News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

eMPee584

Re:F-Droid 2.0: A New Chapter for Android Freedom on Friday September 25, 2026 @04:34PM (#49849588)
Such win-win horrors..
Re:OpenAI is "80% of the way" to AGI on Sunday August 30, 2026 @07:54AM (#49497890)
One could refer to old-style flash powder lamps as "firecrackers" - which did give usable light for photography, quite analogous how a current LLM inference process generates brief "flashes" of intelligence, each time devouring the context window and spitting out a chunk of tokens. Just like with combustion engines or digital processors: at some point, a fast-cycled process is practically indiscernible from a continuous process.
Re:OpenAI is "80% of the way" to AGI on Sunday August 30, 2026 @07:45AM (#49497846)
For current transformer architectures, the weights don't change but the context window is where "it" "lives", so the "only" thing missing for continuous learning is either infinite context or another persistence mechanism.. something akin to "dreaming" has been proposed f.e. .. Pretty likely somethign will make it into roll-out within a year, probably crossing more thresholds into AGI territory.. Of course that will trigger more goal-post moving, but I don't see how even sceptics would come to the conclusion in 2029 AGI hasn't been reached.
Re:OpenAI is "80% of the way" to AGI on Sunday August 30, 2026 @07:09AM (#49497648)
For at least another week!!1! The frontier race is probably very tight actually..
Someone did a port already: https://github.com/lubabs770/gnat
Re:Show HN: Follow London Trains in 3D on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @03:33PM (#48836418)
Like on most other digital maps today, what's direly missing is a scale bar.. cool feat though, thanks for showing!
This is the relevant historical context to understand how this ever got into big G's mission statement, it was to distance themselves from the then well-known anti-competitive mal-practices of the Redmond giant.. which seemingly they've learned a lot from. Don't no-one worry too much, they only have less than half of the world population's messaging metadata, schedules, realtime location and private pictures.
Re:A new Android malware from Google on Thursday July 02, 2026 @11:26AM (#48763052)
no, because screw all that java crap, they optimized for control and developer quantity, not for ux, customizability, performance...
Re:A new Android malware from Google on Thursday July 02, 2026 @11:19AM (#48762972)
which as of now seems to depend on google/apple services being in control of your device and thus gets us half a tiny step closer to freedom at most..
Re:The Countdown to a Major Oil Price Surge Has Begun on Thursday June 11, 2026 @05:39AM (#48488203)
It was absolutely the end of the world for many folks not as privileged by sheer chance of birth place. And getting through this "just fine" will mean hundreds of thousands of starvations in addition to the "default rate" of ~10k just children dying of malnutration each day. So yeah, congratulations to your luck that you can just shrug it off as insignificant for you personally..
Guess that statement will age well... /s
Nice look! as a heavy user of ranger I am hooked to its keyboard shortcuts and malleability though.. hoping that one day, the giant patch queue (including some of mine) will get merged. Multi-threading, as implemented in elio, would also help a lot I guess..
cool but https://github.com/bahdotsh/mdterm even has remote image support : D
Re:GenCAD on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @09:00AM (#48206966)
Well visual reasoning is one approach, another is a coding-like approach like this cadquery-based solution https://articraft3d.github.io/ which was also posted here a couple of days ago.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153064 Curious what you (and others) think, they also are collecting a pool of examples including prompt, reasoning log and token cost, quite interesting imho.
Re:Fusion Power Plant Simulator on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @06:33PM (#47955607)
Plasma physics (magnetohydrodynamics / turbulance) turned out to be a bigger challenge then expected, but it's not far fetched to assume we would be somewhat further along had the funding been closer to one of the "more ambitious" curves.

Here's them infamous 1976 budget scenarios: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi...

KDE's hybrid file / web browser konqueror has had arbitrary tab tiling since 1999 IIRC.. still a gread tool, would just need some love and webextensions support to come back big
Oh and also https://FluidCAD.io Parametric CAD with JavaScript was posted two weeks ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721997

This is cool, what about trying build123d against it to compare. And just post again, not easy to make the HN frontpage with that expansive flood of crazy tech news.
Re:Bot-AGI-1 – a robotics benchmark for VLMs on Saturday April 25, 2026 @01:58PM (#47903252)
Great idea. Interesting to see qwen's textual state evaluation for each frame.

Must say though that the keyboard controls didn't work as advertised for me at all, it seemed very borked.

yes, working on a big END THE MONEY SYSTEM 2030 campaign to get public discussion started about considering the switch to a cooperative commons/resource-based open access economy. open source everything, hack the planet etc. why not make it the singularity of the people
your assumption being the thugs mugging these protesters take care of the dead bodies, which I doubt
There's another more hidden tool avail: right of the search type bar (images/news/books) there is a "search tools" menu where you can open "all results" and switch it to "verbatim". Often times a good way to see another defunct relict of old, quality google: the empty-result-troll that would once upon a time pull out his fishing rod on click..
before:2024-08 after:2023-06 to the rescue? manual but works, even though on queries for "trending" keywords results will still be flooded with hits that should be filtered..
Re:Music for Programming on Monday April 06, 2026 @03:18AM (#47657852)
then you'll adore this "deep progressive techno" mix playlist by artist "Dub Element" with 50 hours of the finest rolling deep pumping oldschool rave techno. Also does d'n'b and dub techno..

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAb7rS-Wvyr0AZdUlgaCg...

Re:Music for Programming on Monday April 06, 2026 @03:11AM (#47657808)
awesome for coding! my fav stations with dub techno chan: Mabu Beatz from Germany, Radio Caprice from Russia & Radio Schizoid from India. Last one has an excellent chillout chan as well, even though the track metadata has been half broken for years (UTF16BE BOM ftw)..

https://www.radio-browser.info/search?name=dub%20techno

Re:Talk like caveman on Sunday April 05, 2026 @06:39AM (#47648037)
f.e.?
There's a new initiative by some non-google non-apple phone vendors called *UnifiedAttestation* which I hope you will support at some point in the future:

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Paying-without-Google-New-conso...

And that konqueror, KDE's web browser, added in 1999 (and still supports). Also, it's still a great browser, albeit still missing webext support.
Konqueror (KDE's original hybrid web browser/file manager) had it first, implemented in 1999 ( https://invent.kde.org/search?group_id=1551&project_id=2544&... ) and it supports arbitrary tiling. Oh by the way, Chrome's rendering engine (called blink nowadays, KHTML once) also originated from KDE.

Implementation details and UX in general is a cluster fsck of sad stories though, can confirm. Try/adapt zen browser maybe?

Re:OCR For construction documents does not work on Monday March 30, 2026 @05:21PM (#47579849)
"The profession" actually is a wide variety of trades, not just architects and contractors. Electricians, plumbers etc. where CAD is not yet widely spread. Which hopefully will change in the near future, with open source BIM tool chains, boosted by generative/agentic AI.. Finally, a huge source of confusion and execution hiccups will be overcome.

Older »