Tom Stevenson on the deciphering of Linear Elamite
Decipherments of ancient scripts are often attributed, and sometimes misattributed, to individual scholars: Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They were also endeavours tinged with madness. […]
Put a data center on the moon?
25 Feb 2025 4 min read Dina Genkina is the computing and hardware editor at IEEE Spectrum Lonestar’s Freedom Data Center payload sits onboard Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander for IM-2 before takeoff. Intuitive Machines Tomorrow, 26 February, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying an Intuitive Machines mission that will stay on the surface […]
Show HN: LLM plays Pokémon (open sourced)
This is my attempt at getting a large language model to play Pokémon FireRed autonomously. My bot has rudementery capabilities to play the game, explore, battle, and respond to game events. To me, this is the future of TV. While building the bot, I felt like I was producing television more than I was programming […]
Replace OCR with Vision Language Models
vlmrun-cookbook/notebooks/01_schema_showcase.ipynb at main · vlm-run/vlmrun-cookbook · GitHub {{ message }} Latest commit 1835 lines (1835 loc) · 597 KB You can’t perform that action at this time.
When This Professor Got Cancer, He Didn’t Quit. He Taught a Class About It
Dr. Bryant Lin, who teaches medicine at Stanford University, was given a terminal diagnosis. He wanted his students to understand the humanity at the core of medicine. Dr. Bryant Lin stood before his class at Stanford in September, likely one of the last he would ever teach. Listen to this article with reporter commentary Just […]
Affixes: The Building Blocks of English
This dictionary contains more than 1,250 entries, illustrated by some 10,000 examples, all defined and explained. It’s based on my book Ologies and Isms: Word Beginnings and Endings, published by Oxford University Press in 2002. That went out of print in 2008 and I immediately made it available as a free service. For more about […]
Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
I was at FB/Meta from late 2013 to early 2023, mostly working in the compiler/runtime spaces. I got hit in the spring 2023 layoff wave. I immediately started making games in my newfound free time (a lifelong interest, and I even worked in AA(A?) back ca. ~2000), and in October 2023 I stumbled upon the […]
The Man Who Spent Forty-Two Years at the Beverly Hills Hotel Pool (1993)
Letter from Beverly Hills The Man Who Spent Forty-two Years at the Beverly Hills Hotel Pool Save this storySave this story Save this storySave this story Illustration by Jean-Philippe Delhomme Until just a few weeks ago, no American seemed on better terms with fortune than Irving V. Link, who had spent most of the past […]
Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
Hey HN, we’re Justin and Jason, co-founders of Maritime Fusion (https://maritimefusion.com/). We’re working on putting fusion reactors on ships—specifically, large container ships and defence applications. Should be easy! Yes, we know: fusion has been the energy source of the future…and it always will be. But high-temperature superconductors (HTS) have changed the game for magnetic confinement, […]
Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
Breakeven fusion is coming soon, but the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactors will be costly, high maintenance, and have low capacity factors, leading to 5–10× higher electricity cost on the grid. These reactors also face significant physics challenges for steady-state operation, such as managing the first wall heat flux and mitigating nuclear activation of structural components that […]