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We kept renting GPUs after getting 7 quotes to buy them
Agora's Param Jaggi walks through seven vendor quotes from Madrid resellers, colocation providers and a carrier for buying GPU servers, and the cost model showing that $354,100 of hardware would take until year nine to beat renting two servers for $7,200 a month, plus advice for teams weighing the same decision.
18 min · 4,160 words
My Reddit AMA on the Law of Web Scraping
Law professor Eric Goldman shares his introduction to a Reddit AMA on US web scraping law: the social benefits and harms of scraping, why trespass-to-chattels law is a mess, and why a scraping campaign must survive many doctrines, from contracts to copyright, to be legal.
8 min · 1,825 words
Is it okay to skip class if the lectures are recorded? what 84 AI models think
We asked 84 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 88% picked No. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
11 min · 2,466 words
Refurb weekend II: Alpha Micro Eagle 300 and friends
A detailed vintage-computing restoration log from Old Vintage Computing Research revisiting a 68EC030-based Alpha Microsystems Eagle 300 running AMOS, covering hardware repairs, storage and peripheral work, and the history of Alpha Micro's business systems.
72 min · 16,511 words
C vs C#: racing VLC's Gaussian blur
Martin Finkel ports a real VLC video filter, the Gaussian blur, line by line to C# with .NET Native AOT and races it against the original C inside VLC 4 on the same frames with byte-identical output, then optimizes both sides and compares again.
9 min · 2,060 words
I Electrified My Push Scooter With A Power Drill
Eddie Abbondanz describes converting a Razor A5 Lux push scooter into a front-wheel-drive electric scooter powered by a cordless power drill, using welding, 3D-printed parts and off-the-shelf hardware, with build photos and notes on the drive wheel design.
3 min · 623 words
Around The World, Part 34: A pretty sky
Thomas ten Cate continues his devlog for Around The World, a sea exploration game in early development, describing small tweaks that made sea, sky and clouds come together: reworking light scattering in clouds, physically based atmospheric scattering, horizon bending, tone mapping, and an in-engine orrery of the planet and its moon used to place them correctly in the sky.
7 min · 1,648 words
David Rudnick on the borderline impossible process of designing a bespoke Arsenal typeface
Olivia Hingley interviews designer David Rudnick and collaborator Johnnie Campbell about Rocastle, a bespoke Arsenal typeface: the research, constraints of football branding, and why crafting a club-specific type system felt borderline impossible.
19 min · 4,280 words
Nvidia's first GPU: GeForce 256
Dave Farquhar looks back at the GeForce 256, released October 11, 1999 as the first product Nvidia called a GPU: what arguably made it a GPU (hardware transform and lighting), how it compared to 3dfx and earlier coprocessors, how Sega's investment kept Nvidia alive, and how Nvidia later bought 3dfx's IP.
3 min · 627 words
Deobfuscating Luraph: Lifting Lua to LLVM, Then Letting AI Try
Naci lifts Luraph-protected Lua to LLVM IR, explains why dynamic table operations survive optimization, and tests how far AI-assisted tooling and partial evaluation get at stripping the VM — and where AI just produces plausible-looking output.
17 min · 3,827 words
Compiler bootstrapping depends on more than you might think
Chris Siebenmann on bootstrapping the Go toolchain from C sources, and how OS and environment changes complicate the “start from source” story more than the language docs suggest.
3 min · 627 words
I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI BOT traffic
Sammy Straus recounts how an HN post for sprinklz.io brought crushing AI-bot and change-monitor traffic, what showed up in NGINX logs, and the robots.txt, blocks, and rate limits that restored the site.
9 min · 2,034 words
How we built demo.usenotra.com
Notra founding engineer Jan Burzinski explains how every visitor to demo.usenotra.com gets an isolated workspace in about 0.4 seconds without signing up—using signed cookies, a Postgres sandbox pool, and a fake model—so people can try the product immediately.
8 min · 1,924 words
Nixpkgs for the frontend impaired
Farid Zakaria introduces jinx, a tool that compiles Nix to TypeScript so all of nixpkgs can be evaluated in the browser with exact drvPath parity—aimed at making Nix’s package graph inspectable without installing Nix.
6 min · 1,431 words
Did Ente Locker copy my code without attribution?
FairScan's developer Pierre-Yves Nicolas describes finding that Ente Locker's new document-scanning feature, which credited FairScan's segmentation model, appears to reuse several of FairScan's GPL image-processing implementations despite claiming they were written from scratch, and reflects on what that means for open-source motivation.
5 min · 1,231 words
Chasing a -O2 pessimization in antcc
The author of the antcc C compiler investigates why a Lua benchmark ran slower at -O1 and -O2 than unoptimized, digging into the interpreter dispatch loop, register allocation, SSA phi handling and stack slots to find and fix the optimization that made the code worse.
12 min · 2,750 words
Christopher Drum of Stone Tools takes a hands-on look at Lotus Improv on NeXTSTEP, the cult-classic spreadsheet that separated data, formulas and views into named categories, testing how its model holds up today, what it got right, and where its rigidity frustrates traditional spreadsheet use.
33 min · 7,630 words
Hittite royal archive found in Turkey
The History Blog reports a large Hittite-period cuneiform archive excavated in Turkey, describing the tablets’ find context, what kinds of administrative and royal records they appear to contain, and why the discovery matters for Anatolian Bronze Age history.
2 min · 549 words
purplesyringa investigates vfmaddrnd231pd, an FMA instruction with per-instruction rounding control documented in Intel's 2024 Software Development Manual that the GNU assembler doesn't recognize, whose documented intrinsics are missing from Clang and ICC, and that has vanished from the 2026 SDM.
2 min · 415 words
Classic 1990's PC Shooter Quake Runs on Pimoroni Explorer
Pimoroni's Les Pounder covers Zenodante's RP2350 Quake, a port of Quake's single-player campaign that runs on the £33.90 Pimoroni Explorer microcontroller board, a game that once needed a £1,000 1990s PC.
2 min · 434 words