Tech one: December 2025

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

A faster heart for F-Droid

A faster heart for F-Droid
399 by kasabali | 161 comments on Hacker News.

Nicolas Guillou, French ICC judge sanctioned by the US and “debanked”

Nicolas Guillou, French ICC judge sanctioned by the US and “debanked”
387 by lifeisstillgood | 394 comments on Hacker News.

Go away Python

Go away Python
381 by baalimago | 347 comments on Hacker News.

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite

Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite
389 by keepamovin | 134 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/13jNIoz ): 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.

Tesla's 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%

Tesla's 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%
353 by coloneltcb | 384 comments on Hacker News.

Monday, December 29, 2025

List of domains censored by German ISPs

List of domains censored by German ISPs
314 by elcapitan | 133 comments on Hacker News.

GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder
436 by haunter | 246 comments 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
421 by quesomaster9000 | 97 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 :)

Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
413 by JeremyTheo | 455 comments on Hacker News.

You can make up HTML tags

You can make up HTML tags
359 by todsacerdoti | 133 comments on Hacker News.

Sunday, December 28, 2025

How we lost communication to entertainment

How we lost communication to entertainment
474 by 8organicbits | 234 comments on Hacker News.

Nvidia's $20B antitrust loophole

Nvidia's $20B antitrust loophole
434 by ossa-ma | 134 comments on Hacker News.

Exe.dev

Exe.dev
426 by achairapart | 279 comments on Hacker News.
https://ift.tt/2kