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SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html
65•valyala•3h ago•13 comments

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions

https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/brookhaven-labs-rhic-concludes-25-year-run-with-final-collis...
21•gnufx•2h ago•9 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
39•surprisetalk•3h ago•45 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
78•mellosouls•6h ago•150 comments

The F Word

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/friction.html
20•zdw•3d ago•0 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
140•AlexeyBrin•9h ago•26 comments

I write games in C (yes, C)

https://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/
112•valyala•3h ago•90 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
88•vinhnx•6h ago•11 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
847•klaussilveira•23h ago•255 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
62•samasblack•5h ago•49 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1084•xnx•1d ago•617 comments

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

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
60•thelok•5h ago•9 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
89•onurkanbkrc•8h ago•5 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
227•jesperordrup•13h ago•80 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
510•theblazehen•3d ago•188 comments

Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-locked-me-out-of-notepad-is-the-thin-...
39•josephcsible•1h ago•34 comments

We mourn our craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
311•ColinWright•2h ago•363 comments

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

https://github.com/Momciloo/fun-with-clip-path
25•momciloo•3h ago•3 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
248•alainrk•8h ago•397 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
34•marklit•5d ago•6 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
604•nar001•7h ago•265 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

https://voratiq.com/blog/selection-rather-than-prediction/
11•languid-photic•3d ago•4 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
175•1vuio0pswjnm7•10h ago•242 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
45•rbanffy•4d ago•9 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
122•videotopia•4d ago•37 comments

History and Timeline of the Proco Rat Pedal (2021)

https://web.archive.org/web/20211030011207/https://thejhsshow.com/articles/history-and-timeline-o...
20•brudgers•5d ago•4 comments

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

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
28•sandGorgon•2d ago•14 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
90•speckx•4d ago•101 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
208•limoce•4d ago•114 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
282•isitcontent•23h ago•38 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.