The magic of DC-DC voltage conversion
substack.com — Every other consumer electronic device on the market performs some form of DC voltage conversion. The reason is simple: the voltage you get out of a typical battery or a cheap wall wart is seldom right for every part of the circuit — from motors, to LCD backlights, to latest-generation digital chips. MAGIC, 1
Chai-1: Decoding the molecular interactions of life
chaidiscovery.com — We’re excited to release Chai-1, a new multi-modal foundation model for molecular structure prediction that performs at the state-of-the-art across a variety of tasks relevant to drug discovery. Chai-1 enables unified prediction of proteins, small molecules, DNA, RNA, covalent modifications, and more. CHAI-1, 2
A good day to trie-hard: saving compute 1% at a time
cloudflare.com — Cloudflare’s global network handles a lot of HTTP requests – over 60 million per second on average. That in and of itself is not news, but it is the starting point to an adventure that started a few months ago and ends with the announcement of a new open-source Rust crate that we are using to reduce our CPU utilization, enabling our CDN to handle even more of the world’s ever-increasing Web traffic. GOOD, 3
Building the same app using various web frameworks
eugeneyan.com — [ learning engineering 🛠 ] · 8 min read BUILDING, 4
Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
google.com — GOOGLE, 5
The Modern CLI Renaissance
gabevenberg.com — Over the past few years, it seems like the rate at which new CLI tools are being written has picked back up again, accelerating after seeing relatively little activity between ~1995 and ~2015. I’d like to talk about this trend I’ve noticed, where people are rewriting and rethinking staples of the command line interface, why I think this trend might be happening, and why I think this trend is a good thing. MODERN, 6
Tutorial on diffusion models for imaging and vision
arxiv.org — arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. TUTORIAL, 7
Lottery Simulator (2023)
perthirtysix.com — Interactively explore lottery probabilities and simulate thousands of tickets in seconds SIMULATOR, 8
Jeremy Couillard's video games capture what it's like to be alive
artbasel.com — New York-based artist Jeremy Couillard began his career as a high-school Spanish teacher, but outside the classroom he would spend hours creating intricate comics and ink drawings. Eventually, he joined Columbia University’s MFA program to study painting, but soon felt bored. ‘I realized I spent more time in front of a screen than in reality, so conversations about technology became more interesting for me. Even when I was painting, I was mostly looking at a computer,’ says the artist. JEREMY, 9
Rust in illumos
wegmueller.it — With the recent rust in Linux events in the last couple of days, It’s a good time to write up Rust in illumos. Both to spread the word a bit and also to set expectations for both sides (Rust and illumos/OpenIndiana devs) what is currently possible and what work would need to be invested to make things smooth. And also to let the rust community know about what illumos people were talking about. RUST, 10
Struggling with Container HTTP Logs? Meet Logmink
github.com — Logmink.hub is a centralized logging hub designed to store all logs sent by agents deployed across containers. It aims to provide a seamless, "Plug-N-Play" experience for capturing HTTP logs from containers without requiring any code modifications. This project addresses the challenges of working with other log management tools like Logstash, Filebeat, Loki, Prometheus, Dynatrace, etc., by offering a straightforward setup. STRUGGLING, 11
Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules
cnbc.com — Europe's top court ruled against Apple on Tuesday in the tech giant's 10-year court battle over its tax affairs in Ireland. The case stems back to 2016 when the European Commission ordered Ireland to recover up to 13 billion euros ($14.4 billion) in back taxes from Apple. MUST, 12
Satellites Spotting Aircraft
marksblogg.com — Umbra Space is a 9-year-old manufacturer and operator of a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite fleet. These satellites can see through clouds, smoke, rain, snow and certain types of camouflage attempting to cover the ground below. SAR can capture images day or night at resolutions as fine as 16cm. SpaceX launched Umbra's first satellite in 2021 and has a total of ten in orbit at the moment. SATELLITES, 13
Ask HN: How do you sync ongoing browser work between desktop and laptop?
news.ycombinator.com — For a long time now, I have both a Work Desktop and a Work/Personal Laptop (both are company issued, but I have full control over both of them). The laptop runs macOS, the Desktop runs Linux (I can install whatever). Also, I'm mostly doing DevOps these days. YOU, 14
Arvo Pärt's Journey
plough.com — OK, the point in the Part extract where the political commissar has stuffed his glasses on his forehead and pinches his eye sockets in despair at how "difficult" a case Part is is pure comedy. No printed words needed; the picture tells it all. I laughed in surprise and delight! I've never read a graphic novel before (or is it a comic strip?) I am stunned that the seriousness and beauty of Part's story could be captured in the medium of a graphic novel. AND, that words and pictures could make me want to listen to his music. This is amazing. I'd like to read the whole thing. I've ordered a copy. Thank you. ARVO, 15
People who are colorblind are less likely to be picky eaters
theconversation.com — David K. Wilson Professor of Psychology, Vanderbilt University PEOPLE, 16
What is the best pointer tagging method?
