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Markdown Now Has a UTI in Apple's Version 27 OSes
5 days ago
- John Gruber highlights Day One, a journaling app with a 4.8 rating.
- Apple's developer beta introduces a new UTI for Markdown: net.daringfireball.markdown, conforming to public.utf8-plain-text.
- Gruber updates his recommendation to public.utf8-plain-text, reflecting the now-universal UTF-8 support.
Show HN: PostgreSQL performance and cost across 23 EC2 instance types
6 days ago
- Choose an AWS instance based on dataset size and throughput needs; select the cheapest option meeting requirements from benchmarked instance-disk combinations.
- The workload for this benchmark is 90% read and 10% write, with a concurrency of 32, using PostgreSQL 17 in the us-east-1 region with on-demand pricing.
- Performance metrics include transactions per second (TPS), latency, and cost per hour; instances like c8i.large and m8g.large offer high TPS at lower costs, while t-series instances are cheaper but less performant.
Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament
5 days ago
- EU Parliament narrowly approves urgency motion to reconsider Chat Control 1.0 before summer break.
- Proponents aim to reinstate expired regulation allowing voluntary scans of private communications for child abuse material without suspicion.
- Critics argue the move violates parliamentary procedure and enables mass surveillance under general suspicion.
- Social Democrats cave to pressure, supporting urgency despite prior rejection of Chat Control extension.
- Tactical advantage for proponents due to lower vote threshold on final session day, making re-enactment likely.
- Concerns raised over AI scan error rates and erosion of privacy, with fears it may delay more effective regulations.
Wikipedia Banned Its Co-Founder Because Its Rules Mostly Work
6 days ago
- Larry Sanger was banned from Wikipedia for canvassing and not contributing to building an encyclopedia, not for proposing WikiProject Intellectual Diversity.
- Wikipedia's existing rules, like verifiability and neutral point of view, already support balanced articles but require patience, research, and cooperation to implement.
- Editors routinely fix bias and disinformation in articles, using layered guidance for sources and dispute resolution processes that work well but demand skill.
- Sanger's advocacy aligns with right-wing campaigns against free information, and his proposals, such as ending administrator anonymity, could undermine intellectual freedom.
- Improving Wikipedia requires intellectual honesty and applying established rules, not bad-faith publicity stunts, and benefits from diverse contributors willing to collaborate.
Show HN: Tarot.free – Free Tarot Readings
6 days ago
- Tarot.Free provides free tarot readings without signup, fees, or ads.
- Users can shuffle a 78-card deck and pull cards quickly for various spreads.
- It features a 'Card of the Day' (e.g., Seven of Wands Reversed) with detailed interpretations.
- The platform explains all 78 cards, including upright and reversed meanings, love and career readings, and yes/no verdicts.
- The process involves holding a question, picking a spread, shuffling, pulling cards, and reading interpretations with shareable links.
- Tarot readings are intended for reflection and entertainment, acting as a mirror rather than a verdict.
A verification loop 4x'd DeepSeek's intelligence, matching Opus at 1/7 the cost
6 days ago
- Verification loops significantly improve coding agents' ability to complete multi-step web development tasks by catching bugs early.
- Using IronBee (a verification layer) with DeepSeek (low-cost model) increased task completion from an average of 6.8 to 17 out of 20 tasks, matching the performance of Claude Opus (frontier model).
- DeepSeek with IronBee achieved similar results to Opus alone but at about 1/7th the cost ($2.4 vs. $15 per run), showing verification can reduce reliance on expensive models.
- The study emphasizes that verification helps most with bugs that only appear when the running application is tested, especially in sequential tasks where early errors compound.
- Limitations include using only one project and model pair initially, with plans to expand testing to more models, projects, and a cost-matched ablation study for broader insights.
Sodium-ion "salt" batteries will revolutionize electric-vehicle and grid storage
5 days ago
- Changan showcased an electric vehicle with a sodium-ion battery under extreme cold conditions (-32°C), highlighting its resilience.
- Sodium-ion batteries are made from abundant salt, potentially cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, and could challenge lithium's dominance in the market.
