1021
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
1022
All-natural geoengineering with Frank Herbert's Dune
Can We Terraform the Earth Using Life Itself?
1023
OpenGL: Mesh shaders in the current year
It Happened.
1024
A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions
1 Prologue A while ago, I took a flight from Canada back to Hong Kong - about 12 hours in total with Air Canada. Interestingly, the plane actually had WiFi: However, the WiFi had restrictions. For Aeroplan members who hadn’t paid, it only offered Free Texting, meaning you could only use messaging apps like WhatsApp…
1025
Multi-Core by Default
On multi-core programming, not as a special-case technique, but as a new dimension in all code.
1026
I switched from Htmx to Datastar
In 2022, David Guillot delivered an inspiring DjangoCon Europe talk , showcasing a web app that looked and felt as dynamic as a React app. Yet he and his team had done something bold. They converted it from React to HTMX , cutting their codebase by almost 70% while significantly improving its capabilities.
1027
My approach to building large technical projects (2023)
Whether it's building a new project from scratch, implementing a big feature, or beginning a large refactor, it can be difficult to stay motivated and complete large technical projects. A method that works really well for me is to continuously see real results and to order my work based on that.
1028
Love C, hate C: Web framework memory problems
I love C. I could give you rational reasons for that. Like the fact that it works everywhere and how it goes fast. But mostly I love C because when I write C I feel an intimate connection with my computer. To me, C has soul. In fact all my personal project are written in C, like the graphics rendering engines that I'm…
1029
The RubyGems "Security Incident"
Ruby Central posted an extremely concerning “Incident Response Timeline” today, in which they make a number of exaggerated or purely misleading claims. Here’s my effort to set the record straight. First, and most importantly: I was a primary operator of RubyGems.org, securely and successfully, for over ten years. Ruby…
1030
Examples are the best documentation
Examples are the best documentation | exotext
1031
ESP32 and Termux
Documenting my journey in trying to use my ESP32 on my phone through Termux
1032
I made a small LED panel
I bought a really small 8x8 LED panel a while ago because I have a problem. I just can’t resist a nice WS2812 LED panel, much like I can’t resist an e-ink display. These days I manage to stay sober, but once in a while I’ll see a nice cheap LED panel and fall off the wagon. It has now been thirteen minutes that I have…
1033
Resizeable Bar Support on the Raspberry Pi
While not an absolute requirement for modern graphics card support on Linux, Resizeable BAR support makes GPUs go faster, by allowing GPUs to throw data back and forth on the PCIe bus in chunks larger than 256 MB. In January, I opened an issue in the Raspberry Pi Linux repo, Resizable BAR support on Pi 5. Unlike most…
1034
The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
Apple’s Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM. The deeper failure is an industry shipping more software while producing fewer engineers capable of fixing it.
1035
Why Self-Host?
Let me make the argument why you should start self-hosting more of your personal services.
1036
Python's splitlines does more than just newlines
I always assumed that Python's str.splitlines() split strings by " universal newlines ", i.e., \n , \r , and \r\n .
1037
Using a laptop as an HDMI monitor for an SBC
Though I spend the majority of my time working with microcontroller class devices, I also have an embarassingly robust collection of single board computers (SBC), including a few different Raspberry Pi models, the BeagleV Starlight Beta (RIP), and more. Typically when setting up these devices for whatever automation…
1038
The C++ programmer and educator Rainer Grimm has passed away
Dear readers, we are extremely sad to inform you that Rainer passed away on October 6, 2025, surrounded by his closest family. After suffering from life-threatening pneumonia, Rainer decided against further life-sustaining measures that would have severely restricted his life. He passed away peacefully, accompanied by…
1039
Dark patterns: Buying a Bahncard at Deutsche Bahn
How do two well liked companies, deutsche Bahn and adobe, advertise their subscriptions? Badly. Deutsche Bahn, the fully state-owned railway company, is a we
1040
Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US?
It’s unfortunately not uncommon for pedestrians to be killed by cars in the US.
1041
Why is everything so scalable?
I’m entirely convinced that basically every developer alive today heard the adage “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” and figured that, since they always wear jeans and a t-shirt anyway, they might as well apply it to their systems’ architecture. This explains why the stack of every single company I’ve…
1042
Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?
In November of 2024 I wrote a blog post titled "Is Python Really That Slow?", in which I tested several versions of Python and noted the steady progress the language has been making in terms of…
1043
The Unknotting Number Is Not Additive
On June 30, 2025, Mark Brittenham and Susan Hermiller uploaded a preprint to the arXiv called “Unknotting number is not additive under connected sum” (and an updated version on Septembe…
1044
Two things LLM coding agents are still bad at
I’ve been trying to slowly ease into using LLMs for coding help again lately (after quitting ), but something always feels off -- like we’re not quite on the...
1045
I/O Multiplexing (select vs. poll vs. epoll/kqueue)
Problems and Algorithms
1046
Designing a Low Latency 10G Ethernet Core (2023)
View the code on GitHub
1047
A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
Let’s say you decide to start a coding bootcamp. Your background is in pedagogy and you love teaching. Your parents were teachers. You find a co-founder, raise a bit of money, and pour your soul into your company. The first couple of years, students love your program. Positive feedback, extraordinary student outcomes…
1048
I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI
In the last two weeks I spent over a dozen hours playing poker, primarily online at pokerstarsmi.com, and live at a local casino. You can view the last 1,000 hands I played here: https://poker.rchase.com I spent at least as much time reviewing my hands with
1049
Svelte’s characteristics that likely contribute most to improved performance
The five most popular JS frameworks – Angular, React, Vue, Svelte and Blazor – use different rendering strategies, and it shows.
1050
Hacking the Humane AI Pin
On February 18, 2025, Humane announced it would be shutting down all services for the always online Humane Ai Pin in ten days, following a sale to HP . I had been vaguely aware of the Ai Pin, definitely more so than the average tech person, as I have a close friend who was one of the earliest adopters and eventually…