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Novelist Cormac McCarthy's tips on how to write a great science paper [pdf]

https://gwern.net/doc/science/2019-savage.pdf
62•surprisetalk•2h ago•10 comments

Living microbial cement supercapacitors with reactivatable energy storage

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/S2666-3864(25)00409-6
47•PaulHoule•3h ago•26 comments

SCREAM CIPHER ("ǠĂȦẶAẦ ĂǍÄẴẶȦ")

https://sethmlarson.dev/scream-cipher
180•alexmolas•2d ago•75 comments

Scientists find that ice generates electricity when bent

https://phys.org/news/2025-09-scientists-ice-generates-electricity-bent.html
17•isaacfrond•3d ago•0 comments

Images over DNS

https://dgl.cx/2025/09/images-over-dns
92•dgl•5h ago•28 comments

Are Touchscreens in Cars Dangerous?

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/09/19/are-touchscreens-in-cars-dangerous
44•Brajeshwar•1h ago•26 comments

Britain jumps into bed with Palantir in £1.5B defense pact

https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/20/uk_palantir_defense_pact/
99•rntn•2h ago•44 comments

Claude Can (Sometimes) Prove It

https://www.galois.com/articles/claude-can-sometimes-prove-it
139•lairv•3d ago•33 comments

MapSCII – World Map in Terminal

https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii
63•_august•1d ago•10 comments

Less is safer: How Obsidian reduces the risk of supply chain attacks

https://obsidian.md/blog/less-is-safer/
449•saeedesmaili•18h ago•212 comments

Is Zig's New Writer Unsafe?

https://www.openmymind.net/Is-Zigs-New-Io-Unsafe/
86•ibobev•2h ago•64 comments

Bezier Curve as Easing Function in C++

https://asawicki.info/news_1790_bezier_curve_as_easing_function_in_c
20•ibobev•3h ago•3 comments

Escapee pregnancy test frogs colonised Wales for 50 years

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-44886585
72•Luc•3d ago•24 comments

Show HN: Math2Tex – Convert handwritten math and complex notes to LaTeX text

15•leoyixing•3d ago•4 comments

If all the world were a monorepo

https://jtibs.substack.com/p/if-all-the-world-were-a-monorepo
223•sebg•4d ago•60 comments

Git: Introduce Rust and announce that it will become mandatorty

https://lore.kernel.org/git/20250904-b4-pks-rust-breaking-change-v1-0-3af1d25e0be9@pks.im/
193•WhyNotHugo•4h ago•144 comments

Show HN: FocusStream – Focused, distraction-free YouTube for learners

https://focusstream.media
65•pariharAshwin•9h ago•38 comments

The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

https://windowsread.me/p/best-youtube-downloaders
465•Leftium•1d ago•199 comments

Evals in 2025: benchmarks to build models people can use

https://github.com/huggingface/evaluation-guidebook/blob/main/yearly_dives/2025-evaluations-for-u...
12•jxmorris12•2d ago•2 comments

LLM-Deflate: Extracting LLMs into Datasets

https://www.scalarlm.com/blog/llm-deflate-extracting-llms-into-datasets/
46•gdiamos•10h ago•21 comments

PyPI Blog: Token Exfiltration Campaign via GitHub Actions Workflows

https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2025-09-16-github-actions-token-exfiltration/
49•miketheman•3d ago•16 comments

Ants that seem to defy biology – They lay eggs that hatch into another species

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-ant-queens-seem-to-defy-biology-they-lay-eggs-tha...
441•sampo•1d ago•145 comments

Show HN: Zedis – A Redis clone I'm writing in Zig

https://github.com/barddoo/zedis
141•barddoo•19h ago•87 comments

IG Nobel Prize Winners 2025

https://improbable.com/ig/winners/
105•JeremyTheo•5h ago•29 comments

What Makes System Calls Expensive: A Linux Internals Deep Dive

https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/what-makes-system-calls-expensive
29•rbanffy•3h ago•3 comments

Show HN: WeUseElixir - Elixir project directory

https://weuseelixir.com/
193•taddgiles•20h ago•43 comments

These days, systemd can be a cause of restrictions on daemons

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdCanBeRestrictionCause
35•zdw•1h ago•42 comments

