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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 78 posts.
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Guarding My Git Forge Against AI Scrapers
A summary of the techniques in place to protect my git forge
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Freeing a Xiaomi humidifier from the cloud
Thoughts, stories and ideas about of a code poet, bit juggler & logic wizard.
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'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay
DHH's Fizzy license blocks competing SaaS offerings, so it is source available, not Open Source, which has a specific shared meaning; the real issue is sustainability.
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Ghostty is now non-profit
Ghostty is now fiscally sponsored by Hack Club , a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit.
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A Love Letter to FreeBSD
I’m still the new person here, learning your ways, stumbling over the occasional quirk, smiling when I find the small touches that make you different. You remind me of what computing felt like before the noise. Before hype cycles and performance theatre. Before every tool needed a plugin system and a logo. You are…
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GitHub to Codeberg: my experience
In which I talk about the process involved in switching forges, and how well that went.
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Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)
I maintain a sorta-popular open source package, and I want to prevent big corporations and "bad guys" from using it. I want feedback on how to do this.
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The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models
When GitHub Copilot was launched in 2021, the fact that its training data included a vast amount of Open Source code publicly available on GitHub attracted significant attention, sparking lively de…
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Pebble Watch software is now open source
Pebble Watch Software Is Now 100% Open Source + Tick Talk #4 - PT2 Demos!
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Arduino published updated terms and conditions: no longer an open commons
The maker community worried Qualcomm would kill the Arduino ethos. New T&Cs confirm the community's worst fears. Here's what's at stake, what Qualcomm got wrong, and what might still be salvaged.
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The peaceful transfer of power in open source projects
Most of the people who run Open Source projects are mortal. Recent history shows us that they will all eventually die, or get bored, or win the lottery, or get sick, or be conscripted, or lose their mind. If you've ever visited a foreign country's national history museum, I guarantee you've read this little snippet…
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The fate of "small" open source
By far the most popular npm package I’ve ever written is blob-util, which is ~10 years old and still gets 5+ million weekly downloads. It’s a small collection…
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Why use OpenBSD?
Last week-end, I was invited to the UNIX Social Camp in Dijon, France to talk about the reasons I still use OpenBSD these days and why should others do so; or at least, have a look at OpenBSD . This post is an English transcription of the original French slides that are available here .
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Free software scares normal people
80% of the people only need 20% of the features.
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Independently verifying Go's reproducible builds
Introducing Source Spotter, a Go Checksum Database auditor and Go toolchain reproducer
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The human only public license
A copyleft software license that restricts AI usage
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We need a clearer framework for AI-assisted contributions to open source
A framework for reasoning about AI-based changes you encounter or create.
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Could the XZ backdoor been detected with better Git/Deb packaging practices?
The discovery of a backdoor in XZ Utils in the spring of 2024 shocked the open source community, raising critical questions about software supply chain security. This post explores whether better Debian packaging practices could have detected this threat, offering a guide to auditing packages and suggesting future…
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Pwning the Nix ecosystem
ptrpaws's blog on reverse engineering, programming, vr finds and miscellaneous stuff.
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Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files
Project documentation: pdfly.readthedocs.io pdfly is the youngest project of the py-pdf organization. It has been created by Martin Thoma in 2022. It's simply a CLI tool to manipulate PDF files, written in Python and based on the fpdf2 & pypdf libraries. I'm a maintainer of the project 🙂 What can …
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Free software hasn't won
This is a translated version of a talk I gave at P.I.W.O in June, with cleanups and adjustments for the blog form.
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Why it took 4 years to get a lock files specification
(This is the blog post version of my keynote from EuroPython 2025 in Prague, Czechia.) We now have a lock file format specification. That might not sound like a big deal, but for me it took 4 years of active work to get us that specification. Part education, part therapy,
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My first contribution to Linux
I upstreamed my first kernel patch, and it was easier than I thought it would be.
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Heavy codes of conduct are unnecessary for open source projects
The debate surrounding the Codes of Conduct (CoC) adopted by Open Source projects may be reaching a turning point. In September 2025, a controversy erupted over the governance of RubyGems, a corner…
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Bundler Belongs to the Ruby Community
I’ve spent 15 years of my life working on Bundler. When I introduce myself, people say “oh, the Bundler guy?”, and I am forced to agree. I didn’t come up with the original idea for Bundler (that was Yehuda). I also didn’t work on the first six months worth of prototypes. That was all Carl and Yehuda together, back…
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Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover
Ruby Central recently took over a collection of open source projects from their maintainers without their consent.
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A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy
What a week it's been as a Ruby Central Board Member.