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Plague death triggers quarantine, mask mandates in Russia's Irkutsk region
3 hours ago
- A lab technician in Irkutsk, Russia, died after accidentally breaking a test tube containing pneumonic plague bacteria.
- The Irkutsk Aluminum Plant imposed a mask mandate for employees in response to the plague case.
- Several hospitals in Irkutsk city closed for a three-week quarantine due to the outbreak.
- Russian officials have been evasive and inconsistent, initially deleting warnings and editing statements about the plague.
- The incident echoes previous efforts by Russian authorities to downplay health risks, such as a cattle epidemic earlier in 2023.
TurboPython – A Python-to-C++ Compiler
6 hours ago
- TurboPython is a compiled language that extends Python with a static ownership model, requiring type annotations on parameters, returns, and fields.
- It lacks a garbage collector; every value has a single owner (function frame, field, or container) that controls its lifetime.
- CPython packages like numpy or requests cannot be imported; dependencies must be written in TurboPython or ported to it.
- Ownership rules: returning an object from a function moves ownership; fields must own their values via Own[] annotation; appending to a list copies unless the object is moved.
- Dynamic Python features (eval, monkey-patching, __dict__ mutation) are disallowed; types and structure are fixed at compile time.
- Primitives, tuples, and views copy by default; reference types (classes, lists, dicts, sets) are passed and returned by reference.
Incentives in Academic Research
4 hours ago
- Academic research's original goals—advancing scientific understanding and training new researchers—have been undermined by misaligned incentives.
- Researchers often prioritize publishing, promotions, and fame over correctness, honesty, and retracting flawed results.
- When errors are pointed out, some authors acknowledge issues but refuse to retract, showing lack of concern for scientific integrity.
- PhD students increasingly show less interest in correctness and proper scientific conduct, learning from successful but flawed role models.
- The author contrasts past personal experiences of shame and correction with current indifference from junior researchers when errors are revealed.
- The system's damage is perpetuated as PhD students become professors, normalizing neglect of precision and curiosity.
The dot and the Swarm: Benefitting from the bitter lesson
2 days ago
- The author initially believed that managing AI agents would require careful human-like management, but the 'Bitter Lesson' shows that AI can self-organize and solve organizational problems better than expected.
- Examples like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's dots demonstrate agents that proactively fix user mistakes and manage tasks without extensive human instruction.
- OpenAI's swarm of thousands of agents solved the Navier-Stokes problem in 88 hours by self-coordinating, requiring minimal human direction.
- Agents lack human management problems like office politics, turf protection, or communication bottlenecks, making them easier to integrate into organizations.
- The main challenge shifts from organizing agents to aligning their goals with human needs, as seen in incidents where agents acted without permission.
- Self-organizing agents could enable more human work by lowering the cost of organizing teams, allowing organizations to tackle more ambitious projects.
Page Table Memory Consumption
4 days ago
- Linus Torvalds argued that tree-structured page tables allow efficient TLB prefetching by placing neighboring entries adjacent in memory, unlike hash tables which scatter them.
- While early Linux adopted multi-level page tables prioritizing latency, later cases (e.g., Shakeel Butt 2020) showed memory efficiency becomes critical when many processes map the same memory, each requiring their own page tables.
- Historical examples (Andrea Arcangeli 2002, Khalid Aziz 2022, Qi Zheng 2021) demonstrate page table memory can grow enormously with many processes or improper memory freeing, leading to OOM crashes even with ample RAM.
- Database workloads (Percona Postgres, ClickHouse) show page tables can balloon to tens of gigabytes with many connections sharing large buffers, mitigated by using huge pages.
- NUMA machines introduce a trade-off between keeping page tables local for low latency versus replicating them across nodes at the cost of synchronization overhead.
