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StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/
1•simonw•35s ago•0 comments

John Haugeland on the failure of micro-worlds

https://blog.plover.com/tech/gpt/micro-worlds.html
1•blenderob•54s ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built an invoicing SaaS with AI-generated invoice templates

https://www.invocrea.com/en
1•mathysth•56s ago•0 comments

Velocity

https://velocity.quest
1•kevinelliott•1m ago•1 comments

Corning Invented a New Fiber-Optic Cable for AI and Landed a $6B Meta Deal [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3KLbc5DlRs
1•ksec•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: XAPIs.dev – Twitter API Alternative at 90% Lower Cost

https://xapis.dev
1•nmfccodes•3m ago•0 comments

Near-Instantly Aborting the Worst Pain Imaginable with Psychedelics

https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/near-instantly-aborting-the-worst
1•eatitraw•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Nginx-defender – realtime abuse blocking for Nginx

https://github.com/Anipaleja/nginx-defender
2•anipaleja•9m ago•0 comments

The Super Sharp Blade

https://netzhansa.com/the-super-sharp-blade/
1•robin_reala•11m ago•0 comments

Smart Homes Are Terrible

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/smart-homes-technology/685867/
1•tusslewake•12m ago•0 comments

What I haven't figured out

https://macwright.com/2026/01/29/what-i-havent-figured-out
1•stevekrouse•13m ago•0 comments

KPMG pressed its auditor to pass on AI cost savings

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2026/02/06/kpmg-pressed-its-auditor-to-pass-on-ai-cost-savings/
1•cainxinth•13m ago•0 comments

Open-source Claude skill that optimizes Hinge profiles. Pretty well.

https://twitter.com/b1rdmania/status/2020155122181869666
2•birdmania•13m ago•1 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
2•samasblack•15m ago•1 comments

I squeezed a BERT sentiment analyzer into 1GB RAM on a $5 VPS

https://mohammedeabdelaziz.github.io/articles/trendscope-market-scanner
1•mohammede•17m ago•0 comments

Kagi Translate

https://translate.kagi.com
2•microflash•17m ago•0 comments

Building Interactive C/C++ workflows in Jupyter through Clang-REPL [video]

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/QX3RPH-building_interactive_cc_workflows_in_jupyter_throug...
1•stabbles•18m ago•0 comments

Tactical tornado is the new default

https://olano.dev/blog/tactical-tornado/
2•facundo_olano•20m ago•0 comments

Full-Circle Test-Driven Firmware Development with OpenClaw

https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/07/full-circle-test-driven-firmware-development-with-openclaw/
1•ptorrone•21m ago•0 comments

Automating Myself Out of My Job – Part 2

https://blog.dsa.club/automation-series/automating-myself-out-of-my-job-part-2/
1•funnyfoobar•21m ago•0 comments

Dependency Resolution Methods

https://nesbitt.io/2026/02/06/dependency-resolution-methods.html
1•zdw•22m ago•0 comments

Crypto firm apologises for sending Bitcoin users $40B by mistake

https://www.msn.com/en-ie/money/other/crypto-firm-apologises-for-sending-bitcoin-users-40-billion...
1•Someone•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: iPlotCSV: CSV Data, Visualized Beautifully for Free

https://www.iplotcsv.com/demo
2•maxmoq•23m ago•0 comments

There's no such thing as "tech" (Ten years later)

https://www.anildash.com/2026/02/06/no-such-thing-as-tech/
1•headalgorithm•23m ago•0 comments

List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments
1•brightbeige•24m ago•0 comments

Me/CFS: The blind spot in proactive medicine (Open Letter)

https://github.com/debugmeplease/debug-ME
1•debugmeplease•24m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: What are the word games do you play everyday?

1•gogo61•27m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Paper Arena – A social trading feed where only AI agents can post

https://paperinvest.io/arena
1•andrenorman•29m ago•0 comments

TOSTracker – The AI Training Asymmetry

https://tostracker.app/analysis/ai-training
1•tldrthelaw•32m ago•0 comments

The Devil Inside GitHub

https://blog.melashri.net/micro/github-devil/
2•elashri•33m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

The most otherworldly, mysterious forms of lightning on Earth

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/lightning-sprites-transient-luminous-events-thunderstorms
121•Anon84•7mo ago

Comments

pbarry25•7mo ago
https://archive.is/7kAwt
nla•7mo ago
Why is there a paywall article on the front of Hacker News?
thunderbong•7mo ago
From the FAQ

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

Nursie•7mo ago
Reading mode in Firefox worked fine for me on this one.
the_arun•7mo ago
NG forces people to enter email address without a close button.
n1b0m•7mo ago
I was able to close it
dylan604•7mo ago
Dev tools, pick element, set display:none. It’s your browser. You can choose what it does
mock-possum•7mo ago
> Not only did the photographers capture a significant number of red sprites, the Himalayan storm also featured even rarer TLEs called jets and ghosts. The team found 16 secondary jets, powerful columns of often blue or purple light darting upwards into the sky, and at least four ghosts, green hazy glows that can sometimes hover above red sprites.

