Digest of Hacker News - Best

https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-news/28652-vienam-bans-unskippable-ads,-requires-skip-button-to-appear-after-5-seconds

By hoherd ⬆️ 1260 💬 658 [comments]

Top comment by jason_s:

I just uninstalled a game from my mobile phone this morning that had heavy ad usage. It was interesting to note the different ad display strategies. From least to most annoying:

- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)

- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)

- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds

- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds

- display several ads in succession, each short, but it automatically proceeds to the next; the net time after which the "x" to close appears after 20-30 seconds

- display several ads in succession, each lasts for 3-10 seconds but you have to click on an "x" to close each one before the next one appears

I live in the USA. The well-established consumer product brands (Clorox, McDonalds, etc.) almost all had short ads that were done in 3-5 seconds. The longest ads were for obscure games or websites, or for Temu, and they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion. The several-ads-in-succession were usually British newspaper websites (WHY???? I don't live there) or celebrity-interest websites (I have no interest in these).

It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/05/aws_price_increase/

By Brajeshwar ⬆️ 694 💬 453 [comments]

Top comment by xvxvx:

- GPU prices rising

- RAM prices rising

- hard drive prices rising

Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?

‘You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription’

‘You don’t need processing power, stream your games through our subscription service.’

Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games but charging per hour. Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA.

Physical media could easily be killed off. Does my iPhone need 1TB of storage or will they shrink that and force everything through iCloud?

How long before car ownership is replaced with autonomous vehicle car pools? Grocery stores closed to visitors, all shopping done online and delivered to your door by drone.

https://burkeholland.github.io/posts/opus-4-5-change-everything/

By tbassetto ⬆️ 502 💬 682 [comments]

Top comment by tripledry:

Putting the performance aside for now as I just started trying out Opus 4.5, can't say too much yet, I don't hype or hate AI as of now, it's simply useful.

Time will tell what happens, but if programming becomes "prompt engineering", I'm planning on quitting my job and pivoting to something else. It's nice to get stuff working fast, but AI just sucks the joy out of building for me.

Trying to not feel the pressure/anxiety from this, but every time a new model drops there is this tiny moment where I think "Is it actually different this time?"

https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-sentiment/

By 7777777phil ⬆️ 470 💬 436 [comments]

Top comment by ryukoposting:

OP's classifiers make two assumptions that I'd bet strongly influence the result:

1. Binning skepticism with negativity.

2. Not allowing for a "neutral" category.

The comment I'm writing right now is critical, but is it "negative?" I certainly don't mean it that way.

It's cool that OP made this thing. The data is nicely presented, and the conclusion is articulated cleanly, and that's precisely why I'm able to build a criticism of it!

And I'm now realizing that I don't normally feel the need to disclaim my criticism by complimenting the OP's quality work. Maybe I should do that more. Or, maybe my engagement with the material implies that I found it engaging. Hmm.

https://github.com/rberg27/doom-coding

By rbergamini27 ⬆️ 397 💬 267 [comments]

Top comment by purrcat259:

If you don't want to run your machine 24/7 (whether for electrical consumption, environmental, noise, etc reasons), I wrote an ssh proxy [1] that will send WOL packets to a target machine and hold your connection until its alive.

I then configured debian-autoshutdown [2] to turn the machine off if there's no traffic on ssh after 15 minutes.

This way I just ssh into my machine (whether via antigravity on my laptop or termius on my phone) and within 30 or so seconds its awake, no physical button presses needed. I documented the whole flow in more detail on my blog [3].

I'm now working on an improvement called machine on proxy (or mop) that will allow me to start Proxmox VMs instead of physical machines, so I can let gemini-cli run wild and if it decides to wipe the entire hard drive I can restore from a snapshot.

[1] https://github.com/simonamdev/ssh-wol-proxy

[2] https://github.com/mnul/debian-autoshutdown

[3] https://www.simonam.dev/ssh-wol-proxy/

https://akr.am/blog/posts/why-is-the-gmail-app-700-mb

By thefilmore ⬆️ 382 💬 341 [comments]

Top comment by crazygringo:

> For most of that period, the size of the Gmail app hovered around 12 MB, with a sudden jump to more than 200 MB near the start of 2017... The Gmail app, on the App Store, is currently 760.7 MB in size.

With charts:

https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/the-top-iphone-apps-are-tak...

I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB. But are now hundreds of MB.

Something like Gmail doesn't have massive hi-resolution bitmap graphics. Since the article doesn't give any answer, I'm assuming it's a hand-wavy "frameworks", but that's an enormous amount of compiled code.

https://sqlite.org/whyc.html

By alexpadula ⬆️ 379 💬 497 [comments]

Top comment by baranul:

Every project and programmer shouldn't feel they have to justify their choice not to use Rust (or Zig), who seem to be strangely and disproportionately pushed on Hacker News and specific other social media platforms. This includes the pressure, though a bit less in recent years, to use OOP.

