Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4
jepsen.io — Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) service which provides managed instances of the PostgreSQL database. We show that Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL multi-AZ clusters violate Snapshot Isolation, the strongest consistency model supported across all endpoints. Healthy clusters occasionally allow Long Fork and other G-nonadjacent cycles. These phenomena occurred in every version tested, from 13.15 to 17.4. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL may instead provide Parallel Snapshot Isolation. This work was performed independently by Jepsen, without compensation, and conducted in accordance with the Jepsen ethics policy. JEPSEN, 1
Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself
github.com — I made my AI think harder by making it argue with itself repeatedly. It works stupidly well. CHAIN, 2
I use zip bombs to protect my server
idiallo.com — The majority of the traffic on the web is from bots. For the most part, these bots are used to discover new content. These are RSS Feed readers, search engines crawling your content, or nowadays AI bots crawling content to power LLMs. But then there are the malicious bots. These are from spammers, content scrapers or hackers. At my old employer, a bot discovered a wordpress vulnerability and inserted a malicious script into our server. It then turned the machine into a botnet used for DDOS. One of my first websites was yanked off of Google search entirely due to bots generating spam. At some point, I had to find a way to protect myself from these bots. That's when I started using zip bombs. USE, 3
An illustrated guide to automatic sparse differentiation
iclr-blogposts.github.io — In numerous applications of machine learning, Hessians and Jacobians exhibit sparsity, a property that can be leveraged to vastly accelerate their computation. While the usage of automatic differentiation in machine learning is ubiquitous, automatic sparse differentiation (ASD) remains largely unknown. This post introduces ASD, explaining its key components and their roles in the computation of both sparse Jacobians and Hessians. We conclude with a practical demonstration showcasing the performance benefits of ASD. ILLUSTRATED, 4
Bamba: An open-source LLM that crosses a transformer with an SSM
ibm.com — In collaboration with CMU, Princeton, and University of Illinois, IBM Research built an open-source LLM that combines the expressive power of a transformer with the runtime speed of a state-space model. Key features will soon be added to IBM Granite 4.0. BAMBA, 5
Everything we announced at our first LlamaCon
meta.com — LlamaCon has officially kicked off. Our inaugural event brings together developers from around the world who all have one thing in common: They love building with Llama. It’s been a little more than two years since we launched Llama. During that time, we’ve surpassed one billion downloads and, most importantly, established Llama as a leader in the open source AI ecosystem. Developers, startups, governments, and enterprises are finding success with Llama by leveraging its capabilities to drive innovation, improve efficiency, and solve complex problems. EVERYTHING, 6
Only Teslas exempt from new auto tariffs thanks to 85% domestic content rule
fuelarc.com — We wondered what Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai meant when he said on their earnings call last Thursday that for Waymos, “there is future optionality for ONLY, 7
Show HN: Beatsync – perfect audio sync across multiple devices
news.ycombinator.com — Hi HN! I made Beatsync, an open-source browser-based audio player that syncs audio with millisecond-level accuracy across many devices. BEATSYNC, 8
Performance optimization is hard because it's fundamentally a brute-force task
purplesyringa.moe — I’m not talking about skill, knowledge, or convincing a world focused on radical acceleration that optimization is necessary. Performance optimization is hard because it’s fundamentally a brute-force task, and there’s nothing you can do about it.This post is a bit of a rant on my frustrations with code optimization. I’ll also try to give actionable advice, which I hope enchants your experience.ComposabilityCertain optimizations can only work together, while others lead to pessimizations when combined. To be an expert means to know what optimization avenues exist; to be a master means to know which ones to choose.I have a post on integer formatting in the works, covering a very particular algorithm design – and I still haven’t finished it because there’s like five different choices to make,... PERFORMANCE, 9
It's School time: Adventures in hacking an old Kindle
samkhawase.com — It was Monday and my daughter was late for the school again. To make things worse, the bus came early by 2 minutes. After rushing and making sure she caught the bus on time, I sat down for my morning coffee and opened up Hacker News. The front page had an interesting entry: “All Kindles can now be jailbroken”. Curiously my old kindle was lying next to me. Was this a sign from the universe? There was only one way to know and thus began my journey to turn my kindle into a get-ready-for-school dashboard. SCHOOL, 10
WorldGen: Open-source 3D scene generator for Game/VR/XR
worldgen.github.io — WorldGen is a model that can generate interactive 3D scenes from text and image inputs in seconds. WORLDGEN, 11
Programming languages should have a tree traversal primitive
