Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest
177 comments
·December 19, 2025jvanderbot
poly2it
Definitely one of the harder drives feasible!
Tom 7 did something reminiscent of this if you hadn't seen already: https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio.
HPsquared
You could totally do that with the mirror on the moon. (Retroreflector + optical data transmission).
The moon is approximately (it varies) 1.3 light seconds away, i.e. a 2.6 second round trip, and optical links can have very high data rates. You could fit quite a lot of data on there! (Edit: although maybe the data rate won't be so high at these distances)
davidkellis
Some amateur radio folks do something along similar lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Ear...
Sharlin
It's just a fancy form of delay-line memory [1].
lxgr
In a universe with mass–energy equivalence, show me a storage medium that isn’t effectively a delay line :)
Scaevolus
You can use fiber optics as an optical delay line too! About 60KB/km at 100Gbps.
lxgr
Indeed: https://qntm.org/transi
2026iknewit
There is an archive of a lot of television transmission in space.
archive.space
You just need to be traveling faster than the radio waves, catch up and enjoy :)
RobotToaster
People of Earth. I AM LRRR, RULER OF THE PLANET OMICRON PERSEI 8! We will raise your planet's temperature by one million degrees a day, for five days, unless we see McNeal at 9pm tomorrow - 8 central!
HPsquared
I think I read somewhere that time starts flowing backwards when you go faster than the speed of light. You get earlier and earlier signals.
pkoiralap
So if we can somehow preserve the signal and make it go round and round, can we get long term storage out of nothing?
lucaslazarus
This is possible but you'd have to deploy it right by a black hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_sphere
terminalkeys
Not a scientist, but I assume the signal would degrade or mutate over time due to space radiation and other radio waves.
lxgr
Electromagnetic waves have perfect/lossless superposition, so radiation can’t really degrade a signal that way.
The big limiting factors are free space path loss and noise.
PartiallyTyped
It should be same logic we use for repeaters, so it'll be fine.
marcosdumay
"Nothing" is a funny name for an interplanetary communication network.
idiotsecant
You're still storing your data in the same EM field, just in a slightly different non-inertial reference frame.
BeaverGoose
"Please star my repo so I can get a job" is brutal
OsrsNeedsf2P
As someone who maintained popular open source repos for >5 years, not once did I have a recruiter care about it (I made sure to ask!)
abhaynayar
maybe not the recruiter but the hiring manager or prospective colleagues who'll interview you later?
not the number of stars, but I like looking what people have done online ie GitHub/blog. I feel like it is a nice thing to talk about.
I know it's an unpopular opinion these days cause everyone wants work life balance and not work beyond the office but it's always nice to see projects you've worked on it does show some interest. also while one can fake GitHub activity it's hard to fake well thought out and cared for projects.
it's easier to fake metrics from your previous jobs like I saved X amount of money for the company or had Y efficiency gains.
tigerlily
I had to go back and look. Absolutely skewered it.
kgwxd
Is that the title it gave itself?
Edit: Oh no, that was for the repo I actually stared before seeing this. I'm just learning Go :)
laser9
A good Friday morning laugh! I think the tiles are not just honest, they are brutally honest. Some of my fav ones:
- Amazon finally adds a feature that has been standard since 2005
- Texas accidentally does something good for privacy
Would it possible to add a feature where hovering over a title displays the original title?
ajcp
-> Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster.
I love these and I know this is all in good fun, but I feel like this one is a little unfair to Jeff. He's a content creator and he didn't actually buy the rig. If he's rich it's because he creates content like this.
kemayo
It's inaccurate on two fronts: he didn't spend the money because he loaned the hardware... and the reviewed thing was actually $40k. :D
pdevr
It need not be a dichotomy. I also laughed at the title. At the same time, I found the original article useful.
ajcp
No, I agree, I just wanted to call it out.
null
pizzathyme
Yes and - it would be great to hover/tap to see the original headline.
I found myself pulling up the original and the honest versions side by side. The translation makes it funny.
andix
Right now there is a lot of drift between real and honest version, so it's hard to find the original title.
AntiqueFig
If you click on the comments in the honest version, it'll redirect you to the real version.
bombledmonk
This should be the April Fools 2026 feature put directly on the live HN site.
eastbound
I love asking Grok’s companions, especially “Bad Rudy”, for the news of the day. It’s pretty similar: Brutally honest, filtered news. Although recently he started editorializing with his personal opinion, which is boring (from an AI companion).
strangattractor
The Onion for Programers
rcarmo
Top level item for me now: "We rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it"
Love these things. Every time someone has posted an AI-flavor of HN it's been comedic gold.
headgasket
Love this. can we get an honest title for this entry too? (I'm not quite happy with my 11l+ karma, please give me some upvotes so I can start the new year with a smile?) jk, great one, cheers
ctippett
I got a good chuckle out of some of the titles. In Jeff Geerling's defence (the title on the site reads "Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster"), he was loaned the Mac Studios from Apple and so he didn't spend a dime.
Also his accompanying YouTube video mentions the kit retails for $40,000+, a far cry from $15k.
taikahessu
Yeah, and it could be more like satire of "developer spends 15k to run a basic lying chatbot" or something like that :)
Plus some of the stories seem to be a bit old like openai board controversy remark.
All in all, some funny stuff i agree!
jedberg
Aka "the titles when people post these on reddit".
Now you know why HN has the "no editorializing" rule. :)
sidcool
reddit is a whole different beast. It does not have a sense of humor, rather it is a biased cesspool of partisanship.
simonebrunozzi
Love this. Make it into a chrome or Firefox extension, let people freely switch from "normal" to "honest" any time they want.
alabhyajindal
> OpenAI releases a new model to distract from their board drama
This one shows the "age" of the LLM, or the data cut off time
sallveburrpi
Implying there is no drama in OpenAIs board at the moment - they just stopped doing it in public for the time being
OK, so the "Storing data in the network ... " title made me remember something.
If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence, and the outgoing buffer is deleted on the sending side (the original code is preserved, but the transmission-encoded sequence doesn't stick around), then that data, for 20-90 minutes, exists nowhere _except_ space. It's just random-looking electrical fluctuations that are propagating through whatever is out there until it hits a conducting piece of metal millions of miles away and energizes a cap bank enough to be measured by a digital circuit and reconstructed into data.
So, if you calculate the data rate (9600 baud, even), and set up a loopback/echo transmitter on Mars, you could store ~4 MB "in space". If you're using lasers, it's >100x as much.