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Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html
296•satvikpendem•3h ago•132 comments

Criminal Deception in Silicon Valley

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10.1287/orsc.2024.19981
43•iamnothere•1h ago•5 comments

Show HN: A Project Oberon System version running on RISC-V instead of RISC-5

https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem/tree/op2-rv32
61•Rochus•4h ago•15 comments

Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)

https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
26•Klaster_1•2h ago•2 comments

John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

https://kibotronics.net/unlisted/lilly-machines/
41•Kiboneu•3h ago•17 comments

Every fast write moves work somewhere else

https://www.shayon.dev/post/2026/220/every-fast-write-moves-work-somewhere-else/
12•shayonj•1h ago•1 comments

Honey, I shrunk the embeddings: Matryoshka vs. PCA

https://dylancastillo.co/posts/matryoshka-vs-pca
58•dcastm•6d ago•11 comments

Human vs. AI – Diff-based line-level provenance for text under agentic editing

https://github.com/eighttrigrams/us-vs-them
6•eighttrigrams•1h ago•1 comments

Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-s-built-in-Weather-app-wastes-more-than-1-GB-of-RAM.1364...
59•akyuu•1h ago•40 comments

There Are Magic Hexagons of Every Order

https://gukov.dev/math/2026/08/02/new-magic-hexagons.html
144•gukoff•9h ago•19 comments

Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/historian-jill-lepore-says-the-tech-industry-is-led-by-bad-read...
100•evo_9•1h ago•72 comments

My server is a phone now

https://seg6.space/posts/phone-server/
451•seg6•18h ago•212 comments

I Wanted to Own the Harness. Then Codex Desktop Won

https://jorypestorious.com/blog/portable-agent-factory/
15•calmhive•2h ago•14 comments

Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port

https://github.com/jmarshall23/msword
132•BruceEel•11h ago•57 comments

Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone

https://www.techeblog.com/tom-stanton-supersonic-trebuchet/
55•Thorondor•1h ago•14 comments

Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

https://os8088.com/
223•jggonz•17h ago•146 comments

The Grid That Doubles the Strength of the Ground

https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/8/4/the-grid-that-doubles-the-strength-of-the-ground
101•michaefe•4d ago•28 comments

Dithered QR Codes

https://www.andrewt.net/dithered-qr-codes/wtf/
328•jmusall•18h ago•35 comments

Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

https://theconversation.com/taxi-drivers-rarely-die-of-alzheimers-how-complex-mental-maps-and-spa...
25•jader201•1h ago•18 comments

Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding

https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/heuristics/differential.html
324•bobbiechen•1w ago•37 comments

The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

https://halfhill.com/byte/1998-12_alpha.html
57•Lammy•7h ago•40 comments

Uber SubmitQueue: a high-performance speculative merge queue

https://github.com/uber/submitqueue/
64•handfuloflight•1w ago•51 comments

A partial digestion of the HRT counterexample

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/08/06/a-partial-digestion-of-the-hrt-counterexample/
6•ijustlovemath•2h ago•1 comments

FCC moves to ban Lidar-equipped foreign drones from US

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/drones/fcc-moves-to-ban-lidar-equipped-foreign-drones-...
10•f-serif•42m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Airy – Free, fast, and simple voice content creation

https://airy.so
23•login588•7h ago•12 comments

We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

https://shopify.engineering/scaling-inventory-reservations
304•adletbalzhanov•18h ago•204 comments

Willoughbyland: England's Forgotten South American Colony

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/willoughbyland-englands-forgotten-south-amer...
7•benbreen•1w ago•1 comments

Show HN: Today's cities on a globe of Earth's tectonic past and future

https://douwe.com/projects/tectonic_globe
5•dosinga•2h ago•0 comments

Banksy works cost public almost £150k

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2vnny7j5zo
6•alvis•33m ago•5 comments

Stylized GGX Shading

https://alexandrelamure.github.io/graphics-posts/stylized-ggx-shading.html
55•ibobev•5d ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-s-built-in-Weather-app-wastes-more-than-1-GB-of-RAM.1364205.0.html
58•akyuu•1h ago

Comments

iamcoder18•52m ago
This article seems to be underestimating how much RAM a weather app should take. A well thought-out, native Weather app wouldn't take more than 100 mb of RAM.
lousken•49m ago
I am pretty sure xfce4 weather plugin takes a lot less.
karmakurtisaani•42m ago
This has strong "How much could a banana cost? 10 dollars?" vibes.

Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran.

big85•33m ago
LumiWeather for AmigaOS runs on 2 MB RAM.
drdaeman•14m ago
ESP32 in my OpenSprinkler pulls the weather (among a few more things it does) just fine and it has 520 kilobytes or RAM total.
2Gkashmiri•4m ago
Windows really I'd shitty for "assuming" unlimited ram, storage, processing, internet budget for them to get away with it.

