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CHICORY

Chicory allows developers to run WebAssembly (Wasm) programs with zero native dependencies or JNI. It can run Wasm anywhere the JVM can go. Chicory aims to be able to run even in very restrictive environments.

AUTOMATTIC'S “NUCLEAR WAR” OVER WORDPRESS ACCESS SPARKS POTENTIAL CLASS ACTION

Automattic and its founder Matt Mullenweg may face a potential class action lawsuit claiming that they deliberately abused their power and control over the WordPress ecosystem to purposefully and repeatedly disrupt contracts. The class would include all persons in the US who had ongoing active WPE WordPress Web Hosting plans on or before September 24, 2024, through to December 10, 2024. The lawsuit warns that the entire internet as a whole could be harmed due to Automattic withholding access to open source software anytime a company doesn't cave into payment demands.

NVIDIA'S AI BOOM BRINGS RICHES TO PARTNERS LIKE DELL, AT A COST

Dell's $5 billion deal to supply servers to xAI is an immense win for the computer seller, but the deal only has a narrow margin of profitability. People familiar with the deal say that the deal is expected to yield gross margins only in the mid-single-digits percentage. Nvidia has expanded its product range, reducing opportunities for companies like Dell to bundle higher-margin items. The company's massive leverage is likely to continue at least until rival chipmakers launch competing products.

YOUTUBE SURPASSES 1B MONTHLY PODCAST VIEWERS

YouTube will be implementing changes to mid-roll ads to place them at more appropriate breakpoints in videos to prevent disruptions.

NVIDIA SALES GROW 78% ON AI DEMAND, COMPANY GIVES STRONG GUIDANCE

Nvidia's fourth-quarter earnings beat Wall Street expectations - the company's report signals that it is confident that it will be able to continue its historic run of growth well into 2025.

RESIGNING AS ASAHI LINUX PROJECT LEAD

Hector Martin is leaving the Asahi Linux project effective immediately - this post details the many reasons for the departure.

I WENT TO SQL INJECTION COURT

The 104th Illinois General Assembly is considering a bill that will stop public bodies in Illinois from hiding information from Freedom of Information requests by keeping that information in databases.

ASK HN: FORMER DEVS WHO CAN'T GET A JOB, WHAT DID YOU END UP DOING FOR WORK? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Unemployed developers are finding jobs in trading, restaurant work, and manual labor or working on their own projects.

VSCLI

vscli is a CLI/TUI that makes it easy to launch dev containers for IDEs like VSCode and Cursor

DEEPSEEK IS RUSHING TO GET ITS NEXT-GEN R2 MODEL OUT SOONER THAN EXPECTED

DeepSeek is looking to maintain the momentum gained by the debut of its R1 reasoning model by rushing its new R2 model to market as quickly as possible. It first planned to launch R2 in early May, but it now wants to move the release date forward. The model will likely have improved coding skills and be able to reason in languages other than English. DeepSeek has a chance to shake up the market once again, especially with GPT-4.5's arrival in a few weeks.

ANTHROPIC'S CLAUDE AI IS PLAYING POKÉMON ON TWITCH — SLOWLY

Claude Plays Pokémon is a livestream on Twitch where Anthropic's newest AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, plays a game of Pokémon Red. Anthropic says Pokémon is a good benchmark for its model as it can effectively 'think' through the sorts of puzzles the game contains. The model has managed to win three gym leader badges. However, it has run into several issues, such as being unable to navigate around a wall and confusing other NPCs for Professor Oak inside his laboratory.

WEDNESDAY'S STACKED SPACEX LAUNCH IS SENDING GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE TO THE MOON AND BEYOND

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket containing a lunar robot, lander, and satellite, as well as a mission to an asteroid, is scheduled to blast off today. The blastoff will ideally occur at 7:17 PM ET. NASA will be livestreaming the launch on its website. This article contains links to the livestream and details about each of the payloads.

IS IT LUNACY TO PUT A DATA CENTER ON THE MOON?

One of the payloads on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launch today is an Intuitive Machines mission that will stay on the surface of the moon for approximately three weeks before returning to Earth. The lander contains a mini data center belonging to Lonestar Data Holdings that weighs just 1 kilogram and contains 8 terabytes of SSD storage. Moon-based data centers would be protected from Earthly hazards such as natural disasters, war, and other disruptions. They would also not be subject to the laws of any nation, allowing them to accommodate a diverse customer base. These data centers could be powered entirely through solar and naturally cooled through the environment.

