Hacker News is the golden standard when it comes to sharing interesting links on the Internet. However, not all of those are read-worthy. We decided to do something about it. This page contains a selection of articles that hit the front page of Hacker News and are worth your reading time and attention.
We don’t talk a lot in public about the big vision for Tailscale, why we’re really here. Usually I prefer to focus on what exists right now, and what we’re going to do in the next few months. But let’s look at the biggest of big pictures for a change.
Mobile (Android and iOS) is getting harder and harder to develop for, and devs are leaving the platforms out of frustration and annoyance. With each new OS update a slew of new requirements have to be met otherwise you’ll face “restrictive action” against your app by a particular time. Usually this ...
Those who want to ditch their car might want to avoid North America
When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending…
Defense of Lisp macros Replacing Lisp's beautiful parentheses with dozens of special tools and languages, none powerful enough to conquer the whole software landscape, leads to fragmentation and extra effort from everyone, vendors and developers alike. The automotive field is a case in point. Intro ...
I once had a sweet, brown pit bull mix named Thembi, who had impressive musculature and a magnificent nose. Often on our walks, I would feel the leash go taut and know she’d sniffed out something tantalizing, likely a squirrel or a rabbit. She would snuffle excitedly, muzzle to the ground, tracing h...
Things I believe about computer programming. Might change.
Humans have always tried to live forever. Maybe you can, but not in the way you imagine.
The origin of the term is credited to Dr Gary L. Henderson, of the University of California at Davis. A designer drug is based on the structure of an existing drug – which may be naturally sourced from a plant (like cocaine or morphine) or be synthetic (like amphetamine) - but with a slightly differ...
First of all, this blogpost is kinda long. Let me prove to you reading it will actually have some payoff:
You would not believe the level of insanity you have to go through to allow a link to see an organic audience on LinkedIn.
Lea Verou Home Blog Specs Projects Speaking Publications Press About Repo Forget “show, don’t tell”. Engage, don’t show! 3 July 2024 4 min read 0 comments Report broken page
A reconsideration of the Microsoft CEO everybody loves to hate
Note: this is a pretty long post. If you’re not interested in the details, the conclusion at the bottom is intended to be read in a standalone fashion. There’s also a related blog post …
This post is a response to Do people IRL know you have a blog? A short while before I came across bacardi55’s call to conversation, I asked my wife if she wanted to see something cool. She said yeah. I showed her the Reading section, and explained that I was constructing the functionality to track m...
In the early hours of May 13th, 2024 and after about sixteen hours of play over two days, I achieved one of my poker dreams and outlasted 773 entrants in the RunGood Poker Series $800 No Limit Hold’em Main Event hosted at Graton Casino and Resort to claim the outright win and top prize of $85,780.
everybody's afraid to disagree with you, so, you know, cool
Research shows your swim, bike, and run training is just as good for the brain as it is the body. Dr. Daya Grant breaks down the science of your brain on triathlon.
Most of the Cuomo-era countdown clocks on the lettered subway lines failed; the old ones on the numbered lines did not.
How I became the focus of a mass ritual against generative AI, and what I did about it.
I receive a fair amount of email from strangers. My email address is public, which doesn’t seemto be a popular choice these days, but I’ve received enough inspiring correspondence over the yearsto leave it be.When I receive a GPG encrypted email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the fee...
that we are now well past an Indigo Point of exothermic core-mantle decoupling, and that we have incorrectly interpreted the heat presented by this transpiration as being caused by man's activity alone. We now face the urgent need to detect the approach of a subsequent Tau Point Dzhanibekov oscillat...
No, I am not revealing my username.
Just when I thought that openSUSE was free from stupid corporate decisions, their main sponsor, SUSE S.A., came with a strange request: openSUSE should “stop using the SUSE brand”! WTF is that shit?! (H/T to Linuxiac.) 1. Lately, animosity arose around an “Open Letter to the openSUSE Board, Project ...
I am currently using the Russian textbook Mathematical Analysis by Zorich. But the more I use it, the more I feel it is making problems too hard or too advanced for the subject and it is unnecessar...
What were the binding constraints on a Roman Industrial Revolution?
A Blogpost series about Model Architectures Part 1: What happened to BERT and T5? Thoughts on Transformer Encoders, PrefixLM and Denoising objectives
Live Microsoft IT outage live: Chaos as internet down and flights grounded around the world Passengers have been forced to wait at check-in desks at Gatwick Airport which have been hit by the severe delays amid a global IT outage Credit: @sergepoliakoff Key moments Chosen by us to get you up to spee...
We live in an amazing world, and we should stop taking it for granted.
Bob Newhart, the genteel comic whose TV series “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart” were huge hits throughout the 1970s and '80s, died Thursday.
To create a real impact on the world is no simple thing. Innovation is never a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation and those things rarely happen in the same place. That’s why effective innovators are great collaborators.
Exclusive video footage of Steve Jobs talking about his design vision and philosophy and how design worked at Apple.
Practical tips that allow you to build an evolving architecture
The classic 1973 GMC Motorhome had a gross, little-known option that let it spray sewage out the exhaust as you drove.
After reading hundreds and hundreds of PhD theses, we accidentally discovered how to write the perfect PhD acknowledgement: it's a kind of poetry.
Panic! at the Tech Job Market Panic! at the Job Market “I have the two qualities you require to see absolute truth: I am brilliant and unloved.” ready for another too-long article about personal failure while blaming the world for our faults? let’s see where we end up with 7,000 9,000 10,000 11,500 ...
For years, Lehrer spent half the year teaching math at UC Santa Cruz. At 96, he now lives in Massachusetts. Richard Stockton tracks his local legacy.
Josh is the founder of NiftyCo, a tech entrepreneur who has been fascinated by computers since childhood. With a career spanning over two decades, he brings various software solutions to life while embracing the challenges of entrepreneurship and coding.
Alexander Billet reviews Dominique Routhier’s “With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation.”
I'm writing this because I've been obsessed with the theory of a Darwin Machine for nearly a year now and I haven't met anyone else who has heard of it.
Platonov is one of the greatest of Russian writers—not least for the characters he brought into the world. He deserves to be more widely read
From melting airport tarmac to power grids hit by hurricanes and reservoir dams stressed by extreme rainfall, our ‘Old World’ infrastructure is ill-equipped for climate change, writes Jeff Goodell.
A few weeks before the release of my first book, a memoir about my mother’s murder, I had to take a polygraph exam. The two things were not in fact related, but that was easy to forget once I found…
Join us on a trip through Fender's factory, Custom Shop, Master Builder department and head office, in celebration of a radically innovative instrument that continues to find new ways to move music forward, even seven decades after its launch.
Dr. Alan Kay:Doing With Images Makes Symbols: Communicating with ComputersSponsored by the Higher Education Marketing Group, Apple Computer, Inc.Recorded on...
Learn how we enhanced TCP performance in Coder to achieve 5X faster throughput by optimizing buffer sizes, implementing the HyStart algorithm, and minimizing packet loss, significantly improving remote development experiences.
Immunotherapy is making tumors melt away.
Imagine a smart watch, but from 1984. That sounds like something straight out of a scifi film since the 80s is not exactly known for great advances in personal computing. Well, it’s real, and it is exactly what Seiko created back in the day and was known as the UC-2000 - a “personal information proc...
In early 2005, Michael Arrington, a lawyer, and Keith Teare, an entrepreneur, started a fund called Archimedes Ventures. Their idea at the time was to invest in Web 2.0, meaning the nascent world of web apps. They built a few products at the time. One was an online classified ad service called Edge....
It was mostly pretty bad, but Happy 4th of July!
You've surely read plenty about how simple is good, but what's wrong with easy?
