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We Mourn Our Craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
119•ColinWright•1h ago•87 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
22•surprisetalk•1h ago•24 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
121•AlexeyBrin•7h ago•24 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
62•vinhnx•5h ago•7 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
828•klaussilveira•21h ago•249 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...
119•alephnerd•2h ago•78 comments

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

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
55•thelok•3h ago•7 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...
4•gnufx•39m ago•0 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
108•1vuio0pswjnm7•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...
1059•xnx•1d ago•611 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
76•onurkanbkrc•6h ago•5 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
484•theblazehen•2d ago•175 comments

I Write Games in C (yes, C)

https://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/
8•valyala•2h ago•1 comments

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html
9•valyala•2h ago•0 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
209•jesperordrup•12h ago•70 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
558•nar001•6h ago•256 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
222•alainrk•6h ago•343 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
36•rbanffy•4d ago•7 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

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

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
29•marklit•5d ago•2 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•31 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
76•speckx•4d ago•75 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
6•momciloo•2h ago•0 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
273•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•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•11 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
286•dmpetrov•22h ago•153 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

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
71•mellosouls•4h ago•75 comments
Open in hackernews

The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System

https://www.schmidtsciences.org/schmidt-observatory-system/
70•pppone•1mo ago

Comments

closewith•1mo ago
The age of plausibly buying a legacy is gone, so these vanity projects inspire more cynicism than anything else.
amelius•1mo ago
Well, this is better than what Bezos is using his surplus money for.
coderjames•1mo ago
You don't support trying to save the planet?

The Bezos Earth Fund: https://www.bezosearthfund.org/

adventured•1mo ago
The planet will be just fine. It measures consequential time in many millions of years. You mean: support saving humanity.
RealityVoid•1mo ago
I mean, yeah. When people way saving the planet they mean saving humanity. That's exactly it. A barren rock does no one no good. I don't get it why people hang onto this expression, it's as if you heard that George Carlin bit and now that's your anchor to reality.
leoc•1mo ago
For the past 50+ years there really has been a somewhat significant and quite influential body of people who genuinely want to preserve the planet’s ecosystem even at the expense of the people living on it.
dylan604•1mo ago
It's not like the dinosaurs had a save the earth campaign. Yet, before humans the rock had life forms that died out while the rock itself continued being a viable planet supporting life. If humans die off, the planet will continue on with life continuing in new ways.
A_D_E_P_T•1mo ago
Bezos is one of the best, though? Blue Origin, the Long Now foundation, and I could go on all day. I don't know of too many other billionaires so willing so spend vast sums on the Heinleinian dreams of their youth.
skeeter2020•1mo ago
I don't believe it's a net benefit to the world when a single person fundamentally changes entire economies, captures a significant portion of the resource stream and then maybe a some point redirects a portion of of it to their pet projects. Although I strongly support shooting tech bros and politicians into space (one way; even better)!
motoxpro•1mo ago
I am not understanding how this is bad. Other than a guy made a bunch of money and is spending it how he wants. Or is that the whole reason?
closewith•1mo ago
> Other than a guy made a bunch of money and is spending it how he wants.

A guy has woken up to the fact that he'll be remembered as a villian and is trying to whitewash his reputation.

ggggffggggg•1mo ago
I don’t know that the vast majority of Americans know who Eric Schmidt is. And unless they find little green men, no one will care about this project, so it won’t affect his (essentially nonexistent) reputation.

It’s not unlike if you had a blog post about a gardening project in your backyard. Perhaps interesting to gardeners, but approximately no one cares.

Low effort cynicism.

BigTTYGothGF•1mo ago
It worked for Alfred Nobel.
dlevine•1mo ago
It seems to have worked for Bill Gates as well. He definitely did some not so nice things when starting and running MS - I think it unfortunately goes with the territory of running a successful company at scale. But subsequently he has become more know for his philanthropy.
melling•1mo ago
I forget why he’s a villain. Did he do something at Google?

He’s sort of a lesser known figure to me.

mikeyouse•1mo ago
He was responsible for a bunch of the anticompetitive hiring agreements with Jobs at Apple and he’s a fairly well known lothario, but otherwise benign IMO considering his competition at that wealth level.
Y-bar•1mo ago
He is also the man who said ”If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.” as if people are not being hunted for being LGBTQ even in the west, or persecutions of various kinds are a thing of the past, or spousal abuse doesn’t matter.
uSoldering•1mo ago
Eric Schmidt is, in his own words, an arms dealer now and is driving the R&D of autonomous A.I. weapons.
BurningFrog•1mo ago
For the vast majority of non pacifists, that is not a bad thing.
youoy•1mo ago
I would go even further: Not only the vast majority, but 100% of non pacifist like AI weapons.
uSoldering•1mo ago
For the bottom 99.9% of wealthy people, it is not a good thing.
palmotea•1mo ago
> For the vast majority of non pacifists, that is not a bad thing.

