1. A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy
Total comment counts : 53
Summary
The article discusses the controversy surrounding Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) or Abusive Head Trauma (AHT). The author, Cyrille Rossant, co-edited a book that thoroughly analyzes the subject from an interdisciplinary perspective. Rossant shares his personal experience of his own son being diagnosed with SBS/AHT and how it led him to question the scientific validity of the shaking hypothesis. He found that the clinical literature supporting the theory suffers from methodological shortcomings and circular reasoning. The article emphasizes the importance of recognizing the scientific unreliability of SBS/AHT determinations and calls for a more robust understanding of the current state of scientific knowledge on the subject.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the issue of child welfare organizations fighting against scientific evidence, which suggests that taking children away based on false accusations is more harmful to their well-being. The author expresses frustration at the injustice that occurs in the name of protecting children and questions whether it is a cultural or innate psychological phenomenon. They feel that their rational thinking about the risks children face is sometimes criticized or seen as abnormal. The author also highlights the importance of monitoring relationships and acquaintances, as those close to the child can pose a greater danger than strangers.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article highlights the issue of doctors misdiagnosing cases of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) instead of recognizing the potentially life-threatening consequences of a minor head injury. The author emphasizes the difficulty for defense lawyers to conduct thorough research on medical papers to uncover such mistakes, potentially causing wrongful convictions or the loss of children. The article concludes by expressing hope that Cyrille Rossant’s findings could help save lives by making this information more widely known.
2. Mistral 7B
Total comment counts : 47
Summary
The article announces the release of Mistral 7B, a powerful language model with 7.3 billion parameters. The model is released under the Apache 2.0 license and can be easily fine-tuned for various tasks. It outperforms Llama 2 13B chat in a chat task. Mistral 7B also performs well on different benchmarks and is comparable to Llama 34B in terms of performance. The model is particularly superior in code and reasoning benchmarks. The article also discusses the sliding window attention mechanism used in Mistral 7B, which improves computational cost and speed. Additionally, the article mentions that Mistral 7B has been fine-tuned on instruction datasets and achieves impressive performance. The Mistral 7B Instruct model is a demonstration of the base model’s generalization capabilities. The article expresses gratitude to various individuals and teams for their assistance and support.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article acknowledges Mistral for being the first company to Apache license a model in its class, unlike other companies such as Meta and DeciLM who claimed to be open source but had restrictions and did not use an open source license. Mistral deserves recognition for actually implementing an Apache license.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author initially had doubts about the effectiveness of a new MacBook Air M1 and its comparability to GPT3.5, but later admits that it performs exceptionally well. They inquire if there is a similar tool to this one, but specifically tailored for function calling APIs and working with structured data such as JSON. The author expresses concern that OpenAI may discontinue support for specialized models like this in the future. They acknowledge that while this may not be as glamorous as multimodal chat UIs, it is an invaluable tool for automation.
3. Writing a debugger from scratch: Breakpoints
Total comment counts : 12
Summary
The article describes the implementation of breakpoint functionality in the DbgRs debugger. The author explains the changes they made to the code, including creating new files for event handling and utilities. They also added the ability to resolve names to addresses and implemented commands for setting, clearing, and listing breakpoints. The article then covers the implementation of hardware breakpoints using the Debug Registers on x86 processors. The author concludes by mentioning that viewing the call stack is the next step in the debugger’s development.
Top 1 Comment Summary
This article tells an anecdote about a team building a Modula-2 compiler for OS/2. They were working on the debugger and reached a point where the debugger was feature complete. They realized they could use the debugger to debug itself. Since OS/2 had true multiple processes, they could run the debugger in one process and attach it to another process, which happened to be another instance of the debugger. This led to a realization that they could debug the debugger while it was debugging itself.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article talks about the author’s experience with Tree-sitter, a tool for generating fast, incremental parsers. Tree-sitter is particularly well-suited for writing “language servers” for IDEs, which re-parse code incrementally as the user works. The author finds Tree-sitter to be an enormous practical advance in this area. They also highlight the discovery that Tree-sitter can be used from Rust, which they think is fantastic. The article concludes by mentioning that Tree-sitter has support for being used from a wide range of languages, not just Rust.