If they are getting good results with C and without OOP, and people like the product, then those from outside the project shouldn't really have any say on it. It's their project.

https://blgardner.github.io/prism.tools/

By BLGardner ⬆️ 349 💬 97 [comments]

Top comment by alsetmusic:

There are lots of these, but this is the first that I've seen that focused on frontend dev a bit more. I've saved it to my list of tools for reference.

Here's another with a more local / backend / IT flavor: https://it-tools.tech

I have a couple more local apps with similar functions. Here's one that's cross platform[0]. This one appears to be Mac only[1].

Someone else mentioned not being able to remember these sites when needed. I recently started manually keeping track of web tools in html files inspired by a random repo[2] that fit well into a mode of category-abstraction that suited me. I don't recall how I landed there, but I liked the minimalism and adapted it to be a jumping-off point to a personal kbase that I made with another tool[3] some years ago. I have no design skills, so this (start-page) was just the right combo of minimalism and tasteful CSS for what I wanted. Works with markdown, which I also recently started using a lot more.

I ended up writing a lot more than I originally intended because I kept thinking of more links. They may be out of order because of non-linear editing and my having to rearrange them, so heads up. Also, it's early and I might just have made dumb mistakes.

0. https://devtoys.app 1. https://devutils.com 2. https://github.com/oinam/start 3. https://github.com/alanagoyal/docbase

Edit: Oh, looks like the it-tools link came from cruising the repo of start-page or vice-versa. Ha!

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a69916699/volkswagen-interior-physical-buttons-return/

By stephc_int13 ⬆️ 339 💬 31 [comments]

Top comment by ChrisArchitect:

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46486646

https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/

By lylejantzi3rd ⬆️ 2289 💬 888 [comments]

Top comment by sirwhinesalot:

It's hard to justify Liquid Glass in general. The wastefulness of flat design (in terms of space) married with the visual excess of skeuomorphism, but without even providing any affordances (does the sidebar being raised give you any new information on how to use a sidebar? No).

If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft. If a PM tells you to shove a UI style meant for an unsuccessful VR device onto desktop and mobile platforms, say no. Get your colleagues to say no. Make that PM read everything the Nielsen Norman group has ever written. Read it too.

https://loworbitsecurity.com/radar/radar16/

By illithid0 ⬆️ 690 💬 323 [comments]

Top comment by Aloisius:

> When BGP traffic is being sent from point A to point B, it can be rerouted through a point C. If you control point C, even for a few hours, you can theoretically collect vast amounts of intelligence that would be very useful for government entities. The CANTV AS8048 being prepended to the AS path 10 times means there the traffic would not prioritize this route through AS8048, perhaps that was the goal?

AS prepending is a relatively common method of traffic engineering to reduce traffic from a peer/provider. Looking at CANTV's (AS8048) announcements from outside that period shows they do this a lot.

Since this was detected as a BGP route leak, it looks like CANTV (AS8048) propagated routes from Telecom Italia Sparkle (AS6762) to GlobeNet Cabos Sumarinos Columbia (AS52320). This could have simply been a misconfiguration.

Nothing nefarious immediately jumps out to me here. I don't see any obvious attempts to hijack routes to Dayco Telecom (AS21980), which was the actual destination. The prepending would have made traffic less likely to transit over CANTV assuming there was any other route available.

The prepending done by CANTV does make it slightly easier to hijack traffic destined to it (though not really to Dayco), but that just appears to be something they just normally do.

This could be CANTV trying to force some users of GlobeNet to transit over them to Dayco I suppose, but leaving the prepending in would be an odd way of going about it. I suppose if you absolutely knew you were the shortest path length, there's no reason to remove the prepending, but a misconfiguration is usually the cause of these things.

https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-loses-org-domain-after-surprise-suspension/

By CTOSian ⬆️ 629 💬 319 [comments]

Top comment by hliyan:

Is this an abuse of the ServerHold status? Was this the same mechanism used to delist a Gaza video archive recently?

> This status code is set by your domain's Registry Operator. Your domain is not activated in the DNS.

> If you provided delegation information (name servers), this status may indicate an issue with your domain that needs resolution. If so, you should contact your registrar to request more information. If your domain does not have any issues, but you need it to resolve in the DNS, you must first contact your registrar in order to provide the necessary delegation information.

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/openai-refuses-to-say-where-chatgpt-logs-go-when-users-die/

By randycupertino ⬆️ 461 💬 266 [comments]

Top comment by YossarianFrPrez:

What a terrible, awful tragedy!

A few months ago, OpenAI shared some data about how with 700 million users, 1 million people per week show signs of mental distress in their chats [1]. OpenAI is aware of the problem [2], not doing enough, and they shouldn't be hiding data. (There is also a great NYT Magazine piece about a person who fell into AI Psychosis [3].)

The links in other comments to Less Wrong posts attempting to dissuade people from thinking that they have "awoken their instance of ChatGPT into consciousness", or that they've made some breakthrough in "AI Alignment" without doing any real math (etc.) suggest that ChatGPT and other LLMs have a problem of reinforcing patterns of grandiose and narcissistic thinking. The problem is multiplied by the fact that it is all too easy for us (as a species) to collectively engage in motivated social cognition.

