perihelions

Here's a 2024 incident:

> "The outage also hit servers that host procedures meant to overcome such an outage... Company officials had no paper copies of backup procedures, one of the people added, leaving them unable to respond until power was restored."

https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/power-failed-spacex...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35150345 ("Show HN: Modern Font Stacks – New system font stack CSS for modern OSs (modernfontstacks.com)" (2023); 144 comments)

> "Seriously, when's the last time we built something like this."

Easy to check: look up Wikipedia's "List of highest bridges", and sort by date.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_bridges#Comple...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210678 ("Apple Removes HKmap.live from the App Store" (2019); 893 comments)

Related old thread,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210678 ("Apple Removes HKmap.live from the App Store" (2019); 893 comments)

Timestamp for the ADHD's,

https://youtu.be/E_ZpY6qHcTk?t=134

> "stay 100m away from tall structures"

But then how do you deliver to the upper floors of vertical buildings? That must be half the near-term market for these kinds of drones: people in dense, urban areas well-served by local droneports, who are looking for convenience above all else.

If you can't safely manage urban canyons—you can't manage. It'd be like selling self-driving cars that are only approved for private racetracks.

Here's a curious article I read the other day, that underscores the market factor:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45445406 ("What It Takes to Get Lunch Delivered to the 70th Floor in a Shenzhen Skyscraper (nytimes.com)" / "An informal network of last-mile runners close the gap between harried delivery drivers and hungry office workers in a Shenzhen skyscraper")

This is completely unconstitutional. The journalist author fails the reader not explaining how the First Amendment works, or quoting a law expert who does.

> "The guidance is likely to raise due process and privacy concerns in light of the Trump administration's recent attempts to deport pro-Palestinian students. The attempts have faced legal challenges."

By "faced legal challenges" they should write they were ruled unconstitutional.

https://www.lawdork.com/p/judge-william-youngs-ruling-agains... ("[T]his Court rules that here the Plaintiffs have shown that Secretaries Noem and Rubio are engaged in a mode of enforcement leading to detaining, deporting, and revoking noncitizens’ visas solely on the basis of political speech, and with the intent of chilling such speech and that of others similarly situated. Such conduct is not only unconstitutional, but a thing virtually unknown to our constitutional tradition.")

(Context:

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pete-hegseth-... ("Trump Tells Generals the Military Will Be Used to Fight ‘Enemy Within’"))

> "It will be of no loss if it were to fail entirely."

That's decades of the public internet that would be permanently erased; billions of dead links pointing nowhere. HN alone would lose ~32,000 images from its archives,

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Is it not hubris to call it "no loss" if, say, 3 hours ago, "Design of a LISP-based microprocessor / Page 22 has a map of the processor layout:" was forever lost to humanity, as collateral damage to some techbros' dispute?

Decentralization can't arrive soon enough.

I learned something fascinating this week! (Unrelated to OP). The algebraic computation of the Hausdorff dimension of a fractal set is *exactly the same* as the Master Equation of the asymptotic analysis of algorithms! I.e.: where a Sierpinski triangle has dimension log(3)/log(2) ~ 1.58—intermediate in between that of a line and of a plane—that's the very same log(3)/log(2) as in the O(n^(log(3)/log(2)) of, say, the Karatsuba algorithm. In Karatsuba, when you recursively split a digit representation of a number in half (2), you get three new multiplications (3). In a Sierpinski triangle, rescaling by a factor of 2 increases the number of non-empty triangles at that scale by 3. And it really is the *same* manipulation: the Hausdorff dimension of the fractal is a critical exponent of an asymptotic function growth rate, a function of the diameters in a covering set in the ε→0 limit.

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

I believe this is the first version that's long-form journalism.

(I'm not a fan of the HN submissions which are short, anecdotal blogposts, that leave you questing for the rest of the story across the internet. I think all those previous ones were of that format. Discussions that start in medias res and assume you've been following every new development daily from the beginning).

The idea with cesium-137 is that it didn't exist naturally in significant quantities prior to 1945. An airtight container, sealed from the atmosphere prior to 1945, should not contain any.

It's not like some other radioisotopes using in dating, such as carbon-14, which are continuously produced naturally (i.e. by cosmic rays initiating nuclear reactions in the high atmosphere). In that case, an airtight container had a known concentration at the time of its sequestration, and radioisotope dating (to oversimplify) counts the number of half-lives that elapsed since that point. (Or with the example of organic matter—the number of half-lives since a tree was felled into lumber—since it ceased metabolizing atmospheric gases).

I feel this WSJ exclusive properly contextualizes the US commerce secretary's threat to abandon an ally:

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/trump-xi-talks-china-taiwan-... ("Xi Is Chasing Huge Concession From Trump: Opposing Taiwan Independence" (2 days ago))

In the 20th century, opposition to totalitarianism in the West was idealistic; in the US it's now transactional. US leadership is signalling Chinese annexation of Taiwan is no longer a red line; it's something to be negotiated—something that Taiwan is expected to negotiate with the US (and perhaps Xi is also invited to negotiate?)

Previous context?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29607989 ("RadioShack – Bringing Cryptocurrency to the Mainstream (radioshack.com)" (2021))

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31958998 ("RadioShack reinvents itself as a crypto platform with wild tweets (washingtonpost.com)" (2022))

(Amusing to count five different HN'ers calling it a "scam", and two more calling it a "Ponzi").

