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Making Hard Things Easy
New talk: Making Hard Things Easy
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,299 posts.
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First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
Vesuvius Challenge \$700,000 Grand Prize “now definitely achievable”
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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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Taking over a Dead IoT Company
5 years after NYCTrainSign collapsed, I investigate why the company failed and end up writing an exploit to take over their fleet.
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Htmx is part of the GitHub Accelerator
htmx gives you access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext htmx is small (~14k min.gz’d), dependency-free, extendable, IE11 compatible & has reduced code base sizes by 67% when…
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So you've installed `fzf` – now what?
Software engineers are, if not unique, then darn near unique in the ease with which we can create tools to improve our own professional lives; this however can …
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Datomic is Free
Nubank is making all editions of Datomic free of licensing fees, released under Apache 2.0 and available directly from Maven Central, no signup required.
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GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
GitHub Copilot is evolving to bring chat and voice interfaces, support pull requests, answer questions, and adopt OpenAI's GPT-4.
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What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?
Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.
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Bun v1.0.0
Bun is stable and ready for production.
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Smartphones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm
Nitrokey security research reveals that smartphones with Qualcomm chips secretly send device data to Qualcomm without user consent. NitroPhone is not affected.
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I accidentally saved my company half a million dollars
I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I've made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.
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Modules, not microservices
Dissecting why everybody keeps talking about microservices.
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Bing AI can't be trusted
Microsoft knowingly released a broken product for short-term hype
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Beeper Mini is back
Bug fixes and other improvements We’ve created an updated version of Beeper Mini that fixes an issue that caused messages not to be sent or received. You can get the update directly from beep…
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(next Rich)
It is with a mixture of heartache and optimism that I announce today my (long planned) retirement from commercial software development, and my employment at Nubank. It’s been thrilling to see Clojure and Datomic successfully applied at scale.
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Draggable objects
Many of my interactive pages have a draggable object . I want the reader to move the object around, and I want the diagram to respond in some way. Here I’ll document the code I use to make this work with both mouse and touch input, using browser features that are widely supported since 2020. Here’s a common case I…
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Federal judge: Border searches of cell phones require a warrant
With United States v. Smith (S.D.N.Y. May 11, 2023), a district court judge in New York made history by being the first court to rule that a warrant is required for a cell phone search at the border, “absent exigent circumstances” (although other district courts have wanted to do so).EFF is...
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What I learned getting acquired by Google
Our 10 person startup gets acquired by Google, we rebuild our product the Google way, and begin to understand that amazing things are possible at Google, if you play the Google game
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Attention Is Off By One
Let’s fix these pesky Transformer outliers using Softmax One and QuietAttention.
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Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max feature groundbreaking technologies that deliver dramatically increased performance and unleash new capabilities for Mac.
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Digitec Galaxus now displays warranty score and return rate
Digitec Galaxus is blazing a trail. The Swiss online retailer now displays how often customers return products, how often products break during the warranty period and how long it takes for a warranty claim to be settled. With that, Galaxus and Digitec now serve as a reference work for the product and service quality…
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How to own an airline in 3 easy steps and grab the TSA nofly list along the way
and grab the TSA nofly list along the way
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My $500M Mars rover mistake
Some mistakes feel worse than death.
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The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge
This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport . It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there? It's not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn't connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built?
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My favourite API is a zipfile on the European Central Bank's website
Simple data pipeline powertools: sqlite, pandas, gnuplot and friends
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Meta plans to lay off 10k employees
Mark Zuckerberg announces steps to make Meta a better technology company and improve our financial performance.
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Bug in macOS 14 Sonoma prevents our app from working
The macOS 14 Sonoma betas and release candidate contain a bug that causes the firewall to not filter traffic correctly. As a result, our app does not work.
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A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy
Cambridge University Press is publishing a textbook I have co-edited with five colleagues, Shaken Baby Syndrome, Investigating the Abusive Head Trauma Controversy, by Findley et al. With contributions by 32 authors, this book provides a thorough analysis of an interdisciplinary subject lying at the intersection of…