Stop syncing everything
sqlsync.dev — Partial replication sounds easy—just sync the data your app needs, right? But choosing an approach is tricky: logical replication precisely tracks every change, complicating strong consistency, while physical replication avoids that complexity but requires syncing every change, even discarded ones. What if your app could combine the simplicity of physical replication with the efficiency of logical replication? That’s the key idea behind Graft, the open-source transactional storage engine I’m launching today. It’s designed specifically for lazy, partial replication with strong consistency, horizontal scalability, and object storage durability. STOP, 1
A 6-Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno's Music for Airports
openculture.com — ©2006-2025 Open Culture, LLC. All rights reserved. 6-HOUR, 2
DEDA – Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit
github.com — Document Colour Tracking Dots, or yellow dots, are small systematic dots which encode information about the printer and/or the printout itself. This process is integrated in almost every commercial colour laser printer. This means that almost every printout contains coded information about the source device, such as the serial number. DEDA, 3
Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
wisc.edu — ELECTRON, 4
Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs in Language Models (Anthropic)
transformer-circuits.pub — We introduce a method to uncover mechanisms underlying behaviors of language models. We produce graph descriptions of the model’s computation on prompts of interest by tracing individual computational steps in a “replacement model”. This replacement model substitutes a more interpretable component (here, a “cross-layer transcoder”) for parts of the underlying model (here, the multi-layer perceptrons) that it is trained to approximate. We develop a suite of visualization and validation tools we use to investigate these “attribution graphs” supporting simple behaviors of an 18-layer language model, and lay the groundwork for a companion paper applying these methods to a frontier model, Claude 3.5 Haiku. CIRCUIT, 5
Bletchley code breaker Betty Webb dies aged 101
bbc.com — A decorated World War Two code breaker who spent her youth deciphering enemy messages at Bletchley Park has died at the age of 101. BLETCHLEY, 6
Where does air pollution come from?
ourworldindata.org — Millions of people die prematurely from air pollution every year. This problem has existed since humans started burning materials for fuel — first wood and biomass, then fossil fuels. WHERE, 7
Open source, 3D-printable smart chess board
thangs.com — Print. Click. Play. OpenChess is a fully open source smart chessboard designed to make interactive, intelligent gameplay accessible to everyone. By combining low-cost electronics, 3D printing, and customizable software, OpenChess empowers makers, educators, and chess lovers to build their own connected chess experience — without the high price tag. OPEN, 8
Show HN: Offline SOS signaling+recovery app for disasters/wars
news.ycombinator.com — A couple of months ago, I built this app to help identify people stuck under rubble. OFFLINE, 9
Shared DNA in Music
pudding.cool — This is a project about shared DNA in music. Loading visualization data... SHARED, 10
Glubux's Powerwall (2016)
secondlifestorage.com — Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen. GLUBUX, 11
The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst
glthr.com — Upon reflection, Myst has long been more analogous to a graph than a traditional linear game, owing to the relative freedom it affords players. This is particularly evident in its first release (Macintosh, 1993), which was composed of interconnected HyperCard cards. MYST, 12
Why F#?
