The user tested OpenAI's GPT-o1, a more capable tool than previous iterations, and found it to be roughly on par with advising a mediocre graduate student, but still struggling with advanced research tasks. They hope for a diverse ecosystem of AI tools to emerge, including general-purpose and specialized models, to assist with various research tasks.

The user shares their experience with flaky wireless connections and how they switched from NetworkManager to wpa_supplicant-based management. They also discuss common falsehoods about TCP, including its reliability and the possibility of creating a guarantee analogous to TCP's reliability at the application level.

The Writing an OS in Rust series provides step-by-step tutorials in individual blog posts, with each post's code available in a separate git branch. The project is licensed under Apache-2.0 and dual-licensed, with contributions subject to the same terms unless explicitly stated otherwise.

The user created a compact directional speaker using piezoelectric transducers that emit ultrasound, which is converted to normal sound as it passes through the air, allowing for a narrow beam of sound. The speaker uses a custom circuit board with 73 transducers arranged in a rectangle, and can produce a beam of sound only a few degrees wide, similar to a laser.

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The user created meet.hn to connect with the Hacker News community in Toulouse, France, and is looking to meet at least one HN member in the city. They invite others to reach out if they're in the area and have a Twitter page for meet.hn at https://x.com/meet_hn.

The BOFH is a humorous character who navigates office politics and technology issues with wit and sarcasm. The story follows his adventures and misadventures as he deals with various challenges and characters.

The US student loan system is a trillion-dollar debt bubble that can't be popped due to non-dischargeable loans, which creates a misaligned incentive system that rewards failure and punishes success. To fix this, loans should be dischargeable, tied to degree value, and institutions should be held accountable, but powerful interests profit from the status quo and resist change.

Large Language Models (LLMs) inherently produce hallucinations due to their fundamental mathematical and logical structure, making it impossible to eliminate them through architectural improvements or fact-checking mechanisms. The concept of Structural Hallucination is introduced, establishing the mathematical certainty of hallucinations in LLMs.

The user installed Arch Linux on their laptop, replacing Manjaro, and customized the installation with features like LVM, LUKS, and Secure Boot. They configured the boot process, set up Plymouth, and enabled Secure Boot with their own keys, and also customized the installation for their specific GPU and network settings.

The author discusses the benefits of using custom allocators in Rust, particularly slab and bump allocators, and how capabilities could simplify allocation strategies. They propose using capabilities to pass allocators as arguments to functions, eliminating the need for manual allocation management and improving code clarity.

Rollstack aims to revolutionize professional work by automating slide deck and document creation using BI tools, CRMs, and data warehouses. Backed by Y Combinator, Rollstack is a startup that helps teams streamline their work.

George Mitchell, known as the father of fracking, pioneered the technique of pumping liquids and sands into the ground to extract gas and oil from shale rock. His innovation, the shale revolution, transformed the global hydrocarbon industry and is now being tested for treating cancer and other diseases.

AWK The AWK Programming Language by Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, and Peter J. Weinberger

If LLM do actually help engineers become significantly more productive what could explain that, for instance, in the open source community: Maybe I am missing something but to me everything looks the same (except for an increasing amount of useless customer service chatbots and garbage LLM generated books on Amazon)

Kierkegaard's quote is followed by a list of developers and a tribute to Raghu Ranganathan, who passed away. The text then discusses updates to the Factor programming language, including ARM64 support, improved console I/O, and compressed images.

A friend asked about startup mortality rates, and the author notes that while it's natural to see some startups close, it's not uncommon and can be planned for. The author references Nate Silver's book, which quotes Marc Andreessen's fund performance numbers, showing that a small percentage of investments produce most returns over a long period.

Rust's Option and Result types handle "no data" and error situations, allowing for explicit error handling and propagation. These types provide a way to signal the absence of a result or an error, and Rust's ? operator simplifies error handling and propagation.

The author worked as a telephone reference librarian in the Brooklyn Public Library from 1984 to 1988, answering a wide range of questions from callers, and developed skills in finding information through various reference sources. The author reflects on the advantages of analog ways of gathering information, including the importance of critical thinking and not taking information for ...

The European Space Agency's ROSIE mission successfully gathered data on the re-entry of a 24-year-old satellite called Salsa, which burned up in the atmosphere, providing insights into how satellites disintegrate during re-entry. The mission aims to improve prediction models and learn more about the re-entry process, which is crucial for ensuring the safety of people on Earth's surface as the ...

A federal antitrust lawsuit was filed against six commercial publishers of academic journals, alleging a conspiracy to fix prices, limit competition, and restrict sharing of scientific research. The lawsuit claims this scheme has delayed scientific progress, worsened the peer-review crisis, and resulted in a "triple pay system" where taxpayers fund research, salaries, and published products.

Time series databases are designed to efficiently store and query large amounts of data with timestamps, and they have become essential tools in various industries such as infrastructure monitoring, finance, and IoT applications. VictoriaMetrics is an open-source time series database that has been developed to address the limitations of existing solutions, offering high performance, ...

The author is dissatisfied with Mozilla's recent focus on AI features in Firefox, such as the AI chatbot, and is considering switching to alternative Firefox-derived browsers like LibreWolf, Floorp, and Zen, which offer better privacy defaults and customization options. The author highlights the pros and cons of each browser, including their unique features, customization options, and ...

A Rust-based Lisp interpreter written using declarative macros, which evaluates Lisp expressions at compile-time and supports lambda functions, recursion, and basic data structures. The interpreter uses a SECD machine simulation to evaluate lambda calculus terms, but its recursive evaluation can be inefficient and may cause performance issues.

As usual when I discuss systems theory (e.g. information flow or material flow), this article pretends to be about one thing, but is really about a much more general concept. Let’s talk about reinforcing feedback loops! I tell non-technical people that the site reliability engineer job is about creating automation to do what a system administrator would otherwise do. The automation does work ...

The author is working on porting the Common Lisp game engine, Trial, to the Nintendo Switch, which involves overcoming various challenges such as building the SBCL runtime and compiler on the Switch, dealing with the Switch's unique constraints, and optimizing performance. The author is seeking support to continue funding the project and is asking for donations on Patreon, GitHub, or Ko-Fi to ...

The author reflects on his experience watching Albert Michelson, a renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, play billiards at the University of Chicago in 1928, noting Michelson's exceptional skill and elegance in the game. The author also shares his observations of Michelson's hands, which seemed ordinary but were capable of great precision and control, much like his work in physics.

A VR system provides multimodal feedback to improve concentration by simulating the experience of pulling out a holy sword. This innovative approach helps users confront and control their concentration more effectively.

Designing software is tough. I think we can all agree on that. No matter how much experience you have, your first idea about how to structure a module or system is usually not the best one. I had to learn this lesson the hard way, and I really wish I knew about the “design it twice” concept earlier in my career. In Chapter 11 of A Philosophy of Software Design, the author introduces a simple ...

The article discusses the vulnerability of fiber optic cables to tapping and sniffing, and proposes a solution using encryption to secure 802.1q trunk links at high speeds. The solution uses a combination of VXLAN and Wireguard to encrypt and encapsulate 802.1q frames, and is demonstrated to work at speeds of up to 9.86 Gbps with a performance penalty of less than 2%.