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Tech Needs Humanists More

2026-09-25 @ 09:31:34Points: 75Comments: 135

The last day of the dinosaurs, as an interactive painting

2026-09-25 @ 08:58:13Points: 17Comments: 12

Special Projects (2016)

2026-09-25 @ 08:55:43Points: 50Comments: 29

Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS

2026-09-25 @ 08:06:49Points: 661Comments: 366

Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini

2026-09-25 @ 07:27:45Points: 154Comments: 68

CVE-2025-13032: Entering and Breaking the Avast Antivirus Sandbox Part 2

2026-09-25 @ 07:03:46Points: 80Comments: 18

Jev Based Code Review

2026-09-25 @ 04:49:23Points: 44Comments: 53

What About Rails?

2026-09-25 @ 02:50:16Points: 161Comments: 91

The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014)

2026-09-24 @ 20:53:39Points: 104Comments: 56

California is chasing wealth that has feet

2026-09-24 @ 20:34:32Points: 265Comments: 727

Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos

2026-09-24 @ 20:28:47Points: 326Comments: 178

Sourcehut account takeover via build logs (XSS in ansi2html)

2026-09-24 @ 19:54:21Points: 140Comments: 27

Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters

2026-09-24 @ 19:14:27Points: 149Comments: 32

Show HN: Whiteboard (YC W26) – An open-source IDE for thoughtful software design

2026-09-24 @ 17:21:36Points: 350Comments: 125

https://whiteboard.dev.fast/), an open-source desktop app where humans and agents can architect software together in a common workspace. Here’s our repo: https://github.com/devdotfast/whiteboard.

We were missing the feeling of a “whiteboard session” with another dev where you leave with a deep understanding of a system, so we built this app for ourselves. Whiteboard plugs into the tools you already use - e.g. Claude Code, Codex, etc. – and gives your agent an SDK to draw on an in-app canvas to describe its work. We began with an MVP based on HTML artifacts and started rethinking the app as we ran into limitations:

1. Built on top of CodeOSS: We found that in pure HTML tools it was hard to connect a spec or diagram to code. In Whiteboard, when you click on visualizations like a sequence diagram, an entity relationship diagram, or a quote from the agent’s trace, you can jump to the underlying code directly. When navigating code, you get keybindings and LSP support from VSCode out of the box. We’ve found this is especially valuable because tradeoffs are often only discovered after a first pass at implementation (re: slop)

2. Semantic diff viewer: we wrote a semantic, AST-aware diff viewer in Rust so you can only view the code changes which are relevant to you [1]. We’ve set up some sane defaults: large added functions are summarized as pseudocode, and things like unit tests and large documentation changes are collapsed / hidden. This is all customizable with a WASM-based plugin system.

3. Decision Log: We found it difficult to reason about what set of decisions our agents made autonomously. So we built tools for agents to query and link their own traces to the Whiteboard, so you can understand how the requirements that you set were implemented, and understand what decisions your agent made autonomously.

Here’s a quick demo video explaining more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChPn3ftULWE

Folks at companies like Salesforce and Modal are using Whiteboard today as a review tool for architecture or spec-level changes – really any change where they want to be involved:

1. Reviewing your own coding agent’s work: because Whiteboard makes it easier to review large amounts of code, folks will typically have their AI agents create a prototype and a corresponding Whiteboard session so they can iterate on the design.

2. Reviewing other people’s changes: We’ve found that Whiteboard is particularly helpful when composed with tools like Greptile. For example, you can run an automated code reviewer on small changes and escalate to a Whiteboard session for the changes that require human judgement.

Why we built this: we’re four buddies from college who quit our jobs as tech leads right before agentic coding became industry standard. As we iterated towards an MVP for a previous idea, we struggled to maintain a comprehensible codebase while reaping all the velocity benefits of agentic coding. As more PRs were merged without our understanding, we felt a ‘cognitive debt’ begin to seep in, until it became difficult for us to even contribute to the system [2].

We’re releasing our desktop app under an MIT license. Please poke through and feel free to contribute! Eventually we’ll charge companies for a hosted web version that manages whiteboard session creation alongside features like trajectory storage and multiplayer reviews. Everything will always remain self-hostable.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you try it out! We would love to hear any feedback and to learn from your expertise.

Here’s are the project links again: https://github.com/devdotfast/whiteboard, and you can install (for MacOS + Linux) at https://install.dev.fast

[1] diffs library: https://github.com/devdotfast/diffr [2] Credit for the term ‘cognitive debt’ goes to https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2026/07/02/understanding-is-the...

Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?

2026-09-24 @ 16:23:00Points: 475Comments: 245

F-Droid 2.0

2026-09-24 @ 15:26:12Points: 1342Comments: 388

Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space

2026-09-24 @ 13:53:29Points: 204Comments: 438

Two-tier encryption in the UK

2026-09-24 @ 10:39:19Points: 482Comments: 434

Nokia Design Archive (2025)

2026-09-24 @ 09:49:33Points: 244Comments: 130

Show HN: Air-gapped file encryption as self-decrypting HTML page

2026-09-24 @ 07:22:17Points: 78Comments: 29

https://github.com/ApelegHQ/ts-cms-ep-sfx

I was inspired by self-extracting archives. I wanted to share files with basically no dependencies. The goal was:

  1. Something that didn't require any installation (assuming a web browser)
  2. Have a single file with no network that could self-decrypt
  3. Be fully auditable
The second point is done by having (sort of(*)) reproducible builds and embedded OpenPGP signatures.

The first point is made by cleverly manipulating the HTML structure so that it can decrypt without breaking the PGP signature. It can even decrypt using bare openssl (which was a design goal too, though getting the exact structure right took some work and bug reports).

The third point is accomplished by the first two, and by the source being freely available.

(*) Depends on the OS at the moment.

Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard

2026-09-23 @ 22:53:28Points: 786Comments: 102

A joke tool that abuses OpenType's ligature feature to mix fonts. It works pretty fast on client-side by loading Python in WASM.

Toyota is taking the Corolla electric

2026-09-23 @ 22:37:28Points: 378Comments: 676

Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]

2026-09-23 @ 15:33:33Points: 379Comments: 406

WaveDigger: Dig into wireless signals to discover their physical locations

2026-09-23 @ 12:57:07Points: 121Comments: 22

My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps

2026-09-22 @ 17:49:46Points: 368Comments: 165

Writing Parquet files using Haskell

2026-09-22 @ 15:02:39Points: 79Comments: 23

2DWillNeverDie

2026-09-22 @ 14:00:08Points: 279Comments: 71

Fearless SIMD v1.0

2026-09-22 @ 12:23:37Points: 282Comments: 45

The forgotten battle of East Lansing

2026-09-21 @ 20:07:08Points: 100Comments: 22

Book review: Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?

2026-09-21 @ 14:30:00Points: 136Comments: 58

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