2851
Designing a Lego orrery
Designing a Lego orrery - Personal blog about game development, programming and making
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,273 posts.
2852
A Revolution in Biology?
how developmental biology might contain the secrets to life, intelligence, and immortality
2853
2854
The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs
A metascience post of sorts that argues we should take human capital more seriously
2855
Ultrasonic investigations in shopping centres
Many public address systems emit a continuous near-ultrasonic sound that is used for system health monitoring.
2856
I built an ROV to solve missing person cases
Introduction
2857
Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
Why is this economy so difficult to manage? The macro statistics are hiding the experience of being cheated.
2858
So you want to build a browser engine
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
2859
How many High Streets are there in London?
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2860
Dmv.org
The majority of US states have something called a "Department of Motor Vehicles," or DMV. Actually, the universality of the term "DMV" seems to be overstated. A more general term is "motor vehicle administrator," used for example by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators to address the inconsistent…
2861
Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked
What follows is the story of how I fixed not one, but two, different flawed Altera USB Blaster clone devices that never worked correctly after I bought them.
2862
Viagra improves brain blood flow and could help to prevent dementia
A new trial conducted by the University of Oxford reveals that sildenafil, commonly known as Viagra, enhances blood flow to the brain and improves the function of brain blood vessels in patients at a heightened risk of vascular dementia.
2863
Claude's Character
How character training cultivates traits like curiosity, open-mindedness, and thoughtfulness in Claude using a variant of Constitutional AI.
2864
Creating a matchmaker for your multiplayer game
Don't test in production. Test in simulation!
2865
Finding out where syscalls are called from: Stack traces with strace
One of the great strengths of strace as a debugging tool is that it shows you what a program is doing regardless of whether it was compiled with debug info or not. The downside of this is that you …
2866
Anti-patterns in event-driven architecture
Event-driven architecture is great, but it can cause a lot of headaches if it is used for the wrong purpose.
2867
My favorite 1980's Canadian TV show: Bits and Bytes
Reflections on whatever I'm thinking about that week (the web, culture, computer graphics, math etc)
2868
Detecting a PS2 Emulator: When 1*X does not equal X
Using an odd floating point error to detect emulators
2869
The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
Like many bits of Internet Culture, this simple image of an empty series of rooms represents a deep-repressed or recently-remembered memory of a common Internet Legend, or it's just a shot of nothing. If the answer is that it's a shot of nothing, let's get you up to speed. This image floated around message boards
2870
Breaking up is hard to do: Chunking in RAG applications
A look at some of the current thinking around chunking data for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.
2871
Compilers are too smart
Last week I noticed some unexpected assembly code in a function calling std::unordered_map::find (yes, I know, friends don’t let friends use STL, but that is a topic for another discussion). I decided to investigate a bit and it turned out to be quite a journey. It was a Clang compiler, ARM-based platform, I will use…
2872
South Pole Water Infrastructure
Fresh water from snow, at 70 below!
2873
WARC-GPT: An open-source tool for exploring web archives using AI
The Library Innovation Lab is growing knowledge and community by bringing library principles to technological frontiers.
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2875
Yes, you can play Duck Hunt without a television (but I can't)
Duck Hunt is considered a classic of the Nintendo Entertainment System. But surprisingly, the concept of hunting ducks did not originate in 1984– people have...
2876
Feynman’s Razor
If an expert can't understand your explanation, you've dumbed it down too much!
2877
Alarms in medical equipment
ISO/IEC 60601-1-8, Patterson and other alarms in medical equipment Sample Alarm Sounds - Sirens, buzzers and other sounds
2878
Writing memory safe JIT compilers
How to kill off a top source of browser exploits
2879
LedgerStore Supports Trillions of Indexes at Uber
Uber connects the physical and digital worlds to help make movement happen at the tap of a button. Billions of trips, deliveries, and tens of billions of financial transactions across earners, spenders, and merchants are made at Uber every quarter. LedgerStore is an immutable storage solution at Uber that provides…
2880
How Does GPT-4o Encode Images?
Here’s a fact: GPT-4o charges 170 tokens to process each 512x512 tile used in high-res mode. At ~0.75 tokens/word, this suggests a picture is worth about 227 words—only a factor of four off from the traditional saying. (There’s also an 85 tokens charge for a low-res ‘master thumbnail’ of each picture and higher…