News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

tkocmathla

Re:Strands Harness on Thursday September 24, 2026 @02:26AM (#49826936)
It's a fair point, but for any well-established capability, the plugin with the most monthly downloads (overwhelmingly) is generally going to be "the one". For MCP, the top plugin [1] has 1M/mo, and the next one down has less than 2k/mo.

I do agree that in the case of benchmarking, it's a bit silly to put the onus on the benchmark runner to try and pick the right plugin for each capability that won't make someone point to /that/ as the reason Pi didn't do as well as expected.

[1] https://pi.dev/packages/pi-mcp-adapter?name=pi-mcp-adapter

Re:Apple Music to open concert venue in Battersea Power Station on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @09:37AM (#49801103)
How do you mean, gentrified? I went for the first time early last year and it was an amazing experience. It's definitely very museum-like, and not cheap to enter, but the rooms all look like perfect time capsules and the audio tour is excellent.
Re:Apple Music to open concert venue in Battersea Power Station on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @02:14AM (#49797351)
That reminds me a bit of The Harmsworth Room [1] in the Churchill War Rooms, where you can dine while you stare at the "original 1940s electric generator wall complete with dials and switches". Very cool space!

[1] https://www.churchillwarroomsvenuehire.co.uk/spaces/harmswor...

It would be really funny, and sociopathic, if every state change registered as a browser history entry so I had to click Back 50,000 times to get back to Hacker News.
Re:Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding on Sunday August 09, 2026 @01:46AM (#49228761)
Incredible write-up, as usual. I still fondly remember discovering Red Blob Games' Hexagonal Grids [1] guide while building an implementation of the Tzaar board game [2]. The illustrations are enormously helpful!

[1] https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons

[2] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31999/tzaar

This is a cool idea, but even more than playing it and learning about NYC, I'm curious to know how you built it, and where the data came from.
Re:Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds on Friday July 10, 2026 @10:24AM (#48860405)
At 5 years old, in the US and UK at least, they're either in preschool/kindergarten or not in school at all yet. Grades aren't a thing at that level and I have to imagine the same is true in other areas of the world.
Re:Learning to code is still worthwhile on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @02:38AM (#48814375)
> I'm reminded of an old friend from long ago. She was an early music major at Harvard, and graduated with a MFA. She was very good. She read and wrote Latin and Greek, could compose and play music using medieval notations, and published a book on early needlepoint.

This sounds to me like a life well lived!

Re:Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg on Saturday June 13, 2026 @01:40AM (#48513704)
Re:Job: Head of Stonehenge on Tuesday June 09, 2026 @03:38AM (#48457867)
Thanks, typo on my part.
Re:Job: Head of Stonehenge on Tuesday June 09, 2026 @01:47AM (#48456996)
The median income in the UK is currently sitting at £2,627 / week or £31,524 / year [1]. This is advertising more than double that at £64,189, not quite graduate wages!

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...

EDIT: £2,627 / month, not week!

Re:What was your "Oh Shit" moment with GenAI? on Sunday June 07, 2026 @02:06AM (#48432291)
Reminds me of Microsoft Research's TextWorld [1] (from 2018!).

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/textworld

Re:What was your "Oh Shit" moment with GenAI? on Sunday June 07, 2026 @02:00AM (#48432256)
I've been using superpowers [1] for this purpose, and have really appreciated how it guides the model to use careful, methodical approaches to answering my prompts. It's great for multi-step planning, design, and implementation, but also has guidance for debugging, accepting a code review, etc.

[1] https://github.com/obra/superpowers

Yes, they can be anonymous in the sense that you can buy one in person and top it up without an ID [1].

[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/ways-to-pay/where-to-buy-tickets-an...

Re:Mojo 1.0 Beta on Saturday May 09, 2026 @02:14AM (#48072321)
HEIR [1] is a homomorphic encryption compiler built on modern MLIR.

IREE [2] is very actively developed ML compiler + runtime, also MLIR-based.

[1] https://github.com/google/heir

[2] https://github.com/iree-org/iree

Re:Bitter Lessons from the ISSpresso on Saturday May 09, 2026 @02:02AM (#48072246)
At London Heathrow too, the 100ml limit was scrapped early this year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46736815

Re:Virtual violin produces realistic sounds on Wednesday May 06, 2026 @08:04AM (#48035257)
They briefly address this in the article:

> Violin bowing, the researchers say, is a much more complicated interaction to model.

> AI also forces folks to be online to code

This isn't true in the broad sense you've used. It's true that most people don't have the hardware to run the bleeding-edge foundation models, but with a modest Macbook you can run very capable local models now (at least capable for coding, where my experience is).

Re:Kelp DAO Exploited for $292M on Monday April 20, 2026 @02:18AM (#47830957)
The KelpDAO Incident Statement from LayerZero:

https://x.com/LayerZero_Core/status/2046081551574983137

How "fat" are the packed machines? In other words, how much bloat is inevitable, or is that entirely controlled by the base image + the user's smolvm machine spec? How does smolvm's pack compare to something like dockerc [0] in terms of speed and size? Disclaimer: I just learned about dockerc!

I can't actually create and test a pack right now because of [1], but I love the idea of using this to distribute applications you might otherwise use a Docker image for.

[0] https://github.com/NilsIrl/dockerc

[1] https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm/issues/159

It's very distracting to have every sentence in this article be its own paragraph.
Re:Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity) on Thursday March 26, 2026 @04:49AM (#47528050)
I love this, from a comment on the article:

  He had in his path a script called `\#` that he used to comment out pipe elements like `mycmd1 | \# mycmd2 | mycmd3`. This was how the script was written:
 
  ```
  #!/bin/sh
  cat
  ```
Cool idea, but of course the very first image I clicked into was a dick.
Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026) on Monday March 09, 2026 @07:10AM (#47307509)
I got this itch too when I came across tinyrenderer [1] and worked through the early lessons through shading, but didn't quite finish the texture mapping yet [2]. It was fun to work in pure C from first principles, even side-questing to write a simple TGA file reader and writer.

I'd be very interested to see your tutorial when it's done!

[1] https://haqr.eu/tinyrenderer

[2] https://github.com/tkocmathla/tinyrenderer

Re:How far back in time can you understand English? on Sunday February 22, 2026 @03:08AM (#47109260)
The "locakly" typo is perfectly placed in the comment thread of this article!
Re:15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram on Wednesday February 18, 2026 @02:22AM (#47058242)
And 3 'i's?

Older »