Bill Hicks had a line about how if you were high on drugs and thought you could fly, maybe try taking off from the ground rather than jumping out of a window. Unfortunately, people who are engaging in motivated social cognition (also called identity protective cognition) and are convinced that they are having a divine revelation are not the kind of people who want to be correct and who are therefore open to feedback. Because one could "simply" ask a different LLM to neutrally evaluate the conversation / conversational snippets. I've found Gemini to be useful for a second or even third opinion. But this means that one would be happy to be told that one is wrong.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/391/bmj.r2290.full [2] https://openai.com/index/strengthening-chatgpt-responses-in-... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technology/ai-chatbots-de...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46499976

By red-polygon ⬆️ 421 💬 74 [comments]

Top comment by weird-eye-issue:

Astroturfing on reddit has been a thing for over a decade and has really accelerated over the last few years. There's several companies where literally that is their business model to promote your product or service on reddit. I saw one for sale on acquire.com a while back for 7 figures

https://perishablepress.com/google-broke-my-heart/

By ingve ⬆️ 404 💬 186 [comments]

Top comment by gorbachev:

So not only do they process illegitimate copyright strikes / DMCA takedowns, but they also don't process legitimate ones.

Google is broken to the very core.

This is what happens with a company that tries to minimize costs of support to zero.

https://tenthousandmeters.com/blog/i-switched-from-vscode-to-zed/

By r4victor ⬆️ 332 💬 301 [comments]

Top comment by bpasero:

We maintain a single VS Code setting that allows you to opt out of the AI features provided in VS Code: "chat.disableAIFeatures" (see also: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_104#_hide-and-disab...). If you can still find AI features appearing after you have configured this setting, then please report an issue at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode and we are happy to take a look.

It is possible that from time to time a new AI related feature slips in that does not respect that setting, but we try our best to push fixes as soon as possible.

Thanks! Ben (VS Code Team)

https://www.office.com

By LeoPanthera ⬆️ 316 💬 247 [comments]

Top comment by ulrikrasmussen:

I genuinely thought this was a joke when I saw the headline, and I had to double check the domain name to verify that this wasn't a parody.

Apart from being absolutely abysmal marketing, the front page alone is wildly inconsistent:

* "Welcome to Microsoft 365 Copilot"

* "The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) [...]"

* "Microsoft 365 (formerly Microsoft Office 365) is a subscription service [...]"

Which is it, "Microsoft 365 Copilot", "(The) Microsoft 365 Copilot app", "(The) Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)", "Microsoft 365" or "Microsoft 365 (formerly Microsoft Office 365)"?

I think Microsoft delegated all marketing decisions to AI. Not even joking.

https://donotnotify.com/

By awaaz ⬆️ 310 💬 138 [comments]

Top comment by Draiken:

I would love to use this, but I don't want to allow a third party app with closed source to read all my notifications. This can read OTP passwords, full messages, etc. so it must be open source for me to consider it.

I would donate/pay for this if it was open source on F-Droid.

Kudos to you for building it. I put off building this exact same application so many times it's not even funny. Too bad I'm too lazy to maintain something like this.

https://idiallo.com/blog/all-ai-videos-are-harmful

By Brajeshwar ⬆️ 299 💬 306 [comments]

Top comment by badsectoracula:

99% of everything is bad, so that unsurprisingly includes AI videos.

But i've seen several good videos made using AI, including pretty much everything NeuralViz[0] on YouTube makes, but also some that have been posted in older comments here in HN. Igorrr's ADHD music video[1] was also made using AI and fit the music perfectly.

The common aspect with these "good" uses though is that they do not let the AI do 99% of the job (as mentioned in another comment) but they still involve editing, writing/scripting, acting (NeuralViz for example uses his webcam to act both the motion and voice in his videos and uses AI to change them) and to some extent leaning into the "weirdness" that AI videos have instead of ignoring it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralViz (i high recommend watching them in upload order because they all build into the same "universe" and often make references to older videos)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGIvO4eh190

https://addyosmani.com/blog/21-lessons/

By cdrnsf ⬆️ 1134 💬 497 [comments]

Top comment by trescenzi:

> At scale, even your bugs have users.

First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turning on their computers, and spending the next 10min chatting and drinking coffee the software was ready before they’d even stood up from their desk!

The moral of the story, and the quote, isn’t that you shouldn’t improve things. Instead it’s a reminder that the software you’re building doesn’t exist in a PRD or a test suite. It’s a system that people will interact with out there in the world. Habits with form, workarounds will be developed, bugs will be leaned for actual use cases.

This makes it critically important that you, the software engineer, understand the purpose and real world usage of your software. Your job isn’t to complete tickets that fulfill a list of asks from your product manager. Your job is to build software that solves users problems.

https://candost.blog/the-unbearable-joy-of-sitting-alone-in-a-cafe/

By mooreds ⬆️ 572 💬 340 [comments]

Top comment by unsungNovelty:

Too many negative comments here. This is just someone discovering something new and sharing it very excitedly.

