andyreagan.com

Blog roll

Daily <2024-07-02 Tue>

Book: Just Enough Software Architecture   programming

  • Found it on HN
  • Just enough abstraction of software problems that it might be helpful
  • E.g., first define the business context (like an insurance policy is a thing, it can have 1 insured (can that change?))
  • Then you can build the software components that map to these at a high level
  • And then on the finer level you can have the software do what it needs to function

GPT-2 From Scratch in MLX   llms

  • Train.py is ~200 lines of python code that define and train GPT-2 from scratch using mlx and numpy as the only dependencies. This readme will detail writing train.py from scratch. The model is trained on ~1 million characters of Shakespeare contained in input.txt, and it can be trained in around 10 minutes on a macbook to produce coherent Shakespeare-like text.
  • This would be a good basis for giving a talk on how the models work.

Start all of your commands with a comma

  • HN
  • Fun little idea to organize your personal scripts. Title about says it all

Inside the tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

  • NFC, electronics breakdown
  • Pretty neat how it works, it's a little passive chip without a processor
  • Cool blog on the whole

Bret Victor   blogroll

  • Amazing inspirational stuff: how to use computers to think
  • New project: Dynamicland

Secret Apple Fab plant caused health issues

  • HN
  • HN seems to call out that she has been suing apple for all kinds of things…EPA doesn't report a problem

Local first   personaldatainfra

Personal computing   personaldatainfra

Supermaven   llms

  • Supposed to be better than copilot

Daily <2024-07-03 Wed>

Still a mountain of stuff to read. Will have to be more aggresive on it.

Exploring Relationships in a 200-variable journal: Seeking Advice   quantifiedself

dotenvx

  • Maybe a better way to do secret handling (from HN - what's the threat model).
  • The encryption key is still in a file (.env.keys)
  • It moves a vulnerability on file access to one on process env access (which is worse?)

Claude ai model the best now   llms

  • Still can't plan

A Bunch of Programming Advice I’d Give To Myself 15 Years Ago   programming

  • If you (or your team) are shooting yourselves in the foot constantly, fix the gun
  • Assess the trade-off you’re making between quality and pace, make sure it’s appropriate for your context
  • Spending time sharpening the axe is almost always worth it
  • If you can’t easily explain why something is difficult, then it’s incidental complexity, which is probably worth addressing
  • Try to solve bugs one layer deeper
  • Don’t underestimate the value of digging into history to investigate some bugs
  • Bad code gives you feedback, perfect code doesn’t. Err on the side of writing bad code (same as quality-pace maybe)
  • Make debugging easier
  • When working on a team, you should usually ask the question
  • Shipping cadence matters a lot. Think hard about what will get you shipping quickly and often

Pipes

  • Like Yahoo pipes, GIU editor with filters and flows

AI doing marketing emails   llms

  • HN
  • Dystopian, it tries to sound like a person who read your stuff (it did…but it's not a person)

Why Is Chile So Long?

  • Chile is so long, it's curved.

Visicalc is all you need   toolsforthought

  • Spreadsheets are a powerful programming abstraction
  • I think tools like Notion and such are indeed close
  • Code allows you to do anything
  • My idea: blocks. Start with a document, blocks are each paragraph. Like observable cells, but markdown default.
    • Blocks > Documents > Userspace

After my dad died, I ran and sold his company (and I was completely clueless)

  • HN
  • Well told story of running an indian chemical manufacturing business for a year

Ruby: a great language for shell scripts!

  • HN
  • It can run shell scripts like perl with backticks
  • Syntax is more compact than Python
  • But it's not install everywhere

Building SimCity

  • HN
  • There was a presentation/slides on it that were fascinating
  • The author

The case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings

  • Focus on 10x work, downplay the rest
  • Build in the open
  • Intergrating novel ideas may be part of that (making connections), but idk if this HN habit helps

Visual Studio Code extensions are much less secure than browser extensions or even npm packages

  • Yeah, I see this…
  • The only extension I have that's not from GitHub or Microsoft is Awesome Emacs Keymap. Replace it by just adding these keys to a personal dotfiles?

Safe Superintelligence Inc.   llms

Backlinks: Long term outlook

  • HN
  • I'm not sure I buy the premise that a super-intelligence is about to come

Why Innovation Heroes are a Sign of a Dysfunctional Organization

  • Maybe, maybe not. Could be good process and still give awards…

Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design   llms

  • HN
  • Yeah, not great at it.
  • Update: Claude 3.5 is better.

Zone comparison chart   training sweatscience ATTACH

  • Chart comparing the zones from different models (3-zone, 5-zone, etc)
Screenshot 2025-04-29 at 3.53.20 PM.png

Evolution through Large Models   llms

  • LLMs guiding genetic programming…interesting.

Arc   llms

  • Also Awesome ARC
  • ARC is a prize for AI, with 2d puzzles that are hard even for humans to solve
  • Learn a pattern from three examples of before/after, and then apply it
  • Maybe the exact opposite of having a human do numerical computing (have the computers do visual processing)
  • Join the competition? The constraints are pretty tight…
  • The one that seems hard to program is filling in circled areas

Question - could Claude generate summaries this good of all these resources? Would reading those summaries allow me to remember less than reading the actual resources?

Daily <2024-07-23 Tue>

Daily <2024-08-05 Mon>

Aider   llms

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/31/aider/

https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider

Update <2025-04-29 Tue>: I never got Aider set up but I have been using Claude Code which is the same idea (but perhaps more expensive!).

Daily <2024-08-13 Tue>

WezTerm

https://alexplescan.com/posts/2024/08/10/wezterm/

WezTerm, terminal emulator. Terminals are software GUIs for devs…

I've been using this, it's…the same to me as iTerm.

Budgeting with ChatGPT   llms

Finding out more about me, for free! – Hacker Dads   quantifiedself

https://hackerdads.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/finding-out-more-about-me-for-free/

Not a lot to take away here. Dude is trying to do some QS stuff.

The Ultimate Guide to Safe Withdrawal Rates – Part 19: Equity Glidepaths in Retirement - Early Retirement Now   personalfinance

FitnessSyncer Status Page   fitnesstech

Could a $40,000 Equinox Membership Really Help You Live Longer? - The New York Times   longevity

Monte Carlo Simulation | Visualize It

Statistical "Which Character" Personality Quiz

Co-designing a wiki-based community knowledge management system for personal science | Royal Society Open Science   toolsforthought

The 12 Hour Walk - Invest One Day, Your Best Life Awaits

Love this idea.

Every company should be owned by its employees   career

  • Every company should be owned by its employees | Hacker News

Anyone can Access Deleted and Private Repository Data on GitHub ◆ Truffle Security Co.

  • Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on GitHub | Hacker News

Britain's Newest Bank

Bayesian statistics: the three cultures | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

  • Bayesian Statistics: The three cultures | Hacker News

Tailscale: The New Internet

  • The New Internet | Hacker News

Ambitious post about how Tailscale is creating a new wave of internet. Not so sure about this…

100R   blogroll

https://100r.co/site/home.html

  • 100R — library
    • Hundred Rabbits is a small collective exploring the failability of modern tech | Hacker News

Neat CSS   webdev

  • Neat CSS

Dry Bulb, Wet Bulb and Dew Point Temperatures   sweatscience

The wet bulb: the most human of temperature measurements. We are wet bulbs!

Daily <2024-11-04 Mon>

Daily <2024-11-05 Tue>

rugged android phone w keyboard

firecracker VM solution

Heard it's what fly uses, and now gitpod: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

Daily <2024-11-18 Mon>

Backlinks: 2024-11-18

Tactile controls making a comeback

I like this! Touchscreens in cars are hard to use.

Longevity Biomarkets   quantifiedself

https://longevitybiomarkers.com/

cache

iOS app to track biomarkers and give you a score. Not sure where the score comes from - not a lot of details! Incorporates some interesting markers besides bloodwork:

ALL BIOMARKERS AVAILABLE IN THE APP:

Body Mass Index • Vitamin D • Blood Pressure • Orthostatic Hypotension • Peripheral Artery Status • Resting Heart Rate • VO2 max Heart Rate Variability • Body Fat • Visceral Fat • Skeletal Muscle • Strength • Flexibility • Balance • Functional Fitness • Walking Speed • Hearing Reaction Time • A1C • Albumin • Apo B • Cystatin C • IGF-1 • Chronic Inflammation

Mirror: An LLM-powered programming-by-example programming language   llms

https://austinhenley.com/blog/mirrorlang.html

cache

Really cool idea - you just write the tests! Of course, the AI could get stuck, but if your tests are simple enough…it could work.

AI Makes Tech Debt More Expensive

https://www.gauge.sh/blog/ai-makes-tech-debt-more-expensive

Cache: cache.

I really like this post because it's so true. If you can break down your work into small, manageable pieces this makes it possible for both humans and AI. Caution: breaking it down is often the hard part!

Daily <2024-11-24 Sun>

Genetic test additional results

Backlinks: Genetic Testing

Plug in your gene data.

https://www.foundmyfitness.com/genetics

Blog from aaron schwartz: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve

Review of longevity trends to jump on   longevity

Daily <2024-11-25 Mon>

Aging coming in bursts   longevity

Backlinks: Longevity

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-024-00692-2

Have I just gone through one? I got so much slower.

Single measures of aging, balance is a good one   longevity

Leaving a stable job for a startup   career

Daily <2024-11-26 Tue>

Beyond pro/con lists for decision making

With Annie Duke.

