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Altermagnets: The first new type of magnet in nearly a century

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2487013-weve-discovered-a-new-kind-of-magnetism-what-can-we-do-with-it/
103•Brajeshwar•2h ago•27 comments

Show HN: Improving search ranking with chess Elo scores

https://www.zeroentropy.dev/blog/improving-rag-with-elo-scores
83•ghita_•3h ago•20 comments

KDB-X: KX releases FREE Commercial KDB license

https://www.defconq.tech/blog/From%20Elite%20to%20Everyone%20-%20KX%20Community%20Edition%20Breaks%20Loose
9•AUnterrainer•44m ago•1 comments

Chain of thought monitorability: A new and fragile opportunity for AI safety

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11473
39•mfiguiere•3h ago•10 comments

Pgactive: Postgres active-active replication extension

https://github.com/aws/pgactive
185•ForHackernews•8h ago•57 comments

Mkosi – Build Bespoke OS Images

https://mkosi.systemd.io/
20•leetrout•1h ago•3 comments

How and where will agents ship software?

https://www.instantdb.com/essays/agents
4•stopachka•6m ago•0 comments

Weave (YC W25) is hiring a founding AI engineer

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/weave-3/jobs/SqFnIFE-founding-ai-engineer
1•adchurch•53m ago

Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141

https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2025/07/15/shipping-webgpu-on-windows-in-firefox-141/
275•Bogdanp•11h ago•107 comments

Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 Incident on July 14, 2025

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1-1-1-1-incident-on-july-14-2025/
443•nomaxx117•14h ago•298 comments

I'm switching to Python and actually liking it

https://www.cesarsotovalero.net/blog/i-am-switching-to-python-and-actually-liking-it.html
167•cesarsotovalero•10h ago•257 comments

How I lost my backpack with passports and laptop

https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/how-i-lost-my-backpack-with-passports
43•eatitraw•1d ago•32 comments

What's happening to reading?

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/whats-happening-to-reading
47•Kaibeezy•3d ago•112 comments

Mill: A better build tool for Java, Scala, and Kotlin

https://mill-build.org/mill/index.html
34•lihaoyi•2h ago•8 comments

Pascal's Scams (2012)

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2012/07/pascals-scams.html
52•walterbell•4d ago•39 comments

Tilck: A Tiny Linux-Compatible Kernel

https://github.com/vvaltchev/tilck
232•chubot•14h ago•44 comments

Thunderbird: Fluent Windows 11 Design

https://github.com/Deathbyteacup/fluentbird
186•skipnup•3d ago•97 comments

Show HN: An MCP server that gives LLMs temporal awareness and time calculation

https://github.com/jlumbroso/passage-of-time-mcp
44•lumbroso•2h ago•28 comments

Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

https://atopile.io/atopile/introduction
39•poly2it•3d ago•10 comments

'Gentle Parenting' My Smartphone Addiction

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/gentle-parenting-my-smartphone-addiction
15•fortran77•2h ago•15 comments

Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

https://prm.ua/en/ukrainian-hackers-destroyed-the-it-infrastructure-of-a-russian-drone-manufacturer-what-is-known/
481•doener•9h ago•322 comments

MARS.EXE → COM (2021)

https://chaos.if.uj.edu.pl/~wojtek/MARS.COM/
114•reconnecting•4d ago•33 comments

Show HN: BloomSearch – Keyword search with hierarchical bloom filters

https://github.com/danthegoodman1/bloomsearch
17•dangoodmanUT•3d ago•3 comments

In-depth system walkthrough: cloud-based VOD

https://app.ilograph.com/demo.ilograph.AWS%2520Video-On-Demand/Workflow
5•billyp-rva•3d ago•0 comments

GPUHammer: Rowhammer attacks on GPU memories are practical

https://gpuhammer.com/
237•jonbaer•17h ago•80 comments

LLM Daydreaming

https://gwern.net/ai-daydreaming
147•nanfinitum•15h ago•112 comments

Show HN: DataRamen, a Fast SQL Explorer with Automatic Joins and Data Navigation

https://dataramen.xyz/
36•oleksandr_dem•6h ago•36 comments

Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL

https://www.matthieulc.com/posts/shoggoth-mini
551•cataPhil•1d ago•102 comments

cppyy: Automatic Python-C++ Bindings

https://cppyy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
60•gjvc•5h ago•15 comments

Reflections on OpenAI

https://calv.info/openai-reflections
667•calvinfo•1d ago•350 comments
Open in hackernews

MARS.EXE → COM (2021)

https://chaos.if.uj.edu.pl/~wojtek/MARS.COM/
114•reconnecting•4d ago

Comments

reconnecting•7h ago
I remember when I saw MARS.EXE for the first time on my 386. That was something absolutely unimaginable for real-time graphics. Pure magic!

It's fascinating to see that 30 years later someone is still working around its source code.

dvh•7h ago
Have you also tried to reach the end?
reconnecting•7h ago
Of course, that was the first intention, to get to the end.

