It's always TCP_NODELAY
brooker.co.za — It's not the 1980s anymore, thankfully. ALWAYS, 1
Sioyek is a PDF viewer with a focus on textbooks and research papers
github.com — Sioyek is a PDF viewer with a focus on textbooks and research papers SIOYEK, 2
Viking-Age Hunters Took Down the Biggest Animal on Earth
hakaimagazine.com — In the fall of 1385, according to a 17th-century Icelandic text, a man named Ólafur went fishing off the northwestern coast of Iceland. In the cold seas cradled by the region’s labyrinthine fjords, Ólafur reportedly came across an animal that would have dwarfed his open wooden boat—a blue whale, the largest animal on record, known in the Icelandic language as steypireyður. VIKING-AGE, 3
Player-Driven Emergence in LLM-Driven Game Narrative
arxiv.org — arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. PLAYER-DRIVEN, 4
Launch HN: Muddy (YC S19) – Multiplayer browser for getting work done
news.ycombinator.com — Hey HN! This is Jimmy, Ron and Austa from Muddy (https://feelmuddy.com/). Muddy is a browser for work that automatically keeps project files organized in the same place where you use and share them. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZr49aN3sjQ. Download and try it out here: https://feelmuddy.com/. LAUNCH, 5
Weapons in Space Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of SDI
mit.edu — Aaron Bateman is Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University and a member of the Space Policy Institute. He has published widely on intelligence, transatlantic relations, and the military use of space during the Cold War and beyond. Prior to academia, he served as a US Air Force intelligence officer. WEAPONS, 6
In medieval England, leprosy spread btwn red squirrels/people, genome evidence
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: MEDIEVAL, 7
ESP32 Drum Synth Machine
github.com — This is my DRUM SYNTH LOFI MACHINE. ESP32, 8
Wprs – rootless remote desktop for Wayland (and X11, via XWayland) applications
github.com — Like xpra, but for Wayland, and written in Rust. WPRS, 9
CS388: Natural Language Processing
utexas.edu — These are the course materials for an online masters course in NLP. All lectures are videos available on YouTube. CS388, 10
Show HN: Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun
wilsonl.in — The above is a map of all Hacker News posts since its founding, laid semantically i.e. where there should be some relationship between positions and distances. I've been building it and some other interesting stuff over the past few weeks, to play around with text embeddings. Given that HN has a lot of interesting, curated content and exposes all its content programatically, I thought it'd be a fun place to start. EXPLORING, 11
Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
news.ycombinator.com — Hi HN, hunterbrooks and nbrad here from Ellipsis (https://www.ellipsis.dev). Ellipsis automatically reviews your PRs when opened and on each new commit. If you tag @ellipsis-dev in a comment, it can make changes to the PR (via direct commit or side PR) and answer questions, just like a human. ELLIPSIS, 12
Algebraic Data Types for C99
github.com — Algebraic data types for C99 ALGEBRAIC, 13
Show HN: An SQS Alternative on Postgres
github.com — A lightweight message queue. Like AWS SQS and RSMQ but on Postgres. SQS, 14
Being Green: A new book marvels at the strangeness of plants
slate.com — Back when I only visited the countryside occasionally, I suffered from what botanists call “plant blindness,” described by Zoë Schlanger in her entertaining new book, The Light Eaters, as “the tendency to view plant life as an indistinguishable mass, a green smudge, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals, as distinct from one another as a lion is from a trout.” Now that I live in small-town New England, I’m a bit more literate in the flora I see. A stand of Japanese knotweed, the bamboo-like invasive I’m constantly beating back to the margins of my own yard, indicates there must be a brook or other waterway out there, since that’s how the plant spreads. One wild apple tree by the roadside may have sprouted from a core tossed out of a car, but two or more s... BEING, 15
RTK Experiments
n1vux.github.io — Copyright © 2022, William D. Ricker, and licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0 or later . RTK, 16
The world has probably passed peak pollution
sustainabilitybynumbers.com — The health impacts of air pollution are often underrated. There are a range of estimates for how many people die prematurely from local air pollution every year.1 All are in the low millions. The World Health Organization estimates around 7 million. WORLD, 17
A Record of Old Kashgar
