An AI model reportedly produces a counterexample to the 85-year-old Jacobian Conjecture; a study finds AI advice makes people three times less accurate but twice as confident; and a leaked 2022 email shows Sam Altman pitched open-sourcing a weak model specifically to starve competitors of funding

Hacker News

Show HN: I Replaced a $120k Bowling Center System With $1,600 in ESP32s

An SRE who bought an abandoned 8-lane bowling center found that a 1:1 replacement of its 2008-era scoring system — camera-based pin detection, ball-speed tracking, fouling, pinsetter control — runs $80-120k from vendors, with $4,000 replacement parts for equipment whose actual job is triggering a single relay on a 70-year-old mechanical pinsetter. He built OpenLaneLink instead: ESP32 microcontrollers in an ESPNow mesh (with RS485 as a wired fallback), reporting sensor events to a Raspberry Pi running Redis and a React front end, for about $200-400 per lane-pair. The post (2,221 points, 236 comments on HN) is a vivid case study in how much of a 'six-figure, decades-old proprietary system' is actually just vendor lock-in wrapped around commodity sensors and a relay — and how cheaply that wrapper can be replaced once someone's willing to write the firmware.

dependablec.org

Dependable C

Dependable C is a documented subset of the C language aimed at safety-critical and long-lived systems, built on a C89 foundation and deliberately avoiding newer standard features that lack universal, battle-tested compiler support across decades of platforms. The pitch inverts the usual 'use the latest standard' advice: for code that has to keep compiling and behaving identically across architectures and toolchains for 20+ years, specification purity matters less than a track record of every implementation actually agreeing on what the code does. It's a useful reminder that 'modern' and 'reliable' are frequently in tension, and that the right subset of a language depends entirely on how long the code needs to survive.

Hashcloak

Introduction to Formal Verification with Lean (Part 1)

This tutorial walks cryptographic engineers new to formal verification through Lean, a theorem prover and functional language, by proving the correctness of the One-Time Pad cipher from first principles — XOR properties, the Shannon cipher definition, and the proof tactics needed to connect them. Rather than treating formal methods as an academic detour, it frames machine-checked proof as a direct extension of the rigor cryptographic engineers already claim to want, just enforced by a proof checker instead of a code reviewer's attention span.

Xiaomi

Xiaomi Robotics-1: A Foundation Model for Real-World Robot Manipulation

Xiaomi introduced Robotics-1, a 10B-parameter foundation model trained on 100,000+ hours of real-world manipulation trajectories across 1,700+ scenarios, applying LLM-style pre-training (embodiment-free pre-training followed by hardware-aligned post-training) to robot control. It reports 75% success on novel tasks from minimal demonstrations and scaling behavior that transfers from simulation to physical hardware. Reception on Hacker News (174 points, 112 comments) split along familiar lines: enthusiasm for the scaled-training methodology and comparatively small model size, against skepticism about the robot's visibly slow, imprecise movements and how well any of this generalizes across different hardware platforms.