5131
The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)
It took me a long time to realize that Bell Labs was cool. You see, my dad worked at Bell Labs, and he has not done a single cool thing in his life except create me and bring a telescope to my thir…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,965 posts.
5132
The Conservationist Who Turned 40 Terabytes of Public Data into a Video Game
Raffael Hickisch spent years dreaming up conservation tools he couldn't afford to build. Then he built them himself, with an AI agent and a country's worth of public data.
5133
thunderbolt-ibverbs: We have InfiniBand at home
Linux kernel experiments implementing IB verbs over consumer Thunderbolt/USB4 hardware to give cheap mini-PCs high-performance RDMA suitable for cluster inference.
5134
Three hundred synths, 3 hardware projects, and one app
MIDI Guide, the open, "comprehensive" MIDI CC & NRPN dataset, has far outgrown its original purpose.
5135
Massively Parallel Postgres Backups
PlanetScale backs up petabyte-scale sharded Postgres databases in hours using parallel infrastructure, object storage, and WAL replay.
5136
Remembering Johannes Doerfert
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of Johannes Doerfert, on September 17, 2026, at the age of 36, after a battle with cancer.
5137
Letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas
OpenAI sent Governor Greg Abbott a letter outlining its commitment to responsible AI infrastructure in Texas. The letter supports reliable, transparent growth that benefits Texans.
5138
The AI Hate Progression
I think I've spoken at length in other places about how I am a very staunch AI hater and covered everything I hate about how the tech is pre...
5139
Self hosted email continues to steeply decline
Ten years of DNS measurements reveal three trends across the Internet's most popular domains: email continues to consolidate around two providers, DMARC enforcement has hit a plateau, and a surprisingly large long tail of infrastructure defies easy classification.
5140
We are going to kill "unalive"
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
5141
What we lost the last time code got cheap
The outsourcing era showed that making code cheaper moves the real cost from production to comprehension. AI-generated code makes that problem more acute. ...
5142
5143
Solar-based sleep patterns compared to modern norms
ex program, en farm
5144
State of Homelab 2026
Evolution of a self-hosting hobby: from clueless to amateur.
5145
Anyone on the Internet Can Ring Your Doorbell
Behind a cheap Temu doorbell sits an IoT backend where device IDs are sequential and requests are forgeable with a string baked into every firmware. One signed call lifts any device's persistent password and lets anyone on the Internet hijack the next live call.
5146
Bear turns 10, and it still feels like day one
🐻🎂 Happy 10th bearthday! Join us for the stories behind our design principles, the tiny details hidden all over the app, plus some wonderful new features and Bear swag.
5147
No knives, only cook knives
Changing perceptions of value and a rude encounter with Ichabod Crane and Xavier Cugat at the flea market --by Josh Donald
5148
Harvard study predicts most suicide attempts a week in advance
Researcher Matthew Nock pioneered the technique of using smartphone technology to survey high-risk adults and adolescents in real time. In a new study, Nock and his team report using the technology to predict 75 percent of suicide attempts in the week before they occurred.
5149
An interview with an Apple emoji designer
It was impossible, I found, when writing Face with Tears of Joy , to get a response to questions or interview requests out of Google, Apple, Meta and the other big emoji vendors. (A lone author writing a book on a twenty-year-old technology probably doesn’t move the PR needle a great deal for companies like these. In…
5150
AI was great until it was not
A cautionary tale.
5151
How scientists are using Claude to accelerate research and discovery
Labs at Stanford and MIT built Claude-powered systems that run genome-wide studies in minutes and automate gene cluster interpretation.
5152
Rebuilding the Computer Room
We traded the physical boundaries of dedicated rooms for the convenience of our always-on digital lives -- but recently I've been building those walls back up.
5153
Burnout is real for open source maintainers
Lodash creator John-David Dalton reflects on the project’s growth, the pressures of maintaining software used across the world, and the personal journey that led to stepping back and eventually rebuilding a sustainable path forward.
5154
Even faster asin() was staring right at me
I don't normally do follow-ups and never this quick. After posting that last article, it was fun to read the comments on Reddit and Hacker News as they rolled in. I even found other discussions . I couldn't help wonder, "Could I have made it even more performant?" . After heading home I decided to take another look.
5155
Closure of the Weatheradio service in Canada
Radio Amateurs du Canada réagit à la fermeture du service Radio-Météo au Canada For immediate release | February 25, 2026Radio Amateurs of Canada (RAC) is saddened to learn about the closure of the Weatheradio service provided by Environment and Climate Change Canada.For decades, Weatheradio has been a trusted and…
5156
iPhone and iPad approved to handle classified NATO information
Today, Apple announced iPhone and iPad are the first and only consumer devices in compliance with information assurance requirements of NATO nations.
5157
The purist's guide to phở in Hanoi
A tribute not only to phở in the capital of Vietnam, but also to three extraordinary writers who wrote about it with wit, nostalgia, and devotion: Thạch Lam, Vũ Bằng, and Nguyễn Tuân.
5158
A third of Perplexity's citations don't contain the number they're cited for
Of 1,826 citations Perplexity's search models attached to a sentence stating a figure, 34.7% pointed at a page that either would not open or did not contain a single figure from that sentence; scored per claim rather than per citation, 14.4% of 872 claims fail.
5159
AI is an elite crime spree
Documents show a Microsoft exec called AI the "largest theft of labor in human history.” New AI regulations are besides the point, the problem is we don’t apply existing laws to the powerful.
5160
This Month in Ladybird – October 2026
CSS animations and hover that keep working while JavaScript is busy, a JavaScript JIT, a new WebAssembly engine, and a redesigned UI.