Show HN: Orbit a systems level programming language that compiles .sh to LLVM
Spaceship is a high-performance systems automation language designed to replace legacy shell scripting. It features a strict, Go-inspired syntax, a powerful fixed-width type system, and a novel JIT (Just-In-Time) compilation model for POSIX commands, all built on top of LLVM. Core Principles Performance: Statically typed and JIT-compiled for maximum execution speed. Security: Eliminates shell injection […]
Research team digitizes more than 100 years of Canadian infectious disease data
Twenty-five years ago, in a neglected storage area at the Ontario Ministry of Health, David Earn happened upon epidemiological gold: two boxes of hand-written documents accounting for 50 years of weekly infectious disease incidence reports, spanning 1939-1989. The buried treasure was exactly the sort of thing that the McMaster University professor hoped to unearth during […]
Making Google Sans Flex
Special thanks to the hundreds of people who have contributed to making and evolving Google Sans, including: Akaki Razmadze, Aleksandra Samulenkova, Alex Blattmann, Alexei Vanyashin, Ali Almasri, Anagha Narayanan, Anaïs Lievens, Andy Stewart, Anonta Mon, Anthony Sheret, Anurag Gautam, Anuthin Wongsunkakon, Ashler, Ben Mitchell (Fontpad), Bianca Berning, Black Foundry, Borna Izadpanah, Botio Nikoltchev, Cadson Demak, […]
2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results
Reach users the moment they’re searching for apps to download Search results ads help customers discover your app right when they’re searching for apps to download. When a user searches on the App Store, your ad can appear at the top of their search results. And starting in 2026, we’ll be introducing more ads to increase opportunity […]
Getting bitten by Intel’s poor naming scenes
I recently came into possession of an old Dell Precision T3610 workstation and promptly installed Proxmox to add it to my Proxmox cluster. After performing some ludicrously silly RAM and storage upgrades (how about 96 GB of DDR3, plus a 13-disk array of 500 GB SSDs?), I decided I wanted to max out the CPU […]
Rust’s Block Pattern
Here’s a little idiom that I haven’t really seen discussed anywhere, that I think makes Rust code much cleaner and more robust. I don’t know if there’s an actual name for this idiom; I’m calling it the “block pattern” for lack of a better word. I find myself reaching for it frequently in code, and […]
Reconstructed Commander Keen 1-3 Source Code
It’s not quite Christmas time yet, but since these are the days of Keen’s 35th anniversary, I thought it was a good opportunity to finally release this to the public: Reconstructed Commander Keen 1-3 Source Code This package contains full source code for all versions of Keen 1-3 that I know, from the November 1990 […]
Qwen-Image-Layered: transparency and layer aware open diffusion model
Recent visual generative models often struggle with consistency during image editing due to the entangled nature of raster images, where all visual content is fused into a single canvas. In contrast, professional design tools employ layered representations, allowing isolated edits while preserving consistency. Motivated by this, we propose textbf{Qwen-Image-Layered}, an end-to-end diffusion model that decomposes […]
Trained LLMs exclusively on pre-1913 texts
Daniel GöttlichUniversity of Zurich Dominik LoibnerUniversity of Zurich Guohui JiangCologne University Hans-Joachim VothUniversity of Zurich Contact: [[email protected]] We thank Diego Rojas @Z.ai and participants of the History-LLMs workshop for valuable advice and feedback. Announcements 2025-12-14 Upcoming Ranke-4B release: A family of time-locked historical models A family of 4 billion (B) parameter large language models (LLMs) […]
1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5
Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt, a new feature in macOS 26.2. The easiest way to test it is with Exo 1.0, an open source private AI clustering tool. RDMA lets the Macs all act like they have one giant pool of RAM, which speeds up things […]