Doesn't matter what domain and how big or small.
Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
1–10 of 446 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#2I found out today that the location header of an HTTP redirect can be a tel:+ URI and phone's will actually ask you whether you want to call that number.
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#3[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#4I was reminded of the US Constitution's 10th amendment and reading some of the history around it.
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Very relevant to what's going on today with National Guard and ICE deployments.
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/14/10th-amendment-ice-trump-il... (or please google whatever source you find reliable about the topic)
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#5I've been exploring the origins of the 'relational turn' in psychoanalysis that began after WWII and ramped up in the 1970s. Psychoanalysis got vastly more interesting after Freud and I had no idea!
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#6I've been trying to research drone navigation tech from what we have learned so far from the russian/ukraine war. I'm very much not a hardware guy but software by itself has been feeling kind of useless or even crueler than usual.
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#7Published an edit today (post dated in Nov. but I've rewritten it 5x now) on my tutorial to use llama3.2:3b to generate fine tuning data to train tinyllama1.1b https://seanneilan.com/posts/fine-tuning-local-llm/ It took a while to figure out that when I made llama3.2 generate json, it didn't have enough horsepower to generate training data that was varied enough to successfully fine tune llama1.1b! Figured that out :) Something you never learn with the bigger models. Every token costs something even if it's a little bit.
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#8I'm building in robotics. Setting up a new 3d camera today. I found that the 10m active USB C cable that I bought transfers power in both directions, but only transfers data in one direction, it turns out to be some weird video USB variant. Next I needed to plug a gripper into a modbus controller. That uses an M8 8-pole 20cm cable. The controller manufacturer recently decided to switch from male to female connector, so now the cable needs to be male-male. After searching online for hours, I believe that is impossible to find as everyone only sells male-female cables.
I'm continuously surprised by how difficult it is to plug things together and how non-descriptive cable "standards" are about the actual capabilities of cables and connectors.
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#9I found out my crimson-bellied conure is laying an egg today! She's nesting in some towels now, chirping away while she works on laying it.
Having an egg is relatively hard on parrots. I've given her lots of food and warmth to prepare. She is comically hungry -- she's usually not such a big eater, but she's happy today to be scarfing down her apple slices, fruit pellets, and safflower seeds.
She usually sleeps at the bottom of her cage, beneath a towel I put down for her. It's already unusual for parrots! But tonight she has made quite a nest with her towel: It's folded in half like usual, but she has nuzzled her way between the fold, so she has the towel underneath and on top of her. It's super cute.
I'm treating her with delicacy but she is determined to be a wild child of a bird. She's still flying around during the day and moving around plenty. I don't think I would be so confident if I had an egg like that inside me.
She has a stone perch that she likes to nibble on when she's working on an egg. I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :)
So that's my night. Sitting outside of the metaphorical delivery ward with a metaphorical cigar, making sure she lays this egg that isn't even fertile to begin with! Birds :)
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#10Today, and yesterday, I've been poking about the history of what was once the longest steam powered fresh water pipeline in the world
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfields_Water_Supply_Scheme
I'm looking into rennovating a massive agricultural machine shed ~ two stories high in the middle built some 80+ years ago using sections of spur pipeline as central upright poles to hold up some beefy jarrah trusses.
The "verandah" wings flaring out from there were bulit from flimsier timber that's rotting and the iron sheet walls are starting to peel away.
The posts are of interest as they have old markings and water fittings, tee pieces, etc.
It's not far from one of the original steam powered pumping stations that moved water through the main line.