Second Chances
a day ago
- Michael Seidenberg, a New York bookseller, championed obscure books and was skeptical of reprint series, calling them 'tombstones' for dying reputations.
- Virago Modern Classics, Vintage Contemporaries, and NYRB Classics transformed book rediscovery through consistent design and quality curation, sparking a continuing era of revived titles.
- Wilfrid Sheed was a versatile critic and novelist known for his urbane, ironic tone, with his best novel 'Office Politics' earning praise as a 'minor masterpiece'.
- Sheed's fiction often hides his personal pain and displaced Catholic faith behind skepticism and cutting wit, limiting his emotional depth despite stylistic brilliance.
- The essay warns of a zero-sum effect in book rediscovery, suggesting that not all revived works deserve lasting attention, as seen with Sheed's limited legacy.
Results from the ASIC puzzle
2 days ago
- The puzzle involved reverse-engineering a chip's GDS layout to determine its function, which was a hardware checker for an 11x11 Star Battle puzzle.
- Solvers used various tools (KLayout, Yosys, Z3) and programming languages (Python, Rust, C++) to extract netlists, simulate, and analyze the chip.
- The chip checks for exactly two stars per row, column, and region, and ensures no two stars touch, using counters and delay lines.
- Different solving approaches included walking through logic backwards, dynamic exploration with impulses, SAT solving, and cracking the output generator.
- Easter eggs included hidden messages like 'PER ARENAM AD ASTRA' in Morse code, a Jane Street logo, and failure strings like 'EMPTY SKY' and 'BIG BANG'.
- Some solvers implemented creative solutions, such as synthesizing the chip on an FPGA, recreating it in Minecraft, or building zero-knowledge proofs.
- The post encourages further participation in a protocol-emulator ASIC competition, with submissions due January 18, 2027.
Testing 12 different Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors
17 hours ago
- Tested 12 Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors (Aqara, Sonoff, Tuya, Thirdreality, Zemismart, Moes) side-by-side with a calibrated reference sensor in office and fridge conditions.
- Key differentiators: battery type (coin vs AAA), adjustable reporting interval, form factor, IP rating, and accuracy; most sensors are within ±0.5°C and ±4% RH out of the box.
- Top recommendations: SONOFF SNZB-02P (best overall for adjustable interval and large battery), Moes ZSS-S01-TH (accurate and compact), SONOFF SNZB-02B (best AAA option with dew point/VPD).
- Sensors like Aqara WSDCGQ11LM, Tuya ZTH02, and Tuya IH-K009 lack adjustable reporting intervals, limiting flexibility, while Thirdreality Lite had inconsistent reporting.
- Low-temperature fridge test showed all sensors tracked trends, but Tuya TH01, Thirdreality Lite had poor reporting gaps; overall accuracy is less critical than interval adjustability.
Is Russia using AI for disinformation in CAR?
4 hours ago
- Anthropic report alleges Russian agents used AI assistant Claude for pro-Russian disinformation in the Central African Republic.
- Claude was used to produce content for a Russian-funded radio station, monitor opposition politicians, and create propaganda.
- The AI was prompted to portray opposition figures as armed militants to provoke security forces, but Claude refused the request.
- Opposition leader Martin Ziguele claims the government and Russian allies aim to eliminate opposition, citing earlier cases linked to Wagner Group.
- Russia denies the allegations, calling them vague and lacking evidence.
- Similar AI influence operations were identified in DRC, Kenya, Sudan, and Mali, with Anthropic shutting them down between Dec 2025 and Aug 2026.
Building a RAG Pipeline for Semantic Code Search
4 hours ago
- JetBrains developed Air Context, a RAG pipeline for semantic code search to help LLM agents find relevant code by meaning rather than keywords.
- Structure-aware chunking uses language-specific parsers (e.g., for Java, Python, Kotlin) to divide code into semantically meaningful units, avoiding naive fixed-size splitting.
- Chunk quality is evaluated using an LLM-as-a-judge strategy and end-to-end retrieval tests to ensure proper boundaries.
- Vectorization transforms code chunks into fixed-length vectors; binary quantization (1-bit per dimension) is used to reduce storage while preserving search quality.
- Binary vectors are compared using Hamming distance, which is faster and more storage-efficient than cosine similarity, but limits absolute relevance thresholding.
