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Πfs – The Data-Free Filesystem

https://github.com/philipl/pifs
1•ravenical•41s ago•0 comments

Go-busybox: A sandboxable port of busybox for AI agents

https://github.com/rcarmo/go-busybox
1•rcarmo•1m ago•0 comments

Quantization-Aware Distillation for NVFP4 Inference Accuracy Recovery [pdf]

https://research.nvidia.com/labs/nemotron/files/NVFP4-QAD-Report.pdf
1•gmays•2m ago•0 comments

xAI Merger Poses Bigger Threat to OpenAI, Anthropic

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-02-03/musk-s-xai-merger-poses-bigger-threat-to-op...
1•andsoitis•2m ago•0 comments

Atlas Airborne (Boston Dynamics and RAI Institute) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNorxwlZlFk
1•lysace•3m ago•0 comments

Zen Tools

http://postmake.io/zen-list
1•Malfunction92•5m ago•0 comments

Is the Detachment in the Room? – Agents, Cruelty, and Empathy

https://hailey.at/posts/3mear2n7v3k2r
1•carnevalem•6m ago•0 comments

The purpose of Continuous Integration is to fail

https://blog.nix-ci.com/post/2026-02-05_the-purpose-of-ci-is-to-fail
1•zdw•8m ago•0 comments

Apfelstrudel: Live coding music environment with AI agent chat

https://github.com/rcarmo/apfelstrudel
1•rcarmo•9m ago•0 comments

What Is Stoicism?

https://stoacentral.com/guides/what-is-stoicism
3•0xmattf•9m ago•0 comments

What happens when a neighborhood is built around a farm

https://grist.org/cities/what-happens-when-a-neighborhood-is-built-around-a-farm/
1•Brajeshwar•10m ago•0 comments

Every major galaxy is speeding away from the Milky Way, except one

https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/every-major-galaxy-is-speeding-away-from-the-milky-wa...
2•Brajeshwar•10m ago•0 comments

Extreme Inequality Presages the Revolt Against It

https://www.noemamag.com/extreme-inequality-presages-the-revolt-against-it/
2•Brajeshwar•10m ago•0 comments

There's no such thing as "tech" (Ten years later)

1•dtjb•11m ago•0 comments

What Really Killed Flash Player: A Six-Year Campaign of Deliberate Platform Work

https://medium.com/@aglaforge/what-really-killed-flash-player-a-six-year-campaign-of-deliberate-p...
1•jbegley•11m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Anyone orchestrating multiple AI coding agents in parallel?

1•buildingwdavid•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Knowledge-Bank

https://github.com/gabrywu-public/knowledge-bank
1•gabrywu•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: The Codeverse Hub Linux

https://github.com/TheCodeVerseHub/CodeVerseLinuxDistro
3•sinisterMage•19m ago•2 comments

Take a trip to Japan's Dododo Land, the most irritating place on Earth

https://soranews24.com/2026/02/07/take-a-trip-to-japans-dododo-land-the-most-irritating-place-on-...
2•zdw•19m ago•0 comments

British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205nxy0p31o
23•bookofjoe•20m ago•9 comments

BookTalk: A Reading Companion That Captures Your Voice

https://github.com/bramses/BookTalk
1•_bramses•21m ago•0 comments

Is AI "good" yet? – tracking HN's sentiment on AI coding

https://www.is-ai-good-yet.com/#home
3•ilyaizen•21m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Amdb – Tree-sitter based memory for AI agents (Rust)

https://github.com/BETAER-08/amdb
1•try_betaer•22m ago•0 comments

OpenClaw Partners with VirusTotal for Skill Security

https://openclaw.ai/blog/virustotal-partnership
2•anhxuan•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Seedance 2.0 Release

https://seedancy2.com/
2•funnycoding•23m ago•0 comments

Leisure Suit Larry's Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
1•thelok•23m ago•0 comments

Towards Self-Driving Codebases

https://cursor.com/blog/self-driving-codebases
1•edwinarbus•23m ago•0 comments

VCF West: Whirlwind Software Restoration – Guy Fedorkow [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLoXodz1N9A
1•stmw•24m ago•1 comments

Show HN: COGext – A minimalist, open-source system monitor for Chrome (<550KB)

https://github.com/tchoa91/cog-ext
1•tchoa91•25m ago•1 comments

FOSDEM 26 – My Hallway Track Takeaways

https://sluongng.substack.com/p/fosdem-26-my-hallway-track-takeaways
1•birdculture•25m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

A short introduction to optimal transport and Wasserstein distance (2020)

https://alexhwilliams.info/itsneuronalblog/2020/10/09/optimal-transport/
40•sebg•5mo ago

Comments

smokel•5mo ago
This is very helpful for understanding generative AI. See for example the amazing lectures of Stefano Ermon for Stanford's CS236 Deep Generative Models [1]. All lectures are available on YouTube [2].

[1] https://deepgenerativemodels.github.io/

[2] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rPOWA-omMM6STXa...

jethkl•5mo ago
Wasserstein distance (Earth Mover’s Distance) measures how far apart two distributions are — the ‘work’ needed to reshape one pile of dirt into another. The concept extends to multiple distributions via a linear program, which under mild conditions can be solved with a linear-time greedy algorithm [1]. It’s an active research area with applications in clustering, computing Wasserstein barycenters (averaging distributions), and large-scale machine learning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mover's_distance#More_th...

ForceBru•5mo ago
Is the Wasserstein distance useful for parameter estimation instead of maximum likelihood? BTW, maximum likelihood basically estimates minimum KL divergence. All I see online and in papers is how to _compute_ the Wasserstein distance, which seems to be pretty hard in itself. In 1D, this requires computing a nasty integral of inverse CDFs when p!=1. Does it mean that "minimum Wasserstein estimation" is prohibitively expensive?
317070•5mo ago
It is.

But!

Wasserstein distances are used instead of a KL inside all kinds of VAE's and diffusion models, because while the Wasserstein distance is hard to compute, it is easy to make distributions whose expectation is the gradient wrt to the Wasserstein distance. So you can easily get unbiased gradients, and that is all you need to train big neural networks. [0] Pretty much any time you sample from your current and the target distribution and take the gradient of the distance between the points, you will be minimizing a Wasserstein distance.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.01558

JustFinishedBSG•5mo ago
Wasserstein itself is expensive but you can instead optimize arbitrarily close entropic regularizations of it ( Sinkhorn algorithm) that are both easy to optimize and differentiable