{"slug": "moss", "name": "Moss", "category": "os", "category_name": "Operating systems and desktop", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 7, "warners": 0, "score": 3.562, "rising": -0.98, "first": "2026-03-04", "latest": "2026-06-14", "why": "go grow your own groups using free/libre open source decentralised", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 2, "compare": 2, "warn": 0}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "go grow your own groups using free/libre open source decentralised", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "stanford.edu", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://stanford.edu", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Moss", "MOSS"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 776460800, "item_id": 48528800, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48528800", "by": "oddb0d", "date": "2026-06-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "go grow your own groups using free/libre open source decentralised", "excerpt": "To this I say: Hey kids, go grow your own groups using free/libre open source decentralised, distributed post-blockchain holochain-powered https://moss.social", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s"}, {"id": 775388224, "item_id": 48461764, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48461764", "by": "initramfs", "date": "2026-06-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Moss looks great.", "excerpt": "Moss looks great. I use LaGrange and Kristall, which support multiple protocols.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet"}, {"id": 756069952, "item_id": 47254372, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47254372", "by": "graypegg", "date": "2026-03-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "That's such a neat idea!", "excerpt": "That's such a neat idea! It's like a paintable version of https://www.shadertoy.com Is there a way to share brushes in the app/a brush sharing gallery? For sharing, I can see the \"weekly\" section from the homepage, which looks to be a weekly art prompt and everyone's go at it, which is really fun! But for the more artistically challenged (myself), it'd probably want to share a brush on it's own haha", "context": "", "use_case": "Pixel painting with brush programs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Moss is a pixel canvas where every brush is a tiny program"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [{"by": "Manuel_D", "context": "former CS section leader", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48394117", "date": "2026-06-03"}, {"by": "dehrmann", "context": "former CS teaching assistant", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47292379", "date": "2026-03-07"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["plagiarism detection in code", "detecting code plagiarism in class", "pixel painting with brush programs"], "compared": [{"slug": "pico-8", "name": "PICO-8", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "procreate", "name": "Procreate", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "aseprite", "name": "Aseprite", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 756005856, "item_id": 47250366, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47250366", "by": "heyitsgarrett", "date": "2026-03-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "MOSS is a drawing toy where each brush is a tiny script that knows about every pixel on the canvas.", "excerpt": "Oh thanks for sharing this! I love asesprite, procreate, pico8 and had this idea for programmable brushes bonking around my head for years now. Recently took some time between projects to put it together. MOSS is a drawing toy where each brush is a tiny script that knows about every pixel on the canvas. You define how it paints with noise, randomness, patterns, stroke speed, pressure, and every touch executes the cod", "context": "", "use_case": "programmable pixel brushes", "switched_from": "", "story": "Moss is a pixel canvas where every brush is a tiny program"}, {"id": 756005571, "item_id": 47250348, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47250348", "by": "heyitsgarrett", "date": "2026-03-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "MOSS is a drawing toy where each brush is a tiny script", "excerpt": "I love asesprite, procreate, pico8 and had this idea for programmable brushes bonking around my head for years now. Recently took some time between projects to put it together. MOSS is a drawing toy where each brush is a tiny script that knows about every pixel on the canvas. You define how it paints with noise, randomness, patterns, stroke speed, pressure, and every touch executes the code. So you can have a brush t", "context": "", "use_case": "Scriptable drawing app", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 737249056, "item_id": 46078066, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46078066", "by": "hexagonal-sun", "date": "2025-11-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It'd be amazing to use Moss as my daily driver OS.", "excerpt": "Eventually, It'd be amazing to use Moss as my daily driver OS. That means targeting the specific hardware that I have, but in doing so, I hope to build up enough of the abstractions to allow easier porting of hardware. A more concrete mid-term goal is for it to be 'self-hosting'. By that I mean you could edit the code, download dependencies and compile the kernel from within Moss.