Best of 2025

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

Systems & Performance
427

Rootless Pings in Rust

Sending a ping by creating an ICMP socket normally requires root: you can’t create a raw socket to send ICMP packets without it. The ping command line tool works without root however, how is that possible? It turns out you can create a UDP socket with a protocol flag, which allows you to send the ping rootless. I…

435

Creating an all-weather driver

Life doesn't freeze when winter comes—if anything, that's when riders need reliable transportation most, when being exposed to the elements becomes less appealing. Today, the Waymo Driver successfully navigates rain, fog, sandstorms, and freezing temperatures. As we expand to more cities across the U.S. and globally…

437

What is gVisor?

It has been a really long time since I last wrote something here as life happens, things get busier, etc etc. I am now trying to get back into writing things down and here we go! So, imagine a tool or a service that allows you to run some arbitrary code via a shell. Either through a ssh or more commonly, via a web…

438

In-Memory Filesystems in Rust

I’ve been working on a CLI tool recently, and one of the things it does is manage files on disk. I have written a lot of file management tests for Bundler, and the two biggest reasons that the Bundler test suite is slow are exec and fstat. Knowing that, I thought I would try to get out ahead of the slow file stat…