Ten months ago, we launched the Vesuvius Challenge to solve the ancient problem of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of scrolls that were flash-fried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Today we are overjoyed to announce that our crazy project has succeeded. After 2000
Nat Friedman
5,672 posts
- The deepseek team is obviously really good. China is full of talented engineers. Every other take is cope. Sorry.
- We moved out of San Francisco to Menlo Park a year ago after two meth addicts broke into our house while we were home and robbed us. They are both free now. The police who arrested them -- and were later forced to release them by the DA -- said these criminals were "frequent
- We did it! We tested 300 Bay Area foods for plastic chemicals. We found some interesting surprises. Top 5 findings in our test results: 1. Our tests found plastic chemicals in 86% of all foods, with phthalates in 73% of the tested products and bisphenols in 22%. It'sI'm going to re-run all these tests on food we eat in California. Also going to test for other plastic chemicals. Let me know what foods we should test and suggestions for methodology.
- Today we are announcing a major breakthrough in the Vesuvius Challenge: we have read the first word from an unopened Herculaneum scroll. The word is "πορφυρας" which means "purple dye" or "cloths of purple." scrollprize.org/firstletters Congratulations to 21yo computer science
- Today we're making GitHub free for teams of unlimited size, for private and public work. 🎉 Every developer on earth should have access to GitHub, and price shouldn't be a barrier. github.blog/2020-04-14-git…
- Many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed and everyone who's paying attention already knows this
- Today(!) we’re thrilled to announce unlimited free private repos for all GitHub users, and a new simplified Enterprise offering:
- TIL: in the 1990s Clinton offered federal workers a $25,000 buyout, and ~150,000 took the deal. He cut federal government spending from 22% to 18% of the economy, the lowest level since 1966.
- Federal spending in 2024 was ~$7T. In 2019 it was ~$4.5T. 🤔
- That @satyanadella had the vision and conviction to put $1B into OpenAI a year before GPT-3 is amazing and underappreciated. openai.com/blog/microsoft/
- Cookie banners are annoying, so we removed them from GitHub:
- Luke Farritor is a national treasure.







