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Syd: A Robust Rust-Based Linux Sandbox Kernel

2025-02-12

Syd is a GPL-3 licensed, rock-solid application kernel written in Rust for sandboxing applications on Linux systems (5.19 and above). Evolving from a tool for detecting package build errors in Exherbo Linux, Syd now provides a robust security boundary. Leveraging modern Linux APIs, it eliminates TOCTTOU vulnerabilities. Unlike other sandboxing tools, Syd operates without extra privileges, offering a simple interface to complex sandboxing mechanisms. Features include path sandboxing, execution control, network sandboxing, and advanced features like lock and proxy sandboxing. It's designed for strong application isolation and security.

(fosdem.org)

Development Linux sandbox

Sony Raises PS5 Prices in the US

2025-08-20

Sony Raises PS5 Prices in the US

Due to the challenging global economic climate, Sony has announced a price increase for PlayStation 5 consoles in the US, effective August 21st. The new recommended retail prices are: PS5 - $549.99, PS5 Digital Edition - $499.99, and PS5 Pro - $749.99. Accessory prices remain unchanged, and no other price adjustments have been announced for other regions.

(blog.playstation.com)

Game

Hatchet: A Robust Background Task Platform Built on Postgres

2025-04-03

Hatchet: A Robust Background Task Platform Built on Postgres

Hatchet simplifies background task management by leveraging Postgres. Forget complex queues and pub/sub systems; Hatchet lets you distribute functions across workers with minimal configuration. It boasts features like complex workflow chaining (DAGs), failure alerting, durable tasks, and a real-time web dashboard. Robust flow control, including concurrency and rate limiting, ensures application stability. Hatchet supports Python, Typescript, and Go, and offers cloud and self-hosted options.

(github.com)

Development background tasks

SpiceNice: An Open-Source Culinary Spice Database Launches

2024-12-17

SpiceNice: An Open-Source Culinary Spice Database Launches

SpiceNice is a new open-source website offering a comprehensive database of culinary spices. It provides detailed information on each spice, including its botanical name, culinary uses, and origin, along with details about the corresponding plant. Built using Strapi (backend), PostgreSQL (database), and Astro (frontend), SpiceNice aims to become a central resource for cooks, biologists, farmers, and spice enthusiasts. Future plans include a web API, multilingual support, and a community forum.

(tderflinger.com)

Development spices

Newton Public Schools' 'Equity' Experiment Fails

2024-12-14

Newton Public Schools' 'Equity' Experiment Fails

In the fall of 2021, Newton Public Schools in Massachusetts implemented a complex initiative called "multilevel classrooms" aimed at improving educational equity. This model mixed students of varying academic abilities into single classrooms with one teacher. Three years later, the results are troubling. Teachers report the model fails to meet the needs of diverse learners; high-achieving students are stifled, while lower-achieving students are hesitant to ask questions. Lack of adequate training and support for teachers led to poor outcomes, with students in multilevel classes often underperforming their single-level counterparts. The school lacked metrics for success, and no data supported the model's efficacy. A teacher's council petitioned to roll back multilevel classes in STEM and world languages, urging the district to find better solutions for addressing educational equity. The failure highlights the need for data-driven approaches and a focus on student needs in educational reform.

(www.thefp.com)

Misc educational equity multilevel classrooms teaching reform

Lightweight Pi-Hole 6: Effortlessly Block Ads on Your Home Network

2025-03-08

Lightweight Pi-Hole 6: Effortlessly Block Ads on Your Home Network

The newly released Pi-hole 6 is lighter and requires no PHP or external web server, reducing system resource demands. The article details the installation and configuration process, including choosing appropriate hardware (like a Raspberry Pi), setting a static IP address, and modifying router DHCP settings. The author successfully tested it on an old Raspberry Pi 3B, effectively blocking ads, increasing speed, and reducing data consumption. Compared to other ad-blocking methods, Pi-hole boasts simplicity, ease of use, and low system resource usage, but requires some network configuration knowledge.

