Update for the week ending on Friday, Nov 28, 2025

mtlynch.io

• Worked on MeshCore blog post

Refactoring English

• Sent a black friday deal to subscribers
• Fixed the font in headers in example code
  • They weren’t picking up the site-wide font and were defaulting to basic fonts

Will it Hit the Front Page?

This is a game where you predict whether new HN stories will reach the front page or not.

• Revamped the predictions page
  • Screenshot
• Added basic user accounts
  • You create an account by just declaring a username
  • No actual login yet
• Added a leaderboard
• Added filter by timeframe (e.g., predictions today, predictions this week)
• Added scoring
  • You win/lose points depending on how likely a story was to reach the front page at the time you predicted
• Added probability of success
• Simplified scoring
  • Instead of a page needing 20 minutes on front page, any amount of time on front page is a successful story
• Tried adding confidence to predictions (e.g., definitely, maybe, probably), but it made it too complex

HN Observer

HN Observer is a tool I’m working on to predict the outcome of submissions to Hacker News based on historical data.

• Did some tuning up on it to support Will it Hit?
• Added graphs
  • Success as a probability of score + comments at different story ages
    • Screenshot
  • Success as a story ages with a given score + comment count
    • Screenshot

Replacing OPNsense with a *BSD OS

Given my recent frustrations with OPNsense, I’m considering just installing a simple firewall-friendly OS and managing networking settings directly in commands and config files. I’m experimenting with my Pis and keeping my OPNsense firewall running, but if experiments go well, I’ll replace the OS on my OPNsense firewall with OpenBSD or FreeBSD.

• Got a virtual network running with Vagrant
  • FreeBSD as the router
  • Alpine as the client OSes
• It took a while to get up and running
  • I first tried with Firecracker and implementing Linux networking bridges directly, but it was too labor intensive

go-app-starter

go-app-starter is my personal boilerplate for starting new Go web apps.

• Add CI checks with Woodpecker
• Update LLM agent rules
• Update to prettier 3.x
• Upgrade errcheck and staticcheck
• Upgrade shellcheck
• Use a better GOPATH in Nix flake
• Use “Go App Starter” everywhere as title
  • For easy find and replace

resticpy

• Reviewed a third-party PR to add cat lock <lock-id> support

Misc

• Upgraded CI server to Woodpecker 3.12.0