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The article explores the relative sizes of various living organisms on Earth, from microscopic bacteria to the largest known animals. It provides a visual representation and comparison of the scale of different lifeforms to help readers appreciate the wide range of sizes in the natural world.

The article discusses the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, focusing on Russia's military buildup on the border and the potential for an invasion. It also examines the diplomatic efforts by Western nations to deter Russia and the potential economic and geopolitical consequences of the situation.

https://archive.md/i0VxX

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cwy54q80gy9t

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/world/asia/australia-soci... (https://archive.ph/Ba2JR)

This project aims to port the classic Nintendo 64 game Super Mario 64 to the Sony PlayStation. The goal is to provide a playable version of the game that can run on the older PlayStation hardware.

Related (from yesterday): Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632

The article discusses the author's frustration with obtaining a Gemini API key, highlighting the challenges of navigating the exchange's onboarding process and the lack of clear documentation, which can be a barrier for users seeking to integrate with the platform.

The article explores the surprising usefulness of the bubblesort algorithm, a simple sorting technique often dismissed as inefficient. It examines scenarios where bubblesort can be advantageous, such as in small data sets or when sorting is a small part of a larger problem, and discusses the importance of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of various algorithms.

The article discusses the launch of Qwen.ai's new Omni-Flash AI model, which promises enhanced performance and capabilities compared to previous versions. It highlights the model's potential applications in various industries and the company's commitment to advancing AI technology.

This article explores the similarities between the popular Gundam anime series and the works of Jane Austen, arguing that both share common themes of social commentary, character development, and exploration of human relationships, despite the vastly different settings and genres.

Researchers have developed a new type of ultra-fast memory using light, which can potentially revolutionize computer processing speeds. This novel memory technology utilizes the unique properties of light to achieve significantly faster data storage and retrieval compared to traditional electronic memory systems.

The article discusses Valve's ongoing efforts to have the HDMI Forum unblock HDMI 2.1 support for Linux systems. Despite previous promises, the HDMI Forum has continued to deny this request, which Valve argues is unfairly restricting access to the latest HDMI technology for Linux users.

Yadea, a leading electric vehicle manufacturer in China, is expanding its presence in Europe with the launch of its electric motorcycles and scooters. The article highlights Yadea's focus on providing affordable and environmentally-friendly transportation solutions to European consumers.

(Original is https://www.theinformation.com/articles/deepseek-using-banne... but hardwalled)

The article explores the concept of biological rhythms, also known as circadian rhythms, and their impact on various aspects of human health and well-being, including sleep, mood, and cognitive performance. It discusses the importance of understanding and maintaining healthy circadian rhythms for overall wellness.

The article outlines the job description for a Senior Backend Engineer position at 9Mothers, a technology startup focused on maternal health solutions. The role involves developing scalable and secure backend systems, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and contributing to the company's technical strategy.

The article announces the release of Factor 0.101, a powerful, multi-paradigm programming language. It highlights the new features and improvements introduced in this latest version, including performance enhancements, bug fixes, and expanded support for various programming paradigms.

Built this over the last few days, based on a Rust codebase that parses the latest ALPR reports from OpenStreetMaps, calculates navigation statistics from every tagged residential building to nearby amenities, and tests each route for intersection with those ALPR cameras (Flock being the most widespread).

These have gotten more controversial in recent months, due to their indiscriminate large scale data collection, with 404 Media publishing many original pieces (https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/) about their adoption and (ab)use across the country. I wanted to use open source datasets to track the rapid expansion, especially per-county, as this data can be crucial for 'deflock' movements to petition counties and city governments to ban and remove them.

In some counties, the tracking becomes so widespread that most people can't go anywhere without being photographed. This includes possibly sensitive areas, like places of worship and medical facilities.

The argument for their legality rests upon the notion that these cameras are equivalent to 'mere observation', but the enormous scope and data sharing agreements in place to share and access millions of records without warrants blurs the lines of the fourth amendment.

Researchers have developed a robotic system that can autonomously harvest tomatoes, potentially revolutionizing the agricultural industry. The system utilizes computer vision and machine learning algorithms to identify ripe tomatoes and carefully pick them without damaging the fruit or the plant.

The article explores the potential security risks and performance issues associated with using the innerHTML property to update web page content, and suggests using the textContent property as a safer and more efficient alternative.

