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io_uring is faster than mmap

TL;DR Sourcing data directly from disk IS faster than caching in memory. I brought receipts. Because hardware got wider but not faster, the old methods don't get you there. You need new tools to use what is scaling and avoid what isn't. Introduction In part 1 I showed how some computer performance factors are scaling exponentially while others have been stagnant for decades. I then asserted, without proof, that sourcing data from disk can be faster than from memory. What follows is the proof.

Memory is slow, Disk is fast – Part 2

TL;DR Sourcing data directly from disk IS faster than caching in memory. I brought receipts. Because hardware got wider but not faster, the old methods don't get you there. You need new tools to use what is scaling and avoid what isn't. Introduction In part 1 I showed how some computer performance factors are scaling exponentially while others have been stagnant for decades. I then asserted, without proof, that sourcing data from disk can be faster than from memory. What follows is the proof.

The Paradigm

Over the past decade, some of the most remarkable AI breakthroughs—AlphaGo, AlphaStar, AlphaFold1, VPT, OpenAI Five, ChatGPT—have all shared a common thread: they start with large-scale data gathering (self-supervised or imitation learning, or SSL) and then use reinforcement learning to refine their performance toward a specific goal. This marriage of general knowledge acquisition and focused, reward-driven specialization has emerged as a the paradigm by which we can reliably train AI systems to

Texas sues PowerSchool over breach exposing 62M students, 880k Texans

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against education software company PowerSchool, which suffered a massive data breach in December that exposed the personal information of 62 million students, including over 880,000 Texans. PowerSchool is a cloud-based software solutions provider for K-12 schools and districts, with more than 18,000 customers and supporting over 60 million students worldwide. In January, the education software giant disclosed that its PowerSource customer s

More Than 4.4 Million Exposed in Credit Bureau TransUnion Breach

The TransUnion data breach exposed the data of up to 4.4 million customers. CNET Sensitive personal information belonging to 4.4 million customers, including names and Social Security numbers, was exposed in a data breach on credit bureau TransUnion, in what is believed to be the latest in a string of attacks targeting companies' Salesforce databases. The data breach, which occurred on July 28, was identified and contained within hours, a TransUnion spokesperson told CNET. TransUnion is one of

Chess.com discloses recent data breach via file transfer app

Chess.com has disclosed a data breach after threat actors gained unauthorized access to a third-party file transfer application used by the platform. The incident occurred in June 2025, with the threat actors maintaining access to the said application for two weeks, between June 5 and June 18. Chess.com discovered the breach on June 19, 2025, and launched an investigation to determine its scope and impact. "On June 19, 2025, Chess.com became aware of potential unauthorized access to data stor

Artie (YC S23) Is Hiring Engineers, AES, and Senior PMM

Why you should join Artie We are building Artie, a real-time data streaming solution focused on databases and data warehouses. Typical ETL solutions leverage batched processes or schedulers (DAGs, Airflow), which cannot achieve real time data syncs. We leverage change data capture (CDC) and stream processing to perform data transfers in a more efficient way, which enables sub-minute latency.

Tech companies ‘be on alert,’ NAACP says with new guiding principles for data centers

is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home , a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. One of the top civil rights organizations in the US is putting the tech industry “on alert,” issuing a call to action for communities to demand more accountability from companies building

Jury orders Google to pay $425 million for violating user privacy

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. A federal jury in California has ordered Google to pay $425 million for violating user privacy by collecting the data of millions of people even after they disabled tracking, as reported earlier by Reuters. The decision stems from a class action lawsuit filed i

No, Your iPhone Isn't Listening to You. Here's What's Really Happening

The bartender's first hoot is so clean and high-pitched it sounds piped in from the ceiling speakers — a single whooo that slices through the post-punk and clinking glassware. My friend Michael jolts on his barstool, beer sloshing dangerously close to the rim. "Did you hear that owl?" he whispers. "Not an owl," I say, matter-of-factly, wiping condensation from my glass before it drips onto the bar. The bartender, in his mid-30s with slicked-back hair and an immaculate black apron, lets out ano

