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

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
38•thelok•2h ago•3 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
101•AlexeyBrin•6h ago•18 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
51•samasblack•3h ago•37 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
789•klaussilveira•20h ago•242 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
38•vinhnx•3h ago•5 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

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

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
462•theblazehen•2d ago•165 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1040•xnx•1d ago•587 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
506•nar001•4h ago•234 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
48•mellosouls•3h ago•49 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
183•jesperordrup•10h ago•65 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
63•1vuio0pswjnm7•7h ago•59 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
186•alainrk•5h ago•280 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

What Is Stoicism?

https://stoacentral.com/guides/what-is-stoicism
15•0xmattf•2h ago•7 comments

72M Points of Interest

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

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

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

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
58•speckx•4d ago•62 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
268•isitcontent•20h ago•34 comments

British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205nxy0p31o
169•bookofjoe•2h ago•152 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
197•limoce•4d ago•107 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
281•dmpetrov•21h ago•150 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•47 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
548•todsacerdoti•1d ago•266 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

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

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
37•matt_d•4d ago•13 comments

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

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

An Update on Heroku

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

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

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

What Is Ruliology?

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

Street-Fighting Mathematics (2008)

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-098-street-fighting-mathematics-january-iap-2008/pages/readings/
59•mpweiher•1mo ago

Comments

stmw•1mo ago
This is a good book. Also, any time this kind of book becomes available (be it a 100 year old one or a new one), it is worth looking into - great improvements in isnight and simplicity are possible above the "baseline" of US math education today.

So for example, I posit that the engineers or scientists you might admire from the 1950's didn't learn calculus or linear algebra the way you did.

gpcz•1mo ago
Feynman learned calculus from the textbook "Calculus for the Practical Man".
nutjob2•1mo ago
Book PDF is here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph-pdf/2284035/book_9...
marci•1mo ago
This is the draft, not the current version.

edit: and for the current unfortunately there's only a dead dropbox link.

NooneAtAll3•1mo ago
what is it about?

how to distribute fighters so that your team defeats-in-detail your opponents?

slow_typist•1mo ago
It is about useful tricks you can usually not learn in university classes.
NooneAtAll3•1mo ago
tricks of what kind
wolfi1•1mo ago
fast multiplying for example
slow_typist•4w ago
Also how to make good estimates, and how to work with units.

One example, the formula to get the speed of a thing after h meters of free fall must deliver an outcome of m/s. We also know the gravitational acceleration g is given in m/s^2. Then, height h in m must somehow be part of the formula. We can get rid of the squaresecond in the denominator by drawing the square root. But then we also need the height in meters. Also it is clear that both more height as well as a higher acceleration must lead to higher speed. Therefore, the speed must be proportional to sqrt(h x g). In fact it is v = 1/2 sqrt(h x g) but we can derive the important part only from knowing how to calculate with units.

brennanpeterson•1mo ago
I also quite liked https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/res-6-011-the-art-of-insight-in-...

Which is, I think, the successor and quite useful.

rm445•1mo ago
I've read this book. It's definitely one of the more interesting and readable maths texts out there. I wasn't exactly sure I'd use the methods. Working as a mechanical engineer I probably go straight to numerical methods, or approximate things even more crudely and approximately than a mathematician's 'rough' work. Though "replace a complicated function with a rectangle" definitely resonated. Overall the impression was that it was full of great techniques for mathematicians and scientists puzzling out every bit of meaning they can from a situation whose true features aren't yet known.
ErroneousBosh•1mo ago
That's kind of how I do maths, too. Working out the lengths of antenna feeders, for example, where a coil of cable is about 30cm across. One turn of that is about one metre, so a coil with ten turns is about ten metres. Roughly. Close enough. I can coil it up shorter but I can't coil it up longer.

If I'm doing really precise stuff, I'm either doing it on a computer already or it's something that's just going to have to be "adjusted" into place when it's done.

In high school my maths teacher said "You'll need to learn all this, you won't always have a calculator!"

My dude, I am walking around with a supercomputer the size of half a slice of bread in my pocket, that probably has a sizeable fraction of the total computing power available in the world when you told me that.

It turns out I don't need either of these things, I just need a good sense of "yeah that feels about right".

stefanfisk•1mo ago
Not to mention instant and searchable access to more subject matter than he’d seen in his whole lifetime.
groundzeros2015•1mo ago
Another book title aimed at getting people who haven’t read their pile of books to buy another.
jesuslop•1mo ago
I skimmed the chapter on operators (7) and always liked that way of thinking (plug things like the derivative operation D into things that expect numbers instead, and see what happens). So plugging into 1/x and getting integrals. Dattoli and Tom Copeland do serious stuff starting from that kind of considerations that go way beyond cocktail party tricks.