Helix: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Generalist Humanoid Control

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Helix is a generalist Vision-Language-Action model that unifies perception, language understanding, and learned control for robots. It enables robots to perform various tasks, including picking up objects, using drawers, and collaborating with other robots, using a single set of neural network weights.

Spice86 – A PC emulator for real mode reverse engineering

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Spice86 is a tool to reverse engineer and rewrite real mode DOS programs. It uses a divide and conquer approach and converts assembly instructions to C# code.

Launch HN: Confident AI (YC W25) – Open-source evaluation framework for LLM apps

Jeffrey and Kritin built Confident AI, a cloud platform for DeepEval, an open-source package for evaluating LLM applications. The platform features dataset editing, regression catching, and iteration insights to provide reliable LLM benchmarks.

After 20 Years, Math Couple Solves Major Group Theory Problem

https://www.quantamagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/WhatIsAGroup-crAdamNickel-Default.webp
Mathematicians Späth and Cabanes have finally proved the McKay conjecture, a decades-old problem in group theory, after working together for over a decade. Their proof establishes a deep connection between a group and its Sylow normalizers, making it easier to study group properties.

Show HN: WinCse – Integrating AWS S3 with Windows Explorer

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/b5a95daee8a9e048c55d479d8673edceb32db094cccce960d976877c84091fbd/cbh34680/WinCse
WinCse is an application that integrates AWS S3 buckets with Windows Explorer, allowing you to treat S3 buckets as if they were part of your local file system. Access your S3 buckets in Windows Explorer on the drive selected in the form screen.

Lox – Oxidized Astrodynamics – A safe, ergonomic astrodynamics library

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Lox is a comprehensive astrodynamics API with varying levels of granularity, suitable for mission planning and analysis. It includes tools for working with time, celestial bodies, and Earth-centric astrodynamics.

RT64: N64 graphics renderer in emulators and native ports

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/4d73a0f1dcbc547e0b020544af5733e3dcd843125ba7779f6fab669a8364245c/rt64/rt64
RT64 is a graphics renderer for N64 games with enhancements for emulators and native ports. It offers features like input latency reduction, higher resolution rendering, and path tracing.

DotSlash: Simplified Executable Deployment

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DotSlash is a command-line tool that converts heavyweight executables into small text files for efficient storage in source control. It facilitates reproducible builds by reducing dependencies on the host environment.
Recent popular social media posts and website pages have claimed that the way in which people first perceive ambiguous images (i.e., pictures that can be interpreted in different ways) reveals insights into their personality and thinking style. In one example, people are shown an image that can be seen as either a young woman or man, and informed that seeing the woman first suggests that they ...

The most underreported story in AI is that scaling has failed to produce AGI

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BYGary Marcus Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus at NYU, is a leading voice in artificial intelligence, well known for his challenges to contemporary AI. He is a scientist and best-selling author and was founder and CEO of Geometric.AI, a machine learning company acquired by Uber.

The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself

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Jim Tucker hosts a meeting of the Heartland Tri-State Bank board to discuss a series of unexplained wire transfers that drained tens of millions of dollars. The bank's president, Shan Hanes, converted the funds into cryptocurrencies which then vanished.

When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

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Bluesky's system design made tradeoffs for performance and consistency, introducing "Lossy Timelines" to reduce hot shards and improve scalability. This approach reduced P99 duration for post Fanout by over 96% and eliminated hot shards in the Timelines database cluster.

1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

Yufeng Gao extracted a working UNIX system from DMR tapes s1 and s2, which he considers a "V2 beta" kernel. He created a bootable RF disk image containing files from s1/s2, available for download, but it's picky about the environment and only works with aap's PDP-11/20 emulator.

iText PDF Library turns 25

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iText releases iText 9.0 and iText Suite 9.1 with new features and improvements, celebrating its 25th anniversary. The release includes significant performance increases for table rendering and SVG implementation.

