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

https://openciv3.org/
499•klaussilveira•8h ago•138 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
836•xnx•13h ago•503 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
53•matheusalmeida•1d ago•10 comments

A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/a-century-of-hair-samples-proves-leaded-gas-ban-worked/
110•jnord•4d ago•18 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
164•dmpetrov•8h ago•76 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
166•isitcontent•8h ago•18 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
59•quibono•4d ago•10 comments

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

https://vecti.com
279•vecti•10h ago•127 comments

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

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
339•aktau•14h ago•163 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
222•eljojo•11h ago•139 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
332•ostacke•14h ago•89 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
421•todsacerdoti•16h ago•221 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
34•kmm•4d ago•2 comments

Show HN: ARM64 Android Dev Kit

https://github.com/denuoweb/ARM64-ADK
11•denuoweb•1d ago•0 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
360•lstoll•14h ago•248 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...
15•gmays•3h ago•2 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
9•romes•4d ago•1 comments

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

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
58•phreda4•8h ago•9 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
209•i5heu•11h ago•156 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
33•gfortaine•6h ago•8 comments

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

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
121•vmatsiiako•13h ago•51 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
159•limoce•3d ago•80 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
257•surprisetalk•3d ago•33 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/
1013•cdrnsf•17h ago•422 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
51•rescrv•16h ago•17 comments

I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor

https://andrewjrod.substack.com/p/im-going-to-cure-my-girlfriends-brain
93•ray__•5h ago•43 comments

Evaluating and mitigating the growing risk of LLM-discovered 0-days

https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/
44•lebovic•1d ago•12 comments

WebView performance significantly slower than PWA

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40817676
10•denysonique•5h ago•0 comments

How virtual textures work

https://www.shlom.dev/articles/how-virtual-textures-really-work/
35•betamark•15h ago•29 comments

Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents

https://docs.smooth.sh/cli/overview
81•antves•1d ago•59 comments
Open in hackernews

A down detector for down detector's down detector

https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/
203•SeanAnderson•2mo ago

Comments

SeanAnderson•2mo ago
I'm not affiliated with this genius. I was just snooping around the other thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45974012), took a chance at modifying the site's URL, and found myself pleasantly surprised.
rocauc•2mo ago
yes, downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector is available.
AceJohnny2•2mo ago
i've reached semantic satiation
thenthenthen•2mo ago
Time for updetector.com! (On the plus side, this could detect if itself was up!)
sixtyj•2mo ago
Is there a length limit for domain names? :)
Cthulhu_•2mo ago
Yes, according to RFC 1035 section 2.3.4 [0], it's 255 octets. Long answer written by a human: https://superuser.com/a/1843870

[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1035#section-2.3.4

danirod•2mo ago
Well, that was fast.

https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector....

daanavitch•2mo ago
Unfortunately this website relies on Tailwind's CDN for styling, which in turn is deployed on Vercel, which in turn is mostly hosted on AWS.
rectang•2mo ago
The bottom turtle should be a raspberry pi in somebody’s closet. No dependencies.
FeepingCreature•2mo ago
Bad news about ISPs... Really you want a RPi on solar power, attached to a longwave transmitter, and with direct peering agreements with all dominant global providers. Most well-connected rpi in existence.
NitpickLawyer•2mo ago
Add that moon-bouncing thing that got popular last week. For redundancy.
5d41402abc4b•2mo ago
The page is 320KB in size. They could have made it a static page with some simple HTML, the whole thing would have been under 10KB and would not have needed a CDN.
pcdevils•2mo ago
Probably churned out using v0 which defaults to bloat
xg15•2mo ago
Wasn't there some tech demo some time ago how to store a tiny webpage in DNS TXT records? I think this would be the usecase for that :)
mceachen•2mo ago
https://isitdns.com/ would like a word
wltr•2mo ago
The thing that worries me the most, is that oftentimes nobody cares. That demotivates me a lot, as I tend to invest huge loads of my time into optimising various things, and all of them are meaningless if you ‘just buy a faster computer.’ Most of my websites are served with a low-powered computer, and I tend to optimise them to work well on them. But buying just one beefy server compensates all my optimisations. I have no idea what to do about that. I still care about these things, as I believe that’s what makes me a professional. But there are countless examples when you can just ignore all that and see no real difference.
LeoPanthera•2mo ago
This is beginning to be a good sign that it was AI generated. For some reason the AI's really love using Tailwind CSS.
beAbU•2mo ago
Human devs also love using tailwind.
ricardo81•2mo ago
Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked

[0] https://youtu.be/79TVMn_d_Pk?t=117

rectang•2mo ago
Seems like this madness is only going to end when we hit the 63-character limit for domain name labels.
keepamovin•2mo ago
Just thinking about it, wouldn't a distributed P2P "mesh" be a better fit for reliability probing? We could share results, see where it was inaccessible from. It's kind of an oxymoron to have a centralized down detector lol
Cthulhu_•2mo ago
Sure, a p2p network of people doing distributed pings on a wide range of services sounds like a good idea. Of course, you'd need people willing to run it. A small incentive might be needed... or just a default of "if you want to use this software, you agree to also have your client ping other websites to check if they're up from your location".

