The hottest Technology Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
Category
Top Technology Topics

Here come the winners

Thái | Hacker | Kỹ sư tin tặc • 0 implied HN points • 29 Dec 15
🕹 Technology Coding Awards Software Development
  1. Manh Luat Nguyen won by creatively implementing memcpy with pop instructions to save space in the code.
  2. Pham Viet Hoa received a special prize for a 10-byte implementation that didn't pass unit tests, but was appreciated by Bruce.
  3. The organizers granted full scholarships to all young participants despite an oversight in booking a small room for the event.

Quality Engineering Basics: Automated vs. Manual

QUALITY BOSS • 0 implied HN points • 11 Mar 24
🕹 Technology Software Testing Automation Quality Assurance Risk management Frameworks
  1. Deciding which tests to automate or run manually is important. You should look at the risk level and necessary effort for each test.
  2. Using a scoring system can help prioritize tests. This involves scoring impact, likelihood, frequency, and the effort required for manual or automated testing.
  3. Starting small with your scoring approach is a good idea. You can adjust the numbers until you find what works best for your testing needs.

TBC Insider Digest 3/30/21

Tech Buzz China Insider • 0 implied HN points • 31 Mar 21
🕹 Technology Tech news Regulations
  1. The post discusses upcoming events like the Columbia Business School China Business Conference and a Friday Weekly Hangout where participants can learn about various topics.
  2. The article provides insights on edtech regulations in China, particularly the rumors surrounding after-school tutoring programs and their potential impact on companies like $GSX, $TAL, and $EDU.
  3. There's talk about the Zhihu IPO and its lackluster debut, exploring concerns about the company's speed issues and the complexity of content commerce in China.
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Invitation to Tech Buzz China Insider

Tech Buzz China Insider • 0 implied HN points • 08 Apr 21
🕹 Technology China tech Tech community Investment Events Community Engagement
  1. Tech Buzz China Insider is a new product for China tech enthusiasts and investors, providing in-depth insights on key issues in China tech.
  2. The Insider membership includes 4+ weekly community posts and expert panels, as well as exclusive events and discussions.
  3. Members have access to discounts on partner events and can join a high-quality community where they can learn, share investment ideas, and engage with like-minded professionals.

TBC Insider 4/9 Digest

Tech Buzz China Insider • 0 implied HN points • 09 Apr 21
🕹 Technology Ecommerce Digital marketing Logistics Beverages Social media
  1. The TBC Insider 4/9 Digest is now moving to 1x a week and starting a WhatsApp group based on user feedback.
  2. Qdama, a fast-growing grocery chain backed by JD, is gaining attention for its unique discount policy and entry into the CGB market.
  3. The update on J&T Logistics, a key player in Chinese ecommerce, raising a substantial round of $1.8Bn signifies good news for the logistics sector.

AgentInstruct Uses Agentic Flows To Create Synthetic Training Data

Cobus Greyling on LLMs, NLU, NLP, chatbots & voicebots • 0 implied HN points • 16 Jul 24
🕹 Technology Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Data science Natural Language Automation
  1. Microsoft is using advanced methods to create high-quality synthetic training data for language models. This helps improve the data's diversity and reduces the need for human oversight.
  2. Agentic workflows are important because they allow multiple agents to generate and refine data, making the process more efficient and effective.
  3. The approach can create large amounts of customized data from unstructured sources quickly, which is useful for enhancing AI models during different training stages.

4/22 TBC Insider Digest

Tech Buzz China Insider • 0 implied HN points • 23 Apr 21
🕹 Technology Tech news E-commerce Startups Artificial Intelligence Logistics
  1. Alibaba and Antitrust Remedies: Summary of Alibaba's record fine and Ant restructuring proposal; Interesting discussions on Alibaba's longer-term prospects; Consider joining the conversation on Alibaba at a Crossroads.
  2. Rumored ByteDance Data: Highlights detailed rumors about ByteDance's data; Impacts on e-commerce, search, education, and gaming sectors; Encouraged to read and analyze cautiously.
  3. SF Express Record Loss: SF Express announces a record loss of $140-170mm USD; Significance due to the close tie between logistics and e-commerce in China; Discusses the slow adaptation to 'low price ecommerce' business.

