Resurrecting the Dead: Running Android Apps on Unsupported Windows Versions with Project Astoria

2025-06-01
Resurrecting the Dead: Running Android Apps on Unsupported Windows Versions with Project Astoria

This post details how to run Project Astoria, Microsoft's defunct Android app bridging solution, on various unsupported Windows versions, from Windows Desktop to the Anniversary Update and beyond. By cleverly utilizing files and registry entries from old Windows 10 Mobile builds and overcoming the 'time bomb' issue of expired builds, the author successfully gets Android apps running. The article thoroughly outlines each step, including copying files, importing registry keys, configuring services, and deploying APKs using a patched WConnectAgent tool. The author concludes by successfully running Android CPU-Z on Windows 10.

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Development

Resurrecting a Lost Arcade Giant: The Galaxian3 Rescue Mission

2025-04-19
Resurrecting a Lost Arcade Giant: The Galaxian3 Rescue Mission

In the early 1990s, Namco's 28-player arcade behemoth, Galaxian3, captivated players. Years later, most installations vanished. This article details a two-year journey to restore a damaged Galaxian3 GT-6 in New Hampshire. The game boasts unique hardware, including dual Sony CRT projectors and LaserDisc players. The team tackled challenges like diagnosing a mysterious LED flashing fault, repairing LaserDisc players, and combating 'CRT fungus' in the projectors. Despite their success in reviving much of the game, challenges remain, showcasing the immense effort required to preserve gaming history.

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Game

A Decade of Rust: Reflections and Future Outlook

2025-06-05
A Decade of Rust: Reflections and Future Outlook

A founder who started using Rust a month after the release of Rust 1.0 reflects on a decade of experience building two startups with over 500,000 lines of Rust code. The article recounts initial challenges like poor version compatibility, long compile times, and the steep learning curve, but also praises the exceptional contributions of the Rust community and highlights Rust's advancements in reliability and performance. Looking ahead, the author anticipates significant improvements in compile speed, portability, const evaluation, and concurrency, along with broader adoption in domains like web browsers and game development.

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LeoLabs: Your Gateway to Low Earth Orbit Data

2025-09-25

LeoLabs provides a comprehensive platform for accessing and analyzing data on low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Their services range from real-time tracking and monitoring to collision avoidance predictions and advanced orbit analytics. Users can access a vast catalog of satellite data, conduct conjunction assessments, and leverage APIs and tools for in-depth analysis. This platform is invaluable for spacecraft operators, research institutions, and government agencies.

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Nintendo's Switch Ban: Online Services Blocked, Offline Functionality Remains?

2025-05-27
Nintendo's Switch Ban: Online Services Blocked, Offline Functionality Remains?

Nintendo's aggressive stance against modded Switches sparks debate. While their terms allow for remotely bricking modified consoles, in practice, the company seems more focused on deterring users than widespread bans. Lawyers point out that this "software tethering," while legally possible, faces public backlash and potential legal challenges. Ultimately, whether Nintendo will actually enforce widespread bans depends on public reaction and legal boundaries.

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Game Modding

The Enigma of Time Spent on Error Handling in Software Development

2025-09-19

A software engineer struggles to find research quantifying the time developers spend on error detection and handling code. While it's widely believed this constitutes a significant portion, perhaps exceeding two-thirds of production code, reliable figures are lacking. This contrasts with the precise quantification of various metrics in current AI research, highlighting a gap in understanding fundamental aspects of software engineering.

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Development code proportion

arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaborators

2025-06-02
arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework enabling collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the website. Individuals and organizations involved embrace arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners who adhere to them. Got an idea for a project that will benefit the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

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Development

UK Economy Surges, But Future Uncertain Amidst Global Trade Tensions

2025-05-15
UK Economy Surges, But Future Uncertain Amidst Global Trade Tensions

The British economy grew at its fastest pace in a year during the first quarter of 2025, expanding by 0.7%, a welcome boost for the Labour government. The services sector fueled this growth, making the UK the fastest-growing G7 economy in Q1. However, economists predict a slowdown in Q2 due to global uncertainty stemming from US tariffs and new UK taxes. While a US-UK trade deal was announced, reducing tariffs on some goods, the lingering effects of the US-China trade war and rising domestic prices are expected to dampen consumer demand and export growth.

