Hasty Briefsbeta

Bilingual

Power without accountability: The Palantir manifesto
6 hours ago
- Elite tech billionaires now seek political power and philosophical esteem while avoiding accountability.
- Silicon Valley's manifestos reveal their goals, values, and enemies, influencing governance through financial and platform control.
- Palantir's manifesto advocates a fusion of government and tech power, reducing oversight and promoting authoritarian technofascism.
- The manifesto calls for defending Western culture and military dominance, aligning with right-wing ethno-nationalist views.
- There's a double standard in accountability: civil servants face scorn while tech elites in government are praised.
- Palantir's growth relies on government contracts, AI, immigration enforcement, and close ties to Trump's administration.
- Critics label the manifesto as technofascist, urging governments to divest from Palantir and regulate tech power.
- The manifesto's incoherence reflects self-serving pleas for grace for tech elites but not for public servants.
- Palantir's worldview and business model are intertwined, promoting policies that increase profitability, like AI arms races and surveillance.
- The manifesto's subtext reveals right-wing biases, such as attacking 'wokeness' and portraying tech elites as victims.
Show HN: No JavaScript Club
12 hours ago
- JavaScript is criticized as harmful to the web, with hyperbolic claims about its negative impact.
- Documents should rely on semantic HTML and optional CSS, allowing readers control over presentation, rather than forcing JavaScript.
- Web applications are acceptable, but websites should avoid JavaScript unless for optional functionality, and sites must be JavaScript-free to join the No JS Club.
- The site continues the legacy of a previous No-JS club and includes a list of member sites that do not use JavaScript.
Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their
2 hours ago
- Meta launched AI software tracking US employees' keystrokes and mouse movements for AI training, causing internal backlash.
- Employees expressed discomfort and questioned privacy, with Meta CTO stating no opt-out option on work laptops, but safeguards are in place for sensitive content.
- The tool is limited to work applications like Gmail and Metamate, applies only to computers not phones, and is part of Meta's broader AI initiatives.
Context Is Software, Weights Are Hardware
3 days ago
- Increasing context window length and improving KV cache compression represent a popular approach to continual learning in LLMs, focusing on in-context learning rather than weight updates.
- Context (via the KV cache) and weights both shape activations in transformers, serving similar functions: in-context learning causes temporary shifts, while fine-tuning leads to permanent changes in internal representations.
- Weights act like hardware, defining computational capabilities, while context functions as software running on that hardware; weight modification adds new "instructions," enabling computations beyond the pretrained model's original scope.
- Long context is effective for tasks within the pretraining distribution but hits a ceiling when requiring representations not covered, such as domain-specific knowledge or unique patterns, where weight updates excel.
- Weight modification offers advantages in inference cost (O(1) vs. O(n) for context), compression (small adapters vs. large token sequences), and composability (cumulative updates vs. single-step approximations).
- The brain's memory systems (hippocampus for fast, temporary memory and neocortex for slow, persistent storage) provide a biological analogy, suggesting complementary roles for context and weight-based learning.
- Future development should integrate both methods: longer context for working memory and weight-space learning for accumulating persistent, generalizable knowledge, as neither alone is sufficient for comprehensive continual learning.
All your agents are going async
2 days ago
- Agents are shifting from synchronous interactions to background, asynchronous operations.
- Traditional HTTP-based transport fails for async agents due to decoupled lifetimes of agent work and HTTP connections.
- Scenarios like agent outliving caller, unprompted pushes, caller changes, and multi-human sessions highlight HTTP limitations.
- Solutions like OpenClaw use external chat providers for durable transport, while Anthropic and Cloudflare focus on durable state storage.
- A durable session primitive combining transport and state is needed for resilient, multi-device async agent interactions.
Pandas feels clunky coming from R. What about Haskell?
6 hours ago
- The author compares data manipulation across R, pandas, and Haskell, focusing on clunkiness and type safety.
- R offers a concise and SQL-like API, making data operations straightforward and readable.
- Pandas becomes clunky with complex operations, requiring more boilerplate and leaking implementation details.
- Haskell's dataframe libraries (like Frames) provide compile-time safety but can be verbose with boilerplate.
