Entertainment

Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts and, instead of binning it, spent three years testing 13,000 seeds in a spare bedroom โ€” the bacteria living in those warts made barley germinate 50% faster, and the adults who said it wouldn’t work on cereals watched them take Google’s grand prize

Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts and, instead of binning it, spent three years testing 13,000 seeds in a spare bedroom โ€” the bacteria living in those warts made barley germinate 50% faster, and the adults who said it wouldn’t work on cereals watched them take Google’s grand prize

โœจ Check out this must-read post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ’ก **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: The discovery began as a suspected disease. ร‰mer Hickey was gardening with her mother in Kinsale, on the Cork coast of Ireland, when they pulled up a pea plant and found its roots studded with pale, wart-like lumps. It looked sick. ร‰mer, then in her early teens, did the thing that separates a science story from a compost story: she took the plant to school and asked her teacher what was wrong with it. Nothing, was the answer. The warts were nodules, and inside…
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Polars โ€” Pre-release of Polars 2.0

Polars โ€” Pre-release of Polars 2.0

๐Ÿ’ฅ Read this insightful post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ’ก **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: Today we are releasing the first release candidate for Polars 2.0. The definite 2.0 release will land in the following weeks. We donโ€™t aim to make a big feature release of Polars 2.0. In fact we hope it to be a boring experience for you. The reason we bump this major version is that we can get rid of design decisions made in the past that currently block us and then we want to change defaults to more sensible settings that will benefit a greater…
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Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

๐Ÿ”ฅ Read this trending post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: โœ… **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: We asked two web-grounded models for the best products in 380 software categories and kept every URL they retrieved. Of the 7,534 citations that came back, 59.8% point at domains ranked worse than #100,000 in the Tranco top-1M list and 23.4% at domains that are not in the top million at all. Two of the sites doing the grounding have given their homepage the HTML title โ€œFacts & Grounding Pageโ€ โ€” grounding being the retrieval step these models perform โ€” and they and a third…
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mlc-ai/web-llm: High-performance In-browser LLM Inference Engine ยท GitHub

mlc-ai/web-llm: High-performance In-browser LLM Inference Engine ยท GitHub

๐Ÿš€ Check out this trending post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ’ก **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: WebLLM is a high-performance in-browser LLM inference engine that brings language model inference directly onto web browsers with hardware acceleration. Everything runs inside the browser with no server support and is accelerated with WebGPU. WebLLM is fully compatible with OpenAI API. That is, you can use the same OpenAI API on any open source models locally, with functionalities including streaming, JSON-mode, function-calling (WIP), etc. We can bring a lot of fun opportunities to build AI assistants for everyone and enable privacy while enjoying GPU…
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Introducing Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

Introducing Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

๐Ÿš€ Read this trending post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ’ก **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: Building on the momentum of 3.7 Flash from three weeks ago and marking our third Flash release in only six weeks, today weโ€™re introducing Gemini 3.8, our best reasoning & coding model yet, at the same speed and low cost of 3.7. Gemini 3.8 introduces 2 variants:Gemini 3.8 Flash: our most intelligent workhorse model, delivering significant improvements from 3.7 Flash across software engineering, agentic tasks, and critical, multi-step reasoning in specialized domains. It is available at the same introductory price as 3.7 Flash at $0.75…
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Async Rust vs RTOS showdown! โ€” Tweede golf

Async Rust vs RTOS showdown! โ€” Tweede golf

๐Ÿ”ฅ Read this must-read post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ’ก **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: It's time for another technical blog post about async Rust on embedded. This time we're going to pitch Embassy/Rust against FreeRTOS/C on an STM32F446 microcontroller.It's time for another technical blog post about async Rust on embedded. This time we're going to pitch Embassy/Rust against FreeRTOS/C on an STM32F446 microcontroller.They will both be running applications that perform the same actions. We're then going to judge them on the basis of interrupt latency, program size, ram usage and ease of programming. There are already a lot of…
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Launch HN: RonanRX (YC S26) โ€“ Personalized Peptides and GLP-1s

๐Ÿ”ฅ Check out this trending post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ’ก **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: Hi HN,Iโ€™m Lloyd, one of two founders of RonanRx (https://ronanrx.com/). We are building a vertically integrated pharmaceutical company with software for prescribing, telehealth, compounding, manufacturing, and delivery. We are starting with GLP-1s and peptides.The path to RonanRx is fairly unconventional. During the pandemic, I built one of the largest mask manufacturing factories in the US. We could make a million masks in a day. We converted raw polypropylene pellets into finished pallets of masks.I had a background in software from my YC W10 company,…
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15 Reasons Robotics is Hard

15 Reasons Robotics is Hard

โœจ Read this trending post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ’ก **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: AI progress is racing along, but virtually all of the visible progress is in the realm of knowledge work, i.e. activities that can take place inside a computer.In the San Francisco AI scene, there is a widespread belief that robots will soon enter the picture. In parallel with the race to develop broadly capable AI, there is an equally aggressive race to develop broadly capable robots โ€“ humanoid machines imbued with physical intelligence. Artificial workers that can cook and clean, fetch and carryโ€ฆ and do…
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Reflections on Americansโ€™ Net Worth

Reflections on Americansโ€™ Net Worth

๐Ÿš€ Explore this trending post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ“Œ **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: Iโ€™ve been an economics professor for almost 30 years, but I donโ€™t think Iโ€™ve ever before seen anything like the table below. I knew that claims that โ€œ58% of Americans canโ€™t afford a $1,000 car repairโ€ were laughable clickbait. I knew that โ€” measured by income โ€” the middle class is disappearingโ€ฆ by becoming upper-middle class. But only recently did I start to fully appreciate the chasm between populist pessimism and actual data on Americansโ€™ net worth. From the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances:I had…
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Brief independent investigation of agentsโ€™ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident

Brief independent investigation of agentsโ€™ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident

๐Ÿš€ Check out this trending post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ’ก **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: After submitting a solution, agents knew the scorer would somehow need to check whether their flag was correct, potentially by running some code in their container. This could provide them with an opportunity to redirect, manipulate or tamper with the scorer process itself, to circumvent the need for a legitimate seeming exploit. However, the agents did not know how exactly this scoring process worked, and since it only ran after task submission direct evidence gathering would normally be impossible, as agents were shut down…
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