I retired in 2021 at 63.5 after about four decades as a programmer. What made me do this was not failing ability in any way, but after a year of consideration, I realized I didn't care to do it anymore. Everyone will eventually reach a point at which they
If someone was making a list of the most important American companies today, it’s unlikely AT&T would be anywhere near the top. It’s large, but not notably so: it came in 32nd in the 2024 Fortune 500 ranking, just above Comcast and below Verizon. Its offerings are not unique: it’s just one of many c...
There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to ...
Exploring Approaches to Electronic Music Notation
Back To the Calvin & Hobbes Page Back To the C&H Books Page Back To the Main Page Introduction By Bill Watterson (C)2001 From the book, "Calvin and Hobbes - Sunday Pages 1985 - 1995"
Use A Work Journal To Recover Focus Faster And Clarify Your Thoughts 2024-Jul-12 You’re working on the most complex problem in computer science: fixing permissions on a deployment pipeline. It’s been 4 days you started on that simple task already. Your manager explained to you in no uncertain terms ...
The Exa API retrieves the best, realtime data from the web to complement your AI
This is the story of how Google killed a 14 year old Android app overnight. 2008 was a time when the web had mostly become ubiquitous but still before most people carried it all with them in their pocket on a smartphone. For me, a high school student at the time without a smartphone, my programming ...
Cradle: Empowering Foundation Agents Towards General Computer Control Weihao Tan3 *, Wentao Zhang3 *, Xinrun Xu5 *, Haochong Xia3 †, Ziluo Ding2 †, Boyu Li3 †, Bohan Zhou4 †, Junpeng Yue4 †, Jiechuan Jiang4 †, Yewen Li3 †, Ruyi An3 †, Molei Qin3 †, Chuqiao Zong3 †, Longtao Zheng3 †, YuJie Wu1 †, Xia...
Host and stream your own music with ease. Open-source, modern, snappy, and comes packed with extensive features, Koel is the music streaming solution that actually works.
Why I’m Writing A Book On Cryptography posted July 2020 I’ve now been writing a book on applied cryptography for a year and a half. I’m nearing the end of my journey, as I have one last ambitious chapter left to write: next-generation cryptography (a chapter that I’ll use to talk about cryptography ...
In 1966, a British psychiatrist had an idea: to change the course of history by asking the public to share their eerie intuitions
I was contacted by someone asking what life in North Korea was really like followed by questions asking about my 3 years living there
A chance encounter in remote Australia has pushed back evidence for the start of complex life on the planet by 750 million years.
From a trash-filled Earth to the futuristic Axiom and back again, WALL·E is a finely crafted balance between consumerist dystopia and sixties space-race optimism. Please join me, then, for a detail…
If plate tectonics, oceans and continents are rare on worlds throughout the universe, that is.
In this post, we’re going to talk about the value of simplicity in software. Simple tools are easier to use, more reliable, and more valuable than their complex counterparts. First, let’s start with my car. I drive a 2020 Toyota Corolla Hybrid, which I bought used in Spring
When the UK was the richest country in the world its regional inequality was unusually low. It's unlikely we could return to being the former without reducing regional inequality.
„If it feels too good, then it’s wrong“, says Christian Olsson, a famous Swedish triple jumper in his interview for a documentary called „The Price of Gold“. With this sentence Olsson states that …
Explore how understanding the brain helps tackle resistance to change in the workplace. This article offers effective ways for leaders to boost learning and adaptability in their teams. Learn how to make learning safe and engaging, and see why small successes matter. Ideal for CEOs, CHROs, and anyon
Biologist John Calhoun’s rodent experiments gripped a society consumed by fears of overpopulation.
Plus! Sanction Economics; Exiting; Building Complements; Shares and Votes; Quality Problems; Diff JObs
In the baltic sea, between Finland and Sverige there is a group of islands that are beautiful but have an anti-growth mindset.
Homeless people in Russia have their own terms for things — people who aren’t homeless are “domestic” people, while they themselves are “street” people, or simply “bums.” Meduza’s special correspondent Irina Kravtsova spent several days with homeless people in St. Petersburg, asking them the most ob...
The Prepper Next Door In 2011, the television show Doomsday Preppers began airing on National Geographic, bringing mainstream attention to what appeared to be an obscure phenomenon. [1] The series featured “preppers” stockpiling bunkers with enormous amounts of food and ammunition while conducti
This article was posted to newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written on 10 Aug 1994 on behalf of Iain M Banks by Ken MacLeod.
Before I read The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, I only knew about John von Neumann in two contexts: that computers use the von Neumann architecture, and that he appeared in a story ab…
Coriander went from ancient staple to persona non grata.
April 2007 A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of...
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If gamification isn’t specific to its subject, it won’t be effective.
Scientists spent ages mocking panpsychism. Now, some are warming to the idea that plants, cells, and even atoms are conscious.
I recently had a conversation with a friend about my twitter journey. I told him about how random accounts have responded with kindness in Dms when I was jus...
Improving efficiency tends to be against the interest of most people in an org, because it’s equivalent to shrinking your budget. Here’s what I’m told is a true story about how things work with actual budgets. A relatively inexperienced VP attends a meeting where senior management is asked to shrink...
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What if you had to fight against your company's culture to bring a revolutionary tool to life? Meet Jeffrey Snover, the Microsoft architect behind PowerShell, a command tool that transformed Windows system administration. Initially met with skepticism, Snover's idea faced resistance from a company t...
Header Image: Katharine Way, undated. Photo courtesy of Physics Today.
This is a story of how it took me way too long to ship a product, and I ended up paying for a competitor product instead.
It really should be acceptable and normal to say “I don’t entirely understand what I just read, but I loved it.”
Rick Tumlinson writes that the International Space Station must be preserved rather than destroyed in reentry.
The University of Liverpool’s synchrocyclotron helped define physics in the 20th century, yet little trace of it remains. Rob Lea looks into the history of this lost machine
The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorun. The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it gets its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: the tree cannot reproduce without the insect; the insect cannot eat without the tree; ...
NEC moved into personal computing relatively quickly. After the hobbyist and industrial success of the TK-80, they produced a handful of “better TK-80s,” which didn’t do as well as the original. Ultimately, they developed a whole new system: the 1979 NEC PC-8001. And boy, did they ever nail it.
Objectives Muscle function and size decline with age, but long-term effects of resistance training in older adults are largely unknown. Here, we explored the long-lasting (3 years) effects of 1 year of supervised resistance training with heavy loads. Methods The LIve active Successful Ageing (LISA)...
I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire. You know what a leap second is. The short version is that planet Earth ...
Four years ago, Americans began creating new businesses at a record rate. The boom is still here, and it could be a great sign for the U.S. economy.
On the freaky model world of the Dollomites; plus—more lucid dreaming and a roundup of recent favorites.
Using new techniques, every object in Conway's Game of Life that can be constructed at all, now has a fixed cost of 15 gliders. Here's how.
The news these days feels apocalyptic to me—as if we’re living through, if not the last days of humanity, then surely the last days of liberal democracy on earth. All the more reason to…
How to maximize 10x work and avoid thoughtless daily 1x work routines
Self-hosting software comes with privacy, simple pricing and it's distributed by design. Why are we not building more self-hosted products?
FOSS, AI, blockchain, and the cycle of empty nonsense
This is part of a series of blog posts relating my experience pushing the performance of programming language interpreters written in Rust.
HATETRIS is the world's hardest version of Tetris; it's Tetris that hates you. In this post, we chronicle our eleven-month journey to get the world record, and some of our wrong turns along the way.
RAND’s halcyon days lasted two decades, during which the corporation produced some of the most influential developments in science and American foreign policy. So how did it become just another think tank?
Investigate Europe finds 15 of the world’s biggest drugmakers operate more than 1,300 subsidiaries in tax havens, as they amassed over €580 billion in global profits over the past five years. Meanwhile, patients face life-threatening delays for medicines due to high drug prices.
