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INKJETS ARE FOR MORE THAN JUST PRINTING

Inkjet technology has found a host of applications beyond putting dots on paper. It can now be used to make DNA microarrays for genomics, create electrical traces for printed circuit boards, and build 3D-printed structures. The technology could eventually also be used for personalized medicine and the development of advanced batteries. This article looks at the history of the technology, how it developed, as well as what the future holds for inkjet systems.

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THE BEST ENGINEERING INTERVIEW QUESTION I’VE EVER GOTTEN

This blog post discusses a programming challenge from a software engineering interview. memcached, an in-memory key-value store, provides a built-in way to atomically add k to a number, but it doesn’t provide other arithmetic operations - there is no 'atomic multiply by k' operation. The challenge required interviewees to add a `mult` command to memcached. The challenge is well calibrated for interviews as there is only one correct answer and it is also a good representation of what most real-world programming is like.

FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS EXPORT TO CSV

CSV is common in the data science space as it is human-readable, less verbose than options like JSON and XML, and super-easy to produce from almost any tool. However, the format is usually underspecified and CSV files have terrible compression and performance. There are many file formats more suitable for working with tabular data. This post looks at one of them, Apache Parquet, and shows how it is better in both compression and performance with examples.

UNITED STATES V. APPLE

The US vs Apple case will take years to conclude. Apple's success is built upon integration - its hardware, software, services, and entire ecosystem of products work together to create an experience. Developers who want to enter the iOS ecosystem have to go through the App Store and abide by its rules and restrictions. This article looks at the facts of the case against Apple, which directly attacks Apple's core differentiation: its deep integrations across its devices.

101 THINGS I WOULD TELL MYSELF FROM 10 YEARS AGO

This blog post, written by a former software engineer with experience writing real-time financial systems, contains advice that they needed to hear back during their freshman year of college. The advice is highly personalized to the author. While some of it may be actively bad for some readers, the rest can be helpful for life in general.

EVERYONE WANTS THE LATEST CHIPS. THAT’S CAUSING A HUGE HEADACHE FOR THE WORLD’S BIGGEST SUPPLIER

The soaring demand for chips has caused a shortage of specialist workers in the semiconductor industry, delaying production.

INCLUSIVE SANS

Inclusive Sans is a text font that incorporates key features that make it highly legible in all uses.

NVIDIA’S AI CHIP DOMINANCE IS BEING TARGETED BY GOOGLE, INTEL, AND ARM

The Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation, a group formed by Intel, Google, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, and other tech companies, is developing open-source software to prevent AI developers from being locked into Nvidia's proprietary technology.

TWO OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS WITH GREAT DOCUMENTATION

esbuild and Redis are two examples of codebases with exceptional documentation - good documentation is necessary, especially if other people will see or contribute to the codebase.

SORA: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

This page contains examples of artists' work with Sora, OpenAI's new video generation AI model, along with their thoughts on how they see Sora fitting into their workflows and businesses.

FEDERATION IS THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA, SAYS BLUESKY CEO JAY GRABER

This interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber covers Bluesky's approach to federation, the growth of the Bluesky app, and the standards and protocols at the heart of the decentralization movement.

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STABILITY AI CEO RESIGNS TO ‘PURSUE DECENTRALIZED AI’

Emad Mostaque is stepping down as CEO of Stability AI. The company will be led by two interim co-CEOs, COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte. Mostaque stepped down partly due to the push toward the development of commercialized AI products. He says he is leaving the company to pursue decentralized AI.

OPENAI HEADING TO HOLLYWOOD TO PITCH REVOLUTIONARY “SORA”

OpenAI plans to meet with Hollywood studios, talent agencies, and media executives to show the potential of its Sora software this week. Sora will likely be released to the public later this year. The model could potentially upend the way movies are made. OpenAI will likely follow its strategy of working in collaboration with the industry through a process of iterative deployment to ensure safe implementation.