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SpaceX Aims for Starship's Orbital Return and Catch

2025-09-20
SpaceX Aims for Starship's Orbital Return and Catch

SpaceX plans to attempt a groundbreaking feat next year: landing a Starship rocket back at its Texas launchpad after returning from low-Earth orbit. This ambitious goal presents a significant geographical challenge, requiring precise navigation within a narrow corridor to avoid landmasses. Previous 10 test flights ended with ocean splashes. Following successful upcoming tests, SpaceX will aim to send the new Starship V3 (171ft tall) into orbit. Starship's design prioritizes full reusability—Super Heavy boosters are already recovered and reused, but upper stage recovery is slated for next year at the earliest. A successful orbital flight and return-to-launch-site landing, requiring flight over parts of Mexico and South Texas, will mark a major milestone in Starship's development.

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FinArva AI Hackathon 2025: Solving India's Financial Distribution Challenges with AI

2025-05-01
FinArva AI Hackathon 2025: Solving India's Financial Distribution Challenges with AI

GroMo presents the FinArva AI Hackathon 2025, powered by AWS, a high-stakes competition to tackle India's toughest financial distribution problems using AI and product innovation. Participants will design intelligent solutions for Bharat's next billion users, receive exclusive mentorship, pitch to top fintech leaders, and compete for prizes exceeding ₹10,00,000. Open to students, professionals, and AI enthusiasts, teams of 3-5 members are encouraged. Winning criteria include problem understanding, innovation, business impact, effective AI integration, and usability.

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Development AI Hackathon

Canonical's Hiring Process: A Kafkaesque Nightmare

2025-06-01

A job applicant details their harrowing experience applying twice for positions at Canonical. The process involved bizarre requirements, from high school grades to pseudoscientific psychometric tests, culminating in an awkward interview with Mark Shuttleworth. The author meticulously documents each stage, ultimately obtaining the rejection reason via GDPR: "Culture/behaviour/motivation misalignment." This account exposes Canonical's unusual and opaque hiring practices, serving as a cautionary tale for prospective applicants.

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Misc

Ratomic: Mutable Data Structures for Ruby Ractors

2025-03-26
Ratomic: Mutable Data Structures for Ruby Ractors

Ratomic provides mutable data structures for Ruby's Ractors, allowing Ruby code to scale beyond the Global VM Lock (GVL). This early-stage project seeks contributors with Rust and Ruby C extension experience. Ratomic offers Ractor-safe structures like counters, object pools, maps, and queues, designed as class-level constants for sharing among multiple Ractors. The project is licensed under MIT.

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Development

Finding the Best Restaurants in Colorado Springs with LLMs and the Google Places API

2025-02-15
Finding the Best Restaurants in Colorado Springs with LLMs and the Google Places API

This post details a data science project using LLMs and the Google Places API to identify the best restaurants in Colorado Springs. The author navigated the complexities of Google API registration, data cleaning (including removing irrelevant entries like synagogues and shops), and experimented with ranking algorithms like Bayesian Average and Wilson Score Interval before settling on the latter. The final output includes a ranked list of restaurants and heatmaps visualizing their locations, revealing interesting geographical patterns in the city's culinary scene.

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Development

Sleep: More Than Brain Rest, a Full-Body Reset

2025-04-10
Sleep: More Than Brain Rest, a Full-Body Reset

Harvard Medical School research challenges our understanding of sleep. While long considered mere brain rest, sleep deprivation experiments showed that fruit flies and mice died within ten days due to a buildup of reactive oxygen species in their guts. Sleep resets the brain, clearing neurotoxins, consolidating memories, and regulating genes, metabolism, and hormones for bodily homeostasis. Even organisms without central nervous systems, like hydra, exhibit sleep-like behavior, indicating that sleep's function transcends the brain and is crucial for whole-body health, reducing cardiovascular disease and cancer risk.

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Tech

A Catalog of Novel Operating Systems: Reimagining the Future of Computing

2025-05-17
A Catalog of Novel Operating Systems: Reimagining the Future of Computing

Following the LLM hype, a wave of new operating system creations has emerged. This article catalogs several such projects, including the UXN/Varvara personal computing stack, the web-research oriented Nette.io OS, and Lisp-based systems like Interim and ChrysaLisp. These projects demonstrate innovative approaches to OS design, such as DesktopNeo's reimagining of the desktop interface and MercuryOS's intention-based OS. These efforts represent bold explorations into the future of computing, reigniting passion for OS innovation.

