top 50% hacker news stories for 2025-08-16

Good system design

https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-system-design/

1 year ago

957 upvotes – 390 comments

Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

https://scrollguard.app/

1 year ago

690 upvotes – 305 comments

Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

https://derwiki.medium.com/do-things-that-dont-scale-and-then-don-t-scale-9fd2cd7e2156

1 year ago

516 upvotes – 207 comments

PuTTY has a new website

https://putty.software/

1 year ago

506 upvotes – 283 comments

Toothpaste made with keratin may protect and repair damaged teeth: study

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/toothpaste-made-from-hair-provides-natural-root-to-repair-teeth

1 year ago

434 upvotes – 209 comments

OpenAI Progress

https://progress.openai.com

1 year ago

391 upvotes – 349 comments

Dicing an Onion, the Mathematically Optimal Way

https://pudding.cool/2025/08/onions/

1 year ago

359 upvotes – 148 comments

Candle Flame Oscillations as a Clock

https://cpldcpu.com/2025/08/13/candle-flame-oscillations-as-a-clock/

1 year ago

339 upvotes – 77 comments

Pfeilstorch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch

1 year ago

324 upvotes – 87 comments

Making Your Own Merchant Service Provider

https://voidfox.com/blog/payment_processor_fun_2025_making_your_own_msp/

1 year ago

268 upvotes – 174 comments

Traps to Developers

https://qouteall.fun/qouteall-blog/2025/Traps%20to%20Developers

1 year ago

256 upvotes – 107 comments

One person was able to claim 20M IPs

https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/MMCCEQKA4UPGGWFWEBWLYKHTYCAOQIZS/#MMCCEQKA4UPGGWFWEBWLYKHTYCAOQIZS

1 year ago

224 upvotes – 63 comments

Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz

https://treeform.github.io/devcompas/

1 year ago

211 upvotes – 110 comments

Eliminating JavaScript cold starts on AWS Lambda

https://goose.icu/lambda/

1 year ago

200 upvotes – 69 comments

Woz: 'I Am the Happiest Person'

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/08/15/woz-on-slashdot

1 year ago

186 upvotes – 113 comments

Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/volkswagen/367566/forget-netflix-volkswagen-locks-horsepower-behind-paid-subscription

1 year ago

186 upvotes – 312 comments

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/16/microsoft_windows_features_help_productivity/

1 year ago

185 upvotes – 204 comments

Best Practices for Building Agentic AI Systems

https://userjot.com/blog/best-practices-building-agentic-ai-systems

1 year ago

183 upvotes – 68 comments

Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator

http://www.technoblogy.com/show?2AON

1 year ago

182 upvotes – 126 comments

Guid Smash

https://www.guidsmash.com

1 year ago

180 upvotes – 70 comments

How Figma’s multiplayer technology works (2019)

https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/

1 year ago

176 upvotes – 54 comments

X-ray scans reveal Buddhist prayers inside tiny Tibetan scrolls

https://www.popsci.com/technology/tibetan-prayer-scroll-scans/

1 year ago

168 upvotes – 69 comments

Dyna – Logic Programming for Machine Learning

https://dyna.org/

1 year ago

163 upvotes – 21 comments

Apple's new Processor Trace instrument is incredible

https://victorwynne.com/processor-trace-instrument/

1 year ago

146 upvotes – 48 comments

Tversky Neural Networks

https://gonzoml.substack.com/p/tversky-neural-networks

1 year ago

131 upvotes – 12 comments

Oil states thwart agreement on plastics

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/global-plastics-treaty

1 year ago

128 upvotes – 108 comments

An IRC-Enabled Lawn Mower (2021)

https://jotunheimr.idlerpg.net/users/jotun/lawnmower/

1 year ago

124 upvotes – 26 comments

Living with Williams Syndrome, the 'opposite of autism' (2014)

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-26888280

1 year ago

116 upvotes – 102 comments

Princeton NuEnergy's battery recycling tech recovers 97% of lithium-ion material

https://www.energy-reporters.com/environment/97-battery-recycling-breakthrough-princeton-nuenergy-opens-first-u-s-commercial-facility-cutting-costs-38-and-slashing-environmental-impact/

1 year ago

111 upvotes – 34 comments

Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/seagate-spins-up-a-raid-on-a-counterfeit-hard-drive-workshop-authorities-read-criminals-writes-while-they-spill-the-beans

