The Linux Boot Process: From Power Button to Kernel

The Linux boot process involves a series of handshakes between tiny programs and the CPU, ultimately leading to the execution of the first line of C code in the kernel. The kernel then initializes, sets up memory, and jumps into long mode, a 64-bit mode that allows it to run with full capabilities.

Synadia and TigerBeetle Commit $512k USD to the Zig Software Foundation

https://www.synadia.com/_astro/soc.mFb-HKgm.webp
Synadia and TigerBeetle pledged $512,000 to the Zig Software Foundation over two years, supporting high-performance software development. They share a belief in Zig's potential to shape the next era of reliable and maintainable software.

California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind

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California's electrical grid has become stronger and cleaner due to investments in battery energy storage, which has grown over 3,000% in six years. The state has not issued a Flex Alert since 2022, reflecting a turning point in its energy reliability.

Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly

Britain's National Centre for Gaming Disorders treats 67 people over 40 for video-game addiction, with the oldest patient being 72. The clinic's patient demographics have shifted from primarily young people to older adults with gaming addictions.

The Journey Before main()

The OS kernel is asked to run a program via the execve system call, which signals the kernel to load the program from an executable file, typically in ELF format on Linux. The kernel then sets up the stack, loads code and data into memory, and prepares to jump to the entry point of the program, which is typically a function called _start that initializes the language's runtime before calling ...

Simplify your code: Functional core, imperative shell

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This article was adapted from a Google Tech on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT epis...

React vs. Backbone in 2025

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The author compares React and Backbone, stating that while React is cleaner and more intuitive, it hides complexity and requires understanding of its internals to debug issues.
Libera.Chat's income has quadrupled since the last post, with large donations and hardware donations received. A legal firm advises that Libera.Chat may not be subject to the UK's Online Safety Act due to lack of sufficient links to the UK.

D2: Diagram Scripting Language

https://d2lang.com/assets/images/cli-d53efad8a27f22b9520d9cd7dc9658d1.gif
D2 is a declarative diagramming language that generates images from text. It allows users to describe diagrams and automatically generates the image.

Show HN: Diagram as code tool with draggable customizations

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/ebfc979e64af8d7cd6d70ae7b1870caf52d33649a89830166f0400f37b0e7441/RohanAdwankar/oxdraw
Oxdraw is a tool for creating and maintaining high-quality diagrams using Mermaid syntax and a web interface for fine-tuning. It aims to unite code-generated diagramming with customizability.

Key IOCs for Pegasus and Predator Spyware Removed with iOS 26 Update

https://framerusercontent.com/images/n00SzoSEjMTKbxlL8wmp11Nv9Yc.png?width=1920&height=1080
iOS 26 overwrites shutdown.log on reboot, erasing evidence of Pegasus and Predator spyware infections. Users should take a sysdiagnose before updating to preserve shutdown.log evidence.

Rock Tumbler Instructions

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Rock tumbling is a process that transforms rough rock into beautiful stones using a rotary tumbler and following a four-step process. By following the Golden Rules and a simple procedure, anyone can achieve high-quality results and create stunning tumbled stones.

Tell HN: OpenAI now requires ID verification and won't refund API credits

User credited OpenAI API, but was required to verify account through third-party vendor, which they refused to do. They're cancelling subscription, disputing payment, and switching to Deepseek.

Making a micro Linux distro (2023)

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We will build a tiny Linux distribution from scratch, starting with the Linux kernel, and then add user space code to create a functional system. The Linux distribution is made up of the kernel and user space code, including the init process, which starts other processes and provides a way to interact with the system.

What is intelligence? (2024)

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Lessons from AI AboutEvolution, Computing, and Minds

Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews

Code review should focus on the bigger picture of the codebase, not just the diff, and leave a small number of well-thought-out comments to avoid overwhelming the author. A good code review should be an approval, not a blocking review, unless the change is truly problematic, and bias towards approving changes to encourage collaboration and progress.

Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts

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European police arrested 7 people and dismantled a large cybercrime operation that created 50 million fake online accounts for fraud. Authorities seized 1200 SIM boxes, 5 internet servers, and $2.2 million in assets.

An Update on TinyKVM

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The author of TinyKVM has implemented limited support for running unmodified executables and per-request isolation with a minimalist system call API.

How programs get run: ELF binaries (2015)

The Linux kernel loads ELF binaries by examining the ELF header, reading the program header table, and mapping the PT_LOAD segments into the process's address space. The kernel also sets up the new program's stack, credentials, and virtual memory, and invokes the ELF interpreter to finish the job of assembling a complete running program.