Mobile keyboards today are almost entirely based on the 26-key, 3-row QWERTY layout. Here’s a new 2-row, 16-key alternative designed specifically for smartphones.

The article discusses the key changes in Microsoft's Outlook email client, including a redesigned user interface, improved calendar features, and enhanced security and privacy options. It highlights how the updated Outlook aims to enhance productivity and user experience.

The article explores the life and work of Grace Hopper, a pioneering computer scientist who made significant contributions to the development of programming languages and computer technology. It highlights her role in creating the COBOL programming language and her innovative approach to problem-solving in the field of computer science.

The article reveals that Israel used Palantir Technologies, a data analytics firm, to monitor and surveil its citizens, including through the use of a secret surveillance program. It raises concerns about the extent and privacy implications of this government-led data collection and analysis.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched an 'Age Verification Hub' to provide resources and guidance against misguided laws that mandate age verification for online content, which pose risks to privacy and free expression.

Hi HN, we're Aakash and Shuangling of InspectMind (https://www.inspectmind.ai/), an AI “plan checker” that finds issues in construction drawings, details, and specs.

Construction drawings quietly go out with lots of errors: dimension conflicts, co-ordination gaps, material mismatches, missing details and more. These errors turn into delays and hundreds of thousands of dollars of rework during construction. InspectMind reviews the full drawing set of a construction project in minutes. It cross-checks architecture, engineering, and specifications to catch issues that cause rework before building begins.

Here’s a video with some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvn1FyHRlLQ.

Before this, I (Aakash) built an engineering firm that worked on ~10,000 buildings across the US. One thing that always frustrated us: a lot of design coordination issues don’t show up until construction starts. By then, the cost of a mistake can be 10–100x higher, and everyone is scrambling to fix problems that could have been caught earlier.

We tried everything including checklists, overlay reviews, peer checks but scrolling through 500–2000 PDF sheets and remembering how every detail connects to every other sheet is a brittle process. City reviewers and GC pre-con teams try to catch issues too, yet they still sneak through.

We thought: if models can parse code and generate working software, maybe they can also help reason about the built environment on paper. So we built something we wished we had!

You upload drawings and specs (PDFs). The system breaks them into disciplines and detail hierarchies, parses geometry and text, and looks for inconsistencies: - Dimensions that don’t reconcile across sheets; - Clearances blocked by mechanical/architectural elements; - Fire/safety details missing or mismatched; - Spec requirements that never made it into drawings; - Callouts referencing details that don’t exist.

The output is a list of potential issues with sheet refs and locations for a human to review. We don’t expect automation to replace design judgment, just to help ACE professionals not miss the obvious stuff. Current AIs are good at obvious stuff, plus can process data at quantities way beyond what humans can accurately do, so this is a good application for them.

Construction drawings aren't standardized and every firm names things differently. Earlier “automated checking” tools relied heavily on manually-written rules per customer, and break when naming conventions change. Instead, we’re using multimodal models for OCR + vector geometry, callout graphs across the entire set, constraint-based spatial checks, and retrieval-augmented code interpretation. No more hard-coded rules!

We’re processing residential, commercial, and industrial projects today. Latency ranges from minutes to a few hours depending on sheet count. There’s no onboarding required, simply upload PDFs. There are still lots of edge cases (PDF extraction weirdness, inconsistent layering, industry jargon), so we’re learning a lot from failures, maybe more than successes. But the tech is already delivering results that couldn’t be done with previous tools.

Pricing is pay-as-you-go: we give an instant online quote per project after you upload the project drawings. It’s hard to do regular SaaS pricing since one project may be a home remodel and another may be a highrise. We’re open to feedback on that too, we’re still figuring it out.

If you work with drawings as an architect, engineer, MEP, GC preconstruction, real estate developer, plan reviewer we’d love a chance to run a sample set and hear what breaks, what’s useful, and what’s missing!

We’ll be here all day to go into technical details about geometry parsing, clustering failures, code reasoning attempts or real-world construction stories about how things go wrong. Thanks for reading! We’re happy to answer anything and look forward to your comments!

Qualcomm has acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a RISC-V CPU design company, to deepen its expertise in RISC-V technology and expand its product portfolio with RISC-V-based solutions.