Hacker News on Friday, 5 April 2024

Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

597 points by panqueca 2 years ago | 645 comments

An Ask HN thread where the poster describes automating a deprecated internal tool and asks others about the most useless projects they have worked on.

FFmpeg 7.0(ffmpeg.org)

469 points by gyan 2 years ago | 171 comments

The FFmpeg project homepage news entry announcing the release of FFmpeg 7.0, the open-source multimedia framework.

M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake(earthquake.usgs.gov)

437 points by theandrewbailey 2 years ago | 341 comments

USGS event page for the magnitude 4.8 earthquake near Whitehouse Station, New Jersey on April 5, 2024, with maps and impact information.

So you wanna de-bog yourself(experimental-history.com)

311 points by world2vec 2 years ago | 75 comments

Former University of Iowa hospital employee used fake identity for 35 years(thegazette.com)

304 points by Georgelemental 2 years ago | 305 comments

The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics(abortretry.fail)

283 points by BirAdam 2 years ago | 298 comments

An IRC client in your motherboard(axleos.com)

273 points by codyd51 2 years ago | 64 comments

OpenBSD 7.5(openbsd.org)

271 points by SoftTalker 2 years ago | 81 comments

World_sim: LLM prompted to act as a sentient CLI universe simulator(worldsim.nousresearch.com)

263 points by CharlesW 2 years ago | 114 comments

SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine(github.com)

255 points by tosh 2 years ago | 79 comments

Show HN: Kyoo – Self-hosted media browser (Jellyfin/Plex alternative)(github.com)

216 points by zoriya 2 years ago | 159 comments

Fortran on WebAssembly(gws.phd)

212 points by georgestagg 2 years ago | 48 comments

Top Israeli spy chief exposes his true identity in online security lapse(theguardian.com)

207 points by philk10 2 years ago | 155 comments

Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage(404media.co)

191 points by marban 2 years ago | 123 comments

C++ Insights – See your source code with the eyes of a compiler(github.com)

176 points by turrini 2 years ago | 42 comments

Apple Updates App Store Guidelines to Permit Game Emulators, EU Music App Links(macrumors.com)

171 points by bangonkeyboard 2 years ago | 116 comments

Cloudflare acquires PartyKit to allow developers to build real-time multi-user(blog.cloudflare.com)

166 points by jgrahamc 2 years ago | 71 comments

A Lego model of financial capitalism(asomo.co)

164 points by Dogwash24 2 years ago | 78 comments

Autonomous Overhead Powerline Recharging for Uninterrupted Drone Operations [video](youtube.com)

163 points by DocFeind 2 years ago | 148 comments

A Japanese hikikomori released a game after 6 years of development [video](youtube.com)

159 points by grugagag 2 years ago | 104 comments

AI and the Problem of Knowledge Collapse(arxiv.org)

139 points by kmdupree 2 years ago | 68 comments

NIST researchers use cellphone compass to measure glucose(nist.gov)

129 points by geox 2 years ago | 42 comments

She slept with a violin on her pillow(nytimes.com)

129 points by tintinnabula 2 years ago | 88 comments

Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data(reuters.com)

126 points by twilightzone 2 years ago | 98 comments

Clojure's machine learning ecosystem(codewithkira.com)

122 points by kmclean 2 years ago | 67 comments

Why CockroachDB doesn't use EvalPlanQual(cockroachlabs.com)

117 points by michae2 2 years ago | 52 comments

For twenty years, PostSecret has broadcast suburban America’s hidden truths(hazlitt.net)

113 points by onthesly 2 years ago | 18 comments

Postgres locks explorer(leontrolski.github.io)

113 points by leontrolski 2 years ago | 9 comments

Outlook is Microsoft’s new data collection service(proton.me)

104 points by quantified 2 years ago | 46 comments

Breakthrough drug trial saw cancer vanish in every patient (2022)(euronews.com)

101 points by wjb3 2 years ago | 44 comments

Deep sea mining could be worse for the climate than land ores(planet-tracker.org)

100 points by neom 2 years ago | 50 comments

Emacs bug: describe-key and lambda too poetic(yhetil.org)

87 points by progfolio 2 years ago | 10 comments

Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media(notes.ghed.in)

84 points by rpgbr 2 years ago | 96 comments

Scientists may have discovered a flaw in their understanding of dark energy(nytimes.com)

76 points by ianrahman 2 years ago | 94 comments

Some colleges will soon charge $100k a year – how did this happen?(nytimes.com)

74 points by gnicholas 2 years ago | 184 comments

GitHub is down(githubstatus.com)

67 points by enescakir 2 years ago | 65 comments

BeeTrove – OpenAI GPTs Open-Source Dataset(beetrove.com)

67 points by robblbobbl 2 years ago | 12 comments

Roku explores taking over HDMI feeds with ads(lowpass.cc)

65 points by revicon 2 years ago | 2 comments

The IT Productivity Paradox (2015)(cs.stanford.edu)

65 points by chiffre01 2 years ago | 40 comments

Apple cuts 600 jobs after dropping self-driving car plans(bbc.com)

59 points by voisin 2 years ago | 71 comments

Excellent succinct breakdown of the xz mess, from an OpenBSD developer(marc.info)

59 points by signa11 2 years ago | 14 comments

RubyGems is not vulnerable to the xz/liblzma backdoor(blog.rubygems.org)

58 points by mooreds 2 years ago | 21 comments

KDE1 on Debian 13(ariasft.github.io)

58 points by indigodaddy 2 years ago | 16 comments

Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset(robmensching.com)

58 points by soheilpro 2 years ago | 38 comments

Jedi Knight (Plus, Notes on an Expanded Universe)(filfre.net)

57 points by doppp 2 years ago | 39 comments

Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science (2011)(thenewatlantis.com)

55 points by gradus_ad 2 years ago | 54 comments

Under Attila's Gaze(quillette.com)

52 points by doat 2 years ago | 14 comments

Data brokers are gearing up to fight privacy bills(theverge.com)

52 points by leotravis10 2 years ago | 13 comments

Identifying Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 images from VAE artifacts (2023)(hforsten.com)

51 points by rcarmo 2 years ago | 17 comments

Jordan Mechner vs. the sands of time(washingtonpost.com)

51 points by anonymousab 2 years ago | 18 comments

C++ coroutines do not spark joy (2021)(probablydance.com)

51 points by signa11 2 years ago | 38 comments

Amazon increased US plastic packaging despite global phase-out(theguardian.com)

48 points by laurex 2 years ago | 30 comments

Opt-Models: Intro to Optimization Programming Using LEGOs(opt-models.org)

47 points by skadamat 2 years ago | 4 comments

Prostate cancer cases worldwide likely to double by 2040, analysis finds(theguardian.com)

47 points by pseudolus 2 years ago | 37 comments

Alcohol Use and Mortality Among Couples in US: Individual and Partner Effects(academic.oup.com)

45 points by gnabgib 2 years ago | 39 comments

Tiny Biosensor Is Just a Cup, a Membrane, and a Magnet(spectrum.ieee.org)

37 points by sizzle 2 years ago | 6 comments

Infrastructure as code is not the answer (2022)(lukeshaughnessy.medium.com)

35 points by scapecast 2 years ago | 33 comments

Favorites from our prompt engineering tournament(blog.promptlayer.com)

35 points by jzone3 2 years ago | 15 comments

A local news site was critical of Facebook–then Meta banned all their links(thehandbasket.co)

34 points by rideontime 2 years ago | 4 comments

We need a permanent solution for universal broadband access(theverge.com)

34 points by rntn 2 years ago | 37 comments