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divbzeroon Sandia turns on brain-like storage-free supercomputer

You’re right, OP got the math wrong. It should be:

  1,440 boards × 96 GB/board = 138,240 GB

divbzeroon How we decreased GitLab repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes

There seems to be a lesson here about the balance between premature vs. anticipatory optimization. We’re generally warned against premature optimization but perhaps, as a rule of thumb, we should look for optimizations in frequently-called functions that are obvious and not onerous to implement.

divbzeroon How we decreased GitLab repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes

The performance improvement that GitLab contributed to Git is slated to be released with v2.50.0:

https://github.com/git/git/commit/bb74c0abbc31da35be52999569...

divbzeroon A masochist's guide to web development

I always assumed that compiling code to run in the browser would be slow, but OP points out that this is not the case. As the Emscripten project describes:

> Thanks to the combination of LLVM, Emscripten, Binaryen, and WebAssembly, the output is compact and runs at near-native speed.

https://emscripten.org/

divbzeroon Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

You can connect iOS Notes with any IMAP server. This supports a reduced feature set (no embedded images, tables, or audio) but does allow for self-hosting.

divbzeroon Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

Apple Notes is used not only with onscreen keyboards in iOS, but also with physical keyboards in iPadOS and macOS, where familiarity with Markdown input could make it faster than shortcut commands.

divbzeroon IRS Direct File on GitHub

Related discussion from last week:

IRS Direct File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131901 - May 2025 (62 comments)

divbzeroon The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

Will companies be forced to design products that can be repaired in any state? Or are there ways they can still restrict repairs for states without right-to-repair laws?

divbzeroon Cinematography of “Andor”

If you thought Rogue One was cool, then yes you should definitely try Andor.

divbzeroon The key to a successful egg drop experiment? Drop it on its side

> They dropped 60 eggs each from three different heights (8, 9, and 10 millimeters) onto a hard surface in three different orientations: horizontal, vertical on the sharp end, and vertical on the blunt end.

I find it hard to extrapolate from this experimental setup to an egg drop competition. A ~1cm drop onto a hard surface is quite different from a ~10m drop in protective packaging.

divbzeroon Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured

In 1995, fifty years after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and forty years after the signing of the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, the Pugwash Conferences and Joseph Rotblat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly "for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms."

divbzeroon A South Korean grand master on the art of the perfect soy sauce

醬油膏 = soy sauce paste

It’s one of my favorites. I try to find ones without much additives and refrigerate after opening to keep it fresh.

divbzeroon It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System

ITBS = Iowa Test of Basic Skills

It took me several seconds to recognize this acronym for a test I took decades ago but haven’t thought about since.

divbzeroon Edit is now open source

Well, Notepad is introducing AI support which already feels like scope creep to me…

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-wri...

divbzeroon A leap year check in three instructions

cal doesn’t offer an option to use the 1582 reform date, but looks like it does handle the 1752 adoption in Great Britain correctly:

  $ cal 9 1752
     September 1752
  Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
         1  2 14 15 16
  17 18 19 20 21 22 23
  24 25 26 27 28 29 30

divbzeroon A leap year check in three instructions

> Note that modern compilers like gcc or clang will produce something like is_leap_year2 from is_leap_year1, so there is not much point in doing this in C source, but it might be useful in other programming languages.

The optimizations that compilers can achieve kind of amaze me.

Indeed, the latest version of cal from util-linux keeps it simple in the C source:

  return ( !(year % 4) && (year % 100) ) || !(year % 400);

https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/blob/v2.41/misc-uti...

divbzeroon Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

> (by now you probably figured out that I am not very popular ar work)

I bet your colleagues appreciate it if you’re similarly strict about ending meetings on time.

divbzeroon Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

It seems to make sense if you interpret it as:

10am c.t. = 10am with extra time

10am s.t. = 10am without extra time

divbzeroon Human

This was unmistakably written by a human.

divbzeroon Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

Walk Score can provide an estimate of walkability for any given address.

https://www.walkscore.com/

divbzeroon How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school

> I was thinking it’s hard to relate to Tom and Daisy in high school…

Yes, it seems easier to relate to them after encountering more “careless people” as an adult.

divbzeroon Starcloud

> So, there you have it: "all you have to do" is deploy a few hectares of radiators in space, combined with heat pumps that can dissipate gigawatts of thermal load…

Starcloud’s whitepaper suggests a 4 km × 4 km radiator. For comparison, the James Web Space Telescope has a sunshield measuring 21 m × 14 m and the International Space Station measures 109 m × 73 m.

divbzeroon Starcloud

I was wondering if these server racks in space would need to be specifically designed for enough radiative cooling. Apparently the answer is yes: the radiators would be expansive and placed on the reverse side of the solar panels.

Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the largest radiators deployed in space - radiating primarily towards deep space, which has an average temperature of about 2.7 Kelvin or -270°C. The radiators can be positioned in-line with the solar arrays as shown in Figure 3, with one side exposed to sunlight.

…

Figure 3. A data center in Sun Synchronous Orbit, showing a 4km x 4km deployed solar array and radiators.

https://www.starcloud.com/wp

divbzeroon Universe expected to decay in 10⁷⁸ years, much sooner than previously thought

Relative to that time scale we are still, at ~10¹⁰ years, in the opening moments of the universe.

divbzeroon Update turns Google Gemini into a prude, breaking apps for trauma survivors

Reliance of small businesses on big tech AI feels similar to reliance of small businesses on Google search: business risk present with each update.

divbzeroon In the Network of the Conclav: How we "guessed" the Pope using network science

Thank you! That answers my question definitively.

It’s notable, of course, that Robert Prevost was highlighted in this post but left off of many other lists of papal candidates.

divbzeroon In the Network of the Conclave

Was this published before the Pope was elected?

The article byline indicates 08 May 2025 but response header shows Last-Modified: Fri, 09 May 2025 13:39:02 GMT and the earliest entry in the Internet Archive is Fri, 09 May 2025 12:28:01 GMT.

The white smoke emerged from the Vatican Thu, 08 May 2025 16:07 GMT and Pope Leo XIV was announced shortly thereafter.

divbzeroon How the US built 5k ships in WWII

I only learned recently that several Japanese Americans were killed in those camps.

[1]: https://www.history.com/articles/japanese-american-relocatio...

[2]: https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Homicide_in_camp/

divbzeroon Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

Thanks for keeping the HN API open for these alternative UIs.

divbzeroon Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

Bloomberg Terminal was the first example that came to mind for me too:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bloomberg_Terminal_M...