coredumped.dev — In this post, we are going to take a deep dive into pointer tagging, where metadata is encoded into a word-sized pointer. Doing so allows us to keep a compact representation that can be passed around in machine registers. This is very common in implementing dynamic programming languages, but can really be used anywhere that additional runtime information is needed about a pointer. We will look at a handful of different ways these pointers can be encoded and see how the compiler can optimize them for different hardware. Because untagging a pointer is usually just a few instructions, it normally won’t show up in a traditional profiler. But billions of these operations can add up to make a difference in the total runtime of a program. WHAT, 17
Another police raid in Germany
torproject.org — Hello to all list-reading entities! ANOTHER, 18
Our Git Hash Bug
tmendez.dev — I work on the live services game Dragon Prince: Xadia. We have iOS/Android clients, hosted gameservers, and a platform. Our gameservers and clients need to be in sync, so we have a field in our platform’s YAML configuration: GIT, 19
Consent-O-Matic – automatically fills ubiquitous pop-ups with your preferences
au.dk — Nearly all websites use tracking technologies to collect data about you. By law, they often need your permission, which is why many websites have “consent pop-ups”. However, 90% of these pop-ups use so-called “dark patterns”, which are designed to make it very difficult to say no, but very easy to say yes. Although using dark patterns is illegal, the laws are not enforced enough, so many websites get away with it. CONSENT-O-MATIC, 20
Among the Moss Piglets: The First Image of a Tardigrade (1773)
publicdomainreview.org — The tardigrade’s tiny size belies both its astounding physical resilience and its charisma. Also known as water bears or moss piglets, they can survive extreme temperatures and pressures, withstand radiation levels that would kill most organisms, and reanimate after long periods of desiccation or oxygen deprivation. They can even handle being in outer space without too much trouble — impressive for creatures that are roughly the size of a grain of sand. As a result, the 1300 known species of tardigrades are found everywhere on Earth: from the deep seas, to rainforests, to Antarctica. AMONG, 21
Floral formula
wikipedia.org — A floral formula is a notation for representing the structure of particular types of flowers. Such notations use numbers, letters and various symbols to convey significant information in a compact form. They may represent the floral form of a particular species, or may be generalized to characterize higher taxa, usually giving ranges of numbers of organs. Floral formulae are one of the two ways of describing flower structure developed during the 19th century, the other being floral diagrams.[2] The format of floral formulae differs according to the tastes of particular authors and periods, yet they tend to convey the same information.[1] FLORAL, 22
Crash dummies and robot arms: How airline seats are tested
bbc.com — In a warehouse building in a quiet town in Northern Ireland, a robot arm is opening and closing an airplane meal table over and over again. CRASH, 23
Tomato64: A port of Tomato Firmware to x86_64
tomato64.org — Tomato64 is a port of Tomato Firmware to the x86_64 architecture.Based on the Linux 6.10 Kernel and musl libc. TOMATO64, 24
Show HN: YourNextStore – an open-source Shopify with Stripe as the back end
news.ycombinator.com — We’re building Your Next Store, a modern, ultra-fast, open-source commerce in Next.js with Stripe as the backend - no DB required. YOURNEXTSTORE, 25
Ask HN: What have you built with LLMs?
news.ycombinator.com — seems like a good time to ask again. WHAT, 26
Debugging in the Multiverse
antithesis.com — Would figuring out your bugs and outages be easier if you had a time machine? We are now making a time machine directly available to all of our customers. DEBUGGING, 27
Show HN: Visual DB – Web front end for your database
news.ycombinator.com — If you have a cloud-hosted database, read on: Visual DB was designed for you. VISUAL, 28
Flipper Zero Gets Major Firmware Update, Can Eavesdrop on Walkie-Talkies
pcmag.com — The Flipper Zero gets JavaScript compatibility, battery life improvements, and faster NFC copying speeds, to name a few of its new features. FLIPPER, 29
What you can get out of a high-quality font
sinja.io — In the previous article (Quick guide to web typography for developers) we covered the basic steps to improve the typography in your apps. Today I'd like to expand a bit more on the topic of fonts and what you can get out of a high-quality font (paid or free). High-quality fonts often come with a full bag of goodies, it will be unwise to not use what the type designer gifted (or sold) to us. WHAT, 30
Roame (YC S23) Is Hiring a Chief of Staff ycombinator.com
College Pulse (YC S18) Is Hiring ycombinator.com
Infisical (YC W23) Is Hiring a Developer Who Love Writing ycombinator.com