Rather than a pros and cons list, Duke suggested people make that forecast by imagining, say, how you think you’ll feel a year from now. “Where are you happier?”. Avoid Loss Aversion.

Daily <2024-11-27 Wed>

https://webring.xxiivv.com/#benji   blogroll

Cool ring of blogs?

https://bitfieldconsulting.com/posts/career   career

Career planning. hn Make a plan so you at least know what you're aiming for, even if it's only 5 years.

https://bitfieldconsulting.com/posts/time-lords

Good writing on time management. Hat tip to Cal Newbort and David Allen.

Podcast on Probiotics some good practical advice.

Daily <2024-12-02 Mon>

The UX of LEGO Interface Panels   design

HN

Deep dive, wonderful. Differentiated controls are very helpful. See Audi vent controls as a master class. Everything is a design problem.

Paul Graham on writing as thinking (again)   toolsforthought

Backlinks: Writing as thinking

and AI will chip away at the need for this skill.

Continue and persist letters

A positive spin / satire on cease and desist letters. Kind of a fun idea, but the letter would totally scare someone.

Don't fuck with scroll   webdev

HN

A play on best fucking website, pro minimal sites.

Sortimo

boxes as used by Adam Savage for incredible organization:

https://www.mysortimo.us/en_US/Storage-Bins-%26-Boxes/T-BOXX/T-BOXX-320/T-BOXX-320-incl-IB-Set-16-pieces-H63-S/p/000000006000015479

He built shelves that allows these to pull out.

Markwhen

Timeline building DSL. Inspired by markdown.

Daily <2024-12-08 Sun>

"just" command runner

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42351101 drop in replacement for make. like it! github: https://github.com/casey/just has a shell export option so you're not totally locked in.

[[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42350245][Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal

data]]

:ID: E9813678-019E-469A-A025-CCE50C54AAFC

Cautionary tale. Took some steps noted in Hardening google dependency.

Approach to technical documentation: https://diataxis.fr/

Daily <2024-12-11 Wed>

https://boz.com/articles/biggest-fear   blogroll

cache

His blog has all sorts of great little essays. This one certainly wasn't my favorite.

Reality has a suprising amount of detail

I had this downloaded from Nov 5… Great post! A classic.

Digital consumption keeps me from getting better at my job

HN

Can't consume all the time dude - got to produce. I resonate a small amount with the time I take reading the top HN links, like this one. I do pick up valuable ideas… but it's a lot of info to process. E.g., I have some quantam computer stuff open, Google Willow, but I don't have time to understand quantam computers right now.

Double.finance   personalfinance

YC startup offering low cost customer ETF indexes. Finances are so complicated!

From where I left

HN

Founder of redis is returning to redis after they yanked the open source license from the community. I like his post. That's not his accounting of what happened on the license, sounds like the HN community is pretty cynical?

Grifters, believers, grinders, and coasters   career

HN I like this breakdown.

https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2023/ethics-self-attestation/

Self attesting a code of ethics. I like it.

Egoless engineering

https://egoless.engineering/ cache

HN I like this approach a lot.

Author of boring technology club.

Daily <2024-12-12 Thu>

Peertube: interesting idea to decentralize video sharing.

Daily <2024-12-13 Fri>

Gambit game simulator used in the paper above   stories

Wagtail is a Django-based CMS, caught it as used by PyCon   python

Could rebuilt the turkey trot site on this so others can edit…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42405046   coffee

One dude made a new espresso machine design. Pretty simple TBH!

Bioniq - personalized daily supplement stack   longevity

Garmin users are on average 2.5 years younger than chrono age   longevity

https://quantus.finance/   personalfinance

Financial skills training

https://www.mozi.app/

See when friends are in town Maybe not a problem we need an app for? Or is it an ideal use of social media? What if you don't want to see someone in particular…

Daily <2024-12-16 Mon>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6plKMU0tTTk&pp=ygUGQXBldG9y

from Lumpy on Strava. Amazing stuff here, apparently he died though…

Turns out the URLs come through in the email, their link removal is post-post.

They see your photos

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42419469 Pretty interesting the amount of details that AI can get here. At some level, just unsuprising compared to what a private detective could get from your photos (a bit worse). On another level, wow they know a lot just from photos.

Rust-based file search application

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42417330 Tangentially related to personal knowledge management.

https://www.openerv.ca/

Didn't realize these things existed… I think our house is leaky enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42425398

Dumb TVs…I like the idea. But paying $190 for an Apple TV just so that Vizio isn't spying on me seems like a high price!

Daily <2024-12-19 Thu>

AI will be dead in five years   llms

It will just blend in, I agree.

Java for scripts   programming

HN

People suggest clojure too!

1-800-ChatGPT   llms

Cool

Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?

HN Interesting post, basically all about information discrepancy. How can I know a van is good, I only get to try a few cars in my life!

How to work with conflict creators   projectmanagement

Helpful strategies!

Sorry, Gas Companies - Parody Isn't Infringement (Even If It Creeps You Out)

HN Pretty hilarious parody website of oil and gas selling "lives"

Wait until 8th

to get a smartphone. hn Good idea. Works if everyone does it.

QS data standard discussion   quantifiedself

without much outcome.

Someday

a calendly alternative.

Daily <2024-12-21 Sat>

Kelly betting strategy

Single page kanban   projectmanagement

Artemis, a calm web reader: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471913   rss

Cool!

Lots of similar projects, like https://alexsci.com/feeds/. Love that webring: https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/

Daily <2024-12-22 Sun>

Arc prize   llms

https://arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-pub-breakthrough O3 model does well on ARC-AGI, maybe it's getting better. Generalization is part of the problem. The hard task seems to be developing just the right abstraction, which could very well be embodiment. Just like alpha zero can do chess, go, etc, and now o3 can do this, there are tasks like GSM-Symbolic that are still too hard (yet very easy for humans), also ARC-AGI-2. Just have to get the right abstraction / DSL! HN The cost axis seems like a strawman, it's interesting if we can solve these with any amount of compute that's less than brute force.

Double dishwasher

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42475390

Love this idea. Sam's a hard pass, bummer.

Rosetta dev going to Lean   programming

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42483895

Lean could be providing the right DSL for math, which is pretty fascinating (recall the math challenge success of some LLMs).

Daily <2024-12-24 Tue>

GPT-5 is behind schedule   llms

A few points: AGI conservation feels old - yes. You have to use it cautiously if you think it's "talking to an expert". It's useful already - yes! "for the most part that AI revolution is not going to be because of PHD-level LLMs" more data won't work forever "inference time scaling": https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/is-ai-progress-slowing-down

Long term software development   programming

Keep is simple. Even simpler. Good stuff! HN

World's largest tube TV

Fun story, watched the youtube (skipped around a bit).

My colleague Julius   llms

HN Can get by without actually understanding. LLM is like this.

C++ Is An Absolute Blast   programming

HN

Commercial tea bags release microplastics, entering human cells

Tea bags have microplastics? From a very questionable journal. Cellulose is not microplastic, is it?!

In praise of the hundred page idea

Yes I like this idea. Should not need 600 pages for an idea.

Daily <2024-12-25 Wed>

Fogus 2024 roundup   blogroll

Interesting stuff. I should try clojure! Can it go real world stuff.

QS looking to organize blood tests   quantifiedself

Insidetracker is expensive.

  • Biotracker

    https://www.biotracker.me/

    Transform your blood tests into a health dashboard Free Beta Track your biomarkers through beautiful, interactive visualizations. Monitor changes, spot trends, and get AI-powered insights — all in one place.

  • Biomarkly

    Simple and free, just keeps track of biomarkers.

    Medical test results tracker Keep all your test results in one place, beautifully organized

    https://biomarkly.com/

  • Ornament Health

    Personal Health Coach 2+ million users. 8m labs analyzed.

    4.99/7 days. 14.99/mo. 90 for a year.

    Over 2M app installs Over 100K active users monthly Over 4M lab reports analysed

    https://ornament.health/

  • Guava Health

Daily <2024-12-27 Fri>

Cognitive load is what matters   programming

(cache) I mean, yes!

Daily <2024-12-29 Sun>

PlasticList report

Super interesting results. Definitely concerning as an endocrine disruptor. BPA in Salmon the only result that seems actionable. HN My avoidance of hot things and plastic is warranted. More glass, more cast iron.

Does current AI represent a dead end?   llms

Backlinks: Long term outlook

While these folks waste breath debating whether AI is useful, I’m going to be over here…using it.

Interesting discussion, but I didn't get any new takes.

Cable-cutting tanker seized by Finland 'was loaded with spying equipment'

Interesting stuff happening out there. Sounds like maybe Russia is just doing chaos.

https://www.lucaiaconistewart.com/model-777

1:60 scale model of an airplane made only with manila folder and glue. Pretty incredible how far he's taken this concept.

Google search has fallen apart

I agree! Maybe the GPT models will too, and this is just a honeymoon period like we had w Google.

2024 emacs conference   emacs

HN Some interesting sounding talks. I'm writing this in Emacs right now!

Automating job applications

Maybe the market out there really is so tough!

Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

HN Apple photos sending hashes of photos off the device? Seems like a violation of privacy, but they're also doing it in the most secure way possible.