They "could" make it easy but why bother? I assume next update will make calculator 1 gb download, 2gb ram resident and ADS

kevin_thibedeau•31m ago
When RAM was $100 per MB that would be $10,000. You can do a weather app in much less provided you use native code.
whynotmaybe•20m ago
Back in my days, I had to remove the mouse driver from autoexec so that microprose grand pirx had 600kb of ram to start
e2le•34m ago
What is the weather app doing that it requires 100MB? For such a simple application, that seems excessive.
kevincox•29m ago
Mostly rendering. A bunch of images, text, UI elements. On a modern high resolution display it adds up quite quickly. You can surely cut it down a bit, but 100MB isn't absurd.
charleslmunger•23m ago
A weather widget using 8 bit color plus alpha on a 4k display show three full size images in 100mb. But I suspect that's not the ux we're talking about here, and a widget style system has no excuse.
satvikpendem•15m ago
https://wttr.in/ shows it's very possible.
galad87•10m ago
Apple's Weather app has an animated background, glassy views, and nice animations like water droplets on the glassy views when it's raining. So rendering all that on a 4k or more display at 10bit depth is going to consume a bit of RAM. However I guess it can surely be improved to make it consume less RAM.
useasvg•9m ago
Use an svg.

Or render everything using css, 100mb is someone not trying. 1gb is absurd abuse that only domestic violence victims put up with.

p1mrx•29m ago
My favorite '90s weather app was WetSock. The installer was 1.5MB, though I don't recall the RAM usage. It showed a sunny/cloudy/etc. icon in the system tray, with the temperature in a tooltip:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softse...

https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutu...

satvikpendem•15m ago
You don't need anything more than https://wttr.in/ even with all the fancy terminal graphics.
benj111•7m ago
Well it's comparing it to apple's weather app, which is a fair comparison I suppose. 100mb still sounds like at least an order of magnitude too high to me though.
feverzsj•43m ago
It's just msn weather page. Can't they use one single browser for all their apps instead of one per app?
whynotmaybe•18m ago
No, because you have to manage communication between different teams on "how" and "what" about the single browser, much easier to let every team do their "best" without any external interference
itopaloglu83•37m ago
And it also ads on it.

Really Microsoft? Do you really need all the ads revenue from the weather app?

What’s next? Ads on the start menu?

WakeUpPeople•35m ago
> What’s next? Ads on the start menu?

They already exist: https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-start-menu-ads-how-to-t...

mort96•35m ago
Microsoft absolutely doesn't need it, but I'm guessing the weather app team (or the core filler apps team or whatever team is responsible for it) needs it to juice a metric to make some middle manager happy.

And it makes the middle manager happy because it lets that middle manager report better numbers to their superiors again.

Etc.

It's why all large dysfunctional organisations do self destructive stuff like this.

SlightlyLeftPad•8m ago
“What value are you bringing to the company?” translates to “if you’re not printing money, you lose your job.”
hyperhello•34m ago
I would like to be assured that the author knows the difference between actual memory and setting aside paging space.
benj111•3m ago
That still isn't a good look.
Wowfunhappy•31m ago
...you know, I keep reading all this stuff about memory prices, and it does suck, but memory is still much cheaper per gigabyte than it was ~15 years ago.

Which matters because the things most consumers are doing on their computers haven't changed in the past 15 years. We browse the web, edit photos, message friends, and so on. AI generally runs on remote servers anyway.

For years, everyone kept saying it was fine that Electron used gigabytes of memory, because on modern PCs memory was plentiful anyway. Well, it's not plentiful anymore! Maybe it's time software developers actually used resources efficiently?

Hey, you even have an LLM to help you now!

AnotherGoodName•24m ago
But it's literally not cheaper than it was ~15 years ago? Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say...

kasabali•2m ago
15 years ago 4GB was comfortable and 8GB was abundant.

Today 8GB is bare minimum.

drtournier•14m ago
PC games were the last reason why I still used windows. Now that Proton works wonders in Linux, I hope I don’t need to ever come back again. Great times with 98, xp and win7 that were snappy, easy to install and with no slop
eviks•11m ago
> By comparison, Apple's native Weather app on macOS reportedly uses less than 250 MB of RAM

That's also bloated, couldn't they find a better comparison to illustrate the egregious waste?

nashashmi•7m ago
[delayed]
hokkos•7m ago
Apple Weather app can jump to 1GB on a mac if you click around a little with the wind gust direction particle effect in the map
w4yai•4m ago
Please, Microsoft, PLEASE ! You can do BETTER ! Stop acting like an internship for every single feature you add ! Where's the money going ?
firefoxd•4m ago
This took me down a rabbit whole. Why can a simple single purpose app not be just a couple megabytes if not less? The popular options are electron 100MB+, or embedding python3 in your executable which is at least 40MB.

But if you build it natively, you should have all of Microsoft tools at your disposition, dlls and such. In theory, this should allow you to make a 1 mb app or less. But in practice, it's the worse option.

trzy•2m ago
The visual assets alone will be tens of megabytes.
ndriscoll•4m ago
My gaming PC I built in January 2006 that IIRC I used to simultaneously run Battlefield 2, Trillian, Xfire, Thunderbird, and winamp with a 1680x1050 monitor had 1 GB of total system RAM.
rdedev•1m ago
How much does rainmeter take? I used to load tons of widgets on it in my old laptop. Ahh those were the days
qlm•7m ago
Quite a tasteless metaphor, no?
Dylan16807•7m ago
If I full-screen it in high enough resolution it can be excused for using 100MB temporarily.

The window in the article wasn't very big. At most it would have about 10MB of framebuffer, and the images on display would fit into 1MB uncompressed.

We can't excuse typical program waste with screen sizes. Especially when you can switch to 1080p and watch them still use massive amounts of memory.