Almost 6-7 years ago, I read about a 30min challenge to sit upright without doing anything in a chair challenge. That changed how I think about distractions. If I had written about it, there surely will be people who would just like here say... What is so crazy about it? I do that all the time...

To me, this post is someone's joy and curiosity shared through a well written piece. Everybody discover certain things at different stages of their lives. What's so bad about that?

Was able to bring a smile on my face. A good post. :)

https://ma.ttias.be/web-development-is-fun-again/

By Mojah ⬆️ 365 💬 449 [comments]

Top comment by simonw:

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents.

AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more.

If you have significant previous coding experience - even if it's a few years stale - you can drive these things extremely effectively. Especially if you have management experience, quite a lot of which transfers to "managing" coding agents (communicate clearly, set achievable goals, provide all relevant context.)

https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_warrier/

By birdculture ⬆️ 357 💬 60 [comments]

Top comment by neomantra:

The true social media. Walk up and stick a quarter on the cabinet. With the ever present sounds of bowling balls hitting pins at the Sports Center, you know exactly which one is yours out of the seven up there. Everybody hovering around, watching and kibitzing. Emotions bounce from stoic concentration to exuberant trash talk. Respect is briefly granted to the kid running the joystick for a half-hour until the hollers and applause when a frame perfect dragon punch knocks him out mid-kick, dethroning the current champ. Quarter laid up again, back in the line for the next dopamine hit shared with strangers.

We are more connected than ever, yet still so far apart.

https://granda.org/en/2026/01/02/claude-code-on-the-go/

By todsacerdoti ⬆️ 299 💬 185 [comments]

Top comment by sideway:

Pandora's box is open; we're moving towards a world where white collar workers will be working 24/7 and they'll be expected to do so.

It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in.

I'm a heavy LLM user. On a daily basis, I find LLMs extremely useful both professionally and personally. But the cognitive dissonance I feel when I think about what this means over a longer time horizon is really painful.

https://scitechdaily.com/anti-aging-injection-regrows-knee-cartilage-and-prevents-arthritis/

By nis0s ⬆️ 295 💬 109 [comments]

Top comment by mcswell:

Anecdote for any runners reading this: I'm a 75 year old runner. (Some young runners might say I run at a jogger's pace, I just tell them to keep off my lawn.)

A couple decades ago, I stopped running on concrete or asphalt, and took up trail running, i.e. running on (mostly) dirt. It feels way easier than running on asphalt, much less on concrete. If you're skeptical that running on concrete or asphalt feels harder, give it a try. YMMV, but I'd bet you notice a difference.

And yes, I do fall sometimes, tripping over roots or rocks. But I recover quickly.

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-01-04-wayland-sway-in-2026/

By secure ⬆️ 285 💬 248 [comments]

Top comment by gsliepen:

A rather big problem is that Wayland is just a protocol, not an implementation. There are many competing implementations, like Gnome, KDE and wlroots. The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another. The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver. So while with Xorg you have a solid base, and desktops are implemented on top of that, with Wayland the each desktop is reinventing the wheel, and each of them has to deal with all the quirks of the graphics drivers. I think this is a big problem with the architecture of Wayland. There really should be a standard library that all desktops use. Wlroots aims to be one, but I don't see Gnome and KDE moving to it anytime soon.

https://github.com/huseyinbabal/taws

By huseyinbabal ⬆️ 282 💬 140 [comments]

Top comment by kristiandupont:

Only tangentially related, but: what is the appeal of TUI's? I don't really understand.

The advantages of CLI's are (IMO) that they compose well and can be used in scripts. With TUI's, it seems that you just get a very low fidelity version of a browser UI?

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/674129/why-does-a-linear-least-squares-fit-appear-to-have-a-bias-when-applied-to-simple

By azeemba ⬆️ 223 💬 54 [comments]

Top comment by tomp:

Linear Regression a.k.a. Ordinary Least Squares assumes only Y has noise, and X is correct.

Your "visual inspection" assumes both X and Y have noise. That's called Total Least Squares.

https://howbrowserswork.com/

By krasun ⬆️ 222 💬 31 [comments]

Top comment by domnodom:

Not all browsers had or have a DOM, and some didn’t until later versions.

Early browsers without DOMs (with initial release date): WorldWideWeb (Nexus) (Dec 1990), Erwise (Apr 1992), ViolaWWW (May 1992), Lynx (1992), NCSA Mosaic 1.0 (Apr 1993), Netscape 1.0 (Dec 1994), and IE 1.0 (Aug 1995).

Note: Lynx remains a non-DOM browser by design.

AOL 1.0–2.0 (1994–1995) used the AOLPress engine which was static with no programmable objects.

The ability to interact with the DOM began with "Legacy DOM" (Level 0) in Netscape 2.0 (Sept 1995), IE 3.0 (Aug 1996), AOL 3.0 (1996, via integrated IE engine), and Opera 3.0 (1997). Then there was an intermediate phase in 1997 where Netscape 4.0 (document.layers) and IE 4.0 (document.all) each used their own model.

