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I Write Games in C (yes, C)

https://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/
45•valyala•2h ago•19 comments

We Mourn Our Craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
228•ColinWright•1h ago•247 comments

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html
31•valyala•2h ago•4 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
128•AlexeyBrin•8h ago•25 comments

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC Concludes 25-Year Run with Final Collisions

https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/brookhaven-labs-rhic-concludes-25-year-run-with-final-collis...
8•gnufx•1h ago•1 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
132•1vuio0pswjnm7•9h ago•161 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
71•vinhnx•5h ago•9 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
836•klaussilveira•22h ago•251 comments

U.S. Jobs Disappear at Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestunson/2026/02/05/us-jobs-disappear-at-fastest-january-pace-sin...
181•alephnerd•2h ago•124 comments

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
57•thelok•4h ago•8 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1064•xnx•1d ago•613 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
85•onurkanbkrc•7h ago•5 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
493•theblazehen•3d ago•178 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
215•jesperordrup•12h ago•77 comments

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

https://github.com/Momciloo/fun-with-clip-path
15•momciloo•2h ago•0 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
231•alainrk•7h ago•366 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
577•nar001•6h ago•261 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

https://voratiq.com/blog/selection-rather-than-prediction/
9•languid-photic•3d ago•1 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
41•rbanffy•4d ago•8 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
30•marklit•5d ago•3 comments

History and Timeline of the Proco Rat Pedal (2021)

https://web.archive.org/web/20211030011207/https://thejhsshow.com/articles/history-and-timeline-o...
19•brudgers•5d ago•4 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
114•videotopia•4d ago•35 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
80•speckx•4d ago•91 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
278•isitcontent•22h ago•38 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
201•limoce•4d ago•112 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
289•dmpetrov•23h ago•156 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
558•todsacerdoti•1d ago•272 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
155•matheusalmeida•2d ago•48 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
431•ostacke•1d ago•111 comments

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
22•sandGorgon•2d ago•12 comments
Open in hackernews

Farming Hard Drives (2012)

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/
43•floriangosse•3mo ago

Comments

atYevP•3mo ago
Good times...

/stares wistfully off into the distance

gadders•3mo ago
Great hardware knowledge. Appalling backup software.

I got told by their support that I had to change my password for their service. Opened the website, went to my account and tried to change my password. Didn't work.

Got told by their customer support that you have to use the "lost password" method.

How hard is it to right a password reset method that works?

gradschool•3mo ago
Former backblaze customer here, the trick is that you can't copy and paste your password as one might do with a password manager. You have to type it manually so that the web page can interactively tell you how strong the password is getting as you type it.

Backblaze lost me as a customer due to the new password and 2FA requirements, which would lock me out if I were to lose my devices, the exact scenario I'm trying to mitigate. Not affiliated, I'm now trying my luck with pixeldrain, mega, and koofr (having quit proton lately as well since it broke rclone compatibility a few weeks ago).

gadders•3mo ago
Crashplan used to work well, but they decided they didn't want retail customers (and now apparently do again).
hobs•3mo ago
I saw they attempted to pivot into corporate spyware and it hasn't done as well as they thought.
qingcharles•3mo ago
I've not had a single lick of trouble with Mega. I try to use it for all my work as it is very reliable and their online file browser is top class.

Koofr is one of the ones offering lifetime plans right? I'm always getting spammed with their offers. Wonder how they compare to pCloud?

philipwhiuk•3mo ago
Going around to lots of stores burning fuel depriving regular consumers of inventory forcing them onto your cloud solution.

It's classic SV screw-regular-folk-as-long-as-its-not-banned.

fwipsy•3mo ago
Devil's advocate: Individual users probably aren't filling a 3tb hard drive most of the time. (This may not apply to HN users, but I imagine most people buy a hard drive larger than they need and never fill it up.) So arguably, Backblaze used the drives more efficiently, because each drive benefited many users and its entire capacity would be used.
gwbas1c•3mo ago
That's not appropriate. People buy those drives to do whatever the ^#$^#$ they want to do with them. Backblaze's service may or may not be an effective replacement for what people wanted the drives for.
Unearned5161•3mo ago
doesn't Backblaze largely do backups? as in their customer's already have the files on their own large drives and they need to back those files up, as in maybe you're reading too much into this?
mastax•3mo ago
I don't think it is immoral to purchase products from retail stores.
MarkusWandel•3mo ago
What fraction of external hard disks is still "shuckable" these days? I know the WD Passports aren't. The USB connector is directly on the drive's PCB, no SATA bridge.
zampano•3mo ago
I think a lot of the larger form-factor/larger capacity models are still shuckable, though sometimes you still have to put kapton tape on one of the pins to allow it to work with a normal machine.
rzzzt•3mo ago
Pin 3 on the power connector used to be constant 3.3V, but its purpose changed to keeping the drive in a low-power shutdown state for enabling e.g. staggered spinup: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-sata-power-disable-fea...
ssl-3•3mo ago
Yep.

And when that's a problem, it's fine to just cut and insulate 3.3v wire that feeds the power supply's SATA connectors.

After this modification, the machine thus becomes compatible with all SATA hard drives, whether old or new or shucked or whatever.

(Not much (if anything) in SATA land ever used 3.3v, and it's completely likely that nothing ever will. AFAICT, that voltage was deprecated with the release of revision 3.3 of the SATA specifications, from nearly a decade ago in February of '16.)

toast0•3mo ago
> sometimes you still have to put kapton tape on one of the pins to allow it to work with a normal machine.

It's easier to cut the 3.3v wire from the power supply. If you have color coded wires, it'll be the orange wire; if not, it'll be the same color as every other wire.

To a first approximation, nothing ever uses 3.3v from sata power, so it made sense to remove it from the spec. Reusing the pins so that 3.3v inhibits functionality was kind of crazy though.

sfblah•3mo ago
I just checked and it looks like this company has never turned a profit. I don't really know why anyone would even use their product, since it's so easy just to use the various cloud systems out there instead of storing any meaningful data locally. Will they turn a profit before this business model totally is outmoded?
MatthiasPortzel•3mo ago
Backblaze is a cloud storage company
ethmarks•3mo ago
The reason they're farming hard drives is so they can add them to their cloud storage network. You realize that cloud storage isn't actually in clouds, right? Hard drives are always local somewhere, and in Backblaze's case that 'somewhere' is a data center.
DaSHacka•3mo ago
Lol, good bait