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What most histories get wrong about MUMPS's first standard

Contrary to common belief, MUMPS was first standardized in January 1976 as NBS Handbook 118, MUMPS Language Standard. From 1972–75, the MUMPS Development Committee (MDC), a public cross‑industry body, produced a three‑part standard (Part I: language; Part II: transition diagrams; Part III: portability). NBS then assembled these MDC releases into the government standard and published it in 1976. ANSI later ratified the material as X11.1-1977 (with later revisions), while the MDC continued stewardship. Historiography often cites the 1977 ANSI standard, overshadowing the 1976 NBS publication.

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Show HN: Turn casual photos into professional headshots with AI

Portraify converts 1–3 front-facing photos into studio-quality headshots in under two minutes. Upload, let Gemini AI analyze features, and generate a professional portrait with auto background removal and lighting. Outputs are high-resolution and ready for LinkedIn, resumes, or company directories; no studio needed. Photos aren’t stored and are discarded after generation. Pricing: Starter $9 for 3 portraits; Pro $25 for 10; Studio $50 for 25; 3 free portraits on sign-up (no credit card). Credits never expire; ~90 seconds per portrait; 4.9★ rating.

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Opaque, Interoperable Passkey Records (and a Go API)

Proposes opaque, interoperable passkey records to treat WebAuthn credentials as strings (e.g., $webauthn$v=1$transports=hybrid+internal$<base64 authenticator data>). The payload is authenticator data (CBOR) and transports encoded as PHC parameters. Applications store per-user passkey records (multiple per user) for cross-language/interoperability, without embedding full flow in code. A stateless Go API is outlined: RelyingParty.NewRegistration/Login, parseCreationOptionsFromJSON/parseRequestOptionsFromJSON, navigator.credentials.create/get, and a cache for login requests. Caveat: avoid Credential ID index collisions; seeking feedback before Go 1.28.

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Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

ACLU reports that Flock Safety has a pattern of misinformation about its ALPR systems, safety, privacy, and data sharing. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Flock lied about heat maps; the city revoked the contract after one day. The piece cites other cases (Loveland, CO) where Flock initially denied federal access, later admitting CBP/DHS pilots; data shared with ICE via local departments; allegations of misuse for abortion enforcement; false blog responses; claims of partnerships with the ACLU denied; calls for governments to avoid working with Flock and implement strict guardrails if ALPR use proceeds.

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The Psychology of Software Teams

Cat Hicks's The Psychology of Software Teams argues that software success requires applying psychology to team design. Drawing on empirical data from leading engineering orgs and thousands of developers, it offers principles to build resilience, sustainable practices, and innovation, while countering myths about productivity. The book treats psychological safety, learning, and collaboration as infrastructure, untangles thinking from “brains-in-jars,” and presents a science-based model to make software teams more joyful, cooperative, and high-performing. Contents cover topics from intent and culture to conflict, organizational self-knowledge, and cognitive scaffolding. Author: Cat Hicks, psychologist and founder of Catharsis.

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My two year old taught me constraint solving

A father explores Brio train layouts with his two-year-old, turning play into a constraint-solving problem. Starting from a closed loop, he shows how layout options explode as pieces grow, moving from naïve backtracking to CSP techniques: variables are open connectors, domains are placements, constraints force pairing and no overlaps. He adds forward checking, then a global feasibility check, which speeds search but not always. Finally he uses a SAT solver with clause learning (CDCL) to maximize complexity. Lesson: meaningful constraints and encoding matter; SAT can find optimal layouts but at memory and time cost.

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Donation Controversy

Mullvad addresses a donation by owner Daniel to a Swedish political party. It says Mullvad and its parent did not endorse or involve themselves in the donation and will keep founders’ views separate from the company’s mission. Mullvad portrays itself as a political actor advocating privacy, free speech, and opposition to censorship and mass surveillance, and it supports privacy‑enhancing open‑source tech (WireGuard, Tor, Qubes) while campaigning on issues like Chat Control and identity verification. It stresses radical tolerance and cooperation with diverse partners; Daniel’s rationale is on his blog. The donation was a bad idea, but diverse ideas matter.

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The creepiest 'sales demo' of all time

In a Dunwoody letter, Jason Hunyar questions a Sept. 30, 2025 incident where a Flock VP accessed the Dunwoody PD’s Flock system to view a single camera in a private community center’s children’s gymnastics room, labeled a “sales demo.” He notes no verifiable demo partner agreement exists and questions why a police agency would review one third‑party camera for such a demo, highlighting concerns about privacy, data security, and transparency in Dunwoody’s use of Flock’s AI surveillance network.

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My falling-out with the rationalist community

lcamtuf recounts his long resistance to criticizing the rationalist movement, tracing his disillusion from early online skeptic culture (Randi, Dawkins, Timecube, Usenet) to the Bay Area rationalists (Slate Star Codex, LessWrong) and the rise of effective altruism. He notes persistent biases, like post hoc justifications and sealioning, recalls the James Damore incident that strained his ties to the community, and ties in later scandals (SBF, Zizians). He explains why he grew wary long before them, offering a personal reckoning on how the movement’s marketing masks its flaws and how to move forward.

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You only need the frontier model for one single edit

Frontier planning often uses /plan: frontier writes a full plan, then a cheaper model re-reads everything to execute. This doubles reading cost, yields marginal gains, and increases cheating risk. Benchmarking across Opus 4.8, Luna, Sol shows /plan offers little benefit; most cost comes from reads. The recommended approach is /prewalk: frontier explores, generates a concise plan as a to-do list with validation, then swaps to a cheap model to execute. This keeps the heavy reading from the cheap model, improves speed, reduces cheating, and achieves about 97% frontier performance at 41% lower cost, 1.9× faster completion. Implement via --prewalk.

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Who's Afraid of Chinese Models?

Ben Thompson argues AI economics are returning to marginal costs and commodity dynamics. Open weights are not free: fixed R&D plus variable inference costs determine profitability, with token efficiency and architecture shaping margins. Frontier labs may lower prices as compute expands, but frontier leadership still commands value. China’s Kimi/K3 and Qwen3.8 Max push toward commoditized intelligence via distillation and open weights, though Western models often offer better capability and costs. Distillation can benefit China and others, but policy should enable open distillation and fair data use. For defense, defenders must access capable models; overreacting to Chinese models is unwarranted.

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85.3 GFlops: Optimizing FP32 Matrix Multiplication on a Single AMD Zen 3 Core

An in-depth study of FP32 single-core GEMM optimization on AMD Zen 3 (Ryzen 5 5500). The repository evaluates 28 configurations using cache tiling, register blocking, FMA chaining, packing, alignment, and prefetching. The best model MX24 achieves 85.30 GFLOPS (63.5% of the 134.4 GFLOPS peak); MX22 and MX23 run 84.10 and 82.93 GFLOPS, respectively. The approach beats naïve code by ~56.5×; top models match a reference implementation with zero error. Includes code (mx85.c), docs, build notes, and MIT license.

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