chinabooksreview.com — In the summer of 1994, I arrived on the streets of Kashgar’s Old City, at the edge of the Tarim Basin region in southern Xinjiang, China’s far west near its border with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. I was a newly recruited English teacher for the UK’s Voluntary Service Overseas, with a degree in Modern Chinese Studies. Over the three years I would spend in Kashgar, the importance of the city to the Uyghur people who called it home, and its unique identity within China, became clear to me. Back then, Kashgar was still unmistakably a Uyghur city first, and a Chinese city second: its homes, businesses, schools and places of worship were filled with everyday life that carried the knowledge of the past into an irrepressible present and uncertain future. RECORD, 18
Deaf girl is cured in world first gene therapy trial
independent.co.uk — DEAF, 19
Logarithmic Scales
briefer.cloud — The first lesson I learned about logarithms is not to mention them when speaking to a large crowd. All the other lessons sucked, so I thought I'd create my own. LOGARITHMIC, 20
The history of 'OK' (2023)
howstuffworks.com — "OK" is probably the most spoken word in the world — besides English, people say "OK" in a dozen languages, including Spanish, Italian and Russian — and yet almost nobody can tell you what those two letters stand for or where the word came from. HISTORY, 21
NOAA Forecasts Solar Storm (G4)
noaa.gov — Space Weather Prediction Center NOAA, 22
C2PA from the Attacker's Perspective
hackerfactor.com — C2PA from the Attacker's Perspective Thursday, 9 May 2024 In my previous blog entry, I mentioned an upcoming conference presentation. This week, I presented at the online IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2024 on the "Metadata and Authenticity" panel. (Video! I begin about 15 minutes into the panel discussion.) It's hard to say everything you want to say when under pressure to keep your introduction short. This blog entry will elaborate on my brief presentation and share how I did a live demo for creating an authenticated forgery. Some of this blog entry won't be news to long-term readers. But after the summary about me and the general attack vectors, I dive into an exploit demonstration that I had not previously made public. My Presentation Focus Unlike the other panelists who ta... C2PA, 23
How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?
leonarddavid.com — Wait a minute.Image credit: Barbara David BAD, 24
UTC, Tai, and Unix Time (2001)
yp.to — TAI times are identified by year, month, day, hour, minute, and second. There are exactly 86400 TAI seconds in every TAI day. TAI days are labelled by the Gregorian calendar. What is UTC? One day of Earth's rotation isn't exactly 86400 seconds. It's closer to 86400.002 seconds, wobbling slightly from day to day. UTC, Coordinated Universal Time, is based on TAI, and very similar to it, except that UTC has leap seconds every year or two. For example, here's how UTC and TAI handled the end of June 1997: 1997-06-30 23:59:59 UTC = 1997-07-01 00:00:29 TAI 1997-06-30 23:59:60 UTC = 1997-07-01 00:00:30 TAI 1997-07-01 00:00:00 UTC = 1997-07-01 00:00:31 TAI Notice the 23:59:60 in UTC. That's a leap second. It extended 1997-06-30 UTC to 86401 seconds. Before the leap second, the TAI-UTC differenc... UTC, 25
Xilinx HBM2 Internals (2023)
lovehindpa.ws — HBM2 is a type of stacked memory, with each stack containing multiple DRAM dies (chips), and each die supporting 2 channels. Every channel accesses a different (and independent) set of DRAM banks - as a result, requests for one channel cannot access data from another channel. This can be thought of as each channel “owning” a certain address range. Channels may be clocked independently. For more details on HBM, see the Wikipedia article. XILINX, 26
Show HN: Browser-based knitting (pattern) software
news.ycombinator.com — I wrote some simple open source web-based app to (1) dynamically compute knitting patterns (based on input parameters, such as the exact desired size), and (2) display these patterns and help me keep track of which row I'm on (as I start knitting), similar to minimalist "row counters" that other knitters use. It also gives you a simple visualization of the shape of what you're knitting. You can see it in action at https://alefore.github.io/knit/ (and read about it in https://github.com/alefore/knit). BROWSER-BASED, 27
VideoPrism: A foundational visual encoder for video understanding
research.google — Posted by Long Zhao, Senior Research Scientist, and Ting Liu, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google Research VIDEOPRISM, 28
Webb Hints at Possible Atmosphere Surrounding Rocky Exoplanet
nasa.gov — Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope may have detected atmospheric gases surrounding 55 Cancri e, a hot rocky exoplanet 41 light-years from Earth. This is the best evidence to date for the existence of any rocky planet atmosphere outside our solar system. WEBB, 29
Freshpaint (YC S19) is hiring software engineers to protect patient privacy ashbyhq.com
CodeStory (YC S23) Is Hiring a Founding Engineer for Building AI-Native IDE workatastartup.com
Empirical Health (YC S23) is hiring engineering leads in NYC ycombinator.com