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Show HN: Mirror Parliament where users vote on top of politicians and draft laws

https://github.com/fokdelafons/lustra
1•fokdelafons•26s ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Opus 4.6 ignoring instructions, how to use 4.5 in Claude Code instead?

1•Chance-Device•1m ago•0 comments

We Mourn Our Craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
1•ColinWright•4m ago•0 comments

Jim Fan calls pixels the ultimate motor controller

https://robotsandstartups.substack.com/p/humanoids-platform-urdf-kitchen-nvidias
1•robotlaunch•8m ago•0 comments

Exploring a Modern SMTPE 2110 Broadcast Truck with My Dad

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/exploring-a-modern-smpte-2110-broadcast-truck-with-my-dad/
1•HotGarbage•8m ago•0 comments

AI UX Playground: Real-world examples of AI interaction design

https://www.aiuxplayground.com/
1•javiercr•9m ago•0 comments

The Field Guide to Design Futures

https://designfutures.guide/
1•andyjohnson0•9m ago•0 comments

The Other Leverage in Software and AI

https://tomtunguz.com/the-other-leverage-in-software-and-ai/
1•gmays•11m ago•0 comments

AUR malware scanner written in Rust

https://github.com/Sohimaster/traur
3•sohimaster•13m ago•1 comments

Free FFmpeg API [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RAuSVa4MLI
3•harshalone•13m ago•1 comments

Are AI agents ready for the workplace? A new benchmark raises doubts

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/are-ai-agents-ready-for-the-workplace-a-new-benchmark-raises-do...
2•PaulHoule•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI Watermark and Stego Scanner

https://ulrischa.github.io/AIWatermarkDetector/
1•ulrischa•19m ago•0 comments

Clarity vs. complexity: the invisible work of subtraction

https://www.alexscamp.com/p/clarity-vs-complexity-the-invisible
1•dovhyi•20m ago•0 comments

Solid-State Freezer Needs No Refrigerants

https://spectrum.ieee.org/subzero-elastocaloric-cooling
2•Brajeshwar•20m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Will LLMs/AI Decrease Human Intelligence and Make Expertise a Commodity?

1•mc-0•21m ago•1 comments

From Zero to Hero: A Brief Introduction to Spring Boot

https://jcob-sikorski.github.io/me/writing/from-zero-to-hello-world-spring-boot
1•jcob_sikorski•22m ago•1 comments

NSA detected phone call between foreign intelligence and person close to Trump

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/07/nsa-foreign-intelligence-trump-whistleblower
8•c420•22m ago•1 comments

How to Fake a Robotics Result

https://itcanthink.substack.com/p/how-to-fake-a-robotics-result
1•ai_critic•23m ago•0 comments

It's time for the world to boycott the US

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/2/5/its-time-for-the-world-to-boycott-the-us
3•HotGarbage•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Semantic Search for terminal commands in the Browser (No Back end)

https://jslambda.github.io/tldr-vsearch/
1•jslambda•23m ago•1 comments

The AI CEO Experiment

https://yukicapital.com/blog/the-ai-ceo-experiment/
2•romainsimon•25m ago•0 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
4•surprisetalk•28m ago•0 comments

MS-DOS game copy protection and cracks

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/game_cracks.php
4•TheCraiggers•29m ago•0 comments

Updates on GNU/Hurd progress [video]

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7FZXHF-updates_on_gnuhurd_progress_rump_drivers_64bit_smp_...
2•birdculture•30m ago•0 comments

Epstein took a photo of his 2015 dinner with Zuckerberg and Musk

https://xcancel.com/search?f=tweets&q=davenewworld_2%2Fstatus%2F2020128223850316274
14•doener•30m ago•2 comments

