Top all-time · #3631
Patrick Louis
Personal blog · venam.nixers.net/blogsystemsprogramming
Patrick Louis writes Venam's Blog, a personal blog at venam.nixers.net about systems and programming. Since 2016, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 43 times, most often “File Corruption Is Attractive”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-19, 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 this blog for technical posts on Unix and Linux, covering time on Unix, PipeWire audio, Linux fonts, and glibc name resolution. Individual posts get praised in comments.
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.
A blog (by Patrick Louis in Lebanon) consisting of well researched articles about Unix, philosophy, and more. From deep dives to well-rounded overviews that remove mysticism, everything is easily explained in a consumable way. Every article tries to take a new point of view, to link ideas together,
Most-linked posts?
- File Corruption Is Attractive3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-10-05
- What Does It Take to Resolve a Hostname3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-11-02
- Software Distributions and Their Roles Today3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-05-04
- Adding Glue to a Desktop Environment2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-01-07
- Drawables, Regions, Shapes, Types of Window Managers, Compositing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-05-11
- Playing with fonts2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-14
- Time on Unix2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-02
- Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-07
- PipeWire Under the Hood2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-23
- Fonts on Unix2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-03
What Hacker News says?
This is a great article. For anyone wondering about the current data storage stack on Unix-like systems today, I wrote a simple article that goes over it [1]. [1] https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2017/11/05/unix-filesyste...
Comment linking /blog/unix/2017/11/05/unix-filesystem.html
on “Non-Posix File Systems”Submitted Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix as a story · 179 points
HN discussionI tried to demystify it once: https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2020/07/06/dbus-polkit.ht... Maybe it can help someone else understand it too.
Comment linking /blog/unix/2020/07/06/dbus-polkit.html
on “The Surreal Horror of Pam”Submitted Time on Unix as a story · 146 points
HN discussionReminds me of the incredible Time on Unix[1] article. 1. https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2020/05/02/time-on-unix.h...
Comment linking /blog/unix/2020/05/02/time-on-unix.html
on “Dates and Times in JavaScript – A New API for Dates from TC39”Submitted PipeWire Under the Hood as a story · 113 points
HN discussionNice post yesterday about the next generation Linux audio system. I've been using Pipewire on my desktop for a while and it's been working well. https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2021/06/23/pipewire-under...
Comment linking /blog/unix/2021/06/23/pipewire-under-the-hood.html
on “Ask HN: What Are You Learning?”Submitted Adding Glue to a Desktop Environment as a story · 104 points
HN discussionIt is mostly hardware dependent. Most people don't have a clue what they are talking about. The software layer is only there to take care of buffering going towards the hardware and conversions that needs to happen such as resampling. When it comes to low-latency, the difference lies in how that buffer is handled. Otherwise you can always play in bit-perfect mode where no software changes anything in the stream. I g…
Comment linking /blog/unix/2021/02/07/audio-stack.html
on “Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix”Submitted Playing with fonts as a story · 66 points
HN discussionI also tried once to make sense of domain name resolution: https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2020/11/01/resolving-a-ho...
Comment linking /blog/unix/2020/11/01/resolving-a-hostname.html
on “The Sisyphean Task of DNS Client Config on Linux”Submitted A Peek into the Future of Distros as a story · 44 points
HN discussionMy old webpage was trying to emulate my window manager: https://venam.nixers.net/old/ EDIT: I remember it was a trend amongst a close group of friends. Everyone was doing their webpage like their window manager. Too bad I can't find any of those.
Comment linking /old/
on “Show HN: Unix-like personal webpage”Submitted Software Distributions and Their Roles Today as a story · 32 points
HN discussionI love it, it's very good. It touches a lot of things I went through when writing this book: https://venam.nixers.net/blog/internet_communication_narrati... I think people agree on a lot of the dynamics in this space and what needs to be done.
Comment linking /blog/internet_communication_narrative_control_booklet.pdf
on “Social media is broken – a new report offers ways to fix it”Submitted File Corruption Is Attractive as a story · 26 points
HN discussionDo you have any performance benchmark comparing with FreeType or Blend2D? Do you plan on adding a utility library to make working with XCB easier? e.g: https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2018/09/02/fonts-xcb.html
Comment linking /blog/unix/2018/09/02/fonts-xcb.html
on “Libschrift: A lightweight TrueType font rendering library”Submitted What Does It Take to Resolve a Hostname as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI dived into glitching once, but from a file format perspective instead of a generative art perspective: https://venam.nixers.net/blog/programming/2020/10/05/corrupt...
Comment linking /blog/programming/2020/10/05/corruption-at-the-core.html
on “Show HN: Glitch Image Generator”Submitted A Compendium of Access Control on Unix-Like OSes as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThis is a great post. I love messing with fonts on Linux, but I ended up with settings that work great for me years ago, so I don't do it much any more. (The game changer was when many of the infinality patches were rolled into fontconfig, so you don't need to build it yourself any more to get great rendering.) The most important takeaways if you're on Linux: 1. Make sure you have autohint=false (except for individu…
Comment linking /blog/assets/fun_with_fonts/ftdiff_v40.png
on “Playing with fonts”Submitted Corruption Is Attractive as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI once wrote an article about that specific idea. For me, it's a question of scale and definition. If someone doesn't agree on the existence of a "self" they won't agree on free will either. https://venam.nixers.net/blog/psychology/2018/02/15/scale.ht...
Comment linking /blog/psychology/2018/02/15/scale.html
on “The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?”Submitted Internet: Medium for Communication, Medium for Narrative Control [pdf] as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI recently did a mini internet-studies on this and some of the stuff is indeed regional, but a lot of it is international too. https://venam.nixers.net/blog/internet_communication_narrati...
Comment linking /blog/internet_communication_narrative_control_booklet.pdf
on “A Substack on how social media has supercharged culture war and driven us insane”Submitted D-Bus and Polkit, No More Mysticism and Confusion as a story · 7 points
HN discussionthey absolutely can. Glibc's NSS ( https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2020/11/01/resolving-a-ho... ) won't work and that's a good thing because putting domain name resolution in libc was a braindead idead from the very beginning. Domain name resolution behaviour should be program-controllable, not system-controllable (and thankfully we are starting to see a bit of sanity with web browsers which do bypass libc's doma…
Comment linking /blog/unix/2020/11/01/resolving-a-hostname.html
on “Rules of static linking: libstdc++, Libc, libgcc (2012)”Submitted Did You Know Fonts Could Do All This? as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI'm aware, it's a half-ironic quote. Take a look a this article: https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2020/07/06/dbus-polkit.ht...
Comment linking /blog/unix/2020/07/06/dbus-polkit.html
on “A Peek into the Future of Distros”Submitted Internet: Medium for Communication, Medium for Narrative Control as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