ELON MUSK CLAIMS NEURALINK ALREADY ALLOWING BLIND MONKEYS TO SEE AGAIN

According to Elon Musk, Neuralink's 'Blindsight' product is already working on monkeys to restore vision. The resolution is pretty low, but researchers are looking for ways to increase the clarity of images. It is unclear whether the monkeys were born blind and how much of their optic nerves were still intact. The device could be made available to far more people if Neuralink was able to bypass both the eye and the optic nerve.

IT’S A FEW YEARS LATE, BUT A PROTOTYPE SUPERSONIC AIRPLANE HAS TAKEN FLIGHT

Boom Supersonic flew its prototype supersonic jet for the first time on Friday. XB-1 reached an altitude of 7,120 feet and a maximum speed of 273 mph, achieving all of its objectives. The prototype is intended to test materials and aerodynamics for a larger commercial aircraft. A picture of the XB-1 aircraft taking off on its inaugural flight is available in the article.

GARNET

Garnet is a remote cache store that offers strong performance, scalability, storage, recovery, cluster sharding, key migration, and replication features. It works with existing Redis clients and can handle multi-key transactions. Garnet has a fast pluggable network design for high end-to-end performance. It can reduce costs for large services.

LAPDEV

Lapdev is a self-hosted application that creates remote development environments anywhere. It can scale from a single machine to a global fleet of servers. Lapdev uses Devcontainer open specification for defining development environments as code. It can be used to help onboard developers to new projects without wasting hours on preparing environments on their machines.

216. UNITED STATES V. APPLE

The US Department of Justice, 16 states, and the District of Columbia are suing Apple for abusing its market position illegally under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The process will likely take up to a decade or more to complete, even though a settlement or withdrawal is possible at any time. This article takes an in-depth look at the case and makes predictions on its outcomes. A link to the filing is available in the article.

CUDA IS STILL A GIANT MOAT FOR NVIDIA

Nvidia controls both its GPUs and CUDA, giving it a killer advantage. CUDA makes it easy to reap the benefits of the hardware that Nvidia makes. One of the reasons for Nvidia's dominance is its years and billions of dollars in investment into the CUDA ecosystem. It may be possible in the future for competing projects to take over, but it will take quite a while for the impacts of Nvidia's heavy long-term strategy to go away.

How to Evaluate an Identity + Auth Solution

BYD’S NEW EV, STARTING AT LESS THAN $10,000, IS STOKING FEAR ACROSS THE INDUSTRY

BYD's new EV, the Seagull EV Honor Edition, starts from as low as $9,700 - while BYD has no plans to enter the US passenger EV market, the release is pushing pressure on US automakers to slash prices.

OPENDEVIN

OpenDevin is an open-source project that aims to replicate Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer capable of executing complex engineering tasks and collaborating on software development projects.

UNEXPLANATIONS: SQL IS SYNTACTIC SUGAR FOR RELATIONAL ALGEBRA

Syntactic sugar refers to common operations that could also be expressed in alternative, more verbose forms.

MAGICK.CSS

magick.css is a mostly classless CSS framework, designed to be easy to use and understand, that retains its look and functionality across all devices and screen sizes and works entirely without JavaScript.

IOS 18 LETS USERS CUSTOMIZE LAYOUT OF HOME SCREEN APP ICONS

App icons in iOS 18 will likely remain locked to an invisible grid system on the Home Screen, but users will be able to create blank spaces, rows, and columns between them.

BLOOMBERG SPENT OVER $10M TRAINING A GPT-3.5 CLASS AI ON ITS OWN FINANCIAL DATA LAST YEAR

GPT-4 8k beat Bloomberg's model on almost all finance tasks without specialized finance training.

U.S. SUES APPLE, ACCUSING IT OF MAINTAINING AN IPHONE MONOPOLY

Apple is being sued by the US for employing a strategy that relies on exclusionary anticompetitive conduct that hurts both consumers and developers. The 88-page lawsuit says that the company violated antitrust laws with practices that were intended to keep customers reliant on their iPhones and make them less likely to switch to competing devices. It seeks to put an end to those practices and possibly a breakup of the company. The lawsuit is likely to drag out for years before any type of resolution.

