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Germany: Amazon is not allowed to force customers to watch ads on Prime Video

https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2025-12/amazon-urteil-video-kunden-werbung
63•febed•1h ago•11 comments

Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

https://www.jaist.ac.jp/english/whatsnew/press/2025/12/17-1.html
244•Xunxi•6h ago•54 comments

Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3-flash/
860•meetpateltech•12h ago•460 comments

OBS Studio Gets a New Renderer

https://obsproject.com/blog/obs-studio-gets-a-new-renderer
183•aizk•8h ago•35 comments

Coursera to combine with Udemy

https://investor.coursera.com/news/news-details/2025/Coursera-to-Combine-with-Udemy-to-Empower-th...
469•throwaway019254•16h ago•280 comments

I got hacked: My Hetzner server started mining Monero

https://blog.jakesaunders.dev/my-server-started-mining-monero-this-morning/
266•jakelsaunders94•8h ago•189 comments

Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

108•cvbox•4h ago•63 comments

Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

https://jsomers.net/blog/speed-matters
92•bschne•2d ago•45 comments

AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/aws-ceo-ai-cannot-replace-junior-developers
837•birdculture•12h ago•447 comments

Don MacKinnon: Why Simplicity Beats Cleverness in Software Design [audio]

https://maintainable.fm/episodes/don-mackinnon-why-simplicity-beats-cleverness-in-software-design
17•mooreds•2d ago•1 comments

More than half of researchers now use AI for peer review, often against guidance

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-04066-5
7•neilv•18m ago•1 comments

TikTok unlawfully tracks shopping habits and use of dating apps?

https://noyb.eu/en/tiktok-unlawfully-tracks-your-shopping-habits-and-your-use-dating-apps
142•doener•5h ago•66 comments

A Safer Container Ecosystem with Docker: Free Docker Hardened Images

https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-hardened-images-for-every-developer/
296•anttiharju•12h ago•60 comments

Tell HN: HN was down

516•uyzstvqs•12h ago•289 comments

My payment agent is named George, not stripe-agent

https://blog.kestrelsnest.social/posts/2025-12-14-why-my-payment-agent-is-named-george-not-stripe...
46•fortyseven•3d ago•31 comments

Show HN: High-Performance Wavelet Matrix for Python, Implemented in Rust

https://pypi.org/project/wavelet-matrix/
75•math-hiyoko•10h ago•2 comments

The Number That Turned Sideways

https://zuriby.github.io/math.github.io/the-number-that-turned-sideways.html
33•tzury•4d ago•13 comments

Zmij: Faster floating point double-to-string conversion

https://vitaut.net/posts/2025/faster-dtoa/
107•fanf2•3d ago•15 comments

How SQLite is tested

https://sqlite.org/testing.html
259•whatisabcdefgh•11h ago•70 comments

Show HN: I built a fast RSS reader in Zig

https://github.com/superstarryeyes/hys
36•superstarryeyes•1d ago•10 comments

Fast SEQUENCE iteration in Common Lisp

https://world-playground-deceit.net/blog/2025/12/fast-sequence-iteration-in-common-lisp.html
42•BoingBoomTschak•4d ago•8 comments

Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor

38•sarreph•12h ago•52 comments

Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review

https://radar.cloudflare.com/year-in-review/2025
67•ksec•7h ago•29 comments

Inside PostHog: SSRF, ClickHouse SQL Escape and Default Postgres Creds to RCE

https://mdisec.com/inside-posthog-how-ssrf-a-clickhouse-sql-escaping-0day-and-default-postgresql-...
83•arwt•8h ago•23 comments

Mozilla's New CEO Confirms Firefox Will Become an "AI Browser"

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/12/mozilla-new-ceo-firefox-ai-browser-strategy
6•LopRabbit•38m ago•2 comments

Developers can now submit apps to ChatGPT

https://openai.com/index/developers-can-now-submit-apps-to-chatgpt/
103•tananaev•7h ago•61 comments

A look back: LANPAR, the first spreadsheet

https://technicallywewrite.com/2025/12/16/lanpar
21•rbanffy•7h ago•1 comments

Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/05/vizio_gpl_source_code_ruling/
8•pabs3•1h ago•0 comments

Opencoil – appropriating inductive charging pads in the wild (2020) [video]

https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-11575-opencoil_a_roaming_speedshow
3•thenthenthen•2d ago•0 comments

The World of OCR (C. 1960) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SekWFCZVLUk
18•indolering•3d ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO

https://dfarq.homeip.net/va-linux-the-biggest-dotcom-ipo/
83•giuliomagnifico•6d ago

Comments

0xbadcafebee•23h ago
> Today, it’s a little unusual for something you buy not to work with Linux

Err... no, it's definitely not unusual. I specifically spent a month looking for a laptop with Linux support just so I didn't have to go through the hell of unsupported hardware, and it's still not fully supported.

