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We built another object storage

https://fractalbits.com/blog/why-we-built-another-object-storage/
60•fractalbits•2h ago•9 comments

Java FFM zero-copy transport using io_uring

https://www.mvp.express/
25•mands•5d ago•6 comments

How exchanges turn order books into distributed logs

https://quant.engineering/exchange-order-book-distributed-logs.html
49•rundef•5d ago•17 comments

macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-26_2-release-notes#RDMA-over-...
467•guiand•18h ago•237 comments

AI is bringing old nuclear plants out of retirement

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2025/12/09/nuclear-power-ai
33•geox•1h ago•25 comments

Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/the-ars-technica-guide-to-dumb-tvs/
433•fleahunter•1d ago•362 comments

Photographer built a medium-format rangefinder, and so can you

https://petapixel.com/2025/12/06/this-photographer-built-an-awesome-medium-format-rangefinder-and...
78•shinryuu•6d ago•9 comments

Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
865•parisidau•10h ago•445 comments

GNU Unifont

https://unifoundry.com/unifont/index.html
287•remywang•18h ago•68 comments

A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251205-how-the-handheld-digital-camera-was-born
42•selvan•5d ago•18 comments

Beautiful Abelian Sandpiles

https://eavan.blog/posts/beautiful-sandpiles.html
83•eavan0•3d ago•16 comments

Rats Play DOOM

https://ratsplaydoom.com/
332•ano-ther•18h ago•123 comments

Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig

https://github.com/ringtailsoftware/uvm32
167•trj•17h ago•11 comments

OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/12/openai-skills/
481•simonw•15h ago•271 comments

Computer Animator and Amiga fanatic Dick Van Dyke turns 100

109•ggm•6h ago•23 comments

Will West Coast Jazz Get Some Respect?

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/will-west-coast-jazz-finally-get
10•paulpauper•6d ago•2 comments

Formula One Handovers and Handovers From Surgery to Intensive Care (2008) [pdf]

https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2008-sower.pdf
82•bookofjoe•6d ago•33 comments

Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards

https://victorpoughon.github.io/bidicalc/
179•fouronnes3•1d ago•85 comments

Freeing a Xiaomi humidifier from the cloud

https://0l.de/blog/2025/11/xiaomi-humidifier/
126•stv0g•1d ago•51 comments

Obscuring P2P Nodes with Dandelion

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/12/08/dandelion/
57•ColinWright•4d ago•1 comments

Go is portable, until it isn't

https://simpleobservability.com/blog/go-portable-until-isnt
119•khazit•6d ago•101 comments

Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/eliminating-state-law-obstruction-of-nati...
169•andsoitis•1d ago•217 comments

Poor Johnny still won't encrypt

https://bfswa.substack.com/p/poor-johnny-still-wont-encrypt
52•zdw•10h ago•64 comments

YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/13/youtubes-ceo-is-latest-tech-boss-limiting-his-kids-social-media-u...
84•pseudolus•3h ago•67 comments

Slax: Live Pocket Linux

https://www.slax.org/
41•Ulf950•5d ago•5 comments

50 years of proof assistants

https://lawrencecpaulson.github.io//2025/12/05/History_of_Proof_Assistants.html
107•baruchel•15h ago•17 comments

Gild Just One Lily

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/04/gild-just-one-lily/
29•serialx•5d ago•5 comments

Capsudo: Rethinking sudo with object capabilities

https://ariadne.space/2025/12/12/rethinking-sudo-with-object-capabilities.html
75•fanf2•17h ago•44 comments

Google removes Sci-Hub domains from U.S. search results due to dated court order

https://torrentfreak.com/google-removes-sci-hub-domains-from-u-s-search-results-due-to-dated-cour...
193•t-3•11h ago•34 comments

String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof

https://www.quantamagazine.org/string-theory-inspires-a-brilliant-baffling-new-math-proof-20251212/
167•ArmageddonIt•22h ago•154 comments
Open in hackernews

Google Logo Ligature Bug

https://www.jefftk.com/p/google-logo-ligature-bug
134•cubefox•6mo ago

Comments

adzm•6mo ago
Wow it still works.
Kyro38•6mo ago
The issue has been fixed on Chrome: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/391788835

But ligature is indeed still visible on Google search.

madeofpalk•6mo ago
Neat to see how impressed the Google team was at how novel this issue was.
bsimpson•6mo ago
I imagine the overlap between number of people who know about google_logo and that the Omnibar is set it Google Sans is quite small.
netsharc•6mo ago
https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/62...

