How Booking.com Turned Marketing Into Computational Infrastructure

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An article traces how Booking.com shifted marketing from persuasive creative work to a component of its computational systems. The company used Google AdWords to target user search intent precisely and pursued a long-tail strategy. By automatically generating thousands of landing pages and testing them at scale, it relied on controlled experiments rather than managerial intuition, a shift the piece describes as replacing the HiPPO approach. This linked search intent to specific accommodation offers and reduced market uncertainty. The result, according to the article, is a streamlined transactional customer journey where advantage comes from how efficiently decisions are structured and analyzed.

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Roku Moves Developer Repositories from GitHub to GitLab

Roku has relocated its developer code repositories from GitHub to GitLab, according to a company blog post. The announcement was shared on Hacker News, where it gathered 14 points and one comment. The source material provides few additional details about the timing or the reasons behind the switch. Developers who rely on Roku's repositories may need to update their links and workflows to reflect the new hosting location.

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ProgrammingHacker News ·

Neural chip decodes interactions between brain regions

Researchers have developed a neural chip capable of decoding how different regions of the brain interact with one another. The work was reported by EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, as described in a news release. The chip is designed to read signals passing between brain areas rather than only activity within a single region. The source material available for this item is limited, so details on the study's methods, scale, and findings are not included here.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

DeepSeek-Linked Paper Proposes Engram, a Lookup Memory Module for Transformers

A new paper from a DeepSeek-linked team argues that large language models waste computation by re-deriving static facts on every query, and proposes Engram, a module that retrieves stored knowledge through a direct lookup. Scaled to 27 billion parameters, the authors report that it outperforms a mixture-of-experts baseline with the same parameter and compute budget across the benchmarks they tested. The largest gains appear on reasoning and code tasks rather than pure knowledge tests. The authors frame the design as a budgeting problem, finding a U-shaped trade-off between neural computation and static memory, with an optimal mix in between. Their Engram-27B model reallocates parameters from expert modules into a 5.7 billion parameter memory, which they say frees the network's early layers and attention capacity for harder work.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Guide: Running a 4B Qwen3 Chat Model Locally on Windows with a Small NVIDIA GPU

A DEV Community guide explains how to run the 4-billion-parameter Qwen3-4B chat model on a Windows PC with an NVIDIA RTX 30, 40, or 50 series GPU, using a prebuilt zip from the author's open-source Pingala-8 project. The only required install is a recent NVIDIA driver, since the package bundles the CUDA runtime files and avoids the full CUDA Toolkit and any compilation. Users extract the zip and run a batch script that downloads the roughly 1.24 GB model from Hugging Face on first launch, then starts a local llama.cpp server and opens a browser-based chat page at 127.0.0.1:8080. The author reports about 200 tokens per second on an RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU and notes that the setup requires roughly 5 GB of free disk space and an internet connection for the initial download.

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