Vincent Bernat: An interactive introduction to the spanning tree protocol

Planet Debian · vincent.bernat.ch · 29 min

A hands-on, interactive guide to RSTP that runs a real STP implementation in the browser via open-source MSTPD, letting readers cut links and watch the protocol rebuild the tree. It covers root bridge election, port roles, proposal/agreement transitions, and topology change notification, with annotated BPDU packet captures along the way.

Christophe Pettus: The Sixth Execution

Planet PostgreSQL · postgr.es · 19 min

In this excerpt from Christophe Pettus's deep dive, PostgreSQL's plan cache makes its generic-vs-custom decision at the sixth execution of a prepared statement, based on estimated cost rather than measured performance. He walks through the source, shows how blind selectivity estimates can yield a plan that suits no real value, and explains which drivers and PL/pgSQL trigger the pattern unknowingly.

Autonomy and Innovation

Ben Thompson · Feed: » stratechery by Ben Thompson · stratechery.com · 14 min

Building on the white-hat/black-hat analogy, the piece argues that AI offense and defense require identical skills, so defenders must fully automate vulnerability finding and patching or be overwhelmed by autonomous attackers. It draws on OpenAI's Black Hat presentation about the Hugging Face incident, Altman's admission that AI adoption is slower than expected, and a sustaining-vs-disruptive framework that favors AI-native startups.

Hacker News: 3 points · 0 comments

WAL + S3: Lakebase storage for the era of agents

Carlota Soto · Blog — Neon Docs · neon.com · 14 min

Neon's Lakebase Postgres treats the write-ahead log as the source of truth and stores immutable history in S3, making the database timeline addressable by LSN. Branches, point-in-time recovery, and replicas become pointers or metadata operations, while reads hit RAM, NVMe, then the pageserver, never object storage, reconstructing pages via a persistent binary search tree over layer files. The same copy is transcoded to columnar format for analytical queries without replication.

Hacker News: 3 points · 1 comments

Patching at Fleet Scale, Twice: How DigitalOcean Closed Januscape and the AMD Safe RET Issue Without Customer Impact

Tim Lisko · DigitalOcean: Cloud computing designed for developers · digitalocean.com · 13 min

DigitalOcean details its response to two critical hypervisor vulnerabilities in one month: Januscape, a KVM escape patched fleet-wide in eight days, and an AMD Safe RET issue that forced reboots of 1,600 hypervisors. The post explains how livepatching, host evacuation, temporary refleeting, and round-the-clock pipeline monitoring kept confirmed customer impact at zero, with the AMD fix completed before public disclosure.

Life’s ‘last universal common ancestor’ may predate life itself

Captain_Wacky · ~science - Tildes · scientificamerican.com · 8 min

Bill Martin's team argues that LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, was not a living cell but a chemical system at hydrothermal vents—part organic, part rock. By back-extrapolating metabolic enzymes from modern bacteria and archaea, they find LUCA lacked half of metabolism, with metal catalysts filling the gaps. The work reframes life's origin as two origins, with the genetic code arising before autonomous life.

An Early History of Space Stations: Where’s My Wheel?

Al Williams · Hackaday · hackaday.com · 8 min

A history of space stations argues that the rotating-wheel design, proposed as early as 1923, lost out to simpler non-rotating stations because artificial gravity was never worth the engineering cost. The piece follows the unbuilt concepts—Convair's MARS mockup, Project Olympus, MOL—to the real ones, Salyut, Skylab, and Mir, and closes still waiting for his wheel.

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Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

larsfaye · Hacker News: Best · larsfaye.com · 13 min

Reliance on AI coding assistants is eroding developer expertise, the piece argues, citing a study where novice programmers using Copilot skipped planning, got derailed, and harbored an 'illusion of competence' while those who mitigated AI use fared best. The author prescribes using LLMs as Socratic tutors rather than code generators, preserving the productive friction — 'Fingerspitzengefühl' — that builds taste.

Hacker News: 513 points · 502 commentsComments

Wealth Can’t Absolve the Families of the Disappeared

Patricia Grace King · Electric Literature · electricliterature.com · 35 min

In this excerpt from Patricia Grace King's 'Already Gone,' six-year-old Ester's parents—graduate students and union activists—are disappeared by masked men in Guatemala City in 1981. Ester is raised by her wealthy great-aunt Silvia, who erases their memory behind etiquette and prayer, insisting the abduction was criminal, not political. The excerpt ends with Molly, a gringa wearing a Virgin of Guadalupe shirt, arriving at Silvia's door.

