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The article reflects on the author's 15-year journey since starting a popular open-source project, discussing the challenges, lessons learned, and the lasting impact of their work in the software development community.

Halt and Catch Fire is a critically acclaimed AMC TV series that chronicles the personal and professional lives of a group of tech pioneers during the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, highlighting the challenges and innovations that shaped the industry.

The article discusses the potential benefits of implementing a four-day workweek, including improved work-life balance, increased productivity, and reduced environmental impact. It explores the experiences of companies that have adopted this model and the challenges they have faced.

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-sonnet-4-6-system-card [pdf]

https://x.com/claudeai/status/2023817132581208353 [video]

13 years ago, we launched Watsi.org with a Show HN [1].

For nearly a year, this community drove so much traffic that we couldn’t list patients fast enough. Then pg saw us on HN, wrote us our first big check, and accepted us as the first YC nonprofit (W13). The next few years were a whirlwind.

I was a young, naive founder with just enough experience to know I wanted Watsi to be more efficient, transparent, and innovative than most nonprofits. We spent 24/7 talking to users and coding. We did things that don’t scale. We tried our best to be walking, talking pg essays.

Over the years we learned that product/market fit is different for nonprofits. Not many people wake up and think, "I'd love to donate to a nonprofit today" with the same oomph that they think, "I'd love a coffee" or "I'd like to make more money."

No matter how much effort we put into fundraising, donations grew linearly, while requests for care grew exponentially. I felt caught in the middle. After investing everything I had, I eventually burned out and transitioned to the board.

I made a classic founder mistake and intertwined my self-worth with Watsi's success. I believed that if I could somehow help every patient, I was a good person, but if I let down some patients, which became inevitable, I was a bad person.

This was exacerbated by seeing our for-profit YC batch mates raise massive rounds. I felt like a failure for not scaling Watsi faster, but eventually we accepted reality and set Watsi on more of a slow, steady, and sustainable trajectory.

Now that I have perspective, I'm incredibly proud of what the org has accomplished and grateful to everyone who has done a tour of duty to support us. Watsi donors have donated over $20M to fund 33,241 surgeries, and we have a good shot of helping patients for a long time to come.

In a world of fast growth and fast crashes, here's a huge thank you to the HN users who have stuck by Watsi, or any other important cause, even when it's not on the front page. I believe it embodies the best of humanity. Thanks HN!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081

Hi HN, After roughly 8 years of silently rolling 1.1 nightlies, we finally tagged a proper stable 2.0 release. We built this because wrist-sized Linux is genuinely fun to hack on, and because a handful of us think it's worth keeping capable hardware alive long after manufacturers move on. Smartwatches don't really get old — the silicon is basically the same as it was a decade ago. We just keep making it useful for us.

No usage stats, no tracking, no illusions of mass adoption. The only real signal we get is the occasional person who appears in our Matrix chat going "hey, it booted on my watch from 2014 and now it's usable again" — and that's plenty.

Privacy is non-negotiable: zero telemetry, no cloud, full local control. Longevity is the other half: we refuse to let good hardware become e-waste just because support ended. On the learning side, it's been one of the best playgrounds: instant feedback on your wrist makes QML/Qt, JavaScript watchfaces and embedded Linux feel tangible. The community is small and kind — perfect for people who want to learn open-source dev without gatekeeping.

Technically we're still pragmatic: libhybris + older kernels on most devices since it just works, but we've already mainlined rinato (Samsung Gear 2) and sparrow (ASUS ZenWatch 2) — rinato even boots with a usable UI. That's the direction we're pushing toward.

Repo: https://github.com/AsteroidOS Install images & docs: https://asteroidos.org 2.0 demo video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6FiQz0yACc Announcement post: https://asteroidos.org/news/2-0-release/

Questions, port requests, mentoring offers, criticism, weird ideas — all welcome. We do this because shaping a tiny, open wearable UX and infrastructure is oddly satisfying, and because Linux on the wrist still feels like a playground worth playing in.

Cheers, the AsteroidOS Team

Stardex, a YC-backed AI company, is seeking a Customer Success Engineer to help with data migration and support for their clients. The role involves working closely with customers to ensure a smooth transition and provide ongoing technical assistance.

The article discusses the concept of semantic diffusion, where the meaning of technical terms can change over time as they are adopted and adapted by different communities. It explores how this phenomenon can lead to confusion and the importance of maintaining clear definitions of key terms.

The article discusses the 'AI productivity paradox', where increased investment in AI and other technologies has not translated into significant productivity gains for businesses. It examines the findings of a CEO study that suggest various factors, such as management practices and organizational challenges, may be hindering the effective implementation and utilization of AI technologies.

Gentoo has announced that they are transitioning their source code hosting from GitHub to Codeberg, a community-driven, non-profit platform. This move aims to provide a more privacy-focused and ethically aligned hosting solution for the Gentoo project.

The article describes the development of a minimal x86 kernel in the Zig programming language, demonstrating the creation of a basic operating system that can boot and execute simple programs.