QS Super app (reddit discussion   quantifiedself

  • gyroscope use to be awesome. They led the game. But they started charging more for less, almost no new integrations, and hidden pricing. I commented as such in the subreddit and was banned and DMd by the CEO. Do not recommend. It’s expensive for almost no benefits.
  • exist is ok, but I wouldn’t invest too much in it. They had a chance to lead the market, but they never scaled beyond two developers and their app has grown at a slower rate. they're still going!
  • Welltory: has become my go-to, but they’re starting to slip. The lack of a decent desktop dashboard is deflating and whenever I open the mobile app it just doesn’t seem to work
  • IFTTT (custom): set up some custom apps that pull your data into gsheets, then import it into a database that you can upload to a custom AI if you feel comfortable doing so.
  • Reflect: devs joined in
  • Guava mentioned by one other as well

Server-Sent Events (SSE) Are Underrated   webdev

Hadn't heard of these, good to know they exist!

Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server   selfhost

Cool self-hosted service. Other good home lab recommendations in the thread. I had a bad experience with Plex, felt like ad-ware (and I'm running this myself!). Jellyfin would have been better, perhaps.

Fstar programming language   programming

The examples here seem insane, this is a research language. Maybe I should learn Lean!

POSIX seconds aren't exact

There are leap seconds. 29 so far.

WebAuthn   webdev

HN Very quick parse - a description of passkeys. Which seem like an improvement, maybe, for people who don't use password managers.

Top medium posts of the year   python

Ultimate Python Cheat Sheet: Practical Python For Everyday Tasks I could have written this? But they did.

Daily <2024-12-30 Mon>

Ten things in tech I found joy in during 2024   blogroll

Excellent list!

https://dll110.github.io/   blogroll

Random blog, inspiring directness, found it from: https://guzey.com/people/

My default apps of 2024   toolsforthought

Recently I found "Things" for my tools for thought page. I should try an RSS reader like Reeder Classic. Otherwise some good overlap. I could keep track of my own list… https://flexibits.com/fantastical seems interesting.

Software Design is Knowledge Building   programming

Yes good points! The design is not always fully decribed by the code itself.

Smoking Slashes Life Expectancy: Each Cigarette Costs Up to 22 Minutes of Life, Study Reveals   longevity

cache Interested in how the derived the 22-minute number. New study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1971 Old study with 11 minutes: https://www.bmj.com/content/320/7226/53.1 So the new study link is just a link to a journal, I couldn't find the article there. None of the four links from the brief actually link to the article. The brief summary leads with "Professor Sanjay Agrawal" but by Googling one of the lines, I found a link to the article via google: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16757 Actual pdf: ./static/smoking-20-minutes.pdf

Daily <2025-01-01 Wed>

Tech pace layers   blogroll

Framework to help think about how tech is layers. Very cool blog + projects, indie web stuff.

Glue work considered harmful   programming projectmanagement

The work of reducing tech debt, making things work. Not just writing the code that works in isolation. I do a lot of this.

Things we learned about LLMs in 2024   llms

HN Pretty solid summary. From HN:

I built and shipped a Swift app to the App Store, currently generating $10,200 in MRR, exclusively using LLMs.

Wow!

Daily <2025-01-02 Thu>

Money Can Buy a Longer Life—to a Point   longevity

A lot of research on this actually, nothing suprising:

People with more money can afford healthier food, more healthcare and homes in safer, less-polluted neighborhoods, says Kathryn Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and a medical director at the Boston Public Health Commission. “We know the things that help us age better, and everyone’s always disappointed when you tell them,” says Andrew Scott, director of economics at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, England. “Eat less and eat better, sleep more, exercise more and spend time with friends.”

The web is too big, or scaling down

how does a technology scale down?

Really good question - when and how to use simpler technology? The web is complicated with JS and WASM and everything, to the point that building a browser is like building an operating system. This is a lot like how I'm trying to use Emacs and plain text as the foundation of my web site.

How to write complex software   programming

Really good guide! Start from the top, rather than the easy "independent" pieces. Envelope-math size critical parts first with simple test scripts.

You start coding at the top of the stack, letting each layer define the API of the layer below it.

Daily <2025-01-03 Fri>

Advent of Code 2024 in pure SQL (hn)

Link Pretty cool thing to do, I'm sure you'd get better at solving problems in SQL!

Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

Some interesting advice - mid size firms and consulting can be fun.

I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life

HN Dude needs some friends or a family. Sounds lonely. Other maybe helpful advice from the hive mind.

Daily <2025-01-05 Sun>

Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you here   blogroll

Author writes a very basic blog. I like it! Lots on HN also appreciate these things. Let's internet like it's 2005!

Nearly half Dell's US workforce has rejected RTO. Rather WFH than get promoted   career

Same WFH kind of stuff we've heard. I avoided the management ladder and love it.

The Militia and the Mole

A lot of very interesting parts to this story! HN

Daily <2025-01-06 Mon>

You wouldn't download an AI   llms

Extracts contents from the android app - the actual model. Pretty fun. HN Uses a tool called frida: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLpW1tZCblo

A story on home server security

Open postgres got taken over. It was in docker, so not a huge deal to contain. HN Love for tailscale on HN, it works great for me.

A messy experiment that changed how we think about AI code analysis   llms

HN The author has the right idea - to be "senior dev" good at coding, it's about developing the mental models of how the code fits together. Abstracting just the right amount.

ARC-AGI requires at least some novel thinking   llms

But it's not a complete test.

Researchers design wearable tech that can sense glucose levels more accurately   wearabletech

HN It's totally not ready yet. But this does seem to be a huge golden goose for wearable technology.

The Plagiarism Plot Is Having a Moment. Copy That.   stories

Not every day your work gets mentioned in the NYT!

But seven, too, was not destined to last. In 2016, data scientists at the University of Vermont, exploiting advances in natural language processing, plugged 1,737 stories scraped from the Project Gutenberg website into a software program in order to chart their “emotional arcs.” Their custom “hedonometer” examined each story in blocks of 10,000 words, assigning a “meaningful sentiment score” to every chunk, and allowing the researchers to express the results as a series of nifty graphs. The one for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” shows a mountain range of peaks and valleys, ending, after Voldemort is finally killed, on a steep upward incline toward a summit at happily ever after. The study made news: The world’s stories boiled down to “six basic shapes.”

Here's a copy of the article.

Alcohol and Health

Backlinks: Alcohol

cache Nuanced take on research around alcohol. Definitely bad for you, but also not clear that light drinking is very harmful.

Alcohol Use Disorder and the Gut–Brain Axis: A Narrative Review of the Role of Gut Microbiota and Implications for Treatment

Backlinks: Alcohol

This is a review. Basically one study that shows probiotics help with cravings. Another with fecal transplantion helped with cravings. Still very early, looks like prebiotics and other non-direct interventions did not affect cravings in AUD.

Daily <2025-01-07 Tue>

All clocks are 30 seconds late

Interesting thought, but it would definitely be worse. See HN.

It seems to me many people are so amazed by the fact they for once had an original thought that at this moment they stop caring whether it is actually a good one. It is crucial to maintain mental flexibility and one does that by thinking things through, killing your darlings, admitting when ideas are wrong or simply just mediocre. Only because it was me who had an idea doesn't mean I have to defend it at all cost. The idea isn't me.

The future of htmx   webdev

Very pie-in-the-sky vision for the software. I love these kinds of big ideas and grand visions. Whether it holds up? Maybe for very simple pages? HN good discussions. It doesn't play nicely with other frameworks or custom js you have to write, an aspect of software that I think about a lot (soft edges, jumping levels of abstraction).

How I program with LLMs   llms

Top level programmer.

I foresee a world with far more specialized code, with fewer generalized packages, and more readable tests. Reusable code will continue to thrive around small robust interfaces and otherwise will be pulled apart into specialized code. Depending how well this is done, it will lead to either better software or worse software. I would expect both, with a long-term trend towards better software by the metrics that matter.

HN

Stim clicker

Very fun little game.

Nvidia personal AI computer   llms

$3,000 to run unlimited full size models. Cool! There is already a mini version for 250 that can run 8B models.

Daily <2025-01-09 Thu>

Fidget by Matt Keeter

HN Cool tool to render 3d surfaces.

Luigi Mangione's account has been renamed on Stack Overflow

HN Two things going on - the author brings a valid point (renaming the account is in violation of the CC license for content) along with complaining after violating the rules. SO needs to just delete the account, they're not required to host it forever.

How We Cracked a 512-Bit DKIM Key for Less Than $8 in the Cloud

Interesting example of how to actually break an RSA key. Possible because it's too short.

Dude wrote software to swap classes, threatened with action

First, maybe it's not real. HN points out he's only been there 1.5yr, and he says about to graduate. But if it's real, dang the university should not be threatening him like that!

Whoop needs to re-innovate to keep up   wearabletech

Nothing new at CES…innovate or die!

Cora app   quantifiedself

App to do correlations on tracked behavior. Seems like it will be cool. So many of these apps… Testflight available: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cora-data-driven-lifestyles/id6737651703

Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases   programming

You must resist the urge to make your little corner of the codebase nicer than the rest of it.

Interesting take, good principles. This guy wrote the glue work post I just saw too. HN My take is that fighting to make things better is really the job.

Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease attributable to sugar beverages (duh)

HN link.

Due to their liquid form, SSBs are rapidly consumed and digested

Lustig, maybe a quack (who knows…): https://robertlustig.com/sugar-the-bitter-truth/

Daily <2025-01-10 Fri>

Accurate predictions on small data with a tabular foundation model   llms

Pretty interesting - pre-training for a tabular model!

reThrive app on QS reddit

Could be interesting, based on Polar360 wearable.

