OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB

https://arcprize.org/media/images/blog/o-series-performance.jpg
OpenAI's new o3 system achieved a breakthrough 75.7% on the Semi-Private Evaluation set and 87.5% with high-compute configuration, showing novel task adaptation ability.

The era of open voice assistants

https://www.home-assistant.io/images/blog/2024-12-vpe/vpe-packaging.png
Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition is a private and open-source voice assistant hardware that lets users control their smart home devices without relying on big tech. It's affordable, easy to set up, and customizable, with a sleek design and industry-leading audio processing capabilities.

Building Effective "Agents"

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Anthropic shares practical advice on building effective large language model (LLM) agents, recommending simple, composable patterns and focusing on two key aspects: tailoring augmentations to specific use cases and providing an easy interface for LLMs. The company outlines common patterns for agentic systems, including prompt chaining, routing, parallelization, and agents, and provides ...

Tldraw Computer

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tldraw computer - a computer by tldraw.

Grayjay Desktop App

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Watch content on your own terms, ensuring you retain full ownership and control over what you watch. Your content, your way. "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red

https://www.htmhell.dev/images/og/advent24_20.png?s=171224
Browsers are forgiving when parsing HTML, allowing invalid values like "chucknorris" to be rendered as red due to a legacy color value parsing rule. This flexibility is what makes the web work, even with imperfect code, and is a fundamental principle of the web's resilience and magic.

A Gentle Introduction to Graph Neural Networks (2021)

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Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a type of neural network that can operate on graph data, which is a flexible data structure that can represent various types of data such as social networks, molecules, and images. GNNs can be used to solve various graph prediction tasks, including graph-level, node-level, and edge-level tasks, and can be built using the "message passing neural network" ...

Doctors Without Borders declares the war in Gaza as genocide

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MSF reports over 45,000 deaths in Gaza due to Israel's war, with 1.9 million people displaced and a collapsed healthcare system. Israel's blockade and siege have made it impossible for people to access essential goods and humanitarian aid.

Show HN: Artemis, a Calm Web Reader

https://artemis.jamesg.blog/assets/demo.png
Skip to main content Artemis is designed to be slow and minimal. It's a calm place to see what's new on your favorite websites, with no urgency. I have tried my best to make this service accessible. If you notice any issues, please feel free to contact me.

Compiling C to Safe Rust, Formalized

https://arxiv.org/static/browse/0.3.4/images/arxiv-logo-fb.png
Researchers developed a method to translate C code to safe Rust, preserving memory safety guarantees. Their approach successfully translated a verified C cryptographic library and binary parsers to pure Rust with minimal performance impact.

A Raycaster in Bash

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/c7e9ed3b166fcc2cb1663d6b8a84dfeaa4f3f76dd20402eaccc240efdf541e6a/izabera/pseudo3d
Bash is slow and lacks features for video game development. It's inefficient for tasks like updating the screen and handling user input.

Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

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Google is reversing its stance on digital fingerprinting, allowing advertisers to track users across devices and platforms. This move has raised concerns among regulators, who warn that it undermines user choice and control over their data.

Qualcomm wins licensing fight with Arm over chip designs

Qualcomm won a trial against Arm Holdings, with jurors finding no breach of a license agreement. The issue of whether Nuvia breached the license remains undecided.

Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?

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A UK website breaks down electricity bills, showing the wholesale price is tripled by network costs and renewable subsidies. The UK needs to improve grid utilisation and reduce costs from renewable schemes to achieve cheaper electricity.

A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

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Researchers analyzed 25.3 million autonomous miles driven by Waymo, showing a significant 88% reduction in property damage claims and 92% in bodily injury claims compared to the overall driving population. Waymo outperformed newer, technologically advanced human-driven vehicles in safety metrics.

The legacy of NeXT lives on in OS X (2012)

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Apple acquired NeXT in 1996 and used its NeXTSTEP operating system as the basis for OS X, incorporating UNIX roots, Objective-C programming language, and Cocoa frameworks. These technologies, developed in the late 80s and early 90s, continue to power key features of Apple's devices, including protected memory, pre-emptive multitasking, and daemon-based services.

The Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach yet to the Sun

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The Parker Solar Probe is a NASA spacecraft that will make its closest approach to the Sun on Christmas Eve, enduring temperatures of over 2,500° Fahrenheit. The probe aims to study the solar wind, a fundamental constituent of the Solar System, and understand its origins.

A bestiary of exotic hadrons

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Scientists at the LHC have discovered 76 new particles, including 23 exotic hadrons whose structure cannot be explained. The discovery of these exotic hadrons is a fascinating detective story, motivating rival schools of thought among theorists.

Talking over a wall changed my direction as a programmer

https://thecodist.com/content/images/size/w2000/2024/10/talking.jpg
The user started their programming career in 1981 at a defense contractor but changed direction after being tasked with building a VT-100 terminal emulator on an Apple II in 7 days. This project led to a career shift towards programming and eventually starting their own company, changing the course of their life.

