Top 28 stories from Hacker News. Top 10 include comment highlights. Compiled at 20:10 UTC.
773 points by monokai_nl · 495 comments
On digital sovereignty, and why European cloud is better than you think
What HN said:
TrackerFF: For the past days I've been participating(albeit over Teams) in a conference relevant to my industry (intel), basically startups and established companies showcasing their products to a closed audience of EU gov. officials.
IAmFledge: I started the process of this back in January and now, at least in terms of product hosting; fully migrated into European infrastructure (https://bannermedia.ltd). It didn't come without a bit of pain, but glad I've done it - and to come with this I've ended up building a whole t...
schnitzelstoat: While I agree with him that the US is becoming more unpredictable, I don't think the EU is much better, especially with regards to digital things where they can be worse in some ways.
Worf: While the EU currently offers more privacy than the US, the best solution would be to use services which no one could have any meaningful control over, as much as possible, except the user.
456 points by jorijn · 247 comments
I left GitHub for self-hosted Forgejo on a hardened NUC. The reason is digital sovereignty, not reliability outages. Here's the thinking and the architecture.
What HN said:
xvilka: The real game changer would be completed Federation[1] support. This is why I am donating both Forgejo[2] and Codeberg[3] and urge everyone doing the same, to give more time and resources for the Forgejo team to implement it properly.
giancarlostoro: Everyone seems to be leaving GitHub, and forgetting the entire spirit of what git is in my eyes. Git was always meant to be decentralized, the problem here is that all the tooling around git was centralized to GitHub because it was a cleaner experience, they scaled nicely, and we...
merb: I do not need a new shiny code hosting platform. I just need a better way for managing merge requests/pull requests. Stuff that does not suck, especially a better diff, like semantic diff that is more clever than before.
sc68cal: I have also moved my git repositories to a self-hosted NUC. I have not yet bothered with a HTTP frontend to share it with the world, mostly because I don't want to provide AI scrapers with content and don't want to put the work in to block them.
379 points by speckx · 114 comments
In the US, you can get a domain name like somename.city.state.us for free. If your town has its own domain, you can get nameservers from Amazon Lightsail, send the Interim .US Domain Template to the delegated manager for your locality, then point DNS entries at your webhost.
What HN said:
kraptv: I have three locality domains, all with different registrars in Oregon. Two are with unique delegated locality domain registrars (think old school consultancies or ISPs that still exist) and one directly via localitymanagement.us (GoDaddy/USTLD).
morpheuskafka: This list of (supposedly 7388, didn't realize there even were that many?) of them can apparently now be registered online replacing the email method in the OP: https://localitymanagement.us/registrar/domain/delegatedzone...
foresto: Having a domain under the .us TLD once seemed appealing to me for practical reasons: It's short, consistently inexpensive, and hasn't already sold the vast majority of its useful namespace to squatters.
kiddico: Seeing the *.k12.oh.us in the delegated subdomains brought me back to highschool. When I was little I always wondered why the city name was before k12. Didn't know it was structured like that everywhere.
285 points by stalfosknight · 209 comments
Kickstarter has updated its content guidelines to prohibit several forms of NSFW content, and payment processor Stripe may be to blame
What HN said:
codedokode: Why payment processors do it? Why people in America do not want to earn more money from commissions? Strong church lobby? Legal risks? I think its mostly religious groups who who are against adult content and sex, or there are other groups? Also this is why we should work to incr...
hitekker: The left-right coalition against porn makes relief for Kickstarter or Stripe unlikely. FOSTA-SESTA, the law that increased liability for platforms facilitating porn, passed 388-25 in the House and 97-2 in the Senate back in 2018.
laweijfmvo: This is the least of my concerns with Kickstarter. It’s so trivial to completely scam an entirely fake campaign, with zero repercussions, that no one should take this site seriously at all.
cromulent: The FT podcast series “Hot Money” season one explained a lot about this. Basically the payment card industry shapes what adult content is produced by governing the money flow. https://www.ft.com/hot-money
284 points by matt_d · 65 comments
We present Elevator, the first binary translator that statically translates entire x86-64 executables to AArch64 without debug information, source code, or assumptions about code layout.
What HN said:
da-x: > Elevator achieves performance on par with or better than QEMU's user-mode JIT emulation. I am not sure what QEMU's JIT is doing (in its userspace wrapper), but I think it has a lot of room to improve.
linkregister: A 50x increase in the size of the .text section is enormous, but seems to be a reasonable price to pay for a fully-deterministic translation. The performance difference over emulation will outweigh the inconvenience of the size increase in many cases.
codedokode: I was always curious, how do translators handle indirect jumps? When analyzing a binary we can discover only segments of code connected with direct jumps, where the destination address is known.
fizza_pizza: The certification angle is the most interesting part to me. Regulated industries (aviation, medical devices) often can't use JIT for exactly this reason, the code that runs has to be the code that was certified.
