The year is 1656. Your body is wracked by violent chills. Your head pounds and you're too weak to sit up. In your feverish state, you see a strange-looking man wearing a beak-like mask, his body covered from head to toe. Without seeing his face, you know: you have the plague. So, where did these iconic outfits come from? Stephanie Honchell Smith...
In the coming years, artificial intelligence is probably going to change your life— and likely the entire world. But people have a hard time agreeing on exactly how AI will affect our society. Can we build AI systems that help us fix the world? Or are we doomed to a robotic takeover? Explore the limitations of artificial intelligence and the pos...
Viruses are wildly successful organisms. There are about 100 million times as many virus particles on Earth as there are stars in the observable universe. Even so, viruses can and do go extinct. So, what is the possibility of the virus that causes COVID-19 going extinct? Explore the three main ways viruses can be driven to extinction. [Directed ...
Many economists think that an eternally growing economy is necessary to keep improving people's lives, and that if the global economy stops growing, people would fight more over the fixed amount of value that exists, rather than working to generate new value. Which raises the question: is infinite growth possible on a finite planet? Explore how ...
A 2016 survey of freelancers in six countries found that those who freelance by choice– 70% of respondents– were happier than people in traditional jobs, specifically when it came to things like independence and flexibility in terms of where and when they work. So what does it take to be a successful freelancer? Explore the benefits and drawback...
As automation eliminates structured jobs and careers, schools should focus on training students to be bold, creative and entrepreneurial. Instead, argues education advocate Ted Dintersmith, the core purpose of education has been lost in a wave of testing, data and increasingly irrelevant metrics. In this talk, he underscores the need to educate...
Since 1850, global average temperatures have risen by 1 degree Celsius. That may not sound like a lot, but it is. Why? 1 degree is an average. Many places have already gotten much warmer and if average temperatures increase one more degree, the coldest nights in the Arctic might get 10 degrees warmer. So how did we get here? And what can be done...
People have become increasingly worried that the threats we face today, like climate change and rising inequality, can't be solved by a capitalist economic system. So, is that true? And if it is, can we fix capitalism or do we need to tear the system down and build a new one from scratch? Explore the different types of capitalism and the role it...
Muscles and joints shift and jostle. The heart's pounding rhythm speeds up. Blood roars through arteries and veins. Over the course of a pregnancy, every organ in the body changes. Initiated by a range of hormones, these changes begin as soon as a pregnancy begins. Explore what we know— and don't know— about pregnancy's effects on the body and b...
In the 1980s, the world faced a huge problem: there was a rapidly expanding hole in the ozone layer. If it continued to grow, rates of skin cancer could skyrocket, photosynthesis would be impaired, agricultural production would plummet, and entire ecosystems would collapse. So, what happened? Stephanie Honchell Smith shares how decisive global c...
Hi everyone. I have been learning about deep learning for some time, and I've tried to implement CNN, neural networks, U-Net, transformers etc. to learn and understand them more and also to get my hands dirty on the frameworks, however I've noticed that many tutorials online are not very detailed, so concepts are not explained clearly, so people would understand neural networks only shallowly. On the other hand, many sources like books may show many, many equations but do not show the
It's opinionated software because I think kanban is the best and simple tool to organize tasks. Notes are for writing longer text like journal. And calendar to manage what and when you need to do something.I started with using three different tools for that but having everything in one place gives you benefit of implementing search everywhere and you don't have to copy yourself.Kanban board is integrated with Calendar view so if you have tasks with time they will show up in Calendar au
I've been using Cursor for some non-coding tasks and it worked perfectly. The problem is that the VS Code IDE is designed for coding, and I needed a better interface for those non-coding tasks. Then I built a few extensions to add the cutom layer: 1.CSV Viewer for data analytics, renders csv files as an editable spreadsheet 2.Slide Maker, renders .md file as slides, and can be created and edited through the Cursor agent. 3.I18n Manager, loads multiple translation files in a single table sid
Hey HN, I’m Julia, my team and I are building Rag-in-a-Box (https://www.joinable.ai/rag-in-a-box), hosted RAG service that let’s builders of any skill level launch their own RAG app loaded with their own data in minutes.[ What can you do ] 1. Load your documents (PDFs, CSV, PPTs, Word Docs, etc) and make them searchable instantly. All your data stays private and encrypted.2. Choose latest open source LLM (Llama 4, Deepseek, GPT-oss, etc) to interact with your docs3. Access your ho
We built Humanmark to provide cryptographic proof that a request came from a human. It uses the secure hardware in smartphones to create attestations of user presence.Note on trying it: The demo requires installing our free app from the App Store or Play Store.Backstory: We were toying around with building an online service that was human-only and saw that existing off-the-shelf verification methods can't enforce this to any reasonable degree. CAPTCHAs are easily solved by automation, AI ca
I've released an MCP server that gives LLMs full access to JSR, enabling natural language package search, dependency analysis, and publishing.
Tools for blend passphrase into public entropy. Quote from LLM:> contropy (CONstant enTROPY) is a TypeScript/JavaScript library that aggregates entropy data from multiple heterogeneous sources, providing both programmatic and command-line interfaces for accessing diverse streams of constantly changing information. The system is designed to offer reliable access to entropy through a unified interface while maintaining cross-platform compatibility between Deno and Node.js ecosystems.Try ru
A powerful i18n translation management CLI tool for Vue.js, Next.js, and other JavaScript projects. Designed for AI agents to efficiently manage translations without reading large locale files, saving tokens and preventing file corruption.
I built a small library for handling state in a transactional way, which gives you automatic conflict resolution and rollback of optimistic updates. It solves some issues I had implementing client-server sync and optimistic updates - so much manual tracking is involved making sure old requests that finish after newer requests aren't overwriting fresh state, and making sure rolling back optimistic updates of older requests isn't destroying the optimistic updates of newer requests. Espec
Found Blue Dwarf (bluedwarf.top), a minimalist social platform with no JavaScript, ads, or tracking. It works surprisingly well on really old hardware and slow internet. Tested it on a 2000s ThinkPad — loads fast and simple.<p>Would love to hear what you think.