Ping, You've Got Whale: AI detection system alerts ships of whales in their path (biographic.com | comments) A new artificial intelligence-based detection system notifies ship captains in real time of nearby whales to prevent collisions. By providing alerts about a whale's presence in their navigational path, the system aims to enhance maritime safety and reduce potential harm to whale populations.

• Hey this is cool! I met people here in Australia doing similar work to spot whales during offshore gas exploration. It was basically a revolving IR camera looking for whale spouts
• Now invent a thing that broadcasts the whale word for danger so they can get out of the way.

Supabase raises $200M Series D at $2B valuation (yahoo.com | comments) Supabase has successfully raised $200 million in a Series D funding round, propelling its valuation to $2 billion. This investment will help expand its offerings in the open-source PostgreSQL database ecosystem, catering to a growing demand for developer-friendly back-end solutions in web and mobile applications.

• That’s a lot of money. What’s Supabase’s exit strategy? Are they sustainable long term as a standalone business? You can also see how money is starting to chase “vibe coding” — as long as you say the magic words, even if your product is only tangentially related to it, you can get funding!

The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great (technologizer.com | comments) The article highlights the creative decisions that transformed raccoon-themed ads into iconic features in computer magazines, showcasing their humorous and playful appeal. It reflects on their lasting impact on advertising in the tech industry, capturing the blend of nostalgia and innovation that these ads represented.

• "The point of the characters, it said, was to add 'a human touch to high tech.'" Something we need today, too
• It's kind of odd, seeing the MicroWarehouse Girl. I very much remember her, smiling out from many different magazines.
• Might be hugged to death, no current copies on archive.org or archive.today :(

SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user interfaces (serenityos.org | comments) SerenityOS is a Unix-like operating system that evokes the charm of '90s user interfaces, integrating elements from various systems while prioritizing user aesthetics and accessibility. It blends late-90s productivity software vibes with modern usability.

• How's this project doing after it lost its founder and biggest contributor (Andreas Kling)? I see the commit history is still reasonably active, so it's not dead at least . . .
• They only show the good part of 90s UIs, the standardized part. They don't show the part where every installer wanted to look unique, weird ICQ clients.

Abusing DuckDB-WASM by making SQL draw 3D graphics (Sort Of) (hey.earth | comments) A developer, inspired by the capabilities of DuckDB-WASM, attempts to build a 3D browser game using SQL for game logic instead of JavaScript. The project revolves around creating a text-based Doom clone that uses SQL queries for managing game state, demonstrating the unconventional application of an analytical database engine in gaming.

• You can use requestAnimationFrame to prevent race in the renderer
• Finally somebody did it! Back in the day my attempts to write a game in SQL were thwarted by buggy query-optimizers. They cached my calls to rand() way too often although documentation promised not to do that.

Making a smart bike dumb so it works again (francisco.io | comments) After the bankruptcy of the smart bike company, the author faced the challenge of a non-functional bike light that required an app to operate. To resolve this, he devised a physical button solution by hacking the bike’s existing hardware, including a USB-C charging upgrade, allowing easier light functionality without reliance on the original app.

• Maybe I've been listening to too much YKS but I can't imagine buying a bike that required me to use an app and company's cloud to control basic functionality like that
• I was hoping this was about the Copenhagen Wheel. I'd love if my expensive brick could get going again. It was my first lesson in "Don't trust a startup".

I should have loved biology too (nehalslearnings.substack.com | comments) In a reflective piece, Nehal Udyavar narrates their journey from disliking biology to developing a fascination for it, sparked by engaging writing and a transformative experience post-scuba diving. This narrative highlights the power of personal experiences in reshaping perceptions and interests.

• A complex three dimensional organism self-assembling from a single cell is 100% magic, especially given how resilient it is to disruption. You can kill one of the two cells produced by the first division and still get a fully formed organism (that's one of the actual early experiments in morphogenesis theory).

Attacking My Landlord's Boiler (videah.net | comments) In a blog post, the author shares their frustrations with their landlord's boiler setup, which utilizes a radio-controlled thermostat that only monitors one area for temperature control, leading to uneven heating. They express a desire to enhance their living experience without breaching any lease agreements or local laws.

• I guess your toolbox really shapes your solution space thinking; as I read through this, being completely lost in the whole world of RF whatnot, my mind jumped straight to an alternative attack that better fit my own tooling: could you encase the thermostat in a box that you can mechanically control the temperature of?

