Paper HN

Ruffle – Flash Emulator – Progress Report

ruffle.rs — Get ready for the biggest Ruffle announcement yet! And the first one on the blog! RUFFLE, 1

Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

bbc.com — Utah has become the first US state to require social media firms get parental consent for children to use their apps and verify users are at least 18. UTAH, 2

Reverse-engineering the Globus INK, a Soviet spaceflight navigation computer

righto.com — One of the most interesting navigation instruments onboard Soyuz spacecraft was the Globus INK,1 which used a rotating globe to indicate the spacecraft's position above the Earth. This electromechanical analog computer used an elaborate system of gears, cams, and differentials to compute the spacecraft's position. The globe rotates in two dimensions: it spins end-over-end to indicate the spacecraft's orbit, while the globe's hemispheres rotate according to the Earth's daily rotation around its axis.2 The spacecraft's position above the Earth was represented by the fixed crosshairs on the plastic dome. The Globus also has latitude and longitude dials next to the globe to show the position numerically, while the light/shadow dial below the globe indicated when the spacecraft would enter or leave the Earth's shadow. REVERSE-ENGINEERING, 3

Why take a compiler course? (2010)

regehr.org — [Also see why take an OS course and why take an embedded systems course.] WHY, 4

Docker

computer.rip — Lately I tend to stick to topics that are historic by at least twenty years, and that does have a lot of advantages. But I am supposedly a DevOps professional, and so I will occasionally indulge in giving DevOps advice... or at least opinions, which are sort of like advice but with less of a warranty. DOCKER, 5

Show HN: Lunette – A word processor designed around writing, not formatting

lunette.app — You need to enable JavaScript to run this app. LUNETTE, 6

U.S. Home Prices Are the Most Unaffordable They've Been in Nearly 100 Years

longtermtrends.net — Historically, an average house in the U.S. cost around 5 times the yearly household income. During the housing bubble of 2006 the ratio exceeded 7 - in other words, an average single family house in the United States cost more than 7 times the U.S. median annual household income. The Case-Shiller Home Price Index seeks to measure the price level of existing single family homes in the United States. Based on the pioneering research of Robert J. Shiller and Karl E. Case the index is generally considered the leading measure of U.S. residential real estate prices. The index has a base of Jan 2000=100 and is multiplied by 1800 in order approximate the Average Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States. According to Mike Maloney this ratio is heavily influenced by interest rates. When int... U.S, 7

Vector database built for scalable similarity search

milvus.io — Open-source, highly scalable, and blazing fast. VECTOR, 8

Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center

science.org — This website requires cookies to function properly. Please enable cookies in your browser and try again. MAJOR, 9

Time to end the speed limit in US airspace?

elidourado.com — I remember the first time I got boomed. I had traveled with my colleague, Matt, to NASA Langley Research Center to get educated on sonic booms. The NASA aeronautics folks were, as ever, welcoming and generous with their time. They escorted us to a room that contained the sonic boom simulator. TIME, 10

I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory

wired.com — I arrive in Taiwan brooding morbidly on the fate of democracy. My luggage is lost. This is my pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain of Protection. The Sacred Mountain is reckoned to protect the whole island of Taiwan—and even, by the supremely pious, to protect democracy itself, the sprawling experiment in governance that has held moral and actual sway over the would-be free world for the better part of a century. The mountain is in fact an industrial park in Hsinchu, a coastal city southwest of Taipei. Its shrine bears an unassuming name: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. SAW, 11

Dismantling a Crappy Malware Operation

mrbruh.com — I had been made aware of a malware spreading site called obspremium.com. This site is claiming to offer a so-called “premium” version of the popular open source recording and streaming program Open Broadcaster Software at obsproject.com. “OBS Premium” hosts a direct rip of it’s legitimate counterparts landing page with a few sentences changed. DISMANTLING, 12

Comparing Hobby PCB Vendors

substack.com — Over the past two weekends or so, I’ve been cranking out Sir Box-a-Lot handhelds for family and friends. There is no way to make a project like this profitable, but the game is more fun than it might appear — and it’s cool to watch recipients’ faces light up after receiving a homemade gift. COMPARING, 13