RevenueCat

Software/SDK for subscription management. Used by Ladder / OpenAI.

Daily <2025-01-14 Tue>

The 2025 AI Engineer Reading List   llms

Sounds like good stuff. HN

WordPress is in trouble

After all the drama HN What a disaster

Sonos drama (hn link)

All from them just bricking devices. Some alternatives to "connect" older systems: Wiim Pro & Mini Airplay server: https://github.com/juhovh/shairplay Maybe sonos will turn it around?

David A. Wheeler's Review of Debugging by David J. Agans

Good principles. Mine: believe the error messages. hn git bisect

Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting Cursor.com

HN Looks like this was not approved, Snyk is sloppy or their founder has a competitor to Cursor? Hmmmm. Hard problem checking code in dependencies…

Daily <2025-01-16 Thu>

Cease fire israel-hamas

Stopping the fighting seems good. Lots of talk of genocide. Caught this link of horrific content on the original hamas attack: https://www.hamas-massacre.net/categories/rockets-striking-civilian-areas

Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its schools

Digital versus hard copy - hard copies do help with memory. Something different about holding the book. Digital has some advantages though too. Saw DEVONthink - another tool for thought perhaps.

Hindenburg research closing down

They're just done. I didn't know what they are - they do investigate investing (find frand, short companies, report them). Shares this to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h96MGcsi7GQ They're short on carvana, made a mountain on Elon's twitter takeover (both from a short and long at the right times). Roblox sounds like a disaster. hn

Bryan Johnson off of rapamycin

No shit, he doesn't need a fast mimicing agent when he doesn't need to fast! Genuinely not suprised. He does seem like he's trying to help, hard to be so genuine on those long Youtube interviews (the one with Magnus was pretty good). But you really never know, could just be selling snake oil (in the form of fancy olive oil).

Daily <2025-01-17 Fri>

Bicep band full time   wearabletech

Yes! Almost 5 years and going.

FitIQ   wearabletech

I signed up, it's pretty cool to see the full 5 year trends. Seeing my best streaks is cool too. I like it, but the annual price is a lot. https://www.reddit.com/r/whoop/comments/1i0fhv1/my_belated_fitiq_and_whoop_year_in_review/

Making an Intersection Unsafe for Pedestrians to Save Seconds for Drivers

I agree w the author, every time this happens it gets just a little bit worse to walk. HN Jaywalking can be safer, it's legal in NYC. Lots of other mixed feelings.

Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

But with foreign labor and shipping overseas to package? Maybe some progress here.

in the belly of the MrBeast

pretty interesting take - he is the algorithm, manifested. some interesting stuff.

Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers   llms

Fun adversarial idea. Not sure I want to battle the bots with my own electricity and compute…

> Markov chain isn't adversarial enough

Small GPTs fighting the bigger ones?

No sales calls

It can work! We could use this tool to give out access codes for the wellness program. Everyone gets an access code, GRAIL can check them. But would we get the log of which ones are being checked? Yes. Grail would have to call some random ones?

Backdooring backdoors

Pretty fun read.

UV package manager   python

I should really check this out (again).

I deleted my social media accounts

Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on.

eah I regret dropping IG. I still read a lot of HN.

META rolling back DEI

Seems politically timed?

Visualizing All ISBNs — $10k by 2025-01-31

I should try with a basic tiling library…

Daily <2025-01-18 Sat>

So You Want to Build Your Own Data Center

Impressive project! Company Railway is building an AWS competitor.

Another pro-RSS blog post on front page   rss

  • GovTrack.us
  • NPR
  • state senator
  • Substack
  • hn
  • Lots of good suggestions there.
  • Turns out org-mode has a feed reader.

Daily <2025-01-19 Sun>

Continuing on RSS, I had found this blog that's made in org mode   rss

https://writepermission.com/org-blogging-unfurling-links.html They seem to have customized it very well, and leaned into writing the code!

Why do bees die when they sting you?

cache Really deep take on why bees die. Take every queestion like this! hn, didn't read

vs code pets

love it. hn is harsher > adopt a real dog

kalman filter tutorial

hn kalman filters are so cool! didn't read yet though.

Daily <2025-01-20 Mon>

Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect (hn link)

Apparently this 3d printer phones home to china constantly. It's possible to use via an SD card and never connect to the internet but you don't get firmware updates. Feels so much like 2d printers, I applied the firmware update from our epson printer and now it doesn't take third party ink cartridges. Recommended: Prusa MK4S. Would need to model stuff using Solid Edge or Fusion 360.

Git autocorrect default is fast

Sort of interesting. Defaults matter.

The PC is Dead: It’s Time to Make Computing Personal Again   personaldatainfra

The original post on enshittification, in some sense. A twitter thread before Cory Doctorow wrote his piece. Basic take is that software has moved to a model where ownership is not like physical goods via DRM and subscriptions and closed source. hn Offline maps: https://osmand.net/ > Convenience kills How much work would it to be to not be locked in to these various ecosystems? I try pretty hard! Looking for more prescriptions. how can I have both the convience of the apple ecosystem and none of the BS he mentions? Some other things

Ed Zitron   blogroll

Some pretty interesting takes here. Anti-tech, for sure.

Daily <2025-01-22 Wed>

Nabeel S. Qureshi's Principles   blogroll

Awesome list. Cache. Love so many of these.

Daily <2025-01-24 Fri>

Llama.vim   llms

locally hosted code assistant. I should really try getting a local model running and hooked up to Emacs.

White hat hacking subaru location data

Interesting!

Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

First posted on show HN in 2009!

Cora QS App   quantifiedself

Daily <2025-01-28 Tue>

My failed attempt to shrink all npm packages by 5%

cache Good idea! Make them smaller. Implementation is a bit harder, the very slow compression seems like the real blocker. Seems like it can be an option, like how the author is using it. hn cache similar idea to switch to brotli, back in 2023.

Pebble source code released by Google   wearabletech

Pebble failed, sold to fitbit, bought by Google, they just released. The future of rebble, hn Rebble is an open port of the web stuff for Pebble post failure. The original founder of Pebble is going to try making them again (see hn). Watchy interesting open source project in the space, costs $60.

Daily <2025-01-29 Wed>

Using uv as your shebang line   programming python

I need to try UV!

Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code   llms

From Simon Willison. Used the web interface here. Discussion on hn. Run deepseek r1 on your own hardware for $6k. Positive reviews of Aider, a bridge between APIs and help coding.

Boom supersonic flight on HN

Pretty cool! Next they have to build a full size plane.

Habit formation and organization system? (reddit QS)   quantifiedself

Obsidian, Anki, Things.

How do you keep track of all your health data? (reddit QS)   quantifiedself

Pull it all down yourself using Python. Reflect. Guava. Excel.

D.E.I. Will Not Be Missed

cache With all the flood the zone news on trump, and expected outrage, was curious to read a pro argument. Maybe some interesting points about lowering standards…a fundamental call for meritocracy. There could definitely be a safety element in military too (I wouldn't want to go into a burning building with someone totally unprepared physically). Tough questions. Military fitness standards are interesting, here is the RAND study. They actually got rid of the leg tuck option, here are the standards. I should got for a test, have most of the stuff. Need a 10lb med ball to throw.

Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

I was hoping to see someone suggest to just run a forum. I'd love to do this for Shutesbury. Front porch forum: could I run this in Shutesbury?

One thing I really like about FPF is that it's daily.

Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown

Great podcast! Life is uncertain. Trying to control everything is recipe for stress. The interviewee has a podcast: https://www.powercorruptspodcast.com/episodes

Daily <2025-01-30 Thu>

Plane crash in DC

Plane crash. Horrific. Can see the tracks online, very interesting.

Lots of stuff about Deepseek   llms

Why DeepSeek had to be open-source (and why it won't defeat OpenAI) HN Meh, it's not really open source if you can't build it!! Arc Analysis of DeepSeek's R1-Zero and R1 HN They don't beat it like o3 did, they're more like the o1. OpenAI mad they trained on output Meh, OpenAI trained on our outputs!

No, I do not want AI to “polish” me.   llms

Love the article.

Jesus. Y’all, if you get an email from me it will be signed with HUGS, LOVE, FIGHT THE PATRIARCHY, DOWN WITH POWDERED GRAVY or SORRY I SUCK SO MUCH. It will be filled with typos and rambling parentheticals and apologies for answering several months too late. This is how you know it’s me and not a robot.

Also

It’s like my whole computer is a toddler screaming “LET ME DO IT!” every time I try to create something.

Yes!

People are bad at reporting what they eat. That’s a problem for dietary research

Up to 30% off!! That's a LOT of noise.

@article{stubbs2025predictive,
  title={Predictive equation helps estimate misreporting of energy intakes in dietary surveys},
  author={Stubbs, R James and Hopkins, Mark},
  journal={Nature Food},
  pages={1--2},
  year={2025},
  publisher={Nature Publishing Group UK London}
}

PDF

Daily <2025-02-04 Tue>

Small bis making flipbooks from mp4

Cool! 10 days until valentines day… One of the commenters does the exact opposite, lol.

Rewriting Your Personal Narrative for Growth   career

Growth mindset. Steve Magness is great! And people are complex: not all good or evil. Can vary on the situation and change. Accept who you are in all situations: radical acceptance (though he doesn't call it that).