Feedmaker: URL + CSS selectors = RSS feed

https://feedmaker.fly.dev
154•mustaphah•19h ago•27 comments

Hidden risk in Notion 3.0 AI agents: Web search tool abuse for data exfiltration

https://www.codeintegrity.ai/blog/notion
166•abirag•19h ago•43 comments

Internet Archive's big battle with music publishers ends in settlement

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/internet-archives-big-battle-with-music-publishers-en...
344•coloneltcb•4d ago•140 comments
Open in hackernews

Britain jumps into bed with Palantir in £1.5B defense pact

https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/20/uk_palantir_defense_pact/
97•rntn•2h ago

Comments

Krasnol•1h ago
This Thiel-Verse product is exactly what privacy concerned people always warned about but worse.

We're delivering tools of surveillance to a world where freedom loving countries turn into oppressive regimes.

Really ugly times ahead of us...

exe34•35m ago
Hydra won at the last election. This is project insight creeping into everyday life.
ludicrousdispla•32m ago
Our tax dollars hard at work.
Alifatisk•1h ago
More and more are feeding the beast, I am starting to get a bit worried
Hikikomori•1h ago
Wait til you find out what Thiel believes about democracy.
sneak•52m ago
Probably pretty similarly to how the people who actually run the world superpowers feel about democracy: a nice illusion for those that live under the military dictatorships that are our current systems.
Hikikomori•20m ago
Presumably most of those you refer to want the system to continue as is, Thiel wants to break it completely.
mola•19m ago
Nope. He believes it is a threat to freedom. And not in the way you presented it
Lio•1h ago
This is a very bad move. Once again the goverment is putting relationships with foreign businesses ahead of domestic firms. It's just more tech we can't independantly rely on.
gms•54m ago
That's how the world works. No country produces everything.
jimbohn•50m ago
But not everything has a killswitch or other sovereign-threatening features
dazc•44m ago
Is there a UK-based company offering a comparable service?
tremon•28m ago
No, and that is unequivocally a good thing.
mhh__•17m ago
Palantir mostly sell SQL joins and dashboards...
dash2•1m ago
I’ve always felt that was the bear case. The bull case may be that their secret sauce is how they get large, difficult, change-resistant organisations to accept their joins and the dashboards.
fidotron•40m ago
The problem is the UK tech business scene positively drips in that particular sort of expensively suited sliminess, as the entire HP Autonomy mess epitomized. Other places have this, but in the UK it's like it has killed almost the whole ecosystem.

It hasn't been a country with a remote chance of producing another Arm for well over a decade, and Arm, successful though it is, is not a huge financial success. Maybe that's what using Prince Andrew as a trade representative achieved.

nickdothutton•12m ago
Once upon a time I worked for a UK firm which could have been a competitor to Palantir, in fact... if Palantir's product could be framed as "next gen" the UK firm had the "previous gen" product(s). They had existing, reliable, but old product, all the right three letter agency customers, revenues in the several 10s of millions of pounds per year back as far as the early 2000s. Zero management interest in making the next gen product or in drastically improving (rather than incrementally improving) the tech underneath. Some of my brighter colleagues were so aggrieved by this that they quit to build something themselves, some just complained and eventually got bored and quit, some are still in the rusting hulk.

Part innovator's dilemma, part lack of ambition, part lack of government support, part the usual UK/Euro VC situ. All I'll say is I met Karp once, face to face, in Palantir's very early days. The UK firm didn't have a Karp.

ksec•2m ago
>Part innovator's dilemma, part lack of ambition, part lack of government support, part the usual UK/Euro VC situ.

I wish I am wrong. Unfortunately agrees with you on everything.

Part innovator's dilemma almost certainly happens to all companies. It is the rest of the sentence that are the problems. Ambition, Government, UK/Euro VC situ, and generally culture.

Those who are Ambition moved to the US. Government, both ruling party and cvivl servant aren't interested to making anything better and I have seen this first hand. UK and Euro VC.

JKCalhoun•5m ago
Fairly ignorant of what Palintir actually does, but my layman's understanding is that it should be a thing easy enough to replicate. Why are they uniquely positioned as they appear to be?
jmclnx•1h ago
Crazy, the UK is signing up to what I believe is a scheme to transfer $ from taxpayers to the extreme wealthy in the US. That includes Trump.

