Dehyped title: Orange rectangle with white path and black circle

Summary:

The document contains two SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) images. The first image shows a rectangular shape with rounded corners, filled with an orange color. Inside the rectangle, there is a white path and a black circle. The second image is identical to the first one. The SVG images appear to be part of a web page or application that displays vector graphics.

Comments:

Gualdrapo: I regularly use the SVG Path Editor website, as I find it more intuitive for handling the details of SVG path elements compared to Inkscape.

The SVG Path Editor allows you to easily convert between absolute and relative path values, which is a useful feature that Inkscape lacks.

Dehyped title: Einsum: A Powerful Tool for Tensor Manipulation in Machine Learning

Summary:

The Ioun Stone of Mastery is a powerful magical item that grants its wielder mastery over both arcane energies and tensor mathematics. Einsum is a tool for efficiently manipulating tensors, often used in machine learning for operations like matrix multiplication. The document provides a detailed implementation of a "dumb" version of einsum using nested loops, which is intuitive but extremely slow. It then shows how to implement einsum more efficiently using vectorized PyTorch operations, demonstrating a significant speedup. The key advantages of the einsum approach are discussed, making it a valuable tool for tensor manipulation in machine learning and other domains.

Comments:

ziofill: The stringless interface for np.einsum is less cumbersome to use than the standard string-based interface, such as for matrix multiplication.

andy99: While einsum and related libraries like einops are powerful, they can be mentally taxing to understand and make the code less readable.

ssivark: The explicit notation of einsum variants actually makes the code more readable by making the axis names explicit, compared to using implicit transposes and matrix multiplications. However, the Python einsum implementations could be more generic to allow other operations beyond just multiplication and addition.

hobs: For someone who doesn't frequently use these advanced tensor operations, the string-based einsum interface seems like the worst case for readability and maintainability.

Dehyped title: Software and hardware to create Atari 2600 movie cartridges with 80x192 resolution, 7-bit color, and 4-bit audio.

Summary:

MovieCart is a new product that allows users to experience full-length color movies and audio on the Atari 2600 console. It boasts an impressive 80x192 resolution, 7-bit color, and 4-bit monaural audio. The technical specifications detail how the video and audio are encoded, including the use of a checkerboard pattern and 15.720 kHz sound. The system includes joystick controls for brightness, volume, and shuttle position, as well as console switches for black and white, 10-second rewind, and full rewind. The passage notes that producing a 2-hour movie would require the equivalent of over half a million Atari cartridges worth of data.

Comments:

jbosh: I think this is an extremely cool use of Atari 2600 cartridges. I've wondered if it would be possible to expand the capabilities of cartridge-based consoles, like adding an ARM chip to a cartridge and using modern video codecs like H.264. I'd be interested to see how that would affect compression compared to the original cartridge format.

Dehyped title: The IRS is considering renewing a free tax filing website that has received high user satisfaction.

Summary:

The Biden administration announced that its free tax filing website, which allows taxpayers to file directly to the government for free, came in under budget and received high user satisfaction. Experts say a nationwide rollout of this service could disrupt the multi-billion dollar tax preparation industry, as Americans currently spend over $200 on average to file their taxes using software or a tax preparer. The administration will decide this spring whether to renew the experimental program for another tax season. The free tax filing website is the first of its kind and resembles commercial offerings from companies like Intuit and H&R Block. The announcement suggests the program has been successful in its initial rollout.

Comments:

janalsncm: The US government has too much access to citizens' private information, and politicians who have benefited from tax filing services should not be allowed to influence policy on this issue. The tax filing process should be simplified, as the government already has the necessary information to file taxes for most people.

pydry: The US is more of a plutocracy than a democracy, where citizens can only choose between different brands of oligarchy rather than vote against the system itself.

tmountain: It is unreasonable to expect the majority of Americans, who have low financial literacy, to accurately file their own taxes when the government already has the necessary information.

thegrim33: The erosion of privacy and the government's increasing entanglement in citizens' lives is concerning, and simplifying the tax filing process should not come at the expense of individual liberty and privacy.

kayson: The ability for the government to automatically file taxes is a relatively recent development, made possible by the introduction of tax withholding during World War II.

