I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
My friend Sam has a feature on his website where you can send him an anonymous message and it’ll be delivered to his phone. I liked the concept and wanted something similar on my site, but a bit more physical than just a push notification. Situated at the corner of my desk is a receipt […]
The macOS LC_COLLATE hunt: Or why does sort order differently on macOS and Linux
Today I noticed something interesting while working with a sorted list of package names: sort(1) orders them differently on macOS and Linux (Ubuntu 20.04). A very simple example, with locale set explicitly: (macOS) $ LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 sort
Improving PixelMelt’s Kindle Web Deobfuscator
A few days ago, someone called PixelMelt published a way for Amazon’s customers to download their purchased books without DRM. Well… sort of. In their post “How I Reversed Amazon’s Kindle Web Obfuscation Because Their App Sucked” they describe the process of spoofing a web browser, downloading a bunch of JSON files, reconstructing the obfuscated […]
OpenAI researcher announced GPT-5 math breakthrough that never happened
Summary OpenAI researchers recently claimed a major math breakthrough on X, but quickly walked it back after criticism from the community, including Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis, who called out the sloppy communication. It started with a now-deleted tweet from OpenAI manager Kevin Weil, who wrote that GPT-5 had “found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved […]
The future of Python web services looks GIL-free
Python 3.14 was released at the beginning of the month. This release was particularly interesting to me because of the improvements on the “free-threaded” variant of the interpreter. Specifically, the two major changes when compared to the free-threaded variant of Python 3.13 are: Free-threaded support now reached phase II, meaning it’s no longer considered experimental […]
The case for the return of fine-tuning
Déjà Tune Most of my reading this week focused on fine-tuning, sparked by Thinking Machines Labs’ announcement of Tinker. The six-month-old, already $12B-valued startup founded by OpenAI’s former CTO Mira Murati wants to bring fine-tuning back into the spotlight with a new fine-tuning-as-a-platform initiative positioned as a foundation for research collaborations with universities. A few […]
Deterministic multithreading is hard (2024)
Hello,While a lot of time of 2.0 development has been spent on new features and quality of life, we still take care of the smaller details and technical improvements. Deterministic multithreading is hard Recently a desync bug was reported to us involving the modding API and multiple Windows and Linux computers that the player was […]
Why formalize mathematics – more than catching errors
I read a good post by one of the authors of the Isabelle theorem prover, that got me thinking. The author, Lawrence Paulson, observed that most math proofs are trivial, but writing them (preferably with a proof assistant) is a worthwhile activity, for reasons similar to safety checklists – “Not every obvious statement is true.” […]
Show HN: Newcomer Ranking – Alternative to GitHub Trending for New Repos
Full-throttle, wire-speed hardware implementation of Wireguard VPN, using low-cost Artix7 FPGA with opensource toolchain. If you seek security and privacy, nothing is private in our codebase. Our door is wide open for backdoor scrutiny, be it related to RTL, embedded, build, bitstream or any other aspect of design and delivery package. Bujrum! 1,167 Current Stars […]
Show HN: A better Hacker News front end
1 136 points by robinhouston a day ago | 34 comments 2 4 points by zxcholmes an hour ago | 0 comments 3 223 points by nhatcher a day ago | 51 comments 4 316 points by WithinReason 2 days ago | 156 comments 5 344 points by bookofjoe 19 hours ago | 70 comments 6 166 points by yichab0d […]