Top all-time · #1483
Kevin Lynagh
Personal blog · kevinlynagh.com · on HN as lynaghkhardwareprogrammingscience
Kevin Lynagh's personal blog at kevinlynagh.com covers hardware, programming and science. Since 2018, 50 different Hacker News readers have linked it 68 times, most often “Pricing niche products”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Pricing niche products11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2019-09-03
- Why I rewrote my Rust keyboard firmware in Zig: consistency, mastery, and fun9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2021-03-07
- Performance of Rust's match vs. lookup tables4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-02-01
- Designing apps for the E Ink Kindle3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-05-25
- CADtron: A gesture-based CAD environment3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-07-29
- Towards the Cutest Neural Network2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-04-29
- Why I shop via print catalogs in 20252 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-08-31
What Hacker News says?
Definitely still mostly C. Although currently tossing up whether we use some very limited C++ for a new project: some templated types to handle memory safety, and some strict encapsulation. I'm quite intrigued by Zig and am hoping to get in and play with it, since it aims to be a "better C" (not C++) so it remains a small language. See this recent post which triggered my curiosity: https://kevinlynagh.com/rust-zig/…
Comment linking /rust-zig/
on “The tools and tech I use to run a one-woman hardware company”Submitted Pricing niche products as a story · 769 points
HN discussionAuthor here --- you're welcome to copy whatever you want from the unminifed CSS: https://kevinlynagh.com/stylesheets/style.css
Comment linking /stylesheets/style.css
on “Pricing niche products”Submitted Why I rewrote my Rust keyboard firmware in Zig: consistency, mastery, and fun as a story · 743 points
HN discussionOne of them was this guy... https://kevinlynagh.com/phonetron/
Comment linking /phonetron/
on “Precursor – A mobile, open source electronics platform”Submitted A home made PCB stepper motor as a story · 271 points
HN discussionHere's a really interesting pricing model your friend might be able to use to capture more value (and not make the community mad). https://kevinlynagh.com/notes/pricing-niche-products/
Comment linking /notes/pricing-niche-products/
on “Apple silicon M1 as-a-Service”Submitted Making Electronic Calipers as a story · 181 points
HN discussionHere's an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about, from the HN front page today: "Why I rewrote my Rust keyboard firmware in Zig: consistency, mastery, and fun" https://kevinlynagh.com/rust-zig/ I apologize in advance if it seems like I'm moving the goalposts. You're right that implementing a C compiler isn't a common or trivial task. My point is that implementing a Rust compiler is a much more complex task.…
Comment linking /rust-zig/
on “Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with”Submitted Generating Simpson's Paradox with Z3 as a story · 173 points
HN discussionhere is a guy who wrote his keyboard firmware in zig https://kevinlynagh.com/rust-zig/
Comment linking /rust-zig/
on “Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes”Submitted Designing an email-only Slack interface as a story · 155 points
HN discussionAuthor here. For more background on product development about Finda, there are notes on my personal website here: https://kevinlynagh.com/datatron/ I started this as a UI research project to try and replace OS X Finder with a keyboard-only UI. A strong inspiration was the Helm Emacs package. My initial prototype was in ClojureScript/Electron, and I was exploring far more features like inline preview, and a command/a…
Comment linking /datatron/
on “Building a fast Electron app with Rust”Submitted Towards the Cutest Neural Network as a story · 121 points
HN discussionHere is an example with a keyboard firmware why you might not always want all that complexity. https://kevinlynagh.com/rust-zig/ https://zig.news/aransentin/analysis-of-the-overhead-of-a-mi... The point of languages like C and Zig is that they are only a bit higher level than assembly for portability, but otherwise they don't hinder you to do whatever. It's up to you to solve problems like memory safety. You might n…
Comment linking /rust-zig/
on “Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code”Submitted Reltron: a GUI for exploring relational databases as a story · 70 points
HN discussionIn re: "complexity" of Rust here's something relevant and interesting that was on HN front page the other day: "Why I rewrote my Rust keyboard firmware in Zig: consistency, mastery, and fun" https://kevinlynagh.com/rust-zig/ In absence of good metrics for the kind of complexity we're trying to discuss I think we kind of have to rely on these sorts of first-person subjective reports from the field.
Comment linking /rust-zig/
on “The biggest threat to Rust's sustainability”Submitted Designing a flatpack bed as a story · 60 points
HN discussion> if you asked about Zig, but isn't also mature enough If you want maturity, use C. The nice thing about Zig is it's a "better C" with better interoperability & less complexity compared to Rust. Here's someone who has rewritten keyboard firmware from Rust to Zig. https://kevinlynagh.com/rust-zig/
Comment linking /rust-zig/
on “Ask HN: Has any Rust developer moved to embedded device programming?”Submitted Notes from a Year of Building Keyboards as a story · 51 points
HN discussionDid you try selling at significantly higher prices? I bet there’s a huge market for boutique guitar pedals. I’ve seen people advocate Vickrey auctions as a price discovery mechanism: https://kevinlynagh.com/notes/pricing-niche-products/
Comment linking /notes/pricing-niche-products/
on “The Pedal Movie”Submitted How do you prototype a nice language? as a story · 44 points
HN discussionNot very satisfying that he didn't actually design a flatpack bed. There is an interesting optimization problem in this that the author didn't touch on: create a design that maximizes the useful material use. So you might start with a design that is really spindly, and has too many joints. Then run that through the optimizer, so that you can see the proposed layout. This design will have lots of waste, but you will…
Comment linking /newsletter/2025_07_flatpack/cad_nesting.jpg
on “Designing a flatpack bed”Submitted Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing as a story · 37 points
HN discussionhttps://maxwelldulin.com/Resources - short summaries of highly technical security posts (4/wk) https://portswigger.net/research - web security research from the geniuses at portswigger (1/wk) https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/ - project zero's research (1/mo) https://hn.invades.space/hn_gems_rss.xml - top links extracted from comments on top hn posts (85/wk) https://kevinlynagh.com/ - posts regularly contain a…
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on “Ask HN: What are your favorite RSS feeds?”Submitted Why I shop via print catalogs in 2025 as a story · 19 points
HN discussionHave you considered pricing the first batch at EUR 4000 each? :) To quote myself[0] from too long ago: "Very rarely will someone tell you that you're not charging as much for something as you should (perhaps with the exception of patio11 because he wants us all to make more money :) ) but generally there's always someone who will say something costs too much." Due to a number of factors (including some past experien…
Comment linking /notes/pricing-niche-products/
on “4-Track Tape Recorder Made Me Fall in Love with Music Again”Submitted I rewrote my Rust keyboard firmware in Zig: consistency, mastery, and fun as a story · 8 points
HN discussion> Zig feels like a good match for replacing C on microcontrollers because it permits “hold my beer” shenanigans People who have used Zig to do embedded work have reported the opposite: they like Zig because it helps keep simple things simple and not more unsafe than they have to be. https://kevinlynagh.com/rust-zig/
Comment linking /rust-zig/
on “Zig and Rust”Submitted CADtron: A gesture-based CAD environment as a story · 8 points
HN discussion
