Hacker NewsMonday, October 20

Replacement.AI is a satirical company that claims to be "honestly" building AI to replace humans entirely. They mock other AI companies by openly stating their goal is human obsolescence for profit, featuring a disturbing child-focused AI called HUMBERT and testimonials about eliminating human jobs and relationships.

The author reflects on text-based IDEs from the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly praising Borland's Turbo series which featured syntax highlighting, integrated debugging, project management, and comprehensive help systems. They argue that despite technological advances, modern TUI editors like Vim, Emacs, and Neovim lack the intuitive, integrated experience of those early IDEs, suggesting the industry went through a "dark era" where many useful features were lost and are only now being rediscovered.

This appears to be a digital collection of root system drawings featuring various plant species. The collection contains 1,180 botanical illustrations organized into categories including pteridophyta, dicotyledoneae, monocotyledoneae, forest trees, shrubs, and cultivated plants from temperate regions.

Users overwhelmingly praise myNoise's tinnitus neuromodulator for providing significant relief from tinnitus symptoms. Many report that after listening for just a few minutes, their tinnitus either disappears completely or is greatly reduced for extended periods. The tool also helps with focus, anxiety, headaches, and sleep issues, with users describing it as "magical" and life-changing.

OpenAI researchers falsely claimed GPT-5 solved previously unsolved mathematical problems, but it actually only found existing solutions that weren't known to the website operator. After criticism from experts including DeepMind's CEO, the researchers retracted their claims. The incident highlights AI's current utility as a research assistant for literature review rather than solving complex new problems.

Andrej Karpathy's guide advises students to prioritize sleep over all-nighters, study well in advance, review past exams, practice active recall rather than passive reading, collaborate strategically, and focus on understanding over memorization. During tests, he recommends doing easy questions first, staying neat, never leaving early, and communicating clearly with graders. Most importantly, he emphasizes that while good grades matter, real-world experience through internships, research, and building relationships with professors who can provide strong recommendations are far more valuable for future success than perfect grades.

Xubuntu's torrent downloads were serving malicious .exe files that monitor Windows clipboards for crypto wallet addresses and replace them with attacker-controlled ones. The malware targets multiple cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin. Attackers' wallets appear empty so far.

Discussants argue Yang is underrated among physicists despite groundbreaking work. Freeman Dyson quote highlights Yang as preeminent stylist after Einstein/Dirac, with Yang-Mills theory potentially more important than his Nobel Prize-winning parity work.

The content discusses common SQL anti-patterns that reduce maintainability and performance, including embedding large CASE statements in views instead of dimension tables, using functions in WHERE clauses that break indexes, overusing SELECT DISTINCT to mask bad joins, layering too many views, and deeply nesting subqueries instead of using CTEs for better readability.

Flowistry is a tool that analyzes information flow in Rust programs to help developers focus on relevant code. It integrates with VSCode to provide a "focus mode" that highlights code influencing a selected variable or expression while fading out unrelated code, making it easier to understand large functions by filtering out irrelevant parts.