“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” ~ Pablo Picasso “Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing.” ~ Stan Kelly-Bootle Back then, the…
As someone who has used a static site generator every day at work for years I am on the threshold of believing “actually just writing HTML by hand is probably easier” This becomes obvious when you …
Our Gen Z editor had a secret: She had never seen Grizzly Man. We recruited bear biologist and podcast host Wesley Larson to watch it with her and recorded their reactions.
That's a big claim. We don't really think self-hosting is better for everyone, but read this article to see if it might be better for you.
Programmers should be paranoid.
Conway’s Game of Life is one of the most popular and iconic cellular automata. It is so famous that googling it loads up a working simulation right in your browser! The rules for the Game o…
I’m trying to make a system that can behave like a human. Consciousness is a personal motivation, but I’m not going to focus on it as a goal because it’s difficult to define well and people often disagree about it. This article instead looks at some aspects of minds that — while still challenging — ...
People expect that we all have the same communication instincts, but there are at least two communication styles that, without knowledge of them, will result in a lifetime of missed connections.
How Ukrainian prisoners are tortured and killed—stories from one Russian detention center.Читати українською
Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced … the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously… this feeling may last for hours at a tim…
A Bunch of Programming Advice I’d Give To Myself 15 Years Ago I finally have the feeling that I’m a decent programmer, so I thought it would be fun to write some advice with the idea of “what would have gotten me to this point faster?” I’m not claiming this is great advice for everyone, just that it...
Before Kyng, no one had ever managed to do that – even though researchers have been working on this problem for some 90 years. Previously, it took significantly longer to compute the optimal flow than to process the network data. And as the network became larger and more complex, the required comput...
Explore how investing in a better developer experience frees developers to do what matters most: building great software.
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood I remember my breakfast as a kid. It was as sugary as it gets, with cereal and milk or a good marmalade toast and a chocolate shake to start my day. I remember the highs and lows of my energy levels throughout the day or how I would look in the mirror and wonder why I grew as...
I used to be extremely confident in myself. I was barely 20 years old and I would tell people how to sleep, how to make friends, and how to live their lives. I started a nonprofit aiming to literally rebuild the institutions of science from the ground up. I was dismissive of everyone who didn’t impr...
Do I Regret Focusing on 'Just Being' A Software Engineer? A semi-biographical piece of reflection about being in tech, how and why I got in and my growing want to eject by me, Jacky Alciné • published Jun 29, 2024 • 14 min to read, 4217 words You can listen to me reading this post! How else to start...
Microsoft blamed for million-plus patient record theft at US hospital giant Updated Probe: Worker at speech-recog outfit Nuance wasn't locked out after firing CSO 26 Jun 2024 | 20
A cadre of engineers who specialize in tunneling and excavation say that we have barely begun to take advantage of the underground’s versatility. The underground is the next great frontier, they say, and figuring out how best to use it should be a priority as we look ahead to the shape our civilizat...
It is both a gift and a curse to be handed a briefcase containing a life’s work
The loop of the ☥ ankh is the Ouroboros, the endless serpent that swallows its own tail, and there is a void at its heart. Mind the gap.
How the Most Important Celebrity Magazine of the Last 50 Years Started Endorsing "The Best Air Purifiers of 2024"
And What is Says About the Institutional Problems in American Cities & Infrastructure
In the past 12 months my body’s mobility and flexibility went from abysmal, a source of persistent pain impacting my quality of life, to pretty darn good. I’m not about to become a stretching influencer, but after a year of researching, trial and error, and hard work I feel back on track and like I....
Developers are systems thinkers and yet, most measures of developer productivity are metrics-based, instead of systems-based. In this post, Sourcegraph co-founder and CTO Beyang Liu presents five charts that visualize what really matters for developer productivity.
BS (behavioral science) without creativity—indeed BS without a tiny little whiff of BS (meaning bullshit)—is actually suboptimal.
In 1521, a German merchant and banker known as Jakob Fugger 'the Rich' funded and built the first social settlement in the world
One of the items on my todo list was: And that’s because I’ve been looking for an easy way to do simple plots for yonks. When I did a post about movie ratings, I tried chart.el: It̵…
I used to be good at spinning stories. Give me a half-baked startup idea, a semi-charismatic founder and a fistful of VC dollars, and I could write a...
Everyone talks about Singapore as an effective (but some say cold) governance model. Many people wish that American cities and towns could follow Singapore's example. However, the ingredients of its success can already be found throughout America. With plenty of cities delivering impressive results....
The noted inventor and futurist’s successor to his landmark book The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will transform the human race in the decades to come Since it was first published...
MTV.com is gone. Kaput. Wiped off the face of the Earth. Parent company Paramount, formerly Viacom, has tossed twenty plus years of news archives. All that’s left is a placeholder site for reality shows. The M in MTV – music — is gone, and so is all the reporting and all the journalism performed by ...
Why we must seek a widely-applicable Science of Systems.
Indonesia’s emergence was both more violent and more pioneering than commonly imagined
Why Do We Still Teach People to Calculate? - Freakonomics
The jhanas are a series of eight (or nine) altered mental states, which progress from euphoria, to calm, to dissolution of reality – culminating in cessation, or loss of consciousness. They are induced via sustained concentration, without any external stimuli or substances. This is a practical guide...
Fedora has an ableism problem but woe to you if you point it out.
We will define one person of compute as 20 PFLOPS (64 A100s, or a single dense 42U A100 rack). We are in the era of the 1 rack person, consuming about 30kW to provide those 20 PFLOPS.
Wild ramblings, raport from the field about choosing Vector Database for a particular project and a little bit of a rant about the current state of AI and how it's perceived, why human brains are a wonder of nature, and why it's far from 'thinking' and 'consciousness'.
The famed English author, poet, and literary critic Samuel Johnson once said that "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in
Music is widely considered to be a freeing experience of self-expression. But you may be surprised to learn that the twelve musical tones that shape o...
In the Berlin Journal: Epistles from a prehistory of the cloud.
Musings on management and how to can get that endorphin rush that I’m missing
From tech in NYC to chemical manufacturing in Nasik (India), here’s a guide that hopefully nobody ever needs. On April 17, 2017 my dad died. It was the worst day of my life. It was also the day I started to lead a second company – his company. (Note: the first company is CB Insights.) His company wa...
Groups Conversations All groups and messages Send feedback to Google Help Training Sign in Groups comp.lang.forth Conversations About Privacy • Terms info Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable. Dismiss Learn more A Forth Story...
Dave Snowden's Organization, Collective, Decision - transcription.md
The Vienna Secession: A History By: Roberto Rosenman Take a […]
In which a pasta-filled rabbit hole leads to an unexpected place
I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Not...
In the mid-to-late 90s I had my first encounters with computers. I remember playing Oregon Trail on an Apple II in elementary school, typing random letters and numbers on a friends MS-DOS machine to print out on a dot-matrix printer, and disassembling old broken PCs and HDDs for fun and a peek at th...
Over the summer, I spent about two weeks in Tajikistan, mostly in Dushanbe (the capital) and various points along the Pamir Highway, which borders Afghanistan and later leads into Kyrgyzstan. This …
LWN .net News from the source Content Weekly Edition Archives Search Kernel Security Events calendar Unread comments LWN FAQ Write for us Edition Return to the Front page User: Password: | | Subscribe / Log in / New account How free software hijacked Philip Hazel's life [LWN subscriber-only content]...
Qualcomm’s new AI/Copilot PCs has overwhelming hype but their actions point to a far murkier picture.
1/25-Scale Cray C90 Wristwatch “Ah, it’s time to order a more practical watch!” Welcome to the latest edition of my on-going series in Cray-related computational necromancy. This was another just-for-fun project. Over the many years Andras and I have been working on our Cray revival efforts, there h...
Two days after his company's downfall, Austen Allred wrote: I wish people could see how ugly it is to be envious, and how obvious it is to those around you when that's what's happening. There's not much uglier than trying to tear someone down because they achieved what you wish
His fingerprints were on the Manhattan Project, the World Wide Web, and more
The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms. These algorithms have splintered the organization of culture, a result of states and tech companies vying for influence over mass audiences. One byproduct of this splintering is a shi...
