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Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
250•theblazehen•2d ago•84 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
23•AlexeyBrin•1h ago•1 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
705•klaussilveira•15h ago•206 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
967•xnx•21h ago•558 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
66•jesperordrup•6h ago•28 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12501
7•onurkanbkrc•43m ago•0 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
135•matheusalmeida•2d ago•35 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
42•speckx•4d ago•34 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
68•videotopia•4d ago•6 comments

ga68, the GNU Algol 68 Compiler – FOSDEM 2026 [video]

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
13•matt_d•3d ago•2 comments

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
39•kaonwarb•3d ago•30 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
45•helloplanets•4d ago•46 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
237•isitcontent•16h ago•26 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
237•dmpetrov•16h ago•126 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
340•vecti•18h ago•147 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
506•todsacerdoti•23h ago•247 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
389•ostacke•21h ago•97 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
303•eljojo•18h ago•188 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
361•aktau•22h ago•186 comments

Cross-Region MSK Replication: K2K vs. MirrorMaker2

https://medium.com/lensesio/cross-region-msk-replication-a-comprehensive-performance-comparison-o...
3•andmarios•4d ago•1 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
428•lstoll•22h ago•284 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
71•kmm•5d ago•10 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
23•bikenaga•3d ago•11 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
25•1vuio0pswjnm7•2h ago•14 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
96•quibono•4d ago•22 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
270•i5heu•18h ago•219 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
34•romes•4d ago•3 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1079•cdrnsf•1d ago•461 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
64•gfortaine•13h ago•30 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
305•surprisetalk•3d ago•44 comments
Open in hackernews

Plutonium Mountain: The 17-year mission to guard remains of Soviet nuclear tests (2013)

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/plutonium-mountain-inside-17-year-mission-secure-legacy-soviet-nuclear-testing
88•jmillikin•8mo ago

Comments

Arainach•8mo ago
The link to download the article seems broken.
brettermeier•8mo ago
I think it should be this PDF: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NunnLugar/2015/64.%202013.08.00%2...
wffurr•8mo ago
It wasn’t immediately obvious, but the article is on the site as html if you scroll past “the latest from Belfer”. The article body is weirdly far from the title.

Ah the article is also not the paper. It’s a long summary.

raddan•8mo ago
Actually it’s just the paper’s introduction.
voidUpdate•8mo ago
The russians left a scary amount of radioactive material in random places after the union fell :/ I'm reminded of the Lia Radiological Incident (three men irradiated by the remains of soviet RTGs) and the 1997 Tbilisi, Georgia incident where 11 servicemen were irradiated by a radioactive source in a jacket, left over from soviet training
perihelions•8mo ago
Don't forget the space nukes [reactors]! Some of them exploded, and stringed the planet with Saturn-like rings of nuclear dust[0]; others are slowly oscillating towards Earth like the blade from the Poe story, to impact sometime a few centuries from now.

[0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190033494/downloads/20... ("The NaK Population: a 2019 Status" (.pdf))

lupusreal•8mo ago
To be clear, nuclear reactors, not nuclear bombs. It's droplets of the liquid metal they used as coolant in their nuclear powered ocean radar recon satellites.
perihelions•8mo ago
It's both nuclear fuel and droplets, although the clouds of metal droplets are much easier to track by radar. Several of the space reactors did explode (were observed to break up and fragment).
jodrellblank•8mo ago
Similar accident in 1980 when a lost Caesium-137 capsule in a quarry became mixed into a concrete wall of a bedroom in an apartment block in Kramatorsk, killing several people and making others ill, for 8 years before it was found:

https://www.curiousarchive.com/death-in-apartment-85-the-kra...

voidUpdate•8mo ago
If you ever want to have a worrying afternoon, have a read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
ikekkdcjkfke•8mo ago
I now want a bluetooth geiger counter hooked up to my smartwatch with sound effects
nancyminusone•8mo ago
Here you go: https://www.radiacode.com/
boringg•8mo ago
Thats a much smaller list than I would have expected considering it covers the entire planet.
cogogo•8mo ago
Wonder what it is about these sources that compels people to pick them up put them in their pocket and surprisingly often keep them in their kitchen. Do they visibly glow or look cool?
m4rtink•8mo ago
Yeah, this one is super scary...
e2le•8mo ago
Not entirely related. Some scam health products are made with radioactive material[0,1] (thorium dioxide) and can be found in wands, baby clothing, pendents, cards, wristbands, face cream, toothbrushes, and more.

Even more concerning given that these products will shed that radioactive material into the environment and be ingested by humans. The "quantum wands" as shown in the YouTube video are filled with a sizeable quantity of thorium dioxide powder and is possible to forcibly open.

They are illegal but continue to be sold.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BA5bw1EV5I

lupusreal•8mo ago
Somewhere in China is a businessman incredibly pleased with himself that he found a way to sell the toxic waste left over from rare earth processing to new age hippies.
mseepgood•8mo ago
Or the 2006 London incident, where a Putin critic was irradiated by a radioactive source in his stomach.
Havoc•8mo ago
Who would be crazy enough to go into soviet tunnels full of questionable radioactive stuff? I'm sure there is fun glowy stuff down there but surely that is a rough risk ratio for even desperate people
kibwen•8mo ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident . It's not implausible.
oersted•8mo ago
Weird how we ended up making real-life objects that "curse" everything and everyone they touch with "invisible evil death magic". It's right out of a fairy tale.
HPsquared•8mo ago
Germs are already a bit like that. A lot of these superstitions were not bad for infection control, even if the underlying mechanism was not understood (much like the Standard Model, incidentally).
pyrale•8mo ago
Lead and abestos have been in use since antiquity.
wildzzz•8mo ago
Unless you work with lead or eat off of leads plates all day, the risk of exposure is low. Even lead pipes are not as scary once they have been mineralized. Same with asbestos, it's the workers that handle it that are at the most risk. An asbestos tile or insulation just sitting there is not a huge risk.
BoxOfRain•8mo ago
I think as well as the obvious connection to nuclear warfare, part of the public fear of nuclear technology comes directly from how highly radioactive objects mimic the idea of a "curse".