The thing 'rebelgecko is alluding to is specific, and fascinating! The coolant in these space reactors is a molten metal (low-melting point sodium-potassium eutectic). When they leaked in the space vacuum, the liquid dispersed into a large number of small, metal spherules, which formed rings around Earth. Because the spherules are metallic and smooth, they're (comparatively) easy to track by radar, from Earth.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190033494/downloads/20... (pdf) ("The NaK Population: a 2019 Status")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passivation_(spacecraft) ("Passivation (spacecraft)")

And used in context (this context),

> "The incident is the fourth time a Centaur upper stage has broken up since 2018. In the earlier three cases, the breakups created hundreds of pieces of debris, but no known collisions. That has raised questions about a potential design flaw with the stage or a failure to “passivate” the stage by venting propellant tanks and draining batteries, removing energy that could cause a breakup."

https://spacenews.com/faa-to-complete-orbital-debris-upper-s...

According to Google's censorship algorithm, Michael Osterholm's podcast (famous epidemiologist and, at the time, a member of President Biden's own gold-star covid-19 advisory panel).

https://x.com/cidrap/status/1420482621696618496 ("Our Osterholm Update podcast episode (Jul 22) was removed for “medical misinformation.”" (2021))

Most ironic thing I've ever seen. I still recall it perfectly, though it's been four years. Never, ever trust censorship algorithms or the people who control them: they are just dumb parrots that suppress all discussion of an unwanted topic, without thought or reason.

(I've removed the distraction).

> "My point is that it's not clear that ESA actually has a huge problem here"

It's not about the ESA as a client and those bespoke science payloads; it's about (mass-produced) European satellite constellations, and similar high-volume, low-cost payloads.

Is there a less clickbait-y source? There's no tangible link to the United Nations described in the article; that seems to be a gratuitous flourish.

> "several locations within a 35-mile radius of the United Nations headquarters"

That's the entirety of New York City!

edit to add: This very weird part was actually lifted from the USSS press release,

> "These devices were concentrated within 35 miles of the global meeting of the United Nations General Assembly now underway in New York City."

https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/releases/2025/09/us-s... ("U.S. Secret Service dismantles imminent telecommunications threat in New York tristate area")

> "They've already started talking about banning trans people from owning guns"

They've (I mean sitting Congressional representatives, not randos) have escalated their rhetoric considerably since that (*is* it rhetoric?)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic... ("MAGA lawmaker calls to forcefully mass institutionalize trans people: ‘We have to get them off the streets!’" (September 17))

> "“We have to do something about this. We have to treat these people. We have to get them off the streets, and we have to get them off the internet, and we can't let them communicate with each other,” he insisted."

> "“I'm all about free speech, but this is a virus, this is a cancer that's spreading across this country,” Jackson concluded. “That’s going to do great damage to normal, hard-working, law-abiding people.”"

> "The hard-right lawmaker, meanwhile, is not the only member of Congress who has seemingly called for transgender people to be locked up in mental institutions."

> "Speaking to reporters earlier this week, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) – who spearheaded the effort to bar trans women from using Capitol Hill bathrooms that don't correspond with their sex assigned at birth – repeatedly used anti-trans slurs while saying transgender people are “mentally ill” and “should be in a straitjacket.”"

Actual Nazi language. Aligns with the Fox News hosts talking about bringing back Aktion T4,

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20... ("Fox News host apologizes for remarks about killing mentally ill homeless people")

> "Kilmeade added: “Or involuntary lethal injection or something — just kill ‘em.”"

I don't see it. I don't see what this Administration has done to erode China's rare earth monopoly; or actions that could erode it in the future. They've spent a lot of brain cells[0] on the opposite: on trying to convince China to continue exporting rare earths to the US (in clownishly inept ways).

Trump's signature accomplishment is to unintentionally convince China to enact a total ban[1,2] on the exports of several rare-earths (and some other minerals)—something he didn't predict, and is now trying to undo.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/26/trump-tariffs-china-rare-ear... ("Trump threatened 200% tariffs on China if Beijing does not export rare-earth magnets to the U.S.")

[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-bans-expor... ("China bans export of critical minerals to US as trade tensions escalate")

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/business/china-rare-earth... ("China’s Grip on [Samarium] Threatens the West’s Militaries")

An analogy is that rare earths are less like something you "have" and more like something you "make". Mining and processing are manufacturing skills.

I poorly expressed the sentiment that you very correctly described the law, as it exists; and that people did not want to hear it (as seen by your numerous downvotes).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43545349 ("CERN scientists find evidence of quantum entanglement in sheep (home.cern)"; April 1, 2025)

The last criticism of Nazism was a very milquetoast 1934 speech by a Nazi, Franz von Papen, who though supporting Adolf Hitler detracted in some (seemingly) lesser ways—decrying the fanaticism of Hitler's personality cult. He was severely punished for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_speech ("...said to be the last speech made publicly, and on a high level, in Germany against National Socialism...")

An ironic tombstone for freedom of speech:

"They will bear them and follow the Führer with unwavering loyalty, if they are allowed to have their part in the planning and in the work, if every word of criticism is not taken for ill will, and if despairing patriots are not branded as enemies of the state."

If any was curious, it's >$5 billion.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-wlfi-world-liberty-financ... ("New crypto token boosts Trump family's wealth by $5 billion")