Astra: An open-source observatory control software
Astra (Automated Survey observaTory Robotised with Alpaca) is an open-source observatory control software for automating and managing robotic observatories. It integrates seamlessly with ASCOM Alpaca for hardware control. @software{Pedersen_Astra, author = {Pedersen, Peter P. and Degen, David and Garcia, Lionel and Zúñiga-Fernández, Sebastián and Sebastian, Daniel and Schroffenegger, Urs and Queloz, Didier}, license = {GPL-3.0}, […]
Caxlsx: Ruby gem for xlsx generation with charts, images, schema validation
Notice: Community Axlsx Organization To better maintain the Axlsx ecosystem, all related gems have been forked or moved to the following community organization: https://github.com/caxlsx Join the Caxlsx Slack channel Axlsx is an Office Open XML Spreadsheet generator for the Ruby programming language. With Axlsx you can create Excel worksheets with charts, images (with links), automated […]
Entomologists use a particle accelerator to image ants at scale
05 Mar 2026 6 min read Researchers reproduced the anatomy of these four species of Okinawan ants with great detail using AntScan, including internal organs. Julian Katzke Move over, Pixar. The ants that animators once morphed into googly-eyed caricatures in films such as A Bug’s Life and Antz just received a meticulously precise anatomical reboot. […]
Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting
Moongate v2 is a modern Ultima Online server project built with .NET 10. It targets a clean, modular architecture with strong packet tooling, deterministic game-loop processing, and practical test coverage. Looking for collaborators: I am actively seeking contributors to help build Moongate v2, and I would especially appreciate support with technical/code reviews. Want to help? […]
CT Scans of Health Wearables
Design to Reality Evolution of the Plastic Bottle In the dark nights of my soul, I fret about how inconsistently engineered my life is. The coffee table I made a year or two ago was intended to look like the dining room table I built a few years earlier, but in reality the two bear […]
Best Performance of a C++ Singleton
In my Januray post, I focused on implementing a singleton correctly. This time I want to add performance into the mix and show you the best way to implement your singleton… or give you guidance to pick your best way. Setting the scene I’m using a display manager as an example, like GDM, LightDM, or […]
Workers who love ’synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals. Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, research by cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell introduces the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric. “Corporate bullshit is […]
Elite Overproduction
A university graduation ceremony in Ottawa, Canada (2016) Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin that describes the condition of a society that has an excess supply of potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.[1][2][3] This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those […]
Hardening Firefox with Anthropic’s Red Team
AI models can now independently identify high-severity vulnerabilities in complex software. As we recently documented, Claude found more than 500 zero-day vulnerabilities (security flaws that are unknown to the software’s maintainers) in well-tested open-source software. In this post, we share details of a collaboration with researchers at Mozilla in which Claude Opus 4.6 discovered 22 […]
Async Programming Is Just Inject Time
All I really wanted to do was learn a little bit more about different models for error handling, but then I kept seeing “effects” and “effect systems” mentioned, and after reading about Koka and Effekt I think I’ve been converted. I want effects now. So here’s what I wished I could have read a few […]