AI Summarized Hacker News

Front-page articles summarized hourly.

The First Photographs of Snowflakes Discover the Groundbreaking Microphotography

Wilson Bentley, a Vermont farmer and self-taught naturalist nicknamed “Snowflake Bentley,” pioneered snowflake photography in 1885 by mounting a microscope to a bellows camera. He produced thousands of images—about 5,000 snowflakes—showing that each is unique. The Smithsonian holds 500 Bentley photos; with William J. Humphreys he published 2,300 snowflake photos in Snow Crystals and wrote over 60 articles. Bentley’s work blends science and art, though some contemporaries questioned its authenticity. His legacy endures in museum archives, documentaries, and a children’s book, Snowflake Bentley.

Quantum Error Correction Goes FOOM

Quantum error correction is approaching a FOOM, driven by growing qubit quality and scale. Early experiments showed a 9-qubit repetition code extending a bit’s lifetime from ~100 μs; later codes reached 3 ms with 21 qubits, 300 ms with 51, and 2 hours with 59. A model L = C λ^q with fixed λ yields superexponential improvement as qubits double yearly. Hurdles include leakage and cosmic rays; gap engineering cut cosmic-ray impact in 2024. Full QEC (surface code) promises exponential suppression; quadrupling qubits can dramatically lower logical error. Quality barriers may fall in five years, enabling FOOM.

We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

In Cardiff, Rob Parsons and his wife Dianne welcomed Ronnie Lockwood, an autistic man without a home, into their Christmas 1975 life, and he stayed for 45 years. They gave him shelter, meals, and a job, forming a deep family bond as Ronnie helped with the children and community. Ronnie died in 2020, leaving £40,000 to charity to fund a wellbeing centre named Lockwood House, symbolizing the lasting impact of their kindness.

Handheld PC Community Forums

Hub page for the Handheld PC Community Forums (hpcfactor.com) listing forum categories and topics, including News & Editorials, Reviews, General Discussion, Developers Arena, Off Topic, HPC:Factor, H/PC Bay, Technical Support, Windows CE generations, Psion/EPOC, and DOS Palmtops. It notes cookies, shows site statistics (171,774 posts in 17,338 threads across 21 forums; 15,419 registered users) and the newest member, Moritz.

Self-referencing Page Tables for the x86-Architecture

Bachelor thesis extended abstract on self-referencing page tables for x86, enabling a unified 32/64-bit paging implementation. By adding a self-reference in the root table (PML4/PGD), the MMU exposes all page tables via the VAS, removing manual mappings and shrinking code bases from two architectures to one. Implemented in eduOS (RWTH Aachen) with 64-bit longmode in an internal research kernel; preserves full cache and memory protection and supports common syscalls. A full version and slides are online; ASPLOS SR Competition submission was rejected.

Coding Intelligence Asymptotics

Imagining unlimited development intelligence, the article argues codebases will grow enormous as debugging scales with log(N) and typing ceases to bottleneck; compilation could become the new limit. AI-driven tools will switch to better tools, create new ones, or even write optimal binaries directly, yielding code that may be alien to humans. Specs will lengthen, but alignment matters: choosing the correct constraint optimization is hard. With formalized constraints, we could prove conformance and red-team failures, and even build from scratch without dependencies.

Free Software Foundation receives historic private donations

FSF announced two anonymous Monero donations totaling about $900,000, boosting its winter fundraising toward the $400,000 goal. The gifts will fund technical capacity, campaigns, education, licensing, and advocacy while preserving independence, and the organization will shift to a member drive, aiming to recruit 100 associate members by January 16. Donors ranged from small to large, all remaining anonymous, underscoring support for free software and digital rights.

Ruby 4.0.0 Released

Ruby 4.0.0 released with Ruby Box isolation (RUBY_BOX=1), ZJIT JIT (Rust 1.85+; --zjit; not production-ready), and Ractor improvements (Port, shareable_proc; reduced contention; experimental status to be removed next year). Language/core updates include nil-to-a behavior change and line-start fluent operators; core class updates (Array#rfind, #find; Binding changes; Enumerator::produce with size; improved ErrorHighlight); Set promoted to core; Pathname promoted to core; Unicode 17/Emoji 17. Stdlib/gems updated; download links provided.

JEDEC developing reduced pin count HBM4 standard to enable higher capacity

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A Child in the State of Nature

Mitchell Abidor reviews Roger Shattuck’s The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, focusing on Victor, the early 1800s 'wild child' studied by Itard. The piece traces the nature vs nurture debate, Itard's misguided emphasis on speech, isolation from peers, and the missed opportunity to explore sign language; it catalogs competing theories about Victor's condition and argues that the case, though ethically fraught, challenges the idea of human perfectibility and shows the limits of late Enlightenment efforts to mold humanity.

Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI

Microsoft denies plans to rewrite Windows 11 using AI in Rust after a top engineer’s LinkedIn post claimed “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code” and to eliminate C/C++ by 2030. The post was edited; Hunt clarified it referred to a research project on language migration, not Windows 11+. Microsoft executives also stated there are no plans to rewrite Windows 11 with AI. The piece notes broader AI-code ambitions at Microsoft and mentions Windows 11 RAM issues linked to WebView2/Electron and web-based features.

The Next-Gen Mainboard Designed with AmigaOS4 and MorphOS in Mind

Trevor Dickinson’s contributions to Amiga—such as the ExecSG kernel and Radeon drivers—are celebrated as Mirari Boards pursues a revival. Dutch enthusiasts Dave and Harald aim to build a low-cost next-gen Amiga mainboard capable of running all AmigaOS software and games, despite production and software-compatibility hurdles. The effort highlights community spirit and promises updates on The First Rebirth page, asserting the Amiga’s future is in the community’s hands.

Prototaxites

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Python Applied Mathematics Labs

ACME Labs provides a lab series that accompanies Foundations of Applied Mathematics. It teaches core technical skills (Python libraries NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, pandas), algorithms, numerical methods, coding best practices, and data visualization, with real‑world applications such as tsunami timing using Dijkstra, LP‑based meal planning, image denoising, facial recognition, recommender systems, Wordle modeling, and population dynamics. The site is structured into four volumes aligned with the textbook, plus getting-started guides, environment setup, student resources, and personal projects. Each self-contained lab includes objectives, theory, exercises, and optional extras; projects can be extended into original work.

Using Vectorize to build an unreasonably good search engine in 160 lines of code

The piece shows how to build a fast semantic search engine in ~160 lines using embeddings and a vector database via PartyKit + Cloudflare Vectorize. Using an embedding model, text (episode descriptions) are converted to vectors and upserted into a vector store. A PartyKit server handles indexing and querying; indexing from a static site braggoscope, querying: embed the user query, find nearest vectors, return metadata. Includes a minimal UI with Remix, a sample braggoscope-search project, and an API to test via curl. The approach also underpins RAG and AI copilots.

Online Book: Exploring Mathematics with Python

Exploring Mathematics with Python updates Arthur Engel's 1993 book from Turbo Pascal to Python, with rewording and new chapters by Andrew Davison after Engel's death. It treats math concepts through programming rather than teaching Python, focusing on mathematical topics first. It uses Python-centric tools (Matplotlib, turtle) while avoiding heavy SciPy/Numpy to keep programming accessible. It comprises 18 chapters across topics from Intro Problems to The Catenary, plus appendices, solutions, and code archives. Aimed at university-level readers with Python background.

Asterisk AI Voice Agent

Open-source AI Voice Agent for Asterisk/FreePBX that integrates via ARI/RTP using Audiosocket. Features a modular pipeline allowing mix-and-match STT/LLM/TTS with five production baselines validated for enterprise deployment. Provides Admin UI for configuration, health checks, call history, per-call debugging, and tool-calling actions. Runs as two containers: ai-engine and local-ai-server; supports AudioSocket and ExternalMedia RTP; can run cloud providers (OpenAI, Deepgram, Google Live, ElevenLabs) or local/on-prem LLMs (Ollama) with local STT/TTS. Requires Linux, Docker-Compose, Asterisk ARI; preflight script seeds env and JWT; docker-compose setup; extensive docs and demo. MIT license.

Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

Google detected unusual automated traffic from the user’s IP, triggering a CAPTCHA to verify a real user. The block should lift once traffic subsides; malware or browser extensions may be responsible. If on a shared network, ask the administrator. The note includes the IP address, time, and the YouTube video URL.

Pantograph: Building a preschool for robots

Pantograph is building a “robot preschool” to solve robotics’ data problem by collecting unsupervised, real-world data with thousands of small, durable robots. The in-house hardware emphasizes low cost, safety, and scale, using 2D-profile manufacturing and treads; grippers enable fine manipulation and tool use. Robots learn from interaction, building world and self representations, guided by scalable data collection and pretraining ideas. Pantograph owns the full stack (hardware, firmware, training infra) and plans to scale hardware and data, while remaining a Public Benefit Corporation committed to broad access and responsible innovation.

Comptime – C# meta-programming with compile-time code generation and evaluation

Comptime is a .NET source generator that executes methods marked [Comptime] at compile time and serializes results into C# code, replacing runtime calls with pre-computed values. This moves expensive work to build time for faster startup. It supports primitive types and limited collections (IReadOnlyList<T>, IReadOnlyDictionary<TKey,TValue>, List<T>, Dictionary<TKey,TValue>), and requires .NET 8+ and C# 12+ (for interceptors). Arrays are not allowed. Examples include GetPrimeNumbers, Factorial, SumList, and CountItems. Limitations: methods must be static; containing class must be partial; return types immutable; arguments must be compile-time constants; no side effects.

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