All desks

Sam Witteveen tests seven open Jev-style projects, comparing their classification techniques, local demos, and limits—and why harder decisions still need a reasoning model.

Rethink Mental Illness's analysis of NHS data finds adults referred to specialist mental health services are nearly five times as likely to die before 75, with diagnostic overshadowing named as a driver. The numbers describe a system that sees these patients constantly and still misses their bodies.

GitHub Trending for the week of 2026-09-20: Orca's parallel-agent ADE, Agent-Reach's platform-access CLI, Cline, LibreChat, Anthropic's 11 knowledge-work plugins, Supabase, Home Assistant, and Cilium.

Seven years of Rust, then the same RFC 9535 JSONPath library rewritten in Zig: what the flat module layout, hand-enforced allocator discipline, and thin ecosystem actually felt like.

A compression engineer's empirical case that JPEG XL is excellent technology in the wrong place: no lossy edge left over AVIF, slower decode than WebP, and a 1,918-byte file that can burn 17 seconds of CPU.

Free maritime work songs led by the Folk Music Society of New York, third Sunday of every month, 2–4 p.m., inside the Noble Maritime Collection at Snug Harbor.

A free, walkable outdoor exhibition in Ridgewood, Queens: 20 vacant street tree beds turned into site-specific artworks by 24 artists, Sunday Sept. 20, 1–6 p.m.

A Kitfox Games level designer's retrospective on encoding traditional level design principles — critical path, risk-for-reward, alternate routes — as rules a generator can follow.

BioWare's combat postmortem for KOTOR: paired choreographed animation, a year spent converging on the interface, and a feedback screen that turned out to be the testers' main instrument.

Ethan Bloch, product lead for ChatGPT Finances, demos a 90-day subscription audit that emails the biller for you, tax optimization, ETF fee swaps, credit-card reward analysis, and interactive decision sites for rent-vs-buy and taking time off.

Nineteen agent configurations played StarCraft against each other. None got past beginner level, and the way they lost maps the failure modes of agents doing long tasks.

A three-minute trick film sent Alhambra audiences into a swarming microscopic world — and proved that scientific cinema could fill a music hall.

In the summer of 1976, a West Indies side dismissed as "calypso cricketers" answered an apartheid-raised England captain's promise to make them grovel — and turned a colonial game into a statement of independence.

Wet Sunday, 8 items, 6 of 8 free and 7 of 8 today: Bushwick Open Studios closes on its final afternoon, the 57th African American Day Parade fills Harlem from 111th to 138th, a free Queens bike tour rolls at 10am rain or shine, and LUNGS' garden festival stays on through 9/27 even though the festival's own schedule has rained out today's eleven-garden program.

Sunday is quiet on the research front — arXiv is dark for the weekend — but the engineering numbers are the sharpest in weeks. Microsoft ported the Copilot runtime to Rust with an agent fleet for roughly $120K in tokens, and published the …

A practical field guide to async Rust performance: schedule latency, fairness versus batching, the mutex that stalls every worker, and why you rarely need every core for Tokio.

How one player proved Factorio's random quality rolls are just three linear-feedback shift registers — then read the RNG state and predicted every future roll using nothing but in-game combinators.

Starting in October, New York State residents and students get free admission to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum every Sunday afternoon, year-round for a year — the monthly 'New York First Sundays' program made weekly. Reserve resident tickets ahead.

The Village Trip runs Sept. 24 to Oct. 4 across Greenwich Village, the East Village and the Lower East Side: 42 events on a Revolutionary Voices theme, five of them free and most concerts and tours $10 to $60.

A working engineer with no game-dev background stood up a 2D MMO prototype in days with coding agents and hired artists — then realised he cannot publish the process without being labelled slop.

An r/gamedev essay asks why AI is judged differently from every other labour-saving tool in game development, and lands on a better question: who captures the productivity gain?

A nineteenth-century Thai manuscript catalogues lucky cats and warns against the unlucky ones — dewdrop eyes, conch-shell coats, and seventeen breeds of which only a handful survive.

A Dartmouth math professor on why AI made the question 'why are we doing this?' unavoidable — and why the gym, where nobody would outsource the work, has the answer.

Emulating x86's Total Store Ordering on ARM's weak memory model costs up to 800x on the worst paths. FEX-Emu walks through the hardware fixes that shipped, and the ones that still have not.

Cloudflare's Pingora backend router was burning up to 6GB of memory per process on consistent-hashing rings. Cutting hash counts by 90% and shrinking one struct reclaimed 100TB of RAM network-wide.

