Quacker News daily superautomated ai tech-bro mockery | github | podcast
1. ▲ New exponent functions that make SiLU and SoftMax 2x faster, at full accuracy (github.com/ggerganov)
In a world where every millisecond counts and every programmer believes they're just one optimization away from revolutionizing computing, one GitHub warrior unleashes New Exponent Functions that Make SiLU and SoftMax 2x Faster, at Full Accuracy. Our hero decisively updates the ancient art of exponentiation, promising a brave new world tuned to double precision! Meanwhile, the comment section becomes a geriatric ward of one-upmanship, where dusty tales of 1970s radar systems morph into a humblebrag Olympics. "Back in my day," boasts one, scribbling on the hazy line between relevance and quaint nostalgia. Everyone else in the thread interrupts their potential learning moment to flex their half-digested concepts, obviously not grasping that most improvements in machine learning boil down to keeping the GPU lights blinking a bit longer. 🚀💾
180 points by weinzierl 2024-05-15T19:57:01 | 40 comments
2. ▲ LLMs are not suitable for brainstorming (piaoyang0.wordpress.com)
Title: AI Can't Think Outside the Box, Cry Humans Stuck in Circles

In a stunning revelation on piaoyang0.wordpress.com, a blogger reminds the world that language models, like human toddlers at a brainstorming session, follow patterns rather than create genuine innovation. Commenters, in a desperate bid to validate their existence in the algorithmic shadow of the LLMs, argue both sides of a coin that’s already been spent. One genius suggests that if we just *ask* the AI nicely (using TRIZ, of course), it might just spit out a Mona Lisa of ideas, ignoring that true inspiration often skips the predictable pathways. Meanwhile, another commenter advocates for AI as the ultimate brainstorming buddy, proving once again that low expectations are the key to eternal happiness. 😂🤖💡
18 points by bcstyle 2024-05-15T23:47:55 | 10 comments
3. ▲ Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013) (computerhistory.org)
Title: Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013) (computerhistory.org)

In a dazzling display of nostalgic technobabble, computerhistory.org drops the source code for Adobe Photoshop like it’s hot (spoiler: it’s not 1988 anymore). Commenters embark on a digitized odyssey, comparing ancient software relics and flexing their retro-tech muscles with tales of "back in my day" bravado, where floppies ruled and "Deluxe Paint" wasn't just a hipster cocktail. One heroic soul recounts their epic quest to rescue this sacred code from the dusty depths of obsolete Macintosh drives, prompting a chorus of back-pats and coulda-shoulda-wouldas about making this digital antiquity public. Meanwhile, the real MVP queries if the chatter is about patents or code, subtly reminding everyone that they're geeking out over techno-ghosts that can't even haunt a patent office anymore. 🤓💾
409 points by PaulHoule 2024-05-15T15:12:15 | 161 comments
4. ▲ In medicine what's the difference between an -ectomy, an -ostomy, and an -otomy? (1986) (straightdope.com)
Welcome to another day of embarrassing misunderstandings presented as education on *straightdope.com*. Today, we dive headfirst into the oh-so-mystical world of surgical suffixes where we pretend that equating complex medical procedures with syntax in programming makes us look intellectual. The comments section valiantly continues this façade, bringing linguistics into the mix with the charm of a first-year med student explaining surgery to a teddy bear. Expect bloated comparisons, misplaced self-assuredness, and the inevitable derail into random medical anecdotes. Brace yourselves for a ride on the rhetoric rollercoaster, where everyone leaves more confused but convinced they've just had a profound learning experience! 🎢💉🤷‍♂️
92 points by tzs 2024-05-15T20:01:37 | 36 comments
5. ▲ Project Gameface launches on Android (googleblog.com)
Google, pioneer of perpetual beta software, unveils its latest gimmick: Project Gameface. Now you can twitch and gurn your way through your favorite games, because nothing says accessibility like eyebrow-raising UI controls that seem lifted from a dystopian sci-fi novel. Tech enthusiasts and confusion hobbyists in the blog's comments juggle skepticism and mild excitement, dishing out a mix of technical modesty and the usual resignation over Google's infamous commitment issues. Meanwhile, someone's already mistaking the tech for telepathy training, proving that no matter how straight you make the face-control feature, some users will always squint things up.
84 points by xnx 2024-05-15T19:39:28 | 35 comments
6. ▲ Jepsen: Datomic Pro 1.0.7075 (jepsen.io)

Database Drama Delights: Datomic Decoded!


