Underjord
underjord.io · Personal blog · on HN since 2019
Lars Wikman writes about Elixir, the BEAM virtual machine, software tooling, and the practical side of building and running systems.
What HN saysHN mostly links his post arguing that the best parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary, notably Live Share, in editor-licensing discussions.
36HN people shared it
12linked it in comments
126stories submitted
4.2Kstory points
7 months agolast shared
2019people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary8 people · 450 points · first shared 2020 · 268 comments on HN
- 2The Beam Marches Forward5 people · 19 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 3Complex Systems All the Way Down4 people · 6 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 4Stupid solutions: Live server push without JS3 people · 348 points · first shared 2020 · 79 comments on HN
- 5Tracking users via CSS3 people · 203 points · first shared 2020 · 116 comments on HN
- 6It is not about Elixir3 people · 10 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 7The Future Stack3 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 8Why am I interested in Elixir?2 people · 344 points · first shared 2019 · 178 comments on HN
- 9Booting 5000 Erlangs on Ampere One 192-core2 people · 233 points · first shared 2025 · 49 comments on HN
- 10What ID3v2 could have been2 people · 166 points · first shared 2022 · 94 comments on HN
- 11The Mac is losing me2 people · 59 points · first shared 2020 · 84 comments on HN
- 12Nerves-keyboard – Running a mechanical keyboard with Elixir2 people · 6 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 13Membrane Media Processing and LiveView – Elixir2 people · 6 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 14Unpacking Elixir: IoT and Embedded2 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 15Physical knobs and Userspace drivers in Elixir2 people · 5 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
yencabulator · 2025-12-29
VSCodium is the open source VSCxxx editor.
https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-are-propriet…
https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
soraminazuki · 2025-08-11
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open
VS Code?
https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-are-propriet…
> they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now
Windows has been going out of its way to be hostile to users for over a decade now.
lawik · 2025-08-08
This probably got second-chanced or something because I posted it over a week ago. Funny that this went up here since the follow-up is probably more in-depth.
https://underjord.io/booting-5000-erlangs-on-ampere-one.html
Hope people enjoy it, both the technically interesting bits and the general goofiness of it all. I personally have enjoyed making the number go up.
I hope my co-fouunder on NervesCloud does some write-up on the allocator variations he has been trying. Every day he pops in and asks me to throw 5000 devices at the servers and see what they do. mimalloc, jemalloc and some others. Those two seem to do a better job with fragmentation for the BEAM than whatever we had by default, presumably from glibc.
pritambaral · 2021-01-10
Not your parent, but this is a good starting point: https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-are-propriet…
jen20 · 2020-09-23
Live Share is probably _the most_ interesting feature of the entire editor, and is not open source or usable with VSCodium. See [1] for further links.
[1]: https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-are-propriet…
robocat · 2024-11-19
Background to the article: https://underjord.io/unpacking-elixir-iot-embedded-nerves.html
Seems like they deploy Elixir on embedded Linux. The embedded Linux distro is Nerves which replaces systemd and boots to the BEAM VM instead as process 1, putting Elixir as close to the metal as they can.
I know nothing about any of the above (assumption is I'm fool enough to try and simplify) plus I know I've misused the concepts I wrote but that's my point so read the article. All simplifications are salads
eliasson · 2024-05-24
Apparently ID3 included some strange frames such as the Popularimeter (POPM) for storing emails and ratings! lawik goes through some om them in this post which I found entertaining.
https://underjord.io/id3-specification-and-speculation.html
vinnymac · 2024-05-05
I can think of a few ways, but here is an example where CSS triggers a request to track a user: https://underjord.io/is-this-evil.html
cpach · 2022-04-21
Some ideas:
If you’re interested in an Elixir job then an acquaintance of mine has a site that might be a useful resource: https://underjord.io/jobs.html – there’s a mailing list there to get notified about Elixir job opportunities.
He also has a YouTube channel with videos about Elixir and other stuff: https://www.youtube.com/c/underjord
Also: On 2022-05-01 there will be new hiring threads here on HN. There’s always three threads: Who is hiring? • Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? • Who wants to be hired? So maybe just post in the who “Who wants to be hired” thread and see what happens? :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring
Godspeed!
eichin · 2021-10-08
One use for this is using old android tablets as ambient display screens - you just autostart a browser on an mjpeg url and update the image to update the screen. Note that mjpeg doesn't have a frame rate - it just renders the frames as they show up, so you don't actually have to keep sending them when they're not changing... except that chrome is buggy about not actually rendering the image right when it shows up :(
(I did a version of this in bash with netcat, and here-documents for the mime parts, which is where I ran into the problem. https://underjord.io/live-server-push-without-js.html was the inspiration for the display-screen case...)
fishtoaster · 2020-09-29
Hey, that's mine! But yeah, it includes an alternate approach to the same problem: use http chunked encoding and continually append html to the web page (which never quite finishes loading).
Funnily enough, it also uses another evil trick with css background images, which TFA mentions as well: https://underjord.io/is-this-evil.html
notRobot · 2022-10-27
Too late to edit the above, but here's another! https://underjord.io/live-server-push-without-js.html
Edit: more!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9457187
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26273960
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312317
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602122
https://mobile.twitter.com/David3141593/status/1372281280772063232
https://mobile.twitter.com/binitamshah/status/1104750325473464320
http://blog.soulshake.net/2016/04/command-line-resume/
https://mobile.twitter.com/netspooky/status/1405860275392335879
https://mobile.twitter.com/fr_brennan/status/1340232792282685443
https://rohitpaulk.com/articles/
https://mobile.twitter.com/angealbertini/status/844294290750754817
https://dev.to/sebastianstamm/this-image-is-also-a-valid-javascript-fi…
https://mobile.twitter.com/angealbertini/status/1265306226755350530
https://hyperpolyglot.org/scripting
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10528899
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25625877
https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/pocorgtfo11.pdf
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29586549