TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
The Kidney Project, led by scientists at UC San Francisco, has made significant progress in developing a new approach to treating kidney failure. They have successfully demonstrated that kidney cells can survive inside a pig’s body by using an implantable device called a bioreactor. This device can mimic important kidney functions and does not trigger […]
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In this web content, the author discusses the topic of measuring developer productivity and shares a personal experience about the worst programmer they know, Tim Mackinnon. The author explains that they fought to keep Tim on their team despite his consistently zero productivity score because Tim’s value was not in delivering individual stories but in […]
of knowledge as we delve into connection pools, lateral joins, stored procedures, and more. Connection pools allow for efficient management of database connections, while lateral joins access data from previous rows in the same table. Stored procedures provide a way to store and execute complex SQL scripts. We’ll also uncover the secrets of isolation levels, […]
Simon Tatham is a huge fan of coroutines and has been since the mid-1990s when he first encountered the idea while reading The Art of Computer Programming. He found coroutines to be a game changer and even developed a way to use them in C code. He believes coroutines are incredibly useful compared to explicit […]
If you’re struggling to write well, it may not be because you lack writing skills, but rather because you don’t know how to edit. Editing is an essential part of the writing process and should not be separated from it. Many writers learn to improve their writing by editing their own drafts. One common mistake […]
In this web content, the author reflects on their science fiction novel that was written in the late 1980s to early 1990s. The novel was based on three ideas: a fascination with a specific asteroid called Toutatis, the concept of a launch tether attached to a small, fast-rotating asteroid, and the development of a network […]
In this web content, the author narrates their attempt to do laundry without a smartphone and reflects on whether technology is truly beneficial. They describe laundry as a chore that some find therapeutic while others do begrudgingly. They emphasize the necessity of manual labor for cleaning clothes, which they see as a great leveler of […]
The author highlights the misconception that digitized documents have an indefinite shelf life and unlimited retrieval opportunities, emphasizing that without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost within a few decades. The article explores the obstacles to data preservation, including hardware longevity, format accessibility, and comprehensibility. It also touches on the concept […]
Lee Butterman has developed a browser-based search engine for Wikipedia that allows users to search for specific information using natural language queries. The search engine downloads the Wikipedia database and performs searches offline, making it convenient and efficient. By using sentence transformers to embed documents, product quantization to compress embeddings, pq.js for distance computation, and […]
Doug Lenat, the brilliant mind behind the Cyc project, dedicated his life to codifying common sense in machine-interpretable form. While Cyc has been deemed a failure by many, it has endured for 40 years, a testament to its significance. Lenat’s goal of getting machines to reason about common sense is still necessary for progress in […]