TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
Wesley Dickinson and James Porter share a riveting story of IBM’s RAMAC, the world’s first disk drive, born out of recurring close calls with disaster. Their recount of RAMAC’s creation showcases the remarkable innovation and dangers faced during its development. The blog post then transitions to a unique visit to the Computer History Museum, where […]
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Puente Hills Landfill in Los Angeles, California, opened in 1957, buried five decades of trash until its closure in 2013. Landfill engineering evolved, from basic trash pits to highly engineered structures. Siting a landfill involves geology, engineering, and more. Landfills prevent trash from contaminating the environment, using liners and leachate collection systems. Compaction maximizes landfill […]
The author explores creating a music visualizer inspired by the classic game pong, where the ball bounces to the beat of a song. By altering the game’s physics and retaining key rules, such as the contact point of the ball on the paddle determining its angle of reflection, the author delves into maximizing screen utilization […]
In 2012, the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider confirmed the existence of a field responsible for generating masses of elementary particles. Physicists struggle to explain how the Higgs field works, often resorting to tall tales involving substances like soup or molasses, which conflict with fundamental laws of motion. In reality, […]
PlasCAD is a versatile software designed for plasmid and primer creation and validation. Running on Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms, it offers robust functionality such as primer quality evaluation based on various metrics and primer tuning options. Notably, PlasCAD can generate primers tailored for SLIC and FastCloning methods. The software boasts a user-friendly interface for […]
In a new twist on the old “sextortion” email scam, recipients are now receiving messages personalized with their name and a photo of their home. The scam claims to have captured recipients on their webcam watching explicit content, threatening to release the video unless a Bitcoin ransom is paid. The detailed email also mentions a […]
Chromatone is a groundbreaking project that aims to revolutionize visual music education and communication. By connecting colors and notes in a standardized way, they are enhancing music perception through the primary sensory channel of vision. With 12 notes, 12 colors, and endless possibilities, they have developed a Visual Music Language that continues to evolve. They […]
The author explores the new structured outputs feature in OpenAI’s API by developing an AI-assisted web scraper using GPT-4o. The post details experiments with extracting data from simple and complex tables, noting successes and failures. Combining two approaches – data extraction and XPath generation – improves results, but issues such as image-to-text conversion arise. The […]
The author discusses the lessons learned by distributed systems engineers, emphasizing the importance of understanding failures and the complexities of coordination. They highlight the significance of feature flags for infrastructure rollout and the challenges of estimating capacity in a distributed system. The author also touches on the importance of metrics, emphasizing the use of percentiles […]
Three men in the United Kingdom have admitted to running OTP Agency, a service that intercepted one-time passcodes needed to access various websites after stealing bank account credentials. Despite initially claiming legitimacy, the service shut down after being exposed by KrebsOnSecurity. Although the operators were arrested shortly after reviving the service post-shutdown, other similar services […]