1 year ago

110 upvotes – 57 comments

A Lisp in 99LOC

https://github.com/Robert-van-Engelen/tinylisp

1 year ago

108 upvotes – 26 comments

Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-library-operator-arrested-study-canceled-for-330k-members-250814/

1 year ago

108 upvotes – 61 comments

Office on HP-UX and Unix

https://www.openpa.net/hp-ux_office.html

1 year ago

102 upvotes – 54 comments

Show HN: Lue – Terminal eBook Reader with Text-to-Speech

https://github.com/superstarryeyes/lue

1 year ago

99 upvotes – 23 comments

Rust in 2025: Targeting foundational software

https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2025/03/10/rust-2025-intro/

1 year ago

98 upvotes – 107 comments

Netflix Revamps Tudum's CQRS Architecture with Raw Hollow In-Memory Object Store

https://www.infoq.com/news/2025/08/netflix-tudum-cqrs-raw-hollow/

1 year ago

92 upvotes – 87 comments

A Visual Exploration of Gaussian Processes (2019)

https://distill.pub/2019/visual-exploration-gaussian-processes/

1 year ago

90 upvotes – 1 comments

The Cutaway Illustrations of Fred Freeman (2016)

https://5wgraphicsblog.com/2016/10/24/the-cutaway-illustrations-of-fred-freeman/

1 year ago

90 upvotes – 11 comments

Show HN: unsafehttp – tiny web server from scratch in C, running on an orange pi

http://unsafehttp.benren.au

1 year ago

87 upvotes – 52 comments

Ask HN: Do you still bookmark websites?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44925438

1 year ago

85 upvotes – 141 comments

When Fascism Comes Wrapped in the Flag and Carrying a Cross

https://wisewolfmedia.substack.com/p/it-cant-happen-here-sinclair-lewis

1 year ago

85 upvotes – 61 comments

Monday – A personality experiment

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67ec3b78892481918c89067962526695-monday

1 year ago

83 upvotes – 95 comments

Flock Reports to Police If It Thinks Car Movement Patterns "Suspicious"

https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/surveillance-company-flock-now-using-ai-to-report-us-to-police-if-it-thinks-our-movement-patterns-are-suspicious?initms_aff=nat&initms_chan=pm&utm_medium=pm&initms=nat-dig-pm-awr-int-fb-social_feed-BZ30%2B-nsp-feed_SurveillanceCompanyFlockNow_20250813&utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=nat-dig-pm-awr-int&utm_content=fb-social_feed-BZ30%2B-nsp-feed_SurveillanceCompanyFlockNow_20250813&ms_aff=nat&ms_chan=pm&ms=nat-dig-pm-awr-int-fb-social_feed-BZ30%2B-nsp-feed_SurveillanceCompanyFlockNow_20250813&utm_term=pm-6748111603595-6838690309595&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0BMABhZGlkAAAGOEHIQhsBHntU-vN-zAj7VllTEkKZxwc7W3NxYS6d6L4_XI4idiZnhTYsnLyqFCbuQ6Mo_aem_dWflVIAJNk7sTdRRfrq5mg&utm_id=6544987402995

1 year ago

81 upvotes – 11 comments

Open office is giving you secondhand ADHD

https://floustate.com/blog/open-office-secondhand-adhd

1 year ago

81 upvotes – 79 comments

Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/tiny-removable-mini-ssd-could-eventually-be-a-big-deal-for-gaming-handhelds/

1 year ago

78 upvotes – 109 comments

Guile bindings for Sway window manager

https://github.com/ebeem/guile-swayer

1 year ago

77 upvotes – 9 comments

VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62weyp4qqgo

1 year ago

75 upvotes – 1 comments

Apple rumored to be working on a smart home operating system version

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/16/apple-working-on-all-new-operating-system/

1 year ago

74 upvotes – 88 comments

8x19 Text Mode Font Origins

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/8x19-text-mode-font-origins/

1 year ago

73 upvotes – 29 comments

How to free up and automatically manage disk space for WSL

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-free-up-and-automatically-manage-disk-space-for-wsl-on-windows-1011/

1 year ago

67 upvotes – 54 comments

Starlink announced a $5/month plan that gives unlimited usage at 500kbits/s

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1956499838809346279

1 year ago

63 upvotes – 47 comments

Blue-collar jobs are gaining popularity as AI threatens office work

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/ai-which-jobs-are-skilled-trades-protected-what-to-know-rcna223249

1 year ago

62 upvotes – 117 comments
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