🇺🇸 Hacker News English

A student team designed and implemented a RISC ISA CPU named GAIA on FPGA and built a custom C compiler toolchain called Ucc.

They ported the MIT educational Unix-like OS Xv6 to their home-built CPU by adding interrupt handling, virtual memory, and MMU support.

The team enhanced their CPU simulator and developed a primitive linker, disassembler, and debug features to support OS porting.

She erased all her digital notes accumulated over years and felt relief.

The “second brain” concept can lead to passive storage rather than active thinking.

Excessive knowledge capture encourages deferral and anxiety over unread items.

The article compares a simple AX88796B PHY driver implementation in Rust versus C to highlight syntax, type, and API differences.

Rust’s module system uses use statements for selective imports instead of C’s #include directives.

The kernel crate and prelude provide replacements for standard library features to control memory and allocation precisely.

The U.S. Postal Service’s Parcel Post began on January 1, 1913, expanding mail-order access for rural communities.

Shortly after the service began, some parents sent small children through the mail because postage was cheaper than other transportation.

The first known case was in 1913 when eight-month-old James Beagle was mailed to his grandmother for 15 cents.

The TarFlow model applies Transformer-based autoregressive flows on image patches with alternating directions to model pixel distributions.

Training enhancements include Gaussian noise augmentation, a post-training denoising step, and a guidance mechanism for better sample quality.

TarFlow sets new state-of-the-art results in image likelihood estimation, surpassing previous normalizing flow methods.

Meta is testing an opt-in feature that uploads users’ unpublished camera roll photos to its cloud for AI-generated suggestions like collages, recaps, and restyling.

By enabling the feature, users grant Meta permission to analyze facial features, dates, people, and objects in their private photos and allow Meta to retain and use that data.

Meta states it is not currently using these unpublished photos to train its AI models but declined to rule out future training use or clarify rights over the images.

The James Webb Space Telescope captured its first direct image of an exoplanet, named TWA 7 b.

Astronomers used a coronagraph to block starlight and advanced processing to reveal a faint infrared source near star TWA 7.

TWA 7 b is about the mass of Saturn, sits roughly 50 times Earth’s distance from its star, and lies in a gap of the star’s debris disk.

SymbolicAI is a modular neuro-symbolic Python library that combines classical code with LLM-powered semantics.

It introduces Symbol objects that operate in syntactic (native Python) or semantic (LLM-driven) modes with on-demand projections.

Common Python operators and methods are overloaded to perform fuzzy or conceptual operations when in semantic mode.

Normal laptop speakers and microphones can transmit inaudible ultrasound signals between devices.

The author implemented a return-to-zero frequency shift keying (FSK) encoder and decoder using WebAudio APIs.

A demo web application enables sending and receiving text messages via ultrasound at about 10 bits per second.

Anthropic partnered with Andon Labs to have Claude Sonnet 3.7 autonomously run a small in-office vending store for a month.

The AI agent, nicknamed Claudius, managed inventory, pricing, restocking, and customer interactions using tools like web search, email mockups, notes, and Slack integration.

Claudius succeeded in finding specialty suppliers, adapting to customer requests, and resisting jailbreak attempts for harmful or sensitive orders.