Matt Mullenweg temporarily shuts down some Wordpress.org functions

WordPress.org is pausing some free services for the holidays due to volunteer burnout and legal issues with WP Engine. WP Engine users can contact their lawyers or the owner directly for access to unaffected services like localization and forums.

Show HN: Rivet Actors – Durable Objects build with Rust, FoundationDB, Isolates

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rivet-gg/rivet/main/.github/media/architecture.png
Rivet Actors enable real-time applications with built-in RPC, state, and events, scaling to zero with low latency and high-throughput writes. It runs globally near users, powered by V8 isolates and Deno runtime, with optional container support.

Ask HN: Who's building on Python NoGIL?

User is interested in Python's NoGIL aspect and its impact on threaded vs async frameworks. They wonder if a threaded Flask app can outperform an AIOHTTP server in a version of Python 3.13 without GIL.

DOS APPEND

The DOS APPEND command is a TSR that allows old DOS applications to find files in directories other than the current one, making it useful for organizing files in multiple directories. It was first introduced in the IBM PC Network Program in 1985 and later integrated into DOS 3.3 in 1987, allowing it to become an internal command once installed.

Turing Machines

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Alan Turing proposed the idea of a universal machine that can compute anything that can be computed, which laid the foundation for modern computers. Turing machines have just 5 instructions and can be used to simulate any computer program, but they have limitations, such as the halting problem, and are not practical for real-world use.

Tracking Down the Bulgarian Marketplace Scams

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A person was targeted by a scammer on Viber while selling an item on a marketplace, but they decided to investigate further and discovered a sophisticated phishing system being sold to multiple teams, with evidence of over 10,000 people involved in scams across Europe. The investigation led to the discovery of tutorials, bots, and groups sharing memes, and the person decided to end their ...

Spherical Harmonics

Yℓ,mY_{\ell,m}Yℓ,m​

The CD Pipeline Manifesto

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Software teams need better tools for managing Continuous Delivery pipelines, which are currently fragmented and inefficient. A unified, code-first pipeline definition is needed for easier management, auditing, and evolution.

Rules to avoid common extended inline assembly mistakes

When using inline assembly, follow six basic rules to avoid common mistakes: use volatile, include a memory clobber if accessing memory, and avoid modifying inputs and using the call qualifier. By following these rules, you can write safe and correct inline assembly code that avoids the pitfalls of this treacherous interface between high and low level programming languages.

Show HN: Ephemeral VMs in 1 Microsecond

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A multi-tenancy system allows one server to safely share resources among many users with minimal overhead. Benchmarking results show a latency of around 9-40 microseconds with 800k-1.7M requests per second.

Process Creation in Io_uring

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi has proposed a new patch series to implement a "spawn new process" functionality in the io_uring subsystem, which would combine the operations of creating a new process and executing a new program. The patch series introduces two new io_uring operations, IORING_OP_CLONE and IORING_OP_EXEC, to create a new process and execute a new program, respectively, with the goal ...

Show HN: Gribstream.com – Historical Weather Forecast API

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The service provides on-demand weather data querying with various pricing plans based on the number of coordinates, parameters, and time range. It offers a free plan and pro plans with higher usage limits.

Ask HN: Stanford CS 153 help

You're co-teaching CS 153 at Stanford, focusing on real-world infrastructure challenges. You're looking for speakers who think unconventionally and have solved hard scaling problems through unique approaches.

Show HN: Interactive graphs in Rerun with a Rust port of D3-force

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Rerun 0.21 introduces a Graph view and UX improvements, including undo and redo operations, drag and drop functionality, and a grid guide for 3D views. The Graph view is powered by GraphNodes and GraphEdges archetypes, with a force-based layout engine called Fjädra.

ByteDance's Recommendation System

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Monolith is a deep learning framework for large scale recommendation modeling with real time training. It supports distributed async training and has a MonolithModel API for easy usage.

Writing and testing a paginated API iterator in Go

The article discusses how to write a custom iterator for consuming a paginated HTTP API, specifically using the GitHub API to list user repositories, and how to test it properly by leveraging Pull Iterators. The iterator abstracts the pagination logic, making the code more readable and reusable, and can be tested by mocking the GitHub API client and checking the expected sequence of values it returns.

Bat Feces Used to Fertilize Cannabis Is Linked to 2 Deaths

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Collections: On Bread and Circuses

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The phrase "bread and circuses" originates from Roman satirist Juvenal's 10th satire, where it refers to the Roman people's desire for basic needs and entertainment, rather than their civic duties and power. Juvenal's phrase is often misinterpreted as a commentary on how the Roman people were bribed into surrendering their power, but it actually reflects the people's loss of control and ...

The birth, life, and death of old Penn Station (2017)

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Pennsylvania Station was a grand Classical gateway to New York City when it opened in 1910, but it was demolished 54 years later due to ineffective design and rising air travel. The station's loss led to the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which has since saved many historic buildings, including Grand Central Terminal.