262 points by HardwareLust · 116 comments
A team at the University of Hong Kong has developed a new “super steel” that can survive the harsh conditions needed to make green hydrogen from seawater. The material uses an unexpected double-protection mechanism that resists corrosion far better than conventional stainless ste...
What HN said:
SoftTalker: "The same research program previously produced anti-COVID-19 stainless steel in 2021" WTF is "anti-COVID-19 stainless steel" I wonder. Edit: Turns out it's a high-copper alloy that has antiviral properties.
smusamashah: > That is what makes the finding so striking. Manganese is usually not viewed as a friend of stainless steel corrosion resistance. In fact, the prevailing view has been that manganese weakens it.
asa400: Very interesting. Highly corrosion resistant "unconventional" steels have become somewhat popular in cutlery, with steels like LC200N, H1/H2, and MagnaCut. LC200N and H1/H2 in particular can be left in body of water uncoated/unpainted and come back in a year and they'll be fine.
lukeinator42: This would be great for other use cases too like climbing bolts and anchors in coastal areas. Lots of areas are switching to titanium glue-ins which are expensive, but I wonder if this could enable more affordable option.
206 points by mikemcquaid · 69 comments
A direct-action manifesto for maintainers keeping open source alive on company time.
What HN said:
jcalvinowens: My employers have generally been fine giving me blanket permission to contribute to specific open source projects. The framing matters: don't say "can I please do some charity work because it makes me feel good".
prmoustache: > "and make sure you own the open source IP you ship. " In all the juridictions I have worked in, the code I ship during my work hours is owned by my employer, not me. I simply just can't decide on my own to contribute during my work hours.
MatrixMan: This is a good idea, a great idea even, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to position it as "resistance". Your job, likely, is to achieve some goal. You're the specialist who gets to decide how to achieve that goal.
zokier: While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission.
186 points by dmitrygr · 39 comments
Dmitry.GR: Fisher-Price Pixter: From unknown and obscure to fully documented, emulated, and preserved
What HN said:
Uncle_Brumpus: Thank you. This is a spectacular amount of work and information. As someone who is interested in similar old hardware that occasionally lacks any kind of documentation (specifically cameras), I sincerely wish I had this level of patience and determination (and also understanding,...
doright: > In 2000, the famous American toy company Fisher-Price released a simple drawing-oriented handheld gaming console for kids called Pixter. It featured no brain-rotting social media and focused, instead, on drawing, sketching, and educational games.
MSFT_Edging: I still follow Dimitry on twitter for his technical talent, as I've done some palmOS software reversing as well, but man every other post is something along the lines of "we should let X group fend for themselves in a rattlesnake pit because they don't produce value".
smusamashah: Is there any dumb LCD console like that available these days for kids? (not those retro gaming consoles). I want to buy one for my kids. It looks so good, specially because it is a dumb and simple device.
171 points by haunter · 139 comments
As time goes on, fewer games than ever are unplayable on Linux
What HN said:
trashface: Feels like there is some real momentum on linux gaming now. I mostly play older games but I've gotten most of them working acceptably in proton on my old system 76 laptop (oryp5, with a nvidia 2060; ~7 years old).
JoeAltmaier: Used to be a staff member working on an x86 OS called CTOS. I realized if I implemented a couple of traps, we could run command-line DOS programs. So I did. And it worked. Dev tools, text processing, piped commands all worked.
Night_Thastus: Show me the numbers. Show me an identical gaming PC running Windows 11 and then Linux, and show not just FPS - but things like frametime pacing, latency, etc. This NTSync stuff is very impressive, but I haven't seen a lot of end-to-end numbers versus Windows.
Animats: There's been real progress. Wine's memory allocator had an architecture with three nested locks. "Realloc" held a futex lock on the memory allocator while recopying the buffer.
159 points by curiousgal · 52 comments
Python 3.14 shipped with a new incremental garbage collector. However, we’ve had a number of reports of significant memory pressure in production environments. We’ve decided to revert it in both 3.14 and 3.15, and go back to the generational GC from 3.13. 3.
What HN said:
athoscouto: We've been impacted by this. I migrated our services to Python 3.14 so we could attach profilers during runtime. A couple of services looked like they had a memory leak. Memory was continuously increasing over time. Thanks to Python 3.
davidkwast: "Python 3.14 shipped with a new incremental garbage collector. However, we’ve had a number of reports of significant memory pressure in production environments. We’ve decided to revert it in both 3.14 and 3.15, and go back to the generational GC from 3.13.
bhouston: .NET seems to have regularly changed the garbage collector over the years and I do not remember any similar surprises in production. I wonder why they have had better experience? I thought that by now dynamic garbage collection was a known quantity so that making changes, outsid...
NooneAtAll3: I'm genuinely surprised that python change was even possible without PEP
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