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

https://openciv3.org/
417•klaussilveira•5h ago•94 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
770•xnx•11h ago•465 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
137•isitcontent•5h ago•15 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
130•dmpetrov•6h ago•54 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
37•quibono•4d ago•2 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
240•vecti•7h ago•116 comments

A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/a-century-of-hair-samples-proves-leaded-gas-ban-worked/
62•jnord•3d ago•4 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
309•aktau•12h ago•153 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
309•ostacke•11h ago•84 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
168•eljojo•8h ago•124 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
36•SerCe•1h ago•32 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
388•todsacerdoti•13h ago•217 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
314•lstoll•12h ago•230 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
48•phreda4•5h ago•8 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
106•vmatsiiako•10h ago•34 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
181•i5heu•8h ago•128 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
233•surprisetalk•3d ago•30 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
13•gfortaine•3h ago•0 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
141•limoce•3d ago•79 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
971•cdrnsf•15h ago•414 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
40•rescrv•13h ago•17 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
8•kmm•4d ago•0 comments

I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor

https://andrewjrod.substack.com/p/im-going-to-cure-my-girlfriends-brain
40•ray__•2h ago•11 comments

Evaluating and mitigating the growing risk of LLM-discovered 0-days

https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/
34•lebovic•1d ago•11 comments

Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents

https://docs.smooth.sh/cli/overview
76•antves•1d ago•57 comments

The Oklahoma Architect Who Turned Kitsch into Art

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-31/oklahoma-architect-bruce-goff-s-wild-home-desi...
18•MarlonPro•3d ago•4 comments

Show HN: Slack CLI for Agents

https://github.com/stablyai/agent-slack
38•nwparker•1d ago•9 comments

Claude Composer

https://www.josh.ing/blog/claude-composer
101•coloneltcb•2d ago•69 comments

How virtual textures work

https://www.shlom.dev/articles/how-virtual-textures-really-work/
25•betamark•12h ago•23 comments

The Beauty of Slag

https://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/beauty-slag
31•sohkamyung•3d ago•3 comments
Open in hackernews

Monte Carlo Crash Course: Quasi-Monte Carlo

https://thenumb.at/QMC/
143•zote•6mo ago

Comments

hnhg•6mo ago
This feels like a crash course for people already very familiar with it all. For everyone else, Steve Brunton's courses cover a lot of the foundational stuff here on probability and stats and might be a lot more accessible: https://www.youtube.com/@Eigensteve
seanhunter•6mo ago
Strong agree. He's an amazing teacher. Working through his course on dynamic systems and differential equations is some of the most fun I've ever had while learning.
FredPret•6mo ago
Thanks for this link. I've never heard of Eigen Steve but his channel looks amazing, which is to be expected from a name like Eigen Steve.
seanhunter•6mo ago
One thing to check out is he has a great series on "Data Driven Science and Engineering" to go alongside his book and the website has all the code and links to all the videos for each chapter. https://databookuw.com/
FredPret•6mo ago
Very cool! Will check it out - thanks!
fithisux•6mo ago
Wow! Thank you.
thevillagechief•6mo ago
Nice coincidence! I'm going through his course as a review of FFT and SVD fundamentals. He's really good.
trutz•6mo ago
Great recommendation. Anyone knows how he creates those videos where he seems to stand before a blackboard made of glass where he can also add a screen share from his laptop? Great technique I haven’t seen before on YouTube.
seanhunter•6mo ago
Cool article.

A couple of things which might not be obvious to people who haven't used monte carlo simulators in practise.

1) The fact that a prng is weak[1] and that the MC is deterministic given a particular seed is almost always a good thing. You want the thing to be as fast as possible and you're going to run a lot of paths. Secondly you very often need repeated runs to give the same result. For example say you're using an MC method to price something, you want exactly the same price every time otherwise you'll get some p&l noise every day arising purely from the difference in the random sequence. That's not what you want.

2) Low-discrepancy sequences like Sobol sequences take this one step further because they don't even pretend to be random, because they give better coverage of the search space for a given number of paths so you can use fewer paths. However, if your path evaluation is cheaper than generating the Sobol sequence then you probably just want to use a normal PRNG and more paths rather than a Sobol sequence. Say there is a bullseye hidden somewhere in a circle and to find the circle you need to throw a dart at it and if the dart lands near to the bullseye you get some feedback. One approach would be to precisely divide the circle into squares and carefully aim each dart to land in a different square (this is a low-discrepancy sequence). But another way is just to throw a lot of darts quickly and not really care where they go (this is the lots of paths approach).

[1] in the Cryptographic sense. Generating even weak random variates is slow especially if you need them to satisfy some property like being distributed in a particular way. Say you're trying to simulate the path of the snp 500. For each path you're simulating 500 stocks so you might be running say a million paths and each path will need 500*x random numbers. That computation time adds up pretty quickly. Cryptographically random numbers are extremely expensive computationally and you don't care about any of the strong cryptographic properties for this.

FredPret•6mo ago
You'd also have to account for the covariances among all 500 stocks, as well as many subgroups. Almost impossible to do properly given the contact area between even one of these 500 organizations and a universe full of random events, never mind one another
clickety_clack•6mo ago
I seem to be in the minority, but I don’t think you should use a fixed seed in the MC runs you use for decision making. It gives a false sense of the accuracy of process as the answers stay the same. I think a decision maker should be exposed to the effects of the standard error.

That said, I know sometimes the point of analysis is more about narrative building than decision making, and changing numbers make it harder to maintain trust in a narrative.

Ntrails•6mo ago
Agree - in one context if your decision is different due to a change in seed -> change in output, then frankly it isn't an input you should be using to decide?

On the other hand once you're happy with the error bars wrt seeding it is imo useful to have consistency in reporting.

rainworld•6mo ago
extremely expensive

No. CSPRNGs can be pretty competitive these days: https://github.com/google/randen

Yes, in some cases that’s still (a bit) too slow or too much code but best to benchmark first.

unixhero•6mo ago
It is maybe a good intro. Way too mathematical for me.