gkhartman•23h ago
If you don't mind me asking, what did you end up buying, and what was lacking support? I'd expect full support from one of the "Linux first" suppliers like System76.
pcdoyle•23h ago
I just got a ThinkPad E14 Gen 6 and the only thing I had to fix/install manually was the driver for the fingerprint reader (fprintd). Everything else just worked, including my docking station and ultra wide monitor.
ghaff•16h ago
It helps to look for things that have some level of official backing. Dell has some models for Ubuntu and Red Hat uses various ThinkPads for employee Linux laptops. (Lot more Macs as well when I left but still plenty of ThinkPads that are overwhelmingly Linux.)
cabirum•20h ago
MIPI camera on my 3 year old Thinkpad still does not work
whatever1•23h ago
Not even high resolution screens work properly yet.

Wayland has done some progress, but still half of my applications look like sh when I use fractional scaling.

Linux is great if all you need is a terminal. Once you need a peripheral, then good luck, literally.

ghqqwwee•22h ago
There’s no OS that doesn’t have problems with wireless headsets in Teams. Bluetooth and sound stacks is a badly/barely working combination everywhere. Hibernation is usually the test that fails the sound stacks everywhere.
dahcryn•21h ago
literally 0 issues on my macbook

It has different issues, but wireless headsets nor hibernation are among them

ThePowerOfFuet•22h ago
>Wayland has done some progress, but still half of my applications look like sh when I use fractional scaling.

Do they look like shell, or like shit? You can use grownup words here.

ErroneousBosh•16h ago
> Linux is great if all you need is a terminal. Once you need a peripheral, then good luck, literally.

Just wait until you try this new Windows thing. Zero hardware support for anything.

roryrjb•20h ago
If I install Ubuntu 25.10, I can't get camera effects (blurred background and so on) to work in Meet because hardware compositing (or something, I'm not entirely clear on the details[0][1]) doesn't work properly on the open Nvidia driver on Wayland. Wait I thought this was all supposed to be the future?

0. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/644 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1due6ni/hardware...

p_l•19h ago
It's a recurring bug in chrome
notadev•20h ago
Been running Fedora on Dell XPS 13 for a couple years with zero problems.
zpr515•20h ago
Same. And then I upgraded to the new Dell 14 Pro Premium, where webcam does not work (as for any IPU7 laptop for that matter). The rest is fine though, but still annoying.
graemep•18h ago
Why did you just not buy a laptop from a supplier that preinstalled Linux?
0xbadcafebee•12h ago
I did. Still issues.
Mountain_Skies•17h ago
Lots of things work out of the box, but yes, it's still far from being the default. Kensington is releasing an update to its Expert Mouse trackball. The MSRP looks to be USD$150, so not an inexpensive accessory. It supports Windows and Mac but has no Linux support. No doubt in time there will be community supported projects to give it functionality on Linux close to, but not entirely like, what it has on the other two OSes.
billy99k•17h ago
I now just use Linux in the WSL. I get Linux with a superior GUI.
grosswait•2h ago
Is Windows 10 still supported?
mikestorrent•23h ago
Ahh, I'd totally forgotten they evolved into Sourceforge. A pity that they didn't pivot to Git hosting more quickly or they would have had a pretty good path to serious ROI for the enterprise.
zeruch•22h ago
They didn't evolve into SF; SF was a project inside of VA that eventually became the flagship of what remained after the hardware and related services were excised. When they started (1998/99), Git wasn't a viable option (the first version of it wasn't released until 2005, by which point SF had ballooned to an enormous scale at the time, with it's own product inertia, and it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself, which is when Github started, and by then VA/SF was in decline and had changed hands several times.

(disclosure: I was on the "Ignition team" for SF)

qdotme•18h ago
TIL: Backstory of sourceforge! Brings back memories…
dizhn•18h ago
If I remember correctly they also provided free hosting to people. It was one of the only places where you could run a PHP site for free.
ErroneousBosh•17h ago
> it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself

People forget that in the olden days we used Subversion and Bazaar (well, the latter if you were Canonical-adjacent), and before that CVS.

And before that, SCCS.

Going back decades, it's all people going "this sucks, I'm writing my own VCS", and for whatever reason Git was the one that gained traction in that particularly sticky and slippery swamp.

rwmj•16h ago
I'd love to know what the "thinking" was behind getting rid of the hardware business. We bought some Penguin Computing servers after VA left the market.
wmf•22h ago
A fun tangent to this is ESR's "Surprised By Wealth" where he accidentally became paper rich off VA Linux stock but never made any real money due to the crash. https://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708492
cheema33•22h ago
I am not going to shed a tear for ESR. He turned out to be a massive turd.
wmf•22h ago
ESR was always somewhat controversial. People trolled him at the time for what they saw as faux humility and virtue signaling.
mongol•18h ago
I recall this. But I didn't know he nevet made real money
justin66•16h ago
To make money he would have needed to sell his shares, and they became worthless before the post-IPO lockup period ended.
compsciphd•16h ago
they shouldn't have been.

