The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,220 posts.
As a consulting exploration geologist, my work life tends to consist of periods of intense work punctuated by periods of intense unemployment. True to form, I completed my last work assignment on July 8th and I found myself with a month and a half of enforced leisure before my next gig. Since the coming job was…
Dori | Art Director, Designer, Artist
Securely connect to anything on the internet with Tailscale. Built on WireGuard®️, Tailscale enables you to make finely configurable connections, secured end-to-end according to zero trust principles, between any resources on any infrastructure.
Robots powered by Gemini Robotics models can learn complex actions like preparing salads and even folding an origami fox.
People hoping to build muscle with the support of a creatine supplement might be disappointed by new research that shows it has little to no effect when taken at the recommended level.
Yarn tests fail consistently at the 27-second mark. The usual suspects are swiftly eliminated to no avail. A deep dive is taken to comb through traces, only to be derailed into an unexpected crash investigation.
I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones. Are there easy ways to delete data—files, photos, etc.—on phones so it can’t be recovered? Does resetting a phone to factory defaults erase…
A breakdown of the sources of many air pollutants that damage our health and ecosystems.
Concept Motivation Imagine an open world RPG where your actions affect the price of goods, the markets reacting to anything the player may do (burn down wheat fields, cost of food increases; kill the merchants, prices differentiate between cities; sell the many swords you’ve collected on your adventures, tank the…
Learn why Linux binary compatibility breaks when shipping software and what developers can do to fix real-world build and deployment issues.
As it turns out, “thrift shopping” in Japan via the internet can be both very enjoyable as well as very dangerous. In this series of posts, I’ve been examining various optical med…
It is with heavy hearts that we report that Dave Täht has passed away.
Upon reflection, Myst has long been more analogous to a graph than a traditional linear game, owing to the relative freedom it affords players. This is…
If someone had told me a few months ago I’d be playing with .NET again after a 15+ years hiatus I probably would have laughed at this.1 Early on in my career I played with .NET and Java, and even though .NET had done some things better than Java (as it had the opportunity to learn from some early Java mistakes), I…
A Caesar cipher is a reasonable transformation for a transformer to learn in its weights, given that a specific cipher offset occurs often enough in its training data. There will be some hidden representation of the input tokens' spelling, and this representation could be used to shift letters onto other letters in…
Update: did you enjoy our April Fool’s day story? While sheep do roam the CERN site and exhibit interesting flocking behaviour, no evidence has been found of their quantum entanglement (yet). However, CERN is participating in the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology . You can see the list of public…
Everyone should pull one great practical joke in their lifetimes. This one was mine, and I think it's past the statute of limitations. The s...
Don’t let an LLM make decisions or implement business logic: they suck at that.
Conversational interfaces are a bit of a meme. Every couple of years a shiny new AI development emerges and people in tech go "This is it! The next computing paradigm is here! We'll only use natural language going forward!". But then nothing actually changes and we continue using computers the way w
Jesse Korosi, Thijs van de Kamp, Mayra Vega, Laura Futuro, Anton Margoline
When we got “create anything” and all made the same thing
Issue warnings about uses of deep reflection to mutate final fields. These warnings aim to prepare developers for a future release that ensures integrity by default by restricting final field mutation, which will make Java programs safer and potentially faster. Application developers can avoid both current warnings…
We’re planning to release our first open language model since GPT‑2 in the coming months. We’re excited to collaborate with developers, researchers, and the broader community to gather inputs and make this model as useful as possible.
Most people think of machine instructions as the fundamental steps that a computer performs. However, many processors have another layer of ...
Discover Graft, an open-source transactional storage engine built to solve the challenges of syncing data at the edge. Inspired by lessons from SQLSync, Graft enables lazy, partial, and strongly consistent replication—allowing edge applications to sync only the data they need, exactly when they need it.
From the creator of Ten Dollar Adventure, a blog about the experience of writing the book, being a parent, navigating the entrepreneurial high seas, and learning.
