Ladybird Browser adopts Rust
The article explores the advantages of adopting the Rust programming language, highlighting its focus on safety, concurrency, and performance, making it a suitable choice for systems programming and building secure and reliable software.
Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel
Elsevier, a major academic publisher, has decided to shut down its finance journal, Review of Financial Studies, after 35 years of operation. This decision reflects the changing landscape of academic publishing and the ongoing challenges facing specialized academic journals in the digital age.
Pinterest is drowning in a sea of AI slop and auto-moderation
The article discusses how Pinterest's reliance on AI-powered content moderation has led to an overwhelming amount of false positives, resulting in legitimate user-generated content being wrongfully removed from the platform. This has created a frustrating experience for many creators and users on the platform.
How close are we to a vision for 2010?
The article discusses the author's perspective on the vision for 2010, evaluating how close we came to realizing the predictions and expectations set out in 2006. It examines the accuracy of those forecasts and the actual technological and societal developments that occurred over the past decade.
Facebook's Fascination with My Robots.txt
Facebook has updated its robots.txt file to disallow crawling of certain areas of its website, indicating a shift in its approach to privacy and data access. The changes suggest Facebook is taking steps to restrict how its data and content can be accessed and used by third-party services and applications.
What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
The article discusses the key lessons the author learned after transitioning from mobile app development to building three TV applications, highlighting the unique challenges and considerations involved in creating TV apps, such as user interface design, content organization, and device compatibility.
QRTape – Audio Playback from Paper Tape with Computer Vision (2021)
The article describes the QRtape, a novel audio playback system that uses paper tape to store and play back audio recordings. It explores the technical details of how the QRtape system works, including the use of QR codes and a custom-built playback device.
femtolisp: A lightweight, robust, scheme-like Lisp implementation
femtolisp is a lightweight, embeddable Lisp interpreter written in C. It is designed to be small, fast, and easy to integrate into other software projects, making it a suitable choice for use in embedded systems and other resource-constrained environments.
Compulsively violent people might have lower IQs
The article reports that people who engage in impulsive violence tend to have lower IQ scores compared to those who do not. The findings suggest a potential connection between cognitive abilities and impulsive aggressive behavior.
Day 1461 of Putin's Three-Day War
The article discusses the ongoing war in Ukraine, now in its fourth year, and the challenges faced by Russia as its initial military objectives remain unfulfilled. It highlights the slow progress of the conflict and Russia's continued struggles to achieve its goals despite the prolonged campaign.
The Billionaires' Eugenics Project
The article explores the alleged ties between convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, billionaires, eugenics, and their influence in academia, particularly at Harvard. It delves into the claims of Epstein's involvement in funding and promoting controversial scientific research and ideas related to selective human breeding.
Show HN: Sprime – weather, crypto, news, forex all normalized to one JSON schema
I kept rewriting the same JSON normalization glue for every side project. Weather APIs return different field names, crypto APIs have inconsistent structures, news APIs format dates differently — and you end up writing adapters for all of it before you can even start building.
Sprime is a unified API gateway that sits in front of 15+ data providers and returns everything in the same JSON shape, every time.
One API key, consistent responses, automatic provider failover if something goes down.
Endpoints live now: weather, crypto, news, forex, air quality, geocode, IP lookup, timezone, holidays, webhooks.
Free tier is 500 req/day. Would love feedback from the HN crowd on pricing, missing endpoints, or anything that seems off.
What was Phil Spencer's plan to save Xbox?
The article discusses Phil Spencer's farewell message to the Xbox community, where he reflects on his tenure as the head of Xbox and the significant achievements of the Xbox brand under his leadership, including the success of the Xbox Series X/S consoles and the growth of Xbox Game Pass.
What Are Free Speech Warriors Doing About Trump's Censorship-Industrial Complex?
The article discusses the rise of 'heterodox free speech warriors' - individuals who claim to champion free speech but often promote controversial or extremist views. It examines the motivations, tactics, and influence of this group within the broader free speech debate.
Show HN: Gridl – A daily block puzzle game
GridlGame is a free-to-play, multiplayer online word game where players compete to solve Wordle-inspired puzzles against each other in real-time. The game offers a unique social gaming experience with daily challenges, global leaderboards, and the ability to chat with opponents.
Sam Altman would like to remind you that humans use a lot of energy too
The article discusses Sam Altman's comments on the energy consumption of humans, highlighting the need to consider the environmental impact of human activities in addition to that of technology and AI systems.
Social media companies face legal reckoning over mental health harms to children
The article explores the impact of social media platforms on user well-being, particularly regarding addiction and mental health concerns. It examines the efforts by companies like Meta, YouTube, and TikTok to address these issues and the ongoing legal and regulatory scrutiny they face.
Show HN: Spacemoji – 3D emoji-filled space warp simulation in a single HTML file
I built this as a weekend project thinking about what I could do with emojis. The whole thing is nothing more than a single HTML file with some JavaScript.
Check it out, and maybe tweak the configs to make the engine more fun (you can change the speed, particle count, and colors pretty easily).
Live demo: https://j-ncel.github.io/Spacemoji/
Interact with this by tapping or holding.
Show HN: Chaos Monkey but for Audio Video Testing (WebRTC and UDP)
It takes an input video and converts it into H.264/Opus RTP streams that you can blast at your video call systems (WebRTC, SFUs, etc.). It also injects network chaos like packet loss, jitter, and bitrate throttling to see how things break
It scales from 1 to n participants, depending on the compute and memory of the host system Best part? It’s packaged with Nix, so it builds the same everywhere (Linux, macOS, ARM, x86). No dependency hell
It supports both UDP (with a relay chain for Kubernetes) and WebRTC (with containerized TURN servers). Chaos spikes can be distributed evenly, randomly, or front/back-loaded for different test scenarios. To change this, just edit the values in a single config file
Sam Altman Turned $1T Non-Binding Commitments into a $100B Round
The article examines the 'circular trap' faced by OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman, who aims to develop beneficial AI systems but is hampered by the need to generate revenue and compete with other AI companies. It explores the challenges of balancing AI development with commercial interests and the potential risks of unchecked AI growth.