Oddly we will just have to take the author’s word for it, because no photographs depicting those rarer TLEs appear in this article.

neom•7mo ago
Cool TLE photo from an astronaut couple days ago: https://x.com/Astro_Ayers/status/1940810789830451563
cs702•7mo ago
Just, wow.

I've never seen anything like that.

Thank you for sharing it on HN!

lbeckman314•7mo ago
We're spoiled in terms of cool astronauts! A couple of personal favorite posts:

1. Jonny Kim: https://www.instagram.com/p/DKkj52PuO6h/

> My first time-lapse. Thanks to some instruction and tips from @Astro_Ayers, I caught my first aurora. After seeing the result, I told her this felt like fishing. Prepping the camera, the angle, the settings, the mount, then setting your timer and coming back to hope you got a catch. And after catching my first fish, I think I’m hooked. Thanks, Vapor!

———

2. Don Petit: https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/xbmhz4/i_captured_so...

> These are Star Trails taken from my previous mission to the ISS, Expedition 30, in 2012. I call it "Lightning Bugs."... In the photo, stars make arcing trails in deep space, while a huge thunderstorm pounds Earth below as seen from the time history of lightning flashes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250215124004/https://blogs.nas...

Synaesthesia•7mo ago
The video of the sprite lightning in Tibet blew me away.

https://x.com/DarshanRajguru5/status/1940829392269463943

r721•7mo ago
News story about that: https://petapixel.com/2025/06/02/rare-red-sprite-photographe...
MisterTea•7mo ago
This is incredible. I'd like to know what the physical process is here in terms of the colors and current paths. Is the red light a product of hydrogen gas disassociated from water vapor? Spectral phenomena of glow discharge?
foxglacier•7mo ago
The trouble with fancy photography (which National Geographic is famous for) is it can make things look far more spectacular or "otherworldly" than real life. Apparently this lightning can't usually be seen by people, occur above the clouds, and in the blink of an eye. You could be looking right at it and not notice anything otherworldly. Well that's not impressive. You can also see otherworldly things just by watching water move up close or looking at space through a telescope, or using an instrument to visualize EM fields or whatever. I expect those things to be otherworldly because they are.
dfedbeef•7mo ago
I think it's ok to think they're all interesting
alwa•7mo ago
For that matter I think a large part of what makes anything “otherworldly” is beauty in things unfolding outside our normal experience of the world: I don’t see what distinguishes glorious NG photography from the other methods. It’s only natural to expect that from techniques that let us access phenomena that wouldn’t be perceptible in terms of ordinary human scale or sense of time
foxglacier•6mo ago
My cynicism of NG photography is that you can't go look at the thing yourself and see it the way they show. The pictures are effectively faked though fancy camera tricks. Yea it's fascinating to see beyond our usual senses, but it's also obvious that those things are going to be strange and otherworldly so it doesn't even need to be said. Truly amazing otherworldliness would be something you can (in principle) stand there and ogle with your own senses.
ujkiolp•7mo ago
substantiate
adolph•7mo ago
The article links to a photographer of the phenomena which arguably has better info than the article.

https://paulmsmithphotography.com/pages/what-are-red-sprites...

  Sprites get their characteristic red color from excitation of nitrogen in 
  the low pressure environment of the upper mesosphere. At such low 
  pressures quenching by atomic oxygen is much faster than that of 
  nitrogen, allowing for nitrogen emissions to dominate despite no 
  difference in composition. As the atmospheric pressure increases in the 
  lower atmosphere, the red emissions are quenched and blue emissions from 
  atmospheric nitrogen excitation dominate. . .
chias•7mo ago
This article eventually links you to it, but what you probably want to look at is this: https://spritacular.org/gallery

(photos of these forms of lightning)

jacobevelyn•7mo ago
I expected ball lightning to be mentioned in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
JKCalhoun•7mo ago
Came up on my feed a few days ago. Looks like convincing ball lightning to me: https://youtu.be/mmOfwFHBu_o
alberth•7mo ago
What’s odd about that video for me is, why didn’t the person zoom in (on the lightning ball)?