In an epic clash of technical verbosity, Jepsen dives deep into Datomic Pro 1.0.7075, discovering that—surprise—it behaves exactly as a complex, temporal database should! Expecting catastrophic failures and finding none, commenters oscillate between awe and existential dread, as they contemplate using this byzantine system to operate something as trivial as a bank. Meanwhile, Datomic's team celebrates their success in documentation gymnastics, skillfully dodging any real changes post the Jepsen gauntlet. Because, who needs fixes when you can redefine your problems away? 🎉🐛
178 points by aphyr 2024-05-15T16:57:30 | 25 comments
7. ▲ A 'plague' comes before the fall: lessons from Roman history (thebulletin.org)
In the never-ending quest to shoehorn modern buzzwords into ancient history, The Bulletin captures the imagination of pseudo-intellectuals by equating the fall of Rome with, wait for it... plagues! 🙄 Readers and commenters alike leap at this "revelation," wielding their half-digested book excerpts like gladiators with foam swords, breathlessly connecting pandemics to the fall of every civilization from Atlantis to Zanzibar. No historical stone is left unturned or untheorized, much to the delight of armchair epidemiologists and wannabe historians pontificating from the depths of their dizzying erudition. We all just can't wait for the next empire-breaking sniffle to prove us right once again! Because, you know, correlation is *totally* causation.
64 points by diodorus 2024-05-15T20:11:55 | 65 comments
8. ▲ SSD death, tricky read-only filesystems, and systemd magic? (rachelbythebay.com)
Once again, the tech wizards and armchair sysadmins convene on rachelbythebay to magically solve ancient IT curses like SSD death and filesystem calamities with the highly accredited "poke it with a stick" method. 💻🔮 Watch as the masses enlighten us with their epic tales from the frontlines of badly beaten block devices, and debate whether to 'dd' or not to 'dd', as if the mere utterance of "ddrescue" can resurrect Lazarus from his data grave. Meanwhile, the comments section devolves into a hilarious mixture of tech elitism and unsolicited advice on read-only settings, sprinkled generously with the kind of textbook paranoia you’d expect when someone accidentally opens a system32 folder. 📂💥 Amidst this existential pondering, remember it’s all futile, as your data was probably doomed from the moment you bought that suspiciously cheap SSD from a pop-up ad. 🌪️🗑️
53 points by ingve 2024-05-15T21:02:50 | 32 comments
9. ▲ Dragonfly: An optical telescope built from an array of off-the-shelf Canon lens (utoronto.ca)
Dragonfly: A Tribute to Bargain Bin Astronomy
You ever wonder what happens when you strap together a metric ton of Canon lenses and call it a day? Well, the University of Toronto sure did, crafting an "optical telescope" that's nothing more than a franken-array of off-the-shelf glass. Armchair astronomers in the comment section are waxing poetic about "diffuse objects with low surface brightness," because if there’s one thing more thrilling than using cheap tech, it’s making it sound like rocket science. Between suggestions of turning a zillion iPhone cameras into the next Hubble and finding long-lost nebulae shaped like directions, it's a real showcase of making much ado about very little.🔭💫
141 points by fanf2 2024-05-15T16:24:03 | 60 comments
10. ▲ Show QN: Open-source BI and analytics for engineers (github.com/quarylabs)
Welcome to the latest episode of Hacker News Theater, where today's spectacle showcases an open-source BI tool that's as "revolutionary" as a new Slack notification sound. 👨‍💻🎉 The comment section, a veritable bastion of original thought, bursts with enthusiasm over a shiny Slack CAT button and strategies blatantly ripped from every startup guide ever written. As commenters trip over each other to offer comparisons with every BI tool of the past decade, the project's creator nods vigorously at anything resembling praise. Strap in as we witness the fierce battle for validation, with bonus points for using the most buzzwords in a single feedback post! 📊🚀
166 points by louisjoejordan 2024-05-15T14:02:35 | 38 comments
11. ▲ Starting emails with "BEGIN PGP MESSAGE" will fool the filter (nondeterministic.computer)
**Title:** How to Sneak Past Email Filters with Ancient Cryptographic Voodoo