Windows 10 Deadline Boosts Mac Sales

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Apple is benefiting from the Windows 10 end-of-support deadline, with Mac shipments growing 14.9% year-over-year in Q3 2025. Lenovo remains the largest PC vendor, while Apple's iPhone Air production is being drastically cut due to weaker-than-expected demand.

Advice for new principal tech ICs (i.e., notes to myself)

https://eugeneyan.com/assets/og_image/principal-notes.jpg
To be an effective principal engineer or scientist, focus on influencing and connecting teams, communicating complex ideas, and empowering others to make key contributions, while also prioritizing your own learning, growth, and well-being. This involves balancing technical vision with business and organizational context, being adaptable and pragmatic, and recognizing that your role is to make ...

Show HN: Shadcn/UI theme editor – Design and share Shadcn themes

https://shadcnthemer.com/og-image.png
Discover and create beautiful themes for shadcn/ui. Browse thousands of community-made themes, customize colors with OKLCH picker, select Google Fonts, adjust border radius, and export themes instantly for your Next.js projects.

AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

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Wikipedia's multilingual project is facing a problem where AI translators are creating poorly translated content in smaller languages, which can poison the training data for future AI models and harm the languages. This issue is particularly concerning for endangered languages, where there are few speakers and resources to correct errors, and can lead to a "garbage in, garbage out" cycle that ...

Project Amplify: Powered footwear for running and walking

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Nike unveiled Project Amplify, a powered footwear system for running and walking that provides an unparalleled boost to everyday athletes. The system, designed to augment natural movement, aims to make walking and running easier and more fun for athletes of all abilities.

Ask HN: Not treated respectfully by colleague – advice?

The user is a senior staff engineer who leads a team and is struggling with a difficult coworker who is resistant to their leadership and consistently engages in passive-aggressive behavior, causing tension and stress in the team. The user is seeking advice on how to address this issue, which has been ongoing for over a year, and is considering involving their manager's manager or HR to ...

Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)

The author is discussing Quake 2's extension mechanism, considering a dll interface and weighing tradeoffs. They plan to release Quake 1's qc interface and interpreter code to the public.

TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation

https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/img/authors/joran.webp
The author chose Zig over C or Rust for TigerBeetle due to its exceptional quality, philosophy, and simplicity. Zig's favorable ratio of expressivity to language complexity and its approach to safety made it the best choice for TigerBeetle's needs.

Agent Lightning: Train agents with RL (no code changes needed)

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/agent-lightning/main/docs/assets/readme-banner.svg
Agent Lightning is a framework that enables training of AI agents with reinforcement learning, allowing users to choose from various frameworks or write their own algorithms. It streamlines the process with a central hub, the LightningStore, and a Trainer that ties everything together.

Why your social.org files can have millions of lines without performance issues

https://en.andros.dev/static/img/footer/org-social.svg
Org Social 2.3+ solves bottlenecks with concurrent queue processing and HTTP Range-based partial fetching. This approach maintains compatibility with all servers and reduces bandwidth usage on large feeds.

ICC Judge Guillou loses all US IT accounts after MAGA sanctions [FR]

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Un juge français, Nicolas Guillou, est victime d'une décision de Donald Trump qui l'affecte sur les services numériques américains. Les sanctions ont des conséquences sur sa vie quotidienne, notamment sur ses comptes et moyens de paiement.

The Great SaaS Gaslight

The SaaS model prioritizes customer lock-in over satisfaction, using data collection and incremental improvements to keep customers paying. This leads to bland mediocrity, where software vendors focus on parity with competitors rather than innovation, resulting in overpriced and predictable products.

The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)

The Missing Semester class teaches students to master essential CS tools like the command-line, text editors, and version control systems. This class is co-taught by Anish, Jon, and Jose, and its resources are available online for others to benefit.

The Goon Squad

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The gooners are a subculture of young men who engage in prolonged masturbation sessions, often fueled by pornography, and have created a community centered around communal rituals and shared experiences. Their behavior is linked to the widespread availability of extreme pornography online, which has led to a phenomenon known as "pornosexuality," where individuals choose to abstain from sex ...

Against SQL (2021)

The SQL language is inexpressive, incompressible, and non-porous, making it difficult to implement new functionality and requiring a massive specification that is not portable across different databases. This complexity creates a drag on the entire database industry, hindering the development of new tools and features, and making it difficult to bring novel ideas to a usable level.