- Using TemplateHaskell in Haskell can reduce fragility and improve ergonomics, balancing safety and usability.
- The trade-off between safety and usability is highlighted, showing that well-designed abstractions can offer both.
- Haskell's typed approach can catch errors at compile time, unlike runtime failures in dynamic languages.
- The discussion emphasizes that clunkiness depends on API design and user familiarity with the tool.
What Async Promised and What It Delivered
5 hours ago
- OS threads are expensive due to memory and scheduling overhead, leading to the C10K problem for high-concurrency systems.
- Callbacks solve resource issues by using event loops but cause callback hell, fractured error handling, and lack cancellation.
- Promises/futures improve ergonomics with composable chains and consolidated error handling, but introduce one-shot limitations and silent errors.
- Async/await makes asynchronous code look sequential, improving readability, but leads to function coloring, ecosystem fragmentation, and parallelization traps.
- Each wave (callbacks, promises, async/await) solves previous problems but introduces new structural costs, affecting codebases and ecosystems.
Rock carving facts – Tanum Sweden
2 days ago
- Rock carvings in Tanum are from 1700-300 BCE, made by hammering with stones, depicting themes of power, ritual, and warrior ideals rather than daily life.
- Over 600 sites exist, now inland but originally near the coastline due to post-glacial rebound; ships are common motifs, reflecting the importance of water travel in Bronze Age culture.
- Common motifs include cup marks, ships, humans, and animals; interpretation focuses on why they were made, revealing insights into Bronze Age society.
- Age is determined by comparing carvings to archaeological finds, using radiocarbon dating, studying overlapping images (overcuts), and considering post-glacial rebound effects.
- First documented in 1751, systematic studies began in the 19th century; known carvings in Bohuslän increased from 1,200 in 1969 to nearly 4,200 by 2023.
- Local populations likely knew carvings long before scholarly recognition, with cup marks part of folklore; many carvings remain undiscovered due to landscape changes.
- Carvings are often shallow and weathered; about ten sites are painted for visibility, though not authentically; viewing tips include using side light in dark or wet conditions.
XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?
4 hours ago
- XOR instruction is most compact for zeroing a register on x86, avoiding encoding a constant.
- SUB encodes to same bytes and cycles as XOR but leaves AF flag cleared; XOR leaves AF undefined.
- Historical popularity of XOR may be due to early compiler adoption, creating a snowball effect.
- Intel added special detection for XOR and SUB to bypass execution and break dependency chains.
- Concerns about CPU manufacturers supporting XOR but not SUB give XOR a slight edge.
- The XOR trick doesn't work on Itanium, which has a dedicated zero register.
- Some early processors or manuals may have favored XOR for performance or recommendation reasons.
From one disappointing order to a massive 'ghost cake' delivery scandal in China
5 hours ago
- A nationwide investigation in China uncovered over 67,000 'ghost' food vendors selling millions of cakes through fake licenses and no physical stores, following a customer complaint about a disappointing cake.
- Seven major delivery platforms, including PDD, Alibaba, Douyin, Meituan, and JD.com, were fined a total of 3.6 billion yuan for failing to protect customers and verify vendor licenses, with PDD receiving the largest penalty due to resistance.
- The probe revealed a shadow supply chain where orders were resold on intermediary platforms for low bids, sacrificing food quality and safety, highlighting issues from intense price competition known as 'involution'.
- Regulators faced obstruction from delivery platforms, including employees passing notes to stay silent, violent confrontations, and feigned medical emergencies, complicating the investigation.
- Beijing's anti-involution campaign aims to curb unhealthy price wars that harm quality and profitability, with initial effects noted, though recovery remains distant.
Clarus, Moofo, and Lackey
3 days ago
- Moof! is the sound made by the dogcow, a legendary creature from Apple's early Macintosh development.
- The dogcow originated from an icon in the Cairo font designed by Susan Kare, later adapted for the Page Setup dialog.
- A debate arose at Apple over whether the image was a dog or a cow, leading to the compromise term 'dogcow'.
- Mark Harlan popularized the dogcow through internal memos, Tech Note 31, and merchandise like buttons and T-shirts.
- Dogcow names include Clarus, Moofo, and Lackey; Moof! is the sound, not a name, though often misunderstood.
- Moof! in Mind symbolizes a creative, irreverent attitude in software development, representing hacks and cutting-edge work.
- The dogcow became a symbol for unofficial or experimental Apple software, promoted through Developer CD-ROMs.
