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 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 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.
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 author argues that the shift to sprints in software development has increased stress levels due to the constant, medium-level pressure and lack of autonomy, leading to long-term stress that can have negative effects on physical and mental health. The author suggests that restoring autonomy and professionalism to software development, allowing developers to control their craft and process, ...
A new study found that one in five genetics papers in top journals contains errors caused by Microsoft Excel's autoformatting, often changing gene names to dates or numbers. The issue can be fixed by formatting Excel columns as text or switching to Google Sheets, where gene names are stored exactly as entered.
The cult of the founder in Silicon Valley, led by Paul Graham, is problematic as it often results in poor management and hiring of "professional fakers" rather than experienced leaders. The hype cycle driven by these founders has made tech look boring and one-dimensional, with a focus on hype and bullying rather than innovation and substance.
The users shared their personal experiences and struggles with depression, anxiety, trauma, and mental health, highlighting the importance of support, resilience, and self-care. Many users emphasized the need for a mentor or a supportive community to help navigate the challenges of life, and some shared their own strategies for coping with adversity and achieving success despite difficult ...
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 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 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.
Saul Justin Newman, a researcher at University College London, won an Ig Nobel Prize for debunking claims of people living over 105 years old, finding that most claims are wrong due to lack of birth and death certificates. Newman's research highlights the need for a more accurate measure of human age, as current data is often flawed and used to inform pension rates, insurance premiums, and ...
FAIR is a Go library that ensures fairness in resource-constrained environments by distributing limited resources evenly across clients, preventing over-allocation and starvation. It uses a Stochastic Fair BLUE algorithm and a multi-level Bloom Filter data structure to store state, allowing it to scale to a large number of clients with low probability of false positives.
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.
Electrico is a cross-platform framework written in Rust and JavaScript that uses Wry/Tauri for WebView rendering, allowing for embedded system-native Web Views and synchronous/asynchronous XMLHttpRequests. It enables lightweight app development without bundling Node.js and Chromium binaries, with features like debug mode and dev tools for Node backend and GUI windows.
Doctor Web experts discovered a malware, Android.Vo1d, infecting nearly 1.3 million devices in 197 countries, allowing attackers to secretly download and install third-party software. The malware uses various methods to anchor itself in the system, including modifying system files, and its authors likely targeted TV boxes due to their outdated Android versions and users' lack of antivirus software.
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, ...
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.
Circuit Artist is a digital circuit drawing and simulation game with sandbox and puzzle modes, allowing users to interact with circuits using Lua. To build and run the game, users must download and build LuaJIT locally and place it in the root directory alongside the luasrc and asset folders.
The author reflects on their 10-year experience on Twitter, describing the platform's toxic environment, the importance of curating digital presence, and their decision to leave the site. They share their process of manually reviewing and deleting over 20,000 tweets, and express hope for a better future in social media, currently exploring alternatives like Bluesky.
The author reflects on the challenges of writing near-future science fiction, citing the unpredictability of human behavior and the changing nature of readers' expectations. The author also discusses the impact of interactive media and fan culture on the way readers engage with fiction, and how this shift is affecting the way authors approach world-building and storytelling.
The blog describes how offloading I/O operations to I/O threads and using memory access amortization techniques, such as speculative execution and prefetching, can significantly improve performance by reducing external memory access latency. The techniques are applied in Valkey, resulting in a 10x speedup in a function that traverses linked lists and a 50% performance increase overall.
WareWoolf is a text-based writing software designed for writing fiction, with features like chapter organization, editing, and revision tools, and the ability to import and export plaintext and docx files. It has a distraction-free writing environment, customizable formatting, and tools for sending drafts via email, managing files, and tracking word counts and goals.
Norway's electric vehicle adoption reached an all-time high in August, with 94% of new car registrations being electric, putting the country on track to meet its 2025 goal of 100% zero-emission sales. The country's incentives, such as lower taxes and fees, have contributed to its rapid EV adoption, with Tesla Model Y being the most popular new car purchase.
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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.
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 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 iPhone 16 Pro's A18 Pro chip has shown promising results in Geekbench tests, with a single-core score of 3429 and a multi-core score of 8790, outperforming the iPhone 15 Pro's A17 Pro chip and iPhone 15's A16 Bionic chip. The A18 Pro chip's performance is comparable to the M1 chip, which was previously only available in Macs and iPads, and highlights Apple's advancements in chip design.
Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist, claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, but a UK court ruled that he is not and that he has been lying extensively. The court's decision was made after a legal challenge by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, which sought to prove that Wright did not have legitimate authorship claims over Satoshi's Bitcoin white paper.
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The author tested the battery life of Chrome and Safari on a MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro processor and 16GB RAM, running a 3-hour browsing session with various tabs open, and found that Chrome used 9% less battery than Safari. The results contradict the common claim that Chrome devastates a Mac's battery, and the author suggests that users should not switch browsers solely based on battery ...
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 ...
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.
Introduction | Galactic Travel | Alien Species | Planet Profiles | Technology | Survival Tips | Don't Panic!
Eisenhower's soldier used a metaphor to simplify the military situation, and metaphors are effective in communication by relating new ideas to familiar ones. Metaphors and analogies can help in understanding complex ideas and resolving conflicts by drawing similarities between two different things.
Kevin Hall, a government researcher, is urging food companies to partner with him to study the health impact of ultra-processed foods, which he believes may be driving the nation's epidemic of overeating. Hall's research has shown that people eat more calories on an ultra-processed diet, but some nutrition scientists have challenged his conclusions.
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.
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.
The user questions the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on productivity, citing the bulk of work in software development lies in requirements, stakeholder consensus, and user needs, not coding. They also express skepticism about LLM-generated content and AI's ability to replace human creativity and problem-solving skills.
