Hacker News on Thursday, 1 January 2026

Linux is good now(pcgamer.com)

1060 points by Vinnl 9 months ago | 847 comments

A PC Gamer opinion piece arguing Linux is now good enough for desktop use and urging readers to switch in 2026 to feel ownership of their PCs.

A website to destroy all websites(henry.codes)

726 points by g0xA52A2A 9 months ago | 354 comments

An essay by Henry on henry.codes arguing for personal, handmade websites as an alternative to the corporate, platform-dominated web.

Spherical Snake(kevinalbs.com)

618 points by subset 9 months ago | 123 comments

A browser game where you play Snake on the surface of a sphere, controlled with arrow keys or on-screen buttons, with a leaderboard and GitHub source.

Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video](media.ccc.de)

517 points by AndrewDucker 9 months ago | 187 comments

Video recording of a 39C3 talk by Dennis Heinze and Frieder Steinmetz on Bluetooth headphone vulnerabilities that can be used to attack paired phones.

Cameras and Lenses (2020)(ciechanow.ski)

515 points by sebg 9 months ago | 56 comments

Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive blog post explaining how cameras and lenses work and how adjustable parameters affect the resulting images.

Show HN: OpenWorkers – Self-hosted Cloudflare workers in Rust(openworkers.com)

474 points by max_lt 9 months ago | 145 comments

Announcement page for OpenWorkers, an open-source Rust runtime for running untrusted JavaScript in V8 isolates as self-hosted Cloudflare Workers.

I rebooted my social life(takes.jamesomalley.co.uk)

455 points by edent 9 months ago | 334 comments

A Substack post by James O'Malley describing how he rebooted his social life, offered as self-help for the New Year.

Finland detains ship and its crew after critical undersea cable damaged(cnn.com)

438 points by wslh 9 months ago | 466 comments

CNN news article reporting that Finland detained a ship and its crew after a critical undersea cable in the Baltic was damaged.

Python numbers every programmer should know(mkennedy.codes)

382 points by WoodenChair 9 months ago | 157 comments

Michael Kennedy's blog post listing Python performance and memory numbers, such as list operations, file I/O, object sizes, and web framework speed.

iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan(developer.apple.com)

370 points by eklavya 9 months ago | 313 comments

Apple Developer support page explaining how, from iOS 26.2, apps for users in Japan can use browser engines other than WebKit, including entitlement requirements.

Sergey Brin's Unretirement(inc.com)

353 points by iancmceachern 9 months ago | 425 comments

Inc. article by Jessica Stillman on Google co-founder Sergey Brin returning from retirement to work on AI, framed as a lesson for others.

2025 Letter(danwang.co)

337 points by Amorymeltzer 9 months ago | 254 comments

Dan Wang's 2025 annual letter, a year-in-review essay comparing Silicon Valley and the Chinese Communist Party, among other reflections.

Can Bundler be as fast as uv?(tenderlovemaking.com)

336 points by ibobev 9 months ago | 96 comments

Aaron Patterson's blog post examining whether Ruby's Bundler can match uv's speed, reviewing uv's techniques and Bundler's bottlenecks.

BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal(bloomberg.com)

335 points by toomuchtodo 9 months ago | 548 comments

Bloomberg news article reporting that Chinese automaker BYD sold 4.6 million vehicles in 2025, meeting its revised sales target.

Welcome to Gas Town(steve-yegge.medium.com)

295 points by gmays 9 months ago | 165 comments

ACM Is Now Open Access(acm.org)

282 points by leglock 9 months ago | 40 comments

Meta made scam ads harder to find instead of removing them(sherwood.news)

248 points by wtcactus 9 months ago | 81 comments

Show HN: Enroll, a tool to reverse-engineer servers into Ansible config mgmt(enroll.sh)

228 points by _mig5 9 months ago | 42 comments

Sony PS5 ROM keys leaked – jailbreaking could be made easier with BootROM codes(tomshardware.com)

225 points by gloxkiqcza 9 months ago | 68 comments

50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player(lightcapai.medium.com)

223 points by ResisBey 9 months ago | 269 comments

The Delete Act(privacy.ca.gov)

164 points by weaksauce 9 months ago | 68 comments

Dell's version of the DGX Spark fixes pain points(jeffgeerling.com)

139 points by thomasjb 9 months ago | 71 comments

Flow5 released to open source(flow5.tech)

138 points by picture 9 months ago | 10 comments

Children and Helical Time(moultano.wordpress.com)

132 points by moultano 9 months ago | 95 comments

Worlds largest electric ship launched by Tasmanian boatbuilder(theguardian.com)