We OCR'ed 30k papers using Codex, open OCR models and Jobs
a day ago
- Researchers can claim papers via Hugging Face accounts, link models, datasets, and spaces, upvote, comment, and tag organizations.
- HuggingChat integration allows chatting with papers using HTML converted to Markdown, but 27,000 papers lacked HTML, requiring OCR.
- Used OlmOCRBench to select Chandra-OCR 2 as the best open OCR model for converting documents to Markdown.
- Leveraged Hugging Face Jobs with vLLM on GPUs for scalable processing; chose L40S GPUs for cost and speed efficiency.
- Codex automated script creation for OCR processing, managed 16 parallel jobs, and estimated costs at $850 vs. higher API alternatives.
- Switched to writing results to mounted Hugging Face Buckets via hf-mount for faster, git-free storage integration.
- Completed OCR of 27,000 papers in about 30 hours, enabling chat functionality for all papers on the hub.
Details that make interfaces feel better
a day ago
- Use text-wrap: balance for titles to distribute text evenly across lines.
- Apply text-wrap: pretty for paragraphs to prevent orphaned words.
- Implement concentric offset for nested elements by calculating outer radius as inner radius plus padding.
- Animate opacity, scale, and blur on icons for smoother contextual transitions, using tools like Motion for spring animations.
- Set -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased (or antialiased in Tailwind) on macOS for crisper text rendering.
- Use font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums (tabular-nums in Tailwind) to prevent number shifting and ensure equal digit width.
- Prefer CSS transitions over keyframe animations for interruptible user interactions, as transitions interpolate to the latest state.
- Break enter animations into smaller chunks, animating elements individually with staggered delays for opacity, blur, and translateY effects.
- Make exit animations subtler than enter animations, using reduced movement and attention-demanding properties.
- Optically align items instead of geometrically when needed, especially for icons or text with icons, using margin or padding adjustments.
- Replace borders with subtle box-shadow for depth, using multiple shadows and transitioning with transition-shadow.
- Add a 1px black or white outline with 10% opacity to images for depth and a consistent outline, adjusting for dark mode.
KDE at 30
9 hours ago
- KDE is celebrating its 30th anniversary, marking three decades of community-driven software development focused on user control, privacy, and freedom.
- Users are encouraged to participate in anniversary events, organize local parties, and contribute through donations or by becoming Supporting Members to ensure financial stability for future projects.
- KDE highlights its environmental initiative '30 for 30,' urging people to undertake eco-friendly actions like planting trees or upcycling electronics, and shares trivia such as its role in Mars rover missions and the development of web browser engines.
Al Killed the TikTok Star and Every Job Imaginable
21 hours ago
- The author feels uncertainty about the future, particularly regarding AI's impact on the economy and job market.
- AI could disrupt employment faster than adaptation, potentially causing market dislocations due to reduced consumer spending.
- A split economy may emerge: an AI-driven sector for cheap goods/services, and a human-presence economy for artisanal, trust-based, or experiential goods.
- Universal Basic Income (UBI) could address income loss but fails to provide the non-monetary benefits of work, like structure and identity.
- School-like structures could offer post-work adults community, purpose, and status, funded by stipends on top of UBI.
- Society may divide into thirds: those thriving independently, those benefiting from structured programs, and those living diminished, screen-heavy lives.
- Progress historically trends toward utopia, and future generations may view today's challenges as 'first-world problems'.
- The author hopes his children develop skills for a post-work world, such as internal motivation and community-building abilities.
Chernobyl and Fukushima show how radioactive materials move in the environment
8 hours ago
- Nuclear accidents release radionuclides, but their behavior varies: some decay quickly, while others like iodine, cesium, strontium, and plutonium persist, causing long-term health and environmental harm.
- Radiation spreads through air, soil, and water; soil composition affects mobility, and contamination enters food chains (e.g., via grass to cows' milk), but monitoring and dilution in oceans can reduce risks over time.
- Scientific instruments like Geiger counters and mapping systems enable precise measurement and visualization of radiation, supporting safety decisions and environmental protection programs in many countries.
- Cleanup methods include soil removal, containment barriers (e.g., clean soil or concrete covers), and chemical treatments (e.g., potassium fertilizers) to limit radionuclide uptake, guided by computer models to minimize exposure.
