Top all-time · #5614
astrid dot tech
Personal blog · astrid.tech · on HN as astralbijectionprogrammingsystems
astrid dot tech is a personal blog at astrid.tech about programming and systems. Since 2022, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “Ansible is a Lisp?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Astrid's technical write-ups: a multi-part teardown of an Amazon Blink Mini camera including a supply chain diagram, a NixOS installation guide, and a Linux distro that writes images with wget and dd.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Astrid's personal website
Most-linked posts?
- Ansible is a Lisp?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-01
- /2026/03/24/2/how-to-pass-secrets-between-reboots/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-24
What Hacker News says?
Here's a few more, from my Feedly: Julia Evans - https://jvns.ca/ Fabien Sanglard - https://fabiensanglard.net/ Rachel - http://rachelbythebay.com/w/ Bruce Eckel - https://bruceeckel.substack.com/ (old blog @ https://www.bruceeckel.com/ ) Blobs in Games - https://simblob.blogspot.com/ Astrid dot tech - https://astrid.tech/ Brendan Gregg - https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/ Stargirl Flowers - https://blog.thea.codes/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite blog in 2024?”Submitted Disassembling an Amazon Blink Mini camera as a story · 215 points
HN discussionBlink cameras can run on battery for a year! A worthy platform to be liberated from app/cloud. https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/camera/firmware Thanks for the supply chain diagram: https://astrid.tech/_/2022/08/03/0/blink-companies.svg Microsoft's ThreadX RTOS was also used on RPi GPU, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCore#Linux_support
Comment linking /_/2022/08/03/0/blink-companies.svg
on “Disassembling an Amazon Blink Mini camera”Submitted What happens to TLDs when their country stops existing? as a story · 154 points
HN discussionpart 2: https://astrid.tech/2022/07/13/0/blink-mini-dumping/ part 3: https://astrid.tech/2022/08/03/0/blink-mini-fw-analysis/ part 4: https://astrid.tech/2022/08/06/0/blink-mini-4/
Comment linking /2022/08/06/0/blink-mini-4/
on “Disassembling an Amazon Blink Mini camera”Submitted Abusing Conda's Turing-Complete YAML Comments as a story · 79 points
HN discussionYea, IME the best manual for nixos/nixpkgs is the repo and the manual for git, grep etc. I clone or save every public repo or article or whatnot i find that helps me or seems interesting. These two examples come to mind: the page that made what the config/options system really is [0], and the post that really drive home to me it’s all just configs! A config language all the way down! [1] [0] https://nlewo.github.io/…
Comment linking /2022/11/03/0/overlay-nixpkgs-pr/
on “How I like to install NixOS (declaratively)”Submitted Ping Ff02:1 as a story · 77 points
HN discussionPart 2 presents a fully automated proof of concept that does all of this: https://astrid.tech/2026/03/24/2/how-to-pass-secrets-between...
Comment linking /2026/03/24/2/how-to-pass-secrets-between-reboots/
on “curl > /dev/sda: How I made a Linux distro that runs wget | dd”Submitted Ansible is a Lisp? as a story · 52 points
HN discussionIt does get linked at the very bottom, though admittedly it could be made clearer. https://astrid.tech/2026/03/24/1/swap-out-the-root-before-bo...
Comment linking /2026/03/24/1/swap-out-the-root-before-boot/
on “curl > /dev/sda: How I made a Linux distro that runs wget | dd”Submitted What happens to TLDs when their country stops existing? as a story · 13 points
HN discussion> My solution was to kexec into a new kernel+initramfs which has a DHCP client and cURL in it - that effectively stops any filesystem access while the image is being written over the disk, then to just reboot. That's what I was expecting from the article. Update: It's not obvious, but it turns out that this is a multipart article, and kexec is reserved for part 3: https://astrid.tech/2026/03/24/2/how-to-pass-secrets…
Comment linking /2026/03/24/2/how-to-pass-secrets-between-reboots/
on “curl > /dev/sda: How I made a Linux distro that runs wget | dd”Submitted Ansible Is a Lisp as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Linux Is an Interpreter as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted curl > /dev/sda: How I made a Linux distro that runs wget | dd as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ansible Is a Lisp as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fixing a Bug with C++'s >>= Operator as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Disassembling an Amazon Blink Mini Camera as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