Dodds speech for the celebration of the teletherm

We need to revive it! Have a thread w The Weather Company behind wunderground. Should contact others…

Daily <2025-02-05 Wed>

Eleven labs hackathon

Feb 22-23, AI Agents. Of course I'd want to build a health one. Prizes are pretty wimpy - I'd want funding from a16z to start the company!

Apple launches Invites

Interesting that Apple's "default" software can take over more space. Kind of like Google, except they don't tend to abandon things so much.

Moral obligations extend to family first, then …

Explains some differences. Need local security (maslow) to extend more broadly.

What's Happening Inside the NIH and NSF

From Derek Lowe, what a wild time. Basically I don't think they are legally allowed to control funding, but the chaos is real. HN Some interesting takes, and different opinions/experiences on what DEI actually is doing. Some saying that it really is seeking equality of opportunity, but plently of examples for equality of outcomes. Open letter from Tom McAndrew on this Forecasting of flu is going to be worse!

Kagi auto-pauses your subscription

Some takes about how this is self-serving, but I would certainly love if all my TV subscriptions, spotify, whoop, etc all only charged me if I used it that month!

Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools   llms

Code forces humans to be precise. That’s good—computers need precision. But it also forces humans to think like machines. … Try writing a tax code in chat messages. You can’t.

Yes, he's obviously right. But I'd also say that it's about writing good prompts. You just have to give it all of the information, concisely. HN

80% of my job is already trying to figure out what's actually needed Building the wrong thing fast is about as useful as not building anything at all.

Yes!

o3 for writing documentation - awesome   llms

Can follow his guide here.

Reddit qs: so many self built apps   quantifiedself

Yeah, the intersection of people is so strong! Some mentions of exist, reflect.

Pope on AI   llms

cache Didn't read the whole thing, maybe it's good, hard for to take fully rationally with some of their other known stances. It is the smallest page I've downloaded today!

Lobste.rs on software that software people dream about but haven't build

Some cool references. Better scripting language than Python… They point to Roc. I've used Julia before. I'm haskell-curious, though no one mentions that. My top language to learn is Lean, out of curiousity. What's the faster subset version of Python? JAX? That could be good too. All solving problems that I don't really have rn. A full little computer simulator is a cool idea. Could build a better UI for this, like lichess tutorial. Some love for org mode, link to a demo of how to use the bullets.

Daily <2025-02-07 Fri>

Cloudflare blocking non-standard browsers

Gatekeepers of the internet…yes it's annoying when using a VPN for me.

TIL they decrypt the traffic to my domain for the proxy, not technically suprising and it's static site.

Avoiding Outrage Fatigue while Staying Informed

Seems important! Hard to know what is just noise.

Some places to donate to actually do something: ACLU, HRC, Democracy Forward. Oh, internet archive!

  • [X] ACLU
  • [X] HRC (via Benevity)
  • [X] Democracy Forward
  • [X] EFF
  • [X] Internet Archive

Where to get news? Weekly seems like a decent cadence. Economist? NYT, WaPo seem pretty biased, IMO. Could get the weekly print Economist for $30/month.

Announcing the Data.gov Archive

Harvard initiative to copy data from all government websites. Sounds complete! Good to have multiple people doing this.

Understanding Reasoning LLMs   llms

An overview of DeepSeek's technical report. Goes over reinforcement learning and how they got from a base model to the more complex models.

Idk…

Built an E-Ink Dashboard for Whoop   wearabletech

Very cool! Basically a dashboard, and it happens to show Whoop data.

I also learned in the comments here that Will Ahmed is a big Trump supporter. Hmmm.

Personal Software: Single use apps   llms

Lee Robinson: https://leerob.com/n/personal-software.

You can build your own little apps with AI now!

I Built an App That Turns Messy Lab Reports Into a Beautiful Health Dashboard (Free Tool!)   quantifiedself

https://www.biotracker.me

Makes a nice-looking dashboard of lab values. Uses LLM processing on a PDF in the background.

People are wary to upload their data to this.

Shortlife v3

Literally a death clock

> A clock to remind you that life is short. ‘ShortLife’ is a small device showing how much percent of your life is completed based on your life expectancy.

Daily <2025-02-11 Tue>

AI Health Doctor   longevity

On reddit: How I Built an Open Source AI Tool to Find My Autoimmune Disease (After $100k and 30+ Hospital Visits) - Now Available for Anyone to Use Open source on github: https://github.com/OpenHealthForAll/open-health HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42999632

Very cool. Autoimmune seems so hard to diagnose. Other projects like Fasten Health's on prem medical data aggregator are pretty amazing: https://github.com/fastenhealth/fasten-onprem

I could self-host something like that. Though for data format, I'm more inspired by somehow keeping it all in plain text like org mode.

Daily <2025-02-12 Wed>

Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget   llms

https://ewintr.nl/posts/2025/building-a-personal-private-ai-computer-on-a-budget/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter

  • 2 x Nvidia Tesla P40
  • HP Z440 Workstation

Pretty cool, way cheaper than buying a macbook with a ton of memory.

WASM will replace containers

https://creston.blog/wasm-will-replace-containers/

Importantly, Cloudflare Workers all run in V8 sandboxes. There are no containers. You have the option of writing your worker in JavaScript/TypeScript, or compiled WASM. A container cannot call another container in the same process. But V8 can. In other words: by deploying WASM in V8 sandboxes, you get all of the developer benefits of microservices with all of the runtime benefits of monoliths. Cloudflare is not the only provider doing this. Wasmer is trying to build a solution in this space as well.

Golden path for software engineering / devops within a company: https://charity.wtf/2018/12/02/software-sprawl-the-golden-path-and-scaling-teams-with-agency/

Good concept! Maybe we can champion a true path at MassMutual. Our LW backend is pretty much on it's own in terms of architecture. Other core stuff all runs on mainframes!

DeepScaleR: Surpassing O1-Preview with a 1.5B Model by Scaling RL   llms

https://pretty-radio-b75.notion.site/DeepScaleR-Surpassing-O1-Preview-with-a-1-5B-Model-by-Scaling-RL-19681902c1468005bed8ca303013a4e2

RL magic is in the air! We introduce `DeepScaleR-1.5B-Preview`, a language model finetuned from `Deepseek-R1-Distilled-Qwen-1.5B` using simple reinforcement learning (RL). It achieves an impressive 43.1% Pass@1 accuracy on AIME2024 (+**14.3% improvement** over the base model), surpassing the performance of OpenAI’s `o1-preview` with just 1.5B parameters. We open sourced our dataset, code and training logs for everyone to progress on scaling intelligence with RL.

Super fit on this particular math task. I am curious what the actual model update step looks like inside of this RL. Seems small enough to really be approachable.

Boring tech is mature, not old   programming

https://rubenerd.com/boring-tech-is-mature-not-old/

Big fan of boring tech, I think there is a whole website and talk about it. Yes: https://boringtechnology.club/

Article says that boring is not just old, or common, but well understood. I think this is just what "boring" actually means! It's a compliment.

Emacs is mentioned on HN.

The year I didn't survive

https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/the-year-i-didnt-survive

Pretty moving story. Her husband Jake died and then she gave birth, not the same person anymore.

Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

Daily <2025-02-13 Thu>

Marshmallow Test and Parenting

https://desunit.com/blog/marshmallow-test-and-parenting/

Some good notes - just set the example.

Follow through on promises (threats too).

Build a predictable environment.

The prophet of parking

https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/the-prophet-of-parking

Great article. Parking and streets themsevles are a tragedy of the commons. Maybe it can get better, but I don't think we'll ever really get back to streets as a place for playing!

Game Bub: open-source FPGA retro emulation handheld

Incredibly detailed notes on building a retro gameboy basically from scratch. Circuit diagrams and everything.

https://eli.lipsitz.net/posts/introducing-gamebub/

🏆 100 Most Watched Software Engineering Talks Of 2024   programming

Lab31: 31 AI projects in 31 days   llms

Home assistant for tracking health   homeassistant quantifiedself

Fullsoak web framework   webdev

New web framework all in JS that makes some interesting choices around where to "hydrate" react pieces. The JS ecosystem still feels pretty crazy.

https://github.com/fullsoak/fullsoak

Daily <2025-02-15 Sat>

Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

Really interesting things going on here with rust and linux. Maintainers of core linux packages get to decide which code to allow in and they're generally not allowing Rust. This guy and his team used rust to write a version of linux that runs on arm macs, which is cool, but they can't get their code into linux itself. Also he's taking feature requests quite personally.

Codeweaver: codebase to markdown file for LLM context   llms

https://tesserato.web.app/posts/2025-02-12-CodeWeaver-launch/index.html

I think this is definitely the right idea if you want to have the tools make any useful suggestions.

I think Aider would have to solve this problem…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43048027

The hardest working font in Manhattan

https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/

Cool deep dive into typography. The manual cutting machine is awesome.

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43053419

AI is Stifling Tech Adoption   llms

https://vale.rocks/posts/ai-is-stifling-tech-adoption

I agree! But in the same way the existing rich-get-richer mechanisms work.

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047792

We Were Wrong About GPUs

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43053844

Fly.io isn't offer more GPUs. I didn't realize you could rent an A100 for $2.50/hour there. The setup with Fly is so simple… Before I run my own LLM hardware that seems so much simpler to just deploy my own on-demand service to fly. A $5k macbook or $2k linux box are a lot of hours with a $8k GPU!

https://medialib.net/   selfhost

Self hosted media tracking app. Cool!

  • TODO Install jellyfin on the NAS, connect to vizio TV

    I should run jellyfin at home (Plex was shit). Put this into a task.