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Development

Noloco is Hiring a Senior Product Designer to Build its No-Code App Platform

2025-03-15
Noloco is Hiring a Senior Product Designer to Build its No-Code App Platform

Noloco, a fast-growing, remote-first company backed by Y Combinator, is hiring a Senior Product Designer. Your primary mission will be to establish a strong design foundation for Noloco, making its platform simple, powerful, and flexible for non-technical users. This includes defining the design system, redesigning the mobile experience, and helping to build new product features that enable businesses to build amazing software without writing code. This is a high-impact role where your work will directly influence Noloco's success, with opportunities for growth as the company scales.

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Development

Internet Archive's Ceramic Archivists: Where Clay Meets the Digital Age

2025-01-11
Internet Archive's Ceramic Archivists: Where Clay Meets the Digital Age

The Internet Archive commissioned artist Nuala Creed to create a series of ceramic sculptures honoring staff members who have dedicated at least three years to the organization. These lifelike sculptures not only depict the Internet Archive's staff but also symbolize the human touch behind the digital age. From internet pioneers to everyday employees, each sculpture is unique, conveying the importance of knowledge preservation and digital legacy. The project is more than an art exhibition; it's a tribute to the unsung heroes of the internet's development.

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Don't Pretend to Be Big: Embrace Early Adopters

2025-05-24
Don't Pretend to Be Big: Embrace Early Adopters

This article shares a valuable lesson learned: don't try to appear like a large company, especially in the early stages of a startup. Instead of using corporate jargon and stock photos, embrace authenticity and transparency. Connect with early adopters who appreciate the fresh approach, are comfortable with a potentially buggy product, and actively engage in feedback. These early users offer invaluable help in building a better product and ultimately contribute to success.

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Deputy: A Clojure-Hosted Dependently-Typed Language

2025-05-20

Deputy is an experimental dependently-typed programming language embedded in Clojure, featuring inductive datatypes. It explores the implications of a Lisp-based REPL-driven workflow for both programming and type checking. Implemented as a Clojure library, it allows programmers to leverage the host language while working at the type level. This enables type-level computations that depend on values, unlocking powerful programming patterns. Importantly, despite the rich dynamic semantics of types, type checking remains a purely compile-time operation.

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Development

A Night at Japan's 'Station of Despair'

2025-02-07
A Night at Japan's 'Station of Despair'

Otsuki Station in Japan is known as a 'zetsubo no eki,' or 'station of despair.' A reporter spent a night there to experience what it's like. The remote location, coupled with the cold night air and limited open businesses, made for a challenging experience. While most shops were closed, options like all-night karaoke or a potentially expensive hotel were available. The article serves as a cautionary tale, highlighting the importance of planning transportation carefully, especially during the holiday season, to avoid getting stranded at a 'station of despair'.

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Misc Nightlife

Pearson Education Giant Suffers Massive Data Breach

2025-05-09
Pearson Education Giant Suffers Massive Data Breach

Global education giant Pearson experienced a significant cyberattack resulting in the theft of a large amount of corporate data and customer information. Attackers exploited an exposed GitLab Personal Access Token (PAT) to breach Pearson's developer environment, gaining access to credentials for cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Snowflake. This allowed them to steal terabytes of data, including customer information, financial data, and source code. While Pearson claims the stolen data was mostly "legacy data," they refuse to provide specifics, raising concerns. The incident highlights the critical need to secure .git/config files and avoid embedding credentials in remote URLs.

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Tech

Solving First-Order Differential Equations with Julia: A Step-by-Step Tutorial

2025-03-05

This tutorial demonstrates how to solve first-order differential equations using the Julia programming language and the DifferentialEquations.jl package. It begins with a recap of differential equation fundamentals, then walks through two examples – radioactive decay and Newton's law of cooling – showing how to translate mathematical equations into Julia code and solve them numerically using DifferentialEquations.jl, visualizing the results with plots. The tutorial is clear and concise, suitable for readers with some background in mathematics and programming.

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Google Search's AI Mode Gets a Massive Upgrade: Gemini 2.5, Shopping, and More

2025-05-20
Google Search's AI Mode Gets a Massive Upgrade: Gemini 2.5, Shopping, and More

Google has fully rolled out its AI Mode to all Search users in the US, powered by Gemini 2.5. This enhanced mode includes new features like shopping capabilities, ticket price comparison, and custom chart generation. Designed to handle complex queries beyond traditional search, AI Mode allows users to compare fitness trackers, for example. Future plans include integrating many of AI Mode's features into the core search experience and adding 'Deep Search' for comprehensive reports. AI Mode will also gain the ability to complete web tasks like booking tickets and reservations, and personalized recommendations via Gmail integration.