The first universal standard was the W3C DOM Level 1 Recommendation (Oct 1998). Major browsers adopted this slowly: IE 5.0 (Mar 1999) offered partial support, while Konqueror 2.0 (Oct 2000) and Netscape 6.0 (Nov 2000) were the first W3C-compliant engines (KHTML and Gecko).

Safari 1.0 (2003), Firefox 1.0 (2004), and Chrome 1.0 (2008) launched with native standard DOM support from version 1.0.

Currently most major browser engines follow the WHATWG DOM Living Standard to supports real-time feature implementation.

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#graph

By maartin0 ⬆️ 973 💬 522 [comments]

Top comment by 0xfaded:

I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g...

I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations.

People used to reach out to me all the time with uses they had found for it, it was cited in a PhD and apparently lives in some collision plugin for unity. Haven't heard from anyone in a long time.

It's also my test question for LLMs, and I've yet to see my solution regurgitated. Instead they generate some variant of Newtons method, ChatGPT 5.2 gave me an LM implementation and acknowledged that Newtons method is unstable (it is, which is why I went down the rabbit hole in the first place.)

Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem. It's not something I'd bother writing up in a paper, and SO was the obvious place were people who wanted an answer to this question would look. Now there is no central repository, instead everyone individually summons the ghosts of those passed in loneliness.

https://refactoringenglish.com/blog/2025-hn-top-5/

By mtlynch ⬆️ 543 💬 106 [comments]

Top comment by geerlingguy:

I've gotten a ton out of this community (much of the time research I've done in the past year stems from various comments and articles I found here), and regarding:

"Jeff started out as a blogger, and he still treats his blog readers as first-class citizens. He structures his articles to fit the text medium rather than just lazily scraping dialog from his videos. You can read his post about upgrading storage on his Mac mini and not even realize it’s adapted from a video."

For most of my favorite projects, I write the blog post _first_, then adapt that to a YouTube script. I still consider the written word to be vastly superior to video form.

But the videos earn an income (about 1/2 what I earned as a software dev, but it's sustainable and lets me do whatever projects I like), whereas the blog has earned maybe a few thousand dollars with Amazon Affiliate links each year (it covers the hosting, at least, and gives a little extra cash, but I try to keep the blog as "old school web" as possible.

Just finished upgrading it to Hugo today! (After being on Drupal for 16 years)

https://www.neowin.net/news/report-microsoft-quietly-kills-official-way-to-activate-windows-1110-without-internet/#google_vignette

By taubek ⬆️ 383 💬 343 [comments]

Top comment by jjaksic:

When Nadella took over from Ballmer, he steered Microsoft in a better direction for a while. But by now he's become a lot worse. The biggest software company can no longer produce good software and its products are actively hostile to users. Nadella cares only about one thing, which is shoving AI everywhere and to everyone, at any cost. The irony is that he knows nothing about AI, how to build capable models or how to build useful AI products, nor does he have people who do. AI is his Metaverse: something he's singularity focused on, to the point of neglecting everything else, without any idea what to actually do with it.

https://c3-lang.org

By y1n0 ⬆️ 330 💬 200 [comments]

Top comment by Fiveplus:

I've been following C3 for sometime now, and I really appreciate the discipline in the design philosophy here.

Neither does it force a new memory model on you, nor does it try to be C++. The killer feature for me is the full ABI compatibility. The fact that I no longer have to write bindings and can just mix C3 files into my existing C build system reduces the friction to near zero.

Kudos to the maintainer for sticking to the evolution, not revolution vision. If you are looking for a weekend language to learn that doesn't require resetting your brain but feels more modern than C99, I highly recommend giving this a shot. Great work by the team.

https://nik.art/the-suck-is-why-were-here/

By herbertl ⬆️ 247 💬 113 [comments]

Top comment by yakattak:

> Because I don’t write a daily blog to crank out a post every day. If that was the point, I’d have switched to AI long ago already. I write a daily blog to make sure I remember how to think.

I feel like this will get missed by the general public. What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?

I could generate some weird 70s sci fi art, make an Instagram profile around that, barrage the algorithm with my posts and rack up likes. The likes will give that instant dopamine but it will never fill that need of accomplishing something.

I like LLMs to get me to reword something, since I struggle with that. But just like in programming I focus it on a specific sentence or two. Otherwise why am I doing it?

https://docs.swifdroid.com/app/

By mihael ⬆️ 185 💬 105 [comments]

Top comment by mihael:

I just released Swift Stream IDE v1.17.0, which now supports full native Android app development entirely in Swift. You can build apps without touching XML, Java, or Kotlin.

Under the hood, projects are powered by SwifDroid, a framework I built that handles the Android application lifecycle, activities, fragments, and UI widgets (Android, AndroidX, Material, Flexbox) while automatically managing Gradle dependencies. The IDE compiles Swift, generates a full Android project ready for Android Studio.

