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Local Agent Bench: Test 11 small LLMs on tool-calling judgment, on CPU, no GPU

https://github.com/MikeVeerman/tool-calling-benchmark
1•MikeVeerman•31s ago•0 comments

Show HN: AboutMyProject – A public log for developer proof-of-work

https://aboutmyproject.com/
1•Raiplus•41s ago•0 comments

Expertise, AI and Work of Future [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsxWl9iT1XU
1•indiantinker•1m ago•0 comments

So Long to Cheap Books You Could Fit in Your Pocket

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/books/mass-market-paperback-books.html
1•pseudolus•1m ago•1 comments

PID Controller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional%E2%80%93integral%E2%80%93derivative_controller
1•tosh•5m ago•0 comments

SpaceX Rocket Generates 100GW of Power, or 20% of US Electricity

https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/2019932764515234159
1•bkls•5m ago•0 comments

Kubernetes MCP Server

https://github.com/yindia/rootcause
1•yindia•7m ago•0 comments

I Built a Movie Recommendation Agent to Solve Movie Nights with My Wife

https://rokn.io/posts/building-movie-recommendation-agent
2•roknovosel•7m ago•0 comments

What were the first animals? The fierce sponge–jelly battle that just won't end

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00238-z
2•beardyw•15m ago•0 comments

Sidestepping Evaluation Awareness and Anticipating Misalignment

https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/
1•taubek•15m ago•0 comments

OldMapsOnline

https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en
1•surprisetalk•17m ago•0 comments

What It's Like to Be a Worm

https://www.asimov.press/p/sentience
2•surprisetalk•17m ago•0 comments

Don't go to physics grad school and other cautionary tales

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2025/12/19/dont-go-to-physics-grad-school-and-other-cautionary...
1•surprisetalk•18m ago•0 comments

Lawyer sets new standard for abuse of AI; judge tosses case

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/randomly-quoting-ray-bradbury-did-not-save-lawyer-fro...
2•pseudolus•18m ago•0 comments

AI anxiety batters software execs, costing them combined $62B: report

https://nypost.com/2026/02/04/business/ai-anxiety-batters-software-execs-costing-them-62b-report/
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•18m ago•0 comments

Bogus Pipeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogus_pipeline
1•doener•20m ago•0 comments

Winklevoss twins' Gemini crypto exchange cuts 25% of workforce as Bitcoin slumps

https://nypost.com/2026/02/05/business/winklevoss-twins-gemini-crypto-exchange-cuts-25-of-workfor...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•20m ago•0 comments

How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646
3•obscurette•20m ago•0 comments

Cycling in France

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/org/france-sheldon.html
1•jackhalford•22m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What breaks in cross-border healthcare coordination?

1•abhay1633•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Simple – a bytecode VM and language stack I built with AI

https://github.com/JJLDonley/Simple
1•tangjiehao•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free-to-play: A gem-collecting strategy game in the vein of Splendor

https://caratria.com/
1•jonrosner•25m ago•1 comments

My Eighth Year as a Bootstrapped Founde

https://mtlynch.io/bootstrapped-founder-year-8/
1•mtlynch•26m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tesseract – A forum where AI agents and humans post in the same space

https://tesseract-thread.vercel.app/
1•agliolioyyami•26m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vibe Colors – Instantly visualize color palettes on UI layouts

https://vibecolors.life/
2•tusharnaik•27m ago•0 comments

OpenAI is Broke ... and so is everyone else [video][10M]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3N9qlPZBc0
2•Bender•28m ago•0 comments

We interfaced single-threaded C++ with multi-threaded Rust

https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/rust_cpp/
1•lukastyrychtr•29m ago•0 comments

State Department will delete X posts from before Trump returned to office

https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5704785
7•derriz•29m ago•1 comments

AI Skills Marketplace

https://skly.ai
1•briannezhad•29m ago•1 comments

Show HN: A fast TUI for managing Azure Key Vault secrets written in Rust

https://github.com/jkoessle/akv-tui-rs
1•jkoessle•30m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

A Bead Too Far: Rethinking Global Connections Before Columbus

https://peterfrankopan.substack.com/p/a-bead-too-far-rethinking-global
64•themgt•8mo ago