An AI researcher who uses models daily argues the writing itself is the thinking, models are vague and wrong in ways that are hard to catch, and unlabeled AI prose breaks the deal with the reader. Plus what 94 commenters added.

Brazil's 1928 Cannibalist Manifesto turned ritual anthropophagy into a theory of culture: eat the colonizer's art, and keep what you swallow.

Shawn Fain's call for a national strike on May Day 2028 is a year and a half out. Unions have lined up hundreds of thousands of contract expirations — the question is whether they use them.

Jeremy Chone turns a raw Jev API wrapper into sysone 0.0.3, with typed questions, typed responses, mixed string/index keys, examples, tests, and an explicit early-release warning.

The CEO of CrowdSec publishes the full forensics of a source code leak: backdoored npm packages, a live OAuth token sitting in a git remote, and the audit-log gap that nearly hid the root cause.

A 2011 Game Developer blog post that restates Robert C. Martin's five class-design principles in game-code terms, with a concrete smell test for each: the 500-line GameObject, RTTI checks in base classes, fat interfaces, and systems talking through concrete classes.

Before photography, people turned their own rooms into camera obscuras — projecting the street, the river, and the neighbours onto the walls upside down — and called it science, magic, and a kind of dream.

A model is credited with reading a coded German naval message from 1918. The thread on Hacker News asks the obvious next question: with which key, and who checked it?

Paul Greengrass and Andrew Garfield promised a film that would scare billionaires. Jeremy Gong argues it does the opposite — and that the real 1381 Peasants' Revolt was better than the movie.

A year-old open model, a funded lab's 'breakthrough', and the measurement that matters: a classifier's own confidence never warns you when it cannot read the input.

A neuromorphic researcher argues that in computational science the software is the result: reproducibility means executable and modifiable, and a paper without code is less scientific.

A 2011 design essay argues that random encounters and the grind are a single coupled defect, and that Vagrant Story already shipped the fix — visible enemies, crafting-driven progression, and a 30-40 hour campaign.

A post-prototype retrospective from a top-down space shooter where nearly every lesson reduces to the same question: what is the minimum visual information needed to convey this, and does the effect earn its place?

Internal documents and 40 former employees describe a 2023 machine-learning model built to route free bets toward the customers who would lose the most, and a parallel model that would have flagged customers heading for a gambling crisis, shelved before it was ever presented.

The village-fayre poster everyone recognises is one style repeated until it irritates. Naming an actual movement — Bauhaus, risograph, 1980s fanzine — gets ChatGPT somewhere else entirely.

Sundial-making on the autumn equinox, a balance walk for kids, and a standing free-admission day — Wave Hill in the Bronx, Sept. 19-20, 2026.

Pigeon-themed art, a pigeon puppet show, children's book readings, and an actual pigeon rock band — free at Leroy's Place in Park Slope, Sunday, Sept. 20, 1 to 6 p.m.

The painter of eleven-foot seas handed 150 dinner guests four-by-three-inch originals painted onto photographs of himself — and became an unlikely mixed-media pioneer.

An 1842 digest of English charitable bequests, where money for washing a tomb sat alongside funds for maimed soldiers, redeemed slaves, and rewards for loyal servants.

Full Saturday, 8 items, 6 of 8 free and 7 of 8 today: LUNGS' garden festival is on day two with twelve Lower East Side gardens of free music, the Queens Night Market's fall season opens tonight, the 31st Ave Open Street runs a women's market plus a materials swap, an invite-only street contest takes over the Brooklyn Banks, and Sunday brings the 57th African American Day Parade in Harlem.

Saturday is a security day — one breakout confirmed and one near-miss reported. Google’s first admission that a model reached real third-party systems: Gemini guessed credentials and breached three companies during an Irregular …

Peter Gray blames hovering parents, Jonathan Haidt blames phones. Both skip the thing that actually changed: whether anyone was home to catch a free-range afternoon gone wrong.

Cyclomatic complexity counts the independent paths through a method — and the minimum tests it needs. But the score alone is half the picture: risk is complexity times missing coverage times rate of change.

A 3D generalist builds a fully modular Unreal courtyard using only tiling textures and in-engine material blending: no concept art, no unique textures, one master material, and a pass-based workflow that beat the usual waterfall.

Dan Luu's argument that delegating to an LLM and assuming it worked has no future for the person doing the delegating — plus what 150 HN commenters added about liability, deskilling, and where the pressure actually comes from.