This is the first public release. Both tooling and framework are open-source and MIT-licensed.

https://twitter.com/PenPizzaReport/status/2007347706017251535

By nomilk ⬆️ 174 💬 152 [comments]

Top comment by russellthehippo:

Confirmed - strike on Venezuela and capture of Maduro. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/03/trump-us-operation-captured-...

https://indieweb.org/POSSE#

By 47thpresident ⬆️ 577 💬 135 [comments]

Top comment by susam:

Also, don't forget to set up an RSS or Atom feed for your website. Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS is dead, most of the traffic to my website still comes from RSS feeds, even in 2̶0̶2̶5̶ 2026! In fact, one of my silly little games became moderately popular because someone found it in my RSS feed and shared it on HN. [1]

From the referer (sic) data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are:

1. RSS feeds - People using RSS aggregator services as well as local RSS reader tools.

2. Newsletters - I was surprised to discover just how many tech newsletters there are on the Web and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers.

3. Search engines - Traffic from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and similar search engines. This is usually for specific tools, games and HOWTO posts available on my website that some visitors tend to return to repeatedly.

[1] https://susam.net/from-web-feed-to-186850-hits.html

https://github.com/j-brooke/FracturedJson/wiki

By PretzelFisch ⬆️ 535 💬 143 [comments]

Top comment by simonw:

It looks like there are two maintained implementations of this at the moment - one in C# https://github.com/j-brooke/FracturedJson/wiki/.NET-Library and another in TypeScript/JavaScript https://github.com/j-brooke/FracturedJsonJs. They each have their own test suite.

There's an older pure Python version but it's no longer maintained - the author of that recently replaced it with a Python library wrapping the C# code.

This looks to me like the perfect opportunity for a language-independent conformance suite - a set of tests defined as data files that can be shared across multiple implementations.

This would not only guarantee that the existing C# and TypeScript implementations behaved exactly the same way, but would also make it much easier to build and then maintain more implementations across other languages.

Interestingly the now-deprecated Python library does actually use a data-driven test suite in the kind of shape I'm describing: https://github.com/masaccio/compact-json/tree/main/tests/dat...

That new Python library is https://pypi.org/project/fractured-json/ but it's a wrapper around the C# library and says "You must install a valid .NET runtime" - that makes it mostly a non-starter as a dependency for other Python projects because it breaks the ability to "pip install" them without a significant extra step.

https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2025.30.27.2400820

By stared ⬆️ 528 💬 298 [comments]

Top comment by stared:

I would like to add:

- HPVs are extremely common: 80% of men and 90% of women will have at least one strain in their lives. Unless you plan to remain completely celibate, you are likely to contract a strain.

- Sooner is better, but vaccination can be done at any age. Guidelines often lag behind, but vaccination makes sense even if you are currently HPV-positive. While it won't clear an existing infection, it protects against different strains and reinfection (typically body removed HPV in 1-2 years). See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38137661/

- HPV16 is responsible for a large number of throat cancers (around 50% in smokers and 80% in non-smokers!). This affects both men and women. Vaccinating men is important for their own safety and to reduce transmission to their partners.

https://sgoel.dev/posts/10-years-of-personal-finances-in-plain-text-files/

By wrxd ⬆️ 462 💬 170 [comments]

Top comment by mtlynch:

+1 to OP's book, which is the best beginner guide I've found for understanding Beancount / plaintext accounting.

I was also confused about double-entry accounting for most of my life until I read the article, "Accounting for Computer Scientists"[0] by Martin Kleppman (author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications). It explains double entry accounting in a surprisingly accessible way by putting it in terms of graph theory. I don't even like graph theory that much or consider myself competent in it, but Kleppman's explanation was extremely effective.

[0] https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-compu...

https://xeiaso.net/notes/2026/year-linux-desktop/

By todsacerdoti ⬆️ 447 💬 304 [comments]

Top comment by roxolotl:

“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews”

Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.

https://www.madebywindmill.com/tempi/blog/hbfs-bpm/

By simonw ⬆️ 418 💬 71 [comments]

Top comment by altairprime:

This is thematically amazing when you consider what the song is about — the roboticization of the abducted band. (Music video:)

https://youtu.be/gAjR4_CbPpQ

In this song, which is also chapter four of the movie Interstella 5000 movie (spoilers from here!), the knocked-out singers are scanned, parameterized, brainwashed, uploaded into The Matrix, and then used in the following songs of the movie-album to robotically mass produce music.

It makes perfect sense that the BPM is 123.45 because that’s exactly the sort of thing you get when a manager (who’s shown at the end!) just enters some numbers on the keyboard into the bpm field. They don’t keysmash the numpad; they just hit 123456789 until the field is full!

So not only does the song itself convey what some boss thinks is music, robotically beating at 123.45 bpm, but it is itself about being endlessly-rotating brainwashed-boring cogs in a pop music production industrial machine. I’m pretty sure the movie scene cuts and animations are timed specifically to the beats of the song, but knowing that they’re timed to a machine-specific bpm that a human would never select at random with a metronome?

Absolute genius.

I had no idea. Thanks for posting this.