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On January 28, 2022, about an hour before dawn, the four-lane Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, collapsed without warning. Five vehicles, including an articulating bus, fell with the bridge, and another car drove o
A year ago I walked out of the office for the last time. I handed in my corpo laptop, said some good-byes, and since then I have been my own boss. This first year has been funded by an NLnet grant, which I’m in the midst of wrapping up. As of now, the work is all done, the final request for payment ...
The five stages describe a grief that’s knowable and controlled. An accident in my kitchen helped me find a truer metaphor
Jonathan Haidt talks to Noema about “The Anxious Generation” and how technology is upending democracy.
Peak Population Projections Posted on 2024-06-04 by tmurphy Last week, I reported the surprising realization that official population projections from the United Nations adhere to a notion of future fertility that appears to be immediately at odds with present real trends. The recent rapid decline i...
What if the internet were public interest technology? Is that too wildly speculative? I think not. I am not talking about a utopian project here — a public interest internet would be a glorious imperfect mess and it would be far from problem-free. But while there is a lot of solid thinking about var...
The better things get, the more desperately activists struggle to stay in business.
The fact that we can’t remove essential complexity with a software redesign doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do about it. What if the problem definition wasn’t outside of our purview? What if we could get the world to conform to the software, and not just the other way around?
Science and technology ASU study points to origin of cumulative culture in human evolution Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge through social learning around 600,000 years ago Stone tools that become increasingly more complex over the course of 3 million years. Left: First tim...
Our human minds hold us back from truly understanding the many brilliant ways that other creatures solve their problems
〰️ it’s weird to look back; I sometimes get confused on how I got here 〰️ Most folks dream of being entrepreneur; “a path that seemed inevitable“, they say. None of that shit applies to me. I’m only here cause I kept getting laid off and that nonsense infuriated me. I treated my first layoff ... Rea...
A few weeks ago I was roasting some pumpkin for a delicious soup and towards the end of the cooking time the fan on the oven started into overdrive, making a lot of noise then it started beeping...
From 1979 to 2012, Marion Stokes recorded her television 24/7. In total, she amassed about 71,000 tapes of archival footage.
Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, ...
Why Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs matters
The Voyager program took advantage of a rare planetary alignment to send two spacecraft on a tour of the solar system's gas giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. In addition to the cameras and scientific instruments, each Voyager has 3 computers (plus their backups, for a total of 6):
I fell in love with numbers some time before I began going to school. I loved arithmetic from day one. I was one of those horrible people who were good at maths at school and actually enjoyed doing…
Missing Pieces The Theft of the Ghent Altarpiece When a priceless altarpiece was stolen from a Belgian cathedral it sparked a 90-year hunt. The crime remains unsolved. Alexander Lee | Published in History Today Volume 74 Issue 6 June 2024 Early on the morning of 11 April 1934 the sacristan of St Bav...
This is the book I wish I had when I started developing software. At the time, there were books on languages and books on object-oriented programming, but few books on design. Knowing the features of the C++ language does not mean you can design a good object-oriented system, nor does knowing the Un...
At the risk of stating the obvious even more obviously than I usually do: sometimes the perfect approach involves tolerating imperfection. Imperfection?! Yes. Specifically, the more macroscopic one’s view becomes, the more microscopic imperfections may need to be tolerated — if they don’t matter t...
Mental illness, as the eminent historian of psychiatry Michael MacDonald once aptly remarked, “is the most solitary of afflictions to the people who experience it; but it is the most social of maladies to those who observe its effects.” It is precisely the many social and cultural dimensions of ment...
On his way to be sworn in as the most powerful man in the world, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to…
The tumor-seeking radiopharmaceuticals are charting a new course in oncology, with promise for targeted treatments with fewer side effects
Baba Is You is a philosophical video game that facilitates the kind of thinking needed for frontier topics in the sciences of life and mind.
Tesla's FSD - a Useless Technology Demo May 20, 2024 Introduction Rules of Engagement Test Ride 1: from Kings Beach to Truckee (11 miles) Test Ride 2: I-80 from Truckee to Blue Canyon (36 miles) Test Ride 3: from West-Valley College to I-85 Entrance (1 mile) Conclusion Introduction In the past month...
This father has been using spaced repetition (Anki) to teach his children how to read several years earlier than average. Michael Nielsen and Gwern tweeted about the interesting case of a reddit user, u/caffeine314 (henceforth dubbed “CoffeePie”), who has been using spaced repetition with his daught...
I started Sidebar in the fall of 2012. At the time my vision was to create a “Hacker News for design”, a place where designers could come to showcase their work and discover new resources.
Just months after Neil Armstrong’s historic moonwalk, Jim Storer, a Lexington High School student in Massachusetts, wrote the first Lunar Landing game. By 1973, it had become “by far an…
Apple Intelligence makes a lot of sense when you get out of the AI bubble. Plus, the cool technical details Apple shared about their language models "thinking different."
| my personal blog Gen AI will increase demand for software engineers Jun 14, 2024 I hear a lot of talk about the impact of AI on software engineers. I want to share a prediction. The number of software engineers will continue to increase for the next 20 years and the average salaries will also incr...
NOTE: This is a companion post to my piece in Public Books, 'The Encylopedia Project: Or, how to know in…
I didn't have a great need to write that story, but the quote would have fit it so perfectly I actually have an unfinished draft somewhere in my discarded Word documents.
As a nerdy teen I hated neural networks in data science because I couldn’t train one to multiply two-digit numbers and had a friend who wanted to build a movie scene detector like Shazam did with songs, which I couldn’t do no matter how I tried — perceptual hashing + NNs — it was too early. I believ...
A social network founded by a former OpenAI employee was caught importing public posts from Mastodon...and ran AI analysis to add tags to them.
We're pausing our fundraising and investing activity
TerraPower just started construction on the Natrium plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming, which will soon be home to the most advanced nuclear facility in the world.
Caltech mourns the loss of Edward C. Stone, leader of humanity’s first foray into interstellar space.
Fields Medalist Terence Tao explains how proof checkers and AI programs are dramatically changing mathematics
I spent the last month wondering and investigating how we might design better workflows for creative work that meld the best of human intuition and machine intelligence. I think a promising path is in the design of notation. More explicitly, I believe inventing better notations can contribute far mo...
A year after OceanGate’s sub imploded, thousands of leaked documents and interviews with ex-employees reveal how the company’s CEO cut corners, ignored warnings, and lied in his fatal quest to reach the Titanic.
Is AI the next big wave? Maybe. Maybe not. If we are lucky maybe we go back to atoms.
Kids growing up in close-knit communities where the social ties are thick are more protected from the harms of the phone-based childhood.
Private equity and monopoly capitalists will destroy anything to make a buck, and they’ve turned their sights on TV and film. If you hated cable’s high prices, endless ads, and copycat programming, you’re going to loathe the future of streaming.
Germany's four-day workweek trial may be the solution to greater productivity, worker satisfaction, and work-life balance.
Skip to main content Advertisement PLOS Mental Health Publish Submissions Submission Guidelines Figures Tables Supporting Information LaTeX What We Publish Preprints Revising Your Manuscript Submit Now Calls for Papers Policies Best Practices in Research Reporting Human Subjects Research Animal Rese...
The Functional Programming Hiring Problem June 9, 2024 | 20 min. read If you've ever seen a discussion of functional programming languages on the Internet, you'll have probably noticed one talking point in particular that comes up frequently. For the sake of generalization, let's make up a hypotheti...
The central fact about child rearing by my parents was the equal intellectual status of everyone in the family. My sister and I did not get a vote on the family budget; we were not the ones who had earned the money. But in any disagreement the question was always who had good arguments, not who was ...