tylerglaiel.com — There should be a control flow construct in programming languages that can handle tree-like traversal in a nice way, similar to how for/foreach loops can handle linear traversal. It's a bit of a missing gap in the current set of control flow constructs most languages these days have settled on. Its a thing I end up having to do *all the time* and it seems like there should be some shortcuts for it. PROGRAMMING, 12
ArkFlow: High-performance Rust stream processing engine
github.com — High-performance Rust stream processing engine, providing powerful data stream processing capabilities, supporting multiple input/output sources and processors. ARKFLOW, 13
Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies
news.ycombinator.com — A FOSS chrome extension that attempts to remove the annoyance of cookie pop ups and banners. CHROME, 14
Show HN: An MCP server for understanding AWS costs
news.ycombinator.com — Hey all - I work at Vantage, a FinOps platform. MCP, 15
Show HN: I build a Fantasy NHL app in 3 days with Claude AI
news.ycombinator.com — I am not from North America, and moved there a couple years ago. After being invited to the first fantasy league and seeing the platform they were using, I couldn't bring myself to check it every day. An excel sheet would have been more appealing to use than this. FANTASY, 16
Path Isn't Real on Linux
danielh.cc — On a fresh installation of Debian 12 (bookworm), executing echo $PATH shows the following output: PATH, 17
China's Clinical Trial Boom
asimov.press — In January, the Chinese company Deepseek released a reasoning AI model, called R1, that performs comparably to OpenAI's GPT-4o Turbo model on certain AI benchmarks but was developed with fewer resources at a much lower cost. Marc Andreessen called it “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” even as NVIDIA’s stock plummeted by 17 percent — the largest ever one-day loss for a U.S. company. CHINA, 18
Firefox tab groups are here
mozilla.org — What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At Firefox, we build it. FIREFOX, 19
Finding paths of least action with gradient descent (2023)
greydanus.github.io — Mar 5, 2023 • Sam Greydanus, Tim Strang, and Isabella Caruso FINDING, 20
O3 beats a master-level GeoGuessr player, even with fake EXIF data
sampatt.com — BEATS, 21
Show HN: An interactive demo of QR codes' error correction
news.ycombinator.com — Hi HN! This is a hobby project of mine that recently landed me my first interview and helped me get my first internship offers. DEMO, 22
Show HN: AgenticSeek – Self-hosted alternative to cloud-based AI tools
news.ycombinator.com — I’ve spent the last two months building AgenticSeek, a privacy-focused alternative to cloud-based AI tools like ManusAI. It runs entirely on your machine—no API calls, no data leaks. AGENTICSEEK, 23
Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment
waymo.com — Author:The Waymo & Toyota Teams WAYMO, 24
Indian court orders blocking of Proton Mail
techcrunch.com — A court in India has ordered the blocking of encrypted email provider Proton Mail across the country. INDIAN, 25
LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo
librelingo.app — an experiment to create a community-driven language-learning platform Start learning Spanish Start learning German Start learning French Start learning Bangla Start learning Middle Persian Start learning Basque Start learning Ladino (for English speakers) Start learning Ladino (for Hebrew speakers) Start learning Ladino (for Spanish speakers) Start learning Houma (for English speakers) About LibreLingo Development documentation (English only) Development tools Development tools LibreLingo was created by Dániel Kántor and various contributors. The source code is licensed AGPL-3.0. LIBRELINGO, 26
The last masters of Afro-Colombian machete fencing
globalvoices.org — Maestro Porfirio spars with a student, practicing defensive techniques. Photo by Rowan Glass, used with permission. LAST, 27
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (2010)
icrl.org — Nearly three decades of intense experimentation leave little doubt that the anomalous physical phenomena appearing in the PEAR studies are valid, and are significantly correlated with such subjective variables as intention, meaning, resonance, and uncertainty. The stark inconsistencies of these results with established physical and psychological presumptions place extraordinary demands on the development of competent new theoretical models for constructive dialogue with the empirical data. But since the contemporary scientific approach leaves little room for such subjective correlates in its mechanistic representations of reality, it follows that science as we know it either must exclude itself from study of such phenomena, even when they precipitate objectively observable physical effects... PRINCETON, 28
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AirBorne: Wormable zero-click remote code execution (RCE) in AirPlay protocol
oligo.security — Oligo Security Research has discovered a new set of vulnerabilities in Apple’s AirPlay Protocol and the AirPlay Software Development Kit (SDK), which is used by third-party vendors to integrate AirPlay into third-party devices. AIRBORNE, 29
Modern Realty (YC S24) Is Hiring workatastartup.com
Hestus, Inc. (YC S24) Is Hiring an ML Engineer to Revolutionize CAD ycombinator.com
Activeloop (YC S18) is hiring a VP of Engineering in Mountain View (on-site) activeloop.ai