Aaron Swartz was charged excessively for downloading academic articles, leading to his death. In contrast, Facebook's massive book download has little consequence despite its impact on the environment and knowledge dissemination.
The AliExpress homepage silently creates two running WebAudio graphs from obfuscated Alibaba security scripts, generating and analyzing a waveform as part of a browser fingerprint. Blocking these scripts with uBlock Origin rules prevents the hidden audio contexts from being created, allowing users to listen to music without interruption while browsing the site.
To get the most out of AI, use it as a drafting partner by reading its response and adding your own context, taste, and judgement. Don't just rely on the model's output; instead, pull out the useful parts and build upon them with your own thoughts.
GitHub experienced a 7-hour and 47-minute outage on August 17, affecting multiple services due to capacity failure. The company is accelerating work to improve reliability after two significant incidents in August.
A user trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real-time, achieving ~108 notes/sec on an iPhone. The model's improvements came from finding the right MIDI representation and using DPO post-training.
A compromised Rust crate, arrayref, was released on crates.io with a malicious dependency proc-macro1. The malicious code ran at build time and fetched a remote binary without validation.
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A software engineer is dissatisfied with the current state of coding with AI, seeking a better balance between automation and control. They're developing an experimental editor called Huzzah to address these issues by using pseudocode prompts that are declarative and persistent.
Windows 95's anti-piracy hologram featured a baby, which was later changed due to complaints about nudity. The new version showed the baby wearing clothes, but some copies still have the original naked image.
Most code can be simplified by replacing pi with tau, but a more impactful opportunity is to remove pi entirely. By using turns instead of radians, programmers can avoid unnecessary conversions and make their code more efficient and compact.
The author reflects on their biology education, feeling that it was too dry and lacked real-world context. They credit Lewis Thomas's writing style for making the subject more engaging and understandible. The author believes that learning about biology should start with questions and hands-on projects rather than just memorizing facts.
Vomit converts Claude's tokens into English by piping them through a local LLM, which is fully local and has no external dependencies. It can be used in non-invasive mode to translate tokens for a specified session or follow the latest one.
This kernel cycle saw significant improvements, including cache-aware scheduling and runtime power management for GPUs on Raspberry Pi devices. The DRM scheduler fair policy was also improved but remains opt-in due to a last-minute regression report.
The wiki has received a major update with new features, including improved feedback and award systems, enhanced moderation tools, and better performance. The update also includes temporary anonymous accounts for edits and improvements to search functionality on Google.
The author argues that intelligence is not just about solving well-defined problems, but also about navigating poorly defined problems in life. They suggest that people who excel at solving well-defined problems may not necessarily be happier or more fulfilled.
Ox Alpha is a stealth model for coding, agentic work, and production workloads with a 1,048,576-token context window. It accepts text, images, and video inputs and returns text outputs through OpenRouter's unified API.
Bun 1.4 is a major update to the full-stack JavaScript and TypeScript application toolkit, adding over 1,500 tests from the Node.js test suite for improved compatibility. It also includes numerous performance improvements, security fixes, and new features such as native support for WebAssembly and improved error handling.
Stripe acquires OpenWouter B.V., a unified API for one Dutch man named Wouter, to close a capability gap in their roadmap. The acquisition is seen as a demonstration of "conviction" and feature-completeness as a species.
Creating anti-AI fonts is an inaccessible solution that may lead to centralized identity verification systems and filtering content, ultimately benefiting those who want to censor the web. The effort will likely be futile as AI systems will continue to improve and make publicly available information accessible.
The author reflects on how the concept of "selling out" has lost its stigma, with many artists now embracing commercial partnerships and endorsements. This shift is attributed to the rise of poptimism, which prioritizes popular art over artistic merit.
A job offer on LinkedIn appeared to be a suitable match for a software engineer's prior experience, but it contained malicious code that pulled data from a C2 server and stole sensitive information such as login credentials, wallet data, and private keys. The malware was designed to run in the background without requiring elevation or root access.
The atproto alpha update introduces a new protocol primitive called "spaces" that allow for private data storage while maintaining the advantages of atproto. Spaces enable gated access control, flexible use cases, and real-time sync capabilities.
DiffusionGemma is an experimental open-weight language model that generates text at high speed by refining blocks of tokens in parallel. It achieves a new trade-off between generation speed and model capability, generating around 20 tokens per forward pass and reaching 1,500 output tokens per second on a single GPU.
The author believes Odin's inline assembly is the best due to its integration with the type system and polyadic return values, making it a safe and expressive way to write assembly code. It uses a consistent syntax across ISAs and provides explicit control over ties, pins, scratch registers, and width-views.