Speak for yourself. I'm a non-pacifist, and I think "autonomous A.I. weapons" are a nightmare.

BurningFrog•1mo ago
Sure, all lethal weapons are a horrific nightmare on some level.

But you also have to keep in mind that China, Russia and Hamas will gladly develop them anyway. Until we've figured out the worldwide peace thing, we need to keep running the race, awful as it is.

palmotea•1mo ago
But AI weapons aren't horrific in some way common to "all lethal weapons." They have that and more.

AI weapons are specially horrific in the way they have potential put massive and specific lethal power under the total control of a small number of people, in a way (like all AI) that basically cuts most of humanity out of the future (or at the very least puts them under a boot where no escape is imaginable).

In some ways, they're even worse than nuclear weapons. A nuclear attack is an event, and if you survive there's some chance of escape. Station 100,000 fully automated drones around a city with orders to kill anything that moves, and the entire population will be dead in a couple months (anyone who tries to escape = dead, everyone else sees that and stays inside out of fear until they starve).

Manpower and attention limitations have been and important (and sometimes only) limit on the worst of humanity, and AI is poised to remove those limitations.

BurningFrog•1mo ago
I think that's exaggerated.

But even if it's true, I don't see why letting China and Russia etc be the only ones having these weapons is good?

palmotea•4w ago
> I think that's exaggerated.

Honestly, I think the tech is probably getting pretty close to what I described. You don't need AGI or anything like it. Just autonomous surveillance drones watching for movement, and attack drones that can autonomously navigate to the area and hit the target (the latter is just stringing together a lot of drone tech I've seen implemented, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/magazine/ukraine-ai-drone...).

> But even if it's true, I don't see why letting China and Russia etc be the only ones having these weapons is good?

That doesn't mean the tech isn't scary (a bad thing) or that I want SV people like Schmidt developing it. There's something weirdly misanthropic and unhinged about many in SV.

arunabha•1mo ago
Apparently, none of them have seen any of the Terminator movies.
k12sosse•3w ago
Maybe they wear two million sunblock?
oulipo2•1mo ago
Right now he's mostly spending it on weapons and AI to control people
DetectDefect•1mo ago
> a guy made a bunch of money

Through the systemic abuse and exploitation of countless individuals' privacy and autonomy. The context is everything.

jacquesm•1mo ago
The 'how' matters.
pama•1mo ago
The broader availability of data from astronomical observations starts to become relevant in the present time of coding agents that can help hobbyists.
benburleson•1mo ago
Interesting. Wayne Rosing (Silicon Valley pioneer and early engineering lead at Google) has been working on a global telescope project for a long time now also.

https://lco.global/

WD-42•1mo ago
Ben you still have code running here.
benburleson•1mo ago
Ha, thanks for letting me know! I hope it's not causing too many problems out there :-)
wittyusername•1mo ago
As you can see by the name of the thing, they are married
halfmatthalfcat•1mo ago
Tell that to Bill and Melinda.
dylan604•1mo ago
At the time the foundation was formed, they were married
knorker•1mo ago
Not sure why that's relevant. But if that's interesting then it's probably also relevant that it's an open marriage.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/article-13439603/eric-...

jacquesm•1mo ago
Besides the quality of the source, that's been slightly overtaken by more recent events:

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-11-20/former-goo...

DetectDefect•1mo ago
Likely Schmidt's repentance for his unbridled Burning Man trips.
WD-42•1mo ago
Lots of weird marketing speak on here for an astronomical observatory. “Modular design that leverages economies of scale” what? These are telescopes, not telephones. There’s a very small amount of scientific grade ones in existence and they are all different.

Best of luck to them anyway.

Edit: it looks like the Argus array at least is a project out of Chapel Hill. Better info here: https://argus.unc.edu/specifications

Schmidt probably helping fund it.

reportingsjr•1mo ago
> what? These are telescopes, not telephones. There’s a very small amount of scientific grade ones in existence and they are all different.

Have you not been following modern satellite and telescope bus architectures? Both planet and spacex have been using this model to great effect over the last decade.

WD-42•1mo ago
Neither of those companies are producing astronomical telescopes as far as I can tell.
tectonic•1mo ago
The level of negativity in these comments is surprising. We can certainly debate whether billionaires should exist at all, but given that they do, here’s one who’s putting his money towards advancing cutting edge science instead of buying a third mega yacht. I am strongly in favor.
jacquesm•1mo ago
Schmidt has done more damage than he ever will undo with his philanthropy.

And one yacht should be enough, especially if it is like this:

https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/eric-schmidt-and-his-wi...

omoikane•1mo ago
> The level of negativity in these comments is surprising

Maybe not so surprising:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46512881 "65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform" (2026-01-06, 456 comments)

ojo-rojo•1mo ago
I agree with you. I clicked into this hoping to hear what new things we could learn or discover with the new observatories. Commenting on the more positive and informative side would be a better use of time and energy I think :)
xqcgrek2•4w ago
https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/former-google-ce...