Search the archive

TYPING FAST IS ABOUT LATENCY, NOT THROUGHPUT

We can improve typing speed by thinking about how to structure code before writing it down.

EXCLUSIVE LEAK: ALL THE DETAILS ABOUT HUMANE’S AI PIN, WHICH COSTS $699 AND HAS OPENAI INTEGRATION

Humane's AI Pin is schedule to launch today. This article contains leaked details about the device. The AI Pin will basically be a wearable smartphone without a screen running on a Humane-branded version of T-mobile's network with access to AI models from Microsoft and OpenAI. The device will cost $699 with a $24 per month subscription fee. It uses a camera, department, and motion sensors to track and record its surroundings. Many more details about the device are available in the article.

SAMSUNG UNVEILS ITS GENERATIVE AI MODEL SAMSUNG GAUSS

Samsung has unveiled its own generative AI model called Samsung Gauss. The model is currently being used on employee productivity within the company but will be expanded to product applications in the future. It can be applied on-device to protect private information. Samsung is working to ensure safe AI usage through its own AI Red Team.

THE WORLD’S LARGEST AIRCRAFT BREAKS COVER IN SILICON VALLEY

Google co-founder Sergey Brin's Pathfinder 1 prototype electric airship is set to embark on a series of test flights over Silicon Valley. It will take increasingly ambitious flights until it moves to Ohio, where an even larger airship is being built. Pathfinder 1 is the largest aircraft to take to the skies since the Hindenberg. Brin's company, LTA Research, hopes to use the airships to provide disaster relief where roads and airports are damaged and provide zero-carbon passenger transportation.

EUCLID'S FIRST IMAGES: THE DAZZLING EDGE OF DARKNESS

The ESA's Euclid space mission has revealed its first full-color pictures of the cosmos. The Euclid mission aims to create the most extensive 3D map of the Universe yet and uncover its hidden secrets. It will investigate how dark matter and dark energy made the Universe look like it does today. The five images from the mission are available in the article along with a summary of what each image is showing.

COMMAND LINE INTERFACE GUIDELINES

This site contains an guide for writing better command-line programs. It takes traditional UNIX principals and updates them for the modern day. Many people today don't know what the command line is or why they should bother with it. The command line is still the most versatile part of a computer, allowing its users to see what's really going on and interact with the machine at a level of depth that GUIs cannot afford.

10 HARD-TO-SWALLOW TRUTHS THEY WON'T TELL YOU ABOUT SOFTWARE ENGINEER JOB

Many people enter the software engineering role because they see good pay, remote work, team building, and pizza parties - no one is telling them about the real things that software engineers actually do. This article aims to give those planning to enter the industry a dose of reality about the role. Some of the hard truths it covers include the fact that college doesn't prepare you for the job, developers rarely get greenfield projects, no one cares about clean code, and you will sometimes have to work with incompetent people.

RULE AMBIGUITY, INSTITUTIONAL CLASHES, AND POPULATION LOSS: HOW WIKIPEDIA BECAME THE LAST GOOD PLACE ON THE INTERNET

Institutional change can occur through population loss, where those who are unhappy with the institution leave while those who benefit from it remain. This form of endogenous change happened with the English Wikipedia. Early disputes over rule interpretation led to the strengthening of Wikipedia's rules. As a result, editors who supported controversial content left or were removed, leading to significant institutional change.

MOST VIDEO GAME ARTWORK WILL NEVER BE SEEN

Artists do some of the most important work in video games - but most of the art they create is never seen. There is much more that goes into game development than the polished pieces we see. Many artists have large holes in their portfolios due to rules governing the crediting and ownership of the works they create. This article looks at the imbalance in power between game studios and their artists to understand why so much work is hidden and how this could change in the future.

velocity while unlocking rigorous, deep analysis. Explore Eppo

GOOGLE OFFERED EPIC $147 MILLION TO LAUNCH FORTNITE ON THE PLAY STORE

Epic had launched Fortnite on Android directly through its website to avoid Play Store fees, but it changed its mind in 2020 after several factors put the game at a severe disadvantage.

AMAZON DEDICATES TEAM TO TRAIN AMBITIOUS AI MODEL CODENAMED 'OLYMPUS'

Amazon is investing millions to train a large language model called Olympus with 2 trillion parameters.

SURPRISING FACTS ABOUT NEW CSS SELECTORS

This article looks at several new CSS selectors, including the Matches-Any Pseudo-class :is(), Negation (or Matches-None) Pseudo-class :not(), Relational Pseudo-class :has(), Specificity-adjustment Pseudo-class :where(), and Nesting Selector &.

