driggs

Seconding this for geospatial dev projects, which may have absolutely massive binary data files.

You've described every recording ever made.

I'm describing a band playing a concert to an empty ampitheatre which has been silent for two millennia after its inhabitants perished together in an instant.

The Live at Pompeii "concert" in that empty amphitheatre has always felt to me like they were playing to an audience of ghosts or spirits.

If you have the opportunity to see it on a big screen or IMAX, it's an incredibly moving experience.

That really improved things! Now each rabbithole goes deeper and deeper and deeper...

This is why we can't have nice things.

Looks like someone scripted `curl` in a loop and generated thousands of permutations of hate content.

It seems like the site's algorithm is that every newly-generate page includes multiple links to not-yet-existing pages. So it doesn't matter that existing pages are cached, all the "leaf node" pages link to multiple uncached new pages.

That's a pretty absurd complaint.

Are you aware of any XML parser ever which preserves the plaintext formatting of the .xml file while magically inserting and modifying an arbitrary amount of XML data anywhere within the document?

SVG is just XML. Save your file in Inkscape, and then run `tidy` on it, or whatever you like for format your XML with.

(As a fellow hand-crafted XML fan, I feel your pain. But I also know when to choose my battles!)

This site is going to be expensive when a web crawler hits it. A honey pot that burns tokens.

This is fantastic. I couldn't find any obvious way to search for a new page, but you can simply bang out any arbitrary URL slug and the new article will be hallucinated fresh, eg:

https://halupedia.com/shortest-cave-in-the-world

https://halupedia.com/echolocation-ability-in-spiders

Agree, CP/M has nothing to do with the story, nor does the 8080/8086 sidetrack.

The whole story is that Microsoft just never bothered to standardize, despite using it themselves.

Zip drives were revolutionary for 100mb and then 250mb storage, at the same time that many people gained widespread access to the Internet. But they were proprietary and required you to have an external drive available to write or read from them (and that might also mean a SCSI port).

So when affordable CD-R became available, even though early drives were slow writers, they had the advantage that they could be read from practically any computer. With ubiquitous non-proprietary CD-ROM drives and the huge 700mb capacity, Zip drives were tossed as soon as someone bought a CD-R drive.

The "neuroplasticity" which leads to a relative quietness presumably comes after the psychedelic experience.

Interestingly, the paper only lists the following adverse effects: visual perceptual changes, nausea, and headache. Given that the patients in the double-blind study were those who suffer from moderate to severe Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I could imagine some significant anxiety in the 200 µg active group!

The paper only reports significant results at the 100 µg and 200 µg dose level, not less, which seems like another strike against psychedelic microdosing. The pharmaceutical industry would love to find a magic psychedelic drug which doesn't result in the psychedelic experience, but it seems like that experience is the key to their mental impact.

Wow, he admits to using two AI tools: He used Claude Code, which failed because the blog was intentionally set up to refuse AI crawlers, so he pasted the page into ChatGPT. Then he blames ChatGPT for paraphrasing the hallucinated quotes.

He makes the claim that he was just using AI to help him put together an outline for his article, when the evidence clearly shows that he used the AI's verbatim output.

Retinal imaging is used to detect damage from glaucoma or other eye disease, by "diffing" the fine blood vessels and nerves.

Particularly relevant to HN is that Bobby's primary writing partner for decades was John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

https://www.eff.org/john-perry-barlow

  A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
  by John Perry Barlow
  
  Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel,
  I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I
  ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You
  have no sovereignty where we gather.
   
  We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address
  you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always
  speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally
  independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.

Many of Bobby Weir's best-known songs had lyrics penned by Barlow. The world is a brighter place because of their partnership, and a little more grey in their absence.

While predation by rats is curious news, much more common (here in the US at least) is predation by raccoons.

Conservation-minded management practice is often to build a "bat friendly" gate at the entrance of a significant bat cave or an abandoned mine portal. These gates are the ideal perch for hungry raccoons to pluck bats right out of the air. Bats emerge from entrances like this near the ceiling, when possible, specifically to avoid predators. Poorly designed gates are the opposite of "bat friendly" and turn the safe entrances into buffets for raccoons.

