Polyamory Doesn't Liberate; Monogamy Doesn't Protect: A Bay Area Dating Retrospective

2024-12-19
Polyamory Doesn't Liberate; Monogamy Doesn't Protect: A Bay Area Dating Retrospective

This essay reflects on a decade of dating in the Bay Area, challenging the notion that polyamory is inherently liberating or monogamy inherently protective. Drawing on personal experiences and anecdotes from friends, the author argues that neither relationship style guarantees emotional fulfillment or prevents heartbreak. Statistical data on polyamory is analyzed, revealing complexities and contradictions. The author concludes that the key to successful relationships lies in self-awareness, communication, and addressing personal attachment issues, rather than solely relying on a specific relationship structure.

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Product Managers in the Age of AI: New Tools, Same Core Principles

2024-12-22
Product Managers in the Age of AI: New Tools, Same Core Principles

Despite the trendy term "AI Product Manager," AI hasn't fundamentally changed product management's core: understanding user needs, creating solutions, and defining tasks. AI provides powerful new tools like Large Language Models (LLMs), but PMs still leverage these tools, not build them. The article explains basic LLM concepts (tokens, context windows, prompts) and advises PMs to learn effective prompting, collaborate closely with engineers, and focus on AI's practical value for the product, avoiding trendy additions. In short, AI is a tool, not a replacement; PMs must embrace AI and enhance their skills to thrive in this era.

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Development Product Management

Two Sean Carrolls Discuss the Universe: A Dialogue on Science and Faith

2024-12-24
Two Sean Carrolls Discuss the Universe: A Dialogue on Science and Faith

Nautilus magazine brought together two scientists, both named Sean Carroll—one an evolutionary biologist, the other a physicist—for a fascinating conversation. From their respective fields, they tackled profound questions about the origin of life, extraterrestrial life, the tension between science and religion, Earth's fate, and their childhood fascinations with science. Their discussion blended rigorous scientific reasoning with humorous anecdotes, ultimately ending on a note of optimism about the universe's mysteries and humanity's future.

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WordPress.org Pauses Services for Holiday Break

2024-12-20

To give volunteers a holiday break, WordPress.org is temporarily pausing several free services: new account registrations, new plugin/theme submissions, and new photo directory submissions. Forums and localization remain open. Founder Matt Mullenweg explains that legal battles with WP Engine are consuming significant time and resources, hindering his work on WordPress improvements. He urges support for WordPress.org and suggests using alternative web hosts not involved in the litigation.

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ISO 8583: The Secret Language of Credit Cards

2024-12-18
ISO 8583: The Secret Language of Credit Cards

Every time you tap your card or pay online, you're interacting with the ISO 8583 protocol. This 1987 standard defines the format of real-time transaction messages between banking networks. It includes core fields like message type indicators, bitmaps, and data elements, but networks vary in their extensions and serialization, leading to compatibility challenges. This article delves into the complexities of ISO 8583's structure, field encoding, nested message handling, and demonstrates building a robust ISO 8583 parser to handle network variations and error scenarios.

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Northern Giant Hornet Eradicated from the United States

2024-12-23

The Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced the eradication of the northern giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) from Washington state and the US after three years without confirmed detections. This success is attributed to a multi-year collaborative effort involving state and federal agencies, community members, and the public, who played a crucial role in reporting sightings. The hornets posed a significant threat to honeybees, other pollinators, and agriculture, and their eradication protects the US ecosystem and agricultural industry. While eradicated, vigilance continues to prevent reintroduction.

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Great Question (YC) Hiring People Operations Manager

2024-12-12
Great Question (YC) Hiring People Operations Manager

Great Question, a YC-backed startup simplifying customer research, is seeking an experienced People Operations Manager. This role will focus on streamlining recruitment, onboarding, compensation standardization, and enhancing company culture to boost employee engagement and retention. The ideal candidate will have 3+ years of experience in people operations, expertise in compensation and performance management, excellent communication skills, and a proven ability to thrive in a remote work environment. This is a crucial opportunity to contribute to a rapidly growing startup.

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GitHub Open Sources Fully Documented Commodore 64 Elite Source Code

2024-12-20
GitHub Open Sources Fully Documented Commodore 64 Elite Source Code

A fully documented and annotated source code for the classic Commodore 64 game Elite has been open-sourced on GitHub. This repository provides four variants of the source code, catering to different hardware platforms and build processes. Developers can explore the meticulously commented source code to understand Elite's inner workings and even compile a playable D64 disk image on modern machines using the provided Makefile, runnable on emulators or real hardware. This project aims to help appreciate this iconic 8-bit game, offering significant educational and archival value.

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New Underwater Footage Raises Sabotage Suspicions Against Yi Peng 3

2024-12-19
New Underwater Footage Raises Sabotage Suspicions Against Yi Peng 3

New underwater footage obtained by TV2 reveals drag marks on the seabed near Læsø, Denmark, coinciding with the unusual maneuvers of the Chinese vessel Yi Peng 3 ten days before the Baltic Sea cable breaks. The footage shows a distinct mark aligning with the Yi Peng 3's path on November 7th, when the ship inexplicably slowed down significantly while passing over the cables. Experts are questioning this unusual behavior for a commercial vessel, citing suspicions of sabotage against three Danish-Swedish underwater cables. The ongoing investigation involves Danish, Swedish, and German naval vessels monitoring the Yi Peng 3, which remains anchored in the Kattegat. Authorities remain tight-lipped, prompting independent investigations by TV2 and its partners.

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Four Surprising Limitations of Rust's Borrow Checker

2024-12-24

This article delves into four surprising limitations of Rust's borrow checker encountered even by experienced Rustaceans. The first limitation involves the borrow checker's inability to fully account for match and return statements, leading to redundant checks when working with HashMaps. The second limitation concerns asynchronous programming, where Rust currently lacks the ability to express certain asynchronous callback type signatures. The third centers around FnMut closures not allowing re-borrowing of captured variables, restricting access to mutable state in async operations. Finally, the Send checker's lack of control flow awareness results in some Futures that should be Send being incorrectly flagged as non-Send. The author illustrates these limitations and their challenges with concrete code examples and workarounds, advocating for improvements to Rust's type system to enhance developer productivity.

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Intel's Ex-CEO and CFO Face Shareholder Lawsuit Over Compensation

2024-12-24
Intel's Ex-CEO and CFO Face Shareholder Lawsuit Over Compensation

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and current CFO and co-interim CEO David Zinsner are facing a shareholder derivative lawsuit alleging they misled shareholders about the financial performance of Intel's foundry unit. The suit claims breaches of fiduciary and contractual duties, seeking the return of all profits, benefits, and compensation. This follows Gelsinger's failed turnaround plan and Intel's record quarterly loss, with the foundry business identified as a major source of losses. The lawsuit highlights Intel's challenges in regaining shareholder trust and rebuilding its image.

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Numbers Look Like Leaves in Set Theory

2024-12-28
Numbers Look Like Leaves in Set Theory

While learning ZFC set theory, the author discovered that the graphical representation of natural numbers using Von Neumann ordinals, when rendered using a force-directed graph layout, strikingly resembles leaves. The article details the recursive definition of Von Neumann ordinals and their tree-like structure, visually demonstrating how numbers from 0 to 16 take on a leaf-like form. The author concludes by questioning whether this 'leaf' shape is inherent to the structure of Von Neumann ordinals themselves and plans to investigate the set-theoretic representation of rational numbers.

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Quick Start with TideCloak: Secure React App in 10 Minutes

2024-12-19
Quick Start with TideCloak: Secure React App in 10 Minutes

TideCloak is an easy-to-use identity and access management system based on Keycloak and secured by Tide's Cybersecurity Fabric. This guide shows you how to build a secure single-page React application with TideCloak in under 10 minutes. First, install Docker and NPM, then run the TideCloak-Dev Docker container. After activating a free developer license, create your React project, install dependencies, and run the application. Users can log in, register, and view customized content based on predefined roles, all managed by TideCloak and secured by Tide's Cybersecurity Fabric.

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Development Identity Management

The Enigma of Luigi Mangione: A Bright Young Man and a Shocking Crime

2024-12-22
The Enigma of Luigi Mangione: A Bright Young Man and a Shocking Crime

This article recounts the author's interactions with Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Luigi, a bright young man from a wealthy family, purchased a premium membership to the author's blog, leading to a two-hour video call. During their conversation, Luigi expressed concerns about the erosion of human agency in modern society, likening many to unthinking 'NPCs' manipulated by technology. He voiced frustration with high US healthcare costs. The author's shock at Luigi's subsequent arrest for murder forms the crux of the article, exploring the complexities of motivation, the coexistence of kindness and cruelty, and the multifaceted nature of human behavior. The article raises questions about free will and societal influences on individual actions.

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Surfer Protocol: Open-Source Framework for Personal Data Control

2024-12-17
Surfer Protocol: Open-Source Framework for Personal Data Control

Surfer Protocol is an open-source framework that empowers users to export and build applications based on their personal data. Addressing the issue of data siloed across numerous platforms, Surfer Protocol offers a solution. It comprises a desktop application for exporting data from various apps and services, and a Python SDK for building applications using this data. Users can leverage Surfer Protocol to create personalized AI models, reclaim control of their data from big tech, or leave a digital legacy.

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Saturn's Rings: Older Than We Thought?

2024-12-19
Saturn's Rings: Older Than We Thought?

A new study challenges the long-held belief that Saturn's rings are relatively young. Previous research, based on data from the Cassini spacecraft, suggested an age of only a few hundred million years. However, a team led by planetary scientist Ryuki Hyodo used computer simulations to show that micrometeoroid impacts on the rings produce far less contamination than previously thought. This implies the rings could be billions of years old, as old as Saturn itself, predating even the dinosaurs. This finding significantly alters our understanding of early solar system evolution and points towards future missions for more detailed investigation.

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Former Twitter Founder Launches Mozi, a Social App Focused on Offline Connections

2024-12-12
Former Twitter Founder Launches Mozi, a Social App Focused on Offline Connections

Ev Williams, founder of Twitter and Medium, has launched a new social app called Mozi, aiming to redefine the essence of social interaction. Unlike content-focused social media, Mozi prioritizes helping users build and maintain relationships with people in their real lives. By integrating with users' contact lists, it shows when users and their acquaintances will be in the same location (city or event), facilitating offline meetings. Mozi emphasizes privacy, lacking public profiles and follower counts, aiming to be a private platform promoting genuine social connections.

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Guile-powered Emacs: A Bold Rewrite Project

2024-12-16

Emacs, renowned for its extensibility, faces performance and expressiveness limitations with its core language, Emacs Lisp (Elisp). To address this, the Guile-Emacs project aims to replace Elisp in Emacs with Guile Lisp. After years of development and dormancy, Guile-Emacs has been revived by developers Robin Templeton and Larry Valkama. The project aims to leverage Guile's compiler and performance advantages to improve Emacs' speed and extensibility while maintaining Elisp compatibility. The ultimate goal is to rewrite a significant portion of Emacs's C code in Lisp, significantly enhancing its customizability. While facing technical and political challenges, the project presents exciting possibilities for the future of Emacs.

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Development

GribStream: A Fast and Efficient Historical Weather Forecast API

2024-12-20
GribStream: A Fast and Efficient Historical Weather Forecast API

GribStream is a fast, efficient, and easy-to-use historical weather forecast API leveraging the National Blend of Models (NBM) and the Global Forecast System (GFS). It provides access to massive historical weather data; a single HTTP request can retrieve tens of thousands of hourly data points for months in seconds. The API supports various output formats (CSV, Parquet, JSON, etc.) and location queries. Its cost-effective pricing and powerful features allow developers to easily access the data they need without downloading and archiving.

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Development historical data

Cultivated Meat: From a $330,000 Burger to the Future of Food

2024-12-16
Cultivated Meat: From a $330,000 Burger to the Future of Food

From Winston Churchill's 1931 prediction to the world's first lab-grown burger in 2013, the cultivated meat industry has overcome challenges to become a booming sector. The initial high cost (the first burger cost $330,000) fueled innovation, leading to over 100 companies worldwide investing a total of $2.6 billion. Technological advancements have reduced costs, such as serum-free growth media, and increased efficiency with innovations like PluriMatrix. Regulatory approvals in countries like the US and Singapore are paving the way for wider adoption, though mainstream acceptance is projected to take 20-30 years.