(www.theregister.com)

Development ad blocking

Sonair Accelerates 3D Ultrasonic Sensor Development with Rust

2024-12-28

Sonair Accelerates 3D Ultrasonic Sensor Development with Rust

Sonair leveraged the Rust programming language to dramatically accelerate the development of its groundbreaking 3D ultrasonic sensor. The article details the reasons for choosing Rust, including its speed, safety, and robust ecosystem. Despite the team's initial lack of Rust experience, they found it surprisingly easy to learn, and its strong type system and borrow checker helped them write safer, more reliable code. Sonair uses Rust for production and Python for algorithm prototyping, creating an efficient workflow. Ultimately, Sonair aims to be among the first to deploy a safety-certified Rust implementation, setting a new standard for functional safety in embedded systems.

(www.sonair.com)

Development 3D Ultrasonic Sensor Functional Safety

ChatGPT Clone in 3000 Bytes of C

2024-12-12

Developer Nicholas Carlini created a ChatGPT clone using only 3000 bytes of C code, powered by the GPT-2 model. This dependency-free implementation loads GPT-2's weight matrix and BPE file, then performs tokenization, matrix operations, transformer inference, and detokenization. While the output quality is not high, its efficiency is remarkable, producing multiple replies per second on modern hardware. This demonstrates the potential of compact code in implementing complex AI models.

(nicholas.carlini.com)

AI

Claude's Bait-and-Switch: Weekly Limits on Pro and Max

2025-07-29

Claude's Bait-and-Switch: Weekly Limits on Pro and Max

Anthropic's Claude Pro and Max AI coding assistants now have weekly usage limits, upsetting paying users. This highlights the industry's problematic trend of initially offering "unlimited" access before imposing restrictions on power users. The author argues this breaches developer trust and advocates for transparent pricing. In contrast, Kilo Code offers pay-per-use with upfront pricing and a 300% bonus credit promotion this week as an alternative.

(blog.kilocode.ai)

Development

Hologram: Elixir Makes Web Dev Simple Again

2025-01-19

Hologram simplifies web development by letting you build rich, interactive UIs entirely in Elixir. Its declarative component system intelligently transpiles your code to JavaScript, giving you modern frontend capabilities without needing any JavaScript frameworks. Say goodbye to JavaScript framework fatigue and hello to the elegance of Elixir.

(hologram.page)

Development

NZ Health System Runs on Excel Spreadsheet, Blows $16B Budget

2025-03-11

NZ Health System Runs on Excel Spreadsheet, Blows $16B Budget

Health New Zealand (HNZ), managing a $16 billion budget, relies primarily on a single Excel spreadsheet for financial management. This led to budget overruns, and a Deloitte report revealed critical flaws: untraceable data, high error rates, and slow analysis. Despite possessing 6,000 applications and 100 digital networks, HNZ's senior leadership lacks coordination, holding only weekly in-person meetings. The Health Minister lacks a concrete improvement plan, raising serious concerns.

(www.theregister.com)

Tech Government Agency Budget Overrun Digital Transformation budget management healthcare system Healthcare System

DIY Website Font: A Calligraphr Success Story

2025-09-06

DIY Website Font: A Calligraphr Success Story

To personalize his website, the author embarked on a quest to create a custom handwritten font. Initial attempts using open-source tools like Inkscape and FontForge proved frustrating due to their clunky UIs. He switched to the paid service Calligraphr, which uses a print-write-scan workflow. Calligraphr's intuitive interface and powerful features enabled efficient font creation. The author praises Calligraphr's fair pricing and user-friendly data handling, contrasting it favorably with other services.

(chameth.com)

Design website personalization

Rethinking Literate Programming: Is Knuth's Approach Obsolete?

2025-01-13

This article offers a critical examination of Donald Knuth's literate programming approach. The author argues that Knuth's method overemphasizes typesetting while neglecting the crucial aspect of code organization, resulting in static, less interactive documentation. The author advocates for a literate programming style that prioritizes code organization and interactive feedback, illustrating its advantages with a simple interpreter he created. The key takeaway is that effective literate programming should allow developers to modify and run code directly within their programming environment, not just passively read a static document.

