Hacker News Digest

· 5 Hacker News

  1. ▲ 45Timothy Leary Invented the Rumor That William Gibson Trademarked Eric Gullichsen

    In 1989, Autodesk applied to trademark "cyberspace" while developing early VR. William Gibson objected through his lawyers, but the story that Gibson retaliated by trademarking "Eric Gullichsen" was…

  2. ▲ 21A DIY laptop built around the 6502 CPU gets a slimmer, faster second version

    Paula has finished the LT6502b, a laptop built around the 6502 CPU. It is half the thickness of the original, with a 10.1-inch 1024×600 IPS screen, a 10MHz processor, an onboard SID emulator, and a W…

  3. ▲ 18Valen's borrow checker walks functions backwards to catch use-after-free

    Valen, an experimental language that makes shared-xor-mutable optional and allows memory-safe calls into Rust, checks memory safety in reverse. After parsing, typing, and static grouping, its fourth…

  4. ▲ 15If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you even know what's going on?

    Most people chat with LLMs through a provider's frontend and trust whatever analytics it shows—often just cute mascot images, not real token usage data. The author argues for running your own proxy:…

  5. ▲ 11Apple quietly added a mysterious /pkg directory to every Mac's PATH

    While troubleshooting a PATH issue, the author spotted an unfamiliar /pkg/env/global/bin entry and found a root-level /pkg directory with env, etc, inv, and var subdirectories. Howard Oakley traces i…