EDIT: At 123.4567bpm, I think the track has precisely 0.2345 seconds of silence before the first 'beat' of the song and actually has 456 beats total, which is either numerological nonsense or pure genius by Daft Punk. Math elsethread :)

https://media.ccc.de/b/congress/2025

By Jommi ⬆️ 383 💬 83 [comments]

Top comment by neiman:

Where were people's favourite lectures?

I attended 7 talks.

My favourite talk by far was hacking the GPG. Brilliant, really: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-to-sign-or-not-to-sign-practical...

The "In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch" was a very inspiring talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-in-house-electronics-manufacturi...

The rest were less good for me personally. Either over-dramatic and shallow (with a sexy-sounding topic) or too procedural in topics I'm not an expert in.

https://beasthacker.com/til/parental-controls-arent-for-parents.html

By beasthacker ⬆️ 373 💬 390 [comments]

Top comment by BeetleB:

Just recently did this with XBox.

I cannot prevent the kid from seeing the marketplace.

I cannot prevent the kid from seeing installed games that are rated Mature. It won't let them play it, but it lists all the games installed in the XBox.

I cannot prevent them from downloading free stuff.

It was frustrating and clear to me that this wasn't designed for the benefits of parents.

I just want it to act like a console with a fixed set of games installed and no marketplace access.

https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026

By WithinReason ⬆️ 358 💬 55 [comments]

Top comment by raudette:

Related: for fun over the holidays, I created an ePub of a paperback copy of "I Brought The Ages Home", by Charles T. Currelly, which went out of copyright in Canada in 2007 (copyright in Canada changed from 50 to 70 years after the death of the author in 2022, but this did not affect works that were already in the public domain).

I couldn't find a ebook online, so I found an old paperback copy and created one: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/create-epub-from-paperback/

Charles T. Currelly was like a real-life Indiana Jones, he was the first director of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and sourced much of its early collections.

Even with modern OCR (I used Mistral's here), and a book with limited formatting, it's funny how hours of touch-ups are required just to get a glitch-free reading experience (no stray headers, paragraphs, page numbers sprinkled through the text).

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/31/ipv6_at_30/

By Brajeshwar ⬆️ 336 💬 674 [comments]

Top comment by ajnin:

I don't use IPv6 because it solves a problem that I don't have and it provides functionality that I don't want. And also because I don't understand it very well.

My points :

- I don't have a shortage of IPv4. Maybe my ISP or my VPN host do, I don't know. I have a roomy 10.0.0.0/8 to work with.

- Every host routable from anywhere on the Internet? No thanks. Maybe I've been irreparably corrupted by being behind NAT for too long but I like the idea of a gateway between my well kept garden and the jungle and my network topology being hidden.

- Stateless auto configuration. What ? No, no, I want my ducks neatly in a row, not wandering about. Again maybe my brain is rotten from years of DHCP usage but yes, I want stateful configuration and I want all devices on my network to automatically use my internal DNS server thank you very much.

- It's hard to remember IPv6 addresses. The prospect of reconfiguring all my router and firewall rules looks rather painful.

- My ISP gives me a /64, what am I supposed to do with that anyways?

- What happens if my ISP decides to change my prefix ? How do my routing rules need to change? I have no idea.

In short, so far, ignorance is bliss.

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/linux/im-brave-enough-to-say-it-linux-is-good-now-and-if-you-want-to-feel-like-you-actually-own-your-pc-make-2026-the-year-of-linux-on-your-desktop/

By Vinnl ⬆️ 687 💬 554 [comments]

Top comment by kentonv:

I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't think of one game we tried that didn't work. And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore.

(I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)

https://henry.codes/writing/a-website-to-destroy-all-websites/

By g0xA52A2A ⬆️ 486 💬 261 [comments]

Top comment by Aurornis:

I think the comments here are a great example of why this idea always sounds better in nostalgic reminiscence than in practice: As I write this, nearly half of the comments here are complaining about this website. There are complaints about requiring JavaScript, the font size, the design, the color choices, the animations. Complaints about everything the designer did to make this site unique and personal, which was the entire point of the exercise. This is coming from a site that supposedly attracts the target audience for this type of page.

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-bluetooth-headphone-jacking-a-key-to-your-phone

By AndrewDucker ⬆️ 475 💬 172 [comments]

Top comment by miduil:

Glad this submission is finally receiving upvotes.

This was just shown at the 39C3 in Hamburg, few days back.

Common (unpached) Bluetooth headsets using Airoha's SoCs can be completely taken over by any unauthenticated bystander with a Linux laptop. (CVE-2025-20700, CVE-2025-20701, CVE-2025-20702)

This includes firmware dumps, user preferences, Bluetooth Classic session keys, current playing track, ...

> Examples of affected vendors and devices are Sony (e.g., WH1000-XM5, WH1000-XM6, WF-1000XM5), Marshall (e.g. Major V, Minor IV), Beyerdynamic (e.g. AMIRON 300), or Jabra (e.g. Elite 8 Active).

