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Open Source

The most popular blog posts about open source on Hacker News. 1,100 posts.

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907

Raspberry Pi Floppy Controller Board

If there’s one criticism I hear more often than any other about the pi, it’s “ I wish my Raspberry Pi had a floppy drive “. It’s really shocking that the pi doesn’t have the ubiquitous 34-pin floppy header that we all know and love. How else are you supposed to interface your Tandon TM100-2A or your Teac FD-55BR or…

910

Is the FSF Fighting the Previous War?

This is a bit genuine red meat and perhaps a little sensitive for some people but it does raise a point that deserves discussion. A shorthand for that point is the title of today’s post. A more descriptive way of describing it is, “Is the FSF’s demand for purity actually harming the users they’re striving to protect?”

912

1,145 pull requests per day

There is a recent video of Patrick Collison at Stripe Sessions 2025 stating that in 2024 Stripe did on average 1,145 pull requests per day. Not just creating them, but actually finishing them; "fully shipped into production". All whilst having less than a minute of API unreliability for the

915

Creating Debian packages from upstream Git

In this post, I demonstrate the optimal workflow for creating new Debian packages in 2025, preserving the upstream Git history. The motivation for this is to lower the barrier for sharing improvements to and from upstream, and to improve software provenance and supply-chain security by making it easy to inspect every…

922

Back from the Blender Conference

Yesterday, me, Dmitry, Wolthera and Agata visited BlenderCon 2019 . Intel had asked us to come to the conference to help set up the Intel/Acer booth, which was showing off Krita in all its HDR glory . After all, it’s pretty cool when a free software project has a real, tangible, technical, artistic first ! It was…

928

Contributing Without Code

In the mid-90s I was an avid user of online conferencing system called CIX (Compulink Information eXchange). CIX was built using the CoSy Conferencing system from the University of Guelph, which has since been open sourced. Think of it like a dial-up or telnet-accessed forum or message board with a nerd-heavy…