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Bob Cringely Has Died

I heard from a friend of the family that Bob passed away in his sleep early Saturday. Very sad news. Bob, who's real name was Mark Stevens, was an early employee of Apple and was best known for his PBS documentaries, especially "Triumph of the Nerds". He will be missed. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49949438 Points: 207 # Comments: 31

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Reasons I didn't become an EMT, ranked

Article URL: https://ben.stolovitz.com/posts/reasons-not-emt-ranked/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49947631 Points: 117 # Comments: 58

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RSS Feed Best Practices (2022)

Article URL: https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946845 Points: 42 # Comments: 8

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Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict

Article URL: https://cosmowenman.substack.com/p/rodin-museum-3d-scan-verdict Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946355 Points: 111 # Comments: 57

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Agents don't need memory, they need documentation

Useful angle: memory and parallelism via memory

Article URL: https://liao.gg/blog/agents-dont-need-memory Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49945933 Points: 78 # Comments: 55

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RetailReady (YC W24) Is Hiring

Article URL: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/retailready/jobs/bFcgIe4-implementations Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49945904 Points: 0 # Comments: 0

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FTL: A new operating system for clouds

Useful angle: open-source tools and infrastructure via github

https://github.com/nuta/ftl Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49944912 Points: 156 # Comments: 63

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Kolibri: A Sovereign Open-Weight Model

tech report: https://aleph-alpha.com/downloads/tech-report.pdf additional paper: https://tej.as/blog/aleph-alpha-kolibri Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49942706 Points: 543 # Comments: 307

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Show HN: Thoreau BASIC – What if BASIC hadn't gone out of fashion?

Useful angle: systems performance via performance

Thoreau BASIC started as a joke. I wanted a BASIC where I could type something ridiculous like: DIM A%(12000000000) Version 3.2 has become considerably more ambitious than the little interpreter I originally intended to write. The language still deliberately looks and feels like old Microsoft BASIC. Line numbers, GOTO, GOSUB, PRINT, PSET, LINE, CIRCLE, DRAW, etc. are all there. But underneath that rather innocent-looking surface is now quite a lot of machinery. Some of the current features: native x64 JIT compilation, with automatic fallback to the interpreter PARFOR for multithreaded numeric loops SSE2 / AVX2 acceleration where available 64-bit addressing and very large arrays native complex, quaternion and other hypercomplex numbers arbitrary-resolution 24-bit graphics sprites, bitmap operations, polygon filling and mouse input TCP/IP networking on Windows and UEFI an integrated profiler, debugger, tracing and program-analysis tools CREATEEXE to turn a BASIC program into a standalone Windows executable CREATEEFI to turn the same program into a directly bootable UEFI application 3.2 also expands the less glamorous but surprisingly useful parts of the environment. There is better file browsing and selection with GETFILES and SELECTBOX, longer case-preserving paths, recovery/file-flush facilities, and considerably more detailed SYSTEMINFO$ diagnostics. The latter is useful for seeing things such as available CPU capabilities and the execution environment while debugging performance differences between machines. One thing I've spent a lot of time on recently is making the BASIC programs themselves fast enough that they stop feeling like demonstrations of an interpreter. For example, the current Mandelbrot demo is a real-time interactive fractal explorer. Mouse movement pans the fractal, left-click zooms in and right-click zooms out, while the BASIC program continuously redraws and displays the frame rate. There are also 3D and procedural demos, sprite programs, networking examples, hypercomplex fractals and games. An important design constraint throughout the project has been that Windows and UEFI should execute essentially the same BASIC language. A program shouldn't suddenly become a different species just because there is no operating system underneath it. And yes, I am fully aware of the absurdity of combining GOTO 100 with AVX2, multithreading, TCP/IP and quaternion arithmetic. That is increasingly the point. I'm interested in the question: What would BASIC look like if it had never gone out of fashion? Thoreau BASIC 3.2 is my current answer. I'd be especially interested in feedback from people who remember GW-BASIC/QBasic, compiler/interpreter people, and anyone sufficiently unreasonable to enjoy the idea of booting a modern x64 PC directly into a BASIC interpreter/JIT compiler. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49942103 Points: 38 # Comments: 13

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Where Is the Planet

Article URL: http://whereistheplanet.com Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49940233 Points: 14 # Comments: 0

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Things that apparently cause cancer

Article URL: https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/things-that-apparently-cause-cancer Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49940219 Points: 114 # Comments: 49

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Show HN: Made an open-source Lego AI generator

Useful angle: computational geometry and graphics via cad

Hi there :-) New on HN, first time posting. Past year, around December, I started experimenting with making ChatGPT and Claude generate source code in LDraw language. This LDraw is literally an "assembly" language, a low-level programming language that describes how to assemble LEGO pieces together into models, one placement instruction at a time. When executed by specific tools, like e.g. LDView, LeoCAD, Studio... these instructions become LEGO CAD models, that can be interacted with, modified, etc. Or, in other words: one LDraw source file in .mpd or .ldr format is equivalent to one LEGO CAD model. So, the idea I had was: if I manage for maybe ChatGPT or Claude to generate high-quality LDraw source files... then, they would actually be generating high-quality LEGO CAD models, right? Then, after months of iterations and trying one thing after the other... it worked!!! Long story short: using GPT-6 Astra and Opus 5.5, I've managed to create a python toolset, instructions, and docs for agents in general. Now, these can be used by them to generate LDraw models. I've packed it all as a dockerized web app for others to try and experiment, with several providers (and agents) to choose from: OpenAI, Claude and OpenRouter. Here's a bunch of exmaples: https://anteloc.github.io/index-samples.html. If you are curious about the internals of an .mpd model, the "what was the agent picturing on its mind", open the .mpd file that got your attention on a text editor, and read the first line under the ones starting with "0 FILE". I'd really appreciate feedback and comments, let's see where this goes =) Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937916 Points: 80 # Comments: 41

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Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS

Article URL: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=p6zjojqw Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937631 Points: 144 # Comments: 86

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Muse Gadgets

Article URL: https://gadgets.muse.ai Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937504 Points: 151 # Comments: 71

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Apple Pass Designer

Article URL: https://developer.apple.com/pass-designer/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937276 Points: 346 # Comments: 225

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From the creator of Redis; run LLM locally with ds4

Useful angle: frontier models and agentic systems via llm

Article URL: https://dwarfstar.sh/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49936575 Points: 177 # Comments: 44