Forecaster reacts: METR's bombshell paper about AI acceleration (peterwildeford.substack.com | comments) New research from METR suggests that the progress of artificial intelligence (AI) follows an exponential growth trend, despite significant uncertainties in the data. The implications of this finding could reshape AI development and deployment strategies.

• Task: Create an imahe of an analog clock that show 09:30 a.m Last time I checked ChatGPT failed miserably, took my 10 year old nephew a minute. Maybe it's bad to extrapolate those trends beacuse there is no constant growth. How looked the same graph when self driving took off and how is it now?

How to quickly charge your smartphone: fast charging technologies in detail (eb43.github.io | comments) Smartphone charging has evolved significantly, moving beyond simple wires to complex technologies that require communication between charger and device. Fast charging now typically means delivering at least 20W, with standards like USB Power Delivery (USB PD) enabling high power delivery through negotiation. Careful selection of cables and chargers is crucial to avoid overheating and ensure safe operation, particularly in devices that can demand higher wattage.

• I don't think Apple was the first to use the magnets to align the phone to the charger. I think I had a nexus 5 that had the magnets in the phone and google Qi charger -- that would perfectly align the phone and charger.
• It is annoying that while the connector itself is now finally standardized, the details of implementation diverge. So while you may be able to charge, it'll be slow charge.
• Wish they’d kept 12V throughout the PD standards. So useful for hobby stuff

Show HN: Morphik – Open-source RAG that understands PDF images, runs locally (github.com/morphik-org | comments) Morphik is an open-source Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) tool designed for local execution that can process and understand PDF images. Its focus on local functionality facilitates user privacy and ease of deployment, making it an essential resource for developers working with document-based AI applications.

• If it’s MIT open source, what does the paid part apply to?
• Looks cool! What are the compute requirements or recommendations for self-hosting Morphik? What are the scaling limits? Can you provide a sense for latencies for ingestion and retrieval as the index size grows?

Solidjs: Simple and performant reactivity for building user interfaces (solidjs.com | comments) SolidJS is a JavaScript library focused on reactive programming, enabling the efficient and flexible construction of user interfaces. Influenced by principles from prior libraries, it promises high performance and a simple, declarative approach to reactivity in web applications.

• I'm a big fan of Solid. It's a very influential community, however it's not widely used. All the pieces are there. I just don't see tons of marketing or real app/product/dx focus from them. Look out for their upcoming 2.0 release, it's supposedly gonna be something special.

Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source IDE for multi-agent systems (github.com/rowboatlabs | comments) Rowboat is an open-source Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed for developing multi-agent systems. It aims to simplify the programming process for complex systems involving multiple agents, providing tools for coding, debugging, and visualizing agent interactions.

• This sounds really really nice. Potentially exactly what I've been hoping would exist. Thank you for putting it out there! Will try it out over the weekend. Exciting stuff.
• 1. Are you going to support Google's A2A protocol? 2. Are you going to support stateless chat?

Atuin Desktop: Runbooks That Run (atuin.sh | comments) Atuin Desktop integrates documentation with terminal functionalities, featuring script blocks, embedded terminal interfaces, database clients, and Prometheus charts. This combination allows users to manage and visualize processes directly within a single application, enhancing workflow efficiency for developers and IT professionals.

• How is this different from a local Jupyter notebook? Can we not do this with ! or % in a .ipynb? Genuine question. Not familiar with this company or the CLI product.
• I can't say I see the point in this. Can someone explain what I'm missing? Why would I use this over a simple shell script?

ClickHouse gets lazier and faster: Introducing lazy materialization (clickhouse.com | comments) ClickHouse introduces 'lazy materialization,' a performance enhancement that delays unnecessary column reads during query execution, increasing query speed and optimizing resource management.

• God clickhouse is such great software, if it only it was as ergonomic as duckdb, and management wasn't doing some questionable things (deleting references to competitors in GH issues, weird legal letters, etc.) The CH contributors are really stellar, from multiple companies (Altinity, Tinybird, Cloudflare, ClickHouse)

Libro: a command-line tool to track your books (github.com/mkaz | comments) Libro is a command-line tool designed for tracking books, enhancing the reading experience through a simple interface. Users can easily add, remove, or view their reading lists and personal libraries, making book management more efficient for avid readers.

• A basic command-line tool to track your books read, show some basic stats and charts. All stored in a sqlite3 database and you can import from a Goodreads export CSV.
• Cool. I like using the cli for almost ever, but somehow for books, I gravitate more towards something with a GUI. I use Zotero nowadays; seems enough for now.

