Tuesday, 30 December 2025

New best story on Hacker News: Go away Python

Go away Python
380 by baalimago | 346 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite

Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite
374 by keepamovin | 122 comments on Hacker News.
Community, All the HN belong to you. This is an archive of hacker news that fits in your browser. When I made HN Made of Primes I realized I could probably do this offline sqlite/wasm thing with the whole GBs of archive. The whole dataset. So I tried it, and this is it. Have Hacker News on your device. Go to this repo ( https://ift.tt/54QXYvN ): you can download it. Big Query -> ETL -> npx serve docs - that's it. 20 years of HN arguments and beauty, can be yours forever. So they'll never die. Ever. It's the unkillable static archive of HN and it's your hands. That's my Year End gift to you all. Thank you for a wonderful year, have happy and wonderful 2026. make something of it.

New best story on Hacker News: Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings

Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings
382 by 1970-01-01 | 676 comments on Hacker News.


Monday, 29 December 2025

New best story on Hacker News: Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA

Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA
310 by vismit2000 | 187 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

Google is dead. Where do we go now?
319 by tomjuggler | 278 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder
453 by haunter | 257 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB

Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB
413 by quesomaster9000 | 94 comments on Hacker News.
How small can a language model be while still doing something useful? I wanted to find out, and had some spare time over the holidays. Z80-μLM is a character-level language model with 2-bit quantized weights ({-2,-1,0,+1}) that runs on a Z80 with 64KB RAM. The entire thing: inference, weights, chat UI, it all fits in a 40KB .COM file that you can run in a CP/M emulator and hopefully even real hardware! It won't write your emails, but it can be trained to play a stripped down version of 20 Questions, and is sometimes able to maintain the illusion of having simple but terse conversations with a distinct personality. -- The extreme constraints nerd-sniped me and forced interesting trade-offs: trigram hashing (typo-tolerant, loses word order), 16-bit integer math, and some careful massaging of the training data meant I could keep the examples 'interesting'. The key was quantization-aware training that accurately models the inference code limitations. The training loop runs both float and integer-quantized forward passes in parallel, scoring the model on how well its knowledge survives quantization. The weights are progressively pushed toward the 2-bit grid using straight-through estimators, with overflow penalties matching the Z80's 16-bit accumulator limits. By the end of training, the model has already adapted to its constraints, so no post-hoc quantization collapse. Eventually I ended up spending a few dollars on Claude API to generate 20 questions data (see examples/guess/GUESS.COM), I hope Anthropic won't send me a C&D for distilling their model against the ToS ;P But anyway, happy code-golf season everybody :)

Sunday, 28 December 2025

New best story on Hacker News: Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief
403 by vitosartori | 310 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English

Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English
398 by josharsh | 191 comments on Hacker News.
I built a CLI tool that lets you do common video/audio operations without remembering ffmpeg syntax. Instead of: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf "fps=15,scale=480:-1:flags=lanczos" -loop 0 output.gif You write: ff convert video.mp4 to gif More examples: ff compress video.mp4 to 10mb ff trim video.mp4 from 0:30 to 1:00 ff extract audio from video.mp4 ff resize video.mp4 to 720p ff speed up video.mp4 by 2x ff reverse video.mp4 There are similar tools that use LLMs (wtffmpeg, llmpeg, ai-ffmpeg-cli), but they require API keys, cost money, and have latency. Ez FFmpeg is different: - No AI – just regex pattern matching - Instant – no API calls - Free – no tokens - Offline – works without internet It handles ~20 common operations that cover 90% of what developers actually do with ffmpeg. For edge cases, you still need ffmpeg directly. Interactive mode (just type ff) shows media files in your current folder with typeahead search. npm install -g ezff

New best story on Hacker News: Gpg.fail

Gpg.fail
423 by todsacerdoti | 274 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert
504 by Vincent_Yan404 | 192 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Calendar

Calendar
457 by twapi | 69 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Nvidia's $20B antitrust loophole

Nvidia's $20B antitrust loophole
439 by ossa-ma | 135 comments on Hacker News.


Saturday, 27 December 2025

Wednesday, 24 December 2025

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: CineCLI – Browse and torrent movies directly from your terminal

Show HN: CineCLI – Browse and torrent movies directly from your terminal
325 by samsep10l | 111 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN I built CineCLI — a cross-platform terminal app to browse movies, view details, and open torrents directly in your system torrent client. Features: - Search movies from the terminal - Rich UI with ratings, runtime, genres - Interactive & non-interactive modes - Magnet handling via system default client - Linux/macOS/Windows support - No ads, no tracking GitHub: https://ift.tt/z4Y0pwP PyPI: https://ift.tt/Z95CcfV Would love feedback from terminal + Python folks

New best story on Hacker News: Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18
415 by radimm | 160 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Unifi Travel Router

Unifi Travel Router
417 by flurdy | 364 comments on Hacker News.


Monday, 22 December 2025

New best story on Hacker News: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
416 by chaps | 358 comments on Hacker News.
Archive Link: https://ift.tt/VjognwE Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo – This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers

New best story on Hacker News: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified
369 by rbanffy | 299 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally

CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
346 by rbanffy | 290 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
339 by TheAlchemist | 188 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025
419 by seinvak | 157 comments on Hacker News.


Tuesday, 9 December 2025

New best story on Hacker News: Handsdown one of the coolest 3D websites

Handsdown one of the coolest 3D websites
440 by razzmataks | 108 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

10 Years of Let's Encrypt
436 by SGran | 176 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Mistral Releases Devstral 2 (72.2% SWE-Bench Verified) and Vibe CLI

Mistral Releases Devstral 2 (72.2% SWE-Bench Verified) and Vibe CLI
435 by pember | 212 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?

Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?
408 by embedding-shape | 241 comments on Hacker News.
As various LLMs become more and more popular, so does comments with "I asked Gemini, and Gemini said ....". While the guidelines were written (and iterated on) during a different time, it seems like it might be time to have a discussion about if those sort of comments should be welcomed on HN or not. Some examples: - https://ift.tt/qQWzHfA - https://ift.tt/fdrHklL - https://ift.tt/BTXxnCf Personally, I'm on HN for the human conversation, and large LLM-generated texts just get in the way of reading real text from real humans (assumed, at least). What do you think? Should responses that basically boil down to "I asked $LLM about $X, and here is what $LLM said:" be allowed on HN, and the guidelines updated to state that people shouldn't critique it (similar to other guidelines currently), or should a new guideline be added to ask people from refrain from copy-pasting large LLM responses into the comments, or something else completely?

Monday, 8 December 2025

New best story on Hacker News: Z2 – Lithographically fabricated IC in a garage fab

Z2 – Lithographically fabricated IC in a garage fab
352 by embedding-shape | 84 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst

GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst
375 by robin_reala | 224 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products
363 by mohi-kalantari | 308 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: The fuck off contact page

The fuck off contact page
431 by OuterVale | 179 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: The past was not that cute

The past was not that cute
420 by mhb | 514 comments on Hacker News.


New best story on Hacker News: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
428 by thecr0w | 356 comments on Hacker News.