frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Decorative Cryptography

https://www.dlp.rip/decorative-cryptography
59•todsacerdoti•2h ago•13 comments

Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2026/01/2025-databases-retrospective.html
88•viveknathani_•3h ago•12 comments

A spider web unlike any seen before

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/science/biggest-spiderweb-sulfur-cave.html
72•juanplusjuan•3h ago•23 comments

Revisiting the original Roomba and its simple architecture

https://robotsinplainenglish.com/e/2025-12-27-roomba.html
21•ripe•2d ago•5 comments

Lessons from 14 years at Google

https://addyosmani.com/blog/21-lessons/
1258•cdrnsf•19h ago•539 comments

During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

https://sparkbox.com/foundry/helene_and_mobile_web_performance
209•CqtGLRGcukpy•7h ago•115 comments

The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

https://candost.blog/the-unbearable-joy-of-sitting-alone-in-a-cafe/
626•mooreds•19h ago•371 comments

Show HN: Terminal UI for AWS

https://github.com/huseyinbabal/taws
317•huseyinbabal•14h ago•156 comments

Logos Language Guide: Compile English to Rust

https://logicaffeine.com/guide
39•tristenharr•3d ago•21 comments

Why does a least squares fit appear to have a bias when applied to simple data?

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/674129/why-does-a-linear-least-squares-fit-appear-to-ha...
245•azeemba•14h ago•66 comments

Street Fighter II, the World Warrier (2021)

https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_warrier/
383•birdculture•19h ago•68 comments

Why Microsoft Store Discontinued Support for Office Apps

https://www.bgr.com/2027774/why-microsoft-store-discontinued-office-support/
28•itronitron•3d ago•27 comments

I charged $18k for a Static HTML Page (2019)

https://idiallo.com/blog/18000-dollars-static-web-page
293•caminanteblanco•2d ago•72 comments

Baffling purple honey found only in North Carolina

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20250417-the-baffling-purple-honey-found-only-in-north-carolina
80•rmason•4d ago•20 comments

Building a Rust-style static analyzer for C++ with AI

http://mpaxos.com/blog/rusty-cpp.html
57•shuaimu•5h ago•26 comments

Monads in C# (Part 2): Result

https://alexyorke.github.io/2025/09/13/monads-in-c-sharp-part-2-result/
24•polygot•3d ago•19 comments

Web development is fun again

https://ma.ttias.be/web-development-is-fun-again/
395•Mojah•19h ago•487 comments

Eurostar AI vulnerability: When a chatbot goes off the rails

https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/eurostar-ai-vulnerability-when-a-chatbot-goes-off-t...
151•speckx•13h ago•37 comments

Show HN: Circuit Artist –Circuit simulator with propagation animation and rewind

https://github.com/lets-all-be-stupid-forever/circuit-artist
4•rafinha•4d ago•0 comments

Linear Address Spaces: Unsafe at any speed (2022)

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3534854
158•nithssh•5d ago•115 comments

Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work

https://howbrowserswork.com/
233•krasun•19h ago•33 comments

How to translate a ROM: The mysteries of the game cartridge [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDg73E1n5-g
18•zdw•5d ago•0 comments

Claude Code On-the-Go

https://granda.org/en/2026/01/02/claude-code-on-the-go/
325•todsacerdoti•14h ago•208 comments

Six Harmless Bugs Lead to Remote Code Execution

https://mehmetince.net/the-story-of-a-perfect-exploit-chain-six-bugs-that-looked-harmless-until-t...
65•ozirus•3d ago•17 comments

NeXTSTEP on Pa-RISC

https://www.openpa.net/nextstep_pa-risc.html
34•andsoitis•9h ago•7 comments

Ripple, a puzzle game about 2nd and 3rd order effects

https://ripplegame.app/
124•mooreds•16h ago•32 comments

Moiré Explorer

https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz/#/src/demos/moire_explorer
167•Luc•21h ago•19 comments

Agentic Patterns

https://github.com/nibzard/awesome-agentic-patterns
125•PretzelFisch•15h ago•22 comments

Anti-aging injection regrows knee cartilage and prevents arthritis

https://scitechdaily.com/anti-aging-injection-regrows-knee-cartilage-and-prevents-arthritis/
319•nis0s•19h ago•120 comments

Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years

https://phys.org/news/2025-12-bison-illinois-kane-county-years.html
152•bikenaga•5d ago•46 comments
Open in hackernews

GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene

https://gdimayhem.temari.fr/index.php?p=all
155•todsacerdoti•6d ago

Comments

self_awareness•1d ago
A lot of those were written in assembly by teenagers, using WinAPI directly. Yet they still run on Win10/Win11. A lost art.
throwfaraway135•1d ago
Thematically, many of them resemble the kind of WordArt we used to make as children in MS Word.
bob1029•1d ago
Win32 is definitely not a lost art. It's more accessible than ever with modern code generation tools like cswin32.

