The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,273 posts.
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured the sharpest infrared images to date of one of the most distinctive objects in our skies, the Horsehead Nebula. These observations show a part of the iconic nebula in a whole new light, capturing its complexity with unprecedented spatial resolution.
By imposing the restrictions on open-source AI, SB-1047 could reduce AI safety, through reducing transparency, collaboration, diversity, and resilience.
Blog post: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs. In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
How to infer character encodings with statistics
The "thorium transition", which physicists have been looking for for decades, has now been excited for the first time with lasers. This paves the way for revolutionary high precision technologies, including nuclear clocks.
A USPS smishing attempt prompts the Akamai SIG to unearth shocking statistics: Illegitimate USPS domains see as much traffic as the legitimate USPS domain.
How the past of Personal Computing gives us a hint into the future of Personal Library Science
California legislators, under the influence of Effective Altruism activists, are trying to sneak through a disastrous bill for open-source AI and the technology industry generally. SB 1047 creates an unaccountable Frontier Model Division that will be staffed by EAs with police powers, and which can throw model…
Are GLP-1 drugs the first real threat to the hyper-processed food and alcohol industries?
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor. IBM's decision to use the 8088 processor in the I...
The Cessna 185 Skywagon is a high wing, single engine aircraft: basically a Cessna 180 with six seats, a strengthened fuselage and a slightly more powerful engine. It’s a popular aircraft in remote…
From the Zed Blog: In this episode of Zed Decoded, Thorsten asks the founders — Nathan, Max, Antonio — about the data structures at the heart of Zed: Rope and SumTree.
Transport for London (TfL) has seen a drop in the sale of paper tickets after it made a small change to the ticket machines in London Underground stations.
You may know me for my interactive tutorials. But before that, I was writing visual but non-interactive tutorials. In particular, there wasn’t a lot of information about A* on the web, so I decided to collect all my notes about pathfinding [1] together in one place in the 1990s. But then in the 2010s I started making…
pdf.tocgen is a set of command-line tools for automatically extracting and generating the table of contents (ToC) of a PDF file. It uses the embedded font attributes and position of headings to deduce the basic outline of a PDF file.
Is it OK to daisy chain UPSs? Let’s look at a few reasons this is a common question and alternative approaches that can better address the target.
Common DB schema change mistakes and how to avoid them in PostgreSQL development.
Almost everyone I know who uses a computer, for...
My main project is to create an executable spec of the Intel Architecture but, every now and then, I get to take a broader look at ISA specifications and think about the strengths and weaknesses of other ISA specs: what makes them work well; and what techniques they could borrow from other specifications. Earlier this…
Today, we would like to present a lesser-known feature of the Linux kernel. Instead of launching a program from a file system, regardless of whether it's virtual or not, it is also possible to embed a user-space program directly into the kernel image itself and start it from there.
I haven't written anything for a bit. I'm not apologizing, because y'all don't pay me enough to apologize, but I do feel a little bad. Part of it is just that I've been busy, with work and travel and events. Part of it is that I've embarked on a couple of writing projects only to have them just Not Work Out. It…
Learn how to use Makefiles to streamline your Terraform and Hugo projects, making environment management and static site generation more efficient.
By Ruben Schade in Eora/Sydney, Australia.
Learn how Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 LTS is built to empower open source developers and deliver innovation for the next 12 years. […]
On goal drift and lower reliability. Or, why can't LLMs play Conway's Game Of Life?
Master the art of efficient text navigation and editing in Vim with this comprehensive command workflow tutorial. Explore key commands and practical examples to enhance your productivity in Vim.
Visual and interactive introduction to 2D planes in 3D space.
