Who carved South America’s mysterious ancient tunnels? [pdf]
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What happened when REM went mainstream
What happened when R.E.M. went mainstream Peter Buck, Michael Stipe, Bill Berry, and Mike Mills backstage at the Hollywood Palladium in 1984. Richard E. Aaron / Redferns / Getty not since the muzak corporation has there been an institution that soundtracks drugstores, supermarkets, and shopping malls more readily than R.E.M. After monstrous airplay across the […]
Debugging an Undebuggable App
I recently ran into an app that: Blocks debuggers from being attached Exits early if you try to inject any code Crashes your whole phone if you run it with a jailbreak on (!) Like — who even does that last one??? The sorts of things we do here, like modding TikTok to only show […]
How browsers really load web pages [video]
![how-browsers-really-load-web-pages-[video]](https://cdn-y.objects.dc-sto1.glesys.net/A1da965d3ac0f2e44c08f1ae072687d311/uploads/2025/02/477885-how-browsers-really-load-web-pages-video.png)
When browsers load a Web page and its subresources, A LOT happens under the hood. They need to take into account render/parsing blocking resources, use a preload scanner, listen to resource hints (like preload/preconnect), loading modifiers (async/defer/module), fetchpriority, responsive images, and much more. Based on all those signals, they then need to somehow decide when […]
Launch HN: Roark (YC W25) – Taking the pain out of voice AI testing
Hey HN, we’re James and Daniel, co-founders of Roark (https://roark.ai). We built a tool that lets developers replay real production calls against their latest Voice AI changes, so they can catch failures, test updates, and iterate with confidence. Here’s a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu8mo28LsTc. We ran into this problem while building a voice AI agent for […]
kartoffels v0.7: Cellular Automata, Statistics, 32-bit RISC-V
kartoffels is a game where you’re given a potato and your job is to implement a firmware for it: https://kartoffels.pwy.io | ssh kartoffels.pwy.io | source code Today I’ve released v0.7, which spans 122 commits and brings: Rooms are nice. I like rooms. Who doesn’t like a room or two? They remind me of my favourite […]
Watch R1 “think” with animated chains of thought
We can visualize the “thought process” for R1 by: Saving the chains of thought as text Converting the text to embeddings with the OpenAI API Plotting the embeddings sequentially with t-SNE Here’s what it looks like when R1 answers a question (in this case “Describe how a bicycle works.”): Consecutive Distance It might be useful […]
Hk, a new Git hook manager from jdx
hk is built by @jdx. Why does this exist? In short: performance and mise-en-place. Initially mise users wanted more functionality than mise provides in its basic mise generate git-pre-commit command provided—such as the ability to only run tasks when certain files are changed. Rather than bake that into mise, I felt it was unique […]
Open Source projects could sell SBoM fragments
Open Source projects could sell SBOM fragments | Discoveries Home Blog 2025-02-17 Scanning source files for licensing information (because the package managers‘ metadata is insufficient) is a lot of work, and a lot of wasted effort, because only rarely do companies pool their resources. One example is OSSelot, another is ClearlyDefined. But maybe Open Source […]
(Ab)using general search algorithms on dynamic optimization problems (2023)
Jan. 24, 2023 In retrospect, my most ambitious blog yet. As it goes, I was reading “Artificial Intelligence. A Modern Approach” the other day. In one of the earlier chapters the authors discuss general search algorithms: breadth-first search, depth-first search, uniform-cost search (Dijkstra), and variations of those. A bit later they also cover Monte Carlo […]