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The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 363 posts.
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The Inner Ring (1944)
When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when…
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SQLite Begin Concurrent
Usually, SQLite allows at most one writer to proceed concurrently. The BEGIN CONCURRENT enhancement allows multiple writers to process write transactions simultanously if the database is in "wal" or "wal2" mode, although the system still serializes COMMIT commands.
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How Beeper Mini Works
It’s a technical deep dive, so buckle up!
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Mixing Swift and C++
Swift is a general-purpose programming language built using a modern approach to safety, performance, and software design patterns.
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What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S.
The number of gun deaths in the U.S. fell for the third consecutive year in 2024 but remained among the highest annual totals on record.
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NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild
Citizen Lab found an actively exploited zero-click vulnerability being used to deliver NSO Group’s Pegasus mercenary spyware while checking the device of an individual employed by a Washington DC-based civil society organization with international offices. We refer to the exploit chain as BLASTPASS. The exploit chain…
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Why was Roman concrete so durable?
Researchers have discovered ancient Roman concrete-manufacturing strategies that incorporated self-healing. Applying this knowledge toward modern cement production, they hope to improve the material’s environmental impact.
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AWS to begin charging for public IPv4 addresses
We are introducing a new charge for public IPv4 addresses. Effective February 1, 2024 there will be a charge of $0.005 per IP per hour for all public IPv4 addresses, whether attached to a service or not (there is already a charge for public IPv4 addresses you allocate in your account but don’t attach to […]
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Type system updates: moving from research into development
A short status update on the effort to bring a type system into Elixir.
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Strong arrows: a new approach to gradual typing
An introduction to strong arrows and how it leverages the Erlang VM to provide sound gradual typing.
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JEP 430: String Templates (Preview) Proposed to Target Java 21
Enhance the Java programming language with string templates . String templates complement Java's existing string literals and text blocks by coupling literal text with embedded expressions and template processors to produce specialized results. This is a preview language feature and API .
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Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’: Every Car Brand Reviewed by Mozilla
Mozilla’s latest edition of *Privacy Not Included reveals how 25 major car brands collect and share deeply personal data, including sexual activity, facial expressions, and genetic and health information.
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Svelte 5: Runes
Rethinking ‘rethinking reactivity’
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LLaMA: A foundational, 65B-parameter large language model
Today, we’re releasing our LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) foundational model with a gated release. LLaMA is more efficient and competitive with previously published models of a similar size on existing benchmarks.
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Statement on AI Risk
A statement jointly signed by a historic coalition of experts: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
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Bill Watterson Commencement Speech (1990)
A speech Bill Watterson gave at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class.
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MosaicML MPT-7B: A Commercially-Usable LLaMa-Quality Model
Introducing MPT-7B, the first entry in our MosaicML Foundation Series. MPT-7B is a transformer trained from scratch on 1T tokens of text and code. It is open source, available for commercial use, and matches the quality of LLaMA-7B. MPT-7B was trained on the MosaicML platform in 9.5 days with zero human intervention…
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JEP 454: Foreign Function and Memory API
Introduce an API by which Java programs can interoperate with code and data outside of the Java runtime. By efficiently invoking foreign functions (i.e., code outside the JVM), and by safely accessing foreign memory (i.e., memory not managed by the JVM), the API enables Java programs to call native libraries and…
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Statement on 'Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses' review
June 2024 update: Following engagement with the authors, the decision has been made that changes to the plain language summary and abstract would not impact the scientific integrity of the content and so Cochrane is no longer seeking updates to the plain language summary and abstract of this version of the review…
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Aligning language models to follow instructions
We’ve trained language models that are much better at following user intentions than GPT-3 while also making them more truthful and less toxic, using techniques developed through our alignment research. These InstructGPT models, which are trained with humans in the loop, are now deployed as the default language models…
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Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIs
Developers can now integrate GPT‑3.5 Turbo and Whisper models into their apps and products through our API.
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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal Protocol—our end-to-end encryption technology—has become the de facto standard for private commu...
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Mullvad VPN was subject to a search warrant – customer data not compromised
On April 18 at least six police officers from the National Operations Department (NOA) of the Swedish Police visited the Mullvad VPN office in Gothenburg with a search warrant. They intended to seize computers with customer data.
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Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features
Apple today previewed software features for cognitive, vision, hearing, and mobility accessibility, along with innovative tools for individuals who are nonspeaking or at risk of losing their ability to speak.
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Fixing for loops in Go 1.22
Go 1.21 shipped a preview of a change in Go 1.22 to make for loops less error-prone.
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Block: Inflated user metrics and “frictionless” fraud facilitation
Initial Disclosure: After extensive research, we have taken a short position in shares of Block, Inc. (NYSE: SQ). This report represents our opinion, and we encourage every reader to do their own due diligence. Please see our full disclaimer at the bottom of the report.
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New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text
We’re launching a classifier trained to distinguish between AI-written and human-written text.
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