I personally believe Palantir provides no real benefit except to enrich the fascist rich in the US.

runlaszlorun•22m ago
If that buggy Java ridden UI thinks it's "enriching the fascist rich", somebody gonna be pissed fr

Lol

espadrine•1h ago
Does Palantir fall under the Cloud Act[0]?

I wonder why so many governments sign with a company that, even if the contract says they will not leak information to the US government, is required to yield any information to it if the US requests it, without even being able to notify their client—regardless of the location of the servers themselves.

[0]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4943...

DoingIsLearning•1h ago
Not just governments, Europol as an European wide police. [0]

Palantir is also likely one of the major lobbyists in pushing for Chat Control to the European Commision.

[0] (warning pdf) https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-00095...

chvid•1h ago
Usually these laws exclude military and police work. (Meaning the cloud act does not apply here.)
__natty__•1h ago
How in practice their products work? For example Palantir Gotham. What for they use it? I wonder if it’s like Tableau for military?
ashtonshears•31m ago
The military boots on the group consider it a mapping tool, intelligence like ‘bomb here’.
pests•26m ago
There are demo vids of most their software on YouTube.
chvid•1h ago
It is wild that various European countries keep handling Palantir contracts for work that could have been done by local companies.
ludicrousdispla•38m ago
Are there any others besides UK? I have heard from a reliable source that Austria banned Palantir but I haven't confirmed it.
qweiopqweiop•52m ago
The UK already uses palantir. Clearly they value it to continue and extend the relationship. But what do they know?

"Jumps into bed" gives a pretty good idea of what the author wants you to think. But I'm going to give the people signing the deal the benefit of the doubt that they might know a bit more.

notepad0x90•30m ago
Before, they were just fooling around on the couch.
moogly•51m ago
I'm already starting to long for the simpler times of the Cold War; it's pretty clear we're not heading for post-scarcity Star Trek or Culture, but rather technofascism into technofeudalism. Some would argue we're already there, but I say it can (and will) still get a lot worse.

Now where did I put that Mutant Chronicles rulebook...

nyc_data_geek•35m ago
Feel like we're doing pretty well on the Star Trek timeline, tbh. Got to get through the Eugenics Wars
nextworddev•24m ago
Were you actually old enough to remember those days? It was a lot scarier
matthewdgreen•20m ago
I see no evidence that we won’t go back there. Our grandparents built an entire world order around curtailing the kind of authoritarian competition that leads to wars between major powers, and we’re already watching it break down. Do you really look at this political world as the harbinger of another 75 years free of major global conflict?
dazc•13m ago
I can remember the public information ads that advised families to hide under the stairs or under a table until the nuclear attack has ended.
JKCalhoun•8m ago
I'm old enough. My own sense is this is much worse.

I have a friend that was afraid a nuclear bomb would eventually drop. I wasn't worried a bit about that though. So perhaps perception or state of mind made a difference.

JohnFen•6m ago
I'm old enough to remember, and I disagree. I think this is the most frightening period in my lifetime.
34ahdgT•51m ago
The lineage is interesting:

Robert Maxwell allegedly sold a backdoored version of the PROMIS software to many governments, including the US government.

Christine Maxwell, founder of the Magellan search engine, co-founded the Chiliad data analysis software that was used in the FBI post 9/11.

Her co-founder was Alan Wade, who then went to the CIA in the role of CIO when In-Q-Tel founded Palantir.

Epstein invested in Thiel's Valar fund after 2008.

net01•33m ago
some leaked emails show they where quite close https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043807
fidotron•49m ago
This whole US investment round in the UK is dreadful, as Nick Clegg is noting.

It's basically we give you money now so you end up paying us back twice and don't develop anything locally either. And we get your data in the mean time.

That said, the UK is clearly desperate, as recent discussions on here attest to.

net01•38m ago
Peter Thiel was very close with Epstein : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043807

so it's unsurprising that the UK, which wants to befriend Pres Trump, would also like to befriend the VP (who owes his entire career to Thiel).

jacknews•36m ago
Not content with having microsoft at the heart of the airforce's logistics, now they want palantir to do the decionmaking and targeting.
runlaszlorun•25m ago
The funny thing is that no one realizes that palantir is shitty java that still need Java 1.1 for AWT, etc

This should scare you immensely more...

#rewrite_it_in_ada