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We built another object storage

https://fractalbits.com/blog/why-we-built-another-object-storage/
60•fractalbits•2h ago•9 comments

Java FFM zero-copy transport using io_uring

https://www.mvp.express/
25•mands•5d ago•6 comments

How exchanges turn order books into distributed logs

https://quant.engineering/exchange-order-book-distributed-logs.html
48•rundef•5d ago•17 comments

macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-26_2-release-notes#RDMA-over-...
467•guiand•18h ago•237 comments

AI is bringing old nuclear plants out of retirement

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2025/12/09/nuclear-power-ai
32•geox•1h ago•24 comments

Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/the-ars-technica-guide-to-dumb-tvs/
433•fleahunter•1d ago•362 comments

Photographer built a medium-format rangefinder, and so can you

https://petapixel.com/2025/12/06/this-photographer-built-an-awesome-medium-format-rangefinder-and...
78•shinryuu•6d ago•9 comments

Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
865•parisidau•10h ago•445 comments

GNU Unifont

https://unifoundry.com/unifont/index.html
287•remywang•18h ago•68 comments

A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251205-how-the-handheld-digital-camera-was-born
42•selvan•5d ago•18 comments

Beautiful Abelian Sandpiles

https://eavan.blog/posts/beautiful-sandpiles.html
83•eavan0•3d ago•16 comments

Rats Play DOOM

https://ratsplaydoom.com/
332•ano-ther•18h ago•123 comments

Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig

https://github.com/ringtailsoftware/uvm32
167•trj•17h ago•11 comments

OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/12/openai-skills/
481•simonw•15h ago•271 comments

Computer Animator and Amiga fanatic Dick Van Dyke turns 100

109•ggm•6h ago•23 comments

Formula One Handovers and Handovers From Surgery to Intensive Care (2008) [pdf]

https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2008-sower.pdf
82•bookofjoe•6d ago•33 comments

Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards

https://victorpoughon.github.io/bidicalc/
179•fouronnes3•1d ago•85 comments

Will West Coast Jazz Get Some Respect?

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/will-west-coast-jazz-finally-get
9•paulpauper•6d ago•2 comments

Freeing a Xiaomi humidifier from the cloud

https://0l.de/blog/2025/11/xiaomi-humidifier/
126•stv0g•1d ago•51 comments

Obscuring P2P Nodes with Dandelion

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/12/08/dandelion/
57•ColinWright•4d ago•1 comments

Go is portable, until it isn't

https://simpleobservability.com/blog/go-portable-until-isnt
119•khazit•6d ago•101 comments

Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/eliminating-state-law-obstruction-of-nati...
169•andsoitis•1d ago•217 comments

Poor Johnny still won't encrypt

https://bfswa.substack.com/p/poor-johnny-still-wont-encrypt
52•zdw•10h ago•64 comments

YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/13/youtubes-ceo-is-latest-tech-boss-limiting-his-kids-social-media-u...
83•pseudolus•3h ago•66 comments

Slax: Live Pocket Linux

https://www.slax.org/
41•Ulf950•5d ago•5 comments

50 years of proof assistants

https://lawrencecpaulson.github.io//2025/12/05/History_of_Proof_Assistants.html
107•baruchel•15h ago•16 comments

Gild Just One Lily

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/04/gild-just-one-lily/
29•serialx•5d ago•5 comments

Capsudo: Rethinking sudo with object capabilities

https://ariadne.space/2025/12/12/rethinking-sudo-with-object-capabilities.html
74•fanf2•17h ago•44 comments

Google removes Sci-Hub domains from U.S. search results due to dated court order

https://torrentfreak.com/google-removes-sci-hub-domains-from-u-s-search-results-due-to-dated-cour...
193•t-3•11h ago•34 comments

String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof

https://www.quantamagazine.org/string-theory-inspires-a-brilliant-baffling-new-math-proof-20251212/
167•ArmageddonIt•22h ago•153 comments
Open in hackernews

Octobass

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/octobass
107•keepamovin•6mo ago

Comments

JKCalhoun•5mo ago
I do remember this tall bass. A very cool and unusual museum, BTW. Phoenix is a fun town. The Botanical Garden too is not to be missed.
leptons•5mo ago
The Musical Instrument Museum is one of the best things to do in Phoenix. It's also one of my favorite museums in the world.
mrbluecoat•5mo ago
Yes, definitely plan to spend a few hours - it's a massive museum packed with musical instruments and cultures from around the world. They give you positional-aware headsets that play music and information as you near a display.
nkrisc•5mo ago
That place is amazing. Went there once thinking it would be a 30 minute diversion before we did other stuff. We spent nearly 4 hours in there.

Wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone in Phoenix.

tkgally•5mo ago
There's also a very nice musical instrument museum in Hamamatsu, Japan [1]. I really enjoyed it and would like to go again.

[1] https://www.gakkihaku.jp/en/

madcaptenor•5mo ago
Serious question - why else do I want to go to Phoenix? Say enough for a long weekend. I keep hearing good things about this museum but Phoenix is too far away for me to go just for this.
leptons•5mo ago
I have family there, which is the only reason I would ever go to Phoenix.
kjgkjhfkjf•5mo ago
Here's a video of one being played (sort of): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K3VdVbBOxw
esperent•5mo ago
Skip to 5:41 to hear it actually played. Although I assume you'd need very good speakers and I'm not sure if the YT audio compression is good for very low tones.
adamgordonbell•5mo ago
At least for my hearing, there is a fall off around 20hz, though that could be my headphones.

https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/

hrnnnnnn•5mo ago
I can't speak for YouTube's specific compression, but since there's less information in low frequency sounds they should compress better than high frequency sounds.

Anecdata: the bass in low bitrate online drum and bass radio in the 2000s always came through cleaner than the mids and treble.

egypturnash•5mo ago
Where "sort of" depends on your personal answer to "does spending 15 minutes recording yourself making various noises with it, then editing the clips together count as "playing"?".
apricot•5mo ago
"The Montreal Symphony Orchestra is the only orchestra that owns one of these unusual instruments"

They actually have three. https://www.osm.ca/en/octobasses/

jpease•5mo ago
Saw it in Phoenix.

Definitely big.

Wouldn’t recommend for slap.

ofrzeta•5mo ago
"Bass! How low can you go?" (Public Enemy - Bring the Noise)
01HNNWZ0MV43FF•5mo ago
"With a range so deep it goes lower than humans can hear"

To be fair, the difference between "sound" and "air pressure" is vibes. A tire inflator is probably putting out infrasonic frequencies, too.

garthogjazz•5mo ago
Co-Builder of the last two in Montreal here, actually the octobass shown in the article is incomplete, it lacks the pedals that are present on the original one by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume. These pedals allows for legato, which is not achievable if you play only with the levers.

About those in Montreal, one of them is a replica (+ minor upgrades) of the original one, and two of them are driven with motors.

You can see some close up in [1]

[1] https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2024/08/14/irez-vous-voir-...

keepamovin•5mo ago
This is the HN we came for. Wow. The guy that built this!
BoostandEthanol•5mo ago
“Some of the instruments fall below the human hearing range, only the vibrations can be felt,” feels unreal to me for some reason. I can’t imagine a vibration rattling through me without hearing something at that power.
keepamovin•5mo ago
Sounds like something you’ll have to try! :)
tpoacher•5mo ago
Apparently this is a thing that was used in old horror movies.

Subsonic music would play just before a scary encounter, creating a feeling of uneasiness to the audience without any consciously perceptible stimulous, and thus priming the audience for the horror to come.

tenthirtyam•5mo ago
The interwebz once told me that the human eye resonates at 19Hz or so, which apparently when triggered is very useful for inducing a sense of fear.
_kb•5mo ago
It's used to rattle more than just humans with processes like DFAT [0]. Here's the NASA handbook on their use [1].

For experiences that are a little more human friendly, subsonic audio is something that's also explored more commonly in the noise art. Stefanie Egedy [2] is one artist that's been working in that space lately.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-field_acoustic_testing

[1]: https://s3vi.ndc.nasa.gov/ssri-kb/static/resources/NASA-HDBK...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1Yo2hcSAbc

jclem•5mo ago
For years, a friend of mine (in San Francisco) and I (in New York City) have sent one another an image [1] of one of these being tuned any time we’re doing coast-to-coast software debugging (especially relevant when we were working on a realtime collaborative text editor).

[1] https://www.loc.gov/item/2014714519/

PaulHoule•5mo ago
Kinda funny, my son recently started playing both guitar and bass guitar and quickly got into building them. He mashed up a Ukulele with a fretless Guitar and put two bridges on the Guitar so it has a harp section. Just before this got posted he came around and asked me about the physics of building an (electric) bass guitar tuned an octave or two octaves lower than a normal bass guitar.