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We Mourn Our Craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
60•ColinWright•56m ago•24 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
18•surprisetalk•1h ago•13 comments

U.S. Jobs Disappear at Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestunson/2026/02/05/us-jobs-disappear-at-fastest-january-pace-sin...
95•alephnerd•1h ago•38 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
120•AlexeyBrin•7h ago•22 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
55•vinhnx•4h ago•7 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
822•klaussilveira•21h ago•248 comments

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
53•thelok•3h ago•6 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
101•1vuio0pswjnm7•8h ago•117 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1057•xnx•1d ago•608 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
75•onurkanbkrc•6h ago•5 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
476•theblazehen•2d ago•175 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
202•jesperordrup•11h ago•69 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
544•nar001•5h ago•252 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
213•alainrk•6h ago•328 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

https://voratiq.com/blog/selection-rather-than-prediction/
8•languid-photic•3d ago•1 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
34•rbanffy•4d ago•7 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
27•marklit•5d ago•2 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
113•videotopia•4d ago•30 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
68•mellosouls•4h ago•73 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
73•speckx•4d ago•74 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
273•isitcontent•21h ago•37 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
199•limoce•4d ago•111 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
285•dmpetrov•22h ago•153 comments

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
21•sandGorgon•2d ago•11 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
155•matheusalmeida•2d ago•48 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
555•todsacerdoti•1d ago•268 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
424•ostacke•1d ago•110 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
42•matt_d•4d ago•18 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
472•lstoll•1d ago•312 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
348•eljojo•1d ago•215 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.