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Martha Lillard, last US polio patient using iron lung, dies at 78 in Oklahoma

Martha Lillard, diagnosed with polio at age 5, was the last U.S. polio patient using an iron lung. She died June 26 in Oklahoma at 78, with chronic pulmonary failure and post-polio syndrome listed as causes; long-haul COVID-19 contributed. She lived largely in an iron lung for years, attending school via intercom and even driving for a time. She later married Baha Salh, whom she met online after 9/11. She contracted COVID-19 twice and spent the last years mostly at home.

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Show HN: Sqlsure – deterministic semantic checks for AI-generated SQL

Sqlsure is a semantic inspector for SQL that catches fan-out double-counting, additivity violations, wrong join keys, and policy breaches before the query runs. It uses dictionary-based rules (offline, deterministic) and does not query databases or collect telemetry. It can be used as a CI gate, an MCP server for AI agents, or as a library wrapper around text-to-SQL systems. The rulebook derives from dbt manifests/schema or introspected catalogs; supports OSI and WrenAI MDL loaders. In benchmarks on BIRD/Spider, it flagged 45 issues across 2,568 expert queries with zero false alarms; found real bugs upstream. Apache-2.0.

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How to Achieve Pruning When Querying by Non-Partitioned Columns in PostgreSQL

Article shows how to achieve partition pruning when querying by non-partition columns in PostgreSQL by leveraging constraint_exclusion and per-partition check constraints. Partitioned by timestamp, pruning works for timestamp but filtering by session_id often scans all partitions. Local indexes help but don't fully solve. The trick is to encode expected session_id ranges in CHECK constraints on each partition and rely on constraint_exclusion to prune. It covers handling outliers with multi-range BRIN ideas, gaps and islands, and a script to auto-generate constraints. It emphasizes data patterns and correlation between session_id and timestamp to enable pruning, easing partition-key choice.

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The fine print that follows you out the door: non-compete clauses are spreading

OECD analyses show non-compete clauses are widespread across 15 OECD countries, affecting 11–41% of private-sector workers, including low-wage, young, and non-managerial staff. Many are broad, long, unpaid, and boilerplate, producing a chilling effect even when unenforceable. They are linked to lower job mobility, slower wage growth, and weaker productivity, though causality is not settled. Policy responses vary—from bans to earnings/duration/compensation/disclosure rules—with enforcement and transparency crucial to mitigating harm.

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Optimization Solver as a Service

Quicopt provides a quick-start to solve hard optimization problems in three steps: install the Python client (pip install quicopt[mathopt] or quicopt[pyomo]), run ready-made QUBO or MILP examples using a standard MathOpt or Pyomo front-end, then call client.solve(model) to receive result.display and fields like status, objective, x, and solve_time. The API currently handles LP, QP, MILP, MINLP, QUBO/PUBO/HUBO, and NLP. The free tier requires no signup; the first call creates an API key. Non-binary integers aren’t yet supported; privacy and further docs are available.

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Weightlifting beats running for blood sugar control, researchers find

Virginia Tech scientists compared endurance and resistance exercise in mice fed a high-fat diet and found weightlifting more effectively reduces abdominal and visceral fat, improves glucose tolerance, and lowers insulin resistance than running, though both improve blood sugar control and insulin signaling. Using a novel mouse weightlifting model, the study shows resistance training offers at least equal or greater anti-diabetes benefits, with distinct metabolic mechanisms. The work supports doing both exercise types for optimal metabolic health.

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RISCBoy is an open-source portable games console, designed from scratch

RISCBoy is an open-source portable game console designed from scratch, featuring a RISC-V RV32IMC CPU, a raster graphics pipeline, and supporting hardware (bus fabric, memory controllers, UART, GPIO) on a KiCad PCB for an iCE40-HX8k FPGA. It mirrors a Game Boy Advance in a world where RISC-V existed in 2001. The design uses synthesisable Verilog 2005 and targets open tooling (Yosys, nextpnr, Icestorm) plus an RV32IMC toolchain for software. Simulation uses ISIM; Rev A hardware is shipped, Rev B planned.

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Mesh LLM: distributed AI computing on iroh

Mesh LLM lets you run large language models across your own GPUs by pooling them into a single OpenAI-compatible API, avoiding centralized cloud. Start with one node and add more; requests can run locally, on a peer, or split across machines as a pipeline. For very large models, Skippy partitions by layer ranges across nodes. Networking uses iroh for authenticated, NAT-traversing QUIC with no central server; OpenAI clients see localhost:9337/v1. Open source, with public and private mesh options.

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Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

The author argues against defaulting to AI for hard, experience-based questions. After trying various methods, including receiving a suggestion to “ask Claude,” they find that AI can mimic helpful responses but misses the nuance of lived, decades-long experience. AI can aid with data and lists, but cannot replace human judgment. Being the go-to source has real costs, and some questions truly require human insight and context.

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ZeroFS vs. Amazon S3 Files

ZeroFS vs Amazon S3 Files: both offer POSIX-like filesystems backed by object storage, but with different bucket semantics. S3 Files preserves ordinary S3 objects: a file maps to a single S3 object, and changes are exported to S3 asynchronously (visibility after about 60 seconds); reads may hit S3, with updates flowing back. ZeroFS uses an internal, opaque layout: file data split into compressed, encrypted segments and metadata in an LSM tree, cached locally, with no direct S3 visibility. Costs differ: S3 Files adds high-performance storage and S3 charges; ZeroFS requires local infrastructure and caching. Choose based on object identity vs internal persistence.

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The Chinese Voice Actor Forced to Prove He's Human

Shen Anyu, a Chinese voice actor, sees AI-generated copies of his voice flood online, used in explainers, news reads, ads, and ultrashort dramas. Platforms often flag his real recordings as AI, slashing views and income. Shen and his wife Wei document infringing clips, contact uploaders, and consider lawsuits, but tracing culprits and securing damages is difficult and costly. China’s courts have treated unauthorized cloning as a personality-right violation, but enforcement lags. Shen is fighting to prove he’s human, while reinventing his career to cope with the disruption.

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Biff.graph: structure your Clojure codebase as a queryable graph

biff.graph is a lightweight Clojure library to model and query data as a unified graph using resolvers that declare input/output shapes. It offers a subset of Pathom without a planning step, but with batching and caching. The ~600-line codebase prioritizes simplicity for small projects. You define per-entity resolvers, join data via nested maps, and query with a context. The README includes an end-to-end example (rss-feed, post), guidance on resolver autogeneration, testing, and integration with biff.fx and the Biff 2 ecosystem. Status: release candidate (2.0.0-rc7).

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