hackernews

1. Anatomy of a credit card rewards program Total comment counts : 37 Summary The article discusses the importance of interchange fees in the credit card industry. Interchange fees are charged to businesses by credit card companies and are used to incentivize customers to use their cards. These fees are not constant and vary based on factors such as the type of card being used. The article also explores how the rewards economy differs in various regions, with the United States having a robust rewards economy while Europe has fewer lucrative rewards....

1. 3D + 2D: Testing out my cross-platform WASM graphics engine Total comment counts : 38 Summary The article discusses the development of a portable, embeddable graphics framework called Renderlet. The author explains that they were inspired by WebAssembly (Wasm) and its ability to run anywhere and be embedded into various applications. They wanted to create a framework that was high-level enough for app developers to easily create graphics, while also taking advantage of the GPU for high performance....

1. Low Cost Robot Arm Total comment counts : 28 Summary This article is about a low-cost robot arm that can be built for approximately $250. The arm can be controlled by building a second robot arm, referred to as the “leader arm,” which controls the first arm, known as the “follower arm.” The design of the leader arm is inspired by the GELLO project but is simpler to construct. The robot arm is well-suited for robot learning, and it can also fold clothes....

1. LLaMA now goes faster on CPUs Total comment counts : 44 Summary The article discusses improvements made to the llamafile project, which is a local language model project started by Mozilla. The author has written new matrix multiplication kernels for llamafile, which enable it to read prompts and images faster. These improvements result in a significant increase in performance, with prompt evaluation time going anywhere between 30% and 500% faster when using certain weights on CPUs....

1. Guess my RGB Total comment counts : 57 Summary error Top 1 Comment Summary The article discusses an optimal strategy for solving a problem where you cannot see the color but only the answers when you click submit. The current strategy, called hillclimbing, suggests moving to the right until the score drops, and then moving one to the left. This strategy results in around 9 tries per slider and 27 tries per color on average....

1. Prolog language for PostgreSQL proof of concept Total comment counts : 13 Summary The article discusses the importance of feedback and states that it is taken seriously by the writer. It also mentions the PostgreSQL Prolog language handler. Top 1 Comment Summary The author shares their positive experience with Prolog, describing a project they worked on in the 1980s. They built a prototype of an air/land battle simulator using Common Lisp and later rewrote it in ExperProlog on a Mac....

1. Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise Total comment counts : 94 Summary The article discusses the Open Source Software Security Wiki and provides information on mailing lists and their use. It recommends reading about mailing lists on Wikipedia and following guidelines for proper formatting of messages. Top 1 Comment Summary The apparent author of a backdoor was in communication with the person writing the article, trying to get xz 5....

1. Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison Total comment counts : 99 Summary Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of crypto exchange FTX, has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for defrauding customers and investors. His parents expressed their heartbreak and vowed to continue fighting for their son. The sentence has drawn criticism from the crypto community, who point out the disparity in punishment compared to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of Silk Road, who received a life sentence....

1. Recent ‘MFA Bombing’ Attacks Targeting Apple Users Total comment counts : 22 Summary Apple customers have recently fallen victim to elaborate phishing attacks that exploit a bug in Apple’s password reset feature. The attacks involve flooding the target’s Apple devices with system prompts, halting device use until the user responds to each prompt. The scammers then call the victim, posing as Apple support, and claim that the user’s account is under attack....

1. Radios, how do they work? Total comment counts : 24 Summary This article provides an introduction to radio communications for hobbyists. It explains the concepts of antennas and electromagnetic waves, discussing how information can be encoded and transmitted through altering wave characteristics. The article also introduces the idea of a half-wavelength dipole antenna and explains its resonant behavior. It concludes by mentioning the presence of dead zones in the antenna’s field propagation due to destructive interference....