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code"}, {"id": 736204864, "item_id": 46012804, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46012804", "by": "hexagonal-sun", "date": "2025-11-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'd like to share it with the community", "excerpt": "Hello! For the past 8 months, or so, I've been working on a project to create a Linux-compatible kernel in nothing but Rust and assembly. I finally feel as though I have enough written that I'd like to share it with the community! I'm currently targeting the ARM64 arch, as that's what I know best. It runs on qemu as well as various dev boards that I've got lying around (pi4, jetson nano, AMD Kria, imx8, etc). It has ", "context": "", "use_case": "Linux-compatible kernel on ARM64", "switched_from": "", "story": "Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47245491", "title": "Moss is a pixel canvas where every brush is a tiny program", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46012803", "title": "Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48527766", "title": "UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450694", "title": "I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392004", "title": "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47290457", "title": "We're Training Students to Write Worse to Prove They're Not Robots", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"compare": 2, "recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 2}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 776460800, "item_id": 48528800, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48528800", "by": "oddb0d", "date": "2026-06-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "go grow your own groups using free/libre open source decentralised", "excerpt": "To this I say: Hey kids, go grow your own groups using free/libre open source decentralised, distributed post-blockchain holochain-powered https://moss.social", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s"}, {"id": 775388224, "item_id": 48461764, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48461764", "by": "initramfs", "date": "2026-06-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Moss looks great.", "excerpt": "Moss looks great. I use LaGrange and Kristall, which support multiple protocols.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet"}, {"id": 774305872, "item_id": 48394117, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48394117", "by": "Manuel_D", "date": "2026-06-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "When I was a section leader we used MOSS", "excerpt": "When I was a section leader we used MOSS: https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/ It's not AI, its a deterministic program that analyzes compiled code for similarity.", "context": "former CS section leader", "use_case": "plagiarism detection in code", "switched_from": "", "story": "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"}, {"id": 756678064, "item_id": 47292379, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47292379", "by": "dehrmann", "date": "2026-03-07", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "We used MOSS [1].", "excerpt": "20 years ago (so very outdated), I TAed an introductory CS class for engineers who weren't going to be majoring in CS. We used MOSS [1]. Maybe it was the threshold we picked, but the results were pretty blatant. People renamed variables, renamed functions, changed comments, and the clever ones inlined or extracted a function. A lot forgot something, copying a bug or quirk from the original. [1] https://theory.stanfor", "context": "former CS teaching assistant", "use_case": "detecting code plagiarism in class", "switched_from": "", "story": "We're Training Students to Write Worse to Prove They're Not Robots"}, {"id": 756069952, "item_id": 47254372, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47254372", "by": "graypegg", "date": "2026-03-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "That's such a neat idea!", "excerpt": "That's such a neat idea! It's like a paintable version of https://www.shadertoy.com Is there a way to share brushes in the app/a brush sharing gallery? For sharing, I can see the \"weekly\" section from the homepage, which looks to be a weekly art prompt and everyone's go at it, which is really fun! But for the more artistically challenged (myself), it'd probably want to share a brush on it's own haha", "context": "", "use_case": "Pixel painting with brush programs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Moss is a pixel canvas where every brush is a tiny program"}, {"id": 756066416, "item_id": 47254151, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47254151", "by": "azeirah", "date": "2026-03-04", "stance": "compare", "quote": "it's a bit different from moss in that it has a physics simulation underneath rather than a sort of shader", "excerpt": "I wrote a program that has programmable brushes about ten years ago, it's a bit different from moss in that it has a physics simulation underneath rather than a sort of shader, but I've always thought this kind of approach has a lot of potential. It feels _amazing_ to draw a bird in a single stroke! Maybe this can give you some inspiration! https://laura.fm/generative-art/wind/wind.html", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Moss is a pixel canvas where every brush is a tiny program"}, {"id": 756032672, "item_id": 47252042, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47252042", "by": "RodgerTheGreat", "date": "2026-03-04", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Moss looks much more general and powerful", "excerpt": "Moss looks much more general and powerful, but Decker has a similar mechanism for custom brush behavior; here's an interactive tutorial with a variety of examples, for comparison: http://beyondloom.com/decker/brushes.html", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Moss is a pixel canvas where every brush is a tiny program"}]}