Seems like human nature would be to zoom in on something of interest.

JKCalhoun•7mo ago
Cell phone with no zoom?

The convincing bit to me is the few frames you see when the ball "collapses".

deepsun•7mo ago
They do at 0:25
omnibrain•7mo ago
Just a few days ago, when those sprite pictures and videos first made their rounds, I thought about ball lightnings. Back in the 90ies I had a physics teacher that was obsessed with them because he saw one as a child.

I figured, with the advent of cameras everywhere we would have much more evidence of them by now, but I found almost nothing.

hermitcrab•7mo ago
>I figured, with the advent of cameras everywhere we would have much more evidence of them by now

The prevalence of phone cameras in the modern world has shown that:

-Bigfoot doesn't exist.

-Police brutality does.

JKCalhoun•7mo ago
There must be a relevant xkcd....
MisterTea•7mo ago
The Doom plasma rifle and BFG no longer appear completely fictional.
spyder•7mo ago
It's likely an arcing powerline (see the reddit comments): https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1lrk1rz/incredible_...
MisterTea•7mo ago
Reading through the comments and reviewing the video does indeed point to arcing power lines. Ive seen videos of fast moving arcs across medium voltage lines that looked like a horizontal jacobs ladder. The lines over current protection equipment might not instantly trip as the current might be limited by enough impedance in the equipment. Disappointing reveal.
JKCalhoun•7mo ago
That sounds plausible.
donatj•7mo ago
I am a huge skeptic in general, but when I was 18 some twenty+ years ago I was sitting in my parents living room during a thunderstorm watching out the back window.

This blaringly loud blindingly bright ball of white light just meandered slowly towards the house, before striking the house and destroying most of our electronics and starting a small fire.

The noise was the most impressing part. It's difficult sound to fully explain, it sounded a lot like when a high power line fell near my house a couple years ago. Imagine you were an ant inside a running blender, it's that all-encompassing.

I will never forget it, I've never seen anything like it.

meindnoch•7mo ago
I don't believe you.
donatj•7mo ago
I can show you my fried HP DE100C audio player, but that's all I've got. I understand being skeptical.
nancyminusone•7mo ago
My mother claims to have seen ball lightning. I was there too, but facing away from the window at the time. Sounded like regular lightning to me.

I asked her about this recently, but she doesn't remember.

wrp•7mo ago
It's funny how controversial this subject has been. From reading the more recent books on lightning physics, I'm convinced of the reality of it. From that perspective, I'm amused by the entry on ball lightning in the Encyclopedic Dictionary Of Physics (Thewlis, 1962). I don' have it here, but I recall he says something like, "Reports of ball lightning have generally come from unreliable characters, so we can assume it doesn't really exist."
TheAceOfHearts•7mo ago
No mention of ball lightning [0]? I also keep feeling incredibly disappointed that some Chinese researchers have had video going back to 2014 but, AFAIK, it has never been published.

Although as I was just looking up the ball lightning link it turns out there was a newly reported recording of ball lightning just a few days ago [1]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/11272805/alberta-storm-lightning-...

MisterTea•7mo ago
> Chinese researchers have had video going back to 2014 but, AFAIK, it has never been published.

There is this video which shows the shape on the left and spectral image on the right: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/5

neuroelectron•7mo ago
The curious phenomena of red sprites, green ghosts and blue jets are clearly derived from the red, green and blue pixels of the simulation aether.
Terr_•7mo ago
Nah, the aether doesn't care, we just see them that way because there's a bug preventing the effect from triggering all simulated retinal cones. :p
eth0up•7mo ago
Really ought to give this a chance. This guy's photography is magnificent, and so full of sprites one might nearly get their fill:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_fGr-NlLTG8

Channel: NatureByJJ

Based in the Kimberley

chasil•7mo ago
Is ball lightning even more mysterious?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning#:~:text=Ball%...

HK-NC•7mo ago
Ive seen the blue sprites while in the mountains above the clouds. If you open an image editor, black background, select paintbrush, electric blue colour, and do a random fast squiggle followed by ctrl+z thats how they look. I only say this because images and video seem to not exist for them yet. Looks like a signature on the sky.