Learning Software Architecture

To learn software design skills as a researcher physicist, it's essential to understand that software design is best learned by doing and adapting to the social context of the project, rather than following formal rules or guidelines. Key recommendations include practicing, paying attention to boundaries, testing, and Conway's Law, and considering resources such as the Boundaries talk by Gary ...

Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise

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An attacker compromised 42 @tanstack/* npm packages by combining GitHub Actions cache poisoning and runtime memory extraction of an OIDC token, publishing 84 malicious versions on 2026-05-11. The attack was detected within 20 minutes by an external researcher and all affected versions have been deprecated, but users who installed the affected versions are recommended to rotate their credentials.

Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

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The user provided a large collection of screenshots showcasing various operating systems and graphical user interfaces from the 1980s to the early 2000s, including GEM, OS/2, Windows, and NeXTSTEP. The screenshots demonstrate the evolution of GUIs, highlighting the differences in design, functionality, and performance across various platforms and releases.

Toxicity on Social Media – The Noisy Room

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Stanford researchers analyzed 2.2 billion social media posts and found a small minority of users produce most toxic content, creating a distorted view of public opinion. This distortion leads to self-censorship, false consensus, and hostility between opposing groups.

They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker

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A fork of uBlock Origin Lite, uBOLite_theylive, replaces cosmetic-blocked ads with white tiles bearing They Live slogans. It requires manual installation and configuration in Chromium-based browsers.

If AI writes your code, why use Python?

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AI has improved significantly in writing systems languages like Rust, Go, and Swift, making them easier to use. This shift changes the constraints of software development, favoring languages that are easiest for agents, not humans.

Rtwatch: Watch videos with friends using WebRTC

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rtwatch allows real-time video synchronization with friends using Pion WebRTC and GStreamer. It stores state on the backend, sending only the current frame to viewers, and requires host networking enabled on macOS.

UCLA discovers first stroke rehabilitation drug to repair brain damage (2025)

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UCLA researchers found a drug called DDL-920 that reproduces the effects of physical stroke rehabilitation in mice. The drug targets a brain cell called a parvalbumin neuron to help recover movement control after stroke.

Claude Platform on AWS

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The Claude Platform on AWS is now generally available, offering full access to Claude features with AWS authentication and billing. It brings native Claude API features to AWS customers with features shipping the same day as the native API.

Extremely Low Frequencies

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The development of submarine communication technology involved overcoming challenges such as seawater blocking radio waves and limited antenna capabilities, leading to the use of long-wave radio and Very Low Frequency (VLF) signals. The Navy's pursuit of Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) signals in the 1960s and 1970s aimed to enable submerged submarines to receive nuclear launch orders, but was ...

Google says criminal hackers used AI to find a major software flaw

A hacking group used AI to detect a previously unknown bug, posing a threat to digital security. Google thwarted the attack, highlighting concerns over AI's potential impact on cybersecurity.

Software Internals Book Club

You run a global email book club with 2,500 members discussing high-level books on databases, distributed systems, and software performance. The club is open to all and features experienced discussion leaders and text-based discussions via a Google Group.

I let AI build a tool to help me figure out what was waking me up at night

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The user built a system to identify and record noise events that wake them up at night using AI tooling, a Raspberry Pi, and a smart home setup, allowing them to pinpoint and address the causes of their sleep disruptions. This project demonstrates how AI tooling has lowered the barrier for personal tooling, enabling the user to tackle small problems that were previously deemed not worth building.

Optimize for change not application performance

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Teams spend weeks improving rendering performance by a couple of milliseconds while engineers are afraid to touch the codebase. I wrote more about this problem in Why you should not access browser globals directly. A system that is theoretically faster but harder to evolve often becomes slower for the business overall. And less frustration means more energy for solving actual customer ...

I hate soldering

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The user dislikes soldering due to health concerns and mess. They want soldering to be replaced by a safer alternative.

Remembering Planet Source Code: Sharing Code Before GitHub Made It Easy

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The author reflects on their early days as a developer, discovering archived code submissions from 20 years ago on PlanetSourceCode.com, a site that helped developers share and learn from each other. The author reminisces about the era before GitHub, when sharing code was more challenging, but still a vital part of the developer community.

