Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it

Joshua Barretto's Blog · blog.jsbarretto.com · 14 min

Software engineering · First persontext editor design · custom regex engine · terminal UI

Matched interests: Text EditorsZed EditorProcedural Text

Frustrated by development tools that choke on remote SSH sessions and project-wide searches, a two-year personal project produces a tailored 10,000-line terminal editor. To parse context-sensitive syntax without third-party crates, its custom regex engine compiles patterns into a continuation-passing threaded code virtual machine that bypasses vtable lookups. Paired with a demand-driven invalidation cache, the system highlights a 50,000-line source file in under ten milliseconds.

Hacker News: 230 points · 114 comments

How Notion handles concurrent editing with CRDTs

notion.com via typesanitizer · Lobsters · notion.com · 11 min

Software engineering · How-toCRDT · collaborative editing · rich-text concurrency

Matched interests: CRDTConcurrencyText Editors

Replacing a last-write-wins engine prone to data loss, Notion adopts a Replicated Growable Array CRDT and Peritext annotations for collaborative rich-text documents. To track text moving between separate database records during block splits, the system introduces text instances routed by binary search labels. A compact label encoding prevents excessive block queries while improving storage efficiency fivefold.

Lobsters: 15 points · 3 commentsComments

What Is Good Taste in Software? How to Develop It

Tejas Kumar · Tejas's Blog · Tejas Kumar · 42 min

Software engineering · Analysisdesign taste · accessibility standards · AI coding agents

Matched interests: Web AccessibilityAPI DesignWeb Development

Discerning software quality is a trainable discipline rather than an innate trait, rooted in tacitly evaluating work against external standards rather than personal bias. Cross-referencing cognitive research on expert intuition with WebAIM's accessibility audits, Tejas Kumar argues that surging automated code generation makes external standards vital, as models cannot supply the tacit judgment required to review their own output.

Software sandboxing: The basics (2025)

mococa · Lobsters · blog.emilua.org · 39 min

Software engineering · How-tosoftware sandboxing · seccomp and Landlock · Capsicum

Matched interests: CryptographyCybersecurityNetworking

Treating discretionary privilege dropping as a distributed systems problem avoids the expanded kernel attack surfaces introduced by Linux user namespaces. Drawing on implementation work for the Emilua runtime, the approach enforces isolation strictly at the process level, replacing ambient system authority with an actor model that communicates exclusively via message passing across three primitives.

Hacker News: 97 points · 16 commentsComments

An undercover Google analyst infiltrated a notorious supply-chain hacking gang

Andy Greenberg, WIRED.com · Ars Technica · 9 min

Software engineering · Reportedsoftware supply-chain attacks · Google threat intelligence · cybercrime arrests

Matched interests: CybersecurityCryptographyHardware Hacking

Operating inside TeamPCP's twelve-person core chat, a Mandiant operative monitors a campaign that breached over a thousand organizations using poisoned open-source dependencies and a self-spreading worm. The clandestine access allows researchers to revoke stolen cloud credentials, intercept an AI-generated zero-day authentication bypass, and trace an administrator's operational security blunders to a personal Google Drive account.

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Adversarial examples for fast hash functions

thomasahle.com via pkhuong · Lobsters · thomasahle.com · 11 min

Software engineering · Analysishash collisions · universal hashing · Lean proofs

Matched interests: Bloom FiltersCryptographyPerformance Profiling

Auditing popular algorithms from SMhasher with Claude Fable reveals that widely deployed non-cryptographic routines collapse at least 20 bits below expected collision bounds. The investigation uncovers seed-independent pairs and key-free multicollisions across dozens of implementations while checking published mathematical proofs in Lean. Benchmarks demonstrate that provably universal alternatives like ChainHash match heuristic throughput, debunking the assumption that speed requires sacrificing formal guarantees.

Hacker News: 6 points · 0 commentsLobsters: 7 points · 2 commentsComments

USWDS is dead. Long live USWDS

matthenry.fyi via kirch · tilde news · matthenry.fyi · 8 min

Internet & web · First personUS Web Design System · AI takeover of OSS · design systems governance

Matched interests: Design SystemsWeb AccessibilityWeb Development

Following the abrupt removal of its last human maintainers by TTS leadership, the U.S. Web Design System repository falls under automated management. Autonomous AI tools flood the project with unvetted architectural decision records, machine-written pull requests, and scripted issue closures that bypass standard accessibility reviews. In response, departed engineers and civic technologists fork the pre-automation codebase to Codeberg to preserve the federal design infrastructure.

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Zephyr RTOS Ported to WebAssembly

beriberikix/zephyr-wasm-soc · tyler's Top Finds on Scour Today · github.com · 7 min

Software engineering · CodeWebAssembly · Zephyr RTOS · Asyncify safepoints

Matched interests: WASMWebAssemblyWebRTC

Running freestanding in wasm32 linear memory rather than a simulator, zephyr-wasm treats the runtime as a real architecture with Binaryen's Asyncify handling thread context switches. Post-link safepoints inserted into loop bodies enable preemption and deterministic virtual-time execution across Node and Wasmtime. The implementation passes thirty-two kernel semaphore tests and runs an interactive shell inside a browser Web Worker.

