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Software Engineering

Software Engineering news — Monday 19 October 2026

100 stories from 4 sources, every one in English. Each links to its publisher.

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  1. WhatsApp's help pages hid LLM instructions: dont recommend a regulator
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://redact.dev/blog/whatsapp-help-pages-hidden-ai-instructions Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50159341 Points: 686 # Comments: 201

  2. How abliterated models can get you pwned
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://projectdiscovery.io/research/how-abliterated-models-can-get-you-pwned Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50159245 Points: 184 # Comments: 100

  3. Intermediary between public and private members
    USlobste.rs

    Say I were to have a struct Foo { pub public: Bar, restricted: Qux } where ‘restricted’ is some member variable which I want to be able to get, but not set, from outside of the struct methods. Normally, I would write a getter method impl…

  4. An ad-free Android TV
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://cretezy.com/2026/ad-free-android-tv Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50158942 Points: 321 # Comments: 129

  5. Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://dri.es/state-of-drupal-presentation-september-2026 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50158408 Points: 110 # Comments: 113

  6. OpenBSD 8.0 release will have inteldrm/radeondrm/amdgpu drivers from Linux 6.18
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://bsd.network/@brynet/117407035545900963 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50158138 Points: 169 # Comments: 39

  7. Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://josie.lol/blog/linux-rtx-spark Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50158100 Points: 209 # Comments: 99

  8. One Hash Bloom Filters
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://calabro.io/ohbf Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50157865 Points: 114 # Comments: 12

  9. The Netherlands is building its own Linux OS to break free from Microsoft
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  10. In Context
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  11. 2026 is an exciting year for the Rust compiler (and me)
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  12. What is this worth?
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  13. Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-3 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50155245 Points: 206 # Comments: 80

  14. Android apps running native on macOS
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://github.com/kksimp/Mac.apk Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154624 Points: 291 # Comments: 156

  15. Making all divisions slower to fix a bug in 0.000000000000000000542% of cases
    USlobste.rs

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  16. MiniMax M3.1 Flash
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://www.minimax.io/blog/minimax-m31f Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154540 Points: 497 # Comments: 209

  17. I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://po-ru.com/2026/10/18/why-im-no-longer-updating-this-repository Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154518 Points: 379 # Comments: 359

  18. Finding a home amidst the wreckage
    USlobste.rs

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  19. DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order
    USHacker News Front Page

    https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-21447.pdf Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154244 Points: 510 # Comments: 434

  20. Dungeon Generation in the Gnomish Mines of NetHack
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://www.boristhebrave.com/2026/10/18/dungeon-generation-in-the-gnomish-mines-of-nethack/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154109 Points: 127 # Comments: 16

  21. Degraded availability for GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages and Webhooks
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/8tzbpcnl75jp Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50153934 Points: 138 # Comments: 109

  22. One Hash Bloom Filters
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  23. Removing a Type Assertion with Object.assign
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  24. Ukraine claims first drone evacuation of wounded soldier
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://www.nbcnews.com/world/ukraine/ukraine-first-drone-evacuation-wounded-soldier-frontlines-hexacopter-rcna604310 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50153664 Points: 374 # Comments: 277

  25. CERN and Mistral join forces to accelerate AI for science
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://home.cern/cern-and-mistral-join-forces-to-accelerate-ai-for-science/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50153630 Points: 286 # Comments: 55

  26. Code is clay now
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://www.albertodenia.com/writing/code-is-clay-now Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50153531 Points: 176 # Comments: 115

  27. Wine ported to OpenBSD
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  28. Maybe There Was an Egg Cartel After All
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/10/18/egg-prices-conspiracy-affordability-issue-01100411 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50152970 Points: 142 # Comments: 101

  29. Hanami, Why?: Model Citizens
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  30. A5 v1.0 | A5
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  31. Maxwell: A new kind of model that sits between code and hardware
    USHacker News Front Page

    Hi HN, I'm Gal from doubleAI. We've built Maxwell, a new kind of frontier model we call a Code Execution Model. It sits between your code and the hardware. No humans in the loop! Maxwell makes the code run faster as it runs, without ever…

  32. Plex vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild to drop a cryptominer
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: http://www.boredhackerblog.info/2026/10/plex-vulnerabilities-being-exploited-in.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50152321 Points: 154 # Comments: 75

  33. Making dns_erlang Fast: Binary Tricks for the BEAM
    USlobste.rs

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  34. Borrow Checking Zero-Cost Cyclic Mutability
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  35. Show HN: Qwen3-4B with the AI writing tics trained out
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://100toolkit.com/blog/deslop-model/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151928 Points: 128 # Comments: 95

  36. Static Analysis for the Uninitialized
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  37. What are you doing this week?
    USlobste.rs

    What are you doing this week? Feel free to share! Keep in mind it’s OK to do nothing at all, too.