In yet another groundbreaking discovery from the halls of "nondeterministic.computer," tech wizards have unearthed the secret spell: start your emails with "BEGIN PGP MESSAGE" to make the corporate mail filters surrender. Watch in awe as code enthusiasts and weekend hackers banter about on forums, competing for the most convoluted way to bypass a system function that... checks file names? That's right, daring adventurers: by renaming your deadly ".exe" files to the more innocuous ".txt," you, too, can teach an old mail filter new tricks! Meanwhile, the comment section erupts in a catastrophic blend of paranoia and technical righteousness, a digital Tower of Babel where everyone speaks in code and nobody agrees. 🎩✨ Just remember, if something breaks, it was probably just a typo in your incantation.
96 points by ColinWright 2024-05-15T16:32:08 | 33 comments
12. ▲ Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking (apple.com)
In a thrilling display of benevolence, Apple graces us mortals with new "eye-tracking" goodies and other magical widgets that allow the plebs to operate their iDevices with marginally less inconvenience. In an eye-opening exposé of tech illiteracy, commenters stumble over themselves in a humblebrag-athon about who can misinterpret accessibility features most egregiously. One visionary soul wistfully imagines a utopia where the effort needed to click an upvote button doesn't equate to scaling Mount Everest. Meanwhile, tech’s luminaries presumably nod sagely from their inaccessible ivory towers, blissfully unaware of what "skip links" are—or simply not giving a flying fig. And thus, the circle of tech "progress" rolls on, ever inclusive, ever elusive. 🙄💔
284 points by dmd 2024-05-15T14:22:05 | 160 comments
13. ▲ Show QN: Tarsier – Vision utilities for web interaction agents (github.com/reworkd)
**HN Launches Yet Another Tool for the Tiny Overlap of Linguists and Web Developers**

Ah, the constant garden of Eden for the self-congratulatory tech elite - Hacker News unveils Tarsier: the latest in squinting really hard at web pages until they turn into semi-useful code. A forum member quickly ties it to some obscure thesis about language and images, inadvertently revealing more about his thesis advisor's patience than about the tool itself. Others suggest integrating this tool with every other half-baked project under the sun while hypothesizing about "broader launches" and other euphemisms for "please notice us." Meanwhile, commonplace questions about functionality get lost amid boasts of how this tool teeters on the edge of reinventing how we poorly automate web interactions. 😂👓🕸️
136 points by KhoomeiK 2024-05-15T16:46:15 | 50 comments
14. ▲ Show QN: I made a Mac app to search my images and videos locally with ML (desktopdocs.com)
**Show HN: I Reinvented File Explorer With AI Glitter**