129 points by aussieguy1234 9 months ago | 108 comments

Show HN: BusterMQ, Thread-per-core NATS server in Zig with io_uring(bustermq.sh)

128 points by jbaptiste 9 months ago | 58 comments

What *is* code? (2015)(bloomberg.com)

117 points by bblcla 9 months ago | 47 comments

Build a Deep Learning Library(zekcrates.quarto.pub)

116 points by butanyways 9 months ago | 14 comments

Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker(github.com)

109 points by ravenical 9 months ago | 175 comments

Six Harmless Bugs Lead to Remote Code Execution(mehmetince.net)

94 points by ozirus 9 months ago | 22 comments

WebAssembly as a Python Extension Platform(nullprogram.com)

82 points by ArmageddonIt 9 months ago | 3 comments

We found cryptography bugs in the elliptic library using Wycheproof(blog.trailofbits.com)

82 points by crescit_eundo 9 months ago | 8 comments

Pixar's True Story(computerhistory.org)

80 points by kristianp 9 months ago | 19 comments

Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) in PHP(centamori.com)

79 points by centamiv 9 months ago | 15 comments

Common Lisp SDK for the Datastar Hypermedia Framework(github.com)

70 points by fsmunoz 9 months ago | 8 comments

Heap Overflow in FFmpeg EXIF(bugs.pwno.io)

69 points by retr0reg 9 months ago | 25 comments

Making Magic Leap past Nvidia's secure bootchain and breaking Tesla Autopilots(fahrplan.events.ccc.de)

68 points by rguiscard 9 months ago | 16 comments

Windows 11 Outperforming Linux on an Intel Arrow Lake H Laptop(phoronix.com)

63 points by tuananh 9 months ago | 40 comments

Building an internal agent: Code-driven vs. LLM-driven workflows(lethain.com)

57 points by pavel_lishin 9 months ago | 25 comments

DHS Says DHS-Certified Real IDs Too Unreliable to Confirm U.S. Citizenship(reason.com)

57 points by xenophonf 9 months ago | 39 comments

Scientists Uncover the Universal Geometry of Geology (2020)(quantamagazine.org)

54 points by fanf2 9 months ago | 11 comments

Show HN: 48-digit prime numbers every git commit(textonly.github.io)

53 points by keepamovin 9 months ago | 28 comments

Judge to Texas: You Can't Age-Gate the Internet Without Evidence(techdirt.com)

52 points by djoldman 9 months ago | 36 comments

The great shift of English prose(worksinprogress.news)

51 points by dsubburam 9 months ago | 39 comments

Monads in C# (Part 2): Result(alexyorke.github.io)

47 points by polygot 9 months ago | 48 comments

Logos Language Guide: Compile English to Rust(logicaffeine.com)

47 points by tristenharr 9 months ago | 25 comments

Gemini 3.0 Deciphered the Mystery of a Nuremberg Chronicle Leaf's(blog.gdeltproject.org)

47 points by kilroy123 9 months ago | 10 comments

Michel Siffre’s self-experiments in a cave with no light (2018)(newscientist.com)

42 points by Anon84 9 months ago | 5 comments

Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans(nerd-lang.org)

42 points by gnanagurusrgs 9 months ago | 67 comments

Why Microsoft Store Discontinued Support for Office Apps(bgr.com)

41 points by itronitron 9 months ago | 34 comments

Memory Subsystem Optimizations(johnnysswlab.com)

40 points by mfiguiere 9 months ago | 8 comments

European Space Agency hit again as cybercriminals claim 200 GB data up for sale(theregister.com)

39 points by smurda 9 months ago | 19 comments

Joseph Campbell Meets George Lucas – Part I (2015)(starwars.com)

39 points by indigodaddy 9 months ago | 17 comments

Straussian Memes(lesswrong.com)

37 points by kp1197 9 months ago | 36 comments

Show HN: Wario Synth – Turn any song into Game Boy version(wario.style)

37 points by birdmania 9 months ago | 12 comments

New maps reveal post-flood migration patterns across the US(kinder.rice.edu)

30 points by toomuchtodo 9 months ago | 9 comments

Arpanet standardized TCP/IP on this day in 1983(tomshardware.com)

27 points by barishnamazov 9 months ago | 1 comments

Autism hasn't increased(marginalrevolution.com)

26 points by paulpauper 9 months ago | 10 comments

Starlink satellites being lowered from 550 km to 480 km(twitter.com)

25 points by wmf 9 months ago | 3 comments

Street-Fighting Mathematics (2008)(ocw.mit.edu)

25 points by mpweiher 9 months ago | 8 comments