    First I'm going to try synology's media server.

    <2025-02-21 Fri 15:45>

    Got the media server installed but can't see it on vizio. I think I'd need to use a Roku or Apple TV to see them there. Or use jellyfin or some other service to stream them… It needs to be EASY for Sam to use it. Might have to go back to Plex, which I don't think will work without the public internet. Sigh.

How I built an AI company to save my open source project   llms quantifiedself

Great story about turning the passion project into a legit small company. Good work dude!

https://www.reddit.com/r/QuantifiedSelf/comments/1ipt10f/journaling_semantic_analysis_a_new_angle_on_my/

https://cipher.sysapp.dev/

Just tried to signup for the beta and it didn't work?

Daily <2025-02-17 Mon>

Caddy – The Ultimate Server with Automatic HTTPS   webdev

https://caddyserver.com/

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070025

Like nginx, but the auto-https would be nice. Can even use it to better handle local traffic with HTTPS turned on.

People also mention traefik. Integrates nicely with tailscale: https://tailscale.com/blog/caddy

All Kindles can now be jailbroken

I think we have one around the house somewhere…how does stuff just disappear?

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969

Source: https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/WinterBreak/

My life in weeks   longevity

https://weeks.ginatrapani.org/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43061498

I must have covered this before - she points to the original references.

Brakes worse than exhaust

Study: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/brake-pads-lung-damage-study

Also tires are bad, which will be worse with electric cars.

I think most people would be shocked to learn it's not just the exhaust…

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43058993

Stories of people next to roads getting stuff covered in black dust.

Deepseek R1 Distill 8B Q40 on 4 x Raspberry Pi 5 8GB   llms

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43059579

It's possible! But probably better to just buy a graphics card.

The self hosting seems fun but I'm good just using Claude.

Benchmarks for different hardware: https://github.com/geerlingguy/ollama-benchmark?tab=readme-ov-file#deepseek

Jellyfin   selfhost

Made the front page of HN and I've been meaning to try it.

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43063167

I set up synology's media server to try that…

Our vizio TV's only option is plex though!

Daily <2025-02-20 Thu>

Condensing The Iceberg

Great post from Steven Johnson. Covers

  • Herbert Simon's lecture on information abundance
  • Chris Hayes' book The Siren Call
  • A biography writer's process
  • SNL skit parodying NotebookLM

I really like this quote from Simon, that Hayes covered, which summarizes the core idea:

What makes a given information processing system useful to an organization isn’t how much information it generates or even the raw amount of information it can process. Rather, [Simon argues], “the crucial question is how much information it will allow to be withheld from the attention of other parts of the system… To be an attention conserver for an organization, an information-processing system must be an information condenser.”

Energetics of vertical kilometer foot races; is steeper cheaper?   sweatscience

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26607247/

20-30 degrees is ideal for energy consumption. No suprises here, having considered the math and done some personal VAM tests thinking about everesting. That's degrees, so it's really 40-60% grades by percentage.

Vintage bikes of D2R2   cycling

Love these bikes! Firefly is represented.

https://lovelybike.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-bikes-of-d2r2.html

The marketing genius of Bryan Johnson   longevity

https://www.petecodes.io/marketing-genius-of-bryan-johnson/

He's good at marketing!

Interesting startup doing health assessment: Neko Health. Some sort of full body scan.

The One AI to Rule Them All   llms

https://spyglass.org/consumer-ai-services-apps/

Comparison of consumer AI models.

Still have OpenAI on the top, which I guess it really is. A lot of pretty similar models nowadays.

Thinking Machines   llms

My LLM codegen workflow atm   llms

https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/

Mix of all of the cool tools: aider, cursor, etc. Hadn't heard of remix.

HN

Really good for greenfield projects, for sure.

Recommended: "Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI" By Ethan Mollick

A year of uv: pros, cons, and should you migrate   python

https://www.bitecode.dev/p/a-year-of-uv-pros-cons-and-should

A TODO.

HN

You can pin versions by time, very cool.

#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run
# /// script
# dependencies = ['requests', 'beautifulsoup4']
# [tool.uv]
# exclude-newer = "2023-10-16T00:00:00Z"
# ///
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

rmlint will replace duplicate files with reflinks (if your fs supports them — xfs and btrfs do), or hardlinks if not.

https://scripton.dev/

Cool IDE with built in viz for Python. But it's $20/month! Need a free tier, IMO.

HN

Pi-Hole v6 is out   selfhost

I was running my tailscale DNS on it for a long time. The only thing I really noticed is that it blocked google ad links, which I often wanted to click.

HN discussion

When Imperfect Systems are Good, Actually: Bluesky's Lossy Timelines

https://jazco.dev/2025/02/19/imperfection/

Good engineering story. Solving data problems at scale, pretty cool.

But as user, I would want all of the posts on my timeline? I wouldn't want to miss any. I guess that if there are 1000 posts per day, I'm not reading all of them anyway.

HN

Show HN: Mastra – Open-source JS agent framework, by the developers of Gatsby   llms

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43103073

Interesting… But I'm not building an AI powered front end app anytime soon.

https://github.com/mastra-ai/mastra

Broken Legs and Ankles Heal Better If You Walk on Them within Weeks

Looking for unified health API   quantifiedself

Reddit QS.

Does anyone know of a unified health api for Apple Healthkit, Google Fit, Withings, etc? Or at least as many as possible. I know there are paid ones, but does someone know one that is free or open source?

Or something similar to Health Auto Export but for more data sources.

Terra, fitnesssyncer

Pokemon sleep   wearabletech

Really really great guide on how to get sleep working.

https://www.pokemonsleep.net/en/devices/

Daily <2025-02-21 Fri>

OpenEuroLLM   llms

https://openeurollm.eu/

Just getting started, nothing done. There's also EuroLLM, which does have some models.

HN

Deepseek infra   llms

Will be interesting once it's actually released?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43124018

Figure Robot

https://www.figure.ai/news/helix

Maybe LLMs will help them generalize a bit. Who knows…

HN

How to Backdoor Large Language Models   llms

Yeah you have to trust models like source code…

https://blog.sshh.io/p/how-to-backdoor-large-language-models

DOGE puts $1 spending limit on government employee credit cards

HN

I don't see how this won't backfire. It's not the big budget items…

Yet:

https://vincentwoo.com/3d/sutro_tower/

Very cool 3d explorer of the radio tower in san fran.

Jonathan on The Nero Show   sweatscience

A deep learning–enabled smart garment for accurate and versatile monitoring of sleep conditions in daily life   wearabletech

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420498122

Like a neck gaiter with strain gauges to see deflection. Pretty cool. Would be dirt cheap to make.

MARBLE: interpretable representations of neural population dynamics using geometric deep learning

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-024-02582-2

Projecting onto a manifold, which is pretty cool. Definitely abstractions/mental models are key.

Daily <2025-02-22 Sat>

Removing Jeff Bezos From My Bed   personaldatainfra

https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/removing-jeff-bezos-from-my-bed

Clickbait title, it's eightsleep. They use AWS to stream data.

Some bad engineering decisions, but they couldn't really ssh into his house wihout exposed NAT!

The aquarium chiller is nice.

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43129439

Some good HA stuff in there on HN. Esphome, etc. Zigbee hub: https://eu.aqara.com/products/aqara-2k-security-indoor-camera-hub-g3

The smart cube for screen free control is very cool idea.

Daily <2025-02-24 Mon>

It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/

Yeah, EU doesn't feel like AWS won't provide their data to Elon. Was never a good idea.

Learning Assembly   programming

FFMpeg gets legit speedups from assembly and SIMD.

https://github.com/FFmpeg/asm-lessons/blob/main/lesson_01/index.md

Indieblog discovery   blogroll

Cool. Need to finish my format and get listed up here!

https://indieblog.page/

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43139953

Ask for no, don’t ask for yes

https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3518

Make the answer you want to get the easier thing to do.

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43144611

You can do this without being aggresive…

20 years working on the same software product   career

Pretty cool story. Dedication!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43133174

Hyper Pro Cable Attachment

https://freakathlete.co/products/cable-attachment

I haven't hooked up the leg attachment yet, don't need this.

Daily <2025-02-28 Fri>

Evaluating the association between the introduction of mandatory calorie labelling and energy consumed using observational data from the out-of-home food sector in England

It didn't change behavior much.

Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02032-1

Superglue   llms

https://github.com/superglue-ai/superglue

Very cool idea. Use LLMs to validate data mappings.

Open source old games

Ladybird, independent browser

Interesting project. Andreas Kling.

HN post about it, promising.

Tracking You from a Thousand Miles Away! Turning a Bluetooth Device into an Apple AirTag Without Root Privileges

https://nroottag.github.io/

You can piggy back on Apples network. They somehow patched this for new devices.

Maybe open airtags: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42835772

Open source CI/CD platform

Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam

Framework desktop

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/framework-known-for-upgradable-laptops-intros-not-particularly-upgradable-desktop/

Most desktops are more swappable, so this is a departure from their laptops.

HN points out that the soldered ram is for better performance, but still?

Hyperspace

https://hypercritical.co/2025/02/25/hyperspace

Interesting app that does compression on your hard drive effectively by hard linking parts of files that are the same. Cross-file compression. Pass for me.

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43173462

I Went To SQL Injection Court

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2025/02/09/fixing-illinois-foia/

Very fun story. Schemas are not sensitive information: they're needed to make the right queries.

