Hacker News: built on more than good software

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Hacker News: built on more than good software

10 April 2026

Every developer who sees HN thinks, “I could build that in a weekend.” And they’re right; they absolutely could. In fact, I’d assume they’re pretty shite at their jobs if they couldn’t. What they couldn’t build in a weekend // month // year // probably ever, is the thing that makes Hacker News actually work. And that ~thing is not the software.

There’s this concept called googlyness. Legend has it, if you want to work at Google, you need a certain set of traits, apparently referred to as googlyness.

To build the next Hacker News, and make a success of it, you’re going to need hackernewsness, something possibly far more elusive than googlyness.

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design, technology, trends

Say nothing to Houston: decades old bug found in Apollo guidance system code

9 April 2026

JUXT, a software consultancy based in the United Kingdom, report discovering a bug in the code of the Apollo Guidance Computer, nearly fifty-four years after the last Apollo Moon flight:

The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) is one of the most scrutinised codebases in history. Thousands of developers have read it. Academics have published papers on its reliability. Emulators run it instruction by instruction. We found a bug in it that had been missed for fifty-seven years: a resource lock in the gyro control code that leaks on an error path, silently disabling the guidance platform’s ability to realign.

The guidance systems were installed in both the command module, and lunar module (the vessel that landed on the Moon), of the Apollo craft.

Thankfully, the bug didn’t manifest itself during the Apollo missions. There’s enough happening during a flight to the Moon without wanting to worry about patches for software bugs.

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science, space exploration, technology

The Indie Internet Index, another new directory of independent websites

8 April 2026

Hot on the heels of Monday’s link to indie/independent blog post aggregator Blogosphere, comes the Indie Internet Index. The importance of these sorts of resources cannot be understated at a time when the independent, open web, is under increasing threat.

Yahoo, cornerstone of pre-2000 old web, is bouncing back

7 April 2026

Nilay Patel, writing for The Verge:

After a long series of mergers and spinouts and an extremely odd moment where it was part of Verizon, Yahoo is once again an independent, privately held company. And it has big properties in sports and finance, and, against all odds, email, where it’s growing with young people. Gen Z loves Yahoo Mail, people. You heard it here first.

If we want a return — at least in part — to the ethos of the so-called “old web”, a period — debatably — spanning the mid-nineties through to the advent of social media, circa 2008 or so, then Yahoo getting back on its feet is surely a prerequisite. It seems strange to think now, twenty-five plus years later, that prior to 2000, Yahoo’s search engine was just about the only player in town.

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technology, trends, web history

Blogosphere: an algorithm free blog post aggregator

6 April 2026

The new (to me at least) aggregator of blog posts aptly and cleverly titled Blogosphere, is the creation of engineer and writer Ramkarthik Krishnamurthy:

But it’s really about something bigger: rebuilding a thriving community of independent writers and thinkers who share their thoughts freely, without waiting for an algorithm to decide who gets to see them.

A list of recent blog posts can also be viewed in a more simple text style format. In addition, both listings of posts have their own RSS feeds.

Blogosphere joins other fine IndieWeb/SmallWeb blog post aggregators including Blogs Are Back, Blogroll Club, Blogroll, Feedle, powRSS, Oceania Web Atlas, and ooh.directory, to name but a few.

Britons social media use declines, but not because they now write blogs

6 April 2026

Data compiled by Ofcom, being the Office of Communications, Britain’s communications regulator, says 49% of adult social media users now post content, compared to 61% in 2024.

The slow down in publishing content cannot, however, be attributed to an IndieWeb/SmallWeb led switch-over to personal websites or blogs. Unfortunately.

Rather, British social media users are concerned old, long forgotten, posts may surface in the future, potentially causing embarrassment, or hamper their employment prospects, should a recruiter view an old post in the wrong context.

Australia facing an AI led job ‘wipe out’ that no one is prepared for

1 April 2026

The latest round of redundancies in the tech sector could well be a result of excess hiring in recent years, even though they are being attributed to greater uptake of AI technologies.

Then again, AI may be the precisely why there have been so many job losses. And there could be more, much more, to come.

This is the sentiment being echoed by a number of IT professionals who are working with AI, including Shaon Diwarkar, a Sydney based Australian entrepreneur and software developer.

Diwarkar is the founder, and sole employee, of InboxAPI, an email app for AI agents, which itself makes use of numerous AI agents including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, to carry out much of the company’s work.

People are saying “adopt AI or die”. If a large number of enterprises can be operated in the same fashion as InboxAPI, I can see why. Companies previously employing half-a-dozen staff, maybe more, could well be able to get by with one person, working in conjunction with several AI agents.

The AI future is now; we all need to start thinking about it.

Over hiring, not AI, behind recent tech industry redundancies

31 March 2026

Julian Fell, Teresa Tan, and Joshua Byrd, writing for writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

“It’s just gravity,” says George Double, a Sydney-based recruiter who has been working with several engineers who were laid off from Block. Block and Atlassian — another company that cited AI as justification for heavy lay-offs — were “bloated”, he says, and needed to downsize regardless of the impacts of AI. Both companies were paying well-above-average salaries for engineers and hired heavily during the COVID years.

Over hiring in recent years, leaving some companies overstaffed, may be the real reason companies including Atlassian, Amazon, and Block, have made large numbers of employees redundant.

Of course, no one wants to admit that, particularly to the workers facing retrenchment. Saying “advances in technology” sounds a whole lot better than “we should never have hired you.”

But then again…

US court finds Meta, Google, failed to warn users of the dangers of their platforms

27 March 2026

Jonathan Vanian, writing for CNBC:

Jurors ultimately ruled in favor of the plaintiff, who claimed that Meta and YouTube’s negligence played a “substantial factor” in causing mental health-related harms. Compensatory damages were assessed at $3 million, with Meta on the hook for 70% and YouTube the remaining 30%. Punitive damages amount to an additional $3 million, with $2.1 million to be paid by Meta and $900,000 by YouTube.

Meta — who all up have been fined just over five million dollars (American) — plans to appeal the judgement. Not on account of the speeding ticket size of the fine (for a company with Meta’s capitalisation that is), but because they “respectfully disagree” with the verdict.

A separate Wall Street Journal article (pay wall) suggested the Los Angeles court decision may trigger numerous legal claims against social media companies, potentially presenting them with an existential dilemma.

An existential dilemma? Can anyone else see these organisations going through some of self reckoning, and changing their ways? No, neither can I.

Do you enjoy forty-nine megabytes of extraneous data with your news?

26 March 2026

Shubham Bose found the publishers of some news websites — often reputable outlets — are forcing readers to download, in some cases, an additional forty-nine megabytes of needless scripts and data with their articles. This might explain why some of us need to keep our phones charging (a no-no I know) while reading the news:

When you open a website on your phone, it’s like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.

We need a browser with an all-scripts kill switch, such as the Quiche Browser (presently for iPhone only), which has the option to include a JavaScript (JS) kill switch on its tool bar.

Sure, we can sift through our browser settings and disable JS, but a one click button, on the interface, is a more elegant solution. Kill switches shouldn’t stop at JS though, give us more. How about AI slop, and auto-play video, for starters.

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