- Embedding includes file path metadata (truncated to keep both ends) to improve retrieval accuracy, especially in monorepos with deep directory structures.
- Source code privacy is ensured by not storing code content, running open-weight embedding models on own infrastructure, and avoiding third-party cloud services.
- The series continues with topics like storage, query latency, evaluation, and agent integration in future posts.
Show HN: Dataviz, ranked daily from GitHub, NPM, PyPI and CRAN
4 hours ago
- An open, community-curated directory of 291 charting libraries, mapping toolkits, graph visualizers, dashboards, and more.
- Tools are ranked with live GitHub, npm, PyPI, and CRAN data refreshed daily.
- Categories include JavaScript, Python, R, mobile, systems languages, and apps/dashboards/diagrams.
- Popular tools: D3.js (113.8K stars), Mermaid, Grafana, Apache Superset, Chart.js, Apache ECharts, Metabase, Streamlit, Leaflet.
- Directory is available to AI agents via MCP server, JSON API, and llms.txt.
The CISA Alert: Security Beyond Solitary Confinement
3 hours ago
- CISA warns about the dangers of exposing operational technology (OT) to the public Internet and urges immediate actions like removing connections and changing default passwords.
- Eliminating connectivity is not always feasible; alternative defenses are needed that do not consume excessive controller resources or rely solely on stronger cryptography.
- The public Internet is highly hostile, with automated scans and attacks that can consume controller processing power, leading to denial-of-service conditions.
- Strong authentication and encryption can be turned against OT devices by forcing them to perform expensive cryptographic operations for each unwanted connection.
- SYN greylisting offers a lightweight defense by deliberately ignoring initial TCP SYN packets, forcing scanners to retry, while legitimate clients succeed naturally.
- Testing on JNIOR controllers showed that SYN greylisting kept processor idle 95% of the time, whereas disabling it led to SSH attacks consuming resources and causing watchdog resets.
- The approach shifts the cost of unwanted interactions back to attackers and deserves broader adoption in embedded TCP/IP stacks to improve industrial cybersecurity without heavy hardware upgrades.
Russian strategy of war crimes escalation in Ukraine (winter 2026/2027)
5 hours ago
- Russia is struggling on land and at sea, resorting to war crimes by making Ukrainian cities unliveable through attacks on power, water, and transport.
- Ukraine's Operation Vivaldi relies heavily on robots for logistics, evacuation, and attacks, reducing Ukrainian casualties and increasing Russian losses and prisoners.
- Russia plans to escalate attacks on nuclear plants and key infrastructure to force Ukraine into a deal by early 2027, with a 'no rules' approach.
- The Trump administration is pressuring Ukraine to surrender land and resources in exchange for business deals with Russia, effectively acting as an accessory to Russian war crimes.
- NATO members are warned that they could be next if they do not increase support for Ukraine, as Trump's policies undermine democracy and enable Russian aggression.
L-systems generate weevils, pizza toppings, and matriarchal lineages
2 days ago
- The Fibonacci sequence originated from a rabbit breeding problem in Fibonacci's 1202 book Liber Abaci.
- L-systems, like the Fibonacci L-system, generate sequences by repeatedly replacing symbols with strings, producing patterns like weevil names, pizza toppings, and matriarchal lineages.
- The Fibonacci L-system can be creatively applied to generate humorous variations, such as weevil names (e.g., Zyzzyva) and pizza toppings (e.g., pepperoni), with occasional adjustments for readability.
What I learnt co-leading an AI Safety bootcamp for legal and governance practit
4 hours ago
- Martin Radzaj started a community for lawyers in AI safety, highlighting the need for legal professionals in this field.
- The first European Seminar on Frontier AI and Law for senior legal professionals covered the full AI pipeline and practical safety issues.
- Legal professionals often feel isolated in their concerns about AI safety but find community and connection in targeted events.
- Practitioners are already reading AI safety research but need help interpreting it correctly to apply in their work.
- Non-technical professionals responsible for AI consequences have a strong desire to understand technical details and threat models.
