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Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
thinking about scary things • examples from Wave • examples from elsewhere • finding a buddy • getting the timing right • a list of abyss questions
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,863 posts.
12932
Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’
It’s not just that Isaacson was wrong about *something*; it’s that he was wrong about the most important thing in Jobs’s career. There’s a decades-long story arc about the software system started at NeXT that Isaacson completely misses.
12933
Firefox 36.0 released
We'd also like to extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who contributed to this release of Firefox!
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Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people? English adults under 60 who have watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie are dying at twice the rate of people who have watched the 2021 Ghostbusters move the same age.And have been for six months. The chart may seem unbelievable or impossible but it is correct…
12938
Making any integer with four 2s
There's a cute math puzzle that can be interesting to folks on very different levels:
12939
Making 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro GA, and introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro are now generally available, and we’re introducing 2.5 Flash-Lite, our most cost-efficient and fastest 2.5 model yet.
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Loss of myelin is one of the major factors of age-related brain deterioration
A new study led by the University of Portsmouth has identified that one of the major factors of age-related brain deterioration is the loss of a substance called myelin.
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Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts
I called a large company the other day. Did I know the information I wanted could be found on their website? And was I aware that I could manage my account online? And would I like to receive a link to chat with their AI assistant via WhatsApp? Naturally, call volumes were higher than expected. I can only assume that…
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There is one, and only one strain of SARS-CoV-2
The moment a preprint emerges describing a new patient isolate of SARS-CoV-2, with a change in the genome sequence, the world seems to explode with concern ...
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Mickey, Disney, and the public domain: A 95-year love triangle
Center for the Study of the Public Domain2023368 points208 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle by Jennifer Jenkins, Director, Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain On January 1, 2024, after almost a century of copyright protection, Mickey Mouse, or at least a version of Mickey Mouse, will enter the United States public domain. The first…
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GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search
Following our opt-in preview last year, we are excited to release sub-issues, issue types and advanced search for issues to everyone! 🎉 Thank you to everyone who opted-in and gave…
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Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags
Complex software is, to put it mildly, hard to get right (for details, see almost any other posting on this or any other security blog). Especially for gadgets that are rich with microphones, cameras, location and environmental sensors, and communication links (such as, you know, smartphones), errors and security…
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Joel Spolsky: Lunch
What do you do for lunch every day? Where do you eat it? With whom? I’ve been on teams that eat together every day, and it’s awesome. I’ve been on teams that don’t, and lunch every day is, at best,…
12947
Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
I reverse-engineered Waffle House's website to build a live version of the (unofficial) Waffle House Index, and got a cease and desist for it.
12948
Modern SAT solvers: fast, neat and underused
Before I started doing research, I saw SAT solvers as academically interesting but without practical uses ouside of other academic applications. I've since then changed my mind, and I want to change yours, because modern SAT solvers are neat, fast and almost criminally underused by the industry.
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Perplexity Deep Research
Deep Research accelerates question answering by completing in 2-4 minutes what would take a human expert many hours.
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Using Silk Road
History, background, visiting, ordering, using, & analyzing the drug market Silk Road 1
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The Inconsistency of Arithmetic (2011)
Note: These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards . They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in…
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Find anything fast with Google's vector search technology
Recently, Google Cloud partner Groovenauts, Inc. published a live demo of MatchIt Fast . As the demo shows, you can find images and text similar to a selected sample from a collection of millions in a matter of milliseconds:
12954
Bose founder, Amar Bose, has died at 83
Entrepreneur served on faculty for 45 years; championed long-term corporate research.
12955
How to draw software architecture diagrams (2022)
D2 is a modern DSL that turns text to diagrams.
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Google Broke Image Search for Creative Commons
Except me. As of one minute ago I confirmed what I noticed last Wednesday. According to the all seeing Google, on the entire world wide web there are but three Creative Commons licensed images of a…
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Cerebras Deploys Trillion-Parameter AI Models
Learn how Cerebras maps trillion-parameter frontier models across WSE-3T wafers to deliver scalable inference at 1,000–2,000+ tokens per second.
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Language models pack billions of concepts into 12k dimensions
In a recent 3Blue1Brown video series on transformer models, Grant Sanderson posed a fascinating question: How can a relatively modest embedding space of 12,288 dimensions (GPT-3) accommodate millions of distinct real-world concepts? The answer lies at the intersection of high-dimensional geometry and a remarkable…