arXivLabs: Community Collaboration on New arXiv Features

2025-02-07
arXivLabs: Community Collaboration on New arXiv Features

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

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Development

AI vs. End-to-End Encryption: A Privacy Showdown

2025-01-17
AI vs. End-to-End Encryption: A Privacy Showdown

This article explores the clash between AI and end-to-end encryption. The rise of AI assistants necessitates off-device processing of increasingly sensitive data, challenging the privacy protections offered by end-to-end encryption. While companies like Apple are attempting to mitigate this with 'Private Cloud Compute' and trusted hardware, this approach relies on complex software and hardware security, falling short of a perfect solution. A deeper concern lies in the control of powerful AI agents; once deployed, access becomes paramount, raising the specter of government or corporate access compromising personal privacy.

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North Korean Hackers Steal $1.5 Billion in Ethereum from Bybit

2025-02-22
North Korean Hackers Steal $1.5 Billion in Ethereum from Bybit

Security firm SEAL reports that North Korean hacking group TraderTraitor stole over $1.5 billion in Ethereum from Bybit, their largest heist ever. The attackers used sophisticated social engineering, contacting employees via LinkedIn, Telegram, or Twitter, then deploying malware to steal private keys. SEAL advises crypto exchanges to immediately conduct internal reviews, check for suspicious employee contacts, and implement multi-sig security measures like using isolated devices for signing transactions, regularly resetting devices, and conducting red team exercises. This is crucial to bolstering security and preventing future attacks.

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Something's Rotten on the Internet: Tech Giants, Streaming Services, and the Erosion of User Experience

2024-12-22
Something's Rotten on the Internet: Tech Giants, Streaming Services, and the Erosion of User Experience

A blog post examines the current state of the internet, arguing that tech companies prioritize investor demands over user experience, manipulating user behavior through frustrating app designs, deliberately degraded search results, and pervasive ad tracking. Simultaneously, the Netflix streaming model is criticized for destroying the movie industry, its disregard for quality and manipulation of viewing data leading to a flood of low-quality content and inflated viewership numbers. The post concludes by highlighting widespread user dissatisfaction with the increasing cost and declining quality of online services, ultimately suggesting smartphones and social media in their current forms are fundamentally flawed and require significant improvement.

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AI-Powered Virtual Cells: From Science Fiction to Clinical Reality

2025-06-20
AI-Powered Virtual Cells: From Science Fiction to Clinical Reality

From Hodgkin-Huxley's four equations to today's whole-cell models with tens of thousands of parameters, simulating life has made incredible strides. Scientists build digital twins of cells, recreating molecular processes in silico, even creating and modeling the synthetic organism JCVI-syn3.0 with just 473 genes. AI's integration accelerates this, shrinking complex gene expression simulations from hours to minutes, pushing virtual cell models into drug discovery and personalized medicine. This marks a new era of biology and computer science collaboration.

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Denmark's HPV Vaccination Program Nearly Eradicates Two Major Cancer-Causing Strains

2025-09-17
Denmark's HPV Vaccination Program Nearly Eradicates Two Major Cancer-Causing Strains

Research published in Eurosurveillance shows that Denmark has virtually eliminated infections with the two most prevalent cancer-causing strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) since the vaccine's introduction in 2008. Analysis of cervical cell samples from Danish women aged 22-30 (2017-2024) revealed that HPV16/18 infection rates in vaccinated women plummeted from 15-17% to less than 1%. This demonstrates not only individual protection but also herd immunity, reducing overall HPV16/18 circulation. However, roughly one-third of screened women still had infections with high-risk HPV types not covered by the initial vaccine. This is expected to decrease as women vaccinated with the newer nine-valent vaccine reach screening age, potentially prompting a review of cervical cancer screening guidelines.

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Software Design Philosophy: Taming Complexity

2024-12-21

This post summarizes three key ideas from the book "A Philosophy of Software Design": zero tolerance for complexity, the misconception that smaller components always equate to better modularity, and the complexities inherent in exception handling. The author argues that complexity isn't caused by single errors but accumulates over time. Examples of an order processing system and user registration illustrate how to avoid duplicated code and find the right balance between component size and modularity. Furthermore, the post details three techniques to reduce exception handling complexity: eliminating errors, masking exceptions, and exception aggregation, with file processing serving as an example. The book ultimately emphasizes the importance of consistently simplifying complexity in software design.