This inspiration to build things that look like this is what has been lost.

self_awareness•22h ago
If today's programmers need code generation tools to use what teenagers could use on their own back in the day, then it truly is a lost art.
anaisbetts•21h ago
The code generator just recreates the C header files in C#, let's not be dramatic.
yonisto•1d ago
Do you know where I can find source code for such intros?
CyMonk•1d ago
e.g. on this very site.

https://gdimayhem.temari.fr/index.php?p=datas

reactordev•22h ago
It wasn’t all assembly (though those were the popular ones), heavy C use too. What really changed the game was when DirectX came.
m00dy•1d ago
If you’re familiar with these concepts, Deepwalker’s intro [0] is heavily inspired by the HOODLUM GTA5 demoscene :)

[0]: https://deepwalker.xyz

mavamaarten•1d ago
I absolutely adored the little intro that Razor1911 added to their crack of GTA IV. Cool graphics, nice jingle, short, to the point. https://youtu.be/htbDeD-wv7s

Also not entirely related (kinda?), but I also regularly listen to the music that was inside the Digital Insanity keygen for Sony Vegas. https://youtu.be/kJln_F7Y2P4

Nostalgia!

Fnoord•1d ago
> Nostalgia!

Maktone [1] did some very nice chiptunes for Razor [2] [3]. This playlist [4] has a lot of good Razor ones, I bet someone was looking for [5] =]

Also, a lot of keygens didn't have to be used back when a simple hexedit of one value could validate the software. I remember that being the case for mIRC. And Sublime Text. I mean, it could be as simple as changing an if statement to if not. I use the same idea for Proxmox. It is quick and dirty, but not the way the code was intended. If you wanna go that route, a keygen is the way (a serial does the job). With crack, you never know what it does, same goes for keygen (wrt malware). I still love Serials 2000. A program which had all the keys and serials in existence. Which was a big feat back in the end of '90s when search engines were shit. It even had regular updates/patches.

As for the website. Screenshots don't show videos.

[1] https://archive.org/details/all_20240526

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mwO26qel2U

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI46EyzaKI8

[4] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5CC3A42488052F20

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K32PLx21Bi0

stevekemp•22h ago
> A program which had all the keys and serials in existence.

That sounds useful! Back in the day reversing was fun, and I'd rather do it myself than risk downloading malware.

That said I'll never forget the name of astalavista.box.sk - which was sometimes used for reference, and +fravia for giving guidance to the beginners.

panki27•21h ago
I have exactly the same Sony Vegas keygen experience as the parent poster, but with the song from your fifth link!
jtvjan•20h ago
Maktone is so good! I remember hearing one of their songs in a GBA intro[1] and it still gets stuck in my head sometimes...

[1]: https://youtu.be/CGaqlSIUSEo

effekt•6h ago
He's still alive and well! While he's not super active and let his website(s) die, you can follow him on Facebook where he generally seems the most active these days: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063887643279&ref=...

And instead of YT/archive (though, shoutout to textfiles.com, which is now part of archive), https://www.pouet.net/ and https://scene.org/ is still where things are generally at

ryandrake•23h ago
Website pretty much unusable on Mac/Safari: The viewport is so wide my browser shows about 1/4 of the horizontal content requiring constant horizontal scrolling. Firefox is better, but still requires horizontal scrolling to see the whole page.
monerozcash•16h ago
Refreshing the page fixed that for me on Safari.
ryandrake•15h ago
Yea, I tried that, and it does fix it initially, but as you scroll through the content, the site decides to resize its canvas all by itself, to the point where you have a giant horizontal canvas again soon. Why do web developers have to do this stuff?
stavros•23h ago
Oh man, the nostalgia of buying magazines that came with shareware CDs (we didn't have the internet back then where I lived) and going to a net cafe for half an hour to download cracks, because we obviously didn't have any way to either procure or send USD half way around the world...

It was a magical time mostly because computers were full of possibilities. Someone gave me a CD with Visual Basic 4 and I figured out programming just from reading the help files. I still have no idea how I managed to stumble my way through to actually making real programs.

shoobiedoo•22h ago
It really was magical. It felt like the wild west. I used to buy a copy of 2600 and sit in a cafe reading it just feeling like I could do anything or go anywhere, which I guess I could to a degree back in those days.

I left my system administration position in the 2010s because it brought back none of anything remotely close to those vibes. Staring at a cloud admin panel in a website all day made me start to hate computers. It was then I realized it was always just going to be a hobby if I wanted to keep it the way I remembered. Fine by me

stavros•22h ago
Exactly, it really did feel like the wild west, and in the best way. All the sites were quirky and personal, not a company in sight. It really felt amazing to discover someone's little personalized corner on every single site.
123pie123•18h ago
I moved away from SysAdmin around 2010 and I worked with a fair amount of other techies and it really was the wild west in the stuff various people did with: sizeable production systems, Firewall rules (or lack of) network connectivity/ switches, and code changes

Get a cool tool from a magazine? yep just throw it on to production servers - no testing or letting people know what the hell they did (I got burnt a few times from people doing this!)

