Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,100 posts.
Open-source self-hosted comments systems for static websites
A side-by-side comparison of open-source, self-hosted commenting systems for static sites — so choosing one doesn’t mean opening every repository yourself. Stars, open issues and last-commit dates are refreshed daily. Missing a system, or a column you need? Leave a comment below or open an issue.
OnionShare 2 adds anonymous dropboxes
After nearly a year of work from a growing community of developers, designers, and translators, I'm excited that OnionShare 2 is finally ready. You can download it from onionshare.org. OnionShare is an open source tool for securely and anonymously sending and receiving files using Tor onion services. It
Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?
Google Maps is incredibly detailed and useful. But Google uses it for tracking and deliver ads. Should you contribute for free to build its monopoly?
Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead
IBM is buying HashiCorp for $6.4 billion. That's four months after HashiCorp rugpulled their entire development community and ditched open source for the 'Business Source License.' As someone on Hacker News pointed out so eloquently: IBM is like a juicer that takes all the delicious flavor out of a fruit skywhopper…
GitLaw: GitHub For Laws And Legal Documents - A Tourniquet For American Liberty
Update : This post received a lot of attention on Hacker News . Please also visit there to read many insightful comments!
Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
When we first announced the transition to Plasma Wayland, one of Martin's slides from stated, "It's done when it's done!"
What NPM should do to stop a new colors attack
Over the weekend, a developer named Marak Squires intentionally sabotaged his popular NPM package colors and his less popular package faker . As I write this, NPM claims 18,971 direct dependents for colors and 2,751 for faker . Open Source Insights counts at least 42,000 more indirect dependents for colors . Many…
Fedora 36: A brave new (DRM/KMS only) world
The upcoming Fedora release includes a change proposed by Peter Robinson and yours truly, that disables all the Frame Buffer Device (fbdev) drivers in the Linux kernel package. This means that star…
VMware joins Linux Foundation: what about the GPL?
As we can read in recent news, VMware has become a gold member of the Linux foundation. That causes - to say the least - very mixed feelings to me. One thing to keep in mind: The Linux Foundation is
The SymPy/HackerRank DMCA Incident
Thank you to Ondřej Čertík, Oscar Benjamin, Travis Oliphant, and Pamela Chestek for reviewing this blog post. Any errors in the post are my own. On April 19, 2022, for approximately 11.5 hours, the do
My first patch to the Linux kernel
How an undefined behavior in C made me pull my hair out for days but became my first patch to the Linux kernel!
The life and death of open source companies
More thoughts on Open Source licensing and companies.
Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers
As you probably already know, I regularly get in contact with drawing tablet brands for reviews on my Youtube channel . I usually agree to do detailed video test of their models (see my hardware tag) but only at two condition: test the tablet on GNU/Linux, and only use Free/Libre and Open Source software for the test…
Tips For Making a Popular Open Source Project in 2021
Introduction I have around ~50k GitHub stars. I’ve come up with a bullet-pointed actionable list of how to make open-source projects popular. One of the projects I created had 67 lines of code and had only existed for 3 days before it hit 1.7k stars. Humans
Affordable Wheel Based Refreshable Braille Display
On HN [1] I came into contact with Mahmoud Al-Qudsi ( mqudsi@neosmart.net ) , who mentioned that he'd been working off-and-on on a braille reader that is both affordable and easy to manufacture. He sent me a some files and pointed to a patent [2] that he took out on a device that uses octagonal wheels with codes on…
Opus 1.3 Released
Ever since version 1.1, Opus has been able to automatically detect whether its input is speech or music, and choose the optimal encoding mode accordingly. The original speech/music detector was based on a simple (non-recurrent) neural network, followed by an HMM-based layer to combine the neural network results over…
Taking a month off from OSS volunteering
On October 1, 2016, I stopped volunteering for open source projects -- including Python -- for a month. While I still did open source work for Python as part of my job, I spent absolutely zero time helping any project outside of work (so no evenings, no weekends). This was the first
Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
Glimpse NX didn't have a great solution for missing menu, but this new 3D CAD application has