That Time Ken Thompson Wrote a Backdoor into the C Compiler

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Ken Thompson created a Trojan horse backdoor in the C compiler that would allow him to log into affected machines as any user. The backdoor was self-reproducing and could perpetuate even after the evidence was removed from the source code.

In memory of the Christmas Island shrew

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The Christmas Island shrew, Australia's only shrew, has been declared extinct due to the introduction of black rats and their parasites. It was a tiny, five-gram mammal that once filled the island's night forest with its high cry before vanishing in the early 20th century.

The mad king's digital killswitch

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The US has created a post-American internet nightmare by forcing countries to ban jailbreaking, allowing US tech companies to control critical systems and giving Trump a veto over how devices work. To escape this, countries must accelerate their independence from American tech and abandon laws that give US companies a stranglehold on their technology.

ARM Memory Tagging: how it improves C/C++ memory safety (2018) [pdf]

Memory is divided into 16-byte blocks with a 4-bit tag stored separately. Tagging stack objects adds complexity with unique tags and extra instructions.

Switzerland is spending millions revamping its vast network of bunkers

DNA reveals the real killers that brought down Napoleon's army

https://www.gavi.org/sites/default/files/vaccineswork/2025/Body/skull-soldier-napoleon-army_msignoli-aix-marseille-uni.jpg
Napoleon's army was decimated by cold, hunger, and disease during its 1812 retreat from Russia. DNA from soldiers' teeth suggests bacteria causing enteric and relapsing fevers were the real killers, not typhus.

Testing out BLE beacons with BeaconDB

https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/content/images/size/w1920/2025/10/feasy_FSC-BP104D_ble_beacon_with_banana_for_scale-1.jpg
The user has been experimenting with GrapheneOS and BLE beacons to contribute to beaconDB, but encountered issues with the API using BLE beacons for geolocation. The API currently accepts and stores BLE beacons but does not use them yet.

Fast TypeScript (Code Complexity) Analyzer

FTA is a fast TypeScript analysis tool written in Rust that generates analytics on code complexity and maintainability. It's open-source, supports JavaScript, and analyzes up to 1600 files per second.

Gitworkshop.dev – Collaborate on code over Nostr

https://gitworkshop.dev/icons/icon-512x512.png?v=1
Freedom tech projects use centralized platforms on top of Git for collaboration. Tools like Gitworkshop.dev, git-remote-nostr, and ngit enable decentralized code collaboration over Nostr protocol.

Belittled Magazine: Thirty years after the Sokal affair

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Social Text, a little magazine, survived a 1996 hoax by physicist Alan Sokal despite being mocked for its perceived elitism and jargon. The journal's survival was due to its publication of good work, its Marxist origins, and its role as a center for energetic political activities.

An Efficient Implementation of SELF (1989) [pdf]

SELF is a dynamically-typed object-oriented language that runs twice as fast as the fastest Smalltalk implementation, thanks to its efficient object storage system and compiler optimizations. The system uses maps to represent objects and their inheritance, and a scavenger to efficiently scan memory for object references, achieving high performance at low cost.

"Learn APL" Notes

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Apl makes it easy to create test data for functions. classes are supported in dyalog, but not in gnu aplio, says scott wilson jr. if you need to write dyadic functions, you can use the axis operator to change the depth of the function - he says it's not as easy as it sounds ; it's more powerful than py

Armed police handcuff teen after AI mistakes chip bag for gun in Baltimore

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A US teenager was handcuffed by police after an AI system mistakenly identified a packet of crisps as a gun. The incident has prompted calls for schools to review their procedures around AI technology.

Sora might have a 'pervert' problem on its hands

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The author of a tech article found disturbing content on OpenAI's Sora 2 video app, including fetish videos made with their face and other women's faces without consent. OpenAI's lack of clear rules on this issue raises concerns about user safety and consent.

Show HN: Chonky – a neural text semantic chunking goes multilingual

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Chonky is a transformer model that segments text into semantic chunks for use in RAG systems. It processes text into coherent segments for embedding-based retrieval or language models.

Honda's ASIMO (2021)

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ASIMO is a humanoid robot created by Honda in 2000, standing 4 feet 3 inches tall and weighing 119 pounds, designed to assist people with mobility and communication. It was discontinued in 2018, but its technology is still used in practical applications, with a price tag ranging from $2,000,000 to $2,500,000.

