MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

Or: The Day My Toaster Started Taking Phone Calls There’s this thing about USB-C that nobody really talks about. Not the part where we all had to buy new dongles (RIP my dongle drawer, 2010-2023). The other part. See, we all thought USB-C was just going to be about charging things and moving files around […]
Sirius: A GPU-native SQL engine

Sirius is a GPU-native SQL engine. It plugs into existing databases such as DuckDB via the standard Substrait query format, requiring no query rewrites or major system changes. Sirius currently supports DuckDB and Doris (coming soon), other systems marked with * are on our roadmap. Performance Running TPC-H on SF=100, Sirius achieves ~10x speedup over […]
Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos in your camera roll you haven’t yet

Facebook is asking users for access to their phone’s camera roll to automatically suggest AI-edited versions of their photos — including ones that haven’t been uploaded to Facebook yet. The feature is being suggested to Facebook users when they’re creating a new Story on the social networking app. Here, a screen pops up and asks […]
Antitrust defies politics’ law of gravity

In 2014, I read a political science paper that nearly convinced me to quit my lifelong career as an activist: “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” published in Perspectives on Politics: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B The paper’s authors are Martin Gilens, a UCLA professor of Public Policy; and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page, a professor […]
Show HN: I made a 2D game engine in Dart
We are hard at work developing the Bullseye2D Premium Edition, which will be packed with advanced features to supercharge your game development. Supporters and sponsors will receive early access to the Premium Edition as it becomes available, as a thank you for their vital support. Features that are stable might be moved to the core […]
Why Do Swallows Fly to the Korean DMZ?

Since 1953, the 250-kilometer-long artificial boundary of the DMZ has cut through the middle of the Korean peninsula. The demilitarized buffer zone created more than seven decades ago between the two warring states often feels impenetrable and permanent. However, the DMZ is livelier and more fluid than it seems. In fact, much of the DMZ […]
ZeQLplus: Terminal SQLite Database Browser

Open any SQLite database file Very fast Runs in a Terminal / CMD window Tiny executable with no dependencies List all tables in the database to browse Paginated view of table rows Run custom SQL queries and view the results Cross platform: macOS, Linux, Windows Open source Pre-built binaries for macOS, Linux, Windows 10+ are […]
I built something that changed my friend group’s social fabric

This is a story that started back in 2022, but I think its a perfect time to reflect on the impact that it has had on my friend group still to this day. A year or so before COVID, our friend group dispersed across the world – I moved to Vancouver, one friend moved to […]
Finding Peter Putnam: The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind

Explore The neighborhood was quiet. There was a chill in the air. The scent of Spanish moss hung from the cypress trees. Plumes of white smoke rose from the burning cane fields and stretched across the skies of Terrebonne Parish. The man swung a long leg over a bicycle frame and pedaled off down the […]
Unheard works by Erik Satie to premiere 100 years after his death

Twenty-seven previously unheard works by Erik Satie, from playful cabaret songs to minimalist nocturnes, are to be premiered a century after the death of the notoriously eccentric and innovative French composer. Painstakingly pieced together from hundreds of small notebooks, most of the new works are thought to have been written in the bohemian bistros of […]