From wikipedia

The company raised $132 million, offering shares at $30/share, but the shares opened for trading at $299/share, before closing at $239.25/share, or 698% above the IPO price, breaking a record for the largest first day gain.[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] Larry Augustin, the 38-year old founder and chief executive officer of the company, became a billionaire on paper and a 26-year old web developer at the company said she was worth $10 million on paper.[2] By August 2000, the shares were trading at $40 each[2] and only 24 mutual funds held the stock.[15] On December 8, 2000, one year later, after the bursting of the dot com bubble, shares traded at $8.49/share.[16]

per his essay he was given 150K shares. Even at the IPO price of $30 a share, that's 4.5 million. Do we not think the investment bank handling his shares would have been willing to take his whole stake at $30 a share?

But even if they wouldn't more than 6 months later it was still north of $40 a share (so $6mil or so) and even a year or so after the IPO, after the bubble popped, it was still north of $8 a share (so $1+mil).

justin66•11h ago
I could be wrong! It seems to me like the terms of his options and his trade restrictions (he was a director of the company, he couldn't sell his shares willy-nilly) are important here, but I don't know the specifics.

He has, ahem, never exuded a "man of leisure" vibe. More power to him if he's actually loaded, I guess.

compsciphd•8h ago
I'm not arguing that he's loaded, just that if he didn't make millions off VA, its more due to his own decisions than anything else. I could also be wrong, but it seems he had the opportunity to unload his stake if he really wanted to.
dehrmann•12h ago
> ESR

That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I'd almost forgotten about the webcomic.

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/

Taniwha•19h ago
It's worth noting that before the dotcom bubble the rule of thumb was that a startup had to have 5 quarters of profit before going public - the whole dot-com thing of going public on vibes before making any profit was part of why it was a bubble, and also why investors were playing in a whole new sandpit and possibly out of their depth
vlovich123•19h ago
I’m not aware of any company that’s going public only after 5 quarters of profit for the past two and a half decades since the dotcom either.
twoodfin•18h ago
Especially strange and relevant here: VA Linux owned Slashdot. Depending on whether you were a Digg person—I was not—Slashdot is either hn’s conceptual grandfather or great-grandfather.

“News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.”

cowsandmilk•17h ago
What do you view as the generations between Slashdot/Digg and HN?
heelix•16h ago
Likely reddit

Many folks left Dig for their primary feed when they did the UI update. I think I switched over to Slashdot around that time. The multi selector for karma, on the comments and them changing usernames so my original no longer worked drove me to reddit as that prime feed for me, for about 10 or so years.

As reddit exploded... that main home switched to here. Not quite that same sense of community and always a grab bag of subject, so much closer to Digg/Slashdot feel. I never ended up doing facebook or some of the other social media sites. As reddit tried/tried to become that sort of space (with monetization!) it became something I was not looking for.

lizardking•16h ago
Reddit
cons0le•18h ago
This article provides NO explanation of what the "VA" in va linux is for. I guess I'm just stupid and everybody else knew right away
guenthert•18h ago
Well, it does list the names of the founders ...
deater•16h ago
way back in the day our college LUG (linux user group) had a rep from VA Linux come to speak, but the person running things was unfamiliar with the company and kept calling them "Virginia Linux"
cons0le•12h ago
Its confusing because the company is from Fairfax. I gave up half way through looking around. I still don't know what the VA is for and I guess I never will
deater•12h ago
as the previous commenter hinted, it's because the founders were Vera and Augustin
roryirvine•17h ago
The article mostly talks about VA's workstations, but I got the impression that their server line was just as important.

As I recall, they were one of the earliest vendors to produce a 1u server, which was a big potential selling point for them (Cobalt's RaQ was first, but initially used a MIPS R5000 variant with a crippled cache so gained a reputation for being a bit "weird").

Unfortunately, the bursting of the telecoms/networking bubble shortly after their IPO (and a year before the dotcom bubble imploded) flooded the market with 4u servers at fire-sale prices. Rack density wasn't nearly so important back then, so VA's neater kit suddenly appeared a whole lot less competitive.

styanax•15h ago
We had 2U VA Linux servers at a company (circa 2000), they were rock solid beasts which continued to run for years. I vaguely remember cannibalizing one chassis to beef up another / replace parts, but as you mentioned by then it was circa 2003 (?) and one could buy palettes of dotcom-bust servers off a dock in SF. A fully kitted HP DL380-G2 was around $100 IIRC, bought one it ran forever too - old Sun and SGI hardware as well, all of it. Dirt cheap, if you still had a job. :-/