MyFlames: View MySQL execution plans as interactive FlameGraphs and BarCharts

https://github.com/vgrippa/myflames
1•tanelpoder•32m ago•0 comments

Show HN: LLM of Babel

https://clairefro.github.io/llm-of-babel/
1•marjipan200•32m ago•0 comments

A modern iperf3 alternative with a live TUI, multi-client server, QUIC support

https://github.com/lance0/xfr
3•tanelpoder•33m ago•0 comments

Famfamfam Silk icons – also with CSS spritesheet

https://github.com/legacy-icons/famfamfam-silk
1•thunderbong•34m ago•0 comments

Apple is the only Big Tech company whose capex declined last quarter

https://sherwood.news/tech/apple-is-the-only-big-tech-company-whose-capex-declined-last-quarter/
4•elsewhen•37m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Randomness Testing Guide

https://random.tastemaker.design/
44•user070223•3mo ago

Comments

guytv•2mo ago
If you take the UTF-8 binary for “hello world” and paste it there, it passes 4 out of 5 randomness tests.

Strange.

(0110100001100101011011000110110001101111001000000111011101101111011100100110110001100100)

cnnlives9099•2mo ago
It looks like there is some repetition in the binary representation to me. English language phrases in UTF-8 are not going to look random.
Antibabelic•2mo ago
It is very easy for short strings to pass most of the tests.
dominicrose•2mo ago
Yes I tried with PHP and it failed with a size of 8800 for the Block Frequency Test, but it was fine at 880. Then I tried another random sequence of 8800 and it also failed the Autocorrelation Test.
jap•2mo ago
There was originally a bug in the GAlib random number generator... if I remember correctly, the guy who identified it told me this was found (or demonstrated) by making a scatter plot of generated numbers an observing there was a pattern to the data.
apwheele•2mo ago
I don't know what NIST says, but for the tests that use Chi-square, you can look at the left tail. Basically tests that have very small Chi-square values are "too close" to the expected distribution.

This is how Fisher critiqued Mendel's experiments -- they were too perfect!

seanhunter•2mo ago
I'm not sure whether it's still the case, but the state of the art some twenty years ago when I generated a random stream and wanted to test it, was the "diehard" suite[1] which started as an implementation of the tests suggested by Knuth in TAOCP and then was expanded from there. The version I had was in C that had been autogenerated by the gnu fortran complier from a fortran original, so the source code was even more impossible than normal quant code to understand. I understand it was superceded by "dieharder", which is a native C implementation I think.

Robert Brown has a page with a bunch of info about dieharder and statistical testing of random generators in general [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diehard_tests

[2] https://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/dieharder.php

camel-cdr•2mo ago
These days PractRand seems to be the best randomness test suite: https://pracrand.sourceforge.net/
seanhunter•2mo ago
Somewhat offtopic, but in case anyone is curious my random stream was a little daemon process I wrote. The problem was around 2000-ish Linux had a weakness in /dev/random where it would read from things like keyboard timings and feed them in as sources of entropy into a cryptographic sponge function that would write them into /dev/random and increase the entropy count. If you had a long-running Linux server, it didn't have anyone typing on the keyboard and the other entropy sources didn't generate that much entropy so your server would eventually run out of entropy in the pool and then would block when people tried to initiate ssl connections.

So I wrote a little "additional entropy daemon" that would read things like CPU temperature fluctuations, signal noise on soundcards if installed etc (I forget them all exactly but there were a few), "bleach them" so they had reasonable statistical properties (eg the soundcard one before bleaching was almost all zeros with just occasional spikes in it so you want that to be normalized a bit) mix them together somewhat chaotically and then feed them into the sponge function with a relatively low entropy estimate. This meant our servers wouldn't block. I used diehard to test the randomness of the sources I was using before and after the mixing.

The bug got fixed and people generally got comfortable using /dev/urandom rather than /dev/random, so my little process moved on to live on a farm with other daemon processes that were retired from use. I don't even have the source code any more.

gammalost•2mo ago
Unfortunatly the site is sloppy when explaining the subject.

For example

> Let's say we have the following binary string. s=00000000000000000000 It is obviously not random since there are no ones in the string. Therefore, we must check that there are roughly an equal number of zeros and ones in the string.