Why do we care about protecting bats? They're the #1 predator for night-flying insects, which are often crop destroying pests. Every bat we lose equals more chemical pesticide that farmers must use to efficiently grow crops.

Windows 2000 or Windows XP - with security updates and modern hardware support - is exactly what I want.

Oof, "zero" is two syllables so we'll have to pronounce it "null".

Because that's for half-time!

This website is a useless exercise, but the idea in the submission title "using fewer syllables to express numbers" has utility.

As a musician, I frequently need to count to a rhythm, and the pesky number seven's two syllables throws my cadence off. So I count a bar of 8 like this:

one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight

Occasionally I'll need to count up to as high as 16, which is especially tricky. It'd be easiest to do it in hexadecimal-style, but somehow I can't bring myself to count a part out as:

one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight, nine, a, b, c, d, e, f, g

If only I could convince musicians to use zero-based indexing instead of one-based.

Have you considered that it's used as a unit to represent capacity of our power grid?

As in, we have now have the energy capacity for 300,000 fewer homes given this operating data center.

So not only is it a relatable unit, but it's an incredibly meaningful unit for those who care about ensuring that energy availability actually support something of value (families) rather than something wasteful (crypto mining).

PS: Someone changed the title of this submission after my comment. It was originally something like "By my count, Linux has over 11% of the desktop market." This statistic is obviously clickbait and false, even if you count ChromeBooks, though ChromeBooks are not what people mean when they say "Linux desktop".

"By my count"...

Which means pretending that every single "unknown" desktop, which is a larger percentage than the Linux desktops, are Linux.

And also by considering ChromeBooks, which also have a larger percentage than Linux, are Linux.

It's a fascinating thought experiment to consider a desert island populated with newborn babies, growing up to be individuals, forming a societal structure, forming culture, without any pre-existing human input.

Obviously there's a "chicken and egg problem" that human babies require human adults.

Raising chickens, however, doesn't have this "chicken and egg problem". You can hatch baby chicks from eggs, and despite them having never seen an adult chicken before, they're pre-programmed to behave exactly like chickens. Every newborn chick is fully programmed from birth.

What would humanity look like after a "hard reboot"?

(Obviously the way to answer this question is that we must send a rocket full of babies to Mars and live-stream their evolution.)

It could be the case that society is responding to overpopulation in many strange ways that serve to reduce/reverse the growth of a stressed population.

Perhaps not making as many babies is the longterm solution.

Funny that Hack #1 compares list versus set value lookup, but the timer doesn't include the time to copy the list into a set. Hack #2 warns against unnecessary copying, and the time for copying the list is almost the same as the performance gain in Hack #1.

In fact, creating a set takes longer than copying a list since it requires hash insertion, so it's actually much faster to do the opposite of what they suggest for #1 (in the case of a single lookup, for this test case).

Here's the results with `big_set = set(big_list)` inside the timing block for the set case:

    List lookup: 0.013985s
    Set lookup:  0.052468s

There is an enormous push to build and power data centers in the DC / Northern Virginia region, and there's legislation in West Virginia right now requiring all coal-fired power plants to operate at at least 69% capacity at all times to support it.

“West Virginia has numerous coal plants that have powered this country for decades. We need these plants to remain operational,” [WV Governor] Morrisey said. “… We will never turn our backs on our existing coal plants and we will work with the federal government to pursue new coal-fired generation.”

https://westvirginiawatch.com/2025/09/11/morrisey-shares-new...

https://wvpublic.org/story/energy-environment/data-center-bi...

https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Status/bills_text.cfm?bil...

Of every story you've ever heard about this child, this singular event is your evidence for telepathy? Shouldn't that alone be strong evidence against your interpretation?

I'm reminded of the anecdotal, arbitrary miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels of the New Testament. An omniscient, all-powerful son of god chooses to prove his infinite power by providing wine at a party.

Or maybe there was another, much more likely and mundane explanation.

One of the most significant updates is a new browser-based processing toolbox powered by a WebAssembly (WASM) build of the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL).

Available tools include:

Buffer, Convex Hull, Dissolve, Bounding Boxes, Centroid, Concave Hull

Why would they want to calculate these from WASM in the browser instead of calling out to the Python kernel?

Islands are good for organisms.

Oil rigs are the worst type of island.