4/29 TBC Insider Digest

Tech Buzz China Insider • 0 implied HN points • 30 Apr 21
🕹 Technology Tech news Antitrust Startups Social media Digital Platforms
  1. Kuaishou and Douyin are two prominent Chinese tech platforms with distinct strategies and characteristics.
  2. Meituan and Tencent are facing antitrust investigations and potential penalties exceeding billions of dollars.
  3. New companies like Manner Coffee and Hello (Bike) are making waves and going public, reflecting the dynamic nature of the Chinese market.

5/28 TBC Insider Digest

Tech Buzz China Insider • 0 implied HN points • 29 May 21
🕹 Technology Enterprise Software E-commerce Music
  1. Understanding the differences in enterprise software markets between China and the US can offer valuable insights into market trends and opportunities.
  2. SheIn's rapid growth and high valuation in the fashion industry despite secrecy around its financials highlights the importance of marketing ROI and product range.
  3. The NetEase Music IPO and its focus on livestreaming, along with the founder's love for music, showcase the diversity of industries and interests in the tech world.

As someone who cares about privacy, how do I feel working for Google?

Thái | Hacker | Kỹ sư tin tặc • 0 implied HN points • 27 Jan 16
🕹 Technology Privacy Data Mining Internet Security Digital Advertising
  1. Google invests heavily in internet security and privacy innovations.
  2. Google's data mining practices for personalized ads are common, but they offer users many choices to control their privacy.
  3. Google emphasizes user privacy by encrypting private data, providing privacy controls, and offering ads-free services.

Building a vernacular with your engineering team

It Depends / Nimble Autonomy • 0 implied HN points • 24 Mar 24
🕹 Technology Engineering Communication Team Building Leadership Culture
  1. Team members often use unique words and phrases that create a special language called vernacular. This helps communicate quickly and effectively within the group.
  2. Different interpretations of the same words can cause confusion and slow down teamwork, so it's important to clarify meanings and have a shared understanding.
  3. Creating a glossary of team-specific terms can help everyone stay on the same page. Updating this as new terms come in keeps the team united and aligned.

June 2021: Tech Buzz China Livecasts Now Live!

Tech Buzz China Insider • 0 implied HN points • 02 Jun 21
🕹 Technology Tech news Podcasts Business China Social media
  1. Tech Buzz China has launched livecasts where you can join and ask questions to China tech investors and practitioners. It's an opportunity to be part of their conversations.
  2. They are actively promoting their premium community for serious China tech enthusiasts called Tech Buzz China Insider, providing in-depth analyses not commonly found in English.
  3. The newsletter also highlights various media appearances, showcasing their expertise and insights on China's tech landscape.

6/6 TBC Insider Digest

Tech Buzz China Insider • 0 implied HN points • 07 Jun 21
🕹 Technology Tech news China tech E-commerce Operating Systems Cloud Computing
  1. The 3-child rule in China and the crackdown on EdTech are linked to efforts to increase fertility by addressing the high cost of education.
  2. AiHuiShou's IPO brought attention to the secondhand market for consumer electronics, and showed the close ties with JD.
  3. Huawei's HarmonyOS 2.0 release aims to power a wide range of devices beyond smartphones, highlighting its adaptability across IoT products.

Inside a malicious Chrome Extension

Altay's Blog • 0 implied HN points • 05 Feb 20
🕹 Technology Cybersecurity Software Malware Web Development Data Privacy
  1. Be careful with Chrome extensions that promise to block ads, as some can be malicious. They may appear harmless but can steal your personal information.
  2. Malicious extensions often wait a little while before doing anything suspicious to avoid detection. They might log you out or demand access to your data stealthily.
  3. If you find a suspicious extension, report it to the Chrome Web Store. It's essential to stay safe and protect your personal data online.

Something special for paid subscribers

Charles Eisenstein • 0 implied HN points • 04 Dec 24
🕹 Technology Artificial Intelligence Information Technology Disruption Innovation Transformation
  1. The author plans to write a series of articles about artificial intelligence. They believe AI is a major change in technology, similar in importance to the printing press.
  2. The upcoming articles will explore AI's impact on information and society. This suggests the author sees AI as a transformative force.
  3. The message is directed towards paid subscribers, indicating exclusive content is being prepared for them. This could mean deeper insights that are not available to everyone.