batsov.com — Hacker. Emacs fanatic. Lover of parentheses. Firebrand. Just another programmer with too many opinions. I’m not the best, but I’m pretty good. WHY, 13
Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks from Japan
goughlui.com — As it turns out, “thrift shopping” in Japan via the internet can be both very enjoyable as well as very dangerous. In this series of posts, I’ve been examining various optical media I’ve obtained from Japan, both in-person and online, and they just keep on coming as the listings are refreshed and more products get put up for sale. It’s been an amazing trip “back-in-time” but also an opportunity to share some of the fun and beauty of older optical discs. TESTING, 14
How Silica Gel Took Over the World
scopeofwork.net — I find them stuffed into the toes of a new pair of sneakers. I find them wedged into a sheaf of seaweed snacks. I find them in the over-inflated bag that contains my new inhaler, and in the vacuum-sealed one puckered around my kids’ 3D printing filament. “DO NOT EAT,” they all admonish me, and I find myself slipping them under the top layer of the garbage already in the trash can, as if my kids wouldn’t be able to control their urge to taste whatever is inside these tiny white pouches. Silica gel packets are everywhere, their presence seemingly the only thing keeping our packaged food crispy and our belongings free of mildew. How on earth did they all get here? Is silica gel taking over the world? SILICA, 15
Converting a Go-Kart into a Deathtrap
matto.io — Este artículo también está disponible en Español 🇪🇸 CONVERTING, 16
Forking Work Simplification – Let's Bring Back Eisenhower's Process Improvement
governance.fyi — Happy April Fool’s, but frankly we are all (well almost all) business today with a neat little update. FORKING, 17
AI image recognition detects bubble-like structures in the universe
phys.org — This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: IMAGE, 18
Show HN: Textcase: A Python Library for Text Case Conversion
github.com — A feature complete Python text case conversion library TEXTCASE, 19
Train and Weather Tracker with Raspberry Pi and E-Ink
sambroner.com — I finally built a Raspberry Pi project my wife loves: an e-ink train and weather tracker! If you want to build one yourself, the Github & instructions are here. TRAIN, 20
Show HN: I vibecoded a 35k LoC recipe app
news.ycombinator.com — Over the last 2-3 weeks, I vibecoded the recipe app that I always wished existed - recipeninja.ai . It now includes a fully interactive voice assistant so you don't need to get your dirty hands over your new iPad when you're cooking. VIBECODED, 21
Travel Guide for Stateless People
substack.com — I’m not sure how many frequent travelers actually travel without a passport, so I don’t know how many people will benefit from this post. Still, here’s a guide for stateless travelers. Please note: this is not legal advice, and I take no responsibility for any outcome if you follow these suggestions. That said, I hope it helps. TRAVEL, 22
Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and How Microserfdom Ate the World (2015)
grantland.com — Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs is about the spiritual yearnings and time-frittering activities of youngish coders immersed in the drudgery of the software-development process, and how those activities become an expression of those yearnings. It was published 20 years ago this month, which as far as I’m aware makes it the earliest significant stab by a fiction writer at the Great North American Tech-Company/Start-up Novel. It predates Po Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, Dave Eggers’s The Circle, numerous other neuroman-à-clefs, score-settling pseudomemoirs and murder-dot-com whodunits,1 as well as tech-sector TV shows like Silicon Valley and Halt and Catch Fire, serials that pick up where the novels leave off. SILICON, 23
Generate autounattend.xml files for Windows 10/11
schneegans.de — GENERATE, 24
Show HN: Zig Topological Sort Library for Parallel Processing
news.ycombinator.com — I believe the best way to learn a language is by doing an in-depth project. This is my first Zig project intended for learning the ropes on publishing a Zig package. It turns out to be quite solid and performant. It might be a bit over-engineered. ZIG, 25
SSLyze – SSL configuration scanning library and CLI tool
github.com — Fast and powerful SSL/TLS scanning library. SSLYZE, 26
Launch HN: ASim (YC S21) – Mobile app that generates mobile apps
news.ycombinator.com — Hey HN, we’re Daniel and Daniel (the Daniels) from aSim (https://asim.sh/). aSim is a mobile app that can generate immediately usable and shareable mobile apps from your phone. LAUNCH, 27
The state of binary compatibility on Linux and how to address it
jangafx.com — To get access to the latest news and releases, subscribe to our email list STATE, 28
Excitable cells
jenevoldsen.com — I wrote this post to answer some of the questions, I had as a medical student, when I first learned about cardiac arrhythmias. Mainly, what are the conditions required to initiate and maintain a reentrant arrhythmia? That is, a state where the heart muscles are continuously activated by a self-sustaining loop, independent of the normal pace-making system. These arrhythmias can be benign, as with AV-nodal reentry tachycardia (AVNRT); a common, and usually harmless, cause of palpitations in young people. Or they can be deadly, as with ventricular fibrillation. EXCITABLE, 29
Hightouch (YC S19) Is Hiring Front End Engineers greenhouse.io
Meru Health (YC S18) Is Hiring ycombinator.com
Extend (YC W23) is hiring engineers to build LLM document processing ashbyhq.com