The Electrogenic kit is a drop-in conversion that retains the original DeLorean's weight and distribution, but with more than twice the power and torque, making it a true sports car. The kit bolts in to the original engine mounts, with a small additional battery pack and custom drive shafts, offering a real-world range of 150 miles.
Brazil's Supreme Federal Court unfroze Starlink and X's assets after they transferred $3.3 million to the government, covering X's fines for noncompliance. The feud between X and Judge Alexandre de Moraes is framed as a battle over free speech and censorship, with X facing suspension in Brazil for refusing to comply with de Moraes's orders.
A newly discovered malware, Android.Vo1d, has infected almost 1.3 million streaming devices running open-source Android, allowing attackers to install additional malware at any time. The malware's authors have used various methods to anchor it in the system, and its geographic distribution is widespread, with the biggest number of infections detected in several countries.
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 iPhone 16 Pro can take ProRAW photos in JPEG-XL format, allowing for compressed RAW images without compromising quality. The new camera features also include 4K video at 120fps, next-generation Photographic Styles, and a 48-megapixel ultra-wide lens.
The Pomera DM250 is a Japanese-made writer's deck, a single-purpose writing machine that runs on Linux and has a 7" LCD display, a full-sized keyboard, and a battery life of up to 24 hours. It is designed to be a distraction-free writing tool, with a focus on plain text editing and minimal connectivity options, and is priced affordably at around $499 for an upcoming Kickstarter campaign.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were left behind on the International Space Station after the Starliner capsule returned to Earth, discussed their experience and the issues that led to their extended stay. They expressed gratitude for the backup option to return on a SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle and emphasized the need for changes to be made to get the Starliner spacecraft ...
The AI-powered system filters out unwanted content on social media, such as war, politics, and outrage, to provide a personalized feed. Users can control the algorithm by using filter tags to dictate what they want to see, promoting a more focused and emotionally stable social media experience.
Teenage girls are leading the charge in language change, with linguists discovering they are trailblazers in adopting new words and phrases. According to Dr Sali Tagliamonte, young women tend to be the drivers of linguistic change, using language as social and symbolic capital to distinguish themselves from others.
US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo met with investors to encourage them to push tech giants to use US foundries for AI chip production, citing growing geopolitical risk around Taiwan. Intel, struggling to gain traction in the foundry business, is considering spinning off its manufacturing division and may receive delayed funding under the CHIPS Act.
The user praises various documentation sites, including Stripe, PHP, and Elixir, for their quality, completeness, and ease of use, while criticizing others, such as AWS, for being complex and hard to navigate. They also mention the importance of having documentation that is well-maintained, up-to-date, and easy to access, with examples and tutorials being particularly helpful.
The author is frustrated with online ads that are irrelevant or targeted to their interests, citing examples of bizarre ads in reputable publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic. They argue that ad targeting companies don't truly understand users' needs or preferences, and that opting out of ads is often the best option.
The author reflects on their past behavior of criticizing other programming languages and developers, realizing that it was a form of gatekeeping and exclusionary behavior that harmed others, particularly women. They urge programmers to stop using contempt and mockery to obtain social status and instead work to create welcoming and inclusive communities.
Mario Draghi's report proposes €800 billion in annual investments to boost Europe's competitiveness, equivalent to 5% of EU GDP, to return to investment levels of the 1960s and 1970s. The report challenges the dogma of fiscal austerity, arguing that low interest rates and unused savings make it necessary for public authorities to invest in key areas like research, healthcare, and infrastructure.
Originally scanned by Jörg Preisendörfer.This paper describes the design and verification strategies used to created a third generation symbolic processor...
The "design it twice" concept suggests that designers should come up with at least two different designs before settling on one to ensure better decision-making and avoid overlooking important details. By taking the time to design alternatives, designers can improve the quality of their designs, sharpen their skills, and feel more confident in their decisions.
California's AI regulation bill, SB 1047, adds whistleblower protections for employees who speak up about AI model risks, and 120+ employees from top AI companies support the bill. The bill now awaits Governor Gavin Newsom's signature or veto by September 30, with some academics and tech groups also offering support or opposition.
QuickTime was a multimedia architecture developed by Apple in the 1990s, supporting various media formats and codecs, and was initially led by Bruce Leak. The technology flourished in the mid-1990s, with hardware support, licensing, and revenue for Apple, but eventually declined with the introduction of AVFoundation and the discontinuation of support for 32-bit code.
Shein, a fast fashion giant, uses AI to predict demand and reduce waste, but its business model is inherently emissions-heavy, and the company's carbon dioxide emissions nearly doubled between 2022 and 2023. Critics argue that AI enables fast fashion to become ultra-fast, but also perpetuates unsustainable practices, and that the key to a more sustainable fashion industry is convincing ...
The debate over AI's artistic value has focused on its generative output, but interactive systems have proved more interesting, allowing users to create unique and engaging experiences. Despite concerns about AI replacing human artists, interactive AI art has the potential to be a new genre, with artists using AI tools to create innovative and collaborative works.
The website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks and has blocked the user's action. The user can email the site owner to report the block and include details of what they were doing when the page came up.
MOUSE is a small, Forth-like language created in 1976, using reverse Polish notation with single-letter operators and variables, and is often recommended as a good starting point for writing an interpreter. The language has a unique syntax and supports macros, which can be defined and called recursively, making it an interesting and powerful language despite its small size.
A man founded Sunamp to store solar power as heat for household use, using a thermal battery with sodium acetate trihydrate. The company aims to make use of excess renewable power and has a foothold in the UK and Italy, with plans to expand globally.