MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Megafrost – A Controversial Backup Service
by theaitch | 2025-12-06 10:33:50+00:00
I created Megafrost because I didn't want to continue paying extortionate prices to keep a backup of my images and videos. For instance, Google Drive charges $20/year for 100GB but that is way more than what it actually costs. Google Cloud offers cheaper storage to businesses: Archive Storage costs $1.44/year for 100GB!

So I just made an Android app that wraps that Archive Storage and integrates with Google Pay. The complexity of Google Cloud is gone and any person can now take advantage of its low pricing.

The only catch is that once you need to restore any image or video, you have to pay for that separatelly. This is because Google Cloud charges for downloading traffic (not for uploading). But it's not really a problem because the gallery of the average user fits in the storage of a modern phones so you will only have to restore in case of disaster.

What are your thoughts? Would you be happy with this pricing model?
by latexr | 2025-12-06 10:34:58+00:00
Last Week Tonight has already ended for the year and won’t be coming back for the next few months. Plus, Netflix just bought HBO, so who knows how they’ll structure that.

This news won’t get more than a passing mention, if it gets mentioned at all. It doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, it’s not even near the top of evil things done by FIFA (which were already covered in another episode).
by jnsaff2 | 2025-12-06 10:35:26+00:00
A few years ago I was running my UDM. Wifi on 2,4GHz and 5GHz was working fine. Then after an upgrade some of my devices start losing connectivity after a while, happened multiple times a week or day. Only restart helped.

I was going mad until I discovered that only the 2,4GHz ones are losing connectivity. Then I started researching and found out that it was not just me, it was just bad code in firmware that was not fixed in any of the versions that came out before I had enough, sold the device and swore off this garbage.
by throwaway219450 | 2025-12-06 10:36:09+00:00
Not a lawyer. The VWP (ESTA) for business specifically says:

> attend short-term training (you may not be paid by any source in the United States with the exception of expenses incidental to your stay)

"source in the US" might be problematic if you're paid by the US company directly and not a UK arm. You'd have to take those days as unpaid, except for a per diem? If you're paid in pounds by a UK source, ought to be fine.

I would confidently say you do not need a C visa. That's for immediate transit (like you have to change airports or something, and you would use an ESTA anyway). A D visa is for people like airline crew who have to stay and have to work whilst there (like getting an aircraft ready for international departure from a US airport). If you needed that, your company ought to know.
by xiconfjs | 2025-12-06 10:36:59+00:00
I have the same concerns and that’s why I only use software which accept my directory structure as input and isn’t messing with it. I, for example, added my top directories of my image directory structure hand by hand each bit itself as a shared directory (read-only) to immich.

The main reason: I don’t trust software NOT deleting my photos. (Yes, I have an off-site) backup, but the restore would take time.
by afarviral | 2025-12-06 10:37:42+00:00
Very cool. I was thinking about something similar. In response to those saying it is not in the true spirit of Zettelkasten, that's probably fair, but this could easily incorporate your own notes/thoughts too, but you get to keep a convenient summary of the content you collected from outsite yourself. I think the other commentors may have missed the fact that while the LLM substitutes you, it does try to create new insights during the "Thread" part of the core loop.
by smegger001 | 2025-12-06 10:39:03+00:00
Game of thrones problem wasnt going on too long quite the opposite. The show runners were assholes to the author of the books their show was based on and he wouldn't work with them anymore then when they got an offer from Disney they decided to cut the show short and finish it one season and cut major character development to get to the pre determined ending resulting in people having sudden character changes or clever characters start carrying the idot ball.
by ffsm8 | 2025-12-06 10:39:16+00:00
I admittedly did not, initially.

I did now and am even more certain it's made up now.

I'm not sure how anyone can honestly think this is a person talking about their family. This is like a textbook made believe story people have been doing since Reddit got popular in early 2010s.

For this story to be real, you'll have to add a fourth and fifth circle to the diagram with a family member being close enough to the person suffering from the illness to be confided in and being so karma hungry to utilize their personal story which is likely shameful to them for going viral on Reddit.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-06 10:39:34+00:00
I have observed two patterns. I can only speak for young men, as I never really worked as an engineer with any women (very tiny ratio over my career). They are hyperfocused at the start of their career, as there is a lot of positive learning and feedback. The promotions (and pay rises) appear quickly. After about 5 years, this slows dramatically as people enter mid-career. This slow down incentivizes many good engineers to enter "cruise mode".