(akkartik.name)

Development literate programming code organization

Debunking HDR: The Hype vs. Reality

2025-06-14

Debunking HDR: The Hype vs. Reality

This article dives deep into the technical details and artistic implications of HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging, arguing that it's not always superior to SDR (Standard Dynamic Range). It debunks common HDR misconceptions, such as increased efficiency, wider gamut, and improved artistic expression. The author highlights flaws in HDR conversion processes, arguing that forced automated conversions often damage the artist's intent and degrade image quality. The article emphasizes the relative nature of tonal perception and prioritizes artistic expression over technical specifications. Ultimately, it advocates for making informed choices between HDR and SDR, stressing the importance of the creator's vision.

(yedlin.net)

Design

YC-Backed Startup Seeks Founding Web Scraping Engineer

2025-03-04

YC-Backed Startup Seeks Founding Web Scraping Engineer

A YC-backed startup is hiring a Founding Web Scraping Engineer to build internet-scale web crawling infrastructure capable of handling millions of domains and evolving anti-bot defenses. The role requires expert-level experience in large-scale web scraping and crawling (Selenium, Puppeteer, Playwright, Scrapy, etc.), with a deep understanding of anti-bot detection strategies and proven experience in captcha solving, proxy management, and data cleaning. The platform aims to provide end-to-end testing for web agents, including a Browser Gym for RL-driven optimization.

(www.ycombinator.com)

Development Large-Scale Data Extraction Anti-bot

Do You Really Need WebSockets? HTTP Streaming Might Be Enough

2025-04-11

Do You Really Need WebSockets? HTTP Streaming Might Be Enough

This article explores the limitations of WebSockets, particularly their shortcomings when handling messages requiring transactional guarantees. The author argues that WebSockets lack transactionality, making it difficult to reliably associate commands and responses, and handling errors and concurrent requests is more complex. In contrast, HTTP streaming offers a simpler alternative, effectively handling real-time data streams while avoiding the complexities of WebSocket lifecycle management and server-side intricacies. The article also introduces the author's eventkit library, simplifying the implementation of HTTP streaming.

(hntrl.io)

Development HTTP Streaming

Open Source Data Collection Tool RudderStack Found to Collect Passwords

2025-02-01

Open Source Data Collection Tool RudderStack Found to Collect Passwords

The open-source data collection tool RudderStack has been found to have a serious security vulnerability that, under certain circumstances, collects user passwords. The vulnerability stems from its autotrack feature, which collects all DOM attributes of elements a user clicks on. These attributes can contain sensitive information like passwords. This mirrors a similar vulnerability found in Mixpanel two years ago. While RudderStack has patched the issue partially, the fix is incomplete and potential risks remain. Users are advised to proceed with caution and monitor for updates.

(www.freshpaint.io)

Development data collection

OpenAI Launches Cheaper, Faster Reasoning Model: o3-mini

2025-01-31

OpenAI Launches Cheaper, Faster Reasoning Model: o3-mini

OpenAI unveiled o3-mini, a new AI reasoning model in its 'o' family. While comparable in capability to the o1 family, o3-mini boasts faster speeds and lower costs. Fine-tuned for STEM problems, particularly programming, math, and science, it's available in ChatGPT with adjustable 'reasoning effort' settings balancing speed and accuracy. Paid users get unlimited access, while free users have a query limit. Also accessible via OpenAI's API to select developers, o3-mini offers competitive pricing and improved safety, though it doesn't surpass DeepSeek's R1 model in all benchmarks.

