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

https://openciv3.org/
391•klaussilveira•5h ago•85 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
750•xnx•10h ago•459 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
118•dmpetrov•5h ago•49 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
131•isitcontent•5h ago•14 comments

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

https://vecti.com
234•vecti•7h ago•113 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
28•quibono•4d ago•2 comments

A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/a-century-of-hair-samples-proves-leaded-gas-ban-worked/
57•jnord•3d ago•3 comments

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

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
302•aktau•11h ago•152 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
304•ostacke•11h ago•82 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
160•eljojo•8h ago•121 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
377•todsacerdoti•13h ago•214 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
44•phreda4•4h ago•7 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
305•lstoll•11h ago•230 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
100•vmatsiiako•10h ago•34 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
167•i5heu•8h ago•127 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
138•limoce•3d ago•76 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
223•surprisetalk•3d ago•29 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
36•rescrv•12h ago•17 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
956•cdrnsf•14h ago•413 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
8•gfortaine•2h ago•0 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
7•kmm•4d ago•0 comments

Evaluating and mitigating the growing risk of LLM-discovered 0-days

https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/
33•lebovic•1d ago•11 comments

I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor

https://andrewjrod.substack.com/p/im-going-to-cure-my-girlfriends-brain
30•ray__•1h ago•6 comments

Claude Composer

https://www.josh.ing/blog/claude-composer
97•coloneltcb•2d ago•68 comments

The Oklahoma Architect Who Turned Kitsch into Art

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-31/oklahoma-architect-bruce-goff-s-wild-home-desi...
17•MarlonPro•3d ago•2 comments

Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents

https://docs.smooth.sh/cli/overview
76•antves•1d ago•56 comments

Show HN: Slack CLI for Agents

https://github.com/stablyai/agent-slack
37•nwparker•1d ago•8 comments

How virtual textures work

https://www.shlom.dev/articles/how-virtual-textures-really-work/
23•betamark•12h ago•22 comments

Evolution of car door handles over the decades

https://newatlas.com/automotive/evolution-car-door-handle/
38•andsoitis•3d ago•61 comments

The Beauty of Slag

https://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/beauty-slag
27•sohkamyung•3d ago•3 comments
Open in hackernews

VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO

https://dfarq.homeip.net/va-linux-the-biggest-dotcom-ipo/
84•giuliomagnifico•1mo ago

Comments

0xbadcafebee•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo ago
MIPI camera on my 3 year old Thinkpad still does not work
whatever1•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo ago
literally 0 issues on my macbook

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

ThePowerOfFuet•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo ago
It's a recurring bug in chrome
notadev•1mo ago
Been running Fedora on Dell XPS 13 for a couple years with zero problems.
zpr515•1mo 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•1mo ago
Why did you just not buy a laptop from a supplier that preinstalled Linux?
0xbadcafebee•1mo ago
I did. Still issues.
Mountain_Skies•1mo 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•1mo ago
I now just use Linux in the WSL. I get Linux with a superior GUI.
grosswait•1mo ago
Is Windows 10 still supported?
CoolCold•1mo ago
by WSL? Not my own experience, but I have couple of guys who still on Win10/WSL. Myself I've migrated to Win11 not sure when exactly, likely 4 years ago
mikestorrent•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo ago
TIL: Backstory of sourceforge! Brings back memories…
dizhn•1mo 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.
zeruch•1mo ago
They did. I actually worked on a few of those projects (e.g. Stampede Linux)

One of these days I should blog about how we ended up hosting Python for years...

ErroneousBosh•1mo 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•1mo 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.
zeruch•1mo ago
1. I have some serious biases against Penguin at the time (for...reasons) and frankly was never impressed with their product. 2. Without getting into a bunch of weird minutiae, we got big enough to be a threat to people who could afford to bleed us; case in point, we started doing incredibly well in HPC clusters, and big vendors like IBM and Dell started to offer severely below cost hardware packaged with their full services that completely undercut a business that already had thin margins.

IMHO, we made better gear at the time, but we were not in a market as wide and deep for linux optimized machines as it is now. It's not an unusual story in the valley. We did have a deep talent bench that ended up in key roles in a bunch of firms that are doing well: Google, Apple, et al.

wmf•1mo 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•1mo ago
I am not going to shed a tear for ESR. He turned out to be a massive turd.
wmf•1mo ago
ESR was always somewhat controversial. People trolled him at the time for what they saw as faux humility and virtue signaling.
mongol•1mo ago
I recall this. But I didn't know he nevet made real money
justin66•1mo ago
To make money he would have needed to sell his shares, and they became worthless before the post-IPO lockup period ended.
compsciphd•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo 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.
lelanthran•1mo ago
ISTR that the lockup period extended well after the delisting.
compsciphd•1mo ago
a year+ lockup seems insane.

90-180 days would be normal and was still trading above ipo price (not opening price) 180 days after ipo as i documented above.

with that said perhaps directors have a different form of lockup, can't say I have any experience with that.

dehrmann•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo ago
What do you view as the generations between Slashdot/Digg and HN?
heelix•1mo 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.

zeruch•1mo ago
Reddit was contemporary to Digg, it just survived 'better'
lizardking•1mo ago
Reddit
cons0le•1mo 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•1mo ago
Well, it does list the names of the founders ...
deater•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo ago
as the previous commenter hinted, it's because the founders were Vera and Augustin
zeruch•1mo ago
Which college?
Lammy•1mo ago
> what the "VA" in va linux is for

If you want to keep Up you'll have to stay Down

zeruch•1mo ago
Vera-Augustin, the two founders.
roryirvine•1mo 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•1mo 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. :-/
zeruch•1mo ago
"but I got the impression that their server line was just as important."

They were far more important for the business.