Another big one: Family. (A) They get married and/or have children, so the focus of their life changes dramatically. (B) Or something outside of work becomes more important, like a sick parent or relative.

I don't write about either of these patterns to criticize people.

Did you never slow down? I certainly did.
by 59nadir | 2025-12-06 10:40:50+00:00
> Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably.

This does not seem true to me. Most popular programming YouTubers are demonstrably great at self-promotion but tend to be mediocre or bad programmers who know very little, even about the topics they talk about.

If anything we have plenty of examples of where being good at self-promotion correlates inversely with actual skill and knowledge.

With that said, I wouldn't classify Brendan Gregg as being good at self-promotion.
by 747fulloftapes | 2025-12-06 10:41:21+00:00
This is intentionally not PII. You accept this burden when you decide to register a vehicle.

Keep in mind you don't need to have a license plate or to register a vehicle to drive it only on private property.

Your license plate is required to be readily visible so that it can be used to find out who the registered and, presumably, responsible party is.

Consider if you skip out on paying for parking at a garage, where you agreed to pay the fee by parking there in the first place. How is the business supposed to identify you to collect the money owed?

Otherwise, how else would automatic private toll roads know where to send the bill?

In Michigan, I believe the law only permits someone to request registration details for certain listed reasons. They don't verify that, but if you're caught submitting a fraudulent request, you can get in trouble - I don't know if it's a fine or crime. Probably depends on the circumstance.

PS Hello from Grand Rapids!
by victorbuilds | 2025-12-06 10:43:15+00:00
At 5:38 he describes "gravity fields" that snap your cursor to lines and endpoints - letting you "be sloppy while drawing and get a precision drawing at the same time."

Every design tool today (Figma, Illustrator, CAD) still uses this exact UX pattern. Sutherland nailed it 62 years ago with a light pen and an oscilloscope.
by frm88 | 2025-12-06 10:43:16+00:00
I have news for you:

“It is a myth,” said Hilal Elver, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food. “Using more pesticides is nothing to do with getting rid of hunger. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), we are able to feed 9 billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.” [0]

It also exposes how far the pesticide industry has gone to suppress information about negative impacts on the environment and public health while spreading the totally false myth that rampant growth in pesticide use is needed to feed the world’s population.”

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/07/un-exper...

[1] https://civileats.com/2017/03/13/new-un-report-pesticides-do...
by autoexec | 2025-12-06 10:43:29+00:00
Local cable providers would broadcast shows on local cable channels. It was mainly movies. Only a few cable channels, plus regular broadcast TV.

The sales pitch was that cable channels didn't have ads because your fees paid for those channels instead, but obviously broadcast TV would still include ads because the ads were just part of the broadcast. Cable programing was very limited, but the promise was it would get better and it was still ad free and looked better than TV over rabbit ears and you got access to broadcast TV in that same quality. It was a pretty easy sell! I doubt many people would have paid for cable if it only offered broadcast TV which most people were already getting for free. I mean, the quality jump was nice, but it's not like most of us hadn't been putting up with it just fine. For people who couldn't get a decent signal I could see it though.

At some point the number of channels expanded to include national channels. Which national channels you got and when depended on your cable provider and whatever agreements they reached for those feeds. Then all you had were national channels. You might even remember ads on some of those channels asking you to call your cable provider and demand certain other national channels that weren't yet avilable in your area.

Eventually cable TV sort of homogenized and everyone pretty much everyone had access to the same set of channels no matter where they were even as some channels changed or went away entirely. Channels were split between premium and basic, then split again to basic, expanded basic, and premium and then split again to multiple package tiers etc. That's how I remember it anyway.
by delaminator | 2025-12-06 10:43:57+00:00
I disagree with the last generation. I think what is going to change is what we actually do not whether we do it or not.

Speaking in metaphors: someone still needs to build the fixings, bricks, wires, pipes and tiles and paint and tools to put them all together someone has to still come up with the building.

I used to work in construction and I've watched the sophistication of all the pieces get better and better over time. Insulated floors, heated floors, push fit pipes, RCDs instead of fuses, better materials, resin driveways. I live in a new build house, I'm not nostalgic for a sandstone cave.

I've built some crazy things these past few months, I've got a voice control computer with head tracking mouse. Apart from the actual voice transcription model and the neural network model that works out where my face is, I could have built it all by hand. With enough data, I could probably have even made the face position model, but I simply wouldn't have taken these on. They just sound too monumental.