(techcrunch.com)

AI

Displaying Website Content on an E-Ink Display: A Family Tech Solution

2024-12-15

Displaying Website Content on an E-Ink Display: A Family Tech Solution

To address the inconvenience of checking the school timetable, the author designed a low-power e-ink display that automatically fetches and displays the school website's timetable. The project overcame challenges of website login and API absence by using Playwright for web scraping, and a server-side application to generate the image, which is then displayed on the e-ink screen. This solution tackles a family's daily problem and showcases the combined application of low-power hardware and web scraping technologies. The project initially explored MicroPython, but ultimately utilized the Arduino library for better reliability and functionality.

(mfasold.net)

Tech e-ink display low-power

500 Days of Daily Math: A Journey from Zero to (Almost) Hero

2025-08-14

500 Days of Daily Math: A Journey from Zero to (Almost) Hero

The author recounts his 500-day journey of daily math practice using Math Academy. Initially motivated by a need to understand the math behind AI, he discovered a significant gap in his foundational knowledge, starting from the very beginning. Through consistent effort and strategic adjustments (like dedicated study time, utilizing spare moments, and publicly sharing progress), he's completed multiple foundational courses and is now tackling calculus and linear algebra. This journey has not only boosted his math skills but also cultivated better learning habits and resilience, positively impacting other aspects of his life.

(gmays.com)

Development

The Dark Side of the Nobel Prize: A Bitter Race for Hypothalamic Hormones

2025-03-30

The Dark Side of the Nobel Prize: A Bitter Race for Hypothalamic Hormones

This article recounts the intense rivalry between Andrew Schally and Roger Guillemin, two endocrinologists, in their race to win the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Their 26-year struggle to discover hypothalamic hormones is a gripping tale of ambition, betrayal, and the cutthroat competition within academia. The author explores the 'winner-takes-all' nature of scientific awards and the dark side of the Nobel Prize, prompting reflection on the flaws in the current system of scientific recognition.

(www.asimov.press)

Tech Scientific Competition Endocrinology

The Reliability of Old Tech vs. the Complexity of Modern Tech

2025-07-04

The Reliability of Old Tech vs. the Complexity of Modern Tech

The author contrasts the reliability of older technology with the complexities of modern "smart" technology, using a 41-year-old TI-99/4A home computer as an example. The old computer boots instantly, requiring no updates, cloud connectivity, or subscription fees, showcasing straightforward computing. In contrast, the author's Google Nest router fails to connect after an update, rendering smart bulbs unusable. The article criticizes the modern tech industry's conflation of complexity with progress, highlighting over-reliance on abstraction and layered software architectures, making systems difficult to understand and repair. The author argues that the hype surrounding AI reflects this "forgetting," where statistical advancements are overblown as revolutionary breakthroughs, neglecting underlying principles. Ultimately, the author calls for a return to simple, reliable design, emphasizing the importance of understanding fundamental knowledge and principles, avoiding dependence on tools at the expense of technical mastery.

(www.elektormagazine.com)

Tech

Is Current AI a Dead End?

2024-12-27

Is Current AI a Dead End?

Professor Eerke Boiten of De Montfort University Leicester argues that current AI systems based on large neural networks, such as ChatGPT, are unsuitable for critical applications due to their inherent complexity and unpredictability. These systems lack manageability, transparency, and accountability; their behavior is emergent rather than compositional, making effective verification and error correction difficult. Boiten suggests that the current direction of AI development may be a dead end, advocating for compositional neural networks or hybrid approaches combining symbolic reasoning to build more reliable AI systems.

(www.bcs.org)

AI AI Safety neural networks

In Memoriam: Donald Bitzer, Pioneer of Computing

2024-12-13

In Memoriam: Donald Bitzer, Pioneer of Computing

The Computer History Museum mourns the passing of Donald L. Bitzer (1934-2024), a pioneering computer scientist. Co-inventor of the flat-panel plasma display and creator of the PLATO system—the world's earliest time-shared computer-based education system and a groundbreaking online community—Bitzer's innovations presaged many modern online features. PLATO included forums, message boards, online testing, email, chat rooms, instant messaging, and multiplayer games, laying the groundwork for the interconnected digital world we know today.