- Long-term studies, such as in Chernobyl's exclusion zone, reveal how environmental factors influence radionuclide migration over decades, improving emergency response and remediation strategies worldwide.
- Clear, timely, and transparent communication is critical after nuclear accidents to reduce public confusion and mistrust, though past disasters often suffered from delayed or inconsistent information.
Hunting a 34 year old pointer bug in EtherSlip (DOS Networking)
3 days ago
- The author revisited SLIP connections between DOS and Linux, noting that EtherSLIP emulates Ethernet for compatibility with DOS packet drivers.
- During testing, Telnet exhibited slow performance and packet drops due to a hardware issue, and upon exit, displayed a 'NULL assignment detected' error from Open Watcom compiler runtime.
- The error indicated corruption in the first 32 bytes of the data segment, leading the author to add trace points and create a nullCheck function to monitor memory during runtime.
- Debugging revealed the corruption occurred after a packet driver interrupt call, with six bytes matching the MAC address of the simulated Ethernet device from EtherSLIP.
- Analysis of EtherSLIP's assembly code uncovered a bug in ARP response simulation where segment registers were incorrectly set, causing data to be written to the wrong memory location.
- The bug involved copying MAC addresses in ARP handling, where DS was erroneously copied into ES, leading to writes near the data segment start instead of the intended buffer.
- Factors like infrequent ARP requests, compiler optimizations, and memory layout variations allowed the bug to remain hidden for years.
- The author fixed the bug by removing the incorrect segment copy and suggested improvements to mTCP to avoid ARP requests on SLIP connections.
- The incident underscores the importance of heeding compiler warnings and thoroughly debugging to prevent obscure issues in legacy systems.
Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment
a day ago
- NASA's Curiosity rover identified over 20 organic compounds in Mars rock samples from Gale Crater, including a nitrogen-bearing molecule similar to DNA-building chemicals.
- The discovery, published in Nature Communications, suggests Mars can preserve complex organic material for billions of years, hinting at past habitable conditions, though it's not direct evidence of life.
- Scientists used the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument with a chemical called TMAH to break down larger molecules, revealing organic chemistry that might otherwise remain hidden.
- One compound, benzothiophene, is linked to material from meteorites, indicating similar building blocks for life may have rained down on both Mars and Earth.
- The findings could guide future missions to search for organic compounds on Mars and Titan, showing Mars preserves complex organics that might be diagnostic of life.
The largest randomized controlled trial of leading longevity drug is underway
18 hours ago
- A new clinical trial at the University of Arizona is the largest and longest randomized controlled trial of low-dose rapamycin in healthy older adults to date.
- Rapamycin, historically used as an immunosuppressant for transplant patients, is being re-evaluated as a modulator of aging pathways at low doses.
- The trial will involve 720 participants aged 65+ and will administer 8 mg of rapamycin once weekly for two years, followed by one year of follow-up.
- Primary endpoints include transition from pre-frail to frail state and reduction in IL-6 levels to measure impact on aging-related inflammation.
- An extensive biomarker panel will assess epigenetic age, immune function, metabolic health, and physical function.
- Preliminary pharmacokinetic studies in 50 participants confirmed safety, with trough levels below immunosuppressive thresholds and no significant adverse events.
- The trial aims to determine if rapamycin slows biological aging and improves healthspan, addressing long-term safety and heterogeneity of response.
AI was ruining my college philosophy classes. So I assigned a new kind of essay
11 hours ago
- A philosophy professor at the University of Chicago redesigned essay assignments to combat AI-generated cheating by having students collaborate on a single, class-wide essay.
- The approach involved the professor acting as a co-writer and 'Philosopher King,' guiding continuous discussions, revisions, and collective decision-making with students.
- Students chose their essay topic through voting and a coin flip, ultimately selecting artificial intelligence as the subject, and produced a 10,000-word philosophical essay together.
- Feedback from students was overwhelmingly positive, with many noting increased effort, deeper learning, and a sense of doing 'real' philosophy rather than just working for a grade.
- The professor recommends this collaborative method to other educators as a way to preserve the essay format, engage students authentically, and reduce reliance on AI tools.

