hackernews

1. Unexpected things that are people Total comment counts : 33 Summary Beyond corporations, the law grants personhood to non-human entities. Ships are treated as legal persons to facilitate liability and can be defendants; they also have salvage rights under the “no cure, no pay” rule, rooted in ancient Rhodian and Roman practice. The Whanganui River in New Zealand was accorded legal personality in 2017, with two custodians, restoration funds, and recognition as an indivisible living whole that sustains communities; it may register as a charitable entity....

1. Marble Fountain Total comment counts : 24 Summary An enthusiast at Formlabs builds Marble Fountain, a procedural art piece designed to exploit printing complexity. Starting with random points, splines, and a fixed slope, they add a path solver to pack as much motion as the printer allows. The system evolves by updating point positions and managing velocity: banks, minimum turn radii, and aggressive banking dissipate speed; the lift doubles as a ball-screw with potential wobble....

1. Marko – A declarative, HTML‑based language that makes building web apps fun Total comment counts : 10 Summary Marko is a streaming, resumable compiler and tiny runtime for building dynamic, reactive UIs from HTML templates. It reimagines HTML as a language for modern apps, extending valid HTML with declarative components while keeping HTML validity. Marko streams content as soon as it’s ready, so rendering starts without client-side bundles or extra data requests....

1. Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages Total comment counts : 20 Summary Myna is a monospace font designed for symbol-rich programming that treats symbols as first-class glyphs alongside alphanumeric characters, aiming to provide ligatures without losing ASCII simplicity. Born from a personal itch to tweak glyphs, it is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 as a simple, single-weight font with no current ligatures (but potential future updates)....

1. Two billion email addresses were exposed Total comment counts : 20 Summary An analysis of the world’s largest credential-stuffing corpus confirms the “2 Billion Email Addresses” headline isn’t exaggerated: about 1,957,476,021 unique emails, plus 1.3 billion passwords (625 million new). The dataset, far larger than the previously reported 183M addresses, is the most extensive processed. Credential stuffing lists come from breaches, are sold and reused, letting attackers log into unrelated sites due to password reuse....

1. Solarpunk is already happening in Africa Total comment counts : 27 Summary Climate Drift argues Sub-Saharan Africa’s off-grid solar is the era’s infrastructure breakthrough, driven by startups selling solar on pay-as-you-go. In 2024, 30 million solar products were sold; ~400,000 new installations monthly; 50% of the market is held by firms founded in the last 15 years; loan repayment among very-low-income households exceeds 90%. The grid may never reach deep rural areas, but cheap hardware, near-zero-cost payments, and pay-as-you-go unlock scale....

1. NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware Total comment counts : 24 Summary The article promotes an experimental firmware loader for Nest Thermostat Gen 1/2 that uses the OMAP DFU interface to flash a custom bootloader and kernel. Once installed, the device stops contacting Nest/Google and runs on a NoLongerEvil backend, granting user control but risking device brickage and unpredictable behavior. It outlines setup steps (tools for macOS/Linux/Windows, libusb), DFU-mode flashing, and linking to the NoLongerEvil account after reboot....

1. Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025) Total comment counts : 211 Summary Pomelo Care is a Series B, multi-disciplinary team of clinicians and engineers focused on improving care for moms and babies. They’re hiring engineers to shape product, codebase, and culture—writing clean code, building systems for personalized care, and delivering a strong mobile experience. Tech stack includes GCP, Kotlin, Typescript, React/React Native, Terraform, Spanner, BigQuery, DuckDB, Dagster, DBT, and Kubernetes....

1. Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again Total comment counts : 8 Summary Seeking change in tech habits, the author embraced BSD, choosing FreeBSD for its multi-workload capabilities over OpenBSD. They set up a Hetzner server using BastilleBSD for jails and vm-bhyve for VMs, documenting the learning curve and personal process. They praise BSD for its simplicity, thorough docs, and long-term compatibility, with community support helping them overcome questions about base system release cycles....

1. Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category Total comment counts : 29 Summary error Overall Comments Summary Main point: The discussion centers on how LLMs and AI-generated content are disrupting academic publishing (preprints, reviews, and arXiv policies) and what reforms might be needed. Concern: The main worry is that incentive systems reward volume over quality, inviting noisy, AI-generated content and gaming, while policy changes risk stifling legitimate work or lagging behind technology....