Một nghiên cứu thất bại

Thái | Hacker | Kỹ sư tin tặc • 0 implied HN points • 30 Mar 16
🕹 Technology Security Programming Research Cybersecurity Certificates
  1. Understand your tools and use them efficiently. Don't waste time trying to solve a problem in a complex way when a simple solution already exists.
  2. Experiment with your ideas without bias. Test all scenarios, even those that may disprove your initial hypothesis. Failure is part of the research process.
  3. Research and learn from existing studies before diving into a new project. Taking a few minutes to search for prior work can save time, money, and prevent investing in unfruitful ideas.

26 Predictions for 2026 (Part II)

Digital Native • 0 implied HN points • 22 Dec 25
🕹 Technology Artificial Intelligence Startups Enterprise Software Consumer Tech Robotics Policy
  1. AI is gaining persistent memory and true "world" understanding through agents and world models. That will unlock lots of new consumer and enterprise products, from lasting personal assistants to smarter household robots.
  2. Interfaces and go-to-market will decide the winners: assistant brands will dominate while UI becomes the main differentiator. Buyers will shift to finance teams focused on P&L, and traditional CRMs will be displaced by AI that ingests unstructured data.
  3. Policy and markets will accelerate AI with big M&A and new prediction-market ecosystems. Those gains will likely concentrate wealth and raise inequality, and some speculative AI rollups will fail even as non-AI, anti-tech products find real demand.

Everything Is TV and Nothing Is TV

Digital Native • 0 implied HN points • 08 Jan 26
🕹 Technology AI Generative AI Consumer Tech Enterprise Tech Media Platforms Video
  1. Consumer AI will increasingly look like television: rich, video-first generative experiences that let you personalize, participate in, and even star in episodic worlds.
  2. Enterprise AI will drive down the cost of services by automating labor and manual workflows, turning many expensive, human-driven industries into software-like businesses.
  3. Because efficiency tends to increase demand, AI-driven cost drops will expand access and grow markets rather than simply reducing spending.

Trivial birthday attacks against HMAC

Thái | Hacker | Kỹ sư tin tặc • 0 implied HN points • 06 Apr 16
🕹 Technology Crypto Security Networking Cryptography Cybersecurity
  1. HMAC is vulnerable to birthday attacks, which can lead to forged signatures with lower cost.
  2. The second attack, duplicate signature attack, is security-relevant as it can produce two messages with the same tag, exploiting a server's validation system.
  3. Birthday attacks on HMAC can often be parallelized, and using HMAC-SHA256 is recommended for increased security.

Geometry-Aware Hashing of GeoJSON objects

Altay's Blog • 0 implied HN points • 26 May 24
🕹 Technology Software Programming Data science Development Web Technologies
  1. Hashing can make comparing large lists of GeoJSON objects faster and easier. It lets you quickly find duplicates without much effort.
  2. GeoJSON shapes, like polygons and lines, can be represented by different sets of coordinates. This means we need a special way to hash them to recognize their shape, not just the order of points.
  3. To achieve this, we can create a consistent way to choose starting points or reorder coordinates. This way, the hash will stay the same, even if the coordinates are ordered differently.

6/17 TBC Insider Digest

Tech Buzz China Insider • 0 implied HN points • 18 Jun 21
🕹 Technology E-commerce Semiconductors Social media Tech investment
  1. The post discusses various topics like Didi's IPO, China's Semiconductor Big Fund, updates on content platforms, cross border e-commerce trends, and differences between US and Chinese unicorns.
  2. The content highlights the importance of understanding semiconductors, the competition between Kuaishou and Douyin in content platforms, and emerging opportunities in cross border e-commerce.
  3. The post also includes insights on the number of unicorns in the US and China, and welcomes new members to the platform from various backgrounds.

Bootstrapping A Chatbot With A Large Language Model

Cobus Greyling on LLMs, NLU, NLP, chatbots & voicebots • 0 implied HN points • 14 Feb 23
🕹 Technology AI Chatbots NLP Data science Programming
  1. To build a chatbot, you can organize unstructured data by clustering it into themes called intents. This helps make sense of lots of information and sets the stage for training the bot.
  2. Once the bot receives a user's message, it uses semantic search to match the message with the right intent. This helps in retrieving the most relevant information quickly.
  3. The bot then generates a response using the matched intent and the user's question. This process allows the chatbot to provide accurate and context-aware answers.