(computerhistory.org)

Tech computer history plasma display PLATO system

Two Weeks with Claude Code: A Deep Dive into an AI Coding Assistant

2025-07-17

Two Weeks with Claude Code: A Deep Dive into an AI Coding Assistant

This detailed account chronicles two weeks of using Claude Code. Initially relying on Cursor and its generous API access for code generation and comprehension, API rate limits pushed the author towards a paid Claude Code subscription. A comparison of Claude Code and Cursor highlights strengths and weaknesses, including Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 model performance differences, Claude Code's context management, search capabilities, and custom commands. The author shares practical tips – efficiently utilizing sub-agents, context management, and command shortcuts – and suggests improvements for Claude Code. Overall, the author finds Claude Code powerful but with a steep learning curve, rewarding curiosity and exploration.

(sankalp.bearblog.dev)

Development

Salesforce Aims to Dominate the Digital Labor Market with AI Agents

2025-03-01

Salesforce Aims to Dominate the Digital Labor Market with AI Agents

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declared their ambition to become the world's leading provider of digital labor, leveraging AI agents to handle tasks like scheduling meetings, executing trades, and even coding. Unlike chatbots, these proactive AI agents require minimal human oversight. Salesforce's Agentforce, launched last year, allows companies to delegate responsibilities such as customer case handling and marketing campaigns to these AI agents. Benioff highlighted that nearly half of Fortune 100 companies utilize Salesforce's AI and Data Cloud products.

(sfstandard.com)

AI digital labor

Climate Messaging Backfires: Individual vs. Collective Action

2025-06-11

Climate Messaging Backfires: Individual vs. Collective Action

A new study reveals that many Americans misjudge the impact of their personal behaviors on carbon emissions, overestimating the effectiveness of actions like recycling while underestimating the impact of reducing air travel or meat consumption. Surprisingly, interventions focusing solely on individual actions decreased commitment to collective efforts like voting or participating in protests. The study highlights the need for a balanced approach, combining individual lifestyle changes with collective action to effectively address climate change. Future research will explore communication strategies that promote both.

(phys.org)

Tech behavioral economics environmental action

London Suburb Dweller's Megawatt-Hour Battery Dream

2025-09-15

London Suburb Dweller's Megawatt-Hour Battery Dream

A London suburban resident attempts to calculate the battery size needed for complete home energy self-sufficiency. Using data from their solar panels (generating 3800 kWh annually, matching their consumption), and years of data analysis, they find a massive 1068 kWh (nearly a megawatt-hour) battery is required to store summer's excess energy for winter use. While currently unrealistic due to technology and cost, they remain optimistic about future battery technology advancements and price drops, envisioning a future where every home has such a battery, achieving complete solar self-sufficiency.

(shkspr.mobi)

Tech batteries energy self-sufficiency

Home Assistant's Internet Accessibility Security Flaw

2024-12-15

Frederik Braun attempted to use Home Assistant for remote smart home control but discovered a significant security vulnerability. While Home Assistant offers username/password and two-factor authentication, its inability to handle URLs with embedded credentials and its requirement for root path deployment prevent additional security layers like web server authentication or obfuscated paths. This leaves Home Assistant's security solely reliant on its internal mechanisms, creating a security risk. The author calls on the Home Assistant community to improve its security configuration flexibility.

(frederikbraun.de)

Development Remote Access

OCaml Editor Gets a Major Boost: Powerful Refactoring Capabilities

2025-08-20

OCaml Editor Gets a Major Boost: Powerful Refactoring Capabilities

During my internship, I added powerful refactoring capabilities to OCaml's Merlin compiler, starting with an "extract toplevel expression" feature. This feature extracts selected expressions into new `let` bindings, supporting constants and expressions (including those using variables), and cleverly handling OCaml's purity issues. Implemented via the Language Server Protocol (LSP) with both code action and custom request interaction methods, the feature is in PRs and nearing merge. This marks a significant step towards an IntelliJ-like editor experience for OCaml, with plans for more refactoring tools in the future.

(tarides.com)

Development

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