In what can only be described as a groundbreaking rehash of existing technology, a brave Hacker News solo-preneur has unveiled yet another "revolutionary" app, DesktopDocs, that promises to change how we browse media files - now with extra unnecessary machine learning! HN commenters fall over themselves hypothesizing edge cases and proposing ‘vital’ features like indexing their extensive PDF collections of forgotten academic papers. One grizzled vet longs for the simpler times of ‘96, when men were men and software refunds didn’t exist. Meanwhile, the skeptical techie laments the misuse of the term AI, deeply concerned that it might actually just be ordinary programming dressed up for the VC ball. 🎩🤖💾
66 points by correa_brian 2024-05-15T19:44:46 | 47 comments
15. ▲ Prototypal Inheritance (2008) (crockford.com)
In a breathtaking display of intellectual hubris, Crockford once again attempts to enlighten the teeming hordes of JavaScript developers about prototypal inheritance, a concept that every CompSci dropout insists they mastered right after "Hello, World." As per usual, the comment section morphs into a battleground where self-proclaimed experts compete to see who can misunderstand the material with the most panache. The sheer irony of programmers trying to inherit knowledge, without cloning the fundamental understanding, is evidently lost on all involved. If there’s ever an apocalypse for common sense in programming, it’s clear these commenters will be the first to go. 🙄
4 points by Tomte 2024-05-13T08:29:02 | 0 comments
16. ▲ It's 2024 and drought is optional (asteriskmag.com)
The usual gang of self-appointed futurists at asteriskmag.com have decreed droughts "optional" now, thanks to the magic of solar-powered desalination. It’s 2024, and rather than considering sustainable usage or climate action, apparently, we can just engineer our way out of environmental crises! In the comments, armchair experts juggle the ethics of dumping brine into the Gulf of California and ponder the grave issue of paying 1.36 cents per gallon for water. Meanwhile, a delightful side debate rages about whether LA is as big as Australia, because population figures are clearly as easy to manipulate as our precious natural resources. 😂
30 points by vwoolf 2024-05-15T20:36:39 | 16 comments
17. ▲ Making a Postgres query 1k times faster (mattermost.com)
In an epoch-defining revolution of SQL management, a Mattermost miracle worker has heroically managed to accelerate a Postgres query from glacial to merely sluggish. Commenters, erupting in ecstasy, exchange their bewildering "OR to UNION" spells like Hogwarts students in the Forbidden Section. Meanwhile, one brave soul dares to dream the impossible: a world where Postgres's query planner isn't outsmarted by a mid-level software developer's hastily drafted script. 🚀🤯 Experts in the lore of SQL optimization gather to mourn the sorrowful state of the Postgres planner, quietly forgetting that none of them remember to index their databases properly in the first place.
106 points by d0mine 2024-05-15T21:00:02 | 34 comments
18. ▲ An Empirical Evaluation of Columnar Storage Formats [pdf] (vldb.org)
The academics have unleashed yet another riveting PDF about columnar storage formats on VLDB, ensuring that the Carpocalypse of data storage debate continues unabated. Commenters, armed with their personal use-cases and anecdotal evidence, heroically miss the forest for the trees, eagerly citing their one-off situations where LZ4 gave them a 2.8% performance boost on their custom-built rigs. Amidst this joust of jargon, someone even manages to drop a *ClickHouse* presentation link, possibly mistaking VLDB for a tech meetup. As they artfully dance around the actual use of multi-core decompression, the rest of us wonder if it's just easier to buy more RAM or maybe a new laptop. 🍿
47 points by eatonphil 2024-05-15T18:29:36 | 21 comments
19. ▲ When to Split Patches (For PostgreSQL) (eisentraut.org)
On eisentraut.org, PostgreSQL enthusiasts tackle the monumental question of when to fragment their patches as if balancing the very fabric of digital civilization. The author earnestly dissects this riveting topic with the clinical excitement of watching paint dry, ensuring readers are well-equipped to ponder splitting patches at their next insomniac convention. Below, the obligatory chorus of commenters engage in a melee of pedantic one-upmanship, debating nuances invisible to the human eye and vital to absolutely no one. A thrilling escapade through the wilds of database management, destined to be bookmarked and forgotten. 📚🔍💤
19 points by todsacerdoti 2024-05-14T07:31:50 | 0 comments
20. ▲ Qualcomm's Oryon LLVM Patches (chipsandcheese.com)
In the latest riveting drama from the world of ones and zeroes, Qualcomm attempts to dazzle the eight people who still care with the introduction of Oryon LLVM patches. The real cliffhanger here: the mystery of the missing L1D cache size. Commenters are losing sleep, performing digital necromancy with `lscpu -C` to summon forth this arcane knowledge. Meanwhile, ARM architecture nuances stimulate heated debates akin to arguing over whether stale bread makes a better weapon or a crouton. It’s high-octane excitement—if your engine runs on mundane tech specs and unresolved CPU lore. 🎭💻
15 points by ingve 2024-05-15T21:02:30 | 4 comments
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