Knowledge-Driven Chain-of-Thought (KD-CoT)

Cobus Greyling on LLMs, NLU, NLP, chatbots & voicebots • 0 implied HN points • 24 Nov 23
🕹 Technology AI Machine Learning Natural Language Data science Human-computer interaction
  1. The Knowledge-Driven Chain-of-Thought (KD-CoT) helps improve how language models answer questions by using knowledge from outside sources. This means better answers for complex questions.
  2. In-Context Learning (ICL) is important for language models. It allows them to use examples and context to provide more accurate and contextually relevant responses.
  3. Researchers are focusing on making language models better by using a human-in-the-loop approach, which means humans help guide and improve the model's ability to access and use data effectively.

Gesture control and the QWERTY effect

Joshua Gans' Newsletter • 0 implied HN points • 25 Feb 13
🕹 Technology Interfaces Wearables Devices Start-ups
  1. Our interaction with devices has evolved from keyboards to touchscreens and gestures.
  2. Personal-specific interfaces like MYO offer customization for individuals, while device-specific interfaces like LeapMotion rely on standardized gestures.
  3. The battle between device-specific and personal-specific interfaces has implications for entrepreneurial strategies in the interface space.

Will Yahoo! return to its portal roots?

Joshua Gans' Newsletter • 0 implied HN points • 14 May 13
🕹 Technology Tech Companies Internet Advertising Consumer behavior Competition
  1. Yahoo! may be returning to its portal roots, wanting to be the daily go-to for users across devices.
  2. Yahoo! is focusing on a portal strategy that includes information aggregation to solve users' information overload problems.
  3. Other big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Google have their own strategies, but Yahoo!'s focus on a daily routine user base and advertising is unique.

Daily Build

traction • 0 implied HN points • 09 Aug 23
🕹 Technology AI Newsletter Tools Apps
  1. Newsletter called Daily Build focuses on using latest AI tools for building various things.
  2. Readers can learn to create apps, icons, widgets, spreadsheets, and more through the newsletter.
  3. The author offers quick building projects like a MacOS note-taking app and a weather app using an API.

How to compete with a non-existent iWatch

Joshua Gans' Newsletter • 0 implied HN points • 08 Jun 14
🕹 Technology Wearables Smartwatches
  1. Competitors to Apple's iWatch have emerged from electronic manufacturers like Sony and Samsung as well as start-ups like Pebble, focusing on phone connectivity and apps.
  2. Established watchmakers are notably absent in the competition against the iWatch, possibly due to prioritizing fashion items over smartwatch features.
  3. The 'Glance' wearable from the University of Toronto's Creative Destruction Lab offers a innovative solution, complementing existing watches with notifications and fitness tracking, possibly indicating a way to compete with potential Apple iWatch.

Why the iPhone confounds disruption theorists

Joshua Gans' Newsletter • 0 implied HN points • 28 Feb 15
🕹 Technology Disruption Innovation Smartphones Architecture
  1. Established companies like Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, and BlackBerry fell victim to disruption with the launch of the iPhone in 2007.
  2. The iPhone conflicted with the traditional disruption theory as it was not disruptive to laptops but instead to traditional handset makers by offering a new architecture and user interface.
  3. The disruption caused by the iPhone stemmed from its unique supply-side mechanisms, challenging established firms by introducing new functionalities and methods of interaction.

The Cobus Quadrant™ Of NLU Design

Cobus Greyling on LLMs, NLU, NLP, chatbots & voicebots • 0 implied HN points • 09 Feb 23
🕹 Technology AI NLP Chatbots Data Management
  1. Understanding customer intent is key to making chatbots work well. Starting with what customers want helps create better and more trusted AI experiences.
  2. NLU Design is about turning messy data into clear information for chatbots. It involves organizing unstructured data and using both human input and machine help to label and manage it.
  3. Improving chatbots requires ongoing evaluation and fine-tuning. Regularly checking their performance and making adjustments helps keep them responsive to users' needs.

An insight into the future: What happens when Disney’s Magic Band system goes down?

Joshua Gans' Newsletter • 0 implied HN points • 21 Mar 15
🕹 Technology Systems Innovation Design
  1. Disney's Magic Band system went down, causing disruptions like no fast passes or park entry.
  2. Despite the system failure, Disney was prepared and had contingency plans in place, like recording transactions and billing later.
  3. The incident raises questions about the reliability of moving towards a cash-free society and the importance of incorporating backups into future designs.