Hacker News: 2 points · 2 commentsComments

The Millennium Problems for Biology

artninja1988 · Hacker News: Front Page · millenniumproblems.bio · 8 min

Science & spaceopen problems in biology · protein design · origins of life

Matched interests: BioinformaticsCellular AutomataScience

Twelve benchmark challenges establish quantifiable, falsifiable milestones for the next era of biological engineering. The concrete criteria span reversibly vitrifying adult mice with 99% viability, synthesizing nucleic acids directly from arbitrary peptide sequences via reverse translatases, and building living cells operating on quadruplet codons. Each problem sets strict empirical thresholds to push molecular biology past nature's existing Pareto frontier.

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Mathematical Billiards (2024)

vismit2000 · Hacker News: Front Page · structures.uni-heidelberg.de · 14 min

Science & space · Analysismathematical billiards · dynamical systems · shader visualization

Matched interests: Spatial ComputingCellular AutomataStatic Analysis

Dynamical models of particle reflections inside convex tables and exterior tangent maps expose complex singularity structures around regular polygons. While Euclidean systems yield uniform tilings for only three regular shapes, extending outer reflection to hyperbolic space uncovers an infinite family of tables where all trajectories remain periodic. Interactive software pinpoints the exact side lengths that eliminate chaos, enabling formal geometric proofs.

Hacker News: 17 points · 3 commentsComments

Neurosurgeon recounts a ‘a miracle of biology’

Dr. Barbra Lazio · Popular Science · popsci.com · 6 min

Science & space · First personneurosurgery · medical memoir · end-of-life consent

Matched interests: NeuroscienceScience WritingJournaling

When cardiac blood thinners trigger a massive subdural hematoma in an unconscious sixty-year-old patient, surgeon Barbara Lazio operates without family consent despite grim odds of functional recovery. Early in his prolonged hospital stay, the intubated patient writes "I want to die" on a whiteboard, haunting Lazio until months of progress lead him to independent living and an overdue word of thanks.

Prompts Aren't Real

mcfunley · Hacker News: Front Page · evaluation.club · 12 min

AI & ML · Analysisagent reliability · LLM evals · prompt optimization

Matched interests: Prompt EngineeringLLM EvalsAI Agents

Building production agents exposes how easily models derail, from flooding structured JSON fields with runaway monologues to breaking under new context. Rather than hand-crafting instructions, teams should generate adversarial pass^k test suites and let genetic Pareto algorithms optimize the text automatically. Domain experts deliver far more value curating labeled evaluation datasets than drafting phrasing that machines can iteratively tune.

Hacker News: 113 points · 54 commentsComments

A Continual learning model trained from scratch on 8GB VRAM laptop with batch-1 stream of data

github.com via Yogthos · Lobsters · github.com · 21 min

AI & ML · Codecontinual learning · mixture of experts · local LLM training

Matched interests: Local LLMKnowledge GraphsMemory Allocators

A byte-level language model trains continually from scratch on a single 8GB GPU by storing expert weights on disk and paging active working sets directly into VRAM. To combat catastrophic forgetting across sequential single-stream data, running the shared trunk at one-tenth the experts' learning rate retains 99.84% of unread subject knowledge. Capacity grows dynamically by recombining trained units into speculative experts and pruning those left unaddressed.

Hacker News: 61 points · 12 commentsLobsters: 1 points · 0 commentsComments

ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector

buchodi.com via jrgtt · Hacker News: Front Page · buchodi.com · 6 min

AI & ML · First personad tracking cookies · third-party pixel SDKs · OpenAI privacy

Matched interests: Digital PrivacyObservabilityWebCodecs

Network traffic audits reveal OpenAI tracks ChatGPT users across external websites using a cross-site cookie configured with SameSite=None. Embedded pixels on participating advertiser domains transmit the identifier back to OpenAI alongside data scraped directly from form fields and tag managers. Verified across more than nine hundred advertiser pixels, the collector persists even when users explicitly reject marketing consent.

Hacker News: 717 points · 382 commentsComments

50 Songs That Explain America

James Parker · The Atlantic · theatlantic.com · 41 min

Culture & arts · AnalysisAmerican popular music · song criticism · immigrant perspective

Matched interests: MusicProcedural MusicCulture

Thirty years after moving to the United States, an English writer assembles fifty intuitive track studies to probe the buried longings of the national unconscious. The survey cuts across genres, tracing restless reinvention from Eddie Money's escapist pop chords and Linda Ronstadt's buoyant resilience to the hypnotic Mississippi hill-country blues of Junior Kimbrough.