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Bilingual

Power without accountability: The Palantir manifesto
6 hours ago
- Elite tech billionaires now seek political power and philosophical esteem while avoiding accountability.
- Silicon Valley's manifestos reveal their goals, values, and enemies, influencing governance through financial and platform control.
- Palantir's manifesto advocates a fusion of government and tech power, reducing oversight and promoting authoritarian technofascism.
- The manifesto calls for defending Western culture and military dominance, aligning with right-wing ethno-nationalist views.
- There's a double standard in accountability: civil servants face scorn while tech elites in government are praised.
- Palantir's growth relies on government contracts, AI, immigration enforcement, and close ties to Trump's administration.
- Critics label the manifesto as technofascist, urging governments to divest from Palantir and regulate tech power.
- The manifesto's incoherence reflects self-serving pleas for grace for tech elites but not for public servants.
- Palantir's worldview and business model are intertwined, promoting policies that increase profitability, like AI arms races and surveillance.
- The manifesto's subtext reveals right-wing biases, such as attacking 'wokeness' and portraying tech elites as victims.
Show HN: No JavaScript Club
12 hours ago
- JavaScript is criticized as harmful to the web, with hyperbolic claims about its negative impact.
- Documents should rely on semantic HTML and optional CSS, allowing readers control over presentation, rather than forcing JavaScript.
- Web applications are acceptable, but websites should avoid JavaScript unless for optional functionality, and sites must be JavaScript-free to join the No JS Club.
- The site continues the legacy of a previous No-JS club and includes a list of member sites that do not use JavaScript.
Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their
2 hours ago
- Meta launched AI software tracking US employees' keystrokes and mouse movements for AI training, causing internal backlash.
- Employees expressed discomfort and questioned privacy, with Meta CTO stating no opt-out option on work laptops, but safeguards are in place for sensitive content.
- The tool is limited to work applications like Gmail and Metamate, applies only to computers not phones, and is part of Meta's broader AI initiatives.
Context Is Software, Weights Are Hardware
3 days ago
- Increasing context window length and improving KV cache compression represent a popular approach to continual learning in LLMs, focusing on in-context learning rather than weight updates.
- Context (via the KV cache) and weights both shape activations in transformers, serving similar functions: in-context learning causes temporary shifts, while fine-tuning leads to permanent changes in internal representations.
- Weights act like hardware, defining computational capabilities, while context functions as software running on that hardware; weight modification adds new "instructions," enabling computations beyond the pretrained model's original scope.
- Long context is effective for tasks within the pretraining distribution but hits a ceiling when requiring representations not covered, such as domain-specific knowledge or unique patterns, where weight updates excel.
- Weight modification offers advantages in inference cost (O(1) vs. O(n) for context), compression (small adapters vs. large token sequences), and composability (cumulative updates vs. single-step approximations).
- The brain's memory systems (hippocampus for fast, temporary memory and neocortex for slow, persistent storage) provide a biological analogy, suggesting complementary roles for context and weight-based learning.
- Future development should integrate both methods: longer context for working memory and weight-space learning for accumulating persistent, generalizable knowledge, as neither alone is sufficient for comprehensive continual learning.
All your agents are going async
2 days ago
- Agents are shifting from synchronous interactions to background, asynchronous operations.
- Traditional HTTP-based transport fails for async agents due to decoupled lifetimes of agent work and HTTP connections.
- Scenarios like agent outliving caller, unprompted pushes, caller changes, and multi-human sessions highlight HTTP limitations.
- Solutions like OpenClaw use external chat providers for durable transport, while Anthropic and Cloudflare focus on durable state storage.
- A durable session primitive combining transport and state is needed for resilient, multi-device async agent interactions.
Pandas feels clunky coming from R. What about Haskell?
6 hours ago
- The author compares data manipulation across R, pandas, and Haskell, focusing on clunkiness and type safety.
- R offers a concise and SQL-like API, making data operations straightforward and readable.
- Pandas becomes clunky with complex operations, requiring more boilerplate and leaking implementation details.
- Haskell's dataframe libraries (like Frames) provide compile-time safety but can be verbose with boilerplate.
- Using TemplateHaskell in Haskell can reduce fragility and improve ergonomics, balancing safety and usability.
- The trade-off between safety and usability is highlighted, showing that well-designed abstractions can offer both.