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175628 Matt Chapman is on HN!

Winter bike tires   cycling

Beyond simple intelligence tests - Launching the Clearer Thinking Cognitive Assessment

./static/2025-02-28-iq-tests.html

Really great research on IQ, the best I've seen. It's definitely measuring something.

Daily <2025-03-05 Wed>

I Created a Hacker News Simulator to Reverse-engineer Virality   llms

From Every.to. A potentially really good use of AI/ML: scrape N profiles, and then use the LLM to generate content from them.

Breaking into dozens of apartment buildings in five minutes on my phone

decrease your screen time… touch grass

app actually verifies you touch grass!

https://touchgrass.now/

It must be a joke. Wouldn't work in the snow here!

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158660

I guess it's real. Lol.

Right to Repair Laws Have Now Been Introduced in All 50 US States

Thoughts on Sabbatical

https://hvpandya.com/sabbatical

Sounds nice to take a break! Not too deep of thoughts here, but good for them.

Claude code   llms

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code

Claude Code is an agentic coding tool that lives in your terminal, understands your codebase, and helps you code faster by executing routine tasks, explaining complex code, and handling git workflows - all through natural language commands.

Maybe like Aider? I definitely need to try this.

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/claude-code/overview

Okay it's so easy to set up. Have to use the API, feels like I shouldn't pay for both the pro web UI AND API credits.

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43163011

Tried it out on a few PRs. Pretty great honestly.

Daily <2025-03-07 Fri>

Tailscale is pretty useful   tailscale

https://blog.6nok.org/tailscale-is-pretty-useful/

I agree! Used it to connect up my local LLM even.

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43270835

Zero-trust is interesting. With things like OpenZiti and https://zrok.io/. Cloudflare tunnels are more zero-trust.

Apple M3 Ultra

512GB of memory its pretty great. Could run AI with ease.

On my exact M1 pro 16gb someone is running this well:

LM Studio with the deepseek-r1-distill-llama-8b model @ Q80

MacBook Air M4

Also sounds nice, just for carrying it around.

Differentiable Logic Cellular Automata

Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it   longevity

Show HN: CodeTracer – A new time-traveling debugger implemented in Nim and Rust   programming

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43280615

Cool! I should see if I can speedup the core loop of the points rewards via Cython.

Succinct Data Structures   programming

Fivethirtyeight shut down

https://www.natesilver.net/p/a-few-words-about-fivethirtyeight

Nate had left a couple years ago, working on a related project it sounds like.

My 16-month theanine self-experiment   quantifiedself

https://dynomight.net/theanine/

Thoughtful self experiment. Didn't seem to work for him. A few resources for evaluating supplements:

Came up on HN <2025-03-09 Sun> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43305803

Some praise, some not praise.

The Demoralization is just Beginning

https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2025/03/03/demoralization-is-just-beginning.html

He's got two suggestions:

  1. Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value. Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China?
  2. Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto), and bring major crackdowns to finance to tie it to real world value. Trading is not a job. Passive income is not a thing. Instead, go produce something real and exchange it for gold.

Maybe? I think gold is long gone.

Mox – modern, secure, all-in-one email server

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261729

Could be fun to run a mail server?

https://www.xmox.nl/

Could I have this running for a sub domain? (I don't think subdomains support email…. how would the MX records work?)

ARC-AGI with compression alone   llms

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43259182

I've been saying for awhile that LLMs are just compression.

Hutter prize: http://prize.hutter1.net/ Is just compression!

How to gain code execution on hundreds of millions of people and popular apps (kibty.town)

RTO is out of touch

https://x.com/EthanEvansVP/status/1895845734177452369

Interesting points here. RTO makes sense if you have a driver and a nanny.

https://tolstoyan.substack.com/p/youth

Time is infinite until it isn't.

Daily <2025-03-09 Sun>

Introducing command and commandfor

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/command-and-commandfor

More functionality in HTML, which is cool. Basic sites can use just HTML without needing JS. I like the examples in the article comparing popular frameworks.

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43292056

Kagi Is Bringing Orion Web Browser to Linux

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302073

I haven't tried Kagi yet but heard lots of good things about their search tools. The small web one in particular.

Kill your Feeds - Stop letting algorithms dictate how you think

https://usher.dev/posts/2025-03-08-kill-your-feeds/

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302132

this is basically a summary of the most recent Technology Connections video, Algorithms are breaking how we think: https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA

Daily <2025-03-12 Wed>

US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43307996

Sounds like just a terrible idea to stop providing support like this. Who will keep buying from the US?

Chasing RFI Waves – Part Seven

https://raoulpop.com/2012/04/15/chasing-rfi-waves-part-seven/

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43315406

The radio astronomy sounds super cool. I couldn't have been so far from here at Virginia Tech.

On Apple Exclaves

https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c37194

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43314657

This goes way above my head but it's a pretty interesting set of ideas.

Two paradoxes in women’s well-being

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt1646

We review the literature on the gender gap in well-being, identifying two key paradoxes. First, although women today report higher levels of life satisfaction and overall happiness than men, they experience worse outcomes in mental health and negative affect. Second, despite substantial advances in women’s social and economic status over the past 50 years, their well-being relative to men has declined. We explore the evidence supporting these paradoxes, considering potential explanations related to differential expectations, biology, and scale use. Using global data from 2006 to 2023 and long-term data from Europe and the US since the 1970s, we provide empirical illustrations. These findings reveal a diverse and seemingly inconsistent pattern of gender well-being gaps between countries, suggesting that the first paradox is not universally applicable. However, there is clear global evidence of a relative decline in women’s well-being, particularly in terms of negative affect.

Powerful introduction too.

Mathematical foundations of reinforcement learning

Daily <2025-03-13 Thu>

seven39: Social media that's only open from 7:39pm to 10:39pm EST.

Factorio Learning Environment

https://jackhopkins.github.io/factorio-learning-environment/

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43331582

Interesting idea… RL should be able to crush this particular task thought.

THE STARTUP CTO'S HANDBOOK

Daily <2025-03-17 Mon>

The DIY Sauna

From the DIY Cold Plunge guy.

Sorry Joe, it looks like a coffin!

https://diycoldplunge.com/products/diy-infrared-sauna-plan

Sidekick   llms

https://github.com/johnbean393/Sidekick

OSX app to be a LLM-based research assistant / knowledge base. Cool idea. Don't love this implementation.

Get your new PebbleOS watch   wearabletech

New ones are out.

https://store.repebble.com/

No GPS though - which is definitely the feature that I want.

NVIDIA DGX Spark   llms

A $3k home computer that can easily run AI models! Pretty cool. But I'd have to spend a hell of a lot on cloud resources to make this worth it.

Scott Young   blogroll

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/podcast/

I loved reading his stuff when I was in college. Very inspiring.

Glad he's still going strong. He has a kid!

Daily <2025-03-19 Wed>

Google to buy Wiz for $32B

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398518

It's a cloud security scanning company. A buy for the customers, maybe more than the tech.

Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones   wearabletech

Yes but this is also half the point. It should be easy and secure for users, this doesn't come tradeoff-free.

https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-awesome-with-iphones

On the other hand, I'd love to be able to reply from my garmin watch.

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43401245

Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different   llms

Locality, Relation, and Meaning Construction in Language, as Implemented in Humans and Large Language Models (LLMs)   llms

The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ozempocalypse-is-nigh

The generics are going away. Bummer for people.

Making money on pharmaceuticals that are expensive to develop but then saves lives seems like an ethical problem from the start.

How I’ve run major projects   projectmanagement

https://www.benkuhn.net/pjm/

Some good advice in here. It's hard work, requires focus.

Tern AI’s low-cost GPS alternative actually works

https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/14/tern-ais-low-cost-gps-alternative-actually-works/

Accelerometer based? Cool idea?

Sounds like it uses accelerometers and road network data to update it's position. Align left/right turns to the road's turns to help with dead-reckoning.

Would love to try this for cycling.

Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline   toolsforthought

Backlinks: Docs

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378239

https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs

I'm a sucker for knowledge management solutions. On man, it uses Django!

Competitor to outline.

Will add a backlink to my list.

Peer-to-peer file transfers in the browser

Fastplotlib   datavis

DuckDB local UI

Daily <2025-03-28 Fri>

Debian bookworm live images now fully reproducible

https://lwn.net/Articles/1015402/

Pretty cool - able to build the same binary from the same source code. Controlling for all of the OS differences and randomness.

Here's the actual update: https://lists.reproducible-builds.org/pipermail/rb-general/2025-March/003675.html

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484520

VanillaOS builds on Debian: https://vanillaos.org/

Airline Demand Between Canada and United States Collapses, Down 70%+

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43485649

People don't feel safe at the borders! Among other concerns (tariffs, threats of annexation).

Botswana launches first satellite BOTSAT-1 aboard SpaceX Falcon 9

A love letter to the CSV format

https://github.com/medialab/xan/blob/master/docs/LOVE_LETTER.md

A decent attempt to defend CSV! Having dealt with so much pain from poorly formatted CSVs I can never look back from parquet.

I didn't realize the double quote trick to escape quotes. Clever!

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484382

> I so hate CSV.

Yeah. I'm so with you dude.

Daily <2025-03-30 Sun>

I drove 300 miles in rural Virginia, then asked police to send me their public surveillance footage of my car. Here’s what I learned.

https://cardinalnews.org/2025/03/28/i-drove-300-miles-in-rural-virginia-then-asked-police-to-send-me-their-public-surveillance-footage-of-my-car-heres-what-i-learned/

In virginia. I know those town names! "Flock" camera data is subject for FOIA which seems bad. Though, better than not being subject to it. Best to not have the data exist in the first place.