GITHUB TEASES COPILOT ENTERPRISE PLAN THAT LETS COMPANIES CUSTOMIZE FOR THEIR CODEBASE

GitHub's enterprise subscription tier, which costs $39 per month, allows companies to fine-tune Copilot based on their internal code base.

AUTOMERGE-REPO: A "BATTERIES-INCLUDED" TOOLKIT FOR BUILDING LOCAL-FIRST APPLICATIONS

Automerge-Repo makes it much easier to build local-first applications, software that allows both real-time collaboration and offline working, with Automerge.

HARE AIMS TO BECOME A 100-YEAR PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

Hare is an alternative to C that is explicitly attempting to emulate C's 50+ year staying power, which means it needs to adhere to specific design goals.

THE OPENAI KEYNOTE

OpenAI recently held its first-ever developer conference. This article presents an analysis of the keynote and its main announcements. The keynote was well-presented and entertaining. The live demos went off without a hitch and leveraged the fact that they were live. All of the new products and features announced were immediately available rather than being available in the coming weeks or months, as is increasingly the case for events like I/O or WWDC.

REDDIT IS STARTING TO TEST ITS OWN ADD-ONS FOR THE PLATFORM

Reddit is starting to test add-ons built through its Developer Platform. Its first add-ons include tools for mods to more easily monitor and remove comment threads, ban spammers and remove their content, and more. They will only be available to a small number of subreddit mods. The Developer Platform is still in beta - it is unknown when it will be generally available.

ELON MUSK’S NEURALINK IS WORKING ON A CHIP THAT WILL SOLVE BLINDNESS

Neuralink is planning to release a vision chip that will solve eye conditions that cause blindness within the next few years. The company has received approval to start recruiting humans for its first clinical trials. Its v0.9 chip aims to fix various ailments, including quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Neuralink is still waiting for regulatory approval for its first human tests.

CRUISE CONFIRMS ROBOTAXIS RELY ON HUMAN ASSISTANCE EVERY FOUR TO FIVE MILES

Cruise uses a remote assistance team to help its autonomous fleet in certain situations. The company claims that remote assistance is being used about 2-4% of the time on average in complex urban environments. It says that the number is low enough that there isn't a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further. The remote assistants mostly provide wayfinding intel to the vehicle instead of controlling it remotely and more than 98% of sessions are answered within 3 seconds. It is an industry standard to have humans on call.

Download the PDF 📥

INSHELLISENSE

inshellisense provides IDE-style autocomplete for shells. It supports more than 600 command-line tools. inshellisense can run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It works on bash, zsh, fish, pwsh, and Windows Powershell.

CAMI.JS

Cami.js is a toolkit for interactive islands and state management in hypermedia-driven web applications. It features reactive web components, tagged templates, store/state management, easy immutable updates, and more. Cami.js doesn't require any build steps and has no client-side router, JSX, or shadow DOM. It was designed for lean teams or solo devs working on multi-page applications.

ARE LANGUAGE MODELS GOOD AT MAKING PREDICTIONS?

This post presents the findings of a study that looks at whether GPT-4 can make good predictions. GPT-4's predictions are not well calibrated - its predicted probabilities are often over-confident. Its prediction ability varies depending on the category - for unclear reasons, GPT-4 is well-calibrated for sports questions but horrendously calibrated for personal questions. The model is better at making predictions for politics than for science or technology.

SEEING LIKE A BANK

Banks often look like notably disorganized institutions to their customers, which is alarming and surprising for an entity that is supposed to accurately keep track of all of the money. Banks are extremely good at tracking ledgers, but bad at tracking other forms of truth for structural reasons. In extreme cases, banks can feel like they lack object permanence - every interaction can feel like you're starting from the beginning. This article explains how it got to be this way.

you’re an early-ish stage startup? See if you qualify

YOUTUBE’S AD BLOCKING CRACKDOWN IS FACING A NEW CHALLENGE: PRIVACY LAWS

YouTube's ad blocker detection system may be a violation of privacy in the EU as it may be classified as spyware.

ALMOST AN AGENT: WHAT GPTS CAN DO

A look at the current capabilities of large language models and what they might be able to do in the near future.

44% OF US JOB POSTINGS HAVE SALARY INFORMATION IN THEM

Louisiana has the lowest level of salary transparency, while South Dakota has the highest.

RIVIAN AND AMAZON ARE NO LONGER EXCLUSIVE

Rivian is now letting other companies buy its commercial electric vans.