I remember as a child, I had spent a lot of time on this, but perhaps the direction was wrong. (-:

richardfey•5h ago
It's endless right?
reconnecting•5h ago
Sure, it was endless.

Here is "making of" from author.

https://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=4662

rwmj•4h ago
I remember when the demo came out (I didn't even know it was called a "demo" at the time). We gathered around it running on one of the lab PCs. It was quite unbelievable that something like it could be done in such a tiny executable.
reconnecting•3h ago
Yeah, I had exact the same fellings.
feiss•2m ago
same feeling
baal80spam•7h ago
Beautiful.

For comparison: In Windows 11, Notepad's size, referring to the disk space it occupies, is approximately 25.1 MB according to the Microsoft Store.

reconnecting•7h ago
For comparison, the size of this HTML page + CSS is larger than MARS.EXE was.
dcrazy•4h ago
That seems inevitable, given the webpage contains an assembly listing of MARS.EXE. Mnemonics are larger than machine code.
reconnecting•4h ago
I meant the source of this page, including the transparent pixel image and the logo.
GuB-42•4h ago
How did it get that big? On my Windows 10, notepad.exe is 196 kB, I remembered it being under 100 kB, but it did get a few more features in the last years. Anyways, hard to judge considering that a good part of the original Notepad is likely to be standard Win32 components.

Anyways, none of these "mainsteam" apps hold a candle to sizecoding productions. Just look like what comes out of Lovebyte, a demoparty where no production is above 1 kB.

hypercube33•4h ago
I think they moved it to .net, made it a store app, dark mode and copilot ai.
pixl97•2h ago
Win11 notepad has multiple tabs and previous session saving, which is nice. But it also has a bunch of other crap such as copilot integration and it's logged into your Microsoft account.
accrual•2h ago
Microsoft recently added both Copilot integration and rich text formatting (!) options to stock Win11 Notepad. Fortunately, they can be turned off for now.

I do like that the rich text support allows converting to/from Markdown, but I still prefer plaintext mode.

reconnecting•2h ago
I thought copilot integration was sarcasm.
pixl97•1h ago
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-wri...
reconnecting•1h ago
Until now, I thought the underlined-bold-red text in official announcements was the worst thing Microsoft bring into humans culture, but it seems there's something even bigger coming.
consumer451•7m ago
It's insidious. Mercedes Benz is doing Copilot integration!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44583520

skrebbel•7h ago
The explanation is a great read. It reminds me of Unc's amazing explanation of how they did "cdak", possibly one of the best 4k demos ever made:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150112121832/https://www.pouet...

(for completeness, cdak pouet/download page: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55758 - youtube capture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCh3Q08HMfs)

112233•5h ago
yay, another person with a bookmark to webarchive copy of that thread. dune's (Lassi Nikko) post about the making of the music for cdak was equally metal, if a bit too short.
skrebbel•2h ago
yeah so sad that the real page's images linkrotted. Hooray for archive.org!
tetris11•6h ago
Ive looked for an online dosbox that would let me load the ASM, but weirdly found nothing.
reconnecting•6h ago
Have you tried this one?

https://archive.org/details/demoscene_mars-TimClarke

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=4662

tetris11•4h ago
Oh wow, really nice -- took me a while to realise that hitting a key exits the program and that it only responds to mouse input
reconnecting•6h ago
Description from pouet.net and how it works (1)

The Mars demo was written by Elixir's resident graphics guru and Head of R & D Tim Clarke in 1993, whilst he was still at school. Freely distributed on the Internet, the demo soon gained legendary status for its ability to generate fractal terrain and render it real time, all with a meagre 5K. As a result Tim was headhunted to work for space agency Lunacorp in Washington for several summers whilst studying at Cambridge University.

We recommend running this in DOS mode as it was designed to run on a 386 and may well crash Windows. Remember that this demo was designed for machines that were around in 1993! Use the mouse to move around and press any key to quit.

(1) https://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=4662

nopakos•4h ago
One of the first emails I've sent in my life was to Tim Clarke asking how Mars did work and I was so happy he answered! I remember the graph with the stars.
reconnecting•3h ago
I didn't have any access to email at this time, and Mars looked to me like people somewhere out there were playing with real-time generated 3d virtual worlds while I was stuck with Windows 3.1 forever and no one would rescue me.
amiga386•6h ago
It's a classic demo. The question is, how does the size-reduced version perform on an 80386? (as opposed to a multi-gigahertz machine trusting DOSBox to emulate a 386)
fl0id•3h ago
at the end, it says it was at least tested to compile (and presumably run) on real machines.
phkahler•3h ago
I remember seeing this, reading the high level description of how it works, and doing my own implementation in school. Probably in Turbo Pascal on a 486.
Andrew_nenakhov•1h ago
MARS.EXE... Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.