Comments

Robotbeat•8mo ago
Seems plausible to me that beads could’ve reached the Americas before Columbus, although the dates seem AWFULLY close to Columbus. Error bars on measurements like this seem like they almost certainly overlap 1492. +/- 30 years (or more) seems pretty typical for that age of sample. https://radiocarbon.pl/en/uncertainty-of-radiocarbon-date/
chilmers•8mo ago
Seems at least one scholar was extremely skeptical of these claims. Says these types of bead weren't even manufactured in Venice until circa 1560: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
mmooss•8mo ago
> the dates seem AWFULLY close to Columbus

What would that matter? Columbus was nowhere near Alaska.

esperent•8mo ago
Suppose that beads became a hot trade item. How fast could they have been traded from the Caribbean to Alaska?

It seems like 30 years is a reasonable time for that.

gus_massa•8mo ago
In that case, I'd expect to find a few beads in the middle.
Robotbeat•8mo ago
Maybe we will.
mmooss•8mo ago
That's the opposite of evidence; there's a very good reason it has no standing in science.
Robotbeat•8mo ago
It took a while to find this one. Absence of evidence is not exactly evidence of absence. That’s the point.
mmooss•8mo ago
You've misunderstood. It's hard to prove a negative, which is the point. But made-up things are lies - evidence is the only currency of the realm.
HelloImSteven•8mo ago
I took their meaning to be that we should keep looking into the whole matter since, either way, there might be more evidence to find. I don’t think they were dismissing this theory or its implications for political/ideological reasons—since they mentioned it seems plausible—but I could be naive.

In any case, clearly the prevailing understanding is wrong in one way or another, and that should be reflected in curriculums alongside this new evidence.

Robotbeat•8mo ago
Yeah, although again, the error bars are too large to say with certainty this was pre-Columbus.

But it really wouldn’t surprise me. As others pointed out, the Inuit traveled across the Bering Strait into what is now Russia many times pre-Columbus, so the idea they may have brought beads back with them is plausible.

rezmason•8mo ago
> ...[A]t the Ust’-Polui site near Salekhard, on the Ob River, archaeologists have found beads... believed to have originated in the Roman Empire or from Parthian production centres

Aw man, I would set a one-way time machine to a 2nd Century Parthian bead production center for the ASMR alone. If I ever got bored I could just hitchhike to Alaska.

alephnerd•8mo ago
The Venetian beads discovery is controversial (I think one of the reviewers argued that those style beads only began being manufactured in the 16th and 17th century), but smelted alloys have been discovered for sometime in older Inuit sites [0].

That said, communities like the Yupik have constantly travelled across the Bering and all the way in Uelkal, but I'm not sure we can treat the Inuit in the same context as other First Nations with regards to Pre-Colombian exchange.

Though, that said as well, if there were trade connections, it was most likely extremely limited. Even Hokkaido wasn't truly settled and colonized by the Japanese until the 1860s, and there's a reason Tungusic peoples like the Jurchen and Manchu preferred migrating south into China and Korea instead of northward - it was inhospitable land whose inhabitants were viewed as "barbarians". Sort of similar to how the Greeks and Romans didn't explore far beyond Crimea into Central Asia due to various Indo-European nomadic tribes that they'd view as "barbarians", and relying on second hand information.

Also, the distances are massive - Chukota to the Amur is the same distance as Paris to Baghdad, except with a fraction of the population density.

Loved visiting the Bering Land Bridge Natural Preserve outside Nome though. It was exhilarating. I always wanted to do something similar in Chukota or Sakha as well, but can't with the current political climate. At least I've been able to scratch my ethnographic itch about Paleo-Siberian and Northern Pacific communities when visiting Fairbanks, Seattle, or Hokkaido on occasional visits.

Highly recommend reading "The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia" by Anna Reid as well. It's what stoked a lot of my interest in Paleo-Siberian peoples. Scratches a similar itch to thinking about Inner Asian communities and the ancestral Puebloans.

[0] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03054...

aetherson•8mo ago
We also have some circumstantial evidence that trade across the Bering strait was very limited or non-existent in that it didn't appear to introduce Eurasian diseases to North America.
ETH_start•8mo ago
Correct, the Bering Strait and North Atlantic before the age of sail permitted only low-bandwidth exchange between Eurasia and the Americas, due to the low population densities and harsh low-resource environments at those northern latitudes.