frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html
81•valyala•4h ago•16 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...
23•gnufx•2h ago•15 comments

The F Word

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/friction.html
34•zdw•3d ago•4 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
87•mellosouls•6h ago•165 comments

I write games in C (yes, C)

https://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/
129•valyala•3h ago•98 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
45•surprisetalk•3h ago•52 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

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

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
95•vinhnx•7h ago•13 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
850•klaussilveira•23h ago•256 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
66•samasblack•6h ago•51 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1090•xnx•1d ago•618 comments

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

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

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

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

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
231•jesperordrup•14h ago•80 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
515•theblazehen•3d ago•191 comments

We mourn our craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
331•ColinWright•3h ago•390 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

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

Show HN: A luma dependent chroma compression algorithm (image compression)

https://www.bitsnbites.eu/a-spatial-domain-variable-block-size-luma-dependent-chroma-compression-...
3•mbitsnbites•3d ago•0 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
253•alainrk•8h ago•411 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
181•1vuio0pswjnm7•10h ago•250 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
610•nar001•8h ago•269 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
35•marklit•5d ago•6 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
26•momciloo•3h ago•5 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
47•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/
124•videotopia•4d ago•37 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
96•speckx•4d ago•103 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•5 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
210•limoce•4d ago•117 comments

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

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
32•sandGorgon•2d ago•15 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
286•isitcontent•1d ago•38 comments
Open in hackernews

Confessions to a Data Lake

https://confer.to/blog/2025/12/confessions-to-a-data-lake/
37•kkl•1mo ago

Comments

lisbbb•1mo ago
I always said our data lake was frozen over. You could get tons of data into it, but barely anything back out.
jmulho•1mo ago
That is literally the definition of a data lake. The one you can get anything back out of is called a database.
viccis•1mo ago
>You could say that LLMs are the first technology where the medium actively invites confession.

I don't think LLMs really constitute a medium by McLuhan's definition. A medium is an extension of man, and LLMs don't extend so much as they replace. An LLM is closer to a secretary or similar force multiplier than an extension of oneself.

Waterluvian•1mo ago
I think it absolutely is a medium based on his big picture idea of how the way we consume information influences us. A TV series or a web search or a university lecture or an evening in the stacks all deeply influence how we might study a subject and in what ways the facts take hold within us. An LLM query or “conversation” is a distinct sibling to those. And a secretary is a medium.
viccis•1mo ago
His idea of media wasn't about "the way we consume information", it's about each medium's ability to extend parts of ourselves. For example, a light bulb is a medium he gives as an example, as it extends our vision. He considers money a medium for extending work and skill.

>And a secretary is a medium.

Not in McLuhan's use of the word. His examples are all pieces of technology that extend our senses; another person helping you do something is not a medium.

I'm not saying you are wrong about the word "medium" in general, but simply that McLuhan had a very specific usage of the word that is not the same as the lay meaning and includes things like light bulbs, numbers, and money. The more modern usage of the word to generically refer to sources of information is very different. In that sense, AI is media insofar as it's feeding us content and information, but it does not meet the specific (and more interesting IMO) definition McLuhan put forward in Understanding Media. Obviously, others can and will disagree with me there, but I simply don't view LLMs are an extension of our thought. Things like the internet, encyclopedias, the education system, etc., are McLuhan-esque media of thought extension, whereas LLMs actually serve the opposite purpose. They abridge rather than extend it by doing it for you.

gus_massa•1mo ago
> You could say that LLMs are the first technology where the medium actively invites confession.

What about ELIZA? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

sosodev•1mo ago
I’ve spent some time thinking about privacy and LLMs. I developed the impression that encryption isn’t meaningful in this space. It seems like end to end encryption only truly works when both ends are outside of the system and can manage their keys independently of it. In this case one end is the system. My message has to be decrypted for processing by the LLM. So is “end to end encryption” in this case any different than HTTPS? It doesn’t seem like it
exo762•1mo ago
Post is lacking in technical details. What it seems to be doing echoes the way ChatGPT is integrated into iOS - your requests are anonymized so your profile can't be (easily) built.

How can I make confer.to work on my Linux machine? Modern CPU.

RadiozRadioz•1mo ago
How does this work technically?

I am unable to go to their website because:

> "This application requires passkey with PRF extension support for secure encryption key storage. Your browser or device doesn't support these advanced features"

Is this really necessary for a product's webpage? I would understand for the application itself.

TimC123456•1mo ago
There's a more-recent post on the same blog that gets into the details of how they're using the WebAuthn PRF extension to store key material, but for platforms and browsers that don't yet support the extension, you'll need a password manager that does. There's a table midway down the post with details: https://confer.to/blog/2025/12/passkey-encryption/
abeyer•1mo ago
This kind of insistence that their way is "better" and thus justifying removing agency from the user is the exact same thing that's kept me away from signal, too. Even their own blog post acknowledges a perfectly good current method for supporting what they want to do without any of this, yet they reject even allowing it as an option because they don't like the ux.

This arguably is more interesting than yet another closed messaging platform, but still not gonna use it with this requirement in place.

3s•1mo ago
It uses confidential computing primitives like Intel TDX and NVIDIA CC, available on the latest generations of GPUs. Secure hardware like this is a building block to enable verifiably private computation without having to trust the operator. While Confer hasn’t released the technical details yet, you can see in the web inspector that they use TDX in the backend by examining the attestation logs. This is a similar architecture to what we’ve been developing at Tinfoil (https://tinfoil.sh) if you’re curious to learn more!
recursivetree•1mo ago
Neither the article nor the linked application explain how confer maintains privacy. As much as I'd like to see something like this, I'm still a bit skeptical as long as they can't explain how the technology at the heart of their product works.