1. The Need for Heretics In the modern world, science and society often interact in a perverse way. We live in a technological society, and technology causes political problems. The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encourag...
We first turned on monetization for our startup last May. We had low expectations but were pleasantly surprised when we got our first customer wi...
how developmental biology might contain the secrets to life, intelligence, and immortality
From 1983 to 1993 DARPA spent over $1 billion on a program called the Strategic Computing Initiative. The agency's goal was to push the boundaries of computers, artificial intelligence, and robotics to build something that, in hindsight, looks strikingly similar to the dystopian future of the Termin
At first glance, Mars seems pretty nice. The sun warms its rusty surface to a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, and gentle breezes ruffle its dirt. Sp…
A metascience post of sorts that argues we should take human capital more seriously
Why is this economy so difficult to manage? The macro statistics are hiding the experience of being cheated.
The story of three adventurers who tried to reach the North Pole via hydrogen balloon in 1897.
Orwell's celebrated novel is celebrating 75 years in print but its message is as important as ever.
The PiDP-10 DEC's 1968 mainframe that became a hacker playground at the MIT AI Lab The MIT AI Lab, with a PDP-10 at its heart, was hugely important in computer history, with many 'firsts' on its record. Over the past decade, a group of enthusiasts did a full reconstruction of the Lab's hardware and ...
Downtown Doug Brown Thoughts from a combined Apple/Linux/Windows geek. Home About Mac ROM SIMMs Software Microcontroller lessons Contact Jun 08 Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked Doug Brown Linux, Microcontrollers, Windows 2024-06-08 What follows is the story of how I fixed not o...
Reflections on whatever I'm thinking about that week (the web, culture, computer graphics, math etc)
The Backrooms of the Internet Archive Posted on June 1, 2024 by Jason Scott Like many bits of Internet Culture, this simple image of an empty series of rooms represents a deep-repressed or recently-remembered memory of a common Internet Legend, or it’s just a shot of nothing. If the answer is that i...
The Khevsurs, who fought in World War I, were believed to be descendants of knights who date to the Crusades in the 12th century.
Giles wrote about how he feels about using RSS feeds and that sparked some ideas that I want to add to the discussion.
The short story In order to fully understand everything that has happened, I strongly encourage you to read the full article below, but this is a very short summary of what I want to say. On 28th J…
One evening back in January I finally had enough of thermal issues within my homelab server. You know, every time the computer fans make more noise than I think they should, I can’t help but investigate! Also, the RTX4090 is so thick that it takes 3 PCIe slots worth of space on a typical mothe...
The short comings of the current state of the Linux desktop experience. The potential that Linux have in becoming the true one OS to rule them all compared to Windows and Mac OS.
Learn how to solve the scheduling problem in the Hay Day game using Mixed-integer linear programming and Google OR-Tools.
Underwater noise from ships has gotten louder, reshaping marine ecosystems and the lives of animals that depend on sounds to eat, mate, and navigate. Can ships ever pipe down?
This document aims to serve as a handbook for learning the key concepts underlying modern artificial intelligence systems. Given the speed of recent development in AI, there really isn’t a good textbook-style source for getting up-to-speed on the latest-and-greatest innovations in LLMs or other gene...
Lola De La Mata speaks to Patrick Clarke about how her experience with severe tinnitus and vertigo fed into her new album Oceans On Azimuth
Don Estridge broke all of Big Blue's rules to create the home computer. The company would never forgive him for it.
The worst kept secret is that employees are making less on average every year.
Discover the incredible women who revolutionized early technology as human computers, shaping the future of computing with their groundbreaking contributions and dedication.
AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible. GPT-2 to GPT-4 took us from ~preschooler to ~smart high-schooler abilities in 4 years. Tracing trendlines in compute (~0.5 orders of magnitude or OOMs/year), algorithmic efficiencies (~0.5 OOMs/year), and “unhobbling” gains (from chatbot to agent), we should expe...
If currently implemented policies are continued with no increase in ambition, there is a 90% chance that the Earth will warm between 2.3°C and 4.5°C, with a best estimate of 3.5°C.
Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login Ask HN: 30y After 'On Lisp', PAIP etc., Is Lisp Still "Beating the Averages"? 10 points by dualogy 32 minutes ago | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments Is it still at the "top end of the power spectrum", against which all others ar...
Bookmarking this so I can stop writing it over and over.
The ups and downs of publishing non-commercial content on the internet.
CO2 is a good proxy for how much exhaled — and potentially infectious — air is in a room. New research suggests the more CO2 there is, the more virus-friendly the air becomes.
Why I'm building a Home Lab using Raspberry Pis, Kubernetes and 3D printing.
Photographs and words by Jake Eshelman,Contributing Editor of Ecological Thinking I Think, Therefore I Relate: An Affirming Meander into Ecological Thinking By Jake Eshelman Sign up for our monthly newsletter! O ne of the joys of having a research-creation practice is fielding questions from people ...
Nvidia's pre-Computex keynote address was certainly something, and none of it felt good.
How much bullshit are you willing to go through to 'maybe' get a shot at working for us?"
A new definition of time suggests that what we once thought was a fundamental element of reality is actually just a byproduct.
Who paid for this? There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord o…
From human testicles to clouds, microplastics have infiltrated seemingly everything.
Tri Dao Toggle navigation About Blog Publications Repositories ctrl k State Space Duality (Mamba-2) Part I - The Model Contents The SSD Model The Linear (SSM) Mode The Quadratic (Attention) Mode State Space Duality SSD vs. State Space Models SSD vs. Attention Best of Both Worlds The Mamba-2 Architec...
Software has never looked cooler, but user interface design and user experience have taken a sharp turn for the worse.
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen
How to use narrative value to become a more interesting, conversation-worthy person when shopping.
To grasp where inequality is headed—much less to reduce it—we will need to look beyond the economic.
The philosopher Galen Strawson ponders meaning in life and critiques the idea of narrativity
A peek behind the curtain at an infrastructure upgrade Heroku completed last year, migrating to a new-and-improved storage backend for platform metrics.
Posted on Friday 31 May 2024. 2,764 words, 27 links. By Matt Webb.
Why bother with Microsoft and its new AI spyware features... When you can always seek your freedom with Linux?
An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar … and mull over survival.
Avital Balwit May 17, 2024 Articles My Last Five Years of Work Zack Minor/Woman walking on seashore. I am 25. These next three years might be the last few years that I work. I am not ill, nor am I becoming a stay-at-home mom, nor have I been so financially fortunate to be on the brink of voluntary r...
The initial social contract that created loyalty was broken by the employers, not employees.
February 19, 2021 Gretchen Kell | UC Berkeley media relations Jim Breen has been the campus’s glassblower for 18 years. (UC Berkeley video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally) To find Room B63 in the nondescript, industrial basement of UC Berkeley’s Hildebrand Hall, it’s best to follow your ea...
“Over the next century, as other women’s residences closed one by one, the Webster stood tall on West Thirty-Fourth, a monument to the old ways of living.”
Her first film adaptation stars Blake Lively and hits theaters this summer, but readers and TikTok haters wonder what’s next. So does she.
When Lulu Hunt Peters brought Americans a new method for weighing their dinner options, she launched a century of diet fads that left us hungry for a better way to keep our bodies strong and healthy
In a post to China’s popular WeChat platform last week, one writer bemoaned the shocking loss of nearly a full decade of information from the early days of the country’s domestic internet. Within hours the writer's reflections had vanished too.
A quarter-century ago, Napster was the talk of the town, triggering a global piracy frenzy that never disappeared.
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai (Hunga Tonga for short) erupted on January 15 2022 in the Pacific Kingdom of Tonga.
I’ve struggled with insomnia for all of my adult life. It began in college and has waxed and waned in severity ever since, correlating with stress levels but not entirely.
