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Start all of your commands with a comma

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
153•theblazehen•2d ago•43 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
670•klaussilveira•14h ago•202 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
949•xnx•19h 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
122•matheusalmeida•2d ago•33 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

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

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
17•kaonwarb•3d ago•19 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
230•isitcontent•14h ago•25 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
223•dmpetrov•15h ago•118 comments

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

https://vecti.com
331•vecti•16h ago•143 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

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

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
381•ostacke•20h ago•95 comments

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

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
359•aktau•21h ago•182 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
289•eljojo•17h ago•172 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
412•lstoll•20h ago•279 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
63•kmm•5d ago•6 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
91•quibono•4d ago•21 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
19•bikenaga•3d ago•7 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
31•jesperordrup•4h ago•16 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
258•i5heu•17h ago•196 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

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

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
44•helloplanets•4d ago•42 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

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

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
15•speckx•3d ago•6 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/
1068•cdrnsf•1d ago•446 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...
35•gmays•9h ago•12 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•68 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

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

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
150•SerCe•10h ago•139 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
73•phreda4•14h ago•14 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
185•limoce•3d ago•100 comments
Open in hackernews

Testing out BLE beacons with BeaconDB

https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/testing-out-ble-beacons-with-beacondb/
63•zdw•3mo ago

Comments

JKCalhoun•3mo ago
Not quite sure what the author's project is, but these sound interesting.

Is there something like war-driving for BLE Beacons?

ciferkey•3mo ago
Author here. I have a big backlog of posts, but I did this one first because I was trying to cram an explanation of BLE beacons into the project post.

> Is there something like war-driving for BLE Beacons?

Yup, that essentially what Neostumbler is! If you have an Android device go check it out.

My hope for the project is to make a little embedded device I can use, so I don't have to drain my phones battery. Also because it's fun to learn about a new topic.

JKCalhoun•3mo ago
Thanks. (iPhone user though. I'll look for another solution. :-))
shibapuppie•3mo ago
Yes! the WiGLE project does Bluetooth geo-logging as well as WiFi.
RicoElectrico•3mo ago
Interesting, because I do detect many BLE beacons in a residential building. These aren't bona fide beacons, this I can infer, but not sure what devices they are.
shibapuppie•3mo ago
They could be anything from indoor location augmentation to hundreds of TV, headphone, pacemaker and other media/medical/anything-you-can-imagine devices.
anitil•3mo ago
I'm surprised that these things transmit at around 1Hz, I thought it'd be on the order of every 10 seconds to a minute. Given that I assume a lot of beacon devices are running on a coin cell battery I would have thought it would be slower. Or is that particular only to this device?
Atotalnoob•3mo ago
1hz seems slow to me. A company that I worked at was designing robust industrial, apple airtag/tiles with a specific application 8 or 9 years ago.

BLE operates on a very crowded frequency. WiFi, Bluetooth, etc are all on the same frequency and spamming out thousands of packets constantly.

We had to triple our broadcast frequency and period in order to reliably detect a beacon within 5 seconds of a phone being in range.

We settled on 200ms frequency and broadcast for 15ms.

Our decide had a 10 year battery life on a couple coin batteries…

shibapuppie•3mo ago
I find it very intriguing you landed on 200ms, considering the default beacon rate of the majority of WiFi access points is 100ms. Clients do not like going much longer before you start dropping beacons and discoverability tanks... which is shown in your results. Genuinely fascinating.
anitil•3mo ago
That answers my question perfectly, thankyou!
mrheosuper•3mo ago
>We had to triple our broadcast frequency

What do you mean by this ?

teruakohatu•3mo ago
I think they meant triple how often they broadcast, not using a radio frequency x3 higher on the spectrum.
ostacke•3mo ago
1 Hz is slow. Apple's iBeacon standard specifies 10 Hz, for instance. Also, every packet is transmitted on three different channels, so there is actually quite a lot of traffic generated.
vaxman•3mo ago
This was obsoleted by UWB and Apple’s Nearby Interactions API.

https://www.qorvo.com/innovation/ultra-wideband/products/uwb...

gsibble•3mo ago
Way back in 2014, I once built a neat test of a product I wanted. I was CEO of a company that allowed an internet API to interface with bar/restaurant POS systems. We could open/close tabs, make orders, etc..

I always hated closing my tabs at the end of the night at bars since it could frequently take a little while for only a few seconds of work.

So I built an app that detected once you entered a beacon's area, and opened a bar tab for you with your name on it. You'd just go up to the bar and order as if you had a tab open already, and when you were done, you'd leave. If your phone didn't detect the beacon for 15 minutes, it closed the tab with your preferred credit card and tip (which you could edit).

We had a demo going for employees at Local Edition on Market street. It was really cool and worked really well. The issues came that exact position was not very exact at that time and I didn't think it was a feasible product to build and market since the installation of beacons at bars vs gaining users would be difficult.

But for a brief period, I never had to hand my credit card to a stranger or worry about getting stuck 20 minutes trying to close my tab.

If you like the idea, take it and run with it. I'm not going to do it but I feel like people would love it.

HWR_14•3mo ago
This is the first time I realized that restaurant POSes were open to something akin to a plugin. I'm guessing you had to set up everything for your test location. Was it more difficult than you would expect a non technical person to be able to do?
ghm2180•3mo ago
The original mozilla MLS was killed off due to litigation by Qualcomm(I think?). MLS wasn't for commercial use and neither is this, so What's the licencing/sustainability difference between these two and what kind of support might be needed to keep this going?
pona-a•3mo ago
Maybe Qualcomm hoped Mozilla had enough money to pay up in a bogus settlement? BeaconsDB is, as far as I know, just one guy.
dakshin_k•3mo ago
I looked into this a few years ago for a personal project. One reason why BeaconDB only uses WiFi APs for geolocation, is because they are usually stationary (excluding mobile hotspots) and so their location, once identified, can be used as a reference point for triangulation.

But the BLE beacons are by design small, portable and usually attached to a moving object. Since BeaconDB doesn't know whether a specific beacon is meant to be stationary or moving, its not safe to use it as a reference point for geolocation.