4. Arena allocator tips and tricks
Total comment counts : 21
Summary
The article discusses the author’s approach to arena allocation, which involves using memory buffers and offsets to allocate and deallocate objects. The author shares their practices and lessons learned, emphasizing the simplicity and efficiency of their approach. They also provide examples and tips for implementing arena allocation in programs. The article concludes by mentioning the author’s plans to write future articles on arena-backed data structures.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author of the article discusses their hobby project in which they pass an allocator argument to every function or object that requires allocation. They express a preference for using bump pointer or stack-based allocators, as it allows them to not worry about deallocation of individual objects. They also mention writing a unit testing framework to test out-of-memory conditions, as it is easy to do with control of allocators. By injecting an allocator that calculates allocations during unit tests and injecting OOM at known allocation points, the author has been able to uncover and address bugs and crashes that occur in such scenarios. The overall aim of the project is to create a resilient HTTP server with request-scoped allocations and recovery from out-of-memory issues without crashes.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses a technique used to run Lua in PlayStation 2 games. The trick involves hooking Lua’s realloc function into Doug Lea’s Malloc, which is set up to run in arena mode. This allows Lua to fragment the memory arena without impacting the rest of the small address space in the PlayStation 2, which has limited RAM and no memory paging.
5. Essence: A desktop OS built from scratch, for control and simplicity
Total comment counts : 28
Summary
The article mentions that the website is optimized for users with JavaScript disabled.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses a new operating system that is built from scratch and has its own custom kernel. The author expresses admiration for people who create their own operating systems or browsers, even if they may not gain widespread popularity. The developers of this new operating system are praised for their efforts.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the features of a landing page for a software called Essence. The landing page includes a screenshot, information about the software’s compatibility with low-powered hardware, its performance, and the availability of its code under the MIT license. The page also includes a demo video. The author believes that Essence could be popular in areas not covered by mainstream desktop operating systems, and suggests that information about the developer toolchain and “getting started” could be included on the page. The author also suggests that Essence could differentiate itself by offering first-class support for touch interfaces and catering to IoT devices.
6. I got robbed of my first kernel contribution
Total comment counts : 77
Summary
The author, a software engineer at Cisco, encountered an issue with debugging multithreaded applications on a PowerPC32 architecture. After extensive investigation, they discovered that a memory corruption issue caused certain threads to be in the wrong process state, rendering them uncontrolled by the debugger. The issue was traced back to a buffer overflow in ptrace_put_fpr, which led to important fields of task_struct, including the state of the process, being overwritten. The author sent a patch to the Linux kernel security team but faced challenges in getting it accepted, as the PowerPC maintainer preferred their own fix. The author felt that their work was not properly recognized and was discouraged from further involvement in the kernel community.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article argues that it would have been more appropriate to give credit to a person who found and submitted a fix for a security issue, even if their patch was not fully accepted. The author believes that no one else was addressing the issue until this person stepped in. Not giving credit and instead using the person’s work without proper acknowledgment is seen as unethical. The author expresses surprise that people support the maintainer who did not give credit. They suggest that if someone took full credit for your work, even if it was a collaboration, it would not feel right and could negatively impact future collaborations.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article highlights several reasons why the maintainer’s patch is better than the original patch. Firstly, it doesn’t lose a test from the 32-bit case. Secondly, it keeps the fallback assignment in the put function. Thirdly, it avoids using a pointless macro. Additionally, the article suggests that the maintainer should acknowledge the thorough investigation and identification of the root cause by Miculas, who had a similar fix. The term “Reported-By” is deemed imprecise in expressing the extent of Miculas’ involvement.