And then we've got the perfect is the enemy of the good. As programmers, we want to produce things that are better for everybody else. So when we start building a library we start considering how all the people are going to use it. Now simply don't care. If it's a bit rough around the edges it doesn't matter because it's for me. And if you want one for yourself, you can prompt it into existence.

I'm a component builder as well. And now I can build polished components that are great for future use. Not only that, they're fully documented. I just wish I wasn't pushing 60. I'm feeling the joy of being with my new computer - 15 again seeing more possibilities than ever.

I've faced serious burnout in this industry. Fed up of another round of read to database, write to database, present data from database. Spending days fiddling with forms, add this box, make this box bigger, that button's got the wrong text. Now I can just say those things out loud into a text box and switch to another text box and build something more complex.
by kergonath | 2025-12-06 10:45:04+00:00
The discussion about the nature of auteur-ship is interesting. I don’t think there is anything wrong with being a highly-skilled technician, craftsman or engineer. Some people are able to do things that are genuinely awesome (in the orignal sense) without necessarily showing the intellectual aspects associated with auteurs. They are not less worthy of praise and admiration than good auteurs.
by Aerroon | 2025-12-06 10:45:11+00:00
Because those researchers become a potential data leak. We all know that deanonymized data isn't actually anonymous. Do you, as the user, really want people poking around your private data "for research purposes"? Where there are basically no consequences if they mess up and leak your data?

I chose to give my data to the company. I didn't choose to give it to some unrelated third party.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-06 10:47:26+00:00
They are well documented now, after reverse engineering.

The manufacturer did not document them, so they really were undocumented.

The same happened with many other CPUs, like Zilog Z80, Intel 8086 and the following x86 CPUs.

They all had undocumented instructions, which have been discovered by certain users through reverse engineering.

Some of the undocumented instructions were unintended, so they existed only due to cost-cutting techniques used in the design of the CPU, therefore the CPU manufacturer intended to remove them in future models and they had a valid reason to not document them.

However a few instructions that were undocumented for the public were documented for certain privileged customers, like Microsoft in the case of Intel CPUs, so they were retained in all future CPU models, for compatibility.
by vintermann | 2025-12-06 10:47:35+00:00
In the context this woman was, they DO take bible verses as justifications. Not "logical reason", for heaven's sake. Expressing it that way suggests you're stubbornly refusing to think about contexts other than your preferred one, how others see the world. That seems to happen a lot with techies online.

I'm not asking you to accept how someone else sees the world as truth, I'm asking you to understand that it's how they see the world. Seems pretty important to understand the impact of a policy like trying to elevate professional institutional fact checkers in the media.

> Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.

That is not the question. The question is, was "citing" 60 anonymous authorities who claim to have evidence you're not allowed to see, going to convince anyone who wasn't already? If that was the attempt, I'd say it's a symptom of the usual "online techie autism" - people with bad theories of mind, bad ability to understand other's people thinking, who think they've got everything that matters worked out (those other people are just stupid anyway, don't you know).

You should ask, are the sort of institutional fact checkers we have now a useful institution? Or maybe more, the ones we used to have a few years ago. Even most of them have given up after the fiasco of Trump's second election.

> I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God.

I was talking about specific people. You don't know them better than me.

> However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.

Ridiculous. That's like saying right-wing grifters like, what's her name, Candace Owens, or the one who recently jumped ship, Marjorie Taylor Greene, are brave and principled for breaking with their side's orthodoxy. They're not. They're just trying to be one step ahead of events, one hour ahead of their time (no more!) and are terribly bad at it.

Your poor harassed institutional fact checkers may deserve pity for the outcome, but they are not brave, they just bet on the wrong horse, and they may well swing back in power and authority soon anyway (though not for long, because they're part of the problem they imagine themselves the solution to).
by tempfile | 2025-12-06 10:48:29+00:00
I am not confused :-)

Of course I can say that. I can say "you can't come into my house if you're black" too. The point is that it's unethical. It would be unethical for me to search your phone before you entered my house, too. This is not complicated, I'm not sure why you're having trouble understanding it.
by bborud | 2025-12-06 10:48:36+00:00
Well, that doesn't sound too bad. But this is a high enough barrier for Mathematica to not see wide spread use.

I don't remember what the pricing has been throughout the years. But I do remember that for some of the time I couldn't really afford Mathematica. And the license I wanted was also a bit too expensive to justify for a piece of software that only I would be using within an organization.

Because it is also about enough other people around you not being able to justify the expense. And about companies not wanting to pay a lot of money for licenses so they can lock their computations into an ecosystem that is very small.

