Testing Postgres race conditions with synchronization barriers
Mikael Lirbank — February 2026 Without race condition tests, every possible race condition in your system is one refactor away from hitting production. Synchronization barriers let you write those tests with confidence. What a race condition looks like You have a function that credits an account. It reads the current balance, adds an amount, and […]
State of Show HN: 2025
Macroeconomics, DIY Hardware and AI-Driven Voting Pools I downloaded every Show HN post since the site was launched and ran them through a hierarchical topic model. I set out to discover what the Hacker News community finds interesting but in the process I ended up uncovering macro-economic trends, evidence of voting rings/fraud, and subtle shifts […]
Use Protocols, Not Services
Published on 15 February 2026 The Internet is almost anonymous and privacy-preserving by design. I mean, unless some administrator actively tries to track you, there is no built-in identity layer. What breaks both properties is the centralization of communication onto closed platforms, where identification becomes possible either by the hosting company itself, or by governments […]
Don’t Trust the Salt: AI Summarization, Multilingual Safety, and LLM Guardrails
“The devil is in the details,” they say. And so is the beauty, the thinking, the “but …”. Maybe that’s why the phrase “elevator pitch” gives me a shiver. It might have started back at AMD, when I was a young, aspiring engineer, joining every “Women in This or That” club I could find. I […]
I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
Feb 14, 2026 I’m sitting on a lānai in a hotel in Waikiki beach, writing this article, and wondering if the job I am starting nine days from now will be my last. This is a unique situation for me in a few ways—I’ve never been to Hawaii before, I think the five minutes it’s […]
WebMCP Proposal
WebMCP Abstract The WebMCP API enables web applications to provide JavaScript-based tools to AI agents. Status of this document Table of Contents 1 Introduction 2 Terminology 3 Security and privacy considerations 4 Accessibility considerations 5 API 5.1 Extensions to the Navigator Interface 5.2 ModelContext Interface 5.2.1 ModelContextOptions Dictionary 5.2.2 ModelContextTool Dictionary 5.2.3 ModelContextClient Interface 6 […]
How to take a photo with scotch tape (lensless imaging) [video]
Show HN: Simple org-mode web adapter
A lightweight local web app for browsing and editing Org files. The app is implemented as a single Python server (main.py) plus one HTML template (templates/index.html) and one stylesheet (static/style.css). It scans a notes directory for .org files and renders a 3-pane UI. ⚠️ There is no authentication or encryption, only run this service on […]
Lindenmayer.jl: Defining recursive patterns in Julia
This is a simple package that can make LSystems. It uses Luxor.jl to draw them. An LSystem, or Lindenmayer system, is a set of rules that can define recursive patterns. These were introduced and developed in 1968 by Aristid Lindenmayer, a Hungarian theoretical biologist and botanist at the University of Utrecht. Lindenmayer used LSystems to […]
What Your Bluetooth Devices Reveal About You
Building Bluehood, a Bluetooth scanner that reveals what information we leak just by having Bluetooth enabled on our devices. If you’ve read much of this blog, you’ll know I have a thing for privacy. Whether it’s running my blog over Tor, blocking ads network-wide with AdGuard, or keeping secrets out of my dotfiles with Proton […]