A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W

NaOH · Hacker News: Front Page · lithub.com · 12 min

History · Analysisletter W history · linguistics · Old English

Matched interests: WritingTypographyWriting Tools

Originating as a sixth-century Frankish scribal fix to record Germanic names in Latin, the doubled character eventually displaces Old English's runic wynn. To avoid visually confusing rows of quill strokes on parchment, medieval copyists swap adjacent vowels to produce spellings like wolf and wonder. The consonant's lip-rounding articulation also drags following vowels backward in the mouth, permanently breaking historical rhymes between pairs like hand and wand.

Hacker News: 158 points · 69 commentsComments

Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy

Maria Popova · Brain Pickings · themarginalian.org · 5 min

Culture & arts · Analysisinvisible creative labor · Leo Lionni · creativity and solitude

Matched interests: Creative WritingCreative AutomationGenerative Art

Deep mental effort often masquerades as idleness, whether a physicist formulates black hole logic on a treadmill or a daydreaming poet sits quietly on a train. Leo Lionni’s 1968 fable *Frederick* illustrates this hidden preparation through a field mouse who stockpiles light and verse while peers gather winter food. Like plants taking subterranean root in winter, imaginative insight requires stillness long before producing visible fruit.

Resident Evil 4 (GameCube) – complete byte-identical decompilation to C/C++

metrofun · Hacker News: Front Page · github.com · 5 min

Games · Codedecompilation · GameCube reverse engineering · compiler matching

Matched interests: Code GenerationCompilersGame Modding

Targeting Capcom's 2004 GameCube debug prototype, a reverse-engineering project reconstructs over 555,000 lines of C and C++ across 15,641 functions. Compiling with original toolchains from SN Systems and Metrowerks CodeWarrior reproduces the main executable and all 114 runtime overlays byte for byte. Internal struct layouts and original C++ symbols are recovered through leftover debugging tables, assert strings, and matched PlayStation 2 type data.

Hacker News: 121 points · 68 commentsComments

Custom home server built from spare parts

sotilrac · Hacker News: Front Page · asmat.ca · 8 min

Hardware · First personhomelab NAS build · ZFS RAIDZ2 · ESP32 status display

Matched interests: Self-hostingSelf-HostedCloud Computing

Bolting a 3D-printed ABS chassis extension onto a compact Zotac mini PC transforms a decommissioned GTX 1070 gaming box into a six-bay, 29-terabyte RAIDZ2 appliance. An ESP32-S3 soldered directly to USB connector pads powers a 1.47-inch front touchscreen displaying real-time system metrics. After ditching TrueNAS over missing Wi-Fi and legacy Nvidia driver support, the machine runs Kubuntu with ZFS and a bespoke amber dashboard.

Hacker News: 82 points · 35 commentsComments

Hannah Allgood, 2026 Run Rabbit Run 100 Mile Champion, Interview

Meghan Hicks · iRunFar.com · 16 min

Outdoors & lifestyle · Interviewultrarunning · trail racing · race strategy

Matched interests: Trail RunningHikingRunning Analytics

Setting a course record through torrential mountain rain, ultrarunner Hannah Allgood details the disciplined pacing and mental strategies behind her hundred-mile victory. She avoids split times from her crew, relying on written affirmations stashed in a plastic baggie and assuming rivals trail right behind her. Battling freezing mud at high elevation, she counters the elements with rapid gear changes and warm ramen.

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What Sun Got Wrong

chmaynard · Hacker News: Front Page · bcantrill.dtrace.org · 4 min

History · AnalysisSun Microsystems · Silicon Valley culture · startup operations

Matched interests: StartupsTech HistoryOpen Source

Nostalgia for Sun Microsystems obscures an operational failure: the company grew bored with the basic mechanics of doing business. When a 2005 cloud startup running OpenSolaris tried buying server hardware, Sun repeatedly ignored the customer, losing the deal to an attentive Dell account executive. Years later, that botched transaction shapes Oxide, founded by a former Sun employee alongside that very Dell salesman.

Hacker News: 8 points · 0 commentsLobsters: 10 points · 1 commentsComments

Why can't error-tolerant parsers also be easy to write?

Joshua Barretto's Blog · blog.jsbarretto.com · 11 min

Software engineering · Analysisparser combinators · error recovery · chumsky

Matched interests: Parser DesignCompilersRust

Existing Rust parser combinators neglect invalid input, forcing language designers to choose between tedious hand-written parsers and cryptic failure messages. The Chumsky library addresses this gap by making error recovery a first-class combinator primitive, automatically tracking source spans and producing partial syntax trees for downstream compiler stages. Dogfooded in the Tao programming language, its declarative design generates rich batch diagnostics with minimal boilerplate.

Who undoes the undoers

Marcin Wichary · Unsung · unsung.aresluna.org · 4 min

Software engineering · Analysisundo history · interface design · clipboard managers

Matched interests: HistoryComputing HistoryInternet History

Standard undo stacks instantly evaporate when an edit is made mid-history, mirroring the data loss of consecutive unpasted clipboard cuts. While additive version histories solve this by marching forward, Photoshop's non-linear history avoids stack collapses entirely. A balanced interface preserves abandoned editing branches in a visual display while keeping keyboard navigation strictly linear.