The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,415 posts.
Lately I tend to stick to topics that are historic by at least twenty years, and that does have a lot of advantages. But I am supposedly a DevOps professional, and so I will occasionally indulge in giving DevOps advice... or at least opinions, which are sort of like advice but with less of a warranty.
An not-for-profit roundup of affordable PCB manufacturers. Originally published in 2023 and last updated January 2026.
Hacker News displays comments in a tree. This can be frustrating if you want to keep track of a particular conversation, as you constantly have to seek through the tree to find the latest comment.
It took me a few minutes to create a fake me giving a fake lecture.
A Raspberry Pi is great if you have a need for which it excels. GPIO, extremely low power requirements, tight space constraints. But the Pi should not be the first thing you reach for when “U…
This is a set of tips/tricks for learning and using pytest.
UPDATE: has evolved a bit and is now on MELPA. I had been meaning to give ChatGPT a good try, preferably from Emacs. As an eshell fan, ChatGPT seemed ...
Software engineers are, if not unique, then darn near unique in the ease with which we can create tools to improve our own professional lives; this however can …
In which I embark on a quixotic quest to make a physical book using web rendering technology.
One of the least well known, and therefore least used, features of many terminal emulators is bracketed paste mode . When you are in bracketed paste mode and you paste into your terminal the content will be wrapped by the sequences \e[200~ and \e[201~ .
Video showing bitwarden. User then sets the pin 2345. The vault is locked and then bitwarden is quit. In the terminal the exploit program is run, which after a short while outputs the PIN 2345.
The current debate surrounding AVIF versus JPEG XL needs some third-party quantitative data to support arguments on either side. I've compiled a dataset of 27 high-resolution photographic images to compare performance across them all at a wide fidelity range.
I’ve had the pleasure of having had to analyse multi-gigabyte JSON dumps in a project context recently. JSON itself is actually a rather pleasant format to consume, as it’s human-readable and there is a lot of tooling available for it. JQ allows expressing sophisticated processing steps in a single command line, and…
Creating a subconscious problem-solving framework.
I’ve been thinking about editing for the last 5 years. Not just thinking, also editing. Trying out what works. You may have noticed different editing styles in the 65 videos I have posted to …
A step-by-step tutorial you can follow along, featuring ffmpeg, xrandr, tcpdump and a dhcp server running on a Raspberry Pi
This technical guide details how you can create your own aerial imagery and 3D models of streets with the built in iPhone LiDAR sensor and open source tools in the OpenDroneMap package.
anarcat
write posix shell 2023-03-10 /\ {.-} ;_.-'\ { _.}_ \.-' / `, \ | / \ | ,/ [0] \|_/ what is shell? most people in tech are familiar with shell scripts. but shell is a language! ... shit. actually. wait, let me rephrase- most people _use_ shell. most people _avoid_ shell. but mostly most people _hate_ shell. but should…
Emacs is Not Just An Editor
See also: Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment right now .
When people say “debuggers are useless and using logging and unit-tests is much better,” I suspect many of them think that debuggers can only put breakpoints on certain lines, step-step-step through the code, and check variable values. While any reasonable debugger can indeed do all of that, it’s only the tip of the…
How to use and configure a Yubikey
There’s not too much to say on this one, so I’ll keep it short. My goal was to do nothing for 24 hours. Like everyone in the modern world, I’m hopelessly addicted to little dopamine bur…
Bootstrapping OCaml projects with Nix
For the last 10 years or so, Arch Linux has been my Linux distribution of choice. The early years were a bit rough, and the process of moving to systemd wasn't without its challenges either, though the experience has improved dramatically since then. In spite of these improvements, certain issues persisted, such as…
This work by Keith Waclena is copyright 2026 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