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The Negative Option

Ernie Smith · Tedium · tedium.co · 10 min

Tedium recounts the rise and fall of Columbia House, the record club that used negative-option billing to send unrequested CDs and then bill subscribers. The piece traces the model's lineage to today's hard-to-cancel SaaS subscriptions, noting the company's 71-year run ended with a whisper, and requests that Darius Rucker finally be paid for the 3 million free copies of Cracked Rear View.

The Moomin Strategy for Living with Uncertainty

Maria Popova · Brain Pickings · themarginalian.org · 9 min

Too-ticky, the sage of Moominvalley, embodies Tove Jansson's philosophy of uncertainty in Moominland Midwinter. Inspired by Jansson's partner Tuulikki Pietilä, the character advises embracing ambiguity—'all things are so very uncertain, and that's exactly what makes me feel reassured'—and accepting slow growth, evolution, and death as natural cycles.

Man, Blood Dungeon Rips

Chris Person · Aftermath · aftermath.site · 5 min

Blood Dungeon, from Messhof of Nidhogg fame, combines Vampire Survivors' auto-firing upgrades with Spelunky's tense platforming. The game wins praise for its active strategic choices and brutally tuned difficulty, and its absurd characters—a baby with a magnum, a nude barbarian, a hand-walking Skinja—make it ideal travel gaming on Switch 2 or Steam Deck.

Before it was known as ‘Old Ironsides,’ it sailed to buoy the Haitian revolution

GBH News · wgbh.org · 6 min

Sent by President John Adams in 1799, the USS Constitution protects American shipping off Saint-Domingue and also builds ties with Toussaint Louverture's revolutionary government. Captain Silas Talbot places his squadron at Louverture's service, aiding the attack on Jacmel and even dining with Haitian officers. The article details this remarkable interracial diplomacy and its reversal under Jefferson.

Classroom to the Streets: Local teens add art to Lynn's outdoor museum

GBH News · wgbh.org · 6 min

Habibatou Bah, 17, is painting a four-story mural of herself and fellow students through Classroom to the Streets, a Beyond Walls program pairing teens with professional artists. The completed wall shows seven people at a wooden table; Bah says the gridding technique she learned from Toronto artist Megan Oldhues will stay with her. Beyond Walls has contributed about 80 of Lynn's roughly 100 murals.

‘How Europe Is Killing Makers and Micro-Entrepreneurs’

John Gruber · daringfireball.net · lectronz.com · 2 min

Under the EU's new packaging waste regulation, a Greek engineer selling a €25 sensor board to four countries faces about €1,150 per year in registration fees and paperwork — for roughly 50 grams of packaging. Lectronz, a marketplace for open-source hardware, argues this will destroy the space where hobbyist makers test ideas, and proposes a de minimis threshold, a single EPR one-stop shop, and marketplace-level collective registration.

Hacker News: 1630 points · 1028 comments

IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

iand · Hacker News: Best · ipshipyard.com · 3 min

Protocol Labs is ending Shipyard's funding, so the IPFS maintenance team will stop all engineering and infrastructure work on September 30, 2026. The wind-down leaves core projects — Kubo, Helia, Rainbow, IPFS Desktop — without dedicated maintainers, and public infrastructure such as ipfs.io, bootstrap nodes, and Wikipedia-on-IPFS will cease operation. The team reports that its gateway re-architecture handled about 3× more traffic while cutting operating costs by roughly 80%.

Hacker News: 345 points · 175 commentsComments

Maryam Rahmani & David Esser ~ Santur & Kamancheh for Electronics

gianmarcodelre · a closer listen · acloserlisten.com · 8 min

Maryam Rahmani and David Esser's album places santur, kamancheh, and voice inside contact microphones and geophones, letting electronics reveal hidden resonances of wood and strings rather than transforming the instruments. An interview with the duo traces how improvisation and live processing let tradition and experimentation coexist, with the pair now planning recordings at former Nazi/GDR infrastructure sites.

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Why do audience members choose specific shows at the Edinburgh Fringe?

@edent · shkspr.mobi · 9 min

A Fringe-goer tallies how they picked 26 shows, finding proximity was the key driver: roughly 20% came from the app's 'nearby now' feature and another 40% from being close to a desired show, while flyers, posters and reviews mattered less. They argue performers spend heavily on promotion without ever asking audiences how they chose, and propose simple tracking tactics like unique QR codes and exit surveys to fix that.

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A curmudgeon tries a language server

a@xkqr.org (kqr) · entropicthoughts.com · 14 min

A Haskell developer attempts to approximate a Lisp-style live-coding workflow: Eglot and the Haskell language server provide introspection, while ghcid and foreign-store recompile and restart the program without losing state, automatically running tests on save. He walks through the fiddly setup — Emacs, direnv, a single-component project — and shares what worked for his differential-equation visualization experiments.