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AI

500 Mile Email: A Curated Collection of Absurd Software Bug Stories

2025-07-09

500 Mile Email is a curated list of bizarre software bug stories, updated weekly. From database servers mysteriously timing out to Wi-Fi only working in the rain, and applications crashing after drinking Coke, these anecdotes are both hilarious and thought-provoking. The site features contributions from developers, engineers, and users worldwide, showcasing the humorous and insightful moments of software development.

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Meta Prompting: Revolutionizing LLM Prompt Engineering

2025-06-03
Meta Prompting: Revolutionizing LLM Prompt Engineering

This article explores meta prompting, a technique using Large Language Models (LLMs) to create and refine prompts. It details various meta-prompting methods, including the Stanford and OpenAI collaboration's method using a 'conductor' LLM to orchestrate expert LLMs; Amazon's Learning from Contrastive Prompts (LCP), which improves prompts by comparing good and bad ones; Automatic Prompt Engineer (APE), Prompt Agent, Conversational Prompt Engineering (CPE), DSPy, and TEXTGRAD. The article compares their strengths and weaknesses, highlighting how these methods significantly improve prompt engineering efficiency. Finally, it showcases prompt generation tools from platforms like PromptHub, Anthropic, and OpenAI, simplifying meta-prompting implementation and unlocking the full potential of LLMs.

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Development meta prompting

Andrew Ng Slams 'Vibe Coding,' Says AI Programming Is 'Deeply Intellectual'

2025-06-05
Andrew Ng Slams 'Vibe Coding,' Says AI Programming Is 'Deeply Intellectual'

Stanford professor Andrew Ng criticizes the term "vibe coding," arguing it misrepresents AI-assisted programming as a casual process. He emphasizes it's a deeply intellectual exercise requiring significant effort. Despite his criticism of the term, Ng remains bullish on AI coding tools, highlighting their productivity benefits. He urges companies to embrace AI-assisted coding and encourages everyone to learn at least one programming language to better collaborate with AI and improve efficiency.

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AI

AI-Powered Illustration Generator: Elevate Your Visuals

2025-03-14
AI-Powered Illustration Generator: Elevate Your Visuals

Need eye-catching illustrations for your app, website, or social media? This AI-powered tool creates custom graphics for everything from app interfaces and onboarding screens to website hero images and social media posts. Boost your visuals with consistent branding across user guides, tutorials, articles, online stores, and educational platforms. Make your content more engaging and your brand more memorable.

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Fennel: A Lisp-like Enhancement for Lua

2025-04-13

Fennel is a programming language running on the Lua runtime. It leverages Lua's efficiency and lightweight nature while addressing some of Lua's shortcomings through Lisp-style syntax and improved design. Fennel employs a paren-first syntax, eliminating operator precedence ambiguity and early returns. Stricter variable management prevents accidental global variable use. Improvements include table notation, looping constructs, function argument checks, data structure destructuring, and pattern matching, enhancing code readability and maintainability. While Fennel offers a powerful macro system, it's often unnecessary. In short, Fennel provides a safer, cleaner way to program in Lua.

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Development

Improved Father Ted Tape Dispenser: Smaller, Better, Easier to Build

2025-06-01
Improved Father Ted Tape Dispenser: Smaller, Better, Easier to Build

The author has improved their Father Ted tape dispenser from a year ago. The new version is smaller, sounds better, and looks more professional. It uses a 3D-printed case, an IR sensor, and an ESP8266 microcontroller, costing less than €10 and is much easier to build. The author has shared the 3D printable models and instructions, encouraging others to build their own. They also suggest donating to a charity supporting trans people, in response to negative comments from the creator of Father Ted.

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Hardware DIY electronics

Firefly's Blue Ghost Captures Solar Eclipse from the Moon

2025-03-16
Firefly's Blue Ghost Captures Solar Eclipse from the Moon

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander captured incredible images from the moon's surface, including a stunning 'diamond ring' solar eclipse during the total lunar eclipse on March 14th. This marks the first time a commercial company has actively operated on the moon and observed a total solar eclipse where Earth blocks the sun, a phenomenon that occurred simultaneously with the lunar eclipse seen on Earth. The event highlights the new era of private lunar exploration.

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