Parsing JSON in Forty Lines of Awk
JSON is not a friendly format to the Unix shell — it’s hierarchical, and cannot be reasonably split on any character (other than the newline, which is not very useful) as that character might be included in a string. There are well-known tools such as jq that let you correctly parse JSON documents in the […]
Addictions Are Being Engineered
How silicon valley is putting a price tag on your attention – and relationships Every few months, a new social platform promises to “fix” the problems with existing ones. BeReal would bring authenticity. Clubhouse would bring intimacy. Each follows the same trajectory: pure intentions, venture funding, growth pressure, algorithmic manipulation, inevitable corruption. I know because […]
The Coming Storm: How Mediterranean Water Collapse Could Reshape Britain
Andreas Gregoriou stands in what used to be his family’s vineyard outside Limassol, Cyprus. The January sun beats down on cracked earth where grapevines once grew. His grandfather planted these vines in 1952. His father expanded the vineyard in the 1980s. Now, Andreas is being paid €42,000 by the government to let it die. “They […]
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 […]