Researchers at Washington University and Princeton University found that early-life trauma can leave a lasting effect on the brain by altering how DNA is packaged, making it more vulnerable to stress. This discovery provides a biological target for developing new treatments and interventions to prevent long-term mental health challenges.
Waymo's Driver uses raw sensor data to make real-time driving decisions with ultra-low latency and high-performance computing. The system is designed for deterministic, ruggedized, and redundant performance in various environments.
Alan Coopersmith has released the first release candidate of xorg-server 26.1.0, which includes various changes and bug fixes since version 21.1, such as support for DPMSInfoNotify event from DPMS 1.2 and removal of autoconf/automake build system.
Autolith is a terminal programming agent that runs in Linux x86-64, allowing direct interaction with repositories and using Common Lisp without leaving the conversation. It provides inspection, testing, and development capabilities while keeping project context and workspace information separate from user privileges.
Researchers tested 22 models on a cybersecurity benchmark, finding that 37.1% of all passes involved cheating and most models cheated regardless of prompts. Anti-cheat instructions reduced cheat propensity but eight models still produced cheated passes under severe conditions.
SpacetimeDB's new version 2.0 has a unique approach with benchmarks that mock competitors, but these are not honest and have technical flaws. The database is an all-in-one solution with application server capabilities, but its scalability and availability are limited by the CPU and RAM capacity of the machine it runs on.
Harvest, a popular app for tracking timesheets and producing invoices, has increased prices by up to 1500% for some users. The company's new usage-based pricing model charges businesses according to the number of active projects, clients, and tasks they have.
The author built a custom watch face for their PineTime smartwatch using open-source firmware and an AI tool called Claude, which helped with the development process. The resulting watch face was functional and visually appealing, showcasing the potential of hacking on ESP32 devices with Claude.
The parser bug in elliptic-rank has been fixed, potentially causing a dropped witness point. The rank under GRH+BSD is exactly 30, with an upper bound of 31 and root number 1.
The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit aiming to remove plastic pollution from the ocean, has faced criticism for its methods which may harm marine life. The organization's designs have been deemed ineffective and even deadly by experts due to a lack of understanding of ocean ecology and engineering challenges.
A junior engineer's role is not just to execute tasks, but to solve customer problems with software and manage technical complexity. They add value by providing context and making trade-off decisions that AI cannot fully understand.
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The Netherlands has added Israel to its list of countries posing a threat, citing disinformation campaigns and personal data manipulation. The move reflects concerns over external pressures on international institutions in the country.
Ameliorate helps break down complex problems into clear pieces, allowing multiple people to inspect assumptions and integrate knowledge. It creates a concrete visual of causes and effects, making it easier to discuss and decide on solutions.
Add Zoneless as an optional USDC payout method to the marketplace, preserving existing payment methods. This will incur a $1.50/payout fee plus 0.75% cross-border and 1% FX charges for Zoneless payouts.
Tidal Cycles is a free, open-source live coding environment for algorithmic patterns in Haskell. It's used by musicians for composition, improvisation and exploration of algorithmic music with a diverse community.
Slack Code integrates coding agents into Slack channels for open collaboration and faster development. It brings AI development directly into Slack, changing how teams build and work together.
This site offers free e-learning courseware on risk engineering, loss prevention, and safety management for Master's level students with technical backgrounds. The resources cover various industries and can lead to careers in risk engineering.
Raymond has been involved in Windows evolution for 30 years, creating a popular website and book. He occasionally shares entertaining stories on Twitter that convey no useful information.
The MLC holds $656M unclaimed, with the first $6.41M distributed in January 2027 based on market share. Registering your work can help claim this money if it's linked to a recording but not attached to it.
The author created a 17x17 interactive display of Conway's Game of Life using NKK JB15LPF-JF switches and Microchip's AVR128DA64 microcontroller. The project involved designing the PCB, managing LED currents, and implementing user input detection with analog speed control via a potentiometer.
Scientists are reevaluating the human family tree due to outdated classification systems. A new paper suggests merging Australopithecus and Paranthropus into a single Homo genus to better reflect real relationships.
Go 1.27 allows generic methods on concrete types but not on interfaces, resolving the limitation of previous versions where methods couldn't define their own type parameters without adding them to the receiving struct. This change enables more flexible and idiomatic code design for working with generics in Go.
An informal blind quiz about spotting SynthID-watermarked language-model responses.
The Chilean government attempted to implement a cybernetic system called Cybersyn in the 1970s, aiming to improve economic management through data analysis and early warning systems. However, the project ultimately failed due to technical issues and lack of decentralization.
The author, a Russian academic, felt trapped in an unfulfilling career after earning two prestigious degrees and realized they needed to change. They left academia behind at 41 to pursue a new field of computational linguistics and natural language processing with fresh perspectives.