Transforming CX with embedded real-time analytics

Stripe is not alone. In today’s digital world, data analysis is increasingly delivered directly to business customers and individual users, allowing real-time, continuous insights to shape user experiences. Ride-hailing apps calculate prices and estimate times of arrival (ETAs) in near-real time. Financial platforms deliver real-time cash-flow analysis. Customers expect and reward data-driven services that reflect what is happening now. In fact, having the capability to collect and analyze data

Google ordered to pay $425 million in app data collection lawsuit

Google must pay $425 million to the plaintiffs of a class action lawsuit that accused the company of collecting users' data even after they've turned off a tracking feature, a federal jury has decided. The lead plaintiff sued Google back in July 2020, arguing that the company still harvested data even though it tells users they can disable tracking under Web & App Activity through its connection with other apps, such as Uber and Instagram. US District Judge Richard Seeborg then certified the law

Incogni vs. DeleteMe: I compared the two best data removal services, and there's a clear winner

Maria Diaz/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. Data removal services began to appear around 15 years ago, after data brokers realized that data could become a new, valuable currency -- and one ripe for exploitation, given the lack of laws and little to no consumer data privacy protection written into legislation. Incogni and DeleteMe, founded in 2021 as part of VPN provider Surfshark and in 2010 by Abine Privacy, respectively, are two of the most widely-known data remo

Say Bye with JavaScript Beacon

Sometimes we want to send a piece of data to our servers when user leaves our website or webapp. Maybe it’s for for analytics or even auto-logout when they leave the website. But do you know what is a reliable way of doing it? Most of you might say use XMLHTTPRequest (or fetch) in beforeunload or unload events. Like, window . addEventListener ( "beforeunload" , () => { fetch ( '/analytics' , { method : "POST" , headers : { "Content-Type" : "application/json" , }, body : JSON . stringify ({ eve

Is Congestion Pricing Working? The MTA’s Revamped Data Team Is Figuring It Out

For the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s data and analytics team, January 5, 2025, felt a lot like kismet. Three and a half years earlier, New York state legislators had passed a law requiring the MTA to release “easily accessible, understandable, and usable” data to the public; by January 2022, MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber officially announced the new team’s formation. Meanwhile, New York City’s controversial congestion pricing program, which tolls cars entering Manhatta

Topics: agency data mta new team

Google told to pay $425m in privacy lawsuit

Google told to pay $425m in privacy lawsuit "This decision misunderstands how our products work, and we will appeal it. Our privacy tools give people control over their data, and when they turn off personalisation, we honour that choice," a Google spokesperson told the BBC. They had been seeking more than $31bn in damages. The verdict comes after a group of users brought the case claiming Google accessed users' mobile devices to collect, save and use their data, in violation of privacy assura

Evaluating Agents

“Models constantly change and improve but evals persist” Look at the data No amount of evals will replace the need to look at the data, once you have a evals good coverage you’ll be able to decrease the time but it’ll be always a must to just look at the agent traces to identify possible issues or things to improve. Starting, end to end evals You must create evals for your agents, stop relying solely on manual testing. Not sure where to start? Add e2e evals, define a success criteria (

Topics: agent data e2e end evals

Reverse engineering Solos smart glasses

Posted 2025/8/28 Reverse engineering Solos smart glasses First and foremost: If you’ve got any documentation on this hardware, please contact me! I would love to read the actual specs for this protocol. Background Before the audio-only AI-based smart glasses of today, we’d periodically see companies announcing smart glasses with displays, usually to small fanfare and little success. The Solos Smart Glasses are just another example. Released in 2018, they targeted cyclists and runners. The co

Eero Wants to Sell Customers a Cellular Internet Backup Dongle for Its Routers

Amazon’s Eero is getting into the cellular hotspot router business… sort of. At IFA 2025, the company announced the Eero Signal, a device that can back up your Eero network with cellular data, kicking in when it detects an internet outage. The Eero Signal is an upright little device with a USB-C splitter that plugs into your existing Eero router’s USB-C port, powering both devices. If you’re paying for a $99.99 annual subscription to Eero Plus, you’ll get 10GB of cellular backup data per year.