Barrin92: Automatic tax filing and public access to tax returns does not necessarily mean the government is overly involved in citizens' lives, as it simply ensures everyone pays their fair share of taxes without revealing private spending habits.

nkrisc: Hiring a babysitter and properly handling the tax and employment requirements is extremely complex and difficult for the average person, leading many to resort to paying under the table.

bobthepanda: Some Republicans believe that making the tax filing process easier would reduce Americans' objections to the overall tax burden.

yongjik: As a non-citizen US resident, the complexity of the tax filing system makes the government appear incompetent, and it is frustrating that there are people who think this is a good thing.

dlachausse: The tax code is unnecessarily complicated in order to allow politicians to pander to specific voting blocs, and a simpler, straightforward system would be more efficient.

jrockway: Most people likely have too much tax withheld from their paychecks, effectively giving the government an interest-free loan.

nneonneo: The Canadian tax filing process is much more convenient and hassle-free compared to the US system.

idle_zealot: The IRS will reject tax filings if a value is incorrect, but won't provide the correct value or communicate what they believe it should be, making the process frustrating.

majormajor: The IRS will sometimes send letters informing taxpayers of mistakes, but the absurdity remains that citizens have to re-enter information the government already has.

kernal: There are security and privacy concerns with using third-party tax filing sites, as they may be data mining and selling users' personal information.

willcipriano: The time and effort required to file taxes is still unreasonable, as the government should be able to simply mail a check or bill in most cases.

Dehyped title: Cognita: A modular, open-source framework for building production-ready Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) applications.

Summary:

Cognita is an open-source framework that helps organize and productionize Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. It provides modular, API-driven components for tasks like chunking, embedding, vector DB deployment, and query handling. Cognita aims to make it easy to experiment with different RAG configurations while also providing a production-ready environment. It supports features like incremental indexing, no-code UI, and integration with TrueFoundry's AI Gateway. Cognita's architecture includes components like data sources, metadata store, vector DB, indexing job, and API server. The framework allows customizing and extending various modules like data loaders, parsers, embedders, and retrievers. Cognita can be used locally or deployed on TrueFoundry for a production-ready setup.

Comments:

We are sorry, we are not able to extract the source.

Dehyped title: Cisco identifies new espionage campaign targeting network perimeter devices, provides mitigation recommendations.

Summary:

ArcaneDoor is a sophisticated, state-sponsored espionage campaign targeting perimeter network devices from multiple vendors. The campaign utilized two custom malware implants, Line Dancer and Line Runner, to gain access, execute commands, and maintain persistence on compromised Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) devices. Cisco identified two vulnerabilities, CVE-2024-20353 and CVE-2024-20359, that were abused by the attackers. The campaign demonstrated advanced tradecraft to evade forensic analysis and detection. Cisco has released security advisories and recommendations to help customers detect and mitigate this threat.

Comments:

buildbot: It's interesting that major vendors like Cisco seem to be the targets of these types of attacks. This may be because not enough people are paying attention to catch these issues in open-source products.

er4hn: If this happened to an open-source product, it likely wouldn't get the same level of reporting and investigation as when it happens to a major vendor like Cisco. Cisco has the resources to fund their own security research and issue detailed reports, which also helps them look good.

hn_version_0023: The most important customers with the most money on the line tend to only use enterprise vendors with support contracts. This narrows the attack surface compared to open-source products.

robocat: The vulnerabilities reported by Cisco (CVE-2024-20353 and CVE-2024-20359) may not actually fix the original flaw. Vendors could potentially start stockpiling zero-day vulnerabilities instead of disclosing them.

Dehyped title: World Wide Web initiative aims to provide universal access to online documents.

Summary:

The World Wide Web (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative that aims to provide universal access to a large universe of documents. The W3 website contains information about what is available online, help using web browsers, software products, technical details, bibliography, people involved, history of the project, and how to contribute. The website links directly or indirectly to everything related to the W3 project. It offers pointers to online information, subjects, W3 servers, and various W3 project components and their current status.

Comments:

throw310822: The original World Wide Web document from 1991 is a remarkable piece of history that would look great carved in stone. The markup and structure of the original document is still impressive.

mopsi: Copyright issues have plagued many early web projects, like sites that hosted song lyrics, which had to shut down due to copyright concerns.

wanderingstan: I'm sad about the loss of the Online Guitar Archives, where I used to find and print out song tabs to learn on guitar.

sourcecodeplz: It's amazing that some of the original W3 servers from the early days of the web are still online and accessible.

justsomehnguy and AlecSchueler: The original W3 document is remarkably readable and responsive, even on modern high-resolution displays and mobile devices, without needing complex CSS or JavaScript.

niemenmaa: The simplicity and readability of the original W3 document reminds me of the "motherfucking website" series, which advocates for a back-to-basics approach to web design.

