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France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
431•nar001•4h ago•206 comments

British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205nxy0p31o
135•bookofjoe•1h ago•114 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
438•theblazehen•2d ago•158 comments

Leisure Suit Larry's Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
27•thelok•1h ago•2 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
86•AlexeyBrin•5h ago•17 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
778•klaussilveira•19h ago•241 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
35•vinhnx•3h ago•4 comments

Software Factories and the Agentic Moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
22•mellosouls•2h ago•17 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
39•samasblack•2h ago•24 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12501
56•onurkanbkrc•4h ago•3 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1027•xnx•1d ago•583 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
173•alainrk•4h ago•231 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
168•jesperordrup•10h ago•62 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
24•rbanffy•4d ago•5 comments

StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/
19•simonw•2h ago•16 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
103•videotopia•4d ago•27 comments

Vinklu Turns Forgotten Plot in Bucharest into Tiny Coffee Shop

https://design-milk.com/vinklu-turns-forgotten-plot-in-bucharest-into-tiny-coffee-shop/
5•surprisetalk•5d ago•0 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
13•marklit•5d ago•0 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
265•isitcontent•20h ago•33 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
152•matheusalmeida•2d ago•42 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
277•dmpetrov•20h ago•147 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
35•matt_d•4d ago•10 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
546•todsacerdoti•1d ago•263 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
419•ostacke•1d ago•110 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
65•helloplanets•4d ago•69 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
364•vecti•22h ago•165 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
338•eljojo•22h ago•207 comments

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
16•sandGorgon•2d ago•4 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
457•lstoll•1d ago•301 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
372•aktau•1d ago•195 comments
Open in hackernews

USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID Under OS X (2004)

http://web.archive.org/web/20040202110812/http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm
65•donnachangstein•9mo ago

Comments

rideontime•9mo ago
He's not wrong, Riviera is pretty groovy. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvjLW0i-2Ebq9iQoZ-m2R...
jmclnx•9mo ago
I remember reading something like this a very long time ago. It must have been about what this guy did. Real cool.
rzzzt•9mo ago
The 8-Bit Guy (formerly iBook Guy) created an array using USB sticks: https://youtu.be/dougISKs2vQ

Action Retro has a video with floppies: https://youtu.be/1hc52_PWeU8

He also references a MacWorld article with Daniel's array: https://www.macworld.com/article/165663/floppyraid.html

geerlingguy•9mo ago
Was going to post the Action Retro attempt. Latency is abysmal, yet it's still a glorious thing to see it (kinda) work at all.

Need to see if someone can hack together RAID on cassettes on an old Apple II

pridkett•9mo ago
This is, quite possibly, one of the best nerd sniping comments I’ve seen.

Two thoughts come to mind, one not serious, one serious.

1. I can’t imagine having to align the counters on all those tapes.

2. I’m guessing this would really only work for sequential reading and writing. In some ways that makes it more fun as the latency would be that much worse.

mrweasel•9mo ago
There is a YouTube video on the Action Retro channel, where this article is used as inspiration. Apparently you're not able to use any random floppy drive, but you can use more than five.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8

somat•9mo ago
I have done it with usb floppy drives under openbsd, I am sure it is just as trivial under linux but I had obsd and a bunch of usb floppy drives at my disposal.

    #it has been a few years I don't remember if it works with bare drives or if you need a disklabel on each floppy
    bioctl -c 5 -l /dev/sd2c,/dev/sd3c,/dev/sd4c softraid0
    #the raid will show up now, check dmesg
    disklabel -E sd5
    newfs /dev/sd5a
    mount /dev/sd5a /mnt/floppy/
    umount /mnt/floppy
    bioctl -d sd5
    #after inserting all floppies reassemble the raid
    bioctl -c 5 -l /dev/sd2c,/dev/sd3c,/dev/sd4c softraid0
    mount /dev/sd5a /mnt/floppy
    
I love it when a system like this A. does not try to railroad you into the "correct path" and B. the independent layers actually work independently.

One day in what was probably sullen resentment that openbsd has no equivalent to DRBD I assembled a raid on iscsi drives, that is, initiate 5 iscsi sessions to independent hosts then assemble a raid with them. and you can imagine my surprise when it very nearly worked, I could read and write just fine. The part that did not work was drive failure. My guess is that iscsid did not fail a drive in a way that softraid understood. so a drive failure just lead to everything hanging.

yjftsjthsd-h•9mo ago
> I love it when a system like this A. does not try to railroad you into the "correct path" and B. the independent layers actually work independently.

Yeah:)

> Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

- Doug Gwyn

accrual•9mo ago
> I love it when a system like this A. does not try to railroad you into the "correct path" and B. the independent layers actually work independently.

Agree! My first thought while reading the article was that it would be very easy to do this on OpenBSD as well, either with USB floppies or normal 34-pin drives as well.

OpenBSD's softraid stack doesn't care much about what the underlying hardware is as long as it looks like a disk and talks like a disk.

tombert•9mo ago
I thought about trying this with LTO drives, to have a ridiculously slow but also ridiculously high capacity raid, but sadly the LTO tape decks are a bit too expensive for this experiment.
kevin_thibedeau•9mo ago
U320 SCSI LTO-5 can be had cheap. Nobody wants them these days.
tombert•9mo ago
Yeah though that wouldn’t have a lot of storage, only 1.5 terabytes per tape. A new 2TB SSD is only about $100 and can easily be connected via usb.
mschuster91•9mo ago
Yeah but who knows if the data will be there in 10 years on the SSD? For tapes, it's about 20-30 years.
somat•9mo ago
the tape may last 30 years. but do you really expect the tape drive to last that long, or, to even be able to get a tape drive that works in the future.

That was my big problem with the economics of tape. the drives are expensive and don't really last that long. At some scale factor tape makes sense, but it is larger than you would naively think.

As there is no good solution for personal scale long term archive type storage, I have sort of given up on it. Actual long term archives take the form of human readable printed documents. However this is very low density. so only the most important stuff. long term bulk storage is live, hard drives based arrays and backups, requiring an active maintainer it will die when I do, but no great loss, it is mostly junk anyhow.

irusensei•9mo ago
Not floppies but I clearly remember some Sun Microsystems video demonstrating ZFS where some guys dressed as over the top engineers randomly disconnecting USB thumb drives that were part of a pool to show the file system resilience.
mattl•9mo ago
Is that the same video where they shout at a hard disk?
wkat4242•9mo ago
I love the "because I can" projects. There's another guy that made a whole music box from hundreds of floppies. Amazing. I love that kind of dedication.

One of my 'friends' is very capitalist and it makes him actually angry that people spend so much time on something that doesn't make money. I find it sad that he doesn't understand the concept of fun. And he has plenty of money.

Macha•9mo ago
This feels like a storage solution that needs a "|0| days since last data loss" sign. Take the reliability of floppies under continuous read write cycles and divide it by 5?
somat•9mo ago
The whole point is to avoid data loss, floppies are notoriously prone to failure, if you can do raid on floppy, you can survive loss of a disk.

Now if you are stripping... Well... then sure the data loss is your own fault, you have taken the R out of RAID.

Macha•9mo ago
Right but as the title and post say, we are discussing striping.