  38. The obscure trust looming over Anthropic's IPO
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-ipo-private-trust-188f41f7?st=RtdGHg&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151376 Points: 120 # Comments: 84

  39. Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?
    USHacker News Front Page

    I saw this LinkedIn post from a Meta engineer and it resonated with me: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ali-hamie_im-an-engineer-at-m... > I'm an engineer at Meta and I never felt this uncomfortable doing my job. I'm writing code these days…

  40. Let's Encrypt is adding two additional remote perspectives for domain validation
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/lets-encrypt-is-adding-two-additional-remote-perspectives-for-domain-validation/252166 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50150809 Points: 246 # Comments: 77

  41. Documents: Police officer gave her Flock login to her ICE agent husband
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://www.wjcl.com/article/savannah-police-officer-ice-agent-flock-access/74135816 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50150750 Points: 201 # Comments: 104

  42. Timestral: Mistral release time-series foundation models
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://mistral.ai/news/timestral/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50150434 Points: 556 # Comments: 104

  43. Way to Play Super Mario 64: On Apple Vision Pro
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://www.pagetable.com/303 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50150214 Points: 189 # Comments: 82

  44. What Is Gridifcation
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://musicalform.substack.com/p/what-is-gridifcation Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50150163 Points: 408 # Comments: 201

  45. I built a drone with only one motor [video]
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndftcft6XhU Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50150089 Points: 619 # Comments: 139

  46. Tor VPN Beta: What we've learned building our own VPN for Android from scratch
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  47. The 7.3 kernel has been released
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  48. Beginning of the Ende (a community Deno fork)
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  49. A Bazel Bard
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  50. Crawlers, floods and fleets: a year of keeping our digital collections open
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  51. Programming Language Fundamentals in Agda
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  52. Tmux and Claude Code: Sessions, Send-Keys, and the Ceiling
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://crystl.dev/guides/tmux-for-ai-agents/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50148855 Points: 113 # Comments: 78

  53. Composite objects and C++26 the std::polymorphic type
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  54. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max)
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v4-1-flash-1017 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50148452 Points: 138 # Comments: 46

  55. Why is GitOps so good?
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  56. Efficient Extraction for Effectful E-graphs
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  57. A response to claims about flatpak being insecure
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  58. Robust Function Calling for LLM Agents Under Interface Drift
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.23342v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-augmented language-model agents rely on interface text: tool descriptions, argument schemas, and the candidate tool list shown at inference time. These interfaces often change after…

  59. A Theoretical Analysis of Test-Driven Code Generation
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2602.06098v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Code assistants are increasingly utilized in test-driven software development, yet the theoretical mechanisms behind their environment-interaction strategies remain underexplored. We…

  60. Between Spoilers and Guesswork: Avoiding Over-Specification in Coding Benchmarks
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.22760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarks drive AI progress, but are hampered by task under-specification and over-specification. Task under-specification causes guesswork, where solutions have to make things up, or…

  61. EnterpriseSynth: Zero-Execution SFT and Evaluation Data from OpenAPI Specs
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.22412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using large language model agents require substantial training and evaluation data, yet collecting execution traces from enterprise APIs is often unsafe, expensive, or infeasible because…

  62. Eliciting Specifications: When Does Interactive Clarification Help?
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.22382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs can generate Lean specifications from task descriptions, but those descriptions are often underspecified or ambiguous and may omit verifier-relevant edge cases, yielding imperfect formal…

  63. Code Skill Server: A Large-Scale Search Engine for Code Generation Skills
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.23186v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills have proven to be an effective technique for improving agent ability on specific tasks, including software engineering, natural science, and mathematics. During such a process…