Customizable HTML Select

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Chrome Canary version 130 has a customizable select feature in Stage 2 of the WHATWG. It allows styling of the select element and its parts with CSS.

Show HN: Subtrace – Wireshark for Docker Containers

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Subtrace is a Chrome DevTools for backend tracking API requests to solve production problems quickly. It uses SQL queries to filter and analyze request details like headers, payload, and latency.

Softmax forever, or why I like softmax

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A colleague pointed out a mistake in the derivation of the partial derivative of the log-harmonic function, which has a problematic gradient that drives the logit towards zero or infinity. The author suggests that the harmonic formulation may not be suitable for gradient-based optimization and proposes introducing a margin or simply using softmax instead.

FAQ on Microsoft's topological qubit thing

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Microsoft claims to have created a topological qubit, a resilient quantum computing component. This achievement is a scientific milestone, but its practical usefulness and scalability are still uncertain.

Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

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The US egg industry is facing a crisis due to bird flu, with prices skyrocketing and many farms affected. Backyard chicken flocks may offer a solution, providing a steady supply of eggs and promoting food system resilience.

Show HN: Mastra – Open-source JS agent framework, by the developers of Gatsby

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/18d1713cfbabee981418625d9b1f42240d4eead652c871dd03a179a65f275e89/mastra-ai/mastra
Mastra is a TypeScript framework for building AI applications with primitives like workflows, agents, RAG, integrations, and evals. It supports local development and serverless cloud deployment with integrations for LLM providers like OpenAI and Anthropic.

All-optical control of charge-trapping defects in rare-earth doped oxides

Charge-trapping defects in crystalline solids play important roles in applications ranging from microelectronics, optical storage, sensing and quantum technologies. On one hand, depleting trapped charges in the host matrix reduces charge noise and enhances coherence of solid-state quantum emitters. On the other hand, stable charge traps can enable high-density optical storage systems. Here we ...

Animate Anyone 2: High-Fidelity Character Image Animation

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Animate Anyone 2 improves character animation by incorporating environment affordance and conditional inputs. It generates characters that interact with their environment while maintaining coherence and fidelity.

AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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The hiring process is being disrupted by AI, making traditional tech interviews less effective. Companies are adapting by using AI-assisted interviews, requiring in-person coding tests, or changing the nature of interviews to test skills like prompting and refactoring.

The 8-Bit Era's Weird Uncle: The TI-99/4A

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The user is exploring the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A home computer, starting with a tour of its BASIC system and capabilities, including tile graphics and sprites. They are using the Classic99 emulator and will continue to explore the system's hardware and capabilities, including the Extended BASIC cartridge, which provides more features and capabilities.

DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

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Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gained full access to USAID's digital infrastructure and is expected to enter IT systems at the CDC and FAA. This level of control raises concerns about sensitive information exposure and potential misuse, including access to health data, financial information, and defense secrets.

The Amazon Appstore for Android devices will be discontinued on August 20, 2025

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The Forecasting Company (YC S24) Is Hiring

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We are building a forecasting foundation model to help enterprise companies plan operations and reduce waste. As the founding MLE, you will build, train, and deploy large foundation model architectures for our customers.

F8 – an 8 bit architecture designed for C and memory efficiency [video]

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The f8 architecture is designed for 8-bit devices, optimized for low-level programming and minimal memory usage. It's based on experience with Small Device C Compiler and aims to fill a niche between simple 8-bit processors and more powerful RISC-V architectures.

Obsidian is now free for work

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Obsidian now offers a free commercial license option for work use, with no account required, ads, or tracking. This change simplifies pricing and aligns with Obsidian's principle of providing effective thinking tools to everyone.

Humane (Or Red Flags to Spot for Next Time)

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There’s a lot to take away from Humane’s story, but first, I want to share something I said on Twitter in July 2022, a full year before Humane revealed their product, the Ai Pin: me Which makes me wonder— is the whole idea for Humane to patent any technologies it develops in the hopes of licensing those technologies to big companies? Maybe the product is effectively a demo to facilitate ...