Deepagent: A powerful desktop AI assistant

https://deepagent.abacus.ai/static/imgs/deepagent/Website_in_minutes_stripe.webp
DeepAgent is an AI tool that offers various services including website building, chatbot creation, research, and data analysis. It uses AI to automate tasks and provide insights.

ProEnergy repurposes jet engines to power data centers

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ProEnergy repurposes old jet engines to power data centers with 48MW capacity, offering a bridging power solution for 5-7 years. The company delivers these turbines faster than traditional gas turbine manufacturers, addressing the growing demand from the AI data center sector.

Torchcomms: A modern PyTorch communications API

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Torchcomms is a new lightweight communication API for PyTorch Distributed, enabling large-scale model training with features like fault tolerance and heterogeneous hardware support. It's designed for open development and will eventually replace the existing c10d APIs in PyTorch Distributed.

Violent crime plummets 36% in downtown Seattle, lowest since 2017

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Downtown Seattle crime rates have fallen 36% since 2024, reaching a 2017 low. The area's economy is also recovering, with visitor numbers and hotel demand near 2019 levels.

Claudeskills.cc – Share, Discover, and Reuse Claude/OpenAI Agent Skills

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Claude Agent Skills offer flexible AI automation with superior composability and enterprise governance, allowing teams to create reusable skills that work across all platforms. Agent Skill Studio provides a shared canvas to author, attach resources, and monitor impact, with features like metadata, invocation cues, and evaluators that match Claude's three-level loading model.

How the brain's activity, energy use and blood flow change as people fall asleep

Researchers at Mass General Brigham used imaging technology to study brain activity during sleep, finding that areas handling movement stay active while thinking and memory areas quiet down. Their results help explain how the brain stays responsive to the outside world during sleep and offer insights into neurological and sleep-related diseases.

Xubuntu website hacked and served malware

User needs to register or sign in with developer credentials and ensure a unique User-Agent string to access the application. Alternatively, try resetting to default User-Agent or file a ticket for assistance.

Load-time relocation of shared libraries (2011)

A modern operating system like Linux uses load-time relocation to resolve internal data and code references in shared libraries when loading them into memory, which involves modifying the relocation section of the shared library to include the correct offset for function calls. The dynamic loader resolves these relocations at load-time by applying the relocation type, such as R_386_PC32, to ...

Underdetermined Weaving with Machines (2021) [video]

Ask HN: Advice for creating a USB device linking 2 computers

You want to connect two computers via USB and send keystrokes from one to the other. You're looking for a hardware solution that doesn't require a network connection.

Visualizing the most common unisex names in the US

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The author updated a post on evenly-split names to visualize common names for both sexes using SSA baby name data. They scaled bar heights to total popularity for easier comparison.

We Saved $500k per Year by Rolling Our Own S3

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Nanit built N3, a custom in-memory landing zone for video processing, to reduce costs and improve efficiency. By using S3 as a fallback buffer, they eliminated $0.5M/year in costs while maintaining system simplicity and reliability.

Precise and scalable analogue matrix equation solving using RRAM chips [pdf]

An analogue matrix inversion solver is developed using an iterative algorithm combining low-precision matrix inversion and high-precision matrix-vector multiplication. It achieves performance comparable to 32-bit floating point processors in just three iterations.

Global key-value metadata storage for Scryer Prolog

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/8660f9940b97ab84e202db01bb653f26fc4c76e66ddff40493f1d2004bd8dc6b/jjtolton/environment.pl
The environment library for Scryer Prolog provides a clean interface for managing global state using association trees backed by the blackboard. It offers features like persistent and local state, conditional execution, and reified predicates for declarative programming.

Show HN: Status of my favorite bike share stations

User created a custom dashboard and iOS widget to improve Toronto's Bike Share experience by providing quick access to bike availability and dock locations. This saves time by reducing the need for multiple taps and scrolling in the Bike Share app.

Draw high dimensional tensors as a matrix of matrices

You're describing a method to visualize high-dimensional tensors by arranging them as matrices of matrices. This method allows for easy identification of axes in higher-dimensional tensors.

Ubios: China's Alternative to UEFI and the New Era of Firmware Standards

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China's Global Computing Consortium released UBIOS, a new firmware standard, on October 17, 2025, to improve system compatibility and stability. UBIOS is designed for heterogeneous computing and Chiplet technologies, offering a unified interface for components to communicate.