Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 543 posts.

Systems & Performance
332

A brief look at FreeBSD

Recently I've been playing around with FreeBSD in a virtual machine. The reason for this is that (if all goes well) some time in December my new Framework laptop will arrive, replacing my current X1 Carbon that is starting to show signs of old age (e.g. a keyboard where certain keys don't always work). Framework in…

333

Heartbeats in Distributed Systems

In distributed systems, one of the fundamental challenges is knowing whether a node or service is alive and functioning properly. Unlike monolithic applications, where everything runs in a single process, distributed systems span multiple machines, networks, and data centers. This becomes even glaring when the nodes…

338

Defragging my old Dell's UEFI NVRAM

I’m setting up an old Dell box (2011-era tech). I was migrating to some new boot drives and setting up grub on them again. Got to the point of deleting the old boot entries and adding new ones, and got an error like Could not prepare boot variable: No space left on device. Weird, because there weren’t that many EFI…