New AI model turns photos into explorable 3D worlds, with caveats

On Tuesday, Tencent released HunyuanWorld-Voyager, a new open-weights AI model that generates 3D-consistent video sequences from a single image, allowing users to pilot a camera path to "explore" virtual scenes. The model simultaneously generates RGB video and depth information to enable direct 3D reconstruction without the need for traditional modeling techniques. However, it won't be replacing video games anytime soon. The results aren't true 3D models, but they achieve a similar effect: The

OSMAnd vs. Organic Maps

There's a new offline mapping program for smartphones, so I thought I'd see how it stacks up against the one I'm already using. For clarity: I'm using the F-Droid releases of both OsmAnd and Organic Maps. I believe that OsmAnd charges for map downloads if you get it from other places. Both programs work most readily with maps loaded onto the device in advance (which is why I feel I should choose—I don't want to have maps for both taking up space). Both of them run off OpenStreetMap data, adapt

US sues robot toy maker for exposing children's data to Chinese devs

The U.S. Department of Justice has sued toy maker Apitor Technology for allegedly allowing a Chinese third party to collect children's geolocation data without their knowledge and parental consent. A complaint filed by the Justice Department, following a notification from the Federal Trade Commission, alleges that Apitor violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) by failing to notify parents or obtain their consent before collecting their children's location information. Ap

Poor man's bitemporal data system in SQLite and Clojure

On trying to mash up SQLite with ideas stolen from Accountants, Clojure, Datomic, XTDB, Rama, and Local-first-ers, to satisfy Henderson's Tenth Law. Viz., to make a sufficiently complicated data system containing an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a bitemporal database. Because? Because laying about on a hammock, contemplating hopelessly complected objects like Current Databases isn't just for the Rich man. Don't try this at work! The "Poor Man's Bitemp

Orchard Robotics, founded by a Thiel fellow Cornell dropout, raises $22M for farm vision AI

Inspired by his grandparents, who were apple farmers in China, Charlie Wu got the idea to apply technology to agriculture while studying computer science at Cornell University, a top agriculture school. “I got to meet fruit professors who are the best in the world at what they do,” Wu told TechCrunch. “Through talking to them, I realized even the largest farms in the nation basically have no idea what is actually growing out in their fields.” He dropped out of Cornell, became a Thiel fellow, a

SaaS giant Workiva discloses data breach after Salesforce attack

Workiva, a leading cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) provider, notified its customers that attackers who gained access to a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) system stole some of their data. The company's cloud software helps collect, connect, and share data for financial reports, compliance, and audits. It had 6,305 customers at the end of last year and reported revenues of $739 million in 2024. Its customer list includes 85% of the Fortune 500 companies and high-profi

European court rules in favor of the latest US and EU data transfer framework

Europe’s second-highest court has dismissed a challenge against a data transfer pact between the European Union and the US. "On the date of adoption of the contested decision, the United States of America ensured an adequate level of protection for personal data transferred from the European Union to organisations in that country," the EU’s General Court ruled ( PDF ). The two sides brokered the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework in 2023 to continue allowing US companies to store European us

Launch HN: Risely (YC S25) – AI Agents for Universities

Hi HN, I’m Danial, co-founder and CTO of Risely AI ( https://risely.ai ). We're building AI agents that automate operational workflows inside universities. Here’s a demo: https://www.loom.com/share/d7a14400434144c490249d665a0d0499?... Higher ed is full of inefficiencies. Every department runs on outdated systems that don’t talk to each other. Today, advising staff are looking up enrollment data in PeopleSoft or Ellucian, checking grades and assignments in Canvas, and trying to track engagement

Disney to pay $10M to settle claims it collected kids’ data on YouTube

Disney will pay $10 million to settle claims by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it mislabeled videos for children on YouTube, which allowed the collection of kids' personal information without their consent or notification to their parents. This occurred after the entertainment giant failed to tag kid-directed videos on YouTube as "Made for Kids" (MFK), a label that instructs the video streaming platform to block personal data collection and stop serving personalized ads on correctly des

How to Switch From iPhone to Android (2025)

Ignore the arguments about which is better, because iPhones and Android phones have far more in common than some folks will admit. Switching from an iPhone to an Android phone is pretty painless these days, and you can take all your stuff with you, including photos, messages, and other bits and pieces. This guide covers all you need to know about how to switch from an iPhone to an Android phone. Updated August 2025: We've verified the instructions and refreshed the copy. What You Need to Get S