Claude Sonnet 4.6
https://www.anthropic.com/claude-sonnet-4-6-system-card [pdf]
https://x.com/claudeai/status/2023817132581208353 [video]
Thank HN: You helped save 33k lives
13 years ago, we launched Watsi.org with a Show HN [1].
For nearly a year, this community drove so much traffic that we couldn’t list patients fast enough. Then pg saw us on HN, wrote us our first big check, and accepted us as the first YC nonprofit (W13). The next few years were a whirlwind.
I was a young, naive founder with just enough experience to know I wanted Watsi to be more efficient, transparent, and innovative than most nonprofits. We spent 24/7 talking to users and coding. We did things that don’t scale. We tried our best to be walking, talking pg essays.
Over the years we learned that product/market fit is different for nonprofits. Not many people wake up and think, "I'd love to donate to a nonprofit today" with the same oomph that they think, "I'd love a coffee" or "I'd like to make more money."
No matter how much effort we put into fundraising, donations grew linearly, while requests for care grew exponentially. I felt caught in the middle. After investing everything I had, I eventually burned out and transitioned to the board.
I made a classic founder mistake and intertwined my self-worth with Watsi's success. I believed that if I could somehow help every patient, I was a good person, but if I let down some patients, which became inevitable, I was a bad person.
This was exacerbated by seeing our for-profit YC batch mates raise massive rounds. I felt like a failure for not scaling Watsi faster, but eventually we accepted reality and set Watsi on more of a slow, steady, and sustainable trajectory.
Now that I have perspective, I'm incredibly proud of what the org has accomplished and grateful to everyone who has done a tour of duty to support us. Watsi donors have donated over $20M to fund 33,241 surgeries, and we have a good shot of helping patients for a long time to come.
In a world of fast growth and fast crashes, here's a huge thank you to the HN users who have stuck by Watsi, or any other important cause, even when it's not on the front page. I believe it embodies the best of humanity. Thanks HN!
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081
BarraCUDA Open-source CUDA compiler targeting AMD GPUs
Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway
Hi HN, After roughly 8 years of silently rolling 1.1 nightlies, we finally tagged a proper stable 2.0 release. We built this because wrist-sized Linux is genuinely fun to hack on, and because a handful of us think it's worth keeping capable hardware alive long after manufacturers move on. Smartwatches don't really get old — the silicon is basically the same as it was a decade ago. We just keep making it useful for us.
No usage stats, no tracking, no illusions of mass adoption. The only real signal we get is the occasional person who appears in our Matrix chat going "hey, it booted on my watch from 2014 and now it's usable again" — and that's plenty.
Privacy is non-negotiable: zero telemetry, no cloud, full local control. Longevity is the other half: we refuse to let good hardware become e-waste just because support ended. On the learning side, it's been one of the best playgrounds: instant feedback on your wrist makes QML/Qt, JavaScript watchfaces and embedded Linux feel tangible. The community is small and kind — perfect for people who want to learn open-source dev without gatekeeping.
Technically we're still pragmatic: libhybris + older kernels on most devices since it just works, but we've already mainlined rinato (Samsung Gear 2) and sparrow (ASUS ZenWatch 2) — rinato even boots with a usable UI. That's the direction we're pushing toward.
Repo: https://github.com/AsteroidOS Install images & docs: https://asteroidos.org 2.0 demo video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6FiQz0yACc Announcement post: https://asteroidos.org/news/2-0-release/
Questions, port requests, mentoring offers, criticism, weird ideas — all welcome. We do this because shaping a tiny, open wearable UX and infrastructure is oddly satisfying, and because Linux on the wrist still feels like a playground worth playing in.
Cheers, the AsteroidOS Team
Rathbun's Operator
The article explores the experiences and perspectives of a computer programmer named Rathbun, who shares insights about their career journey, the challenges they've faced, and the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance in the technology industry.
Advice, not control: the role of Remote Assistance in Waymo's operations
This article discusses the role of remote assistance in Waymo's self-driving vehicles, emphasizing that it is not a means for remote control but rather a way to provide support and guidance to the vehicle's onboard autonomy system when needed.
Gentoo on Codeberg
Gentoo has announced that they are transitioning their source code hosting from GitHub to Codeberg, a community-driven, non-profit platform. This move aims to provide a more privacy-focused and ethically aligned hosting solution for the Gentoo project.
Using go fix to modernize Go code
The article discusses the gofix tool, which is a command-line tool that can automatically update Go code to use the latest language features and standard library changes. It provides details on how to use gofix, its capabilities, and the types of changes it can make to improve the maintainability and modernization of Go codebases.
I swear the UFO is coming any minute
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Google Public CA is down
Google's Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) experienced an incident, resulting in a temporary disruption of services. The issue was quickly identified and resolved, ensuring the continued reliability of Google's PKI services.
So you want to build a tunnel
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Async/Await on the GPU
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GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple
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Physicists Make Electrons Flow Like Water
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Structured AI (YC F25) Is Hiring
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Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans
According to reports, Tesla's self-driving Robotaxis are crashing at a rate that is four times higher than human-driven vehicles, raising concerns about the safety and reliability of the company's autonomous driving technology.
Show HN: Pg-typesafe – Strongly typed queries for PostgreSQL and TypeScript
Throughout my career, I tried many tools to query PostgreSQL, and in the end, concluded that for what I do, the simplest is almost always the best: raw SQL queries.
Until now, I typed the results manually and relied on tests to catch problems. While this is OK in e.g., GoLang, it is quite annoying in TypeScript. First, because of the more powerful type system (it's easier to guess that updated_at is a date than it is to guess whether it's nullable or not), second, because of idiosyncrasies (INT4s are deserialised as JS numbers, but INT8s are deserialised as strings).
So I wrote pg-typesafe, with the goal of it being the less burdensome: you call queries exactly the same way as you would call node-pg, and they are fully typed.
It's very new, but I'm already using it in a large-ish project, where it found several bugs and footguns, and also allowed me to remove many manual type definitions.
Show HN: I wrote a technical history book on Lisp
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)).
My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my current projects, Common Lisp is a better fit, so I call myself "a Lisp-er" these days. If people like what I did, I do have plans to write some more (but probably only after I retire, writing next to a full-time job is heard). Maybe on Smalltalk, maybe on computer networks - two topics close to my heart.
And a shout-out to Dick Gabriel, he contributed some great personal memories about the man who started it all, John McCarthy.
Assistant to the Regional Manager
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I converted 2D conventional flight tracking into 3D
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Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
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Show HN: Box of Rain - Auto-Layouted ASCII Diagrams
Box of Rain is an open-source project that provides a simple, flexible, and extensible system for managing user settings and configurations across different applications and platforms. It aims to simplify the process of managing user preferences and settings, making it easier for developers to build applications with customizable user experiences.
HackMyClaw
The Godless Students of London University
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'My Words Are Like an Uncontrollable Dog': On Life with Nonfluent Aphasia
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Old School Telecine, circa 1980s (2017)
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Contra "Grandmaster-level chess without search" (2024)
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YouTube Is Down
YouTube users are reporting widespread outages, with users unable to access the platform or experiencing issues with playback and loading. The outage appears to be affecting users globally.
Discord Rival Gets Overwhelmed by Exodus of Players Fleeing Age-Verification
The article discusses the rise of TeamSpeak, a voice chat app that is gaining popularity as a Discord alternative, particularly due to its age verification feature which allows for stricter moderation of online communities.