Hacker News on Sunday, 4 June 2023

Why do railway tracks have crushed stones alongside them?(alpharail.co.nz)

654 points by Twixes 3 years ago | 269 comments

AlphaRail blog post explaining why railway tracks are laid on crushed stone ballast.

Show HN: Rarbg on IPFS(ipfs.io)

641 points by rarbgipfs 3 years ago | 121 comments

A search interface for an archived RARBG torrent database hosted on IPFS, shown in an initializing state.

DreamBerd is a perfect programming language(github.com)

622 points by Davidbrcz 3 years ago | 191 comments

GitHub repository for DreamBerd, a satirical joke programming language by TodePond billed as the "perfect programming language".

Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough(xeiaso.net)

564 points by cendyne 3 years ago | 226 comments

Satirical blog post by Xe Iaso about misusing an unconventional service as a message queue, explicitly not meant for production workloads.

WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)(privacyinternational.org)

407 points by thunderbong 3 years ago | 300 comments

Privacy International long-read on how Office 365 features let employers monitor employees' communications and activity, especially during remote work.

High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students(torrentfreak.com)

378 points by andrew-ld 3 years ago | 281 comments

TorrentFreak article on Rights Alliance research showing most Danish students find pirating textbooks acceptable due to high prices despite lawsuits.

Blink 1.0(github.com)

293 points by todsacerdoti 3 years ago | 59 comments

It’s infuriatingly hard to understand how closed models train on their input(simonwillison.net)

288 points by simonw 3 years ago | 189 comments

Apple Virtualization Framework(developer.apple.com)

281 points by serhack_ 3 years ago | 110 comments

Social media for AI bots: “No humans allowed”(fry-ai.com)

268 points by mannylee1 3 years ago | 200 comments

Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices(old.reddit.com)

266 points by UpToTheSky 3 years ago | 105 comments

Lung cancer pill cuts risk of death by half(theguardian.com)

242 points by bichonnages 3 years ago | 95 comments

Meta Is Trying, and Failing, to Crush Unions in Kenya(jacobin.com)

211 points by jrepinc 3 years ago | 12 comments

Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website(bell-labs.com)

202 points by massimosgrelli 3 years ago | 48 comments

Mastodon provides the highest (over 12%) engagement under posts(climatejustice.rocks)

178 points by ZacnyLos 3 years ago | 92 comments

A new line drawing method for the cycle savvy(quiss.org)

165 points by panic 3 years ago | 55 comments

Over 70% of US household Covid spread started with a child(cidrap.umn.edu)

144 points by nico 3 years ago | 116 comments

Live dashboard of carbon dioxide removal purchases(cdr.fyi)

140 points by Kortaggio 3 years ago | 74 comments

It could cost $21B to clean up California’s oil sites, study finds(propublica.org)

140 points by hedora 3 years ago | 128 comments

Do we need copyright? (2012)(lemire.me)

139 points by ibobev 3 years ago | 141 comments

A not-so-quick introduction to the C++ allocator model(quuxplusone.github.io)

131 points by jandeboevrie 3 years ago | 31 comments

.ga domain names soon to return to Gabonese management (from Freenom) [pdf](afnic.fr)

123 points by zinekeller 3 years ago | 51 comments

Iceland: The emerging tech-ecosystem of the Nordics(erikdestefanis.substack.com)

120 points by imartin2k 3 years ago | 120 comments

World’s oceans at record high temperature for 80 consecutive days(climatereanalyzer.org)

118 points by edgefield 3 years ago | 44 comments

GitHub Private Repos Considered Private-­Ish(tylercipriani.com)

115 points by fagnerbrack 3 years ago | 104 comments

A push to bury a weedkiller’s link to Parkinson’s disease(theguardian.com)

113 points by cwwc 3 years ago | 19 comments

Wonky – An exploration of rhythm and grooves that break the rules(pudding.cool)

109 points by mrzool 3 years ago | 16 comments

At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end(pcworld.com)