In the year 1900, automobile sales in the United States were divided almost evenly among three types of vehicles: automakers sold about 1,000 cars powered by internal combustion engines, but over 1…
@var title = "A week with Elixir" @var tags = "elixir" About a week ago I started looking at [[http://elixir-lang.org][Elixir]] Elixir had been one of those things that I was vaguely aware of but had not yet time to look at in any detail. This all changed when I discovered the announcement that Da...
She remade the American songbook in her image, uprooting the very meaning of musical performance.
Will Larson, a veteran engineering leader and the CTO at Carta, holds three conventional engineering management “anti-patterns” up to the light for a closer look.
This is another post in our Code Health series. A version of this post originally appeared in Google bathrooms worldwide as a Google Tes...
They’re not in the group chat. But they’re not social pariahs either.
A traditional mix of authenticity, melancholy, rusticity and modernity, the Portuguese capital has become a mecca for international tourism. But it has paid the price in the form of gentrification and the loss of its essence
This week, Defector has turned itself over to a guest editor. Brandy Jensen, former editor at Gawker (RIP) and The Outline (RIP), and writer of the Ask A Fuck Up advice column (subscribe here!), has curated a selection of posts around the theme of Irrational Attachments. Enjoy! New Atheism feels tod...
Four years after starting TinyPilot from scratch, I've sold the company and handed complete control over to a new owner.
I’m beginning to suspect that one of the most common misconceptions about LLMs such as ChatGPT involves how “training” works. A common complaint I see about these tools is that …
I posit that most software engineers (particularly those working on infrastructural systems) are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws.
In this section, we share best practices for the core components of the emerging LLM stack: prompting tips to improve quality and reliability, evaluation strategies to assess output, retrieval-augmented generation ideas to improve grounding, and more. We also explore how to design human-in-the-loop ...
Marc Andreessen isn’t always known for his good advice, but he was right in one memorable exchange: When asked by a Stanford student if they should drop out of college, he responded, “Stay in school. Because if you’re going to drop out, you won’t listen to me anyway.” As a college dropout, this advi...
With ICQ shutting down on June 26, 2024, I can’t help but feel nostalgic. Remember your old ICQ UIN? I tried to find mine but no luck. How about you? Do you remember yours? ICQ was the first messaging software I truly loved and the one that got me into the messaging industry. I still
Four ginever glasses sit on a mirrored table at Distilleerderij’t Nieuwe Diep in Fevopark, Amsterdam. Only one manufacturer makes these glasses, and it’s closing. The distillery stockpi…
I miss BSD/Linux. Or was that GNU/Unix, I’m not sure? Silly jokes to get a statistical …
What is taking place in America’s most performatively socialist urban areas is that taxes are constantly raised in order to fund public services, resulting in some of the most heavily taxed populations in the country. But this tax revenue is then squandered on private contracts to unaccountable nonp...
17 useful concepts to survive the election Listen to the losers, not the winners It's time to swot up. (HM Treasury) It's time to swot up. (HM Treasury) 2024 General ElectionADHDChristopher HitchensnoneSocietyWalt Disney Gurwinder Bhogal May 27, 2024 4 mins We humans are neophiles; we’re drawn to wh...
My new PSU burns out! I fix it, and torture it by cracking water... May 2024 Electronics Science My brand new PSU, the most complicated circuit I designed and built just recently, started life in October 2023. It seemed to work pretty well, at least I got through the long and dark winter with it fee...
A lot of new CSS features have shipped in the last years, but actual usage is still low. One of the biggest barriers: we need to re-wire our own brains.
The Breakthrough Institute is an environmental research center based in Berkeley, California. Our research focuses on identifying and promoting technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges in three areas: energy, conservation, and food and farming.
A couple of days ago I decided to [write down some of the things I've learned about testing][testing_post] over the course of the last [several years.][codeascraft] In the course of enumerating the...
If your child gets sick, hope for something mechanical. Failing that, wish for something commonplace. This is a mother's quest to find her daughter a diagnosis.
MIT neuroscientists have found reading computer code does not rely on the regions of the brain involved in language processing. Instead, it activates the “multiple demand network,” which is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles.
Christopher Field is one of the winners of the 2024 Golden Grot Awards. Find out why his win is a testament to all the non-traditional use cases for Grafana dashboards.
Where are the builders? Posted on May 9, 2024 by near What are the brightest and most ambitious minds of our generation currently working on? Here is a video from someone who spent 7 months building minecraft inside of minecraft by painstakingly constructing a redstone computer inside of it with its...
After the apocalypse that wasn’t
Even before the web developer job market became as dire as it is today, I was regularly seeing developers burn out and leave the industry. Some left for good; some only temporarily.
Solar is in the process of shearing off the base of the entire global industrial stack – energy – and the tech sector still lacks a unified thesis for how to best enable, accelerate, an…
Computers can be understood • Choose Boring Technology • The Wrong Abstraction • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names • The Hiring Post • The Product-Minded Engineer • Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend • The Law of Leaky Abstractions • Reflections on software performance • ...
Ever transferred assets between brokerages? Impressive, terrifying machinations happened in the background. No cats were harmed.
Today, we’re announcing RAG 2.0, our approach for developing robust and reliable AI for enterprise-grade performance. Unlike the previous generation of RAG, which stitches together frozen models, vector databases, and poor quality embeddings, our system is optimized end to end. Using RAG 2.0, we’ve ...
Trisha shares how her working practices changed after having children, and includes tips for how working parents can get more from their time
Last year I thought that we had reached some sort of peak in terms of how far one can go in building useless things by converting a 42U rack into a
When we turn up the strength of the “Golden Gate Bridge” feature, Claude’s responses begin to focus on the Golden Gate Bridge. For a short time, we’re making this model available for everyone to interact with.
Some of Stephen Wolfram’s “productivity hacks” to make his days and projects more productive. Daily life, desk environment, outside the office, presentation setup, filesystem organization, Wolfram Notebook systems, databases, personal analytics.
Ever since I finished publishing the “defer” paper and successfully defended it on its first go-around (it now has tentative approval to go to a Technical Specification, I just need to obtain the necessary written boilerplate to do so), an old criticism
Nice Nazis, friendly factory farmers, and the evolution of sincere but selective moral instincts
Reversing Choplifter By Quinn Dunki May 13, 2024May 19, 2024 Because it seemed like a good idea at the time. The Apple II line of computers had an amazing run, from 1977 to 1993. In that time, hundreds of thousands of pieces of software were written for it, including many tens of thousands of games....
I just spent a week talking with some exceptional students from three of the UK's top universities; Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College. Along with UCL, these British universities represent 4 of...
mmap(blog) Posts About Atom Feed Enlightenmentware ✏ 2024-05-20 ✂ 2024-05-20 UNIX Git Emacs Boost.Graph Bazel Conclusion As programmers, we interact with software tools daily. Most of them can barely get the job done. But once in a white, we discover a piece of software that transcends mere utility....
Gumroad pays freelancers around the world $125-$200/hr. They choose how much of this they’d like to get in equity–between 0 and 80%. Equity entitles one to annual dividends.
Decades ago, Kris Hansen showed 3M that its PFAS chemicals were in people’s bodies. Her bosses halted her work. As the EPA now forces the removal of the chemicals from drinking water, she wrestles with the secrets that 3M kept from her and the world.
NBC News Butte, MT, reported there is no basis for claims by a Florida man of NRC approval, nor any involvement of Westinghouse, in plan for 100 MW nuclear power plant in that city The Legacy of Id…
For the first time since the 1960's, it looks doubtful whether the US space agency is even capable of getting us to the Moon.
I published this entry both in my old and new blogs, and I repost it here in its entirety.
👯 On training my own AI to steal illustrators’ styles
A quarter-century ago, the “Science Wars” — an unfortunate military metaphor applied to an intellectual debate — pitted a motley crew of postmodernist-influenced literary scholars and social…
Scientists are pursuing materials that can conduct electricity with perfect efficiency under ambient conditions. In this episode, the physicist Siddharth Shanker Saxena tells co-host Janna Levin about what makes this hunt so difficult and consequential.