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The Epic Burning of a NeXT Cube: An Accidental Experiment in Tech History

2025-07-14

This article recounts the author's humorous and arduous journey to photograph a burning NeXT Cube. Initially a simple plan to burn an empty case, the author faced numerous setbacks and unexpected twists, ultimately culminating in a successful burn at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's burn chamber. The narrative is filled with dramatic irony and dark humor, reflecting the challenges NeXT faced as a hardware manufacturer.

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Tech

Chipmakers Slow Expansions in Japan and Malaysia Amid Weak Demand and Tariff Uncertainty

2025-03-29
Chipmakers Slow Expansions in Japan and Malaysia Amid Weak Demand and Tariff Uncertainty

Leading chipmakers and packagers, including TSMC and Intel, are slowing their expansions in Japan and Malaysia due to sluggish demand for older chips and tariff uncertainties. Companies like ASE Technology and SPIL are also scaling back Malaysian expansion plans, adopting a 'wait-and-see' approach alongside numerous other chip suppliers.

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Ory Hydra: The Open-Source OAuth2 Server Powering ChatGPT

2025-03-20
Ory Hydra: The Open-Source OAuth2 Server Powering ChatGPT

Ory Hydra, initially a Go-based Keycloak alternative, evolved from a less flexible initial design to become a robust OAuth2 server. Focusing on building Ory Fosite, a library for OpenID Connect-compliant OAuth2 servers, and simplifying by removing user management, Ory Hydra now boasts impressive performance, reaching thousands of auth flows per second. The project's success is highlighted by its use in OpenAI's OAuth2 infrastructure, showcasing the importance of choosing clear, scalable technology and continuous optimization. This open-source project demonstrates a compelling journey from a student project to powering web-scale services.

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Development

eBPF Performance Boost: Unveiling the Trampoline Mechanism

2025-08-11

This blog post delves into the eBPF trampoline mechanism, a key performance optimization. With eBPF's increasing use in system monitoring and other areas, efficient program execution is critical. The trampoline avoids the overhead of exception handling in traditional kprobe methods by directly calling eBPF programs. The article details the trampoline's inner workings, covering advanced use cases like handling function entry and exit points, multi-argument passing, and implementation optimizations on ARM64.

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Development trampoline

UK Shifts AI Regulation: Risk Mitigation Trumps Mandatory Testing

2025-02-20
UK Shifts AI Regulation: Risk Mitigation Trumps Mandatory Testing

The UK government has quietly shifted its approach to AI legislation, dropping plans to force AI companies to provide pre-release access to the AI Safety Institute (AISI) for testing. This move, met with industry resistance, has raised concerns. Michael Birtwistle, associate director at the AISI, warned that it risks leaving various societal harms unaddressed, such as algorithmic bias. The shift comes amid escalating trade tensions with the US, with the UK's Technology Secretary, Peter Kyle, largely focusing on Ukraine and tariffs in media appearances, offering little comment on the AI policy change.

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Massive Jazz Archive Launches at UNT Music Library

2025-06-11

Thanks to a grant from The Recording Academy’s GRAMMY Museum Grants Program, the UNT Music Library has launched a massive collection of jazz history: the Tim Owens Jazz and Broadcast Collection. This digitized archive boasts over 150 hours of interviews and performance masters from NPR's jazz programs, including interviews by Owens from the Peabody Award-winning *Jazz Profiles*. This adds significantly to UNT's contribution to global music research and preservation.

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Recreating Apple's WWDC 2025 Liquid Glass Effect with CSS, SVG, and Physics

2025-09-09
Recreating Apple's WWDC 2025 Liquid Glass Effect with CSS, SVG, and Physics

This article delves into recreating the stunning Liquid Glass UI effect showcased at Apple's WWDC 2025. It uses CSS, SVG displacement maps, and physics-based refraction calculations to achieve a convincing approximation. The author explains the principles of refraction, detailing how light bends when passing through different materials and how mathematical functions describe the glass surface shape. SVG displacement maps are then employed to simulate the refraction effect. The article culminates in creating UI components, such as magnifying glasses, search boxes, switches, and sliders, with the Liquid Glass effect. Note that optimal performance is currently seen in Chrome due to browser compatibility with SVG filters as backdrop-filter.