But it's not a new idea apparently, a quick search led to https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1lv9flt/built_a... / https://synthmon.io/home,

4ggr0•2mo ago
How To Build a Botnet 101
imiric•2mo ago
Or—hear me out—we actually build services that leverage the native distributed infrastructure of the internet, so that we don't need down detectors. What a concept.
eisbaw•2mo ago
100% agree. But with most used services being pushed by coorps, it will remain centralized until the "distributed mesh" becomes at least as good/robust.
keepamovin•2mo ago
I think this is so important and in fact with services now becoming utilities for daily life and the national/global economy, it's something that people like DARPA could get behind. We understand why a big peering corp's incentives might not align with true distributed (and hence how they may lobby for the crippling of certain useful p2p APIs from being widely 'distributed'), but it's something we should really push for and technically just do. And we'd probably find many allies doing it in the continuity of system and reliability space.
sam-cop-vimes•2mo ago
I'm almost wishing for the next major outage just so I can see this working :-)
theturtlemoves•2mo ago
Down detectors all the way down
lnyan•2mo ago
Can it detect when it itself is down
elashri•2mo ago
No, you will need another layer of down detector.
paul_sutyrin•2mo ago
That'll be HN indeed.
My_Name•2mo ago
Who watches the watchmen indeed
spirographer•2mo ago
It would be great to register this in downdetector to make sure it is up.
rozenmd•2mo ago
And a page monitoring this one: https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=o398t...

This one looks like it's behind a CDN, at least

fedeb95•2mo ago
who detects the down detectors's down detector's downs?
kitd•2mo ago
I'm really hoping downdetector.com
ndr42•2mo ago
The title reminds me of the 5th installment of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams:

"Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite."

The book ("Mostly harmless") and especially the beginning of the first chapter is worth reading as it describes how the automated systems of the space ship try to resolve the situation.

standarditem•2mo ago
It's down detectors all the way down
tfiskgul•2mo ago
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/661/mostly-harmless-...
anonymousiam•2mo ago
It reminds me of the Get Smart episode "Ironhand" (1969), where the top secret plans for the AAAMM (Anti-anti-anti-missile missile) are stolen.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0587527

(Mel Brooks & Buck Henry)

0x006A•2mo ago
its down detectors all the way down
jb1991•2mo ago
Hm, looks like this site is down.
raverbashing•2mo ago
The ultimate down detector should have a fixed IP address as well, in the case of other stuff failing as well
reddalo•2mo ago
Yes, the ultimate down detector should be hosted on a static IP, without need to pass through DNS.
imoverclocked•2mo ago
I think we need to make a highly-available downdetector from a collection of SBCs hosted around the world. Each node gets its configuration via git-pull which is self-hosted/republished. Simplest DNS configuration possible: each node has a unique $n.isdowndetectordown.ultradowndetector.com while they also happily host a common hostname with simple dns round robin entries for it.isdowndetectordown.ultradowndetector.com. The common page attempts to load a check resource (perhaps just a tiny css output?) from all of the $n.i.u.c nodes which just changes a div from gray to green/red.

It would be interesting to see just how small this whole thing could be; I bet it could be made into a <500MB sdcard image for a RaspberryPi4/2GB that simply updates a static css out of (say) cron and serves a surprising number of HN requests.

With all of this redundancy, there is no way it could fail! /s

huhtenberg•2mo ago
Clearly, the proper solution is to have a p2p mesh of down detectors.

As per usual, all new is something old, well-forgotten.

indigo945•2mo ago
Interestingly enough, the architecture of "a p2p mesh of down detectors" converges with the architecture of "not using a down detector".
globalnode•2mo ago
fyi theres also a 4x https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector....

didnt check past that

FabCH•2mo ago
Seems to be down...
mrbluecoat•2mo ago
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45974012
precommunicator•2mo ago
No, it's just one layer deeper.
cadamsdotcom•2mo ago
Quick! Time to register downforeveryone-orjustdowndetector.com :D
victor22•2mo ago
It's not checking for South America, they need to deploy more capital
Ayc0•2mo ago
In a similar fashion, Datadog just released: https://updog.ai
halgir•2mo ago
What's Updog?
lippihom•2mo ago
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists (editing discussion is amusing).
nightfeather•2mo ago
Now let's make it into the Downdetector's site list and complete the loop!
faidit•2mo ago
UNLIMITED POWER!
throwpoaster•2mo ago
This is down.
semiquaver•2mo ago
It’s down for me.
SeanAnderson•2mo ago
I pinged DownDetector's support team to let them know about all this and they helpfully pointed me to https://downdetector.com/status/downdetector :)
az09mugen•2mo ago
Hope it isn't powered by cloudflare, lol.