BEEJ'S GUIDE TO NETWORK CONCEPTS (BOOK)

This book is a guide to concepts seen in networking written to help readers make sense of the terminology and do a bit of network programming in Python.

A FOUR YEAR PLAN FOR ASYNC RUST

This post looks at features that async Rust needs to continue to improve its user experience and a potential change to the language that could take years to plan and prepare for.

ALL THE NEWS FROM OPENAI’S FIRST DEVELOPER CONFERENCE

OpenAI has hosted its first-ever developer conference, almost a year after the company released ChatGPT to the public. This article provides an overview of the announcements from the event. The company plans to launch a GPT store later this month. It has introduced a copyright shield that defends customers from legal action. GPT-4 Turbo is now available. Anyone can now create custom versions of ChatGPT.

YOUTUBE TESTS A ‘PLAY SOMETHING’ BUTTON FOR WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO WATCH

YouTube is testing a new 'play something' button on its mobile app that directs users to a random video. The feature directs users to both YouTube Shorts and full-length videos. It is unclear whether the feature takes into account users' watch histories when picking videos. YouTube has been working on the feature since at least around May.

SCIENTISTS ARE RESEARCHING A DEVICE THAT CAN INDUCE LUCID DREAMS ON DEMAND

Prophetic is a tech startup that aims to bring lucid dreams to a wider audience by developing a wearable device designed to induce the experience when desired. It uses ultrasound and machine learning models to detect when dreamers are in REM to induce and stabilize lucid dreams. Prophetic’s Halo device is slated for release in 2025. A render of the device is available in the article.

APPLE AIMS TO REINVENT THE BATTERY WITH HIGH-PERFORMANCE CATHODE TECHNOLOGY

Apple is designing a battery with a new composition of raw materials. It aims to dramatically increase the silicon content to increase capacity and shorten charging times. One of the main issues with using silicon for batteries is that silicon expands during charging and powering. Apple is also researching the use of carbon nanotubes as a conductive material to improve battery performance. The new battery may be launched as soon as 2025.

NEW MODELS AND DEVELOPER PRODUCTS ANNOUNCED AT DEVDAY

Some of the new additions and improvements announced at OpenAI's DevDay include a new GPT-4 Turbo model, a new Assistant's API, and new multimodal capabilities. Pricing was reduced across many parts of OpenAI's platform. The new features are now available to customers. This article covers the update in detail.

SHOELACE

Shoelace is a forward-thinking library of web components that works with all frameworks and CDNs. It is fully customizable with CSS, includes a dark theme, and was built with accessibility in mind. Shoelace features first-class React support and built-in localization.

A VIDEO GAME THAT PAYS: LESSONS LEARNED FROM WORKING REMOTELY

Remote work is like a video game that pays. There are many similarities between video games and remote software engineering. This blog post looks at insights and lessons learned over almost two years of remote work. Remote work can be very rewarding, but it is not all rainbows and unicorns. Getting to know the people that you work with in person can help improve communication and collaboration immensely.

ASK HN: WHAT ARE YOU PASSIONATE ABOUT AT THE MOMENT? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

A Hacker News thread on developers' passions. Topics discussed include developing a life purpose, powerlifting, running, small city council politics, and mental health. A similar thread from exactly a year ago is linked to in the original post.

HERE’S HOW RISING PAY TRANSPARENCY IS CAUSING AN EMPLOYER COMPENSATION INFORMATION ‘ARMS RACE’

Pay transparency has not significantly altered average wage ranges listed in job postings, but more employers are including a range of cash benefits, perks, and flexibility options.

BUMBLE ANNOUNCES SLACK CEO LIDIANE JONES WILL BE ITS NEW CHIEF EXEC

While Bumble now has a clear line of succession, the move leaves Slack in a bit of a pickle.

XAI PROMPTIDE

xAI's PromptIDE is a development environment for prompt engineering and interpretability research.

THE ARCHITECTURE BEHIND A ONE-PERSON TECH STARTUP

This post breaks down the setup for a one-person SaaS tech startup, from load balancing to cron job monitoring to payments and subscriptions.

WHY ARE WE STILL SURPRISED THAT STARTUPS ARE HARD?

Even Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, one of the five US companies currently worth over a trillion dollars, wouldn't do it all over again if he had the chance.

MY COMPANY DIED — LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES

Braid was a company that designed and shipped a type of multi-user financial account called a money pool - it took two and a half years for the company to find product-market fit, after which it grew - but the company was dead just a few months later.