Tales from the Far Side
Of all the comic strips that I would never, ever, ever have expected to make the transition to animated cartoon, I would think Gary Larson’s The Far Side would be at the top of my list. I don’t recall hearing about it at the time, but apparently it as indeed made into a Halloween special […]
The bizarre siege behind Stockholm Syndrome
Getty Images The six-day bank siege that inspired the controversial Stockholm Syndrome theory began on 23 August 1973. In 1980, a BBC documentary featured two pioneering New York police negotiators who had built their careers on the lessons they had learnt from hostage situations past, including this bizarre robbery attempt. “But Sven, it’s only in […]
Classifying All of the Pdfs on the Internet
The thumbnail of the article. TLDR: I classified the entirety of SafeDocs using a mixture of LLMs, Embeddings Models, XGBoost and just for fun some LinearRegressors. In the process I too created some really pretty graphs! Introduction How would you classify all the pdfs in the internet? Well, that is what I tried doing this […]
Bit-Banging a Basic Birthday
I spent this summer building a new app, for a machine that hasn’t been on the market since 1980 and wasn’t built to support graphics, sound, connectivity or even lowercase letters, sold by a company that went bankrupt a decade ago, tailor-made for an audience of one: my dad, who celebrated his 70th birthday this […]
Ask HN: Determine sound quality of a file, objectively?
Not my area, but: You could use image processing/DSP methods on a sample of spectrogram images taken from the file Visibly it’s obvious when it’s compressed, you get “glitchy” or “smeary” repeated artefacts I’d also look for cuts on the high end (over ~15k hz) that clip more than normal (compared to uncompressed)
Bootstrap Your SaaS (The Fast Way)
Last week, I created a LinkedIn post that generated some buzz (are we connected yet?) and I wanted to expand on it a bit more, because I think it’s an important way of funding a SaaS business aside from VC money. Since the ZIRP (zero interest-rate policy) is over and money actually costs money, funding […]
Migrating from DokuWiki to Obsidian
About a year ago, I decided to move all my personal notes from DokuWiki to Obsidian. DokuWiki is great software and has served me well, but I never utilized it to its full capacity. It’s biggest strength is that it’s a… wiki, and I was the sole user. It made little sense for me to […]
Odigos (YC W23) Is Hiring Lead Product Manager
Keyval leverages eBPF technology to create an open-source solution that can automatically generate distributed traces for any application without any engineering work. Developers are struggling with extracting and delivering high-quality monitoring data. Currently, building a pipeline is a manual process that takes months to implement, is an error-prone process that requires tons of code changes […]
The Origins of the Bloody Mary (2014)
When you think of the few “classic” cocktails that bartenders even know how to make anymore, none has a more storied past than the Bloody Mary, this year celebrating its 80th birthday. In fact, if it weren’t for the 18th Amendment and the Russian Revolution there would be no Bloody Mary. While its original name […]
Archiving “The Famous Computer Cafe”
A previously lost cache of celebrity and historical interviews from a long-dormant radio show have been discovered, digitized, and made available for all. The Internet Archive is now home to 53 episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe, a 1980s radio show about the new world of home computers. The program included computer industry news, product […]