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43504413

Flock was a YC17 company!

You could do it yourself: https://github.com/jfh01/diy-alpr Questionable legally to just post this for free online.

Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43517833

May not be such a bad idea, actually. Just brush your teeth.

Why Apple's Severance gets edited over remote desktop software

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43517301

They used Jump Studio to get the connection.

Paged out

https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_006.pdf#page=3

Pretty amazing magazine. The rust in python example is great. On a single page of PDF a full working example…page 49: https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_006.pdf#page=49

They're taking submissions. Had to fit in a single page.

KoMoot acquired   dcr

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/03/komoot-acquired-history-says-this-wont-end-well.html

I actually hadn't heard of them. Got my first komoot links just yesterday, VTXL 4-day in June.

CN: 40mm road tyres are faster for nearly everyone   cycling

Backlinks: Cycling

TR forum: https://www.trainerroad.com/forum/t/cn-40mm-road-tyres-are-faster-for-nearly-everyone/101891

GP5000's are good road tires. Some hate for the specialized roubaix, which I really liked, and love for the schwalbe pro. Schwalbe pro road tires: https://www.schwalbetires.com/Pro-One-11653978.

Would love to build out the flock of bikes more completely, having road/tt/gravel/mtb all ready to roll.

  • New rear road bike tire (current is shot) - ordered with cassettes and chains.
  • New rims for these wheels? Maybe?
  • Dedicated bike for trainer (it's not compatible with zwift ride). Put on the tarmac, works.
  • Better wheelset for TT?
  • Casettes/chains shot on tarmac and TT bikes - ordered to laughing dog, will come 5/14.
  • MTB back as a MTB.
  • Fenders for FF1169 - talked to FF about this.

Made some moves on this list.

Karpathy's digital hygeine   personaldatainfra

Backlinks: Personal data infrastructure

https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/digital-hygiene/

This VERY closely resembles my own. Really nicely written up.

Insanely expensive keyboard   mechkeyboards

Backlinks: Mechanical Keyboards

https://www.norbauer.co/products/the-seneca

If you have more money than you know what to do with…

Most popular HN personal blogs   blogroll

How NixOS and reproducible builds could have detected the xz backdoor for the benefit of all

Daily <2025-03-31 Mon>

Lex Friedman (not Fridman)

Daily <2025-04-11 Fri>

Busy Bar

https://busy.bar/

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43643534

From the folks at flipper. Total overkill at $250 and with the features.

Can see how it would be helpful for open concept like Springfield office.

Teach yourself electronics   electronics

Pico.sh

Love little hacker projects like this

https://pico.sh/

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43560899

Emacs redux   emacs

https://emacsredux.com/

I can always get better at Emacs.

Why F#

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43546004

I should really give a fully functional language a go. Might change how I see things.

Daily <2025-04-14 Mon>

The Tyranny of the Marginal User

Protesilaos Stavrou   blogroll

https://protesilaos.com/

Very interesting blog!

Including an emacs book. He maintains about 100 emacs packages.

Daily <2025-04-15 Tue>

How I don't use LLMs   llms blogroll

https://www.gleech.org/llms

Interesting blog. Very gwern-esque.

Some Love For Interoperable Apps

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/love-for-interoperability/

Nice post: having plain text or even a standard (email) means you can move data around.

Yes!

File over app

Why I support privacy

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/04/14/privacy.html

privacy is less needed for people whose life situations are relatively normal, and more needed for people whose life situations deviate from the norm, in any direction. And once you add up all of the different directions that matter, the number of people who really need privacy ends up being quite a lot - and you never know when you will become one of them. This is a big reason why privacy is often underrated: it's not just about your situation and your information today, it's also about the unknown unknowns of what happens to that information (and to how it affects you) going forward forever into the future.

A lot of really great points here. Democracy depends on private votes.

Garmin Grafana

https://github.com/arpanghosh8453/garmin-grafana

Uses the garmin auth creds to scrape out the data.

Daily <2025-04-17 Thu>

How to Be a Happy 85-Year-Old (Like Me)   ATTACH

Add a link with C-c C-l and autocomplete on "attachement:" and you get:

2025-04-16-Opinion | How to Be a Happy 85-Year-Old (Like Me) - The New York Times (4152025 10:15:48 PM).html

Org mode is not on his list, but maybe it should be!

Darwin's children drew all over the “On the Origin of Species” manuscript (2014)   ATTACH

Love this. They were good! Of course. Very human story.

How to win an argument with a toddler   ATTACH

The nightmare bicycle   ATTACH

Good designs expose systematic structure; they lean on their users’ ability to understand this structure and apply it to new situations. We were born for this.

Bad designs paper over the structure with superficial labels that hide the underlying system, inhibiting their users’ ability to actually build a clear model in their heads.

Very great point. Should try reading the book.

Daily <2025-04-23 Wed>

Why Anthropic’s Claude still hasn’t beaten Pokémon   ATTACH

Interesting article.

Not going to take over the world any time soon.

Vending Bench   ATTACH

AI benchmark to manage a vending machine business.

Some of the model succeed, sometimes! Need to be able to keep track of context in a more coherent way.

12 Factor Agents

https://github.com/humanlayer/12-factor-agents

I'll revist this when we do the agentic coding week.

Atuin Desktop: Runbooks That Run

https://blog.atuin.sh/atuin-desktop-runbooks-that-run/

Atuin syncs shell history across devices. I can see how this is valuable!

The desktop is a notebook environment, looks like jupyter. But they're at the shell. Tech:

We're using Tauri (https://v2.tauri.app/) on the client, and Elixir + Phoenix (with a little bit of Rust via Rustler) on the server

Basically yeah jupyter notebooks: https://www.nurtch.com

This uses markdown as the backend: https://runme.dev/

Another jupyter competitor: https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo

HN suggests Org babel, filed this under org mode.

Raspberry Pi Lidar Scanner

Pretty neat. Hardware hacking is always fascinating.

https://github.com/PiLiDAR/PiLiDAR

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43738561

Strava acquires Runna   fitnesstech

Interesting…

https://www.trainerroad.com/forum/t/strava-acquires-runna/102615

Feeling anti-strava these days, with the API lockdown and such.

Intuit, Owner of TurboTax, Wins Battle Against America's Taxpayers

They are the WORST.

Ugh: https://prospect.org/power/2025-04-17-intuit-turbotax-wins-battle-against-taxpayers-irs-direct-file/

Glad I gave them $0 this year, instead of the $270 they wanted.

AI as Normal Tech   llms ATTACH

Backlinks: Long term outlook

Read this through. I agree with most of their points. In particular - I don't see any evidence of AI bootstrapping AI research, it's not even that helpful in my own day to day (which is less complex than AI research).

There exists an AI incident database: https://incidentdatabase.ai/

On the limits of predictability: Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration.

Daily <2025-04-28 Mon>

Dot, AI Companion

https://new.computer/

Connected to your calendar, can become a pretty powerful tool. Found this while researching Stevens.

Playing with it now.

Daily <2025-05-12 Mon>

Plain Vanilla Web

Components make pretty powerful framework-free websites: https://plainvanillaweb.com/index.html

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43954896

Framework free reasonably complex site: https://restofworld.org/ Oh gosh, well it uses wordpress. Lol.

High-density UI

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43925732

Nice:

I call it Trader UI vs VC UI

A couple HN alternatives:

I also think this is what FitIQ is trying to provide.

Personal MCP server   qs llm

Guy's resume/info as an MCP server: https://ai.jakegaylor.com/

Kind of the like the "me API": https://www.bobapi.com/

A Critical Look at MCP

https://raz.sh/blog/2025-05-02_a_critical_look_at_mcp

My conclusion is that the whole suggested setup for HTTP transport (SSE+HTTP and Streamable HTTP) should be thrown out and replaced with something that mimics stdio… Websockets.

Stdio is a lot like websockets…they seem fine!

Web as a database

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43906841

Neat idea…kind of like google brain or semantic search database.

Design for 3d printing

https://blog.rahix.de/design-for-3d-printing/

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888117

Good resource on 3d printing. Some tricks that you wouldn't guess.

<2025-05-19 Mon>

Updated Army Fitness Test

They dropped it to 5 exercises:

https://www.army.mil/e2/downloads/rv7/aft/AFT_Scoring_Scales_250601.pdf

My max/min for 100/60 points on each are (and to "pass", need 350 total, not just the min on each):

  • MDL 350/140
  • HRP 60/13
  • SDC 1:33/2:36
  • PLK 3:25/1:15
  • 2MR 13:42/20:44

MDL for 3 reps, hex bar. SDC is 25 meters with 5 legs of "down and back":

  • Sprint
  • Drag 90lb sled
  • Side shuffle (legs can't touch/cross)
  • 40lb weight each hand
  • Sprint

Sounds qute fast to do this in 90 seconds, it's 250 meters!

Ditching Obsidian and building my own

Nice write up of the history and such. Basically a markdown editor and a database, which is cool.

https://amberwilliams.io/blogs/building-my-own-pkms

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022448

Dataview in Obsidian is a lot like the agenda of org mode: https://obsidian.rocks/dataview-in-obsidian-a-beginners-guide/

Daily <2025-05-20 Tue>

NPX business card

Last modified: May 21, 2025