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SSOREADY

SSOReady adds SAML support to apps for free. It makes implementing enterprise SSO obvious and secure by default. There are currently SDKs for Python and TypeScript/Node.js, with more in development.

MAKE SOFTWARE SIMPLE AGAIN

The software industry is more driven by profit and unnecessary complexity than by the ability to build and launch innovative products. Companies can save a lot of money by leaving the cloud. The old pricing model where users pay once for software rather than through monthly subscriptions can be very appealing to customers, but it makes it more difficult to scale a company if customers only pay once. A lower bar to entry for solo developers and small teams will allow more ideas to get the opportunity to prosper.

CROWDSTRIKE'S IMPACT ON AVIATION

An update to a sensor configuration by CrowdStrike on July 19 caused the largest IT outage in history. The outage affected many industries - this article looks at its impact on the US aviation industry. Delta was hit the hardest, followed by United, and to a significantly smaller degree, American. Southwest didn't appear to be affected by the outage at all. Delta took an extended time to recover and had to cancel thousands of flights in the days following the CrowdStrike update.

AMAZON MUST RECALL DANGEROUS PRODUCTS PROPERLY — EVEN ONES SOLD BY THIRD-PARTIES

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has ruled that Amazon, not third-party sellers, is responsible for properly recalling hazardous items sold on its marketplace. Amazon failed to adequately notify the public about more than 400,000 recalled products sold between 2018 and 2021. The company downplayed the severity of hazards, telling customers about 'potential safety issues' rather than explicitly labeling recalls. Amazon now has a page dedicated to recalls that allows users to view product recalls and safety information for items they bought on Amazon.

YES, THERE ARE MORE DRIVERLESS WAYMOS IN S.F. HERE'S HOW BUSY THEY ARE

Waymo logged more than 903,000 commercial driverless vehicle miles over more than 133,000 paid trips in May.

WHAT WE GOT WRONG ABOUT HTTP IMPORTS

Deno's implementation for HTTP imports came with significant tradeoffs - this post discusses why the approach didn't scale and how to overcome those challenges.

INSIDE CROWDSTRIKE'S DEPLOYMENT PROCESS

This post breaks down CrowdStrike's deployment processes, which were detailed in the company's Preliminary Post Incident Review of the July 19th outage.

ASK HN: WEIRDEST COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

A discussion of interesting architectures and computing concepts.

MAKING MACHINES MOVE

Fly.io's Fly Machines can run Docker images on hardware anywhere in the world in just minutes.

THE END OF THE EVERYTHING CLOUD

Amazon has been rolling out peripheral cloud services at an astonishing rate over the past 10 years or so - the company has started to deprecate services without significant adoption or that aren't competitive with more popular alternatives.

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APPLE RELEASES IOS 18.1 DEVELOPER BETA WITH THE FIRST ‘APPLE INTELLIGENCE' IPHONE FEATURES

Apple's newly released developer betas for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 contain the company's first set of AI features, including a Siri with an updated design and ability to maintain context across multiple requests, new Mail features like smart replay and email summaries, and natural language search in Photos. The features will likely not be rolled out to general users until well into 2025. They will only work on the iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max or on iPads and Macs with Apple Silicon chips. Beta testers will need to join a waitlist for access to the features.

YOUTUBE'S WAR ON AD BLOCKERS CONTINUES, NOW MAKING ADS TRULY UNSKIPPABLE

Multiple YouTube users are reporting that the site is serving them with blank ads or black screens before a video when they are using an ad-blocker extension. The change makes users wait for their content, partially defeating the purpose of using an ad blocker. YouTube began testing server-side ad injection last month to further render ad blockers obsolete. The solution inserts ads directly into the main YouTube video feed so that ad blockers can no longer distinguish the two pieces of media.

