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France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
490•nar001•4h ago•228 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
453•theblazehen•2d ago•163 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/
36•thelok•2h ago•2 comments

Software Factories and the Agentic Moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
34•mellosouls•3h ago•31 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
94•AlexeyBrin•5h ago•17 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
786•klaussilveira•20h ago•241 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
43•samasblack•2h ago•31 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
36•vinhnx•3h ago•4 comments

StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/
28•simonw•2h ago•31 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12501
59•onurkanbkrc•5h ago•3 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1036•xnx•1d ago•586 comments

Vinklu Turns Forgotten Plot in Bucharest into Tiny Coffee Shop

https://design-milk.com/vinklu-turns-forgotten-plot-in-bucharest-into-tiny-coffee-shop/
11•surprisetalk•5d ago•0 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
182•alainrk•5h ago•263 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
173•jesperordrup•10h ago•65 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
27•rbanffy•4d ago•5 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
107•videotopia•4d ago•27 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
16•marklit•5d ago•0 comments

British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205nxy0p31o
165•bookofjoe•2h ago•147 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
267•isitcontent•20h ago•33 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
152•matheusalmeida•2d ago•46 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
279•dmpetrov•20h ago•148 comments

What Is Stoicism?

https://stoacentral.com/guides/what-is-stoicism
8•0xmattf•2h ago•4 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
37•matt_d•4d ago•12 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
547•todsacerdoti•1d ago•265 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

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

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

https://vecti.com
365•vecti•22h ago•167 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
66•helloplanets•4d ago•70 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
460•lstoll•1d ago•305 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
338•eljojo•23h ago•209 comments

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

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
374•aktau•1d ago•194 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