frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

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

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

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
114•AlexeyBrin•6h ago•20 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

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

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

https://openciv3.org/
809•klaussilveira•21h ago•246 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

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

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
88•1vuio0pswjnm7•7h ago•99 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1053•xnx•1d ago•599 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
470•theblazehen•2d ago•173 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

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

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
196•jesperordrup•11h ago•67 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
8•surprisetalk•59m ago•1 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
534•nar001•5h ago•248 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...
42•alephnerd•1h ago•14 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
204•alainrk•6h ago•309 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
33•rbanffy•4d ago•5 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
25•marklit•5d ago•1 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
63•mellosouls•4h ago•67 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

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

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
67•speckx•4d ago•70 comments

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

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
21•sandGorgon•2d ago•10 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
271•isitcontent•21h ago•36 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
199•limoce•4d ago•109 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
284•dmpetrov•21h ago•151 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/
553•todsacerdoti•1d ago•267 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/
41•matt_d•4d ago•16 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
348•eljojo•1d ago•214 comments

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

https://vecti.com
367•vecti•23h ago•167 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
466•lstoll•1d ago•308 comments
Open in hackernews

The undeserved status of the pigeon-hole principle (1991)

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1094.html
18•tosh•2mo ago

Comments

xg15•2mo ago
He wasn't wrong, but I also think this an example of "professional blindness", where experts in a topic can lose the ability to imagine the POV of a layman/novice.

I was thinking this was parody for a moment, because the "bad" formulations (0) and (2) seem obviously easier to understand than the "good" formulation (1).

I needed some attempts to parse what (1) even wants to say. (Minimum, maximum and average of what? I imagine the counts per unique item in the bag, but it doesn't say that anywhere)

It's also not obvious at all that (1) is true, so you'd need to see at least a proof.

But what's true is that (1) is more versatile and easier to apply to new problems - it's just harder to teach. So maybe the right solution would have been to start with (0) and (2), then show how those actually imply (1) - and then go on using (1) as a tool, like the quadratic formula.

It's a bit like "If I have two apples and get three more apples, I have five apples" is easier to understand for someone learning addition than "2+3=5", but you still don't want to spend the rest of your life imagining metaphorical apples whenever you have to calculate something.

gweinberg•2mo ago
Yeah, it may seem like a "better" (because stronger) conclusion to the author that if you have more pigeons than pigeonholes you must have more than one pigeon in a hole even if negative or irrational numbers of pigeons. But you're pretty much only invoking the pigeonhole principle in discrete math, where "more than one" means "at least 2".
xg15•2mo ago
Yeah, I think that was something that irked me about the "general" formulation: It suddenly brought in an average, i.e. a real, even though the "common" formulations only dealt with integers. This may be more general but made reasoning and understanding harder.
karmakaze•2mo ago
The Pigeonhole Principle is merely the Law of Excluded Middle with more than two 'slots'.

Proof by Contradiction relies on the Law of Excluded Middle and is considered inferior than direct or by induction, so there is no elevated status given to these.

bmacho•2mo ago
I think overall it's a good habit to go through your proofs again, and remove unnecessary double negations, and make proofs 'more constructive'.

Reductio ad Absurdum makes coming up with proofs easier (you have one more information to use, you can work from both ends of the problem and try to make 2 half long proofs meet, instead of one normal long), but in the end it is often unnecessary, you can remove it, and your proof reads better.

I don't share his view that Generalized Pigeon-hole Principle makes the normal version unnecessary. The normal version is used a lot in the form it is formulated.