Boriel BASIC

Boriel BASIC SDK is a Sinclair BASIC-like compiler with enhanced features and integer data types, suitable for ZX-Spectrum development. It includes a library of functions, sample programs, and a community forum for support and bug reporting.

Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

Justin Frankel, founder of Nullsoft, was a rebellious programmer who created popular music tools like Winamp and Gnutella, often challenging the music industry and his corporate parent AOL. He quit AOL and Nullsoft after releasing a private file-sharing system WASTE, which made it difficult for authorities to track copyright infringement.

Show HN: A modern Music Player Daemon based on Rockbox firmware

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Rockbox is an open source audio player extended with Rust and Zig, exposing audio engine features through APIs and adding multi-room output via various protocols. It can stream audio to multiple devices and supports various output protocols.

Library for fast mapping of Java records to native memory

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TypedMemory is a Java library for working with contiguous off-heap memory through strongly typed views. It provides a type-safe abstraction over memory for systems, interop, graphics, and data-oriented programming.

HDMI 2.1 Display Stream Compression (DSC) Ready for Amdgpu Linux Driver

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AMD has updated its open-source AMDGPU driver to support HDMI 2.1's Display Stream Compression and Fixed Rate Link for higher resolutions and refresh rates. This support is expected to be upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel with Linux 7.2.

Interaction Models

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Researchers at Thinking Machines are developing a new type of AI model called interaction models that can handle real-time conversations and collaboration with humans. These models can perceive and respond to humans in real-time, across multiple modalities such as audio, video, and text, and can be used for a variety of applications including customer service, education, and healthcare.

GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

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GitLab is undergoing a restructuring process to meet the opportunities of the agentic era, including reducing its country footprint by 30%, flattening its organization, and right-sizing roles. The company is reaffirming its Q1 and full year FY27 guidance and will reinvest the majority of savings into accelerating its progress against growth and technological initiatives.

Unitree GD01: China's $537k rideable transformer robot is now in production

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Unitree Robotics launched the GD01, a manned mech suit that transforms between two-legged and four-legged movement, priced at $537,000. The robot is currently available only in China, with regulatory and distributor hurdles to clear before it can be sold in the US or UK.

Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers

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Discover, read, and engage with academic papers. AI-powered summaries, quizzes, and a community of researchers — all in one beautiful app.

VGA Memory Access Is Complicated

The VGA's complexity stems from its multiple logically separate components and the lack of detailed and accurate documentation, particularly for the IBM EGA and VGA's Odd/Even control registers. Adequate documentation is crucial for implementing VGA hardware or emulation, as individual bits have distinct and separate functionality, and incorrect implementations can lead to compatibility issues.

Music has scales / raagas. What about storytelling in movies and prestige shows?

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15 structural archetypes derived from 405 films. Each archetype is defined by five parameters borrowed from Hindustani classical music, a system built on the idea that melody is not just sound but emotional territory. We extended this logic to narrative structure: screen time replaces note duration, dramatic registers replace musical registers, and the characteristic phrase of a raaga becomes ...

When semiconductor materials misbehave

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Advanced chip manufacturing faces a gap between lab simulations and production reality due to complex material interactions and variability. Closing this gap requires better simulation tools, machine learning, and data interpretation to understand novel materials and their interactions in production environments.

Interfaze: A new model architecture built for high accuracy at scale

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Interfaze is a new model architecture that outperforms other models in OCR, vision, and structured output tasks. It offers a balance between performance and price, making it suitable for high-volume tasks.

Training an LLM in Swift, Part 1: Taking matrix mult from Gflop/s to Tflop/s

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The author optimizes a handwritten matrix multiplication code in Swift for training a Large Language Model (LLM) on Apple Silicon, exploring various techniques such as SIMD, AMX, and Metal to achieve performance comparable to C. The author concludes that while Swift can achieve similar performance to C, it requires more complex and unwieldy code, and that the fastest CPU instruction on Apple ...