GET CODING HELP FROM GEMINI CODE ASSIST — NOW FOR FREE

Gemini Code Assist for individuals is a free version of Gemini Code Assist that is now globally available in Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and JetBrains' IDEs. Powered by Gemini 2.0, it supports all programming languages in the public domain. Google is offering up to 180,000 free code completions per month on Gemini Code Assist. The tool supports up to 128,000 input tokens in chat, allowing developers to use large files and ground Gemini Code Assist with a broader understanding of their codebases.

FAST COLUMNAR JSON DECODING WITH ARROW-RS

A lot of data pipelines spend the bulk of their CPU time deserializing JSON. If you want to build a fast stream processing engine, you need to start with a fast JSON deserialization strategy. This post is aimed at helping developers gain some intuition for how to work with columnar data, something many engineers find challenging and unfamiliar with in our typically row-oriented world. It covers batched decoding, column building, streaming extensions, and more.

AI PROMISE AND CHIP PRECARIOUSNESS

There is currently sufficient incentive for the leading research labs to raise money and continue investing in new foundation models, even as competition drives API prices down relentlessly. Getting to a future where the US has a strong AI industry running on US-made chips will take significant interventions in the market to undo the overwhelming incentives for US companies to simply rely on TSMC. Such a shift will take time, which is why making Taiwan indispensable to China's technology industry is the price that needs to be paid in the meantime.

THE DEEP RESEARCH PROBLEM

While the examples of the work Deep Research can do OpenAI has provided look great, there are several issues with the tool. It appears the tool made intern-level mistakes when sourcing its data for one of the examples. While these models are definitely getting better, any model that generates mistakes can't be trusted. The best use cases for tools like this so far are for tasks where the error rate doesn't matter.

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ANTHROPIC'S LATEST FLAGSHIP AI MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN INCREDIBLY COSTLY TO TRAIN

Claude 3.7 Sonnet apparently cost just a few tens of millions of dollars to train, not factoring in related expenses - a sign of how relatively cheap it is becoming to release state-of-the-art models.

HOW CORE GIT DEVELOPERS CONFIGURE GIT

This post looks at the settings in git defaults that even the core developers change.

THERE ISN'T MUCH POINT TO HTTP/2 PAST THE LOAD BALANCER

Handling HTTP/2 is better left to the infrastructure entry point, typically the load balancer or reverse proxy, as they have to decrypt and decompress the request to know what to do with it, so there is no need to re-encrypt and re-compress it to forward to the app server.

HARD PROBLEMS THAT REDUCE TO DOCUMENT RANKING

Some complex problems can be solved by transforming them into document ranking problems, which large language models can be used effectively for.

ARC VIRTUAL CELL ATLAS

This site contains a collection of high quality, open data sets assembled to accelerate the creation of virtual cell models.

GOATDB

GoatDB is a real-time, version-controlled database for Deno, React, and low-friction deployments ideal for prototyping, self-hosting, single-tenant apps, and ultra-light multi-tenant setups without heavy backends or complex DBs.

EMULATORS—all in 100% PARALLEL with ZERO FLAKES.

✅ QA cycles reduced to just 15 minutes

SCHEDULE A DEMO TO LEARN MORE

ANTHROPIC LAUNCHES A NEW AI MODEL THAT ‘THINKS' AS LONG AS YOU WANT

Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet model is designed to 'think' about questions for as long as users want it to. It can give both real-time answers and more considered, thought-out answers to questions. The model is rolling out to all users and developers, but only premium users will have access to its reasoning features. It will cost $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, making it more expensive than OpenAI's o3-mini and DeepSeek's R1.

PERPLEXITY TEASES A WEB BROWSER CALLED COMET

Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine company, has launched a sign-up list for its upcoming browser, Comet. There are few details on what the browser will do or what it looks like, but the company calls it 'a browser for agentic search'. Perplexity's product portfolio is growing at a rapid pace - it recently released a 'deep research' product, an AI-powered assistant for Android, and an API for AI search. It has reportedly raised over $500 million in capital from VCs and is said to be valued at $9 billion.

SPACE MISSION AIMS TO MAP WATER ON SURFACE OF THE MOON

Lunar Trailblazer is set to begin its two year mission when it is blasted into space on a SpaceX Falcon rocket on Thursday. The probe's goal is to seek out water on the lunar surface. Scientists have recently uncovered strong hints that there are significant quantities of water on the surface of the moon. This water could potentially be turned into hydrogen to be used as fuel and oxygen for humans to breathe.