The Digital Antiquarian A history of computer entertainment and digital culture by Jimmy Maher Home About Me Ebooks Hall of Fame Table of Contents RSS ← This Week on The Analog Antiquarian Riven 17 May Robyn and Rand Miller. Sometimes success smacks you right in the face. More often, it sneaks up on...
Some 43% of Americans are obese, compared with just 4.5% of Japanese people. What explains this gap?
This is a lightly edited transcript of my presentation today at the ACCSS/NCSC/Surf seminar ‘Cyber Security and Society’. I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to their conference & giving me a great opportunity to talk about something I worry about a lot. Here are the original slides with ...
All computer users may soon have the ability to author small bits of code. What structural changes does this imply for the production and distribution of software?
Why are buildings today drab and simple, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor.
Alena Kate Pettitt helped lead an online movement promoting domesticity. Now she says, “It’s become its own monster.”
Drawing on his extensive experience as a historian and diplomat, Philip Zelikow warns that the United States faces an exceptionally volatile time in global politics and that the period of maximum danger might be in the next one to three years. He highlights lessons from the anti-American partnership...
Right now, from a society-wide perspective, the healthcare I’ve been getting to keep me temporarily alive against a squamous cell carcinoma onslaught probably fails the cost-benefit test.[1] …
Ideas and Creativity Tags: musings, research Published on Sunday, November 17, 2019 « Previous post: A short analysis of ICLR 2020 reviews — Next post: The Misunderstood Stoic » Developing ideas is the central aspect of many professions, including—but certainly not limited to—academic research and s...
The destructive nature of urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build anything at scale ever again.
Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incred…
An archive of the best articles from Marc Andreessen’s now defunct blog
Robert Oppenheimer’s isn’t the only film-worthy story from the nuclear age. Kurt Gödel’s cameo as a secret agent was surprising — and itself a bomb.
Remote work expert David Tate wrote that when fearful CEOs talk about workplace culture, they’re really talking about workplace control. Their insecurities demand that the way work is done by emplo…
The R Consortium recently interviewed Jan Vitek, a professor at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He specializes in programming languages, compilers, and systems. Notably, he developed one of...
Swift sucks at web serving… or does it? May 15, 2024 by Contents Benchmark method & apparatus Benchmark results Debugging the benchmark Domain experts weigh in Examining the load The “right” load A “fair” load Do these improvements apply to the other cases too? …but… why is the success rate still we...
Tired of being underserved and overbilled by shitty regional broadband monopolies, back in 2002 a coalition of local Utah governments formed UTOPIA — (the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastr…
Just 50 years after the Roman Empire grew to its largest size, a mysterious and crippling pandemic known as the Antonine plague brought it to its knees. Research on climate change and in other areas is shedding light into how the plague, which preceded centuries of decline, emerged to pack such a de...
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Today’s rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide increase is 10 times faster than at any other point in the past 50,000 years, researchers have found through a detailed chemical analysis of ancient Antarctic ice. The findings, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of ...
Studies from two very different cities showed the same result.
The Variational Principles of Mechanics, Cornelius Lanczos (University of Toronto Press, 1949). While sailing a little boat the other day, I thought of a new way to troll the Aristotelians. I love it when my hobbies converge like that, and if the second one sounds a little mean-spirited, well, remem...
The inside story of four years building Muse, a canvas-based thinking tool for iPad and Mac.
In a paper published in Physical Review X on May 13, a quartet of physicists and computer scientists expand the modern theory of the thermodynamics of computation. By combining approaches from statistical physics and computer science, the researchers introduce mathematical equations that reveal the ...
ULTRA VC, an impact-focused EU startup accelerator and early-stage investor, has surveyed startup founders aged 18 to 60+ on how they maintain work-life balance enroute to success.
When we’re disagreeing with others about some aspect of software, we tend to focus on concrete factors we can easily define and argue about: choice of programming language, approaches to testing, file name conventions, and the like [1]. Some of these choices do clearly make software development easi...
In AI systems, multi-modality is the holy grail. When I was working on self-driving cars, that was also the dream architecture: one big model that takes in all of the sensors as inputs (sound, visual, lidar, radar) and makes decisions directly. For technical reasons, this is really hard to do (compu...
References are like jumps May 13, 2024 In a high-level language, the programmer is deprived of the dangerous power to update his own program while it is running. Even more valuable, he has the power to split his machine into a number of separate variables, arrays, files, etc.; when he wishes to upda...
NPR > Shots - Health News Outdoor time is good for your kids' eyesight. Here's why By Maria Godoy Monday, May 13, 2024 • 5:00 AM EDT Heard on Morning Edition If you're a parent struggling to get your kids' off their devices and outdoors to play, here's another reason to keep trying: Spending at leas...
Apple’s iPad ad might not have been good for Apple, but it was a profound encapsulation of what has happened on the Internet; the question is what it leads to next.
Fireside this week! Next week, with luck, I’ll have my ‘On the Reign of Alexander III of Macedon’ up as an addendum to our discussion of Hellenistic armies. But in the meantime, i…
Steve Jobs famously cared about the unseen backs of cabinets. Antique furniture built with hand tools isn’t like that at all. Cabinetmakers made each part to the tolerance that mattered. The …
The Age of Rage: Why are People are So Angry? According to a 2018 Guardian article, we are living in an ‘age of rage’. Such anger is often framed as having an ideological or political bend or etiology (e.g. Trump, Biden, Covid). Another article The West needs to grow up argues that infantilism is to...
Worthy Effort, but Not the definitive work on subject
Learn about the $80 billion company that makes the software behind AI, mobile, and automotive chips. Plus: are we at the end of Moore's Law?
BBC journalist and the documentarian behind HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis, discusses art, individualism, power, myth, and the complications of self-expression.
Home • Tikalon Innovation Service Model • About • Links • Blog • Contact 100 Years of IBM May 6, 2024 There are considerable statistics on human life expectancy. Men in the United States are expected to live 76 years, and women are expected to live nearly 81 years. These are actually lower than for ...
The Uyghur city in Xinjiang has been disrupted by outside forces through history — of which Chinese rebuilding is the latest change. A book of images and stories records what it once was.
Most modern humans regard plants as alive but a bit boring by the standards of creatures that can move around freely. They're wrong.
Inside the worker-led effort to get the world's most valuable company to stop helping the oil and gas industry drill.
The dystopian spot, which depicts the relentless destruction of instruments and artworks, marks a dark turn for the company and begs the question: Will 2024 be like 1984?
The Shellac and Big Black frontman, who recorded classic albums by Nirvana, Pixies, PJ Harvey, and more, has died of a heart attack
David Graeber Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! 2000
Contents: What is Xanadu for - Basic Principles - Writings - chats - Projects
Web software, like all technology, amplifies the priorities of the people who build it. What does that say about our commitment to web accessibility?
LPCAMM2 promises to be the thin, fast, efficient, and REPAIRABLE laptop memory standard of the future. Today, we take apart the first laptop to actually use it.
I was recently lucky enough to be invited along on a trip to Sizewell Bs operations training centre to see and try their control room simulator.
Dennett's classic story raises deep philosophical questions about identity and consciousness.
A Useful Productivity Measure? May 5, 2024 In my new role as VP of Engineering, there was one question I was dreading more than any other: “How are you measuring productivity?” I can’t fault the question. I mean, sure, I’d rather it be phrased about how I’m improving productivity, rather than how I’...
Fear, The Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype
It seems there are too many people in the security industry that are too fast to condemn C/C++, touting the virtues of Rust without fully understanding the nuances and implications. Rust may be a safer language but it’s not that simple.
The story of why and how I developed a tool for designing MDF furniture by writing my own little language that transpiles into a CSS grid layout.
