Hacker News Reader

NKosmatoson Show HN: Nightwatch – a Mac menu-bar app that tells you when tonight is clear

Nice one mate! You’ve included many things and perhaps you should consider making it a full desktop app (or even better web app). Thanks for sharing and extra like for being a DWARFLAB owner :-)

NKosmatoson Launch HN: Magnitude (YC S25) – Self-optimizing inference engine for agents

Nice one! Tried it and unfortunatelly there are no small models that can fit my 16GB RAM or GTX1650 4GB GPU. Yeah, I know that this configuration is not meant to be used for AI/LLM work, but it would be good to provide support for some smaller models so that us plebeians can also play a bit with what you techbros are used to ;-) There are many small/very small models out there and I'm sure you could add a couple just for playing around and experimenting.

NKosmatoson Why the Bronze Age Collapsed

Excellent read and very explanatory… on a funny side, too bad we didn’t see anything about alien technology (joking) ;-)

NKosmatoson Hutter Prize – Compressing Human Knowledge

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

NKosmatoson September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy

Just FYI, not all Greeks support Isreal ;-)

NKosmatoson September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy

True. Certain things changed and improved but many remained the same. Having corrupt politicians doesn't help at all. We're caught in-between bigger players and we're just following along. As the OP stated, many countries are suffering from consequences of the actions by some "great powers".

NKosmatoson NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart

SR-71 stories will always get my upvote! I don't care if my comment gets downvoted but this is my favourite plane and especially the stories that go with it.

NKosmatoson September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy

I feel you... the situation is more or less the same for Greece (and many other countries). Things are not looking very good and I don't know how all this situation is going to stabilize or even better come back to normal.

NKosmatoson Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free

That's the problem with all big billion dollar companies, they don't have enough people for support! You can't talk to a real human to explain your problem anymore :-( The only thing these CEOs, managers and noards care about are profits, they don't care about their users.

NKosmatoson The Test

It could have been a story or something that I read in an article, but the point remains. We shouldn't blindly trust results/calculations if we don't have a feeling of the correctness or how the result is derived. I understand that this isn't valid for many cases where difficult and complex computations are performed, but for many real life scenarios and situations it's valid. As stated in the original article, the people holding the AI strings are somewhat disconnected from us real people and they lack this human and real life touch. I hope I've explained it correctly :-)

NKosmatoson The Test

So many truths in this post… With regards to division and mathematics, I remembered this article/study I saw some time ago about a maths professor handing out “crooked” calculators to the whole class and then having them take an exam. Most of the kids took the results from the calculators as they were, without challenging them and hence failed the test. The minority had the knowledge and critical mind needed in order to understand that what their tool* was telling them was off.

* where tool replace with agent, map, AI

NKosmatoson It's 90 Degrees in the Arctic

https://archive.is/X1z2s

NKosmatoson German court rules Meta liable for scam ads on Facebook and Instagram

From the article: “ The Meta spokesperson also said the company has taken strong action against scam ads, including proactively identifying them and removing reported content.” This is complete crap, I’ve reported countless scam ads and marketplace offers and they haven’t removed a single one. It’s in their interest to continue selling ads (even scam ones), as long as they’re getting money into their pockets. Big companies have stopped caring for their users :-(

NKosmatoson HP ZGX Fury Is Now Orderable: GB300 Superchip, 748GB Unified Memory

These are for billionaires/multi millionaires/cryptobros/stupidly rich people who can afford such “toys”. I’d really love to see a geek/tech freak/gadget lover/IT/homelab billionaire buying large number of things we mere mortals can’t afford, but only dream of, and then he blogs about them ;-)

NKosmatoson EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe

It shows the movement of birds across Europe, and how the birds move north/south according to seasonal changes. You can select different species and see an animation of bird populations. Site works a lot better on desktop.

NKosmatoson Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

LOL because they're greedy and they want the maximum profits for their shareholders and the board. The same explanation applies to every big (greedy) corporation :-( Have you seen what is happeing with Facebook marketplace? with Twitter ads? (no, it's not called X, it's still Twitter for some of us) have you seen apps on Play store and Apple? All soulless, big, greedy companies do this and they don't care about us anymore :-(

NKosmatoson Brick Territories

Check also some other great creations by Etienne Jacob - https://bleuje.com

NKosmatoson Geolocating a random island using geometry and CUDA programming

Excellent write up and an enjoyable read! Reminds me of the “good old times” where posts on HN were written by humans and with a specific writing style like yours. You could’ve used a little bit more of geoguessing to narrow down results, or do a brute force visual check on the last hundred or so ;-)

NKosmatoson Sun Clock

Thanks for posting this, I remember seeing it somewhere some time ago but didn't bookamrk the site and couldn't remember the name. It has some very nice plots (and city comparison) for data freaks like myself :-)

NKosmatoson 2026 Eclipse Webcams

Thanks for posting this, most of us won’t be able to view the eclipse but having a few webcams really helps to get the feeling!

Hoping to be able to see the great eclipse of 2027 live ;-)

https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/solar/2027-august-2

NKosmatoson Scientists Release Biggest 2D Map of the Universe

Direct link to Legacy Survey Sky Viewer: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org

NKosmatoson Germany Records Historic 12B KWh Solar Feed-In in July 2026

Whenever I see news like this one I feel bad for us in Greece... we have so much sun yet we don't utilize it to the maximum we could for generating electricity and our KWh price is one of the most expensive in Europe. It's a pitty the government doesn't invest in solar or encourage households to do so :-(

NKosmatoson Show HN: Elevators

Did exactly the same with Assembly language on a PIC16C84 microcontroller with LEDs dyeing my university years a looong time ago.

NKosmatoson UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions

“Football’s future cannot be dictated by the expectations of those whose first duty is to maximise financial return.” Very well said…replace the word football with internet/technology/web/research/university or so many others and you might understand why this single powerful phrase is so important.

NKosmatoson Turning a pile of documents into a searchable useable knowledge base

Looks good, definitely going to try it. Extra thanks for creating something fully local, we need more projects like this one!

NKosmatoson Microsoft commits $2.5B and 6k employees to new AI implementation unit

If only the could allocate 2% of these resources to a REAL technical manager to fix Microsoft Teams and Outlook, their share price would bounce back ;-)

NKosmatoson A website that lists websites to submit your website to

It should be called Ouroboros ;-)

NKosmatoson Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

Very well written! Now let’s wait to see what happens with the rights to Calvin and Hobbes when Waterson is not around. I’m sure we’ll see a reboot/re-run with merchandise, series and perhaps a movie, when the heirs take the rights.

NKosmatoson Pirates, a naval warfare game inspired by Sid Meier's Pirates

Not playable on iPad, will try it on PC.

NKosmatoson Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe

TLDR (conclusion from the paper): "By a combination of these techniques the satellite Cosmos 2546 (NORAD ID 45608) was identified with high confidence as one source of the interference. Further analysis pointed to the Russian Edinaya Kosmicheskaya Sistema, an early warning constellation to which Cosmos 2546 belongs, as collectively responsible for the wide-area transient interference causing GNSS degradation across Europe since 2019."