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I want everything local – Building my offline AI workspace

https://instavm.io/blog/building-my-offline-ai-workspace
724•mkagenius•14h ago•195 comments

Tribblix – The Retro Illumos Distribution

http://www.tribblix.org/
35•bilegeek•2h ago•1 comments

What the windsurf sale means for the AI coding ecosystem

https://ethanding.substack.com/p/windsurf-gets-margin-called
98•whoami_nr•5h ago•22 comments

I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/08/i-bought-a-16-smartwatch-just-because-it-used-usb-c/
155•blenderob•2d ago•73 comments

Breaking the Sorting Barrier for Directed Single-Source Shortest Paths

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17033
45•pentestercrab•3h ago•1 comments

Sandstorm- self-hostable web productivity suite

https://sandstorm.org/
32•nalinidash•3h ago•9 comments

Ultrathin business card runs a fluid simulation

https://github.com/Nicholas-L-Johnson/flip-card
974•wompapumpum•21h ago•195 comments

Engineer restores pay phones for free public use

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5484013/engineer-restores-pay-phones-for-free-public-use
107•andsoitis•3d ago•36 comments

Tor: How a military project became a lifeline for privacy

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-secret-history-of-tor-how-a-military-project-became-a-lifeline-for-privacy/
317•anarbadalov•17h ago•150 comments

Car has more than 1.2M km on it – and it's still going strong

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/1985-toyota-tercel-high-mileage-1.7597168
5•Sgt_Apone•3d ago•4 comments

Representing Python notebooks as dataflow graphs

https://marimo.io/blog/dataflow
19•akshayka•3d ago•0 comments

A SPARC makes a little fire

https://www.leadedsolder.com/2025/08/05/sparcstation-scsi-termination-fix-magic-smoke.html
17•zdw•3d ago•0 comments

Getting good results from Claude Code

https://www.dzombak.com/blog/2025/08/getting-good-results-from-claude-code/
345•ingve•19h ago•136 comments

Efrit: A native elisp coding agent running in Emacs

https://github.com/steveyegge/efrit
120•simonpure•13h ago•18 comments

How we replaced Elasticsearch and MongoDB with Rust and RocksDB

https://radar.com/blog/high-performance-geocoding-in-rust
237•j_kao•20h ago•63 comments

Hacking Diffusion into Qwen3 for the Arc Challenge

https://www.matthewnewton.com/blog/arc-challenge-diffusion
85•mattnewton•3d ago•7 comments

Jim Lovell, Apollo 13 commander, has died

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/acting-nasa-administrator-reflects-on-legacy-of-astronaut-jim-lovell/
491•LorenDB•14h ago•99 comments

Let's properly analyze an AI article for once

https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2025/08/lets-properly-analyze-ai-article-for.html
62•pabs3•6h ago•34 comments

Ask HN: How can ChatGPT serve 700M users when I can't run one GPT-4 locally?

408•superasn•13h ago•273 comments

Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/2025-shortlist
207•speckx•18h ago•31 comments

Unmasking the Sea Star Killer

https://www.biographic.com/unmasking-the-sea-star-killer/
62•sohkamyung•3d ago•11 comments

Window Activation

https://blog.broulik.de/2025/08/on-window-activation/
200•LorenDB•4d ago•114 comments

Our European search index goes live

https://blog.ecosia.org/launching-our-european-search-index/
49•maelito•12h ago•7 comments

How to safely escape JSON inside HTML SCRIPT elements

https://sirre.al/2025/08/06/safe-json-in-script-tags-how-not-to-break-a-site/
36•dmsnell•10h ago•17 comments

The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/8/surprise-deprecation-of-gpt-4o/
359•tosh•15h ago•345 comments

Debugging a mysterious HTTP streaming issue

https://mintlify.com/blog/debugging-a-mysterious-http-streaming-issue-when-cloudflare-compression-breaks-everything
10•skeptrune•3d ago•4 comments

Build durable workflows with Postgres

https://www.dbos.dev/blog/why-postgres-durable-execution
129•KraftyOne•13h ago•46 comments

Fire hazard of WHY2025 badge due to 18650 Li-Ion cells

https://wiki.why2025.org/Badge/Fire_hazard
95•fjfaase•3d ago•86 comments

A robust, open-source framework for Spiking Neural Networks on low-end FPGAs

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07284
60•PaulHoule•4d ago•5 comments

How attention sinks keep language models stable

https://hanlab.mit.edu/blog/streamingllm
187•pr337h4m•1d ago•30 comments
Open in hackernews

Engineer restores pay phones for free public use

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5484013/engineer-restores-pay-phones-for-free-public-use
107•andsoitis•3d ago

Comments

gnabgib•3d ago
Discussion (125 points, 2 months ago, 80 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44188204
harper•3d ago
Surprised no mention of futel
jjmarr•5h ago
Lmao we still have those exact payphone models in active use at every subway station in Toronto.

They're also for social connectivity in that they're maintained for the suicide hotline at this point.

pinkmuffinere•5h ago
> By Julian Ring

It’s a small thing, but if the reporter picked this story due to their name, I appreciate that decision.

bfuller•4h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
sandy_coyote•3h ago
Bfuller- do you happen to be a pastry chef?
ruined•59m ago
filthy mutt
bravesoul2•10m ago
archaeologist?
dawnerd•4h ago
Meanwhile California is ripping out all of the call boxes along the roads even in areas with poor cell service. It can’t really cost us that much
mtgentry•4h ago
There’s probably a vast difference btwn what the state says it costs the maintain them, and what it costs this guy. Really wish there were more opportunities for the public to do stuff like this. There’s been a light out in the alley near me for years and the city won’t fix it. I’d happily do it myself if it was allowed.
pinkmuffinere•3h ago
Is it literally just the lightbulb? Is it accessible? You should just do it, they likely won’t notice, and even if they do they’re not going to arrest you. If you’re within 30 min of Escondido CA I’ll even come do it for you.
rezonant•3h ago
Guerilla Public Service. If you've not heard of Richard Ankrom who fixed an exit sign on the 110 freeway, check it out. He made a documentary about it (and there are countless other videos on YouTube covering the story).

https://youtu.be/Clgl63CWOkM?si=CZQEzUsY9gWjWbLU

He did it so well, the modification stayed in place for years.

