Just finished skimming Hacker News from Wednesday, July 16, 2025. Man, some interesting stuff popped up.

First off, big news for the open-source crowd: Linux finally hit 5% desktop market share in the USA! People were debating if that includes stuff like the Steam Deck running in desktop mode, or if it's just the overall PC market shrinking, but either way, it's a cool milestone. Some folks were also saying we should really separate Android from desktop Linux stats, which makes sense.

Then, on a more serious note, Ukrainian hackers apparently wiped out the IT systems of a Russian drone manufacturer. Pretty wild, right? Comments were all over the place, from talk about war casualties and propaganda to some random analogies about compiler bootstrapping. Shows the real-world impact of cyber warfare.

Had a minor internet hiccup for some people too. Cloudflare had an incident with their 1.1.1.1 DNS service on Monday. Their post explained it was about some caching weirdness. Turns out their cache.put() only writes to the local data center's cache, which is good to know for anyone building stuff on their platform.

On the dev side, someone wrote about switching to Python and actually digging it. Always a popular topic, right? People in the comments were sharing how Python's been used at big places like Google and YouTube, even Apple back in the day. There was also a bit of a funny comparison to all the "WTF JavaScript" posts out there.

And for the browser geeks, Firefox 141 is now shipping WebGPU on Windows! That's a pretty big deal for web graphics. The comments got pretty deep into graphics APIs, with some wishing Vulkan SDK was as easy to use as Apple's Metal, and others debating if game engines like Unreal or Unity are even a good fit for the web due to huge asset sizes.

Super cool science discovery: scientists found a new type of magnetism called "altermagnets." It's apparently the first new type in almost a century! What's wild is that the idea was inspired by a complex, tessellating art piece. How random is that?

Finally, some ex-Waymo engineers just launched a company called Bedrock Robotics, raising $80 million to automate construction. People in the comments were a bit skeptical, pointing out that none of the founders had construction experience, and that real construction automation might look totally different from just robots laying bricks. Still, $80M is a lot of cash, so they must have a plan.

Alright, that's the quick download for ya. Catch you later!