An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About AI’s iPhone Moment

stratechery.com — I first spoke with Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang after last March’s GTC conference, and again after last fall’s GTC; as I observe in the interview below, Nvidia’s semiannual conference frequency might seem very aggressive, but given Nvidia’s central role in AI our last talk seems like it was years ago. INTERVIEW, 14

A Simple Framework for Architectural Decisions

infoq.com — InfoQ Homepage Articles A Simple Framework for Architectural Decisions SIMPLE, 15

Call yourself titles

josem.co — We constantly question ourselves when attempting anything new for the first time, which is daunting. And what’s worse, it prevents us from doing anything new, so we can’t change who we are. CALL, 16

Things I’ve Learned from Charlie Munger about Moats (2015)

25iq.com — 1. “We have to have a business with some inherent characteristics that give it a durable competitive advantage.” Professor Michael Porter calls barriers to market entry that a business may have a “sustainable competitive advantage.” Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger call them a “moat.” The two terms are essentially identical. Buffett puts it this way: “The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.” A complete discussion about the nature of moats can’t be done well in a ~3,000 word blog pos... THINGS, 17

The fastest rm command and one of the fastest cp commands

alexsaveau.dev — BlogFast Unix CommandsThe world's fastest rm command and one of the fastest cp commandsPublished Mar 24, 2023 • Last updated Mar 25, 2023 • 2 min readFast Unix Commands (FUC) is a project that aims to create the world’s fastest Unix commands. Currently, this means rm and cp replacements named rmz and cpz (the ‘z’ stands for “zippy”). When better performance cannot be achieved, the next highest priority is efficiency. In practice, rmz appears to be the fastest file deleter available while cpz wins in most cases, only losing in flat directory hierarchies.Myth bustingMany Stack Overflow answers will tell you to use this or that as a faster alternative to rm or cp. Let’s look at the data!RsyncUsing rsync for copying is always slower than cp as far as I can tell. This should not come as a surpr... FASTEST, 18

Experimental library for scraping websites using OpenAI's GPT API

jamesturk.github.io — scrapeghost is an experimental library for scraping websites using OpenAI's GPT. EXPERIMENTAL, 19

An EEVDF CPU Scheduler for Linux

lwn.net — Subscribers to LWN.net made this article — and everything that surrounds it — possible. If you appreciate our content, please buy a subscription and make the next set of articles possible. EEVDF, 20

Wittgenstein's Ladder

wikipedia.org — In philosophy, Wittgenstein's ladder is a metaphor set out by Ludwig Wittgenstein about learning. In what may be a deliberate reference to Søren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments,[1][2] the penultimate proposition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (translated from the original German) reads:[3] WITTGENSTEIN, 21

I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney overnight

reddit.com — I am employed as a 3D artist in a small games company of 10 people. Our Art team is 2 people, we make 3D models, just to render them and get 2D sprites for the engine, which are more easy to handle than 3D. We are making mobile games. LOST, 22

British PCs of the 1980s

arstechnica.com — Benj Edwards - Mar 24, 2023 11:00 am UTC BRITISH, 23

Reflect – App for recording and connecting notes, ideas and contacts

reflect.app — REFLECT, 24

My experience crafting an interpreter with Rust (2021)

ceronman.com — Last year I finally decided to learn some Rust. The official book by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols is excellent, but even after reading it and working on some small code exercises, I felt that I needed more to really understand the language. I wanted to work on a small project to get some hands-on experience, but most of my ideas didn’t feel very well suited for Rust. EXPERIENCE, 25

Society's Technical Debt and Software's Gutenberg Moment

substack.com — There is immense hyperbole about recent developments in artificial intelligence, especially Large Language Models like ChatGPT. And there is also deserved concern about such technologies’ material impact on jobs. But observers are missing two very important things: SOCIETY, 26

Paperspace (YC W15) is hiring a fullstack engineer to simplify deploying AI apps paperspace.com

Meticulous (YC S21) Is Hiring #3 Engineer to Build AI for Testing ycombinator.com

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