Show HN: I open-sourced my AI toy company that runs on ESP32 and OpenAI realtime (github.com/akdeb | comments) An open-source project has been launched featuring a toy company that utilizes the ESP32 microcontroller and OpenAI's technology for real-time functionality. This initiative aims to innovate within the realm of artificial intelligence and hardware integration, catering to developers and hobbyists interested in AI-driven projects.

• Its great.lovely. but on the long run these toys rely on subscription payment? Both the supabase Api and OpenAI billing is per api call. So the lovely talking toys can die if the company stops being profitable. I would love to see a version with decent hardware that runs a local model, that could have a long lifespan and work offline.

Pike – a dynamic programming language with a syntax similar to Java and C (liu.se | comments) Pike is a dynamic programming language designed with a syntax similar to Java and C, enabling users to write code easily and perform fast data manipulations. It streamlines the learning process without long compilation times and is available under several open-source licenses like GPL and LGPL, allowing diverse application use.

• What's the itch this language is trying to scratch? For which use cases is it best suited?
• I remember coming across Pike about two decades ago (or more), as a young amateur developer... I couldn't understand why anyone would choose Pike. And today I still can't. Legacy projects?

Show HN: Open Codex – OpenAI Codex CLI with open-source LLMs (github.com/codingmoh | comments) Open Codex introduces a command-line interface (CLI) based on OpenAI's Codex, designed to utilize various open-source large language models (LLMs). This tool aims to simplify integration and improve accessibility for developers who want to leverage LLM capabilities without the constraints of proprietary systems.

• Without any changes, you can already use Codex with a remote or local API by setting base URL and key environment variables.
• curious why you went with Phi as the default models, that seems a bit unusual compared to current trends
• Cool project! It's awesome to see someone taking on the challenge of a fully local Codex alternative.

The complex origin story of domestic cats (phys.org | comments) Recent research highlights that domestic cats likely originated alongside early farmers during the Neolithic period, supporting the theory that they spread through Europe with agricultural practices. This reinforces existing notions about their domestication and habitat adaptation linked to human society.

• I guess I'm trying to get the message of the article. It's more of an origin story of the current lineage of domestic cats in Europe, no? It sounds like ancient Europeans would have had wildcats and older waves of domesticated felines that were mostly supplanted by the current lineage.

π0.5: A VLA with open-world generalization (pi.website | comments) The model π0.5 extends previous versions by enabling generalization in robotic tasks across entirely new environments, like cleaning unfamiliar kitchens or bedrooms. This general-purpose AI aims to execute diverse tasks while adapting to variations it hasn't encountered before, marking advancement in physical intelligence.

• Is the robot platform they're using something they've developed themselves? The paper doesn't seem to mention any details outside of sensors and actuators.
• Finally, machines doing the work we dont want to do
• VLA = vision-language-action, a kind of a machine learning model

Detecting if an expression is constant in C (nrk.neocities.org | comments) This article presents a challenge in C programming: creating a macro that checks if an expression is a constant expression at compile time. It discusses various approaches using C standards, including C23's static compound literals, GNU's __builtin_constant_p, and C11's static_assert. Each method features pros and cons, focusing on type preservation and compile-time checks.

• > And I'd rather keep the library warning free instead of telling the users to switch warnings off. Thank you! Separately, but related: fuck you, Google! (every time I have to deal with protobuf in C++, I curse Google and their "we don't give a shit about signed vs unsigned comparisons").

Are polynomial features the root of all evil? (2024) (alexshtf.github.io | comments) The post refutes the belief that high-degree polynomials are detrimental for machine learning modeling. It argues that, contrary to common myths, these polynomials can be properly controlled and effectively utilized for non-linear features. The author suggests that misconceptions around approximation and estimation power contribute to the negative view on high-degree polynomials.

• It should also be noted that this kind of fitting is extremely closely related to integration or in other words calculating the mean. By using the "right" kind of polynomial basis you can get a polynomial approximation which also tells you the mean and variance of the function under a random variable.

How long does it take to create a new habit? (2015) (thelogicaloptimist.com | comments) Research suggests that the time required to form a new habit significantly exceeds the often-cited 21 days, with actual findings indicating that it may take an average of 66 days or more. This highlights the complexity of behavioral change and the need for realistic expectations in habit formation.

• It took me 3 days to fully drop sugar from coffee, at 17 I think. Never liked sweets and pastry, though, but dropping every sugar drink took me more, a couple weeks, specially Nestea. Edit: took me 1 day to drop the remaining sugar, and plants in general.