no change control, no documentation - just reverse the changes, if it doesn't work immediately - although some people never even made back ups of the previous files - crazy shit

HPsquared•18h ago
Most satisfying is to leverage computers as part of another job like engineering or management or whatever, where you are able to get creative and hack something together under your own control. Then you can use them as you please and they are strictly positive. Actual IT specialists get all the non fun jobs that are deep inside the machine.
overgard•15h ago
Funny to think how useful help files and manuals used to be! I learned QBasic mostly from the builtin help system, VBasic mostly from clicking around, and even DirectX from the help files and tutorials. Nowadays documentation is outsourced to the community it seems, for the most part.
stavros•15h ago
Yeah, VB4 had tutorials on how to make simple apps, and that's how I learned to program! I can't believe I learned about loops and variables and control flow structures by just reading the documentation.
reactordev•22h ago
What made these fun to make was the fact that some really smart people put a lot of time and effort into making a library that will allow you to play midi, “skin” windows HWND surfaces, co-routines, and a high level abstraction over win32 functions. Man, those were the days. These could be cranked out in a matter of hours for any new software as much of the market used the same few vendors or algorithms very similar.

We didn’t know what we know today and so every turn felt like a discovery.

vardump•21h ago
I think most played Protracker, XM, S3M, IT, etc. modules, not MIDI. They typically used very short samples, a style which was called a 'chiptune', songs that were made sound like they came from some eighties microcomputer.

More recently the definition of 'chiptune' shifted to specifically mean music from 8-bit sound chips.

reactordev•20h ago
You’re talking about the songs. I know what a chiptune is, I’m talking about what sits between those. Protracker was how you made them. When embedding into apps, you had to play them. MOD files had to be converted into something. Lookup pocketmod. Some used PCM, some used midi. Windows had a wonderful midi api and synth back then. That’s what I used.
vardump•18h ago
No, the MOD file(s) (embedded in the .exe) were just played as is. There were a lot of MOD player libraries even back then and the CPU load was negligible. The players weighed less than 10 kilobytes.
reactordev•17h ago
>”There were a lot of MOD player libraries”

What the hell do you think I’m talking about? I’m done arguing at a brick wall. You basically just validated what I said and yet continue to say I’m wrong. We embedded the music. We needed to play the music. Windows only supoorts PCM and MIDI at the time. Pick one.

vardump•16h ago
You can't render MOD songs to MIDI. Not even with modern AI.

Obviously the MOD libraries outputted PCM to WinMM. That's the job of the MOD library.

You're arguing with someone who was actually writing Windows (and DOS if it matters) applications in C/C++/asm the early nineties.

If you really wanted MIDI, the best option in the nineties would have been just to include the original MIDI data. You could of course also generate MIDI data as you go, but why bother?

TazeTSchnitzel•17h ago
Oh, so some people actually used DirectMusic's support for DLS? Cool!
reactordev•16h ago
GS Synth baby!! Back when ActiveX was cool and everything was exposed through COM.
vintagedave•22h ago
For all those effects: is their source available?

I see EXE names and I think cracks were distributed that way. I don’t have enough insight into the cracking scene to know if there was any underground open source back then.

These days, having the source to these graphic effects would be invaluable!

Keyframe•21h ago
These days, having the source to these graphic effects would be invaluable!

Nature of _the scene_ was such that one would do an effect and then another would wonder how it was done and try to better it, all without source. That's kind of why it's rare for you to find sources of such things.

mschuster91•21h ago
A ton of these things is handwritten assembly. "All" you need to do is run it through a disassembler and you got the source... the key problem more is that virtually all cracks and keygens come heavily packed.

Either to protect the authors of the original software to check if the warez group got the full algorithm or if they have something mildly different from the original that allows the authors to detect a keygen in newer versions, or because the warez group wants to make life more difficult for copycats... or, and I've seen my fair share of that (and earned good money to clean up), a third party wrapped a highly popular keygen like for Adobe CS6 in some sort of malware and wanted to avoid detection.

burnt-resistor•16h ago
Nothing a debugger can't fix. UPX and PKlite packing made keygens and cracks look more sus than they were. It source had been available, that would make them appear even less sus. There were a few drama incidents with Razor where a cracker provided source because of accusations.
effekt•6h ago
As for cracktros, probably not. I should spelunk through backups. However, the most technical and competitive people generally transitioned to the demoscene in the early 2000s and that scene is far more open.

You can find a lot of groups/individuals publish a lot of esp. their older stuff now.

Two off the top of my head:

- https://github.com/ConspiracyHu (and they made a W32 port of Future Crew's Second Reality, which is public domain: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality)

- Farbrausch published their original demo tool source ages ago: https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public

bitwize•12h ago
I've built games with raw X draw calls, including sprite-based games with XCopyArea and more recently, simulated vector displays with XDrawLine. The fact that there were/are kids doing this kind of thing with Win32 GDI calls tickles some deep aesthetic sweet spot in me.