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Website Showcases Early Christian Writings

2024-12-25

A new website, "Early Christian Writings," offers a comprehensive collection of Christian texts predating the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. It features the New Testament, Apocrypha, Gnostic texts, writings of the Church Fathers, and related non-Christian sources, all with translations and commentary. This resource provides invaluable insight into the history and development of early Christianity.

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Jupyter Notebooks: E2E Testing and Documentation in One

2024-12-18

While developing a quantum computing library, the author leveraged Jupyter Notebooks as both user guides and end-to-end tests. By reading environment variables (like SERVER_URL) within the notebooks, they achieved parameterization, allowing execution by users and automated CI/CD pipelines. Two methods for running notebooks were explored: nbclient for simplicity, and nbconvert/jq for more control but increased complexity. The author opted for nbclient's ease of use, effectively integrating documentation maintenance and code testing, ensuring the integrity of both with every merge request.

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Development E2E testing

OpenAI's GPT-5 Project Hit by Delays and High Costs

2024-12-23
OpenAI's GPT-5 Project Hit by Delays and High Costs

OpenAI's highly anticipated GPT-5 project, codenamed 'Orion,' is significantly behind schedule and facing substantial cost overruns, according to the Wall Street Journal. Intended as a major leap forward for the technology powering ChatGPT, the project is encountering challenges, including concerns about insufficient data to reach its ambitious intelligence goals. Microsoft, OpenAI's largest investor, had expected the new model by mid-2024, but that timeline is now uncertain. The project, underway for over 18 months, faces an unclear future.

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AI

Otto-m8: A No-Code Visual Platform for AI Workflows

2024-12-23
Otto-m8: A No-Code Visual Platform for AI Workflows

Otto-m8 is a flowchart-based automation platform that allows users to interconnect LLMs and Hugging Face models via a simple visual interface and deploy them as REST APIs. It abstracts the complex process of running AI models into an Input, Process, Output paradigm, enabling users to build various AI workflows, such as chatbots or custom APIs, with minimal to no code. Currently in its MVP stage, Otto-m8's source code is publicly available.

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Spark vs. DuckDB vs. Polars: Benchmarking Performance for Small to Medium Workloads

2024-12-15
Spark vs. DuckDB vs. Polars: Benchmarking Performance for Small to Medium Workloads

This article benchmarks Spark, DuckDB, and Polars, comparing their performance, cost, and development ease on 10GB and 100GB datasets. Results show that for large datasets and ETL tasks, Spark remains dominant due to its distributed computing capabilities and mature ecosystem. DuckDB and Polars excel at interactive querying and data exploration on smaller datasets. The author recommends a strategic mix-and-match approach, using Spark for ETL, DuckDB for interactive queries, and Polars for niche scenarios, tailoring engine choice to specific needs.

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Ethereum On-Chain Upgrade Signaling EIP: Community Consensus Drives Upgrades

2024-12-22
Ethereum On-Chain Upgrade Signaling EIP: Community Consensus Drives Upgrades

This proposal introduces an on-chain mechanism allowing Ethereum clients to signal their readiness for protocol upgrades by embedding a "vote" indicator in the extraData field of newly mined blocks. Future fork activation blocks only occur if enough blocks within a specified window signal "for" the upgrade. This shifts upgrade decisions from the Ethereum Foundation to network participants, enhancing decentralization and mitigating centralization risks. The proposal also addresses trademark concerns and potential security vulnerabilities.

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Muscle Atrophy as We Climb the Kardashev Scale

2024-12-16

As humanity ascends the Kardashev Scale, a paradox emerges: increased energy access correlates with decreased physical labor. The author outlines three biomechanical stages: pre-industrial, where physical exertion was essential; industrial-modern, where machines reduced manual labor; and post-biological, where humans might remotely control robots via brain-computer interfaces, rendering physical bodies obsolete. This raises questions about the future of humanity's physical form and the complex relationship between technological advancement and human evolution.

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