  64. Recall-Oriented Precise Binary-to-Source Function Matching
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.23546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Binary-to-source function matching supports software composition analysis by identifying reused third-party code, but existing embedding-based approaches restrict subsequent refinement to…

  65. The compact double category $\mathbf{Int}(\mathbf{Poly}_*)$ models control flow and data transformations
    USarXiv cs.PL (Programming)

    arXiv:2509.05462v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hasegawa showed that control flow in programming languages---while loops and if-then-else statements---can be modeled using traced cocartesian categories, such as the category Set_*…

  66. An Interactive GraphRAG Workspace for Reifying, Auditing, and Steering Conversational AI Memories
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.23559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conversational Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely employed in software engineering for code generation, debugging, and architectural design. However, as developers engage in…

  67. Efficient Program Reduction for Library Fuzzing Harnesses
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.23054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Library fuzzing harnesses translate generated inputs into API calls. When a complex harness triggers a crash, developers must determine whether the cause is a library defect or invalid…

  68. Cross-Dialect Generalization Without Retraining: Benchmarks and Evaluation of Schema-Derived Constrained Decoding for MLIR
    USarXiv cs.PL (Programming)

    arXiv:2607.18254v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) underlies modern ML compiler infrastructure (TensorFlow, JAX/StableHLO, PyTorch Inductor, IREE), yet appears only in trace amounts in…

  69. Towards Agentic Proof Harness Engineering
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.23241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal verification of real-world projects requires substantial manual effort, from specifying correctness properties to constructing the infrastructure needed to check them. We envision…

  70. Enjoying the Product but Not Joining the Builders: Investigating Why Students Don't Contribute to OSS
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.22664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-source software (OSS) participation provides students with authentic exposure to collaborative, real-world software development, yet active contributions remain limited. This short paper…

  71. FeatureFuzz: Treating Bug-prone Features as Core Primitives for Compiler Fuzzing
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2601.12360v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: CI/CD pipelines often execute build and test tasks with high privileges, making the compilation stage security-sensitive. In this setting, malicious pull requests may exploit carefully…

  72. Pluvio: Assembly Clone Search for Out-of-domain Architectures and Libraries through Transfer Learning and Conditional Variational Information Bottleneck
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2307.10631v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The practice of code reuse is crucial in software development for a faster and more efficient development lifecycle. In reality, however, code reuse practices lack proper control…

  73. AuditKIT: A Unified Evaluation Spine for Benchmarking, Judging, and Comparing Large Language Models and Agentic Systems
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.22511v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluating language models and agents requires combining benchmark accuracy, judge-based assessment, runtime performance, tool-use behavior, and retrieval quality. Differences in…

  74. Understanding LLM Hallucinations Caused by Soft Errors
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.22520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been extensively studied from a software perspective, limited attention has been paid to hardware-level factors. In this paper, we…

  75. Empirical Insights from AI-Powered Software Engineering in Practice
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.23632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is becoming indispensable in future software engineering. Its application spans a wide spectrum - from assisted development to autonomous software…

  76. Arbitrary Functors as Modalities in a Linear Calculus
    USarXiv cs.PL (Programming)

    arXiv:2610.23023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study modalities in the linear lambda calculus, by interpreting them as endofunctors in monoidal closed categories. We support functors that do not distribute over products, including…

  77. ForTress: Bringing Assurance and Determinism for LLM-Driven Fortran-to-Python Translation
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.22528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modernizing mature scientific software from Fortran to Python can improve accessibility and integration with modern computing tools, but manual rewriting is expensive. Large language models…

  78. Operon: Incremental Construction of Ragged Data via Named Dimensions
    USarXiv cs.PL (Programming)

    arXiv:2511.16080v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern data processing workflows frequently encounter ragged data: collections with variable-length elements that arise naturally in domains like natural language processing, scientific…

  79. VulnSAGE: Adjudicating SAST Reports by Connecting LLM Reasoning to Program Structure
    USarXiv cs.PL (Programming)

    arXiv:2610.23035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Static Application Security Testing (SAST) reports flag operations whose safety depends on project-specific context, and maintainers must decide which reports describe real defects. Large…

  80. No One-Size-Fits-All: Adaptive Code Editing with Feature-Based Strategy Selection
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.22881v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models have shown strong potential in automating code editing (CE) tasks, yet most existing systems rely on a fixed CE strategy (i.e., one-step, search-replace, and plan-apply)…

  81. SIEVE: A Parameterized GitHub Corpus Builder for Software Engineering Research
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.22544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Software engineering research increasingly relies on large, richly annotated corpora of real-world code. Still, researchers typically assemble these with ad-hoc scripts or static, pre-built…

  82. Enforcing Code Reasoning in Agentic Scaffold for More Effective Issue Resolution
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.23782v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning is central to ReAct-based programming agents, yet whether and how they reason about code remains unclear. We study 7,955 issue-resolution trajectories from six single- and…

  83. Mizzle: A Complete Concurrent Incorrectness Logic with Applications to Agentic Bug Certification
    USarXiv cs.PL (Programming)

    arXiv:2607.11611v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to find bugs in real-world programs, but they also produce a flood of false alarms that waste developers' time. We propose to prevent these…

  84. A Taxonomy of Predicate Transformer Monads for Specifying Monadic Programs
    USarXiv cs.PL (Programming)

    arXiv:2610.23604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monads of weakest precondition predicate transformers are the foundation of several verification frameworks for monadic programs. For specifying monadic computations with nondeterminism and…

  85. MLOps-Bench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Production ML Engineering in Real Repositories
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.23506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are increasingly expected to modify and maintain machine-learning systems in production, yet existing benchmarks primarily evaluate either competition-style ML experimentation or…

  86. Where Does the Performance Go? Understanding and Recovering Performance Regressions in C-to-Rust Translation
    USarXiv cs.PL (Programming)

    arXiv:2610.23044v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rust is increasingly adopted as a memory-safe successor to C, and transpilers such as \crust{} can migrate entire C projects while preserving their behavior. Preserving behavior, however…

  87. MergeShuffle: Reconstruct Shared Libraries for Improved Performance and Security
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.22952v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Debloating shared libraries has been an active research topic for years. Tools for shared library debloating rely on either static or dynamic analysis techniques to discover which parts of…

  88. Superset Decompilation
    USarXiv cs.PL (Programming)

    arXiv:2603.28002v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decompilation is the task of recovering high-level source from a compiled binary. Conventionally, it is implemented as a series of analyses and rewrites over a single representation…

  89. Veri-Sure: Multi-Agent RTL Code Generation with Temporal Tracing, Slicing and Formal Verification
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2601.19747v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the rapidly evolving field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA), the deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Register-Transfer Level (RTL) code generation has emerged as…

  90. Monitor-Validity Failures: LLM Safety Evidence Paths at Evolving Framework Boundaries
    USarXiv cs.SE (Software)

    arXiv:2610.23362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern LLM applications rely on runtime monitors that inspect tool calls, traces, streams, detector outputs, and verifier inputs. This creates an interface-reliability problem: a framework…

  91. What the heck is /pkg?
    USlobste.rs

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  92. What requirements don't you have?
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  93. ZX Spectrum Next Laptop
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://www.dorchester3d.com/printing/blog/2020/11/zx-spectrum-next-laptop-version-2 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50147799 Points: 103 # Comments: 19

  94. Superlite: A Faster Alternatie to Superpowers
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://contextfirst.blog/superlite-hand-an-agent-a-spec/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50147492 Points: 131 # Comments: 61

  95. Updates to site guidelines and AI/LLM tags
    USlobste.rs

    Hey folks, I've been having to perform an increasing number of moderation actions surrounding the vibecoding tag and AI/LLM related content. I started reading Lobsters because it had the most interesting viewpoints related to computing…

  96. BBC Master Pi 1MHz Domesday
    USlobste.rs

    Dominic Plunkett has updated the BBC Micro PiMHz software to emulate most of the hardware for a BBC AIV system, including the LV player! Just add a trackball/mouse and a PiTubeDirect and you'll be able to run the Domesday disc! This video…

  97. Starcraft: Ashfall
    USHacker News Front Page

    Article URL: https://starcraft-shooter-2026.pages.dev/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50147233 Points: 512 # Comments: 154

  98. Inline rendering with document.currentScript
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  99. Speeding up code review with `small-change`
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  100. Dynamic Packages
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