Hacker News: rozab

New comment by rozab in "Show HN: Made a little Artemis II tracker"

rozab — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:40:35 +0000

The actual Earth and Moon are still not nearly to scale though!

New comment by rozab in "Show HN: Made a little Artemis II tracker"

rozab — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 02:04:07 +0000

This has always been a peeve of mine, but the lack of scale diagrams in coverage of this is maddening. We know what the Earth and the Moon look like, there is no need to make them 20 times bigger. Surely the point of these diagrams is to show the unbelievable scale of the journey. I'm yet to see one this news cycle, from NASA or anyone else

New comment by rozab in "I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era"

rozab — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:53:00 +0000

I see loads of LLM articles where it's been prompted to never capitalise, avoid full stops, pepper in spelling mistakes, etc. it sucks.

New comment by rozab in "France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app"

rozab — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:32:41 +0000

All through this whole ghost fleet thing I've had this question as to how a large ship in the sea can possibly keep its movements secret. Large media organisations seem to be unable to say where large tankers have been if they turn their transponders off.

Don't we have constellations of satellites constantly imaging the entire earth, both with visual and synthetic aperture radar, with many offering their data freely to the public? Wouldn't a large ship on the ocean stick out somewhat? And yet journalists seem lost without vesselfinder. Is this harder than I'm imagining, or are they just not paying the right orgs for the info?

New comment by rozab in "60 Minutes Havana Syndrome report finds U.S. government tested energy weapon"

rozab — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 22:13:45 +0000

I've read reports about Havana Syndrome before and remain thoroughly unconvinced. The locations vary wildly, the symptoms vary wildly and can be explained by normal medical phenomena in a way Occam would find more agreeable.

Look at their 'smoking gun' evidence here:

>He tracked down an email, what he considers a receipt, for services provided to the Russian government by a member of Unit 29155 for "potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons."

Acoustic crowd control weapons are not mysterious, there are people on YouTube building and testing them! American companies will sell them to any oppressive government around the world (I believe the ones used against Serbian protestors were American). Yet this description contradicts speculation about microwaves just a bit further down in the article.

New comment by rozab in "DARPA’s new X-76"

rozab — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:58:10 +0000

It's cool they actually still commission concept paintings like this

New comment by rozab in "Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)"

rozab — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:05:54 +0000

Not sure what the downvotes are about, that looks to be exactly what happened.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

New comment by rozab in "Bars close and hundreds lose jobs as US firm buys Brewdog in £33M deal"

rozab — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:09:38 +0000

I'm not sure how old you are, but I understand that that UK beer culture is in a great place now compared to the 80s, partly due to CAMRA.

New comment by rozab in "OpenAI – How to delete your account"

rozab — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:43:00 +0000

> Claude Code in the last three months has finally made it possible to dump Windows and buy a loaded MacBook Pro

What does this mean?

New comment by rozab in "Show HN: Free printable micro-habit tracker inspired by Atomic Habits"

rozab — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:58:24 +0000

I like the open source app Loop Habit Tracker, but there's definitely an advantage to using paper for stuff like this.

https://loophabits.org/

New comment by rozab in "Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015"

rozab — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 11:27:43 +0000

If this is the only option, I would suggest that means the team doesn't know what they are doing.

New comment by rozab in "Discord just killed anonymity"

rozab — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:04:06 +0000

>mandatory age verification for all users is rolling out next month.

This is a lie, this only affects you if you want to view porn/nsfw channels on discord. I'm in the UK happily using it without age verification.

New comment by rozab in "End of an era for me: no more self-hosted git"

rozab — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 14:56:00 +0000

I had the same issue when I first put up my gitea instance. The bots found the domain through cert registration in minutes, before there were any backlinks. GPTbot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and others.

I added a robots.txt with explicit UAs for known scrapers (they seem to ignore wildcards), and after a few days the traffic died down completely and I've had no problem since.

Git frontends are basically a tarpit so are uniquely vulnerable to this, but I wonder if these folks actually tried a good robots.txt? I know it's wrong that they ignore wildcards, but it does seem to solve the issue

New comment by rozab in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

rozab — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:13:48 +0000

What am I missing? According to this, the only difference is you get a warning popup when someone new DMs you, right? And they can't send you images flagged as porn?

How does this impact you in any way?

New comment by rozab in "Guinea worm on track to be 2nd eradicated human disease; only 10 cases in 2025"

rozab — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:27:59 +0000

>The eradication program works by offering cash rewards for reporting cases in areas where the worm is present.

I wonder how they prevented a cobra effect[0] here? Clearly they did avoid it since there were so few human cases. Or maybe some of the animal cases reflect this?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_Effect

New comment by rozab in "Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features"

rozab — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 09:38:33 +0000

It's incredible that even vscode had this before Firefox. How could they misjudge their audience so badly?

New comment by rozab in "The engineer who invented the Mars rover suspension in his garage [video]"

rozab — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:08:16 +0000

This guy has incredible videos on hiking gear, examining common claims scientifically and rationally. He never gave any hints as to his professional background, so as not to taint his arguments with appeals to authority. It makes perfect sense that he grew up in this environment, doing engineering work for NASA as a kid!

New comment by rozab in "Sins of the Children"

rozab — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 13:11:41 +0000

The idea of taking ONS to an extreme is cool, and also feels very old-school. The concept of complete monodominance of an ecosphere is a bit unfashionable since Lynn Margulis upended thinking here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontogenetic_niche_shift

New comment by rozab in "The Olivetti Company"

rozab — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 02:16:00 +0000

I restored a beautiful 1946 Olivetti last year, having had nothing to do with typewriters beforehand. I just happened to see it on marketplace and pulled the trigger.

It needed a good clean, and some parts needed bent back into shape, but after that it worked like a dream. The mechanism for the tab stops is fantastic.

New comment by rozab in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"

rozab — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:00:10 +0000

These are new electric power plants. The US is still ramping up oil and gas production, and is now producing more than ever before. No signs of transitioning away from fossil fuels for transport, industry, export.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/fossil-fuels/chart-the-...