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Start all of your commands with a comma

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
193•theblazehen•2d ago•56 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
678•klaussilveira•14h ago•203 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
954•xnx•20h ago•552 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
125•matheusalmeida•2d ago•33 comments

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
25•kaonwarb•3d ago•21 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
62•videotopia•4d ago•2 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
235•isitcontent•15h ago•25 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
227•dmpetrov•15h ago•121 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
38•jesperordrup•5h ago•17 comments

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

https://vecti.com
332•vecti•17h ago•145 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
499•todsacerdoti•22h ago•243 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
384•ostacke•21h ago•96 comments

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

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
360•aktau•21h ago•183 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
21•speckx•3d ago•10 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
291•eljojo•17h ago•182 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
413•lstoll•21h ago•279 comments

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

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
6•matt_d•3d ago•1 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
20•bikenaga•3d ago•10 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
66•kmm•5d ago•9 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
93•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/
260•i5heu•17h ago•202 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

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

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
38•gmays•10h ago•12 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/
1073•cdrnsf•1d ago•458 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
60•gfortaine•12h ago•26 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
291•surprisetalk•3d ago•43 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
150•vmatsiiako•19h ago•71 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
8•1vuio0pswjnm7•1h ago•0 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
154•SerCe•10h ago•144 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
187•limoce•3d ago•102 comments
Open in hackernews

A SPARC makes a little fire

https://www.leadedsolder.com/2025/08/05/sparcstation-scsi-termination-fix-magic-smoke.html
96•zdw•6mo ago

Comments

burnt-resistor•6mo ago
Oh my. Yeap, definitely check polarity and voltages on used stuff.

At least it wasn't as bad as someone at my high school (c. 1995) who plugged a Centronics printer into a Mac SE external SCSI connector and released the magic smoke™ of both.

cheschire•6mo ago
Worth the read if for no other reason than to see the disk ejected in zero gravity.
donatj•6mo ago
"Bad magic number" brings back some PTSD of trying to get a Sun Server working in like 2001. My friend and I futzed with that thing for hundreds of hours.
lisbbb•6mo ago
Combing usenet for answers and reading useless, bulky manuals.
anonzzzies•6mo ago
Good memories from uni working with those (and other Sun) machines. I still have many of them and last I checked (during covid) they all still work.
davidgerard•6mo ago
I have mixed feelings about the openboot font, specifically that most times I saw it my life was actively sucking.

Other than that it's very nice for a console font. Why don't we have PC BIOSes with that font, eh?

throwanem•6mo ago
Thank goodness I gave up physical retrocomputing as a hobby ages back. Oh, I've held on to my display piece IIe, and framed the motherboard of my high-school 486, the first machine I ever built myself. Past that, though, these days everything is emulated or virtualized. Leaded solder fans and museumists are welcome to the rest!
sys_64738•6mo ago
Those SPARCstations were noisy, slow, and power hungry. I wouldn't be running them either which is why I got rid of mine which were in the attic for a decade.
hylaride•6mo ago
Yeah, nostalgia or historical learning is one thing, but these things can’t even browse the modern web (processors can’t handle modern TLS ciphers and our phones have higher resolutions that these can drive). You will be hard pressed to even run modern-ish server-side code that doesn’t use encryption. Even OpenBSD, which tries to cross-compile on as many architectures as possible to expose potential bugs, had to give up on sparc32.

They will eventually just take up space.

throwanem•6mo ago
You see a Duesenberg in a museum sometimes, too. We even still say "doozy."
linksnapzz•6mo ago
A Sparcstation5/10 will run NetBSD 10.1; but modern web browsers are just too fat for that hardware.
lisbbb•6mo ago
The Sparc 1 and 1+ was already landfill by around 1995 or so. The 5s and 10s ran circles around them.
TimMeade•6mo ago
Oh my that brought some real memories back. My first real programing job was in 1989 on a Sun Sparc 1+ Identical to that. Writing imaging C code for an industrial app before photoshop.... Loved that box.
jasoneckert•6mo ago
I still fire up my old SPARCbook 3000ST (Solaris 2.5.1) in case I need a hit of Sun UNIX nostalgia from back in the day.

And whenever I give a presentation at a venue that has a projector with VGA input, I'll do the presentation from the same SPARCbook.

Stevvo•6mo ago
The title had me thinking it was first plasma at the SPARC reactor. Unfortunately, not yet.
lisbbb•6mo ago
What's with all the retro hardware stuff going on?

I owned a couple of Sparc 1s back when Sparc 10s were cool and they were ancient, then! I'm talking like 1996? I don't even remember now. I had scrounged up a bunch of cast off Sparc hardware because I was obsessed with UNIX at the time and UNIX machines were hard to get near unless you worked at a big company or a university. Linux was in its infancy but was already making fast inroads to the UNIX market, particularly SCO, which was pretty much already out of business by then (kept alive for lawsuit purposes). HP-UX was huge, along with Solaris, which the Sparc 1 could run with a little effort (as opposed to SunOS, which was already pretty much obsolete).

Anyways, I had the Sparc box going for quite awhile and a friend at the time who worked in the campus switch room hatched a plan where we would hide it under the drop floor and make it into a DNS-less (IP only) pirate Ftp site, complete with a, um, ok, STOLEN, 1GB SCSI drive, which at the time, was a fairly expensive item. We operated the pirate ftp site for a couple of years. I don't know what happened to that box because I subsequently moved many states away and I think my friend just kind of lost interest and turned it off, probably scrapped it in the end. Linux killed off all the desktop UNIX platforms shortly thereafter. I doubt anyone could get away with adding some random node to a university network these days due to all the monitoring, but back then nobody gave a damn. It was truly an amazing time of discovery and quasi-illegal (and totally illegal) behavior.

jasoneckert•6mo ago
There's something thrilling about spinning up an old machine... it's like resurrecting a digital dinosaur. You're back in a time when systems felt strange and commands were different (especially on older UNIX). Everything was slower, but somehow more intentional. It's like stepping into Jurassic Park: you're not just using old tech, you're interacting with a living fossil. It's a glimpse into the DNA of modern computing, and it's a lot of fun!