A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering (2008)
Here’s the situation: it’s 1984, and you’re assigned to write the spellchecker for a new MS-DOS word processor. Some users, but not many, will have 640K of memory in their PCs. You need to support systems with as little as 256K. That’s a quarter megabyte to contain the word processor, the document being edited, and […]
Launch HN: Pyq (YC W23) – Simple APIs to Popular AI Models
Hello HN! We’re Emily and Aman, the cofounders of Pyq (https://www.pyqai.com). We make it easy for developers to build features powered by AI. We do this by identifying specific tasks that AI can solve well and providing simple APIs that any developer can start using straight from our website. We built Pyq because it took […]
Writing an OS in Rust to run on RISC-V
(This is a translation of the original article in Japanese by moratorium08.) (UPDATE (22/3/2019): Added some corrections provided by the original author.) Writing your own OS to run on a handmade CPU is a pretty ambitious project, but I’ve managed to get it working pretty well so I’m going to write some notes about how […]
Complex Systems of Secrecy: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs
Accepted manuscripts Accepted manuscripts are PDF versions of the author’s final manuscript, as accepted for publication by the journal but prior to copyediting or typesetting. They can be cited using the author(s), article title, journal title, year of online publication, and DOI. They will be replaced by the final typeset articles, which may therefore contain […]
Legion Health (YC S21) is hiring a founding engineer to fix mental health
Legion Health is looking for an experienced and motivated founding engineer to join our growing startup as our first full-time engineering hire. In this role, you will work closely with the co-founders to help drive the direction of the product and build scalable and robust technology solutions to help increase the availability of mental health […]
The E-Ink Badge: The Coolest Badge You Didn’t Know You Needed
At Census, we have a diverse and distributed team, with many of us working remotely from all over the world. However, we’re growing, and if you bet me $100 to recognize one of my fellow engineers on the street, you have decent odds you’ll be $100 richer. So, we recently had the opportunity to come […]
Hackers claim they breached T-Mobile more than 100 times in 2022
Image: Shutterstock.com Three different cybercriminal groups claimed access to internal networks at communications giant T-Mobile in more than 100 separate incidents throughout 2022, new data suggests. In each case, the goal of the attackers was the same: Phish T-Mobile employees for access to internal company tools, and then convert that access into a cybercrime service […]
Loneliness Reshapes the Brain
But loneliness doesn’t merely feel bad: It takes a toll on our health. It can lead to high blood pressure, stroke and heart disease. It can also double the risk of Type 2 diabetes and raise the likelihood of dementia by 40%. As a consequence, chronically lonely people tend to have an 83% higher mortality […]
The End of the English Major
A side effect of A.S.U.’s remote-learning boom has been improvement in its humanities numbers. On paper, the number of English majors at A.S.U. has grown, even as the number of students in English classrooms has dropped. Several professors insisted to me that they really, truly felt no preference for online or on-site students—but that they […]
Ford patents car that can repossess itself and drive back to showroom
A new patent allows Ford to build cars that take action if the owner falls behind on payments by playing annoying sounds – or even driving themselves back to the seller Technology 28 February 2023 By Matthew Sparkes Ford wants to build cars that repossess themselves, although the technology can’t be used on current models […]