How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/blog/images/ChipTycoon.png
User uses generative AI for various tasks but finds LLM explanations too simplistic. They created a game, ChipTycoon, to learn chip building by asking AI to build knowledge, review accuracy, and create a low-poly animation.

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.

Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

The user has been working on various projects including an offline meeting document generator, a software house, a PlayStation bare-metal programming tutorial repo, a free and open source Chrome extension, and several other tools and platforms such as a music player, a calorie tracker, and a screen recording tool. They are also working on analytics for AI chat and search, a language with AI, ...

Saying No

The author is reading "The Coaching Habit" to improve 1:1s with their team and came across a quote by Peter Block about adult-to-adult relationships where you can ask for what you want, knowing the answer may be No. The author struggled to say No in a conflict over AC use at a coffee shop, but after considering Peter Block's quote, they stood their ground and negotiated a resolution.

OpenChamber: An Agentic Development Environment

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OpenChamber is a powerful tool for developers and devops, offering a polished interface, browser access, and end-to-end encryption. It runs on the OpenCode SDK and provides features like agent orchestration, tunnel links, and QR code pairing.

Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)

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

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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.

Crickets as Pets

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Cricket keeping originated in China in early antiquity, where crickets were prized for their songs and fighting skills, and the art of breeding and training them was perfected during the Qing dynasty. Today, cricket fighting remains a popular seasonal sport in China, with a thriving trade in wild-caught crickets and a complex system of ranking and betting on fights.

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.

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
The text provenance tool identifies human-authored lines within machine-generated text, preserving ownership and agency in collaborative editing. It uses version history and diffing to categorize text as human (1.0), modified (0.46), or agent-authored (0.00).

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 ...

If experience is the goal, then you always win

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The author seeks to break free from their comfort zone and reinvent themselves, inspired by artists who remain fresh and fearless in their work. They aim to cultivate a mindset of openness and experimentation, embracing the idea that "waste" can be a valuable part of the creative process.

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.

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.

Analyzing data from Silicon Valley ventures and founders prosecuted for fraud

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.

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.

A zero-dependency, ultra-lightweight database time machine for SQLite

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/1424a9f9cc04ed5d1b011e409358cb4897cb17cbeea96ab748cd079447a4db44/nsrht/time-travel-sqlite-debugger
This is a lightweight PHP web app that tracks and restores SQLite databases to previous states. It has features like instant snapshots, visual diff viewer, and automatic cleanup.

Plug-In Solar Panels Starting to Sprout in U.S. Backyards

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How Golden Is Silence, Actually?

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/6a68fe1fa95c25f63e93b31b/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/r49879.jpg
One of the virtues of John Bunyan, the author of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” is how little he bothered with the high and mighty. He preferred the low and ordinary, in his discourse as in the company he kept. In “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners”—his spiritual autobiography, which went through many editions after first being published, in 1666—revelations tumble upon him when he is least ...

Show HN: A replayable A2A jury for tracing how agents influence decisions

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/140121e64dad0ca8574788a97bc6e3948ed2b3666ca1834f16459e4c265fc0cb/nMaroulis/protolink
This ProtoLink showcase puts autonomous agents inside a fictional liability tribunal and makes their communication observable. The case is memorable, but the case is not the product. The product is the interaction: The default run is deterministic and offline. It produces JSON results, ProtoLink traces, a public transcript, and standalone interactive HTML reports. Everything and everyone in ...

Ransomware gangs skip the CEO, head straight for the 40-something IT manager

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Turns out the fastest way to get a company to consider paying a ransom isn't calling the CEO – it's targeting the 46-year-old IT manager. That's according to Zscaler, whose ThreatLabz researchers tracked 351 victims across 334 organizations caught up in a single ransomware campaign over the course of a month. The data suggests today's ransomware crews have become oddly ...

A partial digestion of the HRT counterexample

The Heil-Ramanathan-Topiwala conjecture stated that certain functions obeying linear relations between their time-frequency shifts do not exist. However, the conjecture has been resolved by Faulhuber et al. who found a counterexample using AI-assisted guesswork and numerical computation.

Literary Sins

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6317a497832bf15c3b30f236/6113f78a-b79c-44dc-bf11-51ddf2b3dad8/Sin.png
The author confesses to various literary sins, including stealing from other writers, avoiding full stops, and questioning an author's vision. They also admit to laziness in writing, such as using Google for word suggestions and failing to track sources.

Cross-compilation with Wails (2025)

On 2025-12-9, I tested the cross-compilation of the official Svelte template of Wails v2.11.0, a desktop app framework for Go, on my amd64 laptop running Ubuntu 24 with Go v1.25.5. Of course, the results may change in the future as Wails and Go are being improved. Go is known for making cross-compilation much easier than most other languages, and that is mostly still true when using ...

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
Countries and cities are used as colored markers on crust polygons split by the 2021 plate model. Red areas show overlapping plate fragments after reconstruction, with the future side as an interactive sketch rather than a forecast.

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 ...

UnYOLO: Agent credential broker and policy engine for your GitHub account

Skip to content unYOLO is a framework for building credential brokers and proxies for services like GitHub, Hugging Face, or Google Workspace. Your agent talks to the broker and never holds the real credential. unYOLO lets you keep fine-grained policies in a local file. No permission screens to click through and no separate account to create for the agent. When the agent needs more ...

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 ...

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.