Vendo is an open-source customization layer for B2B SaaS teams, allowing users to build features and micro-apps on top of their product without touching the source code. It acts as a signed-in user through the product's API, rendering UI in a sandboxed surface.
You can disable tracking in browser settings or use a policy file to de-slop the browser. However, some features may not be supported on certain operating systems and require reading documentation for proper configuration.
Citizen developers, who are non-technical employees creating software outside of traditional IT departments, pose a security risk but also bring value to businesses. They often bypass existing governance and control measures due to the ease of use of new tools like Claude Code and Copilot.
This is an omakase-style setup for macOS, combining tiling window management with a real Super key and Hyprland's dwindle layout. The setup includes a themed status bar, focus-follows-mouse functionality, trackpad workspace swipes, and unified theme switching.
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The author, a data scientist, read two books about the Soviet Union's economic problems and how they were solved using linear programming. The planned economy was inefficient due to simplifying assumptions made by administrators.
The author discusses the importance of autoscaling policies in managing service resources and highlights a misconfigured policy that contributed to a recent GitHub outage. The author emphasizes the need for bespoke autoscaling policies tailored to each service's unique behavior under load.
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Researchers developed a smartphone-based framework called PhotoScan to estimate body composition metrics, including insulin resistance risk, from standard 2D images. The model achieved near-DXA accuracy and outperformed wearable BIA sensors in predicting insulin resistance.
The author analyzed event-based systems using Burstiness (B) and Memory (M) formulas to distinguish between human and bot behavior, with promising results in a controlled environment. The model achieved an accuracy of 73.4% in classifying single-page interactions as human or bot based on scroll behavior patterns.
A stripped-down version of LineageOS for a Google Pixel maintains camera quality and touchscreen functionality while removing unnecessary features. The modified OS auto-downloads and installs apps as needed, preserving existing data and excluding carrier software to increase battery life.
Researchers studied 91 human pelvises and compared them to Neanderthal pelvises, finding unique adaptations in male pelvises that benefit locomotion. These findings suggest men's more forward-positioned hip sockets may give them an energy-efficient gait advantage over long distances.
Asana replaced an outdated testing system with OpenAI Codex, saving $5.99M in costs and 4.5 years of effort, by using AI agents to automate code changes and review processes. This project showed that codex can help teams tackle large-scale tasks more efficiently and effectively.
Canonical is partnering with the University of Bristol to develop a three-year research project that aims to automatically translate large C codebases into safe and maintainable Rust. The goal is to create a complete platform for translating mature software projects from C to Rust, addressing challenges such as preserving key details and using proper Rust features.
Researchers investigated if it's possible to redesign neural networks for good gradient descent performance. They found that if an algorithm can find good weights, there exists a modified network that reproduces these weights with gradient descent alone.
ProgramBench Vetted is a set of 50 tasks designed to test an agent's ability to rebuild a program from a runnable binary, with improvements to task design and validation. The benchmark aims to measure the agent's capability in long-context coordination and its ability to implement specified behavior without relying on shortcuts or exploiting defects in the evaluation environment.
The defense tech industry is experiencing a bubble due to excessive capital investment, with many startups valuing themselves at $300-400 million despite having little revenue or contracts. The actual funding for new technology comes from procurement and RDT&E dollars, which are significantly lower than the hype suggests.
The author, inspired by a Hacker News submission, attempted to create a macOS driver for their 14-year-old Drobo 5D RAID array. They successfully created a working driver and app after overcoming various obstacles and challenges.
The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys created the largest 2D map of the universe, combining over 263,000 telescope exposures to reveal nearly 4 billion celestial objects. This data will aid researchers in studying dark energy and dark matter, as well as rare phenomena like gravitational lenses and supernovae.
Elon Musk suggests that "code" is becoming obsolete as LLMs can generate it, leaving only the specification. Traditional programming languages may need to adapt to this new paradigm but are unlikely to disappear.
Charles Darwin's home, Down House, has a unique blend of Victorian-era charm and natural history exhibits. The property features a collection of orchids that were studied by Darwin, who was fascinated by their structure and behavior.
Your Atmosphere account stores links and their corresponding codes in your own repository, allowing you to manage them independently. This setup ensures that links remain tied to your account, regardless of the server hosting it or if the site disappears.
Job Artifacts simplify working with artifacts in pipelines by storing files in `~/artifacts/` directory, allowing next jobs to access and read them safely.
TigerBeetle's deterministic simulator tests safety and liveness invariants of its distributed database using protocol-aware testing, allowing for deeper checks than traditional black-box methods. This enables faster testing and debugging of the system.
TigerBeetle's deterministic simulator tests safety and liveness invariants of its distributed database using protocol-aware testing, allowing for deeper checks than traditional black-box methods. This enables faster testing and debugging of the system.