- Haskell's typed approach can catch errors at compile time, unlike runtime failures in dynamic languages.
- The discussion emphasizes that clunkiness depends on API design and user familiarity with the tool.
What Async Promised and What It Delivered
5 hours ago
- OS threads are expensive due to memory and scheduling overhead, leading to the C10K problem for high-concurrency systems.
- Callbacks solve resource issues by using event loops but cause callback hell, fractured error handling, and lack cancellation.
- Promises/futures improve ergonomics with composable chains and consolidated error handling, but introduce one-shot limitations and silent errors.
- Async/await makes asynchronous code look sequential, improving readability, but leads to function coloring, ecosystem fragmentation, and parallelization traps.
- Each wave (callbacks, promises, async/await) solves previous problems but introduces new structural costs, affecting codebases and ecosystems.
Rock carving facts – Tanum Sweden
2 days ago
- Rock carvings in Tanum are from 1700-300 BCE, made by hammering with stones, depicting themes of power, ritual, and warrior ideals rather than daily life.
- Over 600 sites exist, now inland but originally near the coastline due to post-glacial rebound; ships are common motifs, reflecting the importance of water travel in Bronze Age culture.
- Common motifs include cup marks, ships, humans, and animals; interpretation focuses on why they were made, revealing insights into Bronze Age society.
- Age is determined by comparing carvings to archaeological finds, using radiocarbon dating, studying overlapping images (overcuts), and considering post-glacial rebound effects.
- First documented in 1751, systematic studies began in the 19th century; known carvings in Bohuslän increased from 1,200 in 1969 to nearly 4,200 by 2023.
- Local populations likely knew carvings long before scholarly recognition, with cup marks part of folklore; many carvings remain undiscovered due to landscape changes.
- Carvings are often shallow and weathered; about ten sites are painted for visibility, though not authentically; viewing tips include using side light in dark or wet conditions.
XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?
4 hours ago
- XOR instruction is most compact for zeroing a register on x86, avoiding encoding a constant.
- SUB encodes to same bytes and cycles as XOR but leaves AF flag cleared; XOR leaves AF undefined.
- Historical popularity of XOR may be due to early compiler adoption, creating a snowball effect.
- Intel added special detection for XOR and SUB to bypass execution and break dependency chains.
- Concerns about CPU manufacturers supporting XOR but not SUB give XOR a slight edge.
- The XOR trick doesn't work on Itanium, which has a dedicated zero register.
- Some early processors or manuals may have favored XOR for performance or recommendation reasons.
From one disappointing order to a massive 'ghost cake' delivery scandal in China
5 hours ago
- A nationwide investigation in China uncovered over 67,000 'ghost' food vendors selling millions of cakes through fake licenses and no physical stores, following a customer complaint about a disappointing cake.
- Seven major delivery platforms, including PDD, Alibaba, Douyin, Meituan, and JD.com, were fined a total of 3.6 billion yuan for failing to protect customers and verify vendor licenses, with PDD receiving the largest penalty due to resistance.
- The probe revealed a shadow supply chain where orders were resold on intermediary platforms for low bids, sacrificing food quality and safety, highlighting issues from intense price competition known as 'involution'.
- Regulators faced obstruction from delivery platforms, including employees passing notes to stay silent, violent confrontations, and feigned medical emergencies, complicating the investigation.
- Beijing's anti-involution campaign aims to curb unhealthy price wars that harm quality and profitability, with initial effects noted, though recovery remains distant.
Clarus, Moofo, and Lackey
3 days ago
- Moof! is the sound made by the dogcow, a legendary creature from Apple's early Macintosh development.
- The dogcow originated from an icon in the Cairo font designed by Susan Kare, later adapted for the Page Setup dialog.
- A debate arose at Apple over whether the image was a dog or a cow, leading to the compromise term 'dogcow'.
- Mark Harlan popularized the dogcow through internal memos, Tech Note 31, and merchandise like buttons and T-shirts.
- Dogcow names include Clarus, Moofo, and Lackey; Moof! is the sound, not a name, though often misunderstood.
- Moof! in Mind symbolizes a creative, irreverent attitude in software development, representing hacks and cutting-edge work.
- The dogcow became a symbol for unofficial or experimental Apple software, promoted through Developer CD-ROMs.
We OCR'ed 30k papers using Codex, open OCR models and Jobs
a day ago
- Researchers can claim papers via Hugging Face accounts, link models, datasets, and spaces, upvote, comment, and tag organizations.
- HuggingChat integration allows chatting with papers using HTML converted to Markdown, but 27,000 papers lacked HTML, requiring OCR.
- Used OlmOCRBench to select Chandra-OCR 2 as the best open OCR model for converting documents to Markdown.
- Leveraged Hugging Face Jobs with vLLM on GPUs for scalable processing; chose L40S GPUs for cost and speed efficiency.