- Sodium-ion batteries have historical roots but gained serious development in the past 15 years due to rising demand for electrification.
- Challenges include heavier weight compared to lithium-ion batteries, but advancements have improved energy density to compete with some lithium variants.
- Sodium-ion batteries offer advantages like better performance in extreme temperatures, lower fire risk, and reduced cooling costs.
- Applications are expanding beyond grid storage to EVs, data centers, and home energy systems, with companies like CATL and GM investing in the technology.
- Experts predict sodium-ion batteries could reduce costs for EVs, home energy storage, and energy delivery, impacting daily life significantly.
C++ Details of Asymmetric Fences
9 days ago
- Asymmetric thread fences optimize concurrency by shifting heavy synchronization costs from a common path to an infrequent slow path, using lightweight compiler barriers on the fast path and stronger fences on the slow path.
- The lightweight fence (asymmetric_thread_fence_light) is implemented as a compiler barrier (e.g., asm volatile("" : : : "memory")), preventing compiler reordering but not hardware reordering.
- The heavy fence (asymmetric_thread_fence_heavy) on Linux uses the membarrier() system call, which issues inter-processor interrupts (IPIs) to enforce memory ordering across cores, involving smp_mb() barriers before and after IPI sending.
- The C++ standard formalizes asymmetric fences (P1202R5) by integrating them into the memory model, with rules affecting the single total order S for memory_order_seq_cst operations and requiring careful handling to avoid transitivity issues.
- Implementation details include fast-path optimizations in membarrier() for single-core or single-mm scenarios, architecture-specific smp_mb() implementations, and considerations for data races and happens-before relationships.
Netherlands recruited 29 top scientist leaving U.S. under Trump
6 days ago
- The Netherlands recruited 34 top scientists last year, with 29 coming from the United States.
- Recruitment was driven by the Tulip Fund, established after Trump's cuts to U.S. scientific funding.
- The fund offers up to €1 million per scientist over five years, with €50 million total from the government and NWO.
- Recruits include researchers from top U.S. institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.
- Their fields span AI, medical sciences, and energy transition.
- The move aims to strengthen Dutch science and reduce dependency on other countries.
- Other European countries like Germany and France have launched similar initiatives.
Reinforcement Learning with Metacognitive Feedback Elicits Uncertainty in LLMs
6 days ago
- Large Language Models (LLMs) often show poor metacognition, leading to overconfidence, hallucinations, and failure to recognize their own knowledge limits.
- The paper introduces Reinforcement Learning with Metacognitive Feedback (RLMF), a method that uses a model's self-judgments of performance to improve completion rankings during preference optimization and for selecting high-value training data.
- A second method, metacognitive data selection, uses similar self-judgments to outperform standard active learning by identifying more useful training examples.
- These innovations are applied to the task of faithful calibration (FC), aiming to align an LLM's expressed uncertainty with its actual intrinsic uncertainty.
- A two-stage approach is used: first calibrating self-reported confidence scores for faithfulness, then mapping these to natural, context-adaptable language through output editing.
- Extensive experiments demonstrate that RLMF achieves state-of-the-art performance in faithful calibration across diverse tasks without sacrificing accuracy, and surpasses standard reinforcement learning by up to 63%.
- RLMF enhances LLMs' ability to assess and express their own capability limits, suggesting it as a promising paradigm to improve LLM metacognition, leading to better capabilities and alignment.
Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal
6 days ago
- The Manifesto Library is a new library of banned and censored books located inside the historic Livraria Lello bookshop in Porto, Portugal.
- It was launched as part of the BABELL – City of Books festival and contains nearly 100 books organized around themes of power, control, voice, and memory.
- Dua Lipa founded the Service95 Book Club and is a passionate advocate for reading; she described the library as a 'dream partnership' and a 'shrine' to censored works and courageous authors.
