February 2026
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February 17, 2026
Thank HN: You helped save 33k lives
436 by chaseadam17 | 55 comments on Hacker News.
13 years ago, we launched Watsi.org with a Show HN [1]. For nearly a year, this community drove so much traffic that we couldn’t list patients fast enough. Then pg saw us on HN, wrote us our first big check, and accepted us as the first YC nonprofit (W13). The next few years were a whirlwind. I was a young, naive founder with just enough experience to know I wanted Watsi to be more efficient, transparent, and innovative than most nonprofits. We spent 24/7 talking to users and coding. We did things that don’t scale. We tried our best to be walking, talking pg essays. Over the years we learned that product/market fit is different for nonprofits. Not many people wake up and think, "I'd love to donate to a nonprofit today" with the same oomph that they think, "I'd love a coffee" or "I'd like to make more money." No matter how much effort we put into fundraising, donations grew linearly, while requests for care grew exponentially. I felt caught in the middle. After investing everything I had, I eventually burned out and transitioned to the board. I made a classic founder mistake and intertwined my self-worth with Watsi's success. I believed that if I could somehow help every patient, I was a good person, but if I let down some patients, which became inevitable, I was a bad person. This was exacerbated by seeing our for-profit YC batch mates raise massive rounds. I felt like a failure for not scaling Watsi faster, but eventually we accepted reality and set Watsi on more of a slow, steady, and sustainable trajectory. Now that I have perspective, I'm incredibly proud of what the org has accomplished and grateful to everyone who has done a tour of duty to support us. Watsi donors have donated over $20M to fund 33,241 surgeries, and we have a good shot of helping patients for a long time to come. In a world of fast growth and fast crashes, here's a huge thank you to the HN users who have stuck by Watsi, or any other important cause, even when it's not on the front page. I believe it embodies the best of humanity. Thanks HN! [1] https://ift.tt/CW9E6Br

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February 14, 2026
Tell HN: Ralph Giles has died (Xiph.org| Rust@Mozilla | Ghostscript)
504 by ffworld | 27 comments on Hacker News.
It's with much sadness that we announce the passing of our friend and colleague Ralph Giles, or rillian as he was known on IRC. Ralph began contributing to Xiph.org in 2000 and became a core Ghostscript developer in 2001[1]. Ralph made many contributions to the royalty-free media ecosystem, whether it was as a project lead on Theora, serving as release manager for multiple Xiph libraries or maintaining Xiph infrastructure that has been used across the industry by codec engineers and researchers[2]. He was also the first to ship Rust code in Firefox[3] during his time at Mozilla, which was a major milestone for both the language and Firefox itself. Ralph was a great contributor, a kind colleague and will be greatly missed. Official Announcement: https://ift.tt/ZtVo78Y... [1]: https://ift.tt/3hFrXSt... [2]: https://media.xiph.org/ [3]: https://ift.tt/wrIqg7j...

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February 09, 2026
Show HN: Algorithmically finding the longest line of sight on Earth
332 by tombh | 133 comments on Hacker News.
We're Tom and Ryan and we teamed up to build an algorithm with Rust and SIMD to exhaustively search for the longest line of sight on the planet. We can confirm that a previously speculated view between Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan and the Hindu Kush in China is indeed the longest, at 530km. We go into all the details at https://alltheviews.world And there's an interactive map with over 1 billion longest lines, covering the whole world at https://map.alltheviews.world Just click on any point and it'll load its longest line of sight. Some of you may remember Tom's post[1] from a few months ago about how to efficiently pack visibility tiles for computing the entire planet. Well now it's done. The compute run itself took 100s of AMD Turin cores, 100s of GBs of RAM, a few TBs of disk and 2 days of constant runtime on multiple machines. If you are interested in the technical details, Ryan and I have written extensively about the algorithm and pipeline that got us here: * Tom's blog post: https://ift.tt/RrPBjuU * Ryan's technical breakdown: https://ift.tt/gjYo1Zr This was a labor of love and we hope it inspires you both technically and naturally, to get you out seeing some of these vast views for yourselves! 1. https://ift.tt/Vh7ZR8m

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February 08, 2026
DoNotNotify is now Open Source
356 by awaaz | 47 comments on Hacker News.
A month ago, I submitted my app "DoNotNotify" to control Android notifications on Show HN [0], and it trended on the front page for a day. I was happy, but the most upvoted comments on the thread were asking for the app to be open sourced, since it dealt with system-wide notifications. My promises weren't good enough, and the community wanted more! Why didn't I open source it in the first place? Linux has been by primary driver for more than a decade. I genuinely believe in the philosophy, and have always wanted to give back to the community. The primary reason, probably, was because I was ashamed that I had 90% vibe-coded the app. More than 2 decades of writing software, and my first contribution to FOSS would be AI-generated code? Would it withstand even the most minimal of scrutiny? Would by (unknown) name forever be tarnished? I exaggerate, but only slightly :) So, yesterday, after a fair bit of trepidation, I changed the github repo visibility to public and put up a announcement on the app's website [1]. I have also submitted the app to F-Droid [2]. As before, I welcome the community's feedback and suggestions! [0] https://ift.tt/SlHwRUz [1] https://ift.tt/QkcLUNh [2] https://ift.tt/N4uojCb -- Anuj Jain

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