104 points by edward 3 years ago | 79 comments

Pentagon contracting Starlink to provide satellite communications for Ukraine(defensescoop.com)

102 points by mpweiher 3 years ago | 71 comments

Child Labor Is on the Rise(newyorker.com)

101 points by cocacola1 3 years ago | 133 comments

Where the Wood-Wide Web Went Wrong(undark.org)

97 points by abscond 3 years ago | 18 comments

Crun: Fast and lightweight OCI runtime and C library for running containers(github.com)

95 points by nateb2022 3 years ago | 39 comments

A birder's quest to see 10k species(outsideonline.com)

93 points by elijahparker 3 years ago | 29 comments

Democracy Is the Solution to Vetocracy(sambowman.co)

89 points by ksec 3 years ago | 69 comments

Redream: Realtime Diffusion, Using Automatic1111 Stable Diffusion API(github.com)

86 points by nateb2022 3 years ago | 13 comments

XB, or eXtreme Bullshitting: a less misleading name for LLMs(twitter.com)

83 points by gmac 3 years ago | 60 comments

Trick Yourself into Breaking a Bad Habit(hbr.org)

81 points by ingve 3 years ago | 27 comments

D-Day Psyop (2014)(psywarrior.com)

81 points by mmastrac 3 years ago | 10 comments

AMD’s RX 7600: Small RDNA 3 Appears(chipsandcheese.com)

81 points by picture 3 years ago | 63 comments

In Praise of the Park Bench(lithub.com)

77 points by wrong-mexican 3 years ago | 25 comments

The culture map: How to navigate foreign cultures in business(ahalbert.com)

73 points by navait 3 years ago | 48 comments

Rowan Atkinson on free speech (2012) [video](youtube.com)

73 points by graderjs 3 years ago | 44 comments

GNU poke: an extensible editor for structured binary data(jemarch.net)

73 points by dima55 3 years ago | 7 comments

OpenAI is getting sued for being biased with Y Combinator(twitter.com)

72 points by udev4096 3 years ago | 14 comments

Reverse Engineering Self-Supervised Learning(arxiv.org)

72 points by headalgorithm 3 years ago | 12 comments

eBPF for Cybersecurity – Part 1(blog.cloudnativefolks.org)

72 points by sangam14 3 years ago | 6 comments

Blood test for 50 types of cancer could speed up diagnosis, study suggests(theguardian.com)

70 points by birriel 3 years ago | 13 comments

Power outages and sweltering heat in Vietnam, people struggling to cope(vietnam.postsen.com)

62 points by geox 3 years ago | 15 comments

Pneumatic Antenna Launching Systems(antennalaunchers.com)

61 points by pubby 3 years ago | 17 comments

Atomic Wallet exploited, users report loss of entire portfolios(cointelegraph.com)

57 points by paulpauper 3 years ago | 26 comments

The end of the Silicon Valley dream(spectator.co.uk)

57 points by Veen 3 years ago | 39 comments

Exclusive: Ministers had ‘chilling’ secret unit to curb lockdown dissent(telegraph.co.uk)

57 points by electic 3 years ago | 15 comments

Was this the most dangerous children's toy?(keith-mcnulty.medium.com)

57 points by sephiroth73 3 years ago | 64 comments

The AI firm that conducted ‘state surveillance’ of your social media posts(telegraph.co.uk)

54 points by perihelions 3 years ago | 15 comments

How to use repetition (2017)(blog.oup.com)

52 points by highway-trees 3 years ago | 22 comments

Rsh: Ruby SHell(github.com)

49 points by mpweiher 3 years ago | 24 comments

Book Review: Applied Math for Security(dustri.org)

46 points by todsacerdoti 3 years ago | 5 comments

Uncle Sam wants DEF CON hackers to pwn this Moonlighter satellite in space(theregister.com)

46 points by LinuxBender 3 years ago | 9 comments

A shocking number of birds are in trouble(arstechnica.com)

44 points by Tomte 3 years ago | 8 comments

Forward Referencing in C(twitter.com)

42 points by azhenley 3 years ago | 29 comments