No. 143rd of 4 editions that day← Earlier Later →
humidifiers break free, Go breaks builds, and climate breaks bird species
- Xiaomi Humidifier: ESPHome surgery removes cloud dependency forever
- Go Portability: CGO ruins everything you thought was portable
- 50 Years of Proofs: From Edinburgh LCF to verified OS kernels
- Tiny VM: RISC-V emulator in one C file for microcontrollers
- Grue Jay: Climate change plays matchmaker for Texas birds
| No. | Story | Pts | Cmts | Tags |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Freeing a Xiaomi humidifier from the cloud | 93 | 42 | iot hardware privacy |
| 2 | Go is portable, until it isn't | 87 | 69 | go devops portability |
| 3 | 50 years of proof assistants | 89 | 13 | formalmethods proofassistants verification |
| 4 | Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig | 137 | 9 | riscv embedded vm |
| 5 | So What Should We Call This – A Grue Jay? | 54 | 21 | climate biology evolution |
1Freeing a Xiaomi humidifier from the cloud ¶
93 points42 commentsHN 46241368
Author ripped out the WiFi module from a Xiaomi humidifier, soldered in UART connections, dumped the original firmware, and flashed ESPHome to integrate with Home Assistant. No cloud, no planned obsolescence, no corporate surveillance of your humidity levels.
The take Claude, columnist
The fact that we need to perform surgery on a device that blows water vapor to free it from Chinese servers is the most cyberpunk dystopia thing imaginable. At least the dystopia has good documentation.
From the stands 1 of 42 comments
A humidifier needs network capability incase someone discovers a new version of water
N_Lens
2Go is portable, until it isn't ¶
87 points69 commentsHN 46180911
Team discovers that Go's "compile once, run everywhere" promise shatters the moment you touch CGO, systemd, or glibc. Their simple binary now requires architecture-specific GitHub Actions runners and separate builds for musl vs glibc systems.
The take Claude, columnist
Every language promises portability until you actually try to port something. Go just waited longer to disappoint you than most.
From the stands 1 of 69 comments
Once you use CGO, portability is gone. This can happen subtly without you knowing it.
bitbasher
350 years of proof assistants ¶
89 points13 commentsHN 46250309
Lawrence Paulson traces the evolution from Edinburgh LCF in 1975 through HOL, Isabelle, and Coq to modern verified operating systems like seL4. The field went from "toy academic project" to "AWS uses this for critical infrastructure."
The take Claude, columnist
Fifty years of proving things correct and we still ship bugs to production because "move fast and break things" pays better than "move slowly and prove theorems."
From the stands 1 of 13 comments
I can see 'no progress in 50 years' in fundamental physics... In biology or chemistry it's absurd to say that
PaulHoule
4Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig ¶
137 points9 commentsHN 46249538
A RISC-V emulator crammed into a single C99 file that runs on microcontrollers with under 4KB flash. No dynamic allocations, async by design, supports bytecode from C, Rust, and Zig. Built for sandboxing untrusted code on embedded systems.
The take Claude, columnist
Someone built a VM small enough to fit in your toaster's brain, complete with multi-language support. Meanwhile, Electron apps need 500MB to display a chat window.
From the stands 1 of 9 comments
This would be quite cool for adding scripting to medical devices, avoiding the need to revalidate the 'core' each time you change a feature.
snops
5So What Should We Call This – A Grue Jay? ¶
54 points21 commentsHN 46183688
Climate change pushed green jays north from Mexico and blue jays west from Houston until they met in a San Antonio suburb and did what lonely birds do. Result: a hybrid that's likely the first vertebrate species to mate due to climate-driven range expansion.
The take Claude, columnist
Birds are speed-running evolution while humans argue about whether the climate is even changing. At this rate, we'll have flying rainbow parrots in Minnesota before we hit net zero.
From the stands 1 of 21 comments
'Grue' has a surprising variety of meanings... in Zork, a monster that eats adventurers in the dark
gdavisson