Great interview with Michael Friendly on how the history of data visualization became a research discipline. He walks through the discoveries, forgotten figures, and organizing ideas behind the Milestones Project, and shows how those ideas still shape how we design and read charts today.

Why data visualization matters, and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.

Saloni Dattani walks through a practical checklist for making visualizations clearer, more honest, and easier to read, with tons of real redesigns and trade-offs you’ll recognize immediately.

This is a thoughtful teardown of a bad temperature chart, followed by nine well-justified redesigns with full ggplot examples.

Line charts, anomaly bands, distributions, and heatmaps show how encoding choices shape interpretation in practice.

What can you build with one HTML file and an LLM? A lot more than you think. This post shows hard-won patterns from 150+ real tools, showing how to skip frameworks, exploit browser primitives, and build projects fast with copy/pasteable code.

It is impossible to disentangle technical innovation from technical debt. Machine learning feels theoretical, but in practice it runs on benchmarks, leaderboards, and social norms. In this post, Ben Recht reflects on why ML progress is driven more by engineering culture and empirical testing than clean theory. And why that tension is impossible to escape.

The data professions (data science, analysis, engineering, etc.) are highly technical fields, and much online discussion (in particular, on this blog!), conference presentations and classes focus on technical aspects of data work or on the results of data analyses. These discussions are necessary for teaching important aspects of the data trade, but they often ignore the fact that data and analytics work takes place in an interpersonal and organizational context.

NornicDB is a high-performance graph database designed for AI agents and knowledge systems. It speaks Neo4j’s language (Bolt protocol Cypher) so you can switch with zero code changes, while adding intelligent features including GPU accelerated embedding search, k-means, and auto TLP with optional LLM inference, plus plugins. - orneryd/NornicDB

Stay informed with AI-summarized top stories from Hacker News. TL;DR for devs, ELI5 for everyone.

「君たちはどう生きるか」の場面写真を提供致します。 現在、劇場公開中の「君たちはどう生きるか」の場面写真 14枚を、本日から提供いたします。 これまでの分と同様に、常識の範囲でご自由にお使いください。 君たちはどう生きるか14枚 2023.08.04 提供開始 2020.12.18 提供開

1300 Still Images from the Animated Films of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli (2023)

76/300 Pocket Dobson: a tiny yet real telescope that comes with you everywhere

A “relaxation” project, mostly drawn on planes to and from Norway this month, where I had to travel to setup a digital art installation in Kristiansand with friends from the digital art collective Lab212. It has been drawn with one major constraint: it must fit in the inner pocket of my jacket (well, one specific jacket), except for the rods.

This is a 3D-printed dobsonian telescope built around a 76mm/300mm parabolic mirror kit. While there are plenty of mini-scope models on the internet, I wanted something that looked like a dobson that went a bit too hard through the clothes dryer, but without compromise on what matters:

Balance Smooth movements Rigidity Collimatable Focusable eyepiece holder A minimum of style (entirely subjective)

Open-source platform to build and deploy AI agent workflows. - simstudioai/sim

Design agent workflows visually on a canvas—connect agents, tools, and blocks, then run them instantly.

Miscellaneous HTML+JavaScript tools built mostly with the help of LLMs. See also /python/ for tools written using Python.

This collection is an experiment in prompt-driven development with very low stakes.

The colophon lists commit messages and transcripts for every tool.

The code lives in simonw/tools and many tools used the Claude custom instructions described here.

LlamaIndex is a simple, flexible framework for building knowledge assistants using LLMs connected to your enterprise data.

Learning PyTorch: tensors, operations, linear regression, datasets, dataloaders, and computer vision

Doing it yourself is way more cost effective.

A tool to snap pixels to a perfect grid. Designed to fix messy and inconsistent pixel art generated by AI. - Hugo-Dz/spritefusion-pixel-snapper

CLAUDE.md is a high-leverage configuration point for Claude Code.

Learning how to write a good CLAUDE.md (or AGENTS.md) is a key skill for agent-enabled software engineering.

An LLM will perform better on a task when its’ context window is full of focused, relevant context

The physics of sound, and the PC fan CR box v1.

In which I talk about the process involved in switching forges, and how well that went.

ty is an extremely fast Python type checker.