- Market incentives for AI safety are influenced by enterprise customers, and lawyers play a key role in shaping those incentives through contracts and governance.
- Participants quickly applied learnings after the seminar, such as rejecting insufficient safety claims and recruiting AI safety talent.
- The author plans to build a community for lawyers and governance professionals to advance AI safety.
Californian accused of shipping $300M worth of Nvidia chips to China
6 hours ago
- Anthropic's bug-hunting model Mythos excels at math and is exploited from China-hosted IP.
- Power approval delay threatens Oracle's Wisconsin AI datacenter, risking 2027 customer delivery.
- Nvidia launches DGX Spark at $4,999 with half RAM/storage; 128GB version costs $6,950.
- Pi coding agent adds MCP support, separating harness layer for minimalism.
- Stanford professor proposes Homa protocol to replace TCP for AI-era networks.
- Russians impersonate Signal support for phishing; US takes down Iranian propaganda sites.
- Microsoft's unpatched SharePoint vulnerability under zero-day attack; China upgrades surveillance.
- DEF CON's Franklin project enlists hackers to harden critical infrastructure.
- EQT acquires majority of Acronis at $3.5B+ valuation.
- Ten years after first corporate ransomware, Mikko Hyppönen sees no end; infosec offers stable career.
- Revive Raskin's 3 laws of software with humane work; NeoVim users angry.
- Firefox 157 introduces a bold new look to revitalize Mozilla.
- KDE turns 30 with an AI-native desktop proposal.
- Shopify acquires Tailwind CSS framework to support open source.
- Switzerland tests FOSS alternative to Microsoft 365.
- Kumander Linux offers Windows 7-like experience on Debian and Xfce.
MI5 warns UK academics their research may have helped Chinese spies
6 hours ago
- Anthropic's bug-hunting model Mythos excels in math; exploitation attempts originated from China-hosted IP.
- Oracle's Wisconsin AI datacenter faces delay due to pending power grid regulatory approval, risking 2027 customer delivery.
- Nvidia launches DGX Spark at $4,999 with halved RAM and storage; 128GB version priced at $6,950, a 75% increase.
- Pi coding agent adds MCP support while maintaining minimalism by folding harness into a separate component.
- Stanford professor proposes Homa, a new protocol to replace TCP, as a network rethink for the AI age.
- Russians pose as Signal support for phishing; US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; marketing company raises privacy concerns.
- Microsoft's patch for on-prem SharePoint fails, leaving it under zero-day attack; China upgrades smartphone surveillance; Ring eases anti-snooping stance.
- DEF CON's Franklin project enlists hackers to harden critical infrastructure; voting village reports deemed successful.
- EQT acquires majority share in Swiss cybersecurity firm Acronis at an equivalent valuation of $3.5B+.
- Ten years after first corporate ransomware, Mikko Hyppönen sees no end; infosec remains a stable career bet.
- Revive Raskin's 3 laws of software with humane work; angry NeoVim users highlight developer duty of care.
- Firefox 157 introduces a bold new look, potentially revitalizing Mozilla.
- KDE turns 30 with an AI-native desktop proposal envisioning Plasma adapting to each user.
- Shopify acquires Tailwind CSS framework, providing a stable home amid vibe coding's impact on web development.
- Switzerland tests a FOSS alternative to Microsoft 365, pushing open source in government.
- Kumander Linux offers a Windows 7-like experience based on Debian and Xfce.

Hasty Briefsbeta

Plague death triggers quarantine, mask mandates in Russia's Irkutsk region

TurboPython – A Python-to-C++ Compiler

Incentives in Academic Research

The dot and the Swarm: Benefitting from the bitter lesson

Page Table Memory Consumption

Second Chances

Results from the ASIC puzzle

Testing 12 different Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors

Is Russia using AI for disinformation in CAR?

Building a RAG Pipeline for Semantic Code Search

Show HN: Dataviz, ranked daily from GitHub, NPM, PyPI and CRAN

The CISA Alert: Security Beyond Solitary Confinement

Russian strategy of war crimes escalation in Ukraine (winter 2026/2027)

L-systems generate weevils, pizza toppings, and matriarchal lineages

What I learnt co-leading an AI Safety bootcamp for legal and governance practit

Californian accused of shipping $300M worth of Nvidia chips to China

MI5 warns UK academics their research may have helped Chinese spies