Pushing back on the cult of complexity.
<p>What tools would you reach for today to style the UI for a <a href='https://medium.com/all-the-things/the-trouble-with-saas-279694551b25'>hyper-customizable app</a>? I just spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to understand the current landscape and settle on the perfect framework. I was...
Athletes train for years to overcome pain, exhaustion, and fatigue. But some people take it too far and are never the same again.
Let's talk compilers with part one of a whistle stop tour of their history
May 4, 2024 @ 6:45 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Borrowing, Epigraphy, Language and archeology, Language and culture, Language and history, Language contact
Silences that close us off, refusing connection, shoring up the ego at others’ expense—those are dead silences. But the letting-go sort, the silences that hold space or keep vigil for someone else? They are alive.
Can't switch off from work? Envy those 'lazy' strikers? In this 1932 essay, Bertrand Russell, socialist and winner of some minor award called the Nobel Prize in Literature, presents the case for idleness. One can also download and/ or listen to an audio version here.
It was the 28th of June, 2020; the perfect summer day. I remember it distinctly because of two important events that took place on that day. The first was the unfortunate discovery that I am highly sensitive to the venomous hairs of the Oak processionary caterpillar. If you’ve never wished you could...
We think we remember works of art rather well; and probably assume that the greater the work of art, and the more...
Chinampas — an ingenious adaptation to the Valley of Mexico's lake-filled landscape — could hold lessons for cities around the world.
Many predicted that globalization would cause the world's values to converge around freedom and personal rights. This hasn't happened.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the burn.
Rita Piçarra decided to resign as a corporate CFO to prioritise her happiness, but how does one embrace this new reality? Read her full story.
It’s not you. It’s me. (Taking a break from Mastodon) April 4, 2024March 17, 2024 I’m closing up shop on my Mastodon for the foreseeable future. I have for the most part very much enjoyed my experience on the Fediverse, and experts say that Mastodon is one of the components of the Fediverse. Mastodo...
How the eccentric Argentine author came to occupy the center of Latin American literature.
Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.
Though repetition has felt like punishment for many of us throughout our lives, perhaps it’s actually a blessing in disguise.
It's so easy to end up with git commit history which looks like London tube map. Let's see how we end up with those big, ugly, meaningless commit histories and how to prevent having one.
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Europe is special to me as I consider myself a proud European, but damn we need to talk. Europe please wake up.
A common complaint amongst the old guard bloggers is that the old web as we knew it is dying. This is false.The old web has actually been dead for many...
AI developer Andrew Mayne explains why technology could create more jobs and lead to unprecedented economic growth.
Over the last two newsletters (three, if you include my reply to Google’s “rebuttal” of the Prabhakar Raghavan newsletter), I’ve made the case that while rot economics are responsible for making technology products manifestly worse, this transformation was only possible thanks to the interventions o...
In the early 1940s, German submarines (U-Boats) were wreaking havoc on Allied forces in the Atlantic Ocean, sinking ships, and threatening to turn the tide of the war. What the Allies of WWII needed was something literally too big to fail. And one inventor working for the British Combined Operations...
In the first Map Story we met Eratosthenes, who tried to calculate the size of the Earth almost 2300 years ago (and got really pretty close). Today we’ll meet
From BBS to Facebook, here's how messaging platforms have changed over the years.
AI has the potential to transform technologically lagging industries by leapfrogging SaaS workflows. Here's what we're seeing.
It’s a common spy thriller trope. There’s a special key that can unlock something critical – business records, bank vaults, government secrets, nuclear weapons, maybe all of the above, worldwide.
It’s quite a journey from being born on a commune to raising more than $87m in funding at a software company. This journey forced me to wrestle with existential questions about my true beliefs, and how they intersected my life as an entrepreneur. One’s work is rarely a pure reflection of ideology, b...
The "thorium transition", which physicists have been looking for for decades, has now been excited for the first time with lasers. This paves the way for revolutionary high precision technologies, including nuclear clocks.
The Apple MacBook Air 15-inch M3 is a near-perfect combination of silent and effortless performance, epic battery life, and elegant design.
How the past of Personal Computing gives us a hint into the future of Personal Library Science
Newly released documents reveal the Greens engaging in outright fraud to deceive ministers and push the nuclear phase-out in Germany.
Quick math-personality quiz: What is seven-and-one-fourth minus three-fourths, expressed as a mixed number (a whole number plus a proper fraction)? What matters isn’t what answer you get but how yo…
Suitcases once belonging to residents of a New York State mental hospital tell the stories of long-forgotten lives
The Voyage of Magellan Chapter 5: Underway Apr 26, 2024 September 20 – October 3, 1519 At nearly the same instant that Magellan’s carracks sailed from Sanlúcar, a dozen or so sleek, swift Portuguese caravels put to sea from Lisbon. Taking advantage of the same favorable wind as Magellan’s fleet but ...
I am a perfectionist by nature. Releasing software in to the wild that has imperfections annoys me. For that matter, doing anything that is imperfect annoys me. Thankfully, there is this little thi…
>>> 2024-04-26 microsoft at work (PDF) I haven't written anything for a bit. I'm not apologizing, because y'all don't pay me enough to apologize, but I do feel a little bad. Part of it is just that I've been busy, with work and travel and events. Part of it is that I've embarked on a couple of writi...
I had another instance of my Apple ID mysteriously being locked. First, my iPhone wanted me to enter the password again, which I thought was the “normal” thing it has done every few months, almost since I got it. But after doing so it said that my account was locked.
640 Pages in 15 Months ↩ ↪ July 29, 2021 book design language personal My book Crafting Interpreters on programming languages is done. OK, OK. I know I said it was done like fifteen months ago. But now it’s really done. And by that I mean, the print, e-book and PDF versions are done. You can buy it....
Laws of Software Evolution by kqr , published 2024-03-25 Tags: design management organisations product_development Andrew Kelly has written a thoughtful article on why we can’t have nice software. He acknowledges that software often gets continuous maintenance, and notes that this is curious, since ...
We are now in a very weird liminal space in information retrieval for consumers, particularly those attuned to trends in search and working on the bleeding...
Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years Once you get good at Rust all of these problems will go away Rust being great at big refactorings solves a largely self-inflicted issues with the borrow checker Indirection only solves some problems, and always at the cost of dev ergonomics ECS solves the wrong kin...
This is a bit of a continuation of my last post about burnout, or at least a tangent. I have no tech news to share right now nor any startup tips, so this is what you get :) A thought I had a bit, well, for a long time, was what were the occupational hazards of computing, tech, and to a lesser exten...
John Archibald Wheeler is a bit of a hero for me (and also, like all good hero’s a bit of a villain). Discovering his paper “It from Bit” was definitely a huge inspiration for me …
I want to tell the story of a beautiful phenomenon in biology. In some sense it’s the prototype of much of the activity of life. The phenomenon is the way in which an individual cell of E. coli forages for nutrients. This process, known as “chemotaxis”—the “chemo-” for chemical and the “taxis” from ...
Their plan was to bomb themselves to Mars by 1965 and Saturn by 1970.
Focus by Automation Automation Programming Emacs Vim Posted on 2024-03-19 Contents Automation 🤖 Focus 🔍 Distractions ⚡ Organization 📓 The value of mastery 🧙 Braaains 🧠 Footnotes Automation 🤖 I’ve invested leisure time to save time when I’m working hard...
The first entry on this blog was 20 years ago yesterday, first substantive one was 20 years ago tomorrow (first one that drew attacks on me as an incompetent was two days later). Back when I started this up, blogging was all the rage, and lots of other blogs about fundamental physics were starting a...
Article URL: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/the-violent-role-of-relentless-positivity-in-the-workplace/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39702323 Points: 6 # Comments: 1
Article URL: https://www.june.so/blog/lean-startup-method-2024 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39702224 Points: 15 # Comments: 5