SPACEX TARGETING FRIDAY FOR NEXT TEST OF STARSHIP MEGAROCKET

SpaceX is targeting a launch window that opens at 5:30 PM on Friday for its next Starship megarocket test flight, pending regulatory approval. The previous test flight ended with Starship's upper stage disintegrating, prompting cleanup and recovery efforts for fallen debris. SpaceX has implemented numerous upgrades to the upper stage for the upcoming flight to enhance reliability and performance. The mission is expected to last just over an hour and will include another attempt to catch the booster stage using the launch tower.

CLAUDE CODE RESEARCH PREVIEW

Claude Code is an agentic coding tool that lives inside the terminal. It understands code bases and helps developers code faster by executing routine tasks, explaining complex code, and handling git workflows, all through natural language commands. Claude Code can edit files, fix bugs, execute and fix tests, search through git history, resolve merge conflicts, create commits and PRs, and more.

JSON HAS BECOME TODAY'S MACHINE-READABLE OUTPUT FORMAT ON UNIX

JSON has a bunch of pragmatic virtues in a modern UNIX system. It provides a clear and basically unambiguous way to represent text and most numeric data, and it's also generally extensible. There are increasingly more tools to deal with and process JSON and it can generally be transformed to various other formats if needed. Designing a machine-readable output format is somewhat more complicated than it looks - using JSON means that people writing programs don't have to design their own formats.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM AMAZON'S BIG ALEXA EVENT THIS WEEK

Amazon is holding a press event this week where it will launch its new generative AI-infused Alexa. The event, which will be hosted by Amazon's new devices and service chief, Panos Panay, is scheduled for 10 AM on Wednesday in New York City. There will likely be new hardware launched at the event, including an updated Amazon Echo speaker and possibly even smart glasses. This article provides an overview of the rumors so readers know what to expect and what not to expect from the event.

APPLE EXEC PHIL SCHILLER TESTIFIES THAT HE RAISED CONCERNS OVER APP STORE COMMISSIONS ON WEB-BASED SALES

Phil Schiller, the executive in charge of leading Apple's App Store, testified in court that he had originally raised concerns about the 27% commission that Apple planned to charge app developers on purchases made outside the App Store. He had claimed that it would be a potential compliance risk and that the fee would create an antagonistic relationship between Apple and developers. It would also require Apple to have audit rights to check whether companies owe Apple money for transactions that took place outside the App Store. Apple's pricing committee ultimately decided to charge the commission despite Schiller's concerns.

TWO AI AGENTS ON A PHONE CALL REALIZE THEY'RE BOTH AI AND SWITCH TO A SUPERIOR AUDIO SIGNAL GGWAVE (1 MINUTE VIDEO)

GibberLink mode allows the two AI agents to communicate much more efficiently as they use audio codes instead of words.

GURMAN: FOLDABLE IPHONE AND ‘ANOTHER NEW IPHONE DESIGN' COMING IN 2026

There aren't any details on the second new design, but the rumors seem to support recent teases from CEO Tim Cook and hardware chief John Temus that Apple's iPhone roadmap is more ambitious than ever.

FAST CASH VS. SLOW EQUITY

Cash businesses print money, often immediately, but may have limited long-term value, while equity businesses are more like planting a tree - it takes considerably longer to replace your salary, but once you do, those earnings are more durable and the business often has some value of its own.

A NEW GENERATION OF AIS: CLAUDE 3.7 AND GROK 3

The new generation of AI models are smarter and the jump in capabilities is striking, particularly in how they handle complex tasks, math, and code.

WE DON'T NEED STARTUPS, WE NEED DIGITAL-MITTELSTAND

Germany's Mittelstands are small to medium-sized enterprises that typically have a laser-sharp focus on a single niche in which they excel, making them exceptionally resilient and stable.

THOUGHTS ON SABBATICAL

Taking a sabbatical allows you to evaluate what's coming next in life.

IOS 18.4 WILL BRING APPLE INTELLIGENCE-POWERED ‘PRIORITY NOTIFICATIONS'

The iOS 18.4 beta adds a new 'Priority Notifications' feature. Powered by Apple Intelligence, the feature is designed to help users manage notifications by prioritizing important alerts and minimizing distractions from less important ones. Priority Notifications will be displayed in a separate section on the iPhone's Lock Screen. Users will still be able to swipe to view all of their notifications. The feature will be off by default but can be enabled through the Notifications section in Settings.

MICROSOFT OUTSOURCES OPENAI'S AMBITIONS TO SOFTBANK

The announcement around the Stargate project made it clear that Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI was to evolve, allowing OpenAI to use other cloud providers. Microsoft is not fully breaking up with OpenAI - it will remain a key partner in many regards. However, what was a tight coupling of OpenAI and Microsoft will now be a tight coupling of OpenAI and SoftBank.