- The library includes books like Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' and works by Salman Rushdie, highlighting titles that have been banned or restricted due to themes of race, sexuality, or LGBTQIA+ content.
- Livraria Lello's brand head stated the library reflects the belief that 'the book is a technology of freedom,' emphasizing the importance of reading for societal imagination and freedom.
- Dua Lipa is also set to curate the Southbank Centre's 2026 London Literature Festival, continuing her promotion of literature and free expression.
Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors
6 days ago
- The study analyzed DNS A/AAAA records for 19,450 European company websites to determine their internet-facing infrastructure vendors.
- US-headquartered vendors dominate in the UK (67.5%) and the Netherlands (53.6%), and hold a plurality in Italy, Spain, and France (44-49%).
- Cloudflare is the largest infrastructure vendor in all seven European countries studied, surpassing other US vendors, European hosting companies, and domestic ISPs.
- Germany and Poland are exceptions, with dense domestic hosting industries like Hetzner and Home.pl reducing US vendor dominance.
- The research focuses on vendor attribution, not physical data-center location, distinguishing between CDN front-end providers and origin hosting.
- The findings have implications for EU policy, procurement, and discussions on sovereignty, vendor concentration, and supply chain risks.
- Limitations include not measuring origin hosting behind CDNs, EU sub-processor arrangements, or specific product configurations.
- The methodology uses AS operator names from DNS resolutions and includes data from a specific snapshot window, with deduplication per entity.
98% Isn't Much
6 days ago
- 98% success rate is context-dependent: excellent for exceptional achievements but unacceptable for basic expectations.
- In web development, 98% support for a feature can exclude a significant portion of users, especially if audience demographics differ from the general population.
- Robust engineering requires graceful handling of edge cases; lack of degradation for unsupported features means 98% isn't truly 'widely supported'.
Woman suspected of Monaco bombing found shot dead near Kyiv
6 days ago
- A suspect in a bombing targeting a Ukrainian businessman in Monaco is found dead near Kyiv with gunshot wounds.
- Ukrainian intelligence officers are arrested in connection with the case, with one admitting to the murder.
- The bombing injured three people, including a child, at the home of sanctioned businessman Vadym Yermolaev.
- Investigators are exploring possible involvement of Ukraine's SBU, suggesting it may have been a 'warning' rather than an assassination.
- The suspect, Anastasiia Berezovska, had been outside Ukraine for months and may have disguised herself as a man.
- Monaco and French authorities continue the investigation, with Ukraine providing information and cooperating.
9 Mothers (YC P26) Is Hiring in Austin, TX
6 days ago
- 9 Mothers is hiring for 9 roles in Austin, TX, to build counter-drone systems with a focus on hardware, AI perception, and kinetic engagement.
- The team emphasizes fast iteration, real deployment, and ownership where engineers directly influence specifications.
- Key perks include working on autonomous perception and terminal engagement with short feedback loops and real telemetry from range testing.
- Operators are involved from the start to prioritize practical specs like mass, setup time, and human factors.
- Design constraints include cost-per-shot, serviceability, and manufacturability to build affordable weapons for the U.S. and allies.
- A typical day involves range setup, live-fire iteration, operator debriefs, hardware rework, and whiteboard planning.
- Open roles span hardware engineering, robotics, perception, and platform, with 4 hardware, 2 robotics, 2 perception, and 1 platform role available.
- The company encourages direct applications even if no exact role matches, but asks recruiters not to contact them.
Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)
6 days ago
- The Tulp Fund, established by OCW and NWO in 2025, supports international top researchers to continue their work in the Netherlands, addressing global academic freedom pressures and boosting innovation.
- It has approved nominations for 34 top researchers from institutions worldwide, focusing on urgent Dutch issues like AI, quantum tech, vaccines, and societal resilience, with 29 from the U.S.
- Funding totals 50 million euros, with contributions doubled by NWO, offering up to 1 million euros per researcher over five years to attract talent from outside the EU, EEA, and Switzerland.
