Paper HN

Embeddings are a good starting point for the AI curious app developer

substack.com — Vector embeddings have been an Overton window shifting experience for me, not because they’re sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, but the opposite. Once I started using them, it felt obvious that this was what the search experience was always supposed to be: less “How did you do that?” and more mundanely, “Why isn’t this everywhere?” EMBEDDINGS, 1

Flying Aircraft Carriers (2019)

neverwasmag.com — From the flying British aircraft carriers in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to the helicarriers of S.H.I.E.L.D. FLYING, 2

Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

substack.com — The Cyc group at MCC is attempting to build a single intelligent agent whose knowledge base contains […] tens of millions of entries. We believe such a system will be a useful, perhaps necessary, platform on which to undertake the next generation of work in expert systems, natural language understanding, and machine learning.1 CYC, 3

CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

consumerfinance.gov — For-profit school made false claims about job-placement rates CFPB, 4

Show HN: Speeding up LLM inference 2x times (possibly)

news.ycombinator.com — Here's a project I've been working on for the last few months. SPEEDING, 5

How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?

johnhawks.net — A Reddit poster finds an ancient jaw in his parents' new travertine. It may be more common than most people imagine. MANY, 6

The forgotten war on beepers

pessimistsarchive.org — 30 years before parents and lawmakers sought to save youth from smartphones via age limits and bans in schools, a similar conversation took place about a pre-cursor to the cellphone: pagers FORGOTTEN, 7

An electric new era for Atlas

bostondynamics.com — This week we announced the retirement of our hydraulic Atlas and unveiled what comes next—a fully electric Atlas robot designed for real-world applications. The next generation of the Atlas program builds on decades of research and furthers our commitment to delivering the most capable, useful mobile robots solving the toughest challenges in industry today: with Spot, with Stretch, and now with Atlas. ELECTRIC, 8

Hardest Problem in Computer Science: Centering Things

tonsky.me — This is my claim: we, as a civilization, forgot how to center things. HARDEST, 9

libxev: A cross-platform, high-performance event loop

github.com — libxev is a cross-platform, high-performance event loop that provides abstractions for non-blocking IO, timers, events, and more and works on Linux (io_uring or epoll), macOS (kqueue), and Wasm + WASI. Available as both a Zig and C API. LIBXEV, 10

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

themarginalian.org — Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. DICTIONARY, 11

Solving the minimum cut problem for undirected graphs

research.google — Di Wang, Research Scientist, Google Research SOLVING, 12

Everything we can't describe in music

hazlitt.net — “It’s a slow melodic line that climbs up with a swell in dynamics and then it comes back down again with a diminuendo.” Stephen McAdams had been leaning back in his chair in a casual end-of-workday position, but he sat up a little bit as he described a musical phrase at the beginning of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal. “He starts in with the violins but it’s thickened by some bassoons and cellos and violas.” EVERYTHING, 13

Show HN: BiTE – Cross-platform executable viewer and reverse engineering tool

news.ycombinator.com — Hey everyone! BITE, 14

How Antithesis finds bugs

antithesis.com — A year and a half ago, our friends at TigerBeetle invited me to give a sneak preview of Antithesis at Systems Distributed. This talk was recorded, but never published (since we were in stealth at the time). ANTITHESIS, 15

LCD displays still don't match the responsiveness of clunky CRT screens (2019)

vice.com — Let's say you have $1,000 to burn on a desktop PC gaming monitor. You could buy a brand-new 4K display with quantum dots, high dynamic range, and a fast refresh rate, or splurge on a curved QHD monitor so wide that it stretches into your peripheral vision while playing. LCD, 16

Humane AI – Pico Laser Projection – AI Twist on an Old Scam (2023)

kguttag.com — Quick Note: I’m Going to CES and SPIE AR/VR/MR 2024 HUMANE, 17

The great commercial takeover of low Earth orbit

technologyreview.com — Axiom Space and other companies are betting they can build private structures to replace the International Space Station. GREAT, 18

Joseph Priestley created revolutionary "maps" of time

neh.gov — It’s a testament to the wide-ranging and unconventional nature of Joseph Priestley’s mind that no one has settled on a term to sum up exactly what he was. The eighteenth-century British polymath has been described as, among other things, a historian, a chemist, an educator, a philosopher, a theologian, and a political radical who became, for a period of time, the most despised person in England. Priestley’s many contradictions—as a rationalist Unitarian millenarian, as a mild-mannered controversialist, as a thinker who was both ahead of his time and behind it—have provided endless fodder for the historians who have debated the precise nature of his legacy and his place among his fellow Enlightenment intellectuals. But his contributions—however they are categorized—have continued to live on... JOSEPH, 19

AltStore PAL, the first alternative app marketplace on iPhone, is available now

mastodon.social — To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform. ALTSTORE, 20

The Making of Django Reinhardt

messynessychic.com — Django Reinhardt was a legendary jazz musician and considered by some the greatest guitarist who ever lived, even more so when you find out he did it all with two fingers. He began as a nomadic busker before becoming a virtuoso and then a romanticised Parisian sepia memory, who still calls out in rolling arpeggios from the grooves of a crackling wax disc. A Romani nomad who would overcome great adversity in life to astound audiences with his genius and technique, he would influence all that would come after him with woven melodies that danced and sang from his fingertips. He would travel a murky road through prejudice and fame, and then survive Nazi occupation through World War II only to succumb to a brain hemorrhage at age 43. He is remembered as the embodiment of European jazz and a cul... DJANGO, 21

Oolite: An open source open-world space opera

oolite.space — There are well over a thousand expansion packs released for Oolite. There are two expansion pack formats in use since Oolite 1.80, usually referred to as OXZ and OXP. The OXZ format is more modern and can be downloaded and installed automatically by the game by selecting the "Manage Expansion Packs" option on the start screen. The OXP format is older, easier to tweak and must be installed manually. OOLITE, 22