7. Building a string art machine
Total comment counts : 9
Summary
The article discusses the process of automating the creation of string art. The author first creates software to generate an accurate representation of an image using string and nails. They then work on physically aligning and dispensing nails, facing difficulties in finding suitable nails and designing a sorting mechanism. The author builds the CNC gantry using linear rails and assembles the machine with a RAMPS 1.4 board. They develop software to determine the string placement order and route the string to avoid intersections with other nails. They also experiment with different methods for inserting the string. After several iterations and modifications, the author successfully creates string art pieces using the automated machine. They make improvements to increase the reliability and efficiency of the machine, such as adding a nail loading mechanism and a nail verification tool. The article includes images and videos demonstrating the process and the final string art creations.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author of the article read it and felt like they might be the only person in the world who had that thought. However, they discovered that the first comment on HN (Hacker News) was from another person who had the same experience. The author acknowledges that HN is a small, curated community, and the world is a much bigger place.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article mentions that the writer built a machine similar to the one being discussed in 2018-2020. However, they did not automate the nail pick-and-place part and used epoxy instead of plaster. The article also provides a link to their Instagram page for more information.
8. Merlin’s Wisdom Project
Total comment counts : 18
Summary
The article highlights some advice given by Merlin Mann, a podcaster and retired project manager, who lives in San Francisco. The author mentions the importance of being careful about what we pretend to be and keeping our “crap detector” on at all times. They also emphasize the need to let go of arguments that are futile and take us away from our purpose. Overall, the article encourages readers to take the advice that is helpful to them and let go of what is not.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article advises against arguing on the internet, explaining that people will not remember the outcome of the argument but will instead remember that you are someone who argues online. The author also suggests that this advice applies to other contexts, such as friend groups or coworkers, where you have to be exceptionally correct to be remembered as someone who was right about something. Otherwise, you risk being perceived as someone who argues about things regardless of the outcome.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the reasons behind a situation before attempting to alter it, using the concept of Chesterton’s Fence. In the context of developers working with existing code, the author advises against refactoring or replacing code without fully comprehending its purpose and functionality. The author shares personal experiences of making this mistake in the past and highlights the importance of understanding the complexity and dependencies of the old code before attempting to make changes. The article also mentions that while there may be cases where changes are needed due to the deterioration of the old system, it is crucial to differentiate between accidental complexity and necessary complexity.
9. Radar Maps Platform
Total comment counts : 15
Summary
The article promotes Radar’s location and geofencing solutions for businesses, offering news and insights via email subscription.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses a pricing page for a website called Radar. The author mentions that they were initially interested in the address autocompletion feature, but the pricing page does not provide any information about its cost. Additionally, the author expresses confusion about the term “monthly tracked user” and its relevance. The author concludes by expressing a desire for the “Contact Sales” aspect to be removed.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article expresses disappointment with Radar, a service that was expected to provide a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mapping service similar to Capella Space. Instead, Radar turned out to be an adtech platform, leaving the author puzzled about the reason behind their choice of name.
10. GPU.zip: side channel attack that exposes visual data processed on the GPU
Total comment counts : 9
Summary
The article discusses a new side-channel attack called GPU.zip that exposes visual data processed on the graphics processing unit. This attack exploits a data-dependent optimization called graphical data compression found in modern GPUs. The authors analyze this optimization and demonstrate that it can be used to leak visual data, violating the security model of web browsers. The paper provides details on the attack and its implications. The researchers tested GPUs from various vendors and found that all tested GPUs are affected. While most sensitive websites already deny being embedded by cross-origin websites, some websites remain vulnerable. The paper also discusses the technical aspects of GPU graphical data compression and the algorithms used by different vendors. The researchers disclosed their findings to GPU vendors and Google, but as of September 2023, no vendor has committed to patching the vulnerability. The article concludes by providing additional information on the GPU.zip logo and source code.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the author’s experience running webgl shaders in Chrome and encountering a problem where portions of other app windows would appear in the result with a post-processing webgl shader filter applied to it. The author initially thought it was a glitch on their system, but it was good to know that it wasn’t just their system experiencing this issue.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article suggests that there is a need to address a new class of side channel attacks. It suggests that a reevaluation of the current computing architecture or a change in how untrusted code is handled may be necessary to prevent these issues from recurring.