NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers

242 rbanffy 2026-04-18 21:50:14 UTC nist.gov Llama Share 105

Scientists at NIST have developed a way to make integrated circuits for light, which could power emerging technologies like AI, quantum computers, and optical atomic clocks. The new technique allows for the creation of complex circuits that can manipulate light in various ways, potentially making these technologies more powerful and portable.

Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

477 anabranch 2026-04-18 16:50:14 UTC tokens.billchambers.me Full Share 479

Anonymous request-token comparisons from the community, showing how Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7 differ on real inputs Open source · stored rows contain anonymous submission IDs onlyNot affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.

College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

218 gnabgib 2026-04-18 19:50:14 UTC sentinelcolorado.com Llama Share 201

Grit Matthias Phelps, a Cornell University instructor, introduced manual typewriters to her German language class to prevent AI use and teach students the value of writing without digital assistance. The "analog" assignment allowed students to experience the raw feeling of typing without screens, online dictionaries, or delete keys.

What Are Skiplists Good For?

21 mfiguiere 2026-04-19 03:50:14 UTC antithesis.com Llama Share 3

The user encountered a problem at Antithesis where they needed to efficiently query a large tree data structure in Google BigQuery, but point lookups were slow. They solved this by inventing a "skiptree" data structure, which is a hierarchy of skiplists that allows for efficient querying with a fixed number of JOINs in SQL.

Updating Gun Rocket through 10 years of Unity Engine

53 tyleo 2026-04-19 00:50:14 UTC jackpritz.com Llama Share 16

The user is updating their 10-year-old Unity project, Gun Rocket, to the latest version, starting with Unity 5.5 and migrating through various versions, noting changes in Unity's tech and UI along the way. The user successfully updates the project to the latest Unity version, 6000, and fixes various bugs, concluding that simplicity and luck played a significant role in the project's success.

The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker

307 NelsonMinar 2026-04-18 16:50:14 UTC righto.com Llama Share 87

Before GPS, aircraft navigated using celestial navigation, which was automated in the 1960s with the development of the Astro Compass system that used an electromechanical analog computer called the Angle Computer. The Angle Computer physically modeled the celestial sphere to solve the navigational triangle and provide accurate heading and position information to the aircraft navigator.

Zero-Copy GPU Inference from WebAssembly on Apple Silicon

57 agambrahma 2026-04-18 22:50:14 UTC abacusnoir.com Llama Share 21

The user discovered a zero-copy path for WebAssembly modules to share memory with the GPU on Apple Silicon, eliminating expensive serialization boundaries and enabling near-zero overhead between the CPU and GPU. This discovery is the foundation for a runtime called Driftwood, which will allow stateful AI inference and actor mobility with GPU acceleration, including portable snapshots of ...

Why Japan has such good railways

353 RickJWagner 2026-04-18 12:50:14 UTC worksinprogress.co Llama Share 351

Japan's railway system excels due to good public policy, business structure, and land use rules, not cultural factors. Its unique model of private companies building cities and capturing value from real estate and commercial side businesses has contributed to its success.

Metatextual Literacy

13 dado3212 2026-04-19 02:50:14 UTC jenn.site Llama Share 1

The author discusses how people misinterpret confessional essays by assuming the writer lacks self-awareness, when in fact the writer may be intentionally portraying themselves in a negative light. This phenomenon is often seen in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and real-life examples like Daniel Oppenheimer's NYT article.

Modern Common Lisp with FSet

125 larve 2026-04-18 20:50:14 UTC fset.common-lisp.dev Full Share 15

Top (Modern Common Lisp with FSet)

State of Kdenlive

360 f_r_d 2026-04-18 11:50:14 UTC kdenlive.org Llama Share 117

The Kdenlive team made significant progress in 2025, releasing new features, bug fixes, and improvements to the user interface, with a focus on stability and community support. The team is now looking ahead to upcoming features, including 10/12 bit color support, playback optimizations, and OpenFX support, and is grateful for community contributions and donations that enable continued development.

Optimizing Ruby Path Methods

73 weaksauce 2026-04-18 20:50:14 UTC byroot.github.io Llama Share 27

The author optimized Ruby's Bootsnap and File.join methods to improve performance, reducing setup time and boot time in Ruby applications. The optimizations included load path caching, reducing syscalls, and implementing fast paths for UTF-8 and ASCII encodings.

Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

727 yusufusta 2026-04-18 13:50:14 UTC isayeter.com Llama Share 368

A company migrated from DigitalOcean to Hetzner dedicated servers with zero downtime, saving $14,388 per year. The migration involved six phases, including MySQL replication, DNS TTL reduction, and reverse proxy setup.

Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

272 cdrnsf 2026-04-18 19:50:14 UTC samhenri.gold Llama Share 174

The author thinks Figma's systemization led to a complex, manual design process that's being replaced by code as the source of truth. This shift will make Figma's infrastructure look outdated.

The becquerel as an SI unit for request rate

10 fanf2 2026-04-19 02:50:14 UTC entropicthoughts.com Llama Share 0

Request rates should be measured as the number of requests per second to ensure consistency. Using the becquerel (Bq) unit is suitable for request rates due to its association with average frequency.

Sumida Aquarium Posts 2026 Penguin Relationship Chart, with Drama and Breakups

195 Lwrless 2026-04-18 12:50:14 UTC sumida-aquarium.com Full Share 7

The 2026 edition of our penguins relationship chart is finally here! It's fun, adorable, and as complicated as always!

NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

129 sohkamyung 2026-04-18 23:50:14 UTC science.nasa.gov Llama Share 54

NASA engineers shut down Voyager 1's LECP instrument to conserve power, giving the spacecraft about a year of extra life. The move is part of a plan to extend Voyager operations, with a more ambitious energy-saving fix, called "the Big Bang," planned for later this year.

Show HN: MDV – a Markdown superset for docs, dashboards, and slides with data

105 drasim 2026-04-18 15:50:14 UTC github.com/drasimwagan Llama Share 38

The user writes documents, dashboards, and slides in a Markdown superset using a theme and named styles. The rendered output is self-contained HTML and PDF, and can be previewed live in VS Code with auto-reload.

My first impressions on ROCm and Strix Halo

29 random_ 2026-04-18 22:50:14 UTC blog.marcoinacio.com Llama Share 19

User installed ROCm and Strix Halo on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, requiring a BIOS update and adjusting video memory settings. They successfully ran PyTorch and Qwen3.6 with Podman.

Dizzying Spiral Staircase with Single Guardrail Once Led to Top of Eiffel Tower

11 bookofjoe 2026-04-19 02:50:14 UTC smithsonianmag.com Llama Share 3

A section of the original Eiffel Tower staircase is going to auction on May 21, expected to fetch between $141,000 and $176,000. The staircase fragment, owned by a French businessman, is one of 24 sections dismantled in 1983 and recently restored by Eiffel Tower maintenance workers.

Scientists discover “cleaner ants” that groom giant ants in Arizona desert

91 t-3 2026-04-18 15:50:14 UTC sciencedaily.com Llama Share 34

Scientists discovered a unique partnership in Arizona's desert where tiny cone ants act as "cleaners" for larger harvester ants, licking and nibbling their bodies. This behavior is the first known example of one ant species cleaning a much larger ant, similar to cleaner fish in the ocean.

80386 Memory Pipeline

99 wicket 2026-04-18 13:50:14 UTC nand2mario.github.io Llama Share 13

The 80386's memory pipeline is a carefully engineered combination of latency-hiding techniques that allows protected virtual memory to perform close to physical memory, making it a practical foundation for serious PC operating systems. The FPGA 386 core's memory pipeline design aims to map the historical 386 memory pipeline to modern FPGAs while achieving high Fmax and low CPI, with ...

Understanding the FFT Algorithm (2013)

76 peter_d_sherman 2026-04-18 16:50:14 UTC jakevdp.github.io Llama Share 7

The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is a fast algorithm to compute the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) with a time complexity of O[N log N]. It was introduced by JW Cooley and John Tukey in 1965 and exploits symmetries in the DFT computation to achieve this speedup.

Bipartisan Bill to Tighten Controls on Sensitive Chipmaking Equipment

13 num42 2026-04-19 03:50:14 UTC baumgartner.house.gov Llama Share 3

Congressman Michael Baumgartner introduced the MATCH Act to strengthen US national security by closing gaps in export controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment. The bipartisan bill aims to create a level playing field for US and allied toolmakers and prevent China from dominating the semiconductor supply chain.

I dug into the Postgres sources to write my own WAL receiver

34 alzhi7 2026-04-18 22:50:14 UTC medium.com/@mailbox.sq7 Llama Share 4

The author started with a simple goal to understand how PostgreSQL's WAL receiver works, but it evolved into a complex project that required deep knowledge of C and PostgreSQL's internal workings. The project became a system for reliable WAL archiving and base backup, with a focus on simplicity, reliability, and maintainability, and the author gained a new respect for the engineering culture ...

Floating Point Fun on Cortex-M Processors

47 hasheddan 2026-04-18 19:50:14 UTC danielmangum.com Llama Share 5

The Arm compiler flag -mfloat-abi controls three floating point Application Binary Interface (ABI) options: soft, softfp, and hard, which determine how floating point operations are handled. The choice of ABI affects how arguments are passed to subroutines and whether floating point instructions can be used within routines.

Bypassing the kernel for 56ns cross-language IPC

19 riyaneel 2026-04-19 01:50:14 UTC github.com/riyaneel Llama Share 11

This directory contains Architecture Decision Records for Tachyon, documenting significant design choices and their consequences. New ADRs use a template and are never deleted once accepted.

Fuzix OS

89 DeathArrow 2026-04-18 15:50:14 UTC fuzix.org Llama Share 23

Fuzix kernel 0.4 has bug fixes, improved interfaces, and a reworked networking layer for modularity. It supports various 8-bit and 16-bit processors.

Show HN: SmallDocs – Markdown without the frustrations

70 FailMore 2026-04-18 17:50:14 UTC news.ycombinator.com Llama Share 31

SmallDocs (SDocs) is a CLI + webapp for privately previewing and sharing markdown files with customizable styling and chart rendering. It ensures 100% privacy by storing content in compressed base64 in the URL fragment, never sent to the server.

It's OK to compare floating-points for equality

188 coinfused 2026-04-18 09:50:14 UTC lisyarus.github.io Llama Share 121

The user discusses the limitations and pitfalls of using epsilon-comparison for floating-point numbers, arguing that it's often a bad solution and can lead to unexpected behavior and bugs. They provide several examples of how to handle floating-point comparisons in a more robust and reliable way, such as using acceptance radii, analyzing the problem, and avoiding epsilons altogether.