This article explores the economic impact of the Super Bowl, highlighting the significant financial investments made by host cities, the revenue generated from tourism and media rights, as well as the potential long-term economic benefits and challenges associated with hosting such a major sporting event.

tinyice is a lightweight WebRTC implementation for IoT devices, designed to enable real-time communication and data exchange between embedded systems and web browsers without the need for a central server.

Hello HN,

Recently an amazingly beautiful explainer was shared on HN: https://explainers.blog/posts/why-is-the-sky-blue/

I loved it so much that I wished more topics were explained that way. So, I decided to stress-test today's frontier models (Opus 4.6 in Claude Code) to generate similar explainer on any given topic WITH (almost) one shot and minimal nudging.

I'm launching with four topics: Fourier transformation, scaling laws in bio, cellular automata and LLMs.

I would let you be the judge, but I'm quite liking them.

Some things I learned:

- Prompting CC to test what it builds using headless chromium is essential - There are subtle bugs in explanations (like in one animation human lifespan is 40 years) - Asking CC to verify its plan via codex works really well

I do want to reiterate that the pages generated were mostly one-shot, which amazed me given how detailed the pages + animations are.

Hey HN! I’m Simone. We re-built Breadboard, a visual app builder that mixes Figma-style UI design with Shortcuts-style logic so you can build, preview, and publish interactive web apps directly from the canvas.

What it does

    Design UIs visually with a flexible canvas –like Figma–.
    Define app logic with a visual, instruction-stacked editor inspired by Shortcuts.
    Live preview apps directly on the canvas –no separate preview window–.
    Publish working web apps with one click.

    Modernize the HyperCard idea: combine layout, behavior, and instant sharing in one place.
    Reduce friction between design and a working app.
    Make simple web apps approachable for non-developers while keeping power features for developers.
    Build a foundation for LLM integration so users can design and develop with AI while still understanding what’s happening, even without coding experience –in progress!–.

Weather forecast app: https://app.breadboards.io/playgrounds/weather

Swiss Public Transit: https://app.breadboards.io/playgrounds/public_transit

info: https://breadboards.io

I would appreciate any feedback :)

The article discusses the gofix tool, which is a command-line tool that can automatically update Go code to use the latest language features and standard library changes. It provides details on how to use gofix, its capabilities, and the types of changes it can make to improve the maintainability and modernization of Go codebases.

The article discusses the process of building a tunnel, including the various challenges and considerations involved, such as geological surveys, regulatory approvals, construction methods, and project management. It provides a comprehensive overview of the key steps and factors that must be taken into account when undertaking a tunnel-building project.

The article discusses the implementation of async/await functionality on the GPU, exploring the challenges and potential benefits of this approach. It highlights how this technology can improve performance and efficiency in GPU-accelerated applications.

The article explores the experience of living with nonfluent aphasia, a language disorder that affects a person's ability to produce spoken language. It discusses the challenges and strategies of communicating with this condition, highlighting the resilience and creativity of individuals living with aphasia.

The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)).

My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my current projects, Common Lisp is a better fit, so I call myself "a Lisp-er" these days. If people like what I did, I do have plans to write some more (but probably only after I retire, writing next to a full-time job is heard). Maybe on Smalltalk, maybe on computer networks - two topics close to my heart.

And a shout-out to Dick Gabriel, he contributed some great personal memories about the man who started it all, John McCarthy.

This article provides a comprehensive guide to using Microsoft Office keyboard shortcuts in LibreOffice, the popular open-source office suite. It covers shortcuts for various LibreOffice applications, enabling users to improve their productivity and efficiency when working with the software.

The article provides a comprehensive weather forecast for the city of SFO, including detailed information on temperature, precipitation, wind, and other meteorological conditions for the next several days.

The article chronicles the author's journey from a small-town job to a corporate position, highlighting the challenges and lessons learned along the way. It offers insights into navigating workplace politics and personal growth while pursuing career ambitions.

Throughout my career, I tried many tools to query PostgreSQL, and in the end, concluded that for what I do, the simplest is almost always the best: raw SQL queries.

Until now, I typed the results manually and relied on tests to catch problems. While this is OK in e.g., GoLang, it is quite annoying in TypeScript. First, because of the more powerful type system (it's easier to guess that updated_at is a date than it is to guess whether it's nullable or not), second, because of idiosyncrasies (INT4s are deserialised as JS numbers, but INT8s are deserialised as strings).

So I wrote pg-typesafe, with the goal of it being the less burdensome: you call queries exactly the same way as you would call node-pg, and they are fully typed.

It's very new, but I'm already using it in a large-ish project, where it found several bugs and footguns, and also allowed me to remove many manual type definitions.

The article explores the enduring fascination with unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and the persistent claims of their imminent arrival, despite a lack of conclusive evidence. It examines the psychology behind this phenomenon and the factors that contribute to the perpetuation of UFO sightings and predictions.