Hacker News Reader

Deus Ex has so much to enjoy, but in particular I’m glad to see continued love for the music.

I can’t recommend highly enough the remasters and remixes by Mothership Loudspeakerz.

This was all a prototype for a much larger LLM.

jl6on Writing seen in PHerc. 306B, for the first time in 2000 years

Amazing work. Makes you wonder what else is out there holding a record of the past, with us too primitive to read it.

jl6on StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month

SO in the end was like walking into a bar, and the music stops, and all the regulars stare at you, and say “Yeah, what do YOU want, kid? Quit wasting our time. And by the way, you opened the door wrong.”

Most of the easy questions have been asked. I stopped using it because I was asking questions that weren’t trivial to answer, and I guess it is easier to earn internet points through mod actions than through writing answers.

jl6on Woman faces six years in prison over Cash App account she never opened

Would the EFF get involved in a case like this? Feels like it could set an important principle about how weak the link can be between “PII” and the actual person, given the preponderance of data leaks.

jl6on CVE-2026-111943: Compromised Intermediate Certificate Authority

Gender-neutral variant of man-in-the-middle. They should have just used something less controversial like master-in-the-middle.

jl6on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck

Maybe the best time to express disapproval of kings is before they happen.

jl6on Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time

Always good to see the future arriving, but the job is not done yet by far. We need to be sure not to take our foot off the gas (figuratively of course).

We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.

jl6on Tell HN: Remember to migrate away from .name domain

It’s so ad hoc that we need to maintain reference datasets to identify what’s registrable:

https://publicsuffix.org/

A real mess.

jl6on BIPM decides to stop adding leap seconds to UTC

Decoupling time from the Earth’s rotation paves the way for the future depicted in Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, where they use a straight count of seconds since the UNIX epoch, and units like msecs (million seconds ~= 11.5 days).

Hopefully by the time UTC drifts more than an hour from UT1, we’ll be a spacefaring civilization that is happy to treat time as wholly independent from how a particular rock moves.

jl6on Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years

It could be that doing things you don’t like is sometimes good for you, and maybe there is a collective preference shift towards avoiding short-term pain at the expense of long-term gain.

jl6on David Rudnick on "borderline impossible" process of designing Arsenal typeface

Speaking of ludicrous displays, it kinda looks like Fraktur.

jl6on Container ship sinks in Strait of Hormuz as Iran steps up attacks

Perhaps they are closet climate activists, because raising the price of gas significantly and persistently is realistically the only way we’re ever going to stop burning it.

jl6on The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s

I import more than I export in December and January, but for every other month of the year it’s the reverse by some margin. My annual electricity bill is net negative, and the installation cost will be paid off in 7 years. The numbers would be even better in, say, Spain, but they are perfectly adequate here, despite suboptimal latitude.

Incidentally, the grid only knows about my exports. Self-consumption manifests as demand reduction, so UK solar production and electricity consumption is probably higher than aggregate figures suggest.

jl6on 4-hour battery storage is cheaper to install than gas turbines all across globe

> For onshore wind, continuous capex and opex improvements are expected to drive LCOE down 16% by 2060

What’s with the forecasts going as far out as 2060?? Given the scale of changes we’ve seen in just the last 10 years, looking forward 34 years seems absurd, and to still only expect a 16% drop in cost?

jl6on Living off-grid: Hundred Rabbits

What does it really mean to live off grid, anyway? Eschewing electrical and/or road connections takes you out of physical grids, but you still live in the wider and more important grid of depending on other people. It might feel rustic to live in a log cabin or a boat, but if you bought it with capital and heat it with imported fuel, and power it with mass-produced solar panels, and stock it with purchased food, you’re still on the grid of industrial civilization.

jl6on Holes (1996-2025)

I see this as a broadening of the problem of how we assign identities and names to things. Clearly we can name the absence of things too, and in doing so perhaps eliminate their absence…

jl6on Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics

Hey, we're just tryin' to have a good time, narc. Why do you want to destroy us? Don't commit your hate crimes here! Hate crime!

Simpsons called it 30 years ago.

jl6on PostmarketOS is rebranding as Nura

Was the original name some kind of nod to PostgreSQL?

jl6on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

And as a result it's very well emulated, making it very likely that Amiga code can still be run in 50 years' time.

jl6on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

> How does someone write software that needs to run for ~50 years where the hardware will need to be replaced with non-equivalent, newer hardware?

Some ideas:

Write it in a popular language/ecosystem, stick rigidly to well-defined APIs, use commodity hardware, flatten out any malignant cleverness, maintain documentation on why every part does the thing it does, and make the source code readily available.

This is based on working with some very old systems, and each point above is the opposite of something that made life harder.

jl6on Factorio that you can touch

Which Monday?

jl6on Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

I don’t know why commenters here are treating energy technologies as winner-takes-all. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, and that’s fantastic news for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it suits every country, every niche, and every application. There are plenty of places that don’t have massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather. Even if nuclear isn’t ever the cheapest option, the world energy market is so huge and diverse that it still makes sense to have nuclear as an option.

jl6on Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions

Kinda, but the back catalog has never been bigger or more valuable. There is good stuff from every era, and it only accumulates. What happens when the viewing mix is 10% new stuff, 90% classics?

jl6on Teen Social Media Bans Miss the Point

Maybe it’s because tech people are prone to binary thinking, but there seems to be the idea that if you can’t prevent a bad thing entirely, then you shouldn’t try to prevent it at all. Or maybe the other way around: if you can’t achieve a good thing completely, then why even bother trying?

jl6on If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious

> We call the iPhone a phone, but is it? I can call people from my laptop, my tablet, etc. I can watch videos and play music and write notes on my phone. Everything is everything, and nothing is what it is.

Fuzzy edges don't render the centers un-useful. Philosophical debates about the edges consume all the oxygen, but regardless of whether you think an iPhone is a phone or a computer or a television, it is definitely not a cricket bat. An inability to draw a sharp boundary doesn't mean classification has broken down, and it's nihilistic to conclude that real, meaningful distinctions cannot be drawn.

jl6on WangNet – 1.8 MB, zero-dependency Numberwang adjudication in 11 languages

Amazing, I passed by Mornington Crescent only yesterday!

jl6on The case against JPEG XL

The chart showing jxl-rs taking 1209ms to decode a 5456x3632 image in a single thread is a little damning, but is there an equivalent benchmark showing multithreaded decode performance? Clients tend to have an abundance of threads these days.

jl6on Show HN: Bodily Oddities

I used to feel mildly synaesthetic about day colours.

Saturday red, Sunday blue, Monday orange, Tuesday purple, Wednesday green, Thursday pink, Friday cyan.

Then I realised that was just the colour scheme used by the Radio Times.

jl6on Mind-altering drugs played key role in rise of Andean civilization

Context does matter though? There are plenty of substances which are legal for certified professionals to use in controlled settings that would be illegal for untrained amateurs to use for recreational purposes. Plutonium, for example.