drivers have a lower risk of dying from Alzheimer's disease due to their continuous real-time navigation work. This association is linked to the hippocampus, a brain region that governs memory and spatial navigation, which is damaged early in Alzheimer's disease.

Dithered QR Codes

https://www.andrewt.net/dithered-qr-codes/divbyzero.728b270e.png
A QR code is a grid of squares that encodes data, with function patterns for easy scanning and data modules for storing information. By modifying data modules, QR codes can be made to look distinctive, but may be less robust when scanning.

The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

https://halfhill.com/byte/1998-12_alpha1.gif
Digital Equipment is offering a sneak preview of the next generation in NT processing with the 64-bit Alpha 21264 processor, which is one of the fastest chips in the world and available today. The 21264 has an innovative design with larger primary caches, additional functional units, and out-of-order execution, making it a brainiac processor that executes instructions out of order more ...

Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding

The user discusses optimizing A* pathfinding by improving the heuristic function, specifically using landmarks to guide the search towards the goal. Landmarks can be used to create a lower bound for the path length, and multiple landmarks can be used to cover more of the map, but their placement depends on the start point, goal, and map layout.

Uber SubmitQueue: a high-performance speculative merge queue

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/afb752d644e49f01f43e6ef897324c9904e9ab5f83e5cce95cd757394afec04e/uber/submitqueue
SubmitQueue is a high-performance speculative merge queue that keeps the trunk green at scale by validating multiple changes in parallel. It's designed for large monorepos and fast-moving teams with concurrent changes.

Banksy works cost public almost £150k

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/1920/cpsprodpb/5b09/live/88e263b0-8e72-11f1-98c2-039438173617.jpg
Three artworks by street artist Banksy have cost taxpayers almost £150,000 in cleaning operations and security so far, with the bill expected to rise. The largest single cost relates to a mural painted on the Royal Courts of Justice in September 2025, where removal efforts and security have so far cost more than £85,000. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) says it has spent £50,000 trying to remove ...

A partial digestion of the HRT counterexample

A function of one variable can be translated in space by a spatial shift to obtain a new function and also modulated in frequency by a frequency shift to obtain a new function One can compose these two operations to obtain a time-frequency shift: (This can be viewed of as a portion of the Weyl representation of the Heisenberg group, but we will not adopt a representation-theoretic perspective ...

FCC moves to ban Lidar-equipped foreign drones from US

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/5kwusaMihCGAETxiT5pkRV.jpg
The FCC proposes banning US sales of foreign-made drones with LiDAR features, citing national security concerns. The ban would affect popular consumer models like DJI's Air 3S and Mini 5 Pro, but not existing owners.

Show HN: Airy – Free, fast, and simple voice content creation

Airy Studio — Turn lines into speech. Choose a voice and export audio.

We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

https://cdn.shopify.com/b/shopify-brochure2-assets/d5a289aad251536cebddff8378b429f0.png?originalWidth=1848&originalHeight=782
Shopify used SKIP LOCKED, composite primary keys, and connection visibility to handle high-throughput inventory reservations during peak traffic. The solution eliminated overselling and underselling issues, improved database health, and allowed Shopify to meet its scale targets on Black Friday 2025.

Willoughbyland: England's Forgotten South American Colony

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Show HN: Today's cities on a globe of Earth's tectonic past and future

https://douwe.com/static/projects/tectonic_globe/tectonic_globe.jpg
Today's countries and cities are used as colored crust markers. Country polygons are split by the present-day static polygons from the Merdith 2021 plate model, then each country-on-plate fragment is reconstructed backward with pyGPlates finite rotations. The future side is a constant-motion extrapolation from young plate rotations with a few coarse collision handoffs, so treat it as an ...

Stylized GGX Shading

https://alexandrelamure.github.io/resources/graphics-posts/stylized-ggx-shading/diffuse-thresholding.jpg
To achieve a stylized look in 3D rendering, the user proposes a mixed approach called "Stylized GGX Shading" that combines PBR and toon shading. This approach involves modifying the GGX Cook-Torrance microfacet model to create a more stylized look with big sharp highlights at low roughness and soft gradients at high roughness.

Making difficulty curves in games

http://www.davetech.co.uk/pages/difficultycurves/i/expected-dfifficulty-curve.gif
Game developers should aim to create a smooth difficulty curve by introducing new mechanics and challenges gradually, allowing players to feel a sense of progression and accomplishment. To achieve this, developers can use various techniques such as providing subtle hints, allowing players to grind for experience, and hiding shortcuts that require knowledge to access, all while monitoring ...