SPACEX MOVING DRAGON SPLASHDOWNS TO PACIFIC TO SOLVE FALLING DEBRIS PROBLEM

SpaceX will begin returning its Dragon crew and cargo capsules to splashdowns in the Pacific Ocean sometime next year and end recoveries of the spacecraft off the coast of Florida. This will eliminate the tiny risk that a piece of debris from the ship's trunk section might fall on someone and cause damage, injury, or death. Debris from several Dragon missions have been discovered on properties over the past couple of years. SpaceX is unaware of any structure damage or injuries caused by this debris.

HOW LG AND SAMSUNG ARE MAKING TV SCREENS DISAPPEAR

Both LG and Samsung demonstrated transparent television screens at CES 2024. The companies have very different approaches to the technology - Samsung is betting on microLED screens while LG is pursuing OLED displays. Neither technology is ready yet. This article takes a deep dive into each of these display technologies. It looks at how they work, the problems they face, and the applications of transparent screens.

this quick demo video from Appifre & Isos Technology.

TEA-TASTING

tea-tasting is a Python package for the statistical analysis of A/B tests. It features an extensible API, confidence intervals for both absolute and percentage change, power analysis, and Student's t-test, Z-test, Bootstrap, and quantile metrics out of the box. tea-tasting calculates statistics directly within data backends. It eliminates the need to import granular data into a Python environment.

FASTHTML

FastHTML is a framework for fast scalable web applications with minimal compact code. Its apps are just Python code, so developers can use the framework with the full power of the Python language and ecosystem. FastHTML is powerful and expressive enough to build advanced interactive web apps and it features an intuitive syntax that makes it easy to build complex apps quickly.

GHOSTERY'S CEO SAYS REGULATION WON'T SAVE US FROM AD TRACKERS

Ghostery was launched in 2009 to help people understand and block all the ways that advertisers were tracking them. The world of online advertising has changed dramatically since then. 15 years later, Ghostery has been downloaded more than 100 million times and has 7 million monthly active users. This article contains an interview with the company's CEO, Jean-Paul Schmetz, where he discusses the company's strategy, the state of ad tracking, and why regulation isn't the most effective path to protecting online privacy.

AMAZON PAID ALMOST $1 BILLION FOR TWITCH IN 2014. IT'S STILL LOSING MONEY

Twitch remains unprofitable despite periods of explosive popularity. Its biggest users are paying less and growth in new users and engagement has slowed. Staff are concerned about potential upcoming layoffs this fall following an annual operational review. Investors are worried that Twitch is at risk of becoming a 'zombie brand'. Amazon remains confident in Twitch's potential.

APPLE SAYS ITS AI MODELS WERE TRAINED ON GOOGLE'S CUSTOM CHIPS

Apple detailed its reasons for using Google's homegrown Tensor Processing Unit for training in a recent technical paper.

A FEW BLOCKBUSTER PODCASTS ARE MAKING ALL THE MONEY

Big brands like BMW, DraftKings, and Home Depot have started advertising on podcasts over the past year.

RUNNING ONE-MAN SAAS, 9 YEARS IN

A look at how Healthchecks.io, a one-man business with 652 paying customers and $14,043 in monthly recurring revenue, operates.

ATTRIBUTION IS DYING. CLICKS ARE DYING. MARKETING IS GOING BACK TO THE 20TH CENTURY

Attribution fundamentally doesn't work anymore, so marketing investments should be made based on knowing the audience and where/how they can be influenced.

GPT-5: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW

This article looks at GPT-5, what we can expect from next-gen models, new features that are appearing on the horizon, business pressures on OpenAI, and the technical constraints the company's engineers are facing.

THE DOCUMENTATION TRADEOFF

It's not how much documentation you have, it's whether you have communicated clearly.

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auth0.com/startups/TLDR

APPLE INTELLIGENCE DELAYED TO IOS 18.1 IN OCTOBER

THE $600 BILLION DIGITAL AD BUSINESS IS HANGING ON A FEW WORDS FROM GOOGLE

Google plans to introduce a prompt asking users to opt in or out of cookies in Chrome. The company's choice of wording for the prompt could have widespread implications for the industry. It could result in cookies being effectively deprecated because consumers opt out. Google still plans to develop and test its Privacy Sandbox, a suite of alternative technologies to the cookie.