- Codex automated script creation for OCR processing, managed 16 parallel jobs, and estimated costs at $850 vs. higher API alternatives.
- Switched to writing results to mounted Hugging Face Buckets via hf-mount for faster, git-free storage integration.
- Completed OCR of 27,000 papers in about 30 hours, enabling chat functionality for all papers on the hub.
Details that make interfaces feel better
a day ago
- Use text-wrap: balance for titles to distribute text evenly across lines.
- Apply text-wrap: pretty for paragraphs to prevent orphaned words.
- Implement concentric offset for nested elements by calculating outer radius as inner radius plus padding.
- Animate opacity, scale, and blur on icons for smoother contextual transitions, using tools like Motion for spring animations.
- Set -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased (or antialiased in Tailwind) on macOS for crisper text rendering.
- Use font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums (tabular-nums in Tailwind) to prevent number shifting and ensure equal digit width.
- Prefer CSS transitions over keyframe animations for interruptible user interactions, as transitions interpolate to the latest state.
- Break enter animations into smaller chunks, animating elements individually with staggered delays for opacity, blur, and translateY effects.
- Make exit animations subtler than enter animations, using reduced movement and attention-demanding properties.
- Optically align items instead of geometrically when needed, especially for icons or text with icons, using margin or padding adjustments.
- Replace borders with subtle box-shadow for depth, using multiple shadows and transitioning with transition-shadow.
- Add a 1px black or white outline with 10% opacity to images for depth and a consistent outline, adjusting for dark mode.
KDE at 30
9 hours ago
- KDE is celebrating its 30th anniversary, marking three decades of community-driven software development focused on user control, privacy, and freedom.
- Users are encouraged to participate in anniversary events, organize local parties, and contribute through donations or by becoming Supporting Members to ensure financial stability for future projects.
- KDE highlights its environmental initiative '30 for 30,' urging people to undertake eco-friendly actions like planting trees or upcycling electronics, and shares trivia such as its role in Mars rover missions and the development of web browser engines.
Al Killed the TikTok Star and Every Job Imaginable
21 hours ago
- The author feels uncertainty about the future, particularly regarding AI's impact on the economy and job market.
- AI could disrupt employment faster than adaptation, potentially causing market dislocations due to reduced consumer spending.
- A split economy may emerge: an AI-driven sector for cheap goods/services, and a human-presence economy for artisanal, trust-based, or experiential goods.
- Universal Basic Income (UBI) could address income loss but fails to provide the non-monetary benefits of work, like structure and identity.
- School-like structures could offer post-work adults community, purpose, and status, funded by stipends on top of UBI.
- Society may divide into thirds: those thriving independently, those benefiting from structured programs, and those living diminished, screen-heavy lives.
- Progress historically trends toward utopia, and future generations may view today's challenges as 'first-world problems'.
- The author hopes his children develop skills for a post-work world, such as internal motivation and community-building abilities.
Chernobyl and Fukushima show how radioactive materials move in the environment
8 hours ago
- Nuclear accidents release radionuclides, but their behavior varies: some decay quickly, while others like iodine, cesium, strontium, and plutonium persist, causing long-term health and environmental harm.
- Radiation spreads through air, soil, and water; soil composition affects mobility, and contamination enters food chains (e.g., via grass to cows' milk), but monitoring and dilution in oceans can reduce risks over time.
- Scientific instruments like Geiger counters and mapping systems enable precise measurement and visualization of radiation, supporting safety decisions and environmental protection programs in many countries.
- Cleanup methods include soil removal, containment barriers (e.g., clean soil or concrete covers), and chemical treatments (e.g., potassium fertilizers) to limit radionuclide uptake, guided by computer models to minimize exposure.
- Long-term studies, such as in Chernobyl's exclusion zone, reveal how environmental factors influence radionuclide migration over decades, improving emergency response and remediation strategies worldwide.
- Clear, timely, and transparent communication is critical after nuclear accidents to reduce public confusion and mistrust, though past disasters often suffered from delayed or inconsistent information.
Hunting a 34 year old pointer bug in EtherSlip (DOS Networking)
3 days ago
- The author revisited SLIP connections between DOS and Linux, noting that EtherSLIP emulates Ethernet for compatibility with DOS packet drivers.
- During testing, Telnet exhibited slow performance and packet drops due to a hardware issue, and upon exit, displayed a 'NULL assignment detected' error from Open Watcom compiler runtime.
- The error indicated corruption in the first 32 bytes of the data segment, leading the author to add trace points and create a nullCheck function to monitor memory during runtime.
