14848
Top stories from https://news.ycombinator.com (with 100+ score) Contribute to the development here: https://github.com/phil-r/hackernewsbot Also check https://t.me/designer_news Contacts: @philr
Why is the world losing color? (Score: 152+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s3vZ
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s3vZ
Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator (🔥 Score: 152+ in 1 hour)
Link: https://readhacker.news/c/6s3Tr
Hi all,
Tom Howard is going public as HN moderator today. He has been doing HN moderation work for years already and knows the site and its practices inside-out, so the only new thing you'll see is mod comments from Tom showing up in the threads the way mine do. I'm not going anywhere, so you'll have two of us to put up with going forward :)
I've known Tom since he was sctb's and my batchmate back in YC W09. Many of you know him as the kind and thoughtful community member tomhoward (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomhoward). He's still kind and thoughtful, but he's going to post as tomhow from now on (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomhow), the same way I switched to dang when I went through this rite of passage years ago.
Below is a bit from Tom about himself. Please join me in welcoming him to this new status which he was crazy enough to say yes to!
---
YC and HN have been a huge part of my life for nearly two decades. I read pg's essay How to Start a Startup in 2005 after my friend (and later, co-founder) Fenn found it on Slashdot, and it opened our eyes as to how to go about building products and companies. I first signed up in late 2007, and since then HN has been the place I come to find interesting news and discussions.
Hacker News gave me a window into the big wide world of technology and startups, that had previously seemed so remote and opaque from where I lived (and still live) in Australia. We were lucky enough to be accepted into the W09 batch of YC, and since then HN has been a place where we could share announcements about the startup, but also where I could share the challenges and struggles I experienced in the startup journey and other aspects of life, particularly to do with health and wellbeing.
From the discussions that have happened about these topics I've ended up making enduring friendships with people all over the world, and have been able to learn many things that have improved my life in profound ways. I love HN's ethos - of being a place people come to engage their curiosity. That's what it's always been for me and what I hope I can help it to be for everyone!
--Tom
Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs in Language Models (Anthropic) (❄️ Score: 150+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rTtF
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rTtF
Sports supplement creatine makes no difference to muscle gains, trial finds (🔥 Score: 150+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s39Y
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s39Y
Porting Tailscale to Plan 9 (🔥 Score: 154+ in 1 hour)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s3BG
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s3BG
Systems Correctness Practices at AWS: Leveraging Formal and Semi-Formal Methods (Score: 150+ in 22 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rYmB
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rYmB
RubyUI (Former PhlexUI): Ruby Gem for RubyUI Components (Score: 151+ in 20 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rYwN
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rYwN
Where does air pollution come from? (Score: 152+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s2hZ
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s2hZ
Shared DNA in Music (Score: 150+ in 9 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rZyJ
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rZyJ
DEDA – Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit (Score: 152+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rZzx
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rZzx
Show HN: Qwen-2.5-32B is now the best open source OCR model (Score: 154+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rYQ2
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rYQ2
Last week was big for open source LLMs. We got:
- Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b)
- Gemma-3 (27b)
- DeepSeek-v3-0324
And a couple weeks ago we got the new mistral-ocr model. We updated our OCR benchmark to include the new models.
We evaluated 1,000 documents for JSON extraction accuracy. Major takeaways:
- Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) are by far the most impressive. Both landed right around 75% accuracy (equivalent to GPT-4o’s performance). Qwen 72b was only 0.4% above 32b. Within the margin of error.
- Both Qwen models passed mistral-ocr (72.2%), which is specifically trained for OCR.
- Gemma-3 (27B) only scored 42.9%. Particularly surprising given that it's architecture is based on Gemini 2.0 which still tops the accuracy chart.
The data set and benchmark runner is fully open source. You can check out the code and reproduction steps here:
- https://getomni.ai/blog/benchmarking-open-source-models-for-...
- https://github.com/getomni-ai/benchmark
- https://huggingface.co/datasets/getomni-ai/ocr-benchmark
Ask HN: Why hasn’t AMD made a viable CUDA alternative? (Score: 150+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/c/6rYgx
I appreciate developing ROCm into something competitive with CUDA would require a lot of work, both internally within AMD and with external contributions to the relevant open source libraries.
However the amount of resources at stake is incredible. The delta between NVIDIA's value and AMD's is bigger than the annual GDP of Spain. Even if they needed to hire a few thousand engineers at a few million in comp each, it'd still be a good investment.
Everything is Ghibli (Score: 150+ in 19 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rW3Q
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rW3Q
CERN scientists find evidence of quantum entanglement in sheep (Score: 150+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rXDx
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rXDx
Why F#? (🔥 Score: 154+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rXRe
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rXRe
Show HN: Offline SOS signaling+recovery app for disasters/wars (Score: 150+ in 21 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rZG9
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rZG9
A couple of months ago, I built this app to help identify people stuck under rubble.
First responders have awesome tools. But in tough situations, even common folks need to help.
After what happened in Myanmar, we need something like this that works properly.
It has only been tested in controlled environments. It can also be improved; I know BLE is not _that_ effective under rubble.
If you have any feedback or can contribute, don't hold back.
A 6-Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno's Music for Airports (❄️ Score: 150+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rPB4
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rPB4
Animals Made from 13 Circles (2016) (🔥 Score: 153+ in 1 hour)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s3Db
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s3Db
Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks from Japan (Score: 150+ in 19 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rZEh
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rZEh
How Silica Gel Took Over the World (Score: 151+ in 18 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rZiw
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rZiw
RIP Val Kilmer: Real Genius .. the Film Nerd Culture Deserves (2015) (🔥 Score: 158+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s2PQ
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s2PQ
The state of binary compatibility on Linux and how to address it (Score: 150+ in 13 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rZK8
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rZK8
Generate autounattend.xml files for Windows 10/11 (❄️ Score: 150+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rP7k
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rP7k
Stop Syncing Everything (Score: 155+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rV5i
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rV5i
The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst (Score: 150+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rYTX
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rYTX
Dave Täht has died (Score: 152+ in 6 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rZak
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rZak
A man powers home for eight years using a thousand old laptop batteries (🔥 Score: 155+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rYyK
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rYyK
Why is this site built with C (Score: 150+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rRv4
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rRv4
Bletchley code breaker Betty Webb dies aged 101 (🔥 Score: 156+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rXVn
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rXVn
Interactive article about heart arrhythmias (❄️ Score: 151+ in 4 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rJKW
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rJKW