20161
The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,910 posts.
20162
Repeating yourself thrice doesn’t turn you into a 3x developer
Three is a magic number. This is the number of things we can keep in our minds without losing focus. So, logically, a three-tier software…
20163
One week of empathy training (2019)
I've spent a week cosplaying as a disabled user. And I hate it. A couple of months ago, I attended a private talk given by a disabled colleague of mine. "Everyone should believe disabled people's stories about accessibility problems," she said. "But, given that people don't, here's what I want you to do. Spend one…
20164
Worldcoin: A solution in search of its problem
Worldcoin doesn't seem to know what problem it's trying to solve, but they want to scan your eyeballs anyway.
20165
A dive into the AMD driver workflow
I ended up getting a response from high level people at AMD. It was still very light on any real technical information, but it did include some great phrases like “I am able to replicate the issues you are facing” and some mockable phrases like “We are hoping that this will improve your perception of AMD products and…
20166
Trying to become a better developer by learning more about aviation
In the last few months, I started geeking more about aviation-related topics. Mostly by watching A LOT of videos explaining how things…
20167
New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
Linguistics and genetics combine to suggest a new hybrid hypothesis for the origin of the Indo-European languages
20168
Emacs 29.1
Today is a great day for Emacs - Emacs 29.1 has just been released1! Every Emacs release is special, but I haven’t been so excited about a new version of Emacs in ages. Why so? Reason #1 - pure GTK front-end (a.k.a. pgtk). This also means that now Emacs supports natively Wayland. Which in tern means that it’s easier…
20169
Scientists may have found mechanism behind cognitive decline in aging
Scientists have discovered what they believe to be the central mechanism behind cognitive decline associated with normal aging.
20170
20171
GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot
Canoeboot – Free, Libre BIOS/UEFI boot firmware
20172
Button Pushes You (2022)
From reconfiguring the system to reconfiguring the user.
20173
Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed cancer risk, kept quiet
Tobacco companies knew that cigarette smoke contained radioactive alpha particles for more than four decades and developed "deep and intimate" knowledge of these particles' cancer-causing potential, but they deliberately kept their findings from the public, according to a new study by UCLA researchers.
20174
Red algae proteins grafted into tobacco double plant growth
Cornell researchers have successfully transferred key regions of a highly efficient red algae into a tobacco plant to dramatically improve plant productivity and increase carbon sequestration.
20175
How fast should you accelerate your kid in math?
We thought we were accelerating fast enough. Turns out we weren't.
20176
Gzip beats BERT? Part 2: dataset issues, improved speed, and results
Summary : Update to my last post analyzing the gzip+knn paper. Some of the datasets have heavily contaminated train/test tests. I show some ways to significantly speed-up the gzip method. I present more results of my "fair" reimplementation .
20177
Functions are vectors
Conceptualizing functions as infinite-dimensional vectors lets us apply the tools of linear algebra to a vast landscape of new problems, from image and geometry processing to curve fitting and machine learning.
20178
Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Redis
Personal website of Phil Booth
20179
Critical theory is radicalizing high school debate
New rhetorical tactics are creating a generation of nihilists
20180
Cyberdecks (2013)
Article about the philosophy of custom made computers without displays, usually known as decks.
20181
What happened to Vivaldi Social?
A deep dive into the events of Saturday 8 July 2023, when user accounts started disappearing from the Vivaldi Social Mastodon instance.
20182
IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)
An article on why IRC is still the only chat protocol worth using, and a positive look at the surprisingly autistic-friendly Microsoft Comic Chat IRC client.
20183
So you want to build your own open source chatbot
A small team within Mozilla’s innovation group recently undertook a hackathon to build a trustworthy internal chatbot prototype.
20184
Using C++ as a scripting language, part 8
Improving API function calls using inline assembly
20185
IBM Blue Lightning: World’s Fastest 386? (2014)
One of the OS/2 Museum’s vintage boards is a genuine Made in U.S.A. Alaris Cougar. These boards were produced by IBM for Alaris and are a bit unusual: There’s a small IBM DLC3 processor in plastic package soldered on board, and there’s also a Socket 2 which accepts regular 5-Volt 486DX/SX processors or a Pentium…
20186
LPython: Novel, Fast, Retargetable Python Compiler
About LPython is a Python compiler that can compile type-annotated Python code to optimized machine code. LPython offers several backends such as LLVM, C, C++, WASM, Julia and x86. LPython features quick compilation and runtime performance, as we show in the benchmarks in this blog. LPython also offers Just-In-Time…
20187
The U.K. government is close to eroding encryption worldwide
The U.K. Parliament is pushing ahead with a sprawling internet regulation bill that will, among other things, undermine the privacy of people around the world. The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backdoors into messaging…
20188
Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
Allowing more unsupervised free play is among the most powerful and least expensive ways to bring down rates of mental illness
20189
20190
An ultra-sensitive on-off switch helps axolotls regrow limbs
Stanford Medicine researchers discover an "on-off" switch that powers tissue regeneration in axolotls, a type of salamander.