Most vendors gave the security researchers either silent treatment or were slow, even after Airoha published fixes. Jabra was one of the positive outlier, Sony unfortunately negatively.

What is exciting, even though the flaws are awful, that it is unlikely for current generation of those Airoha bluetooth headsets to change away from Aiorha's Bluetooth LE "RACE" protocol. This means there is great opportunity for Linux users to control their Bluetooth headsets, which for example is quite nice in an office setting to toggle "hearthrough" when toggling volume "mute" on your machine.

RACE Reverse Engineered - CLI Tool: https://github.com/auracast-research/race-toolkit

I feel like this should receive state-level attention, the remote audio surveillance of any headset can be a major threat. I wonder what the policies in countries official buildings are when it comes to Bluetooth audio devices, considering that Jabra is a major brand for conference speakers, I'd assume some actual espionage threats.

https://openworkers.com/introducing-openworkers

By max_lt ⬆️ 420 💬 129 [comments]

Top comment by bob1029:

> It brings the power of edge computing to your own infrastructure.

I like the idea of self-hosting, but it seems fairly strongly opposed to the concept of edge computing. The edge is only made possible by big ass vendors like Cloudflare. Your own infrastructure is very unlikely to have 300+ points of presence on the global web. You can replicate this with a heterogeneous fleet of smaller and more "ethical" vendors, but also with a lot more effort and downside risk.

https://ciechanow.ski/cameras-and-lenses/

By sebg ⬆️ 408 💬 50 [comments]

Top comment by nntwozz:

Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog brings back the joy of surfing the web during the heyday of Adobe Flash (minus the 100% CPU).

It's so much fun manipulating things, exploring and getting surprising feedback.

I know it's not really fair to compare this highly scientific masterpiece to the artistic flash websites of the past, but for me at least it immediately evokes the same feelings.

https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/this-might-be-oversharing

By edent ⬆️ 394 💬 296 [comments]

Top comment by alexpotato:

Back in 2019, got to go to Hong Kong for a couple months for work and got to bring my family.

I was about to turn 40 and realized that the place we were staying had a rock wall. In a somewhat "mid life crisis" spur of the moment decision, I decided to go buy shoes, a belt and a chalk bag (I did a lot of indoor rock climbing in college).

We get there and the rock wall is a. closed and b. only for kids.

Get back to the US and COVID lockdown starts. As things open up, I go on the town dad's Facebook group and ask if anyone wants to go rock climbing with me. Multiple dads say "hell, yes!" so I start a rock climbing club.

One of the dads that joins the climbing club loves board games, is inspired by my starting the rock climbing club so he starts the town board game club.

I tell people this story to illustrate that:

- if you don't have a club or org for something that you're into, go start one

- you doing the above can trigger other people to start clubs too

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/31/europe/finland-estonia-undersea-cable-ship-detained-intl

By wslh ⬆️ 388 💬 372 [comments]

Top comment by deliciousturkey:

The fact that this area where the incident happened, Gulf of Finland, is not fully part Finnish/Estonian territorial waters, is only because of a bilateral Finnish-Estonian agreement. This was done in the 1990's purely for benevolence towards Russia.

Russia clearly hasn't acted in such way that they should enjoy these kinds of acts of benevolence. Finland and Estonia should seriously consider retreating from this agreement.

https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engines-jp/

By eklavya ⬆️ 382 💬 341 [comments]

Top comment by MBCook:

I’m not going to say I think Apple should be able to lock out competing browsers, I know this is going to happen.

But God I don’t want this. The iPhone is basically the only thing stopping a total Chrome/Chromium hegemony from ruling the web the way IE did.

I don’t think Google will practically abandon things the way Microsoft did. But they will absolutely have the kind of power Microsoft did to force any feature.

I don’t want to be forced to use Chrome because it’s the only browser that works on most sites. It’s already bad enough with some sites.

But Apple‘s stubbornness and completely different reasons are the only things accidentally holding back the tide.

https://mkennedy.codes/posts/python-numbers-every-programmer-should-know/

By WoodenChair ⬆️ 334 💬 139 [comments]

Top comment by thundergolfer:

A lot of people here are commenting that if you have to care about specific latency numbers in Python you should just use another language.

I disagree. A lot of important and large codebases were grown and maintained in Python (Instagram, Dropbox, OpenAI) and it's damn useful to know how to reason your way out of a Python performance problem when you inevitably hit one without dropping out into another language, which is going to be far more complex.

Python is a very useful tool, and knowing these numbers just makes you better at using the tool. The author is a Python Software Foundation Fellow. They're great at using the tool.

In the common case, a performance problem in Python is not the result of hitting the limit of the language but the result of sloppy un-performant code, for example unnecessarily calling a function O(10_000) times in a hot loop.

I wrote up a more focused "Python latency numbers you should know" as a quiz here https://thundergolfer.com/computers-are-fast

https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2026/january/acm-open-access

By leglock ⬆️ 322 💬 46 [comments]

Top comment by macintux:

Discussed extensively two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313991 (243 comments)