- Researchers cover key areas such as energy transition, health (e.g., cancer, Alzheimer's), climate, food production, and democracy, strengthening the Netherlands' knowledge landscape and reducing dependency.
- The fund aims to enhance scientific and societal capabilities in Europe, providing safe workspaces for researchers under pressure, and supports fundamental, applied, or practice-oriented research.
- Named after the tulp, a symbol of Dutch integration, similar initiatives exist in other European countries like Germany and France.
The Making of Claude Code
6 days ago
- The text appears to be corrupted or encoded with block characters (█) making the original content unreadable.
- The author is indicated as 'BY ANTHROPIC', which may be a branding or attribution.
- Without decodable text, main points cannot be summarized.
Why migrants come to Germany for work and then leave again
6 days ago
- Migrants leave Germany due to a combination of factors, including family reasons, discrimination, bureaucracy, housing issues, and language barriers.
- Emigrants are typically younger, spent less time in Germany, have family abroad, lack German proficiency but often know English, with 60% returning home and 40% moving to other European countries.
- Bureaucratic hurdles like slow processing of visas, high fees, and lack of career support hinder long-term planning and sense of belonging, affecting decisions to stay.
- Learning German is crucial for integration; inadequate language support leads to high return rates, while good preparation increases retention.
- Germany faces competition for skilled workers, with demand high in elderly care, and migrants often work below their qualifications, leading to dissatisfaction.
- Policy improvements include faster centralized systems and plans for a 'Work and Stay' agency, but staff shortages and slow digitalization remain challenges.
Why you should not have Managers in your class name
6 days ago
- Naming classes and methods correctly is crucial as it influences code structure, future thinking, refactoring, and extension, with poor naming leading to technical debt.
- Using '-er' suffixes like 'Manager' often indicates poor design; for example, 'ConnectionManager' became complex with multiple responsibilities, whereas 'Connection' would have been clearer and simpler.
- Choosing precise names helps maintain clean code, simplifies extension and refactoring, and reduces complexity and bugs, so spending extra time on naming is recommended.
Dropping in on Gottfried Leibniz (2013)
9 days ago
- Gottfried Leibniz, born in 1646, was a polymath interested in systematizing knowledge, aiming to create a universal symbolic language ('alphabet of thought') for computational knowledge representation.
- He made significant contributions to mathematics, including developing integral and differential notation, exploring binary numbers, and designing a mechanical calculator for arithmetic operations.
- Leibniz envisioned applications of his formal methods across fields like science, law, and theology, but his practical successes were largely limited to continuous mathematics, with less progress in discrete systems.
- His archive in Hanover contains around 200,000 pages of diverse documents, including notes, diagrams, and correspondence, many not fully studied, reflecting his broad intellectual pursuits.
- Leibniz's computational thinking, though ahead of his time, was constrained by the technology of his era, but his ideas foreshadowed modern concepts like universal computation and computational law.

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Hasty Briefsbeta

Markdown Now Has a UTI in Apple's Version 27 OSes

Show HN: PostgreSQL performance and cost across 23 EC2 instance types

Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

Wikipedia Banned Its Co-Founder Because Its Rules Mostly Work

Show HN: Tarot.free – Free Tarot Readings

A verification loop 4x'd DeepSeek's intelligence, matching Opus at 1/7 the cost

Sodium-ion "salt" batteries will revolutionize electric-vehicle and grid storage

C++ Details of Asymmetric Fences

Netherlands recruited 29 top scientist leaving U.S. under Trump

Reinforcement Learning with Metacognitive Feedback Elicits Uncertainty in LLMs

Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal

Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

98% Isn't Much

Woman suspected of Monaco bombing found shot dead near Kyiv

9 Mothers (YC P26) Is Hiring in Austin, TX

Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

The Making of Claude Code

Why migrants come to Germany for work and then leave again

Why you should not have Managers in your class name

Dropping in on Gottfried Leibniz (2013)