In reality there's many forms of industrial pollution that are arguably scarier than nuclear waste, but none are quite so eerie in how their harm is caused. Even though it represented the very worst practices for these materials, the idea of a place like Lake Karachay where even half an hour on its shore would have killed you without you even knowing you were doomed is really unsettling. I don't think nuclear technology should be avoided, but there's definitely a formidable image problem here I think.

lupusreal•8mo ago
Chemical pollution is a lot scarier in a way, since it's much harder to detect. Even absolutely tiny amounts of radioactive contamination its existence to cheap widely available detectors. But I think chemical pollution is easier to ignore since it's harder to detect.
wat10000•8mo ago
A lot of chemical pollution lasts literally forever, too. It's kind of funny the way the mind works. "This will remain dangerous for ten thousand years" somehow sounds scarier than "this is always dangerous."
lostlogin•8mo ago
> Lake Karachay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay

voidUpdate•8mo ago
Because it almost certainly isn't actually glowy, they just look like tunnels, maybe with some scrap inside that can be sold off, and not everyone knows that it has radioactive waste inside or what it can actually do to you. The average person knows a lot less about radiation than you do

https://xkcd.com/2501/

542354234235•8mo ago
>In the post-Soviet vacuum of the early 1990s, the conditions at Semipalatinsk-21 resembled the apocalypse that nuclear weapons have long portended. A city of 40,000 that was once serviced by two daily direct flights from Moscow had been transformed into a dystopia of a few thousand stragglers and feral dogs whose main challenge was finding food and warmth…In the winter of 1995, Kairat Kadyrzhanov, a metallurgist living in Semipalatinsk-21, confronted the scavengers at Degelen to alert them that radiation might be present in the tunnels. “My wife and children are starving,” one of the scavengers told Kadyrzhanov, as he recalled it. “What am I supposed to do?”
ivl•8mo ago
There are many people who die every year going into tunnels without knowing if the air is safe to breathe where they're exploring.

Do you think they'd be worried about radiation?

Cthulhu_•8mo ago
People looking for bomb grade plutonium, of course. But also scavengers who have no idea, there's been plenty of incidents with abandoned nuclear material.
rdtsc•8mo ago
Anyone desperate to make a buck on scrap with no other jobs around. Especially in 90s things were pretty bleak in post Soviet states.

Now imagine the appeal of selling any of this radioactive stuff to a shady buyer. Now it's even more appealing.

HelloUsername•8mo ago
(2013)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257899

https://web.archive.org/web/20130822102920/http://thebulleti...

r721•8mo ago
Related story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41617207
acc_297•8mo ago
Funny anecdote from the full article

"Equipment provided by Raytheon as part of a multi-million dollar contract broke the winter after it was installed. One U.S. official said most of the detectors had been designed by Raytheon for the desert environment of the U.S.-Mexican border. The Kazakhs, on their own initiative, sourced equipment designed to withstand Siberian winters from a Russian military supplier; it cost half the amount of the U.S. contract, and easily survived the winter."

alistairSH•8mo ago
We overpaid for equipment not fit for purpose... Not sure I'd call that "funny". Depressing or maddening, maybe.
soneil•8mo ago
Possibly. We'd need to know whether the Siberian equipment could survive Nevada to make that call.
alistairSH•8mo ago
I don't follow - the problem stated was the purchase of desert-spec sensors for use in the cold. Unless there's more context, we didn't buy Siberian-spec items for use on the Mexico border.
nancyminusone•8mo ago
I'm kind of surprised that if there was enough plutonium left they were worried about someone taking it, they never recovered it themselves. In the Manhattan project, plutonium was so valuable it made the value of gold look like a doorstop. I guess by the 50s, plutonium would have been available at every corner drugstore then?
rdtsc•8mo ago
Once they had a process to make it and enough to fire off hundreds of tests it probably wasn’t worth to waste time to dig through the rubble and then separate it all out again.
epistasis•8mo ago
This reminds me of the massive risks that Chernobyl presents to this day, as Russia has attempted to destroy the newly installed $2B protective sarcophagus, on Feb 14 with a drone:

https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chernobyl-protective...

The highly engineered protective cover was designed to carefully maintain air pressure to confine the site. The hole caused by Russia threatens all of that, as the Russia's drone lit a fire in the waterproof insulation. The destruction of this basic weatherproofing threatens the entire structure, which was meant to last for 100 years without anybody being required to get close to it. Repairs are, well, difficult. A more detailed examination of the structure and its risks is here in a 12:39 video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW4BEqDS_wM

jxjnskkzxxhx•8mo ago
Classic russian. Target something for no reason other than psychological impact. Same reason why they bomb civilians etc. The Ukrainians meanwhile bomb Russian bombers.
johnshades•8mo ago
Also see: https://www.vice.com/en/article/plutonium-in-the-hills-how-d...
1oooqooq•8mo ago
dunno about you, but if i was trying to steal something that was left in the open i too would not alert any of the competent authorities, and fill everything with concrete after i was done.

very sus.

richardatlarge•8mo ago
My novel set partly in the Polygon (Semipalatinsk) is “State of Matter”