Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 140 posts.

Networking & Internet
100

Geolocation and Starlink

"Where are you?" is not an easy question to answer on the Internet. The telephone system's address plan embedded a certain amount of physical location information in the fixed line network, and a full E.164 telephone number indicated your location in terms of your country, and your area within that country. The…

101

How much EU is in DNS4EU?

This is another post that started after several toots on mastodon. Most of the things presented here were already tooted by other people, but I think this is a good chance to write a mini tutorial about what to look at. We’ll use DNS, whois, BGP and your favourite search engine. What is DNS4EU? To quote the web page…

107

ESP32 WiFi Superstitions

The ESP32 is a popular microcontroller to use for do-it-yourself home automation, sensors, and a variety of other bits and bobs that you might want to take care of around the house. It’s the successor to the venerable ESP8266 which has found its way into many of our WiFi connected devices (seriously, open up a device…

115

Nostr and ATProto (2024)

This post could’ve been titled “Nostr vs ATProto”, but that really isn’t what I wanted to do here. While I will be comparing and contrasting them a lot, and that’s kind of even the point of writing this, I didn’t want to really pit the two against each other at all, and especially not with the title. I also want to…

117

Fun with Telnet (2024)

Some time ago I came across a cinematic experience ......... @@@@@ @@@@@ ........... ......... @ @ @ @ ........... ......... @@@ @ @ .......... ........ @@ @ @ ......... ........ @@@@@@@ @@@@@ th ....... ...... ----------------------- ...... ..... C E N T U R Y .... .... ----------------------- ... ... @@@@@ @@@@@ @ @…

119

Chrome Returns 206 when the Server Returns 403

Chrome Returns 206 when the Server Returns 403 Postmortem It is a feature not a bug! I got detailed explanation from chrome developers which is very helpful. You may find the complete response in the bug ticket. Also this blog post draws a lot of attention after I post it on Hackers News. You may find comments here…