Gotta love that the patch isn't fixing the font, but adding a rule for domain names which contains a substring similar to the ligature name...

em-bee•6mo ago
fixing the font does not help those that downloaded the font and won't get the new version. it also does not prevent malicious code from replacing the font on your machine with a version that has the ligature.

in fact this could be a novel attack vector. replace fonts on victims devices to hide the true address of a website. the fix then would have to be to not display any ligatures at all in website addresses, which in my opinion would be a smart change.

toast0•6mo ago
> fixing the font does not help those that downloaded the font and won't get the new version. it also does not prevent malicious code from replacing the font on your machine with a version that has the ligature.

Fixing the code doesn't help users that downloaded code and don't get the new version either.

Malicious code that can replace a font can replace a lot more too.

em-bee•6mo ago
right, but a replacing a font is much easier than replacing a browser.
arcfour•6mo ago
Disabling ligature rendering in the omnibox seems significantly more sane and safe than this (why wouldn't you do that already?! URLs need to be displayed clearly - not be "aesthetically pleasing").
anal_reactor•6mo ago
I can imagine a group of excited guys coming up with that idea as something cool, and then the whole thing slowly evolving into a yet another branding tool.
a2128•6mo ago
Guess I'll have to come up with a different domain name for my new business MakeLogoLigatures :(
jasonthorsness•6mo ago
And look, a working bug bounty program!

“$10,000 for report of high-quality && high-impact security UI issue + $5,000 bonus for unique, novel cool bug -- this was a very neat discovery!”

moralestapia•6mo ago
OS-dependent? I don't see it on OS X.
stefan_•6mo ago
I thought there was something wrong with this blog post that kept writing "googlelogoligature" but no some absolute cretin really added that as a ligature to the font.
sublinear•6mo ago
> Fonts can include "ligatures", which let font designers special-case specific combinations of letters ... but the feature has been (ab)used for many other things

Same reason to not use ligatures in your IDE, terminal, etc.

Did that trend finally die off?

nine_k•6mo ago
Ligatures that give slightly stylized rendering to stuff like <!-- or even replace a >= with a ≥ in your source code view are much less prone to exploitation than a "ligature" that replaces a 18-letter sequence with the word "Google" in your browser's address bar. It's like comparing the hazardousness levels of a safety pin and of a chainsaw.
jasonthorsness•6mo ago
My great fear is they will become so popular that the option to disable them will be forgotten. I can’t stand the ligatures that noticeably change and merge the glyphs.
wbl•6mo ago
Have you ever read a book typeset without them? Imagine a dot in fig where the loop of the f conflicts.
jasonthorsness•6mo ago
Those historical use cases are fine and important, the problem ones are the ones in monospace fonts that change <= to ≤ and that sort of thing, or even crazier abuses like shown here.
toast0•6mo ago
I like the dotted i in fig, thank you. Not a big fan of underlines that don't cross descendeds either.
kstrauser•6mo ago
Fortunately, no. They’re increasingly well supported for the user base who think they look nice… like me.

I love the way my code looks in Berkeley Mono on any modern editor version. Seeing `>=` render similar to `≥` makes me smile. It’s a tiny visual tweak that doesn’t even cause anything to move on the screen, because that font’s ligatures are the same width as the characters they replace. I see no downside to it for me.

layer8•6mo ago
Personally, I find an extra-wide “≥” more ugly and jarring than “>=“. If anything, I would prefer programming languages to understand the actual Unicode “≥”, and people learning how type that (Compose key, dedicated IDE support, or whatever). It would be nice for more people to appreciate that the characters one can type aren’t limited to the symbols printed on the keyboard.
kstrauser•6mo ago
Every editor and language I use is fine with Unicode in files, but I don’t know if that’s true for everyone I collaborate with. Sure, I can type all those symbols, but can they? Does a screen reader pronounce them reasonably? Do they render correctly in GitHub’s web source code viewers? Will I ever get as fast typing composed characters as just pressing `>=`? Does everyone use a font that supports those codepoints? I don’t know. Probably, but who can tell? I tend to limit non-ASCII text to inside quoted strings and use exclusively ASCII-compatible codes for all identifiers.

But the great part about ligatures is that I can use fonts that support them and enable them in my editors because I think they look pretty. Anyone who doesn’t like their appearance can just not use them. We can both have editors that look nice to ourselves without making the other’s editors look worse. How often can we say that?

