Published: 2025-10-25 | Origin: Hacker News

California has experienced a significant shift in its energy landscape, with no emergency Flex Alerts issued since 2022, marking a departure from previous decades of rolling blackouts. This change is attributed to substantial investments in the electrical grid, particularly in battery energy storage, which has increased over 3,000% since 2020, from 500 megawatts to over 15,700 megawatts. These batteries play a crucial role in storing solar energy for later use, enhancing grid reliability during peak

Published: 2025-10-25 | Origin: Hacker News

Amit Prasad discusses his experience creating a RISC-V-based userspace simulator, focusing on the mechanics of how a program is executed in Linux. The core of the process is the `execve` system call, which initiates program loading by passing the executable file name, arguments, and environment variables to the kernel. Higher-level programming languages, like Rust, simplify this process through wrappers that translate command names to full paths, similar to how shells resolve commands via the PATH variable. Prasad

Published: 2025-10-25 | Origin: Hacker News

Chonky is a transformer model designed to segment text into meaningful semantic chunks, facilitating its use in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. It is now multilingual and processes text into coherent segments that can be integrated into embedding-based retrieval systems or language models within a RAG pipeline. The model is trained on sequences of up to 1024 tokens, despite the default mmBERT supporting sequences of up to 8192 tokens. A Python library named "chonky" has been created for

Published: 2025-10-25 | Origin: Hacker News

OpenAI has released a new browser called Atlas, which is designed to actively limit users' access to the web. The browser presents itself as a conventional search tool but produces synthesized responses rather than traditional search results that link to external sources. For instance, a search for "Taylor Swift showgirl" yielded a summary of information that looked like a web page but lacked actual links, giving the impression of a web search when it was merely an AI-generated output. This raises concerns about users being confined to AI

Published: 2025-10-25 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses the importance of separating business logic from side effects in code to enhance maintainability, testability, and adaptability. It criticizes the practice of mixing these elements, using an example of a function that sends expiration notification emails, which combines business logic with database calls and email sending. To improve the code structure, it suggests adopting a pattern where a **functional core** contains pure, testable business logic free of side effects, while an **imperative shell** handles all interactions with external systems

Published: 2025-10-25 | Origin: Hacker News

The content outlines key characteristics of effective principal engineers and scientists, drawing on observations primarily from Amazon's perspective, though applicable to other tech roles. It emphasizes that different principals have varied strengths—some specialize deeply while others excel in broad influence, technical innovation, or organizational alignment. Key points include: 1. **Varied Approaches:** Each principal engineer can have a unique style, focusing on different aspects such as technical depth, simplification of complex concepts, or fostering collaboration across teams. Finding a style

Published: 2025-10-25 | Origin: Hacker News

The Ludlum Model 3 is a robust and user-friendly radiation meter, notable for its analog display and lightweight (1.5 kg) design. It is widely available second-hand at reasonable prices, easy to repair, and capable of driving various Geiger tubes and scintillation detectors due to its adjustable high-voltage power supply. While Geiger tubes effectively detect alpha and beta particles, they struggle with surface contamination, often missing signals obscured by dirt. Scintillation counters are highly sensitive to gamma

Published: 2025-10-25 | Origin: Hacker News

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Published: 2025-10-24 | Origin: Hacker News

Swift has evolved over the last decade, expanding its reach into various applications, including cloud services, Windows, browser apps, and microcontrollers. The Android workgroup, an open group focused on extending Swift to Android, has announced nightly preview releases of the Swift SDK for Android. This development follows months of community effort and allows developers to create Android applications using Swift, enhancing cross-platform development. The Swift SDK for Android is available with the Windows installer or can be downloaded separately for Linux and macOS. To

Published: 2025-10-24 | Origin: Hacker News

Joseph DeNatale, an entrepreneur and project coordinator at Jetson Home, has written a guest post discussing the importance of execution in transforming ideas into reality, particularly in the field of home electrification and heat pumps. In the piece, which was originally published in Climate Drift and will be shared in five parts on Heat Pumped, DeNatale emphasizes that while the technology for heat pumps is available and advancing, the main challenge lies with homeowners, contractors, manufacturers, and policymakers who must embrace and implement