If you can do it right, I say go for it.

vasco•1h ago
Of course it's allowed. How far have things come that you think you'll get in trouble for replacing a bulb somewhere in the street?
teaearlgraycold•1h ago
You need to understand that there's The Law and then there's "what people get in trouble for". Practice anarchy in your daily life. Take control of your surroundings. Just make sure you only do good. And if you suspect you'll get into a "no good deed goes unpunished" scenario, make a game of it and do it under cover of night.
juliangmp•30m ago
You should also consider a bat suit.
Animats•4h ago
The one time, years ago, I tried to use one of those, it was non-functional because someone hadn't paid the cell phone bill.
dawnerd•2h ago
That’s actually pretty hilariously ironic.
gamblor956•4h ago
It cost about $1.7 million in LA alone during the Hahn administration.
rezonant•3h ago
In LA "alone"? The city of Los Angeles has a population of 3.8 million people and in 2025 a budget of about $14 billion. That would be something like 0.01% of LA's budget.

https://cao.lacity.gov/budget25-26/Budget_Summary/2025-26Bud...

That's like saying "At Google alone they spent X dollars" as if it was indicative of companies in general.

To be fair if you mean Kenneth Hahn, and are referring to when he was LA County Chair in 1978, obviously that would be a much larger sum relatively. But it's the largest city in CA now and it was then too.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK•3h ago
That's not an issue of cost, but the issue of anonymity. Terrorists, child traffickers, illegal immigrants could use them without authorities knowing who is calling.
bluealienpie•2h ago
You could get a tourist SIM and do the same? Cellphones don't have some perfect identification system.
ruined•50m ago
who are you?
bee_rider•18m ago
Your good buddy, Eva 5I7bHFq9mnYK
fitsumbelay•4h ago
good man
mattigames•4h ago
Around 2016 I was visiting the bay area for the first time (and the US for that matter) and my phone ran out of battery, I was kind of lost without the map app and then I spotted a pay phone boot in the distance under some strong sunlight, I wondered if I could get some help with it, maybe bus routes back to the place I was staying, I pick the phone and a few tiny plastic crumbs fell from my hand, it's then when I noticed the handset was completely hollow, I looked more carefully and everything else was hollow too, it felt surreal, a bit like twilight zone but like I traveled through time and just realized it, I knew people didn't used them as much anymore but I guess I just hadn't grasp that they didn't exist any more.
fzeroracer•3h ago
The loss of pay phones is a really good example of saving pennies and losing essential service as a result of technological progress. When companies started taking them down, local governments should've stepped in to take over or help form a non-profit to maintain these services. There's a number of times where I've been out and about and my phone either can't get service or just inconveniently died on me, and having easy access to a pay phone helps prevent one from being totally stranded. And strangers, rightfully so, are reluctant to share their phone.
Larrikin•3h ago
The big problem is that the only people I would be able to call in that situation would be my own dead phone, my parents, my friend's house from 5th grade, and the pizza places near where I grew up. I wonder if people younger would even have that many numbers memorized.
hidroto•11m ago
a simple solution is to have emergency contacts written in your wallet, with the added benefit of letting bystanders call for you when you are incapacitated.
de6u99er•2h ago
Pay phones might become a thing again, with governments pushing to end of E2E communication.
rock_artist•2h ago
That’s indeed a very cool thing. I also guess it requires some PR so people would actually know where such phones available.

I wonder how Satellite services that just started to rise lately would change the dead spot issue.

bravesoul2•8m ago
Easy to PR, leaflet the 10000 people in tbe 10 towns (guessing population) and say "now you can use a phone and call people.... and it is free!!!!"

Could be paid for by that chamber of commerce in the background. In turn paid for by business that benefits from more people coming into shops.

praveen9920•40m ago
Interestingly, someone on Reddit recently mentioned that “Pay phones started disappearing almost immediately after The Matrix movie showed everyone how to escape matrix”.

Let’s see if they will sustain :)

pyman•7m ago
You could also argue that they disappeared the moment Neo took that Nokia 8110 out of his pocket and everyone wanted one of those instead. Even Nokia released the 8110i because people wanted that same phone, which had been modified for Neo.

The fact that mobile phones took off after the movie and replaced pay phones could also suggest that most people don’t want to escape the Matrix and realised that ignorance is bliss.

(Just saying what Cypher would say)

quitit•34m ago
In Australia the public pay phones have free nationwide calling and SMS, and double as wifi access points.

They've proven useful for natural disasters and victims of domestic violence/coercive control.

Since these phone booths tend to also show street advertising, it might be a way of preserving that revenue stream, while providing a reason for communities to want to keep the mostly redundant phone booths.

pyman•15m ago
Except in Brazil, pay phones have disappeared across most of America, especially in the US. The last time I was in New York City, I only saw a few left.

This post made me realise how much work and cost goes into keeping a public phone running, including painting, repairs, cleaning, replacing vandalised parts, paying for electricity, and even sending people out to collect the coins. I didn't even know that was an actual job.

awesome_dude•12m ago
> Since these phone booths tend to also show street advertising, it might be a way of preserving that revenue stream, while providing a reason for communities to want to keep the mostly redundant phone booths.

https://cities-today.com/australian-cities-win-appeal-over-t...