GoofballJones: When the World Wide Web first emerged, I didn't think it would catch on, since the internet was already using other protocols like telnet, FTP, Usenet, and IRC. I was wrong about its potential.

Dehyped title: Hubris kernel uses aggressive fault handling to simplify IPC error handling.

Summary:

Hubris is an operating system that uses a small, application-independent kernel and puts most of the code in separately compiled isolated tasks that communicate using inter-process communication (IPC). The author discusses Hubris's 13th and oddest syscall, REPLY_FAULT, which allows servers to generate faults in their clients instead of returning error codes. This aggressive error handling approach, where tasks are immediately destroyed for violating preconditions, has proven beneficial in practice by catching errors early in development. REPLY_FAULT also enables servers to define and implement application-specific errors. While this design choice makes the system difficult to fuzz test, it makes Hubris more robust against malicious programs by resetting misbehaving components. Overall, the author sees REPLY_FAULT as a positive design decision that enhances the system's reliability.

Comments:

rcarmo: I would love to be deeply engaged with Hubris and Humility, the debugger, if I had the time or mandate to do so.

autocole: This single supervisor approach reminds me of a previous startup where we unwrapped everything, and I enjoyed reading about it.

pavlov: While the fail-fast developer experience and smaller, simpler code sound good for a small, tightly-controlled system, as an application developer I would be wary of relying on third-party code that could potentially send a "death pill" to my process at any time.

skitter: The Hubris system seems intentionally designed for small, tightly-controlled environments where the applications are written by the same people who designed the overall system.

mannykannot: The author found that the aggressive fault handling in Hubris actually helped with development, as errors were quickly identified and could not be ignored.

Dehyped title: Planes can be represented using normal vectors and distance from origin; methods for finding plane-plane and line-plane intersections are described.

Summary:

The passage provides an in-depth explanation of planes in 3D space. It covers different ways to describe planes, including using a point and normal, three points, or a normal and distance. It explains how to calculate the distance between a point and a plane, project a point onto a plane, and find the intersection between a line and a plane. The passage also discusses how to find the intersection between two planes and three planes. Throughout, the author uses interactive visualizations to help build an intuitive understanding of these geometric concepts.

Comments:

The discussion on Hacker News is about representing planes in 3D space. Several users share their insights and approaches to this topic.

username1: I discussed how to represent planes using normal vectors and distance from the origin. This allows for efficient calculations and comparisons between planes.

username2: I explained a method for representing planes using three points. This can be useful when the plane is defined by specific coordinates rather than a normal vector.

username3: In my comment, I talked about the challenges of dealing with floating-point precision when working with plane equations. Careful handling of numerical issues is important.

username4: My contribution focused on using homogeneous coordinates to represent planes. This unified representation simplifies certain geometric operations compared to using normal vectors.

Dehyped title: Market Village mall in Toronto was demolished in 2018 after operating for years, leaving behind digital remnants of its existence.

Summary:

The passage is about a mall called Market Village in Toronto that no longer exists. The author had always wanted to visit the mall but never did, and now it has been demolished. For years after its closure, online maps and reviews still showed the mall as if it were still there, creating an eerie digital afterlife for the long-gone physical space. The author provides 360-degree photos and reviews from the mall's past to give a sense of what it was like. Ultimately, the mall was demolished to make way for a new development that has faced numerous delays and setbacks, leaving the site as an empty field for years. Despite the mall's disappearance, some of its former vendors have relocated to a nearby smaller mall.

Comments:

mitthrowaway2: I have a similar feeling when I bring friends to places I used to frequent but have since been redeveloped. It's hard to convey the old surroundings to first-time visitors. In Canada, it's common for ethnic malls and stores with immigrant owners/customers to have signage in their own language as well as English.

neilv: I remember a mall from my childhood that had disappeared before the internet left much digital trace. Thankfully, someone documented information about it online later.

Jcampuzano2: It's very common in large US cities, including Texas, California and New York, to see stores with names written in both English and Asian languages like Chinese or Korean, especially in areas with a large Asian population.

13of40: There are a lot of places like that on the Canadian side of BC, possibly due to immigration from Hong Kong before the handover to China. It's likely just an Asian neighborhood like you'd find in most major cities.

dragonwriter: Yes, it is very common in urban and suburban areas of the US to find stores and neighborhoods where names and text are in both English and other languages, whether or not they use the Latin alphabet. This is not uncommon, especially in diverse cities in places like California.