Published: 2025-10-24 | Origin: Hacker News

The author describes their experience flying with British Airways from Hong Kong to London in June 2025. Unlike a previous flight in 2023, this time they discovered that British Airways offered free WiFi for messaging to members of "The British Airways Club," which is the airline's frequent flyer program. The author was able to sign up for this program in-flight without internet verification, allowing access to messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal, and WeChat (though not for image transfers), while Discord did

Published: 2025-10-24 | Origin: Hacker News

The article discusses a mathematical inquiry into whether one object can pass through another by boring a tunnel through it. This concept was famously wagered by Prince Rupert of the Rhine in the 1600s, who proved that if a tunnel is drilled through a cube along its inner diagonal, another equal-sized cube can fit through, though only if the second cube is not more than 4% larger. The author, Tom Murphy, explores the broader implications of this property in various shapes, highlighting its significance in

Published: 2025-10-24 | Origin: Hacker News

JupyterGIS, launched in June 2024, is a collaborative web-based GIS application built on the JupyterLab framework. It aims to facilitate QGIS-inspired workflows in a browser environment, allowing real-time collaboration and integration with geospatial data formats. Since its announcement, JupyterGIS has seen significant improvements, including enhanced vector tile capabilities with full pmtiles compatibility, a new browser-based processing toolbox powered by WebAssembly (WASM) for GEOSPATIAL Data Abstraction Library (GDAL

Published: 2025-10-24 | Origin: Hacker News

The text discusses the evolution of photography from a cherished art form to a reality where images are often manipulated and generated by AI, leading to confusion about what is real. To address this issue, the Roc Camera has been developed to capture "verifiably real moments" using advanced technology like sensors and on-device zero-knowledge proofs. This camera creates a unique photo that can be verified as authentic through the Roc Photo SDK. Beta testing for the Roc Camera is currently open, with a lead time of

Published: 2025-10-24 | Origin: Hacker News

The content outlines a series of computer science courses, emphasizing the practical application of technology to implement ideas rather than focusing solely on the technology itself. 1. **CSCI 2100: Unlearning Object-Oriented Programming** - This course teaches students to create and use variables outside of object hierarchies and introduces functions, which are broader in utility than methods. A prerequisite is having taken a course involving "abstract base class." 2. **CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies** -

Published: 2025-10-24 | Origin: Hacker News

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Published: 2025-10-23 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses React Flow and Svelte Flow, which are open-source libraries designed for creating node-based UIs using React and Svelte, respectively. Users are encouraged to provide feedback and report bugs to support the development of these libraries, which are maintained by the xyflow team under an MIT License. If organizations are utilizing these libraries and generating revenue, they are urged to support the projects financially. Resources for getting started, documentation, and a community Discord server are available for users seeking assistance or collaboration.

Published: 2025-10-23 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses various Varnish products, including Varnish Enterprise, Pro, Controller, Cache, and Traffic Router, with a focus on enhancing application performance through the use of memory maps. Memory maps, introduced in Unix in the 1980s, allow files to be mapped into virtual memory, enabling faster data access by reading directly from memory instead of making slower system calls through disk I/O. A Go library demonstrates the performance benefits of memory mapping compared to traditional reading methods. The article highlights

Published: 2025-10-23 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses the characteristics of `/dev/null`, highlighting its web-scale operations that are "all or nothing." When data is written to `/dev/null`, it is either fully discarded or not written at all, ensuring the file remains consistently empty. Concurrent transactions can occur without interference, as no data is stored. Once a transaction is committed, it remains so, even through crashes, maintaining the invariant that the file always contains nothing. However, it notes a limitation: `/dev/null` has 0

Published: 2025-10-23 | Origin: Hacker News

The text discusses the concept of "bikeshed painting," a metaphor that suggests individuals often debate trivial aspects of a project (like the color of a bikeshed) instead of focusing on more significant issues. The main takeaway is that while you may be capable of discussing every detail or change, you shouldn't prevent others from making choices about less critical features simply because you disagree. Ultimately, the amount of debate tends to be inversely related to the complexity of the change being discussed.