🇺🇸 Hacker News English

Film grain adds realistic noise to video but is tough to compress.

AV1 Film Grain Synthesis denoises video, compresses it, then recreates grain during playback using an auto-regressive pattern model and a brightness-based scaling function.

Using FGS reduces average bitrate by around 36% for high resolutions while preserving grain appearance.

K-Scale Labs launched K-Bot, a full-size open-source humanoid robot priced at $8999 to make advanced robotics accessible to indie developers and hackers.

The hardware and software designs are public to simplify manufacturing, navigate supply chain challenges, and invite community contributions.

Customers can choose a “Full Autonomy” option, receiving free hardware and software upgrades until the robot achieves full autonomy.

Pennybase is a minimal Backend-as-a-Service implemented in under 1000 lines of Go code.

It stores data in append-only, human-readable CSV files with versioned records and maintains an in-memory index for fast access.

Provides a REST API for CRUD operations, as well as server-sent events streaming for real-time updates.

Google has open sourced its Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) libraries to support age assurance.

ZKP enables people to prove facts about themselves, such as being over 18, without revealing any other personal data.

The open source release allows developers, businesses, and researchers to build privacy-enhancing applications and digital ID solutions.

The Peasant Railgun is a D&D 5e exploit that hires 2,280 peasants to pass a dismantled ladder pole over two miles in 6 seconds to deal 300d6 damage in one round.

It leverages the Ready action, reaction timing, falling object rules, and medium creature space to calculate extreme acceleration and damage under RAW.

Real-life physics issues—like peasants’ low hit points, reaction limits, and aiming difficulties—make the tactic impractical despite RAW allowing it.

The author ported tmux’s ~67,000 lines of C code to ~81,000 lines of unsafe Rust as a hobby project.

Starting with C2Rust autogenerated code demonstrated feasibility but resulted in inflated, unmaintainable output, prompting a manual translation.

Integrating Rust with tmux’s autotools build required custom scripts, later simplified by using cargo’s build.rs and the cc crate to compile remaining C.

Model Context Protocol tools are not truly composable and require excessive context, making them less efficient than direct code execution.

Writing code directly often yields faster, more reliable automation than relying on LLM inference for each step.

Automating tasks via generated scripts allows for easier validation, debugging, and repeated execution at scale.

Gmailtail is a command-line tool to monitor Gmail and stream new messages as JSON.

It offers a real-time tail mode for continuous email monitoring.

Users can filter emails by sender, subject, labels, attachments, or Gmail search queries.

uv provides a native build backend integrating tightly for fast performance and improved user experience.

It only supports pure Python code and requires an alternative for projects with extension modules.

To use uv backend, add uv_build to the pyproject.toml build-system or run uv init --build-backend uv.

Vitamin C increases epidermal thickness by promoting keratinocyte proliferation in a human skin equivalent model.

Vitamin C treatment raises global 5-hydroxymethylcytosine levels by enhancing TET-mediated DNA demethylation.

Inhibition of TET enzymes blocks Vitamin C’s effects on DNA demethylation and epidermal cell proliferation.