SEVENTH PATIENT ‘CURED' OF HIV: WHY SCIENTISTS ARE EXCITED

A 60-year-old man in Germany is the seventh person with HIV to be announced free of the virus after receiving a stem-cell transplant. The patient received stem cells which only had one copy of a gene that has been suggested as the best target for an HIV cure. The findings widen the donor pool for stem-cell transplants - roughly 1% of people of European descent carry mutations in both copies of the gene, while 10% of people carry one mutated copy. The procedure, which is risky and offered to people with leukemia, is unlikely to be rolled out for most individuals with HIV.

SOLID-STATE BATTERIES ARE FINALLY MAKING THEIR WAY OUT OF THE LAB

This article takes a look at the history of batteries, the latest breakthroughs, and the trends that suggest that solid-state batteries could soon overtake lithium-ion ones. Battery design hasn't changed much since the first battery in 1799 - solid-state batteries have been the major exception. Their development has been held back by cost, manufacturing challenges, and a tendency for them to short-circuit. Solid-state batteries seem to finally be ready to deliver on their promise, with several companies getting ready to or already releasing products containing the technology.

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SGREP - SEMANTIC GREP

sgrep is a command-line tool designed to find semantically similar matches, similar to grep. It performs semantic searches on text input using word embeddings, going beyond simple string matching. sgrep features a configurable similarity threshold, context display, color-coded output for matched words and line numbers, and support for reading from files or standard output. It is configurable through a JSON file and command-line arguments.

PATCHWORK

Patchwork automates development gruntwork like PR reviews, bug fixing, and security patching using a self-hosted CLI agent and large language models. It features customizable prompts optimized for chores like library updates, code generation, issue analysis, and vulnerability remediation. Patchflows can be run locally in a CLI or IDE or as part of a CI/CD pipeline. A short demo video is available.

THE NEW INTERNET

This article discusses the big vision for Tailscale. The tech industry has evolved into a mess, making things harder for developers. While almost all devices are now supercomputers compared to the standards of 20 years ago, they become useless once you turn off AWS. This centralization is caused by a lack of connectivity. Tailscale aims to increase connectivity by creating a new Internet that works how you thought the Internet worked, before you learned how the Internet works. Its network slices out layers of nonsense so that every device can connect securely and safely and be a peer without adding latency or overhead.

BLOCK TO FACE ‘DISRUPTIVE' INTERNAL OVERHAUL, FOUNDER JACK DORSEY WARNS STAFF

Fintech company Block is about to reorganize its entire internal reporting structure. The company has been conducting rounds of layoffs since the end of last year. CEO Jack Dorsey says the move may feel 'big and disruptive or uncomfortable'. The company is due to report its latest quarterly earnings next week.

A SKEPTIC'S FIRST CONTACT WITH KUBERNETES

This blog post presents an overview of Kubernetes, ending with open-ended questions/rants about the system.

THERE IS NO FIX FOR INTEL'S CRASHING 13TH AND 14TH GEN CPUS — ANY DAMAGE IS PERMANENT

Intel will issue a patch in mid-August, but it won't fix 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processors that are already crashing - any degradation of these processors is irreversible.

35% FASTER THAN THE FILESYSTEM

SQLite reads and writes small blobs 35% faster than fread() or fwrite().

STRIPE ACQUIRES PAYMENT PROCESSING STARTUP LEMON SQUEEZY

Lemon Squeezy calculates and pays global sales tax for digital products, handling legal processing and fees in every country.

FEAR OF OVER-ENGINEERING HAS KILLED ENGINEERING ALTOGETHER

Organizations have taken the philosophies of the Agile Manifesto too far, shipping products as fast as they can without always fixing problems with them - some engineering practices are actually very useful.