Volvo Gave Away the Most Important Design They Ever Patented
In 1959, Volvo invented the 3 point seat belt we use today. Then they gave the design away for all other car manufacturers to use for free.
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,857 posts.
In 1959, Volvo invented the 3 point seat belt we use today. Then they gave the design away for all other car manufacturers to use for free.
All I can say is “wow”! The response to Light Table has been far more positive and far greater than I could’ve imagined. To put it into perspective, here are some aggregated numbers at the time of this writing:
We'll explain the concepts underlying LLVM IR, and how you can use the LLVM C++ API in your programming language's compiler.
What a sad week. Rob Pike reports that Dennis Ritchie also has passed away. Ritchie was one of the pioneers of computer science, and a well-deserved Turing winner for his many contributions, notabl…
This page contains entries for the year 2026 . Other years are available in the Devlog archive page .
The costs of some parts of solar farms will drop to near zero. But some obstacles remain to make this energy cheaply available everywhere. As a result, the entire energy industry will change. What are those obstacles? How will the industry change?
AI systems are no longer just specialized research tools: they’re everyday academic companions. As AIs integrate more deeply into educational environments, we need to consider important questions about learning, assessment, and skill development. Until now, most discussions have relied on surveys and controlled…
Exploring the chardet v7.0.0 controversy: Can an AI rewrite legally 'launder' a library from LGPL to MIT?
I figured they, and others, could benefit from an explanation. The full details of an industrial-strength spell corrector are quite complex (you can read a little about it here or here ). But I figured that in the course of a transcontinental plane ride I could write and explain a toy spelling corrector that achieves…
Do we have any idea how many people there are in the world?
dmitriid: My favorite theory (which is yet to be challenged) is that modern car interfaces are designed by people who have never even seen a car in their entire life.
We are excited to begin rolling out the new version of Messenger on iOS. To make the Messenger iOS app faster, smaller, and simpler, we rebuilt the architecture and rewrote the entire codebase, whi…
The M1 is the beginning of a paradigm shift, which will benefit RISC-V microprocessors, but not the way you think.
A note from the author This is an older version of this story, from 2007. Here's the latest version, from 2022. Tim already had his bag and overcoat on and his keys in his hand and was about to leave when Diane stopped him at the door. "I just got this thing working....
The new pi has been released and it has a USB Type-C connector for power however people are finding some chargers are not working with it (notably macbook chargers). Some have speculated that this is due to a manufacturer limitation on the power supplies however it is actually due to the incorrect detection circuitry…
"I learned Zig in a weekend! …Six hours! …6µs!" say the blissful lizards. Followed by something to the effect of, "It’s easy to pick up because the syntax is so simple."
From the Zed Blog: Powerful AI-assisted coding powered by Anthropic's Claude, now available.
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Earlier this month, employees at more than 1,000 companies saw one or two paycheck’s worth of funds deducted from their bank accounts after the CEO of their cloud payroll provider absconded with $35 million in payroll and tax deposits from customers . On Monday, the CEO was arrested and allegedly confessed that the…
Discover how Anki can enhance your memory and productivity in computer science and maths. Learn techniques from G-Research's expert insights.
The frozen pizza aisle has become the national security risk du jour
Edward Snowden recently released his memoirs. In some parts of the Internet, this has rekindled an ancient debate: namely, was it all worth it? Did Snowden’s leaks make us better off, or did …
This PEP proposed a list of standard library modules to be removed from the standard library. The modules are mostly historic data formats (e.g. Commodore and SUN file formats), APIs and operating systems that have been superseded a long time ago (e.g. ...
NVIDIA and Mellanox today announced that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Mellanox.
Stop Using Fandom 2024-06-16 fandom is a wiki website (allegedly) if you are unfortunate enough to browse a fandom wiki without an ad blocker, you will experience what i like to call "attention assault" upon opening a fandom page (for me, it was the hollow knight wiki), you will note the very subtle aroma of a 1/3…
Nearly every modern smartphone is equipped with an accelerometer, which, as the name implies, is a sensor that measures acceleration. It’s most commonly used for detecting the device’s orientation. It also has many other uses, whether as a game controller in racing games, as a pedometer for counting daily steps, or to…