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Development

Pushing the Limits of Linux Pipes: From 3.5GiB/s to 62.5GiB/s

2025-06-22
Pushing the Limits of Linux Pipes: From 3.5GiB/s to 62.5GiB/s

This post explores the implementation of Unix pipes in Linux by iteratively optimizing a test program that writes and reads data through a pipe. Starting with a simple program achieving around 3.5GiB/s throughput, the author improves its performance twentyfold through several optimization stages. Key improvements include utilizing `vmsplice` and `splice` system calls to eliminate data copying, leveraging huge pages to reduce paging overhead, and employing busy-looping to minimize synchronization costs. The journey is detailed with code examples and performance analysis using Linux's `perf` tool.

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Development Pipes

Manx: An Open Source Treasure Trove of Vintage Computer Manuals

2024-12-23

Manx is an open-source project dedicated to cataloging and preserving manuals for older computers. It currently boasts nearly 10,000 manuals from 61 websites, covering minicomputers, mainframes, and associated peripherals like terminals and printers. While many manuals are scanned images and not directly indexable by search engines, Manx adds metadata and information to compensate. Its search currently focuses on part numbers, titles, and keywords. For microcomputer manuals, Tiziano's 1000 BiT is a better resource.

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Programming with Music and Photos? Exploring the Weird World of Esoteric Languages

2025-09-08
Programming with Music and Photos? Exploring the Weird World of Esoteric Languages

A new book, "Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code," explores 44 bizarre programming languages, some using musical notation, others producing different results each run, and even one using photographs. Author Daniel Temkin uses these languages to explore the creativity of programming and the subtle power dynamics between programmer and machine. He highlights the contrast between esoteric languages and AI-generated code, the latter often lacking creativity. The history of esoteric languages dates back to early computing and is intertwined with the rise of shareware, demoscene culture, and the early internet.

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Development esoteric languages

Native Windows Todo App in Pure C

2025-05-11
Native Windows Todo App in Pure C

A modern, native Windows todo application built with C and the Win32 API. It allows users to create, edit, delete, and mark todo items as complete, with persistent storage in AppData. Features include system tray integration and a native Windows look and feel. The application supports up to 100 todo items. The source code is open-source and includes build instructions.

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Development Todo App

The Enigma of Julius and the Rise of AI

2024-12-23
The Enigma of Julius and the Rise of AI

The author recounts the story of Julius, a college classmate who, despite a lack of actual technical skills, rose through the ranks of various companies due to charisma and self-assurance. His success is mirrored in the author's current experience with seemingly productive AI tools that require extensive manual corrections. The narrative explores the parallels between Julius's career trajectory and the complexities of AI's impact on the workplace.

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Misc workplace

Haiku January Development Report: Core Improvements and New Features

2025-02-14

The January Haiku development report covers numerous improvements, including a major refactor of the Tracker file manager adding context menus, cut/copy/paste functionality, and live menu updates. Applications saw additions such as new features in the icon editor, touchpad settings, and styled text editor. Driver support was expanded to include Alder Lake chipsets, AMD temperature monitoring, and the Wacom CTH-470. Kernel-level changes focused on extensive memory management, page mapping, and permission check optimizations, boosting system stability and security. Many bugs were fixed, and the build system and documentation were improved.

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Development Development Report

My Secret Stash: Why I'm Hesitant to Share My Dotfiles

2025-08-06
My Secret Stash: Why I'm Hesitant to Share My Dotfiles

The author loves dotfiles – configuration files for software and operating systems – and enjoys sharing ideas and code. However, they're hesitant to publicly release their own extensive dotfiles repository, which includes configurations for zsh, tmux, neovim, vscode, a Homebrew package list, Stylus CSS rules, and is managed with GNU Stow. They feel their personalized customizations are too intimate to share, despite the coolness factor. This raises questions about the balance between personalized developer configurations and open-source sharing.

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Development

Clojure Flow: Building Highly Concurrent Dataflow Applications

2025-08-18

Clojure's Flow library offers a novel approach to building highly concurrent dataflow applications. It strictly separates application logic from deployment concerns such as topology, execution, communication, lifecycle management, monitoring, and error handling. Developers define processing logic using step-fn functions, while Flow manages process lifecycles and message passing. Step-fns have four arities: describe, init, transition, and transform, handling function description, initialization, lifecycle transitions, and message processing respectively. Flow also provides process monitoring and lifecycle management tools, supporting hot reloading and dynamic adjustments, simplifying the development of highly concurrent applications.

