Playing Santa Does Things to a Man. What It Did to Bob Rutan Was Even Stranger
Aaron Richter Santa Claus was nursing a beer at an uptown dive bar. The neighborhood was gentrifying, and management seemed eager to accommodate—there was scented soap in the bathroom and twenty-two-dollar lobster rolls. But the place couldn’t outrun the regulars. They drank tumblers of Irish whiskey filled to the brim, illicit pours they secured with […]
Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
I’ve been working on a personal project recently, rewriting an old jQuery + Django project into SvelteKit. The main work is translating the UI templates into idiomatic SvelteKit while maintaining the original styling. This includes things like using semantic HTML instead of div-spamming, not wrapping divs in divs in divs, and replacing bootstrap with minimal […]
Annual Production of 1/72 (22mm) scale plastic soldiers, 1958-2025
It is often said that this hobby is currently going through a ‘Golden Age’, with new sets appearing all the time and a record number of manufacturers satisfying demand. So we thought it would be interesting to actually quantify that, and let the statistics show just how the hobby has fared over the few decades […]
AI is bringing old nuclear plants out of retirement
The Palisades Nuclear Generating Station is nestled between sand dunes on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. It shut down for financial reasons in 2022. Three years later, it’s on the cusp of reopening, with hundreds of workers streaming through its security barriers every day. Palisades is on track to restart in early 2026. When […]
We built another object storage
A Crowded Market, But An Unsolved Problem Object storage is the backbone of modern data infrastructure. AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, MinIO, Ceph, newer players like Tigris Data—the market is saturated. So why build another one? Because the fundamental assumptions behind these systems are shifting. High performance is no longer optional—but having high performance available […]
The state of the kernel Rust experiment
The ability to write kernel code in Rust was explicitly added as an experiment — if things did not go well, Rust would be removed again. At the 2025 Maintainers Summit, a session was held to evaluate the state of that experiment, and to decide whether the time had come to declare the result to […]
Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. Can you help? Email paris AT paris.id.au (and read on for […]
Poor Johnny still won’t encrypt
The state of email encryption This title is an obvious nod to The 1999 article Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt, and The 2006 article Why Johnny Still Can’t Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of Email Encryption Software. To encrypt email in 1998 you’d run GnuPG from a terminal, importing the recipient’s public key into your local keyring […]
Show HN: Claude Code recipes for knowledge workers
Your Complete Guide to AI-Powered Productivity Version 1.0 — December 2025 This collection contains 100 practical recipes for using Claude Code to automate, accelerate, and enhance your professional work. Each recipe provides step-by-step instructions, ready-to-use prompts, and real-world examples that you can apply immediately. Whether you’re drafting emails, analyzing data, preparing presentations, or managing complex […]
OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI
12th December 2025 One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic’s new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just a folder with a Markdown file and some optional extra resources and scripts, so any LLM tool with the ability to navigate […]