hackernews

1. 2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web Total comment counts : 6 Summary Two early pioneers, Last.fm and Audioscrobbler, independently built music discovery around collaborative filtering before the Web 2.0 era. Last.fm, founded in 2002 by four Austrian/German students in London, let users build listening profiles and share them via a “Map of Music,” using collaborative filtering to recommend songs akin to Amazon’s item-to-item approach. Audioscrobbler, started the same year by Richard Jones at the University of Southampton, coined “audioscrobbler” (scrobbling) to track listening and generate recommendations....

1. VPN location claims don’t match real traffic exits Total comment counts : 9 Summary IPinfo’s analysis of 20 popular VPNs found 17 exit traffic from countries different than claimed, with many listing 100+ countries but using few actual data centers in the US/Europe. They examined 150k exit IPs across 137 countries, revealing mismatches between claimed and measured exits. Mullvad, IVPN, and Windscribe had zero mismatches; others show significant discrepancies, often via virtual locations....

1. GNU Unifont Total comment counts : 10 Summary GNU Unifont is a GNU Project font providing glyphs for all printable BMP code points (U+0000–U+FFFF), with growing coverage of SMP and CSUR. It is dual-licensed under GNU GPLv2+ with the GNU Font Embedding Exception and the SIL Open Font License v1.1, permitting use in commercial software; derivatives must remain under the same terms, preserving contributor acknowledgments. As of version 13.0.04, there are standard and CSUR variants....

1. GPT-5.2 Total comment counts : 91 Summary error Overall Comments Summary Main point: Discussion comparing OpenAI’s ChatGPT with Google Gemini, weighing performance, benchmarks, pricing, and user experience. Concern: The main worry is that benchmarks may not translate to real-world UX and reliability, with bugs, session handling issues, and opacity around pricing and training undermining value. Perspectives: Viewpoints range from Gemini outperforming ChatGPT on current information and OCR to skepticism about benchmarks and concerns over price increases, transparency, and inconsistent UX....

1. Size of Life Total comment counts : 69 Summary error Overall Comments Summary Main point: Discussion centers on Neal.fun’s dynamic soundscape and its reception, including comparisons to retro games, praise for the labor of love, and mentions of related science/education content. Concern: Abrupt, non-smooth transitions in the dynamic music risk breaking immersion. Perspectives: Viewpoints range from admiration and support for the creator and the dynamic audio design to critique of sharp cuts and discussion of related educational content and potential monetization concerns....

1. Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 hallucinates the HN front page 10 years from now Total comment counts : 152 Summary error Overall Comments Summary Main point: A discussion about predicting and crafting a ten-years-from-now Hacker News front page using AI, sparking humor, nostalgia, and debate about the model’s limits. Concern: The main worry is that AI-generated futures may be misleading, repetitive due to context-taint, and could propagate a false sense of what the future holds, plus concerns about second-order effects and verification....

1. Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1 Total comment counts : 10 Summary Jepsen independently evaluated NATS JetStream (v2.12.1) and found data loss under several fault conditions. On minority-node data corruption or truncation, coordinated power failures, OS crashes with delays or pauses, committed writes could be lost and persistent split-brain could occur. The root cause traced to a disk-flush policy that waited two minutes before acknowledging writes. A belated note cites a similar issue with process crashes in v2....

1. I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam Website with Claude Total comment counts : 44 Summary An engineer tries to get Claude to recreate Warner Bros’ 1996 Space Jam landing page from a screenshot. The page is a single HTML with absolute positioning and a starfield background. Through a man-in-the-middle proxy, the author tracks Claude’s attempts: a near-accurate but off orbital layout, and hesitance to extract exact pixel coordinates....

1. Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop Total comment counts : 24 Summary Tiny Core Linux is a ultra-small, modular OS from the Core Project. It starts with a recent Linux kernel (vmlinuz) and a minimal root filesystem (core.gz). Core (11MB) is the kernel plus core.gz and serves as a foundation for user-built desktops, servers, or appliances. TinyCore adds a tiny X desktop (Xvesa, Xprogs, aterm, FLTK-1....

1. Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros Total comment counts : 163 Summary error Overall Comments Summary Main point: Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery would mark a major consolidation in streaming with broad implications for content, distribution, and competition. Concern: The deal could reduce consumer choice and competition, potentially raise prices or ads, and face regulatory scrutiny plus integration challenges. Perspectives: Opinions range from viewing the deal as harmful to consumers and content quality to seeing potential strategic benefits for Netflix (IP access, scale, HBO integration) and questions about which bidders would be best and how it would affect theatrical releases, ads, and governance....