AStonesThrow•6mo ago
> Does a screen reader pronounce them reasonably?

I've been pushing the limits of emoji/Unicode recognition where I try to input it in an app or while communicating with others, and see what happens.

It's especially fun to use Emoji in the "favorite lists" for rideshare apps. In particular, each of my Favorite Waymo Destinations is accompanied by 3-5 Emoji which identify the unique spot or its category.

The really amusing part is that the Waymo car itself verbally reads off the destination when it gets underway. So the Emojis are translated into English and rattled off uncritically, but accurately, including incidentals like which skin-tones were chosen. It makes me giggle; I haven't found any unpronounceable glyphs yet!

layer8•6mo ago
This is sort of my point: I would wish for the world to move towards typing Unicode symbols being a normal thing. That would also imply screen readers properly handling those (if they don’t already). What I don’t like is source code being rendered as something different than the actual printable characters it consists of.

I’m not disputing your preference, I was just stating mine. I do prefer “≥” over “>=“, but not in the form of a double-width ligature that is still “>=“ under the hood.

> Will I ever get as fast typing composed characters as just pressing `>=`?

Typing “>=” usually involves pressing three keys. The same can be true with Compose.

That’s not to say that there isn’t some trade-off in some cases. But the frequently used symbols can be prioritized, and it opens up a vastly larger repertoire of characters you can type. I routinely type foreign languages with accents and other non-ASCII letters using Compose, and it has become muscle memory.

cubefox•6mo ago
The IDE could also do an automated ASCII to Unicode replacement for certain strings of characters if they are supported in a language, similar to how Microsoft Word automatically replaces (R) with ®, or the like.
em-bee•6mo ago
in vim i can define abbreviations like this:

    :iabbr >= ≥
then, when typing ">=" it will automatically be converted to "≥" as soon as i hit space.
cubefox•6mo ago
Exactly. Though in an IDE it should only be done depending on whether the current language supports the Unicode operators in question. And ideally the replacement shouldn't happen when editing string literals. Though perhaps that is asking for too much.
em-bee•6mo ago
in vim you can make these definitions dependent on the file type, which is also used to detect languages for eg syntax highlighting. so it's certainly possibly to define these only for a specific language. it should even be possible to define it based on the syntax detected: https://superuser.com/questions/487603/abbreviations-overrid...
immibis•6mo ago
Ligatures should not be used in monospaced fonts, for obvious reasons.
jefftk•6mo ago
I would be ok with the equivalent of the "fi" ligature, where two letters would be drawn slightly differently when next to each other.
immibis•6mo ago
Why? Monospaced characters fit in their separate cells.
Hasnep•6mo ago
If the ligature takes up the same horizontal space as the characters it represents, then I don't see why not.
underrun•6mo ago
hard disagree. i use monospace fonts with ligatures for programming. primarily i get things like -> rendered as a full arrow or == connected or ... as an actual ellipsis. it's subtle but it's nice.

I've also seen nice use of ligature for markdown formatting.

the idea that ligatures shouldn't be used with monospace fonts would also break monospace in multiple languages as some languages require ligatures to display single characters correctly.

sjs382•6mo ago
There are many others including "glogoligature".
jasonthorsness•6mo ago
It’s difficult (impossible?) to force a font on the web in a way that can’t be overridden by some users. This must have been a font designed for device-specific applications picked up for other use-cases? Or maybe they just didn’t care that the long tail of users might see the string “googlelogoligature” instead of the logo.
em-bee•6mo ago
any website that supplies its own fonts will work. the number of people that would override the fonts specified in a website is small.
void-pointer•6mo ago
Why didn’t google just use a Unicode private use code point like apple does with U+F8FF? ()
layer8•6mo ago
Because that wouldn’t degrade gracefully with a different font.
odo1242•6mo ago
I mean, “googlelogoligature” degrades just as gracefully as “undefined”, I would say

(Which is to say that it doesn’t)

layer8•6mo ago
I guess we have to disagree on that. When the Apple private-use code point shows as a box, you have no idea what it is supposed to represent. With the ligature you have the equivalent of an alt text.
anal_reactor•6mo ago
The linked article on Unicode is far more interesting actually. I never really cared to think before how Unicode works, but reading the submission letter of beet emoji was the most interesting thing I've read this month so far.