NY governor signs law making the restaurant reservation black market illegal

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New York Governor Kathy Hochul is signing the Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act into law to end the black market for restaurant reservations. The bill aims to protect consumers and businesses from predatory reservation practices.

Ask HN: How do you work with people who are "not quite smart"?

The user struggles with colleagues who lack critical thinking and conceptualization skills, making it hard to work with them despite efforts to coach and provide feedback. They seek techniques to address this issue without being confrontational or dismissive, especially when they're not in a management position.

Cqd: Colour my __dir__ please

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rayking99/cqd/master/assets/example.png
A lightweight Python utility that provides colored visualization of object attributes, making it easier to inspect objects during development and debugging.

Show HN: Spotify and Apple Health data as art

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Day by Data app transforms everyday data into visualizations and personalized art pieces. It tracks steps, Spotify activity, and milestones, making personal stats meaningful and shareable.

' first' open-source ARMv9 motherboard surfaces – Radxa Orion O6

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Radxa Orion O6 is a powerful open-source Armv9 SBC with 12 CPU cores and desktop-level graphics acceleration. It supports various Linux flavors and upcoming OS support including Windows and Android, with prices starting at $200 for 8GB RAM.

Language and Personality

Victor Lane conducted a study on linguistic relativity by administering a personality test in both English and German to bilingual speakers. He found that about half of his subjects showed a measurable shift in personality when changing language.

Death of a Forum: How the UK's Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities

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The UK's Online Safety Act is forcing small online forums to shut down due to excessive regulatory burdens. This includes a requirement for moderation teams and proactive child protection measures, which are unaffordable for small sites.

CISA: Do not use SMS as a second factor for authentication [pdf]

New physics SIM trains robots 430k times faster than reality

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Researchers unveiled Genesis, an open source simulation system that lets robots practice tasks 430,000 times faster than in real life. It uses graphics cards to run simulations up to 100,000 times at once and can train robots in hours what would take decades in real time.

Sovereign Tech Fund Invests in OpenStreetMap

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The OpenStreetMap Foundation received a 384,000 EUR service agreement from the Sovereign Tech Agency to modernize and stabilize OpenStreetMap's core software. This investment will create two new roles and enhance volunteer contributions through improved documentation and testing infrastructure.

Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance

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The article compares Intel Core Ultra 9 285K performance on Windows 11 and Linux, specifically Ubuntu 24.10, with various kernel configurations.

Samsung gets $4.7B grants for Texas fabs

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Samsung received up to $4.745 billion in funding to strengthen US semiconductor supply chain and create over 15,000 jobs. The investment will support two new logic fabs and R&D fab in Texas, expanding US semiconductor manufacturing and leadership.

Walmart employees now wearing body cameras

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Walmart is testing a body camera pilot program in some US stores to enhance worker safety and deter conflict. The program aims to evaluate the effectiveness of body cameras before making any long-term decisions.

Intel Terminates X86S Initiative

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Intel has stopped working on the x86S specification and will focus on the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group with AMD and other industry leaders. The decision makes sense due to the need for cooperation and standardization in the x86 architecture.

Never Forgive Them

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The tech industry has become a "Rot Economy" where growth is prioritized over user experience, leading to a toxic digital environment that is hostile, manipulative, and exploitative. This has resulted in a society where people are constantly bombarded with ads, notifications, and algorithm-driven content that is designed to keep them engaged, but often at the expense of their well-being and sanity.

Show HN: Get e-signatures & pay per signed doc

https://cdn.dorik.com/6759364093522c00ad9e980d/images/Frame9023-fzOkR.png
I was looking for a good alternative to DocuSign that offered pay-per-use instead of a subscription, but everything I found was either too expensive or didn’t meet my needs. Then I came across SignWith, which is pay-per-use and exactly what I was looking for. I’m excited to start using it!

AI for Product Managers

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Product Managers don't need to develop AI models but should understand AI concepts to make informed decisions and communicate effectively with their team. They should focus on using AI tools to improve their product, collaborate with engineers, and stay updated on AI trends to solve user problems and drive business value.

The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed

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The author discovered Spotify's "Perfect Fit Content" program, which promotes passive consumption by seeding tracks from production companies on playlists, often at the expense of human musicians' royalties. The author calls for Congress to investigate, pass laws for transparency, and prevent streaming platforms from promoting songs based on financial incentives, and for the music industry to ...

Tea bags release microplastics, entering human intestinal cells

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Researchers found that commercial tea bags release millions of microplastics and nanoplastics when infused, which can be absorbed by human intestinal cells and enter the bloodstream. This study highlights the need for standardized test methods and regulatory policies to mitigate microplastic contamination from plastic food contact materials.

'United Healthcare' Using DMCA Against Luigi Mangione Images

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Someone claiming to be United Healthcare is filing DMCA requests to remove artists' depictions of the surveillance video of Luigi smiling and parody merchandise. This is seen as a wild overstep of the company's legal rights and possibly an example of "copyfraud."