- Debugging revealed the corruption occurred after a packet driver interrupt call, with six bytes matching the MAC address of the simulated Ethernet device from EtherSLIP.
- Analysis of EtherSLIP's assembly code uncovered a bug in ARP response simulation where segment registers were incorrectly set, causing data to be written to the wrong memory location.
- The bug involved copying MAC addresses in ARP handling, where DS was erroneously copied into ES, leading to writes near the data segment start instead of the intended buffer.
- Factors like infrequent ARP requests, compiler optimizations, and memory layout variations allowed the bug to remain hidden for years.
- The author fixed the bug by removing the incorrect segment copy and suggested improvements to mTCP to avoid ARP requests on SLIP connections.
- The incident underscores the importance of heeding compiler warnings and thoroughly debugging to prevent obscure issues in legacy systems.
Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment
a day ago
- NASA's Curiosity rover identified over 20 organic compounds in Mars rock samples from Gale Crater, including a nitrogen-bearing molecule similar to DNA-building chemicals.
- The discovery, published in Nature Communications, suggests Mars can preserve complex organic material for billions of years, hinting at past habitable conditions, though it's not direct evidence of life.
- Scientists used the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument with a chemical called TMAH to break down larger molecules, revealing organic chemistry that might otherwise remain hidden.
- One compound, benzothiophene, is linked to material from meteorites, indicating similar building blocks for life may have rained down on both Mars and Earth.
- The findings could guide future missions to search for organic compounds on Mars and Titan, showing Mars preserves complex organics that might be diagnostic of life.
The largest randomized controlled trial of leading longevity drug is underway
18 hours ago
- A new clinical trial at the University of Arizona is the largest and longest randomized controlled trial of low-dose rapamycin in healthy older adults to date.
- Rapamycin, historically used as an immunosuppressant for transplant patients, is being re-evaluated as a modulator of aging pathways at low doses.
- The trial will involve 720 participants aged 65+ and will administer 8 mg of rapamycin once weekly for two years, followed by one year of follow-up.
- Primary endpoints include transition from pre-frail to frail state and reduction in IL-6 levels to measure impact on aging-related inflammation.
- An extensive biomarker panel will assess epigenetic age, immune function, metabolic health, and physical function.
- Preliminary pharmacokinetic studies in 50 participants confirmed safety, with trough levels below immunosuppressive thresholds and no significant adverse events.
- The trial aims to determine if rapamycin slows biological aging and improves healthspan, addressing long-term safety and heterogeneity of response.
AI was ruining my college philosophy classes. So I assigned a new kind of essay
11 hours ago
- A philosophy professor at the University of Chicago redesigned essay assignments to combat AI-generated cheating by having students collaborate on a single, class-wide essay.
- The approach involved the professor acting as a co-writer and 'Philosopher King,' guiding continuous discussions, revisions, and collective decision-making with students.
- Students chose their essay topic through voting and a coin flip, ultimately selecting artificial intelligence as the subject, and produced a 10,000-word philosophical essay together.
- Feedback from students was overwhelmingly positive, with many noting increased effort, deeper learning, and a sense of doing 'real' philosophy rather than just working for a grade.
- The professor recommends this collaborative method to other educators as a way to preserve the essay format, engage students authentically, and reduce reliance on AI tools.

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Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment

The largest randomized controlled trial of leading longevity drug is underway

AI was ruining my college philosophy classes. So I assigned a new kind of essay

Power without accountability: The Palantir manifesto

Show HN: No JavaScript Club

Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their

Context Is Software, Weights Are Hardware

All your agents are going async

Pandas feels clunky coming from R. What about Haskell?

What Async Promised and What It Delivered

Rock carving facts – Tanum Sweden

XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?

From one disappointing order to a massive 'ghost cake' delivery scandal in China

Clarus, Moofo, and Lackey

We OCR'ed 30k papers using Codex, open OCR models and Jobs

Details that make interfaces feel better

KDE at 30

Al Killed the TikTok Star and Every Job Imaginable

Chernobyl and Fukushima show how radioactive materials move in the environment

Hunting a 34 year old pointer bug in EtherSlip (DOS Networking)

Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment

The largest randomized controlled trial of leading longevity drug is underway

AI was ruining my college philosophy classes. So I assigned a new kind of essay