HERE’S HOW MICROSOFT IS PROVIDING A ‘GOOD OUTCOME’ FOR INFLECTION AI VCS, AS REID HOFFMAN PROMISED

Unnamed sources say that Microsoft is paying approximately $650 million in its deal with Inflection AI. $620 million was paid for non-exclusive licensing fees for Inflection's technology and $30 million was paid to get Inflection to agree not to sue over Microsoft's poaching. Inflection will pivot away from building a personalized AI chatbot to becoming an AI studio that helps other companies work with large language model AI. Microsoft has several reasons for needing a backup for OpenAI - for one, its deal with OpenAI is being scrutinized by the FTC.

PIG KIDNEY TRANSPLANTED INTO LIVING PERSON FOR FIRST TIME

Doctors have performed a pig-to-human kidney transplant for the first time at Massachusetts General Hospital, the first hospital to perform a kidney transplant. The genetically modified kidney was implanted into a 62-year-old patient who had been diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease. They are recovering well and are expected to be discharged from the hospital soon. It is unknown how long the kidney will last for. This was the third transplant of a pig organ into a living human. The first two patients, who received heart transplants, died weeks after receiving their organs.

THE BAFFLING INTELLIGENCE OF A SINGLE CELL/

E. coli cells forage for nutrients using a process called chemotaxis. While the bacteria don't have brains, they possess something similar to a sense of smell, drive, and even memory. Chemotaxis involves 'smelling' chemicals and then deciding where to swim. The system is able to adapt to different environments with varying levels of attractant concentration. This article introduces the clever system that powers chemotaxis and explains how the complex signaling network works.

DROPFLOW

Dropflow is a CSS layout engine with a high-quality text layout implementation capable of displaying many languages. It can generate PDFs or images and render rich wrapped text to a canvas in the browser. Dropflow supports bidirectional and RTL text, font fallbacks at the grapheme level, colored diacritics, optimized shaping, and much more.

TORTOISE

Tortoise is an automated solution designed to meet all Kubernetes resource optimization needs. It shifts optimization responsibility from service owners to platform teams, requiring service owners to configure only a minimal amount of parameters to initiate autoscaling. Tortoise allows for comprehensive tuning by platform teams. It currently only supports deployment - support for all resources supporting scale subresources is in development.

THE REDDITS

Reddit was one of the reasons Y Combinator was started. This post tells the story of how the site came to be. Despite being rejected in the first round for their food delivery app idea, Reddit's founders were offered funding after agreeing to work on a project that would eventually become Reddit. The project was launched on a quick schedule. It had a core set of real users after just a few weeks. Reddit is now a fundamentally useful tool that seems almost unkillable.

CHOOSING STARTUP LIFE

This article discusses things to consider when thinking about joining a startup. A job may provide higher salaries, more perks, security, less stress, and other benefits, but working in a startup can result in huge payoffs. Startups require a ton of challenging work to be successful, they have minimal infrastructure in place, and startup employees have lower salaries. However, startup employees own a portion of the company, and this could be worth a lot in the future.

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WHO CARES ABOUT TECH REGULATION?

Most people in tech don't care much about tech regulations - they don't really affect what people are working on.

UNIVERSITIES HAVE A COMPUTER-SCIENCE PROBLEM

Universities are treating computer science as though it were a technical school for producing a certain type of professional when it should be a superordinate realm of scholarship similar to arts or engineering.

DUCKDB AS THE NEW JQ

DuckDB has many data importers included without requiring extra dependencies - it can natively read and parse JSON as a database table.

U.S. VERSUS APPLE: A FIRST REACTION

The US Department of Justice, 16 states, and the District of Columbia are suing Apple for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, which specifically regulates monopolies, making some things that are legal for regular companies to do illegal when monopolies do them.

ASK HN: HOW TO ONBOARD YOURSELF TO A NEW PRODUCT/INDUSTRY IN A NEW JOB? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Put aside your ego, get into a beginner's mindset, and ask all the stupid questions.

ELON MUSK COMPANIES ARE GOBBLING UP NVIDIA HARDWARE EVEN AS TESLA AIMS TO BUILD RIVAL SUPERCOMPUTER

Musk has promised that his companies will develop sophisticated AI products - doing so requires a lot of hardware.