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Nix Home Manager: A Guide to Dotfiles Management

2024-12-22

This article delves into the advantages and techniques of using Nix Home Manager for dotfiles management. The author begins by acknowledging the steep learning curve of Nix and Home Manager, recommending a gradual approach to mastering its features. The article explains various Home Manager use cases, including software installation, declarative program and service configuration, and dotfiles management. A key focus is on the `mkOutOfStoreSymlink` function, which creates symlinks to dotfiles, allowing modifications without rebuilding the entire system. A custom module example is provided for easy switching between mutable and immutable configurations. Finally, the author compares Home Manager to other dotfiles management tools, highlighting its reproducibility benefits.

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Development

DeepSeek's smallpond: A Lightweight Distributed Compute Framework Built on DuckDB

2025-03-04
DeepSeek's smallpond: A Lightweight Distributed Compute Framework Built on DuckDB

DeepSeek released smallpond, a lightweight distributed compute framework built on DuckDB for handling massive datasets. It employs lazy evaluation and Ray for distributed computing, supports multiple partitioning strategies, and integrates efficiently with DeepSeek's proprietary 3FS file system. While reliance on Ray and 3FS adds complexity, smallpond balances ease of use with performance, offering data engineers a new option for processing terabyte-scale datasets. Compared to heavyweight frameworks like Spark, smallpond is lighter, easier to learn, and particularly suitable for smaller companies that don't need to handle overly complex queries.

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Development

Refactoring Pitfalls: When Not to Refactor

2025-02-06
Refactoring Pitfalls: When Not to Refactor

This article explores the pitfalls of code refactoring, highlighting that not all code needs refactoring. The author presents several scenarios where refactoring is inappropriate, such as attempting to fix bugs or adapt to third-party changes through refactoring; introducing unnecessary abstraction leading to code complexity; tackling multiple code smells simultaneously; refactoring untested code; and refactoring unchanging code. The article emphasizes that refactoring should be incremental, behavior-preserving, and involve small, reversible changes with test coverage. It advocates for pausing refactoring when understanding is lacking or new requirements emerge. Refactoring frequently changing and complex code yields the best results.

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Development best practices

Neo4j's License Modification Case Threatens Open Source

2025-02-28
Neo4j's License Modification Case Threatens Open Source

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will soon rule on Neo4j's attempt to modify the GNU AGPLv3 license, adding restrictive clauses that users cannot remove, contradicting the license's core principle. This case's outcome will significantly impact the enforceability of all open-source licenses, potentially eroding the trust that underpins open source. The Software Freedom Conservancy filed an amicus brief, but the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) non-involvement sparks controversy. The central question is whether licensors can add irremovable restrictions. The ruling will have far-reaching consequences for the open-source community and may even impact Neo4j forks like ONgDB and DozerDB.

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Development open-source license

Blizzard Reverses Hardcore WoW Classic Death Policy After DDoS Attacks

2025-03-25
Blizzard Reverses Hardcore WoW Classic Death Policy After DDoS Attacks

Streamer Sodapoppin's World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore raid was wiped out by a DDoS attack. Blizzard responded by resurrecting characters killed during the attack, a departure from the game's usual permadeath policy. Blizzard stated that the DDoS attack was a malicious third-party action, warranting a different response than typical in-game deaths. While the overall Hardcore mode rules remain unchanged, deaths specifically caused by external attacks like this will be handled differently.

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Legion Health: AI-Powered Mental Healthcare – Hiring Backend Engineers

2025-02-11
Legion Health: AI-Powered Mental Healthcare – Hiring Backend Engineers

YC-backed Legion Health is hiring top-tier backend engineers to build a next-gen, AI-driven mental healthcare system. This system uses AI to streamline operations like scheduling, billing, and patient interaction, not diagnostics. Engineers will architect and implement a highly scalable, event-driven backend using Node.js, Supabase, and AWS, handling real-time data and ensuring HIPAA compliance and security. This is a challenging and impactful opportunity to shape the future of AI in healthcare.

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Development AI Healthcare
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