Mathematica is, in the computing world, pretty irrelevant. And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know of it. They just don't use it for work.

It would have been nice if the language and the runtime had been open source. But Wolfram didn't want to go in that direction. That's a perfectly fine choice to make. But it does mean that as a language, Mathematica will never be important. Nor will knowing how to program in it be a marketable skill.

(To Stephen Wolfram it really doesn't matter. He obviously makes a good living. I'm not sure I'd bother with the noise and stress coming from open sourcing something)
by socksy | 2025-12-06 10:49:26+00:00
The database is Postgres, and the schema is quite sensible. You can (and I have) write normal SQL queries in psql to modify the data.

It might not be as easy as rsync to transfer data out, but I would trust it way more than some of the folder based systems I've had with local apps that somehow get corrupted/modified between their database and the local filesystem. And I don't think ext4 is somehow magically more futureproof than Postgres. And if no-one else writes an export tool, and you feel unable to, your local friendly LLM will happily read the schema and write the SQL for you.
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-06 10:51:16+00:00
I have a VPN, self hosted, I had one because it was a way to keep my infra in one network for config management. I then extended it for skirting round giving my raw ID to some dogshit start who'll then either get hacked, or sell my details to someone nefarious.

If there had been a free, public and verifiable Age/ID service, that wasn't tied to advertising, then I might be more willing to hand over my ID. But because the VC whispered "freemarket" in the ears of the prick who designed this, we are stuck with the worst of all worlds. A non-secure way to prove ID, and a non-acceptable way to shield those that don't or cant consent, from harm.
by enoent | 2025-12-06 10:51:27+00:00
Nice work Dmitry, looking forward to read your next article.

The later model Pixter Multimedia had the full memory space accessible via JTAG, which is how some carts and even boot ROM got dumped a while ago [1], is it the same deal with Pixter Color?

That OpenOCD script was a bit flaky, and sometimes the boot ROM would be already unloaded before reading, maybe you have some insights in how to make it more robust.

btw, have you looked into the original Pixter? The cart connector seems to have a very narrow bus, so it doesn't look like those carts have code, and probably can only be dumped with a decap.

[1]: https://qufb.gitlab.io/writeups/pixter
by 747fulloftapes | 2025-12-06 10:52:12+00:00
That, or, establish a trust to own the vehicle and grant yourself permission to use it. It's not exactly trivial to do and costs some money, but it's doable.

You can do similar with an LLC, but that gets more complicated with the rules regarding using a "company" vehicle for personal purposes. IANAL

Similar things are done for things like cellphone plans, firearm ownership, homes, etc.

The only thing I am aware of that you can only do in your own name is register to vote. Almost all of the Michigan voter database can be FOIA'd. It's called the QVF - qualified voter file. Only a few fields in the database (ie, day and month of birth) as well as all voter records for victoms domestic battery are protected by statute.
by antonvs | 2025-12-06 10:52:18+00:00
I skipped some bits of the video so probably missed this, but: in the beginning he mentioned no spark or glow plugs and said “similar to a diesel”, but in the end that didn’t work and he had to resort to a glow plug.

Did he mention what fuel he was using for the compression-only attempts? If not actual diesel, it seems like he would have had to use ether or something like that.
by suspended_state | 2025-12-06 10:53:58+00:00
I don't know what GP meant, but I can give an example of how I understand it (disregarding the spurious "the" in his comment): in a type system with sub-typing, your expression could be statically typed to return a certain type, and at runtime return any of its sub-types.

For instance, in typescript you could ascribe an expression with the type Any, yet the actual runtime type will not be Any, it will be any concrete type.

In object oriented languages, you may define a hierarchy of classes, say with "Car" and "Truck" being sub-classes of "Vehicle", each having a concrete implementation, and have an expression returning either a "Car" or a "Truck", or maybe even a "Vehicle". This expression will be statically typed as returning a "Vehicle", yet the dynamic type of the returned value will not necessary be (exactly) that.
by Kwpolska | 2025-12-06 10:54:27+00:00
Just like the recent Bazzite post, this page is full of buzzwords, but fails to explain what it actually is. It’s an image-based Linux distro. Which is nothing groundbreaking, and a solution looking for a problem, because classic Linux distros just work.

> Aurora is nothing more than a collection of bash scripts, containerfiles and custom programs stitched together.

That sentence appearing on the same page as "rock-solid" is not very convincing either and does not instil confidence.