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2023-07-06

Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The Netherlands

  • The demoscene in The Netherlands has been accepted as Dutch national intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO.
  • This recognition adds to the success story of the demoscene as the first digital culture accepted by UNESCO.
  • The acceptance of the demoscene in The Netherlands may have positive implications for pending applications in other countries and may increase the likelihood of joint international applications.

Industry Reactions

  • Demoscene, a combination of art and engineering coding, has been accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in the Netherlands.
  • Demoscene has influenced coding and programming, inspiring programmers to push the boundaries of what is achievable with limited resources.
  • The recognition of demoscene as cultural heritage solidifies its importance, contributes to its preservation, and showcases its impact on various industries.

Fast

  • This post highlights examples of fast and ambitious accomplishments in various fields, showcasing the power of human ingenuity and collaboration.
  • It emphasizes that many of these remarkable achievements took place before 1970, raising the question of why similar projects today face delays and bureaucratic hurdles.
  • The post offers possible explanations such as changes in governance, bureaucratic red tape, and the influence of interest groups, providing readers with valuable insights into the challenges of modern infrastructure projects.

Industry Reactions

  • The post discusses examples of fast projects, such as the development of the iPod and JavaScript implementation, highlighting the impressive speed of execution.
  • It emphasizes the importance of prior research and collaboration in achieving fast results, using the example of mRNA COVID vaccines.
  • The post acknowledges that fast projects may face challenges and consequences, emphasizing the need for finding a balance between speed and efficiency.

Hacker News user blogroll

  • This post is about a "Hacker News Blogroll" that includes a collection of personal blogs shared by Hacker News users.
  • The blogroll includes a wide range of topics, such as reverse engineering, cybersecurity, devops, cloud computing, programming, and more.
  • The blogs are written by individuals who are experts in their respective fields and provide valuable insights and knowledge related to technology and software engineering.

Industry Reactions

  • Hacker News user created a blogroll to aggregate and search through personal blogs shared on the platform.
  • The blogroll includes a list of blogs and the latest posts from each blog.
  • Users can recommend blogs, sort by various criteria, and explore random blogs.

PhD Simulator

  • The post is titled "PhD Simulator."
  • The post was written by Mianzhi Wang and is copyrighted in 2023.
  • The post includes a section on "Help" and a section on "Privacy Notice.".

Industry Reactions

  • The "PhD Simulator" is a game that accurately reflects the stress, challenges, and realities of pursuing a PhD.
  • It highlights the importance of persevering through setbacks, adapting research focus, and facing various obligations and responsibilities.
  • The game provides a unique perspective on the PhD experience, shedding light on lesser-known aspects of academic life.

Why is desalination so difficult?

  • Desalination, the process of removing salt from seawater, is a difficult and energy-intensive technology that only provides less than 1% of global water needs despite operating more than 18,000 desalination plants worldwide.
  • The two main methods of desalination are distillation, which involves boiling and condensing water, and reverse osmosis, which uses pressure to push water through a membrane while leaving behind salt and impurities.
  • Desalination plants face challenges such as high energy consumption, the need for pretreatment to remove contaminants, disposal of concentrated saline waste, and the high costs associated with building and operating these plants. However, desalination can be a viable solution in areas with severe water scarcity and can provide a reliable source of water during drought conditions.

Industry Reactions

  • Desalination is a challenging process due to the unique properties of salt and its interaction with water.
  • Disposal of waste brine, a byproduct of desalination, is a major challenge with potential negative effects on ecosystems.
  • More research and innovation are needed to make desalination more efficient, sustainable, and economically viable.

Rejected GitHub profile achievements

  • This post showcases a collection of rejected achievements for GitHub Profile achievements.
  • The rejected achievements listed include humorous titles like "Vital Contributor," "Sith Lord," "Procrastinator," "Secret Santa," and more.
  • The post emphasizes that it is a joke and welcomes contributions from readers.

Industry Reactions

  • Various humorous and fictional achievements that developers jokingly propose for GitHub profiles are discussed.
  • These achievements poke fun at different types of behavior, such as posting unhelpful comments, creating fake profiles, and making excessive commits.
  • While these achievements are not actually part of GitHub's official features, they provide entertaining commentary on the gamification of the platform.

Simple Unix Chat

  • Simple Unix Chat (suc) is a minimalistic chat system that offers real-time, rich-text chat, file sharing, access control, automation, and encryption.
  • suc is implemented in just five lines of bash, making it incredibly lightweight and efficient compared to other chat systems like Mattermost or Slack.
  • suc leverages SSH for authentication, UNIX's access control API for user permissions, and ANSI escape codes for rich text display, resulting in a secure and feature-rich chat experience with minimal code.

Industry Reactions

  • "Simple Unix Chat" is a chat platform that leverages existing Unix tools instead of reinventing them.
  • The core functionality of suc can be implemented with only a few lines of code, compared to the hundreds of thousands of lines in platforms like Slack.
  • Suc focuses on the simplicity and efficiency of Unix tools, and highlights the potential for creating powerful applications without excessive code complexity.

Regex engine internals as a library

  • The blog post discusses the rewriting of Rust's regex crate to improve internal composition and add optimizations while maintaining correctness.
  • A new crate, regex-automata, was created to expose the regex crate internals as their own APIs, making it the first regex library to do so to this extent.
  • The rewrite addressed problems with composition, testing, and the need for niche APIs, and introduced critical optimization techniques like literal extraction for faster and more efficient regex matching.

Industry Reactions

  • The Rust regex crate is highly praised for its performance and ease of use.
  • Regular expressions are powerful tools for parsing and pattern matching in programming languages.
  • The regex-automata crate is a new release that provides a library for regex engine internals, allowing for more customization and optimization.

Bret Victor update

  • The post titled "Bret Victor update" may be about a new update or development related to a person named Bret Victor.
  • The post could be discussing a technology, project, or innovation that Bret Victor is involved in.
  • The post might highlight something exciting or unique that Bret Victor has done in the tech industry.

Industry Reactions

  • Bret Victor has released an update on his project Dynamicland, showcasing the strengths of the Realtalk demo.
  • Some commenters express skepticism about the practicality and limitations of the physical interface in scientific and design fields.
  • Others appreciate the value of the tactile and intuitive aspect of the interface for certain tasks, such as molecular chemistry, and the potential for enhancing spatial reasoning skills.

Firefox 115 can remotely disable any extension on any site

  • Firefox version 115.0 introduced a new feature that allows Mozilla to remotely disable certain extensions on specific websites for various reasons, including security concerns.
  • This feature is different from other browsers like Safari and Chrome, as they do not have a remote domain-specific kill switch for extensions.
  • The user interface design of the feature is flawed, as it hides the warning of disabled extensions when they are pinned to the toolbar.

Industry Reactions

  • Firefox 115 introduces a feature that can remotely disable any extension on any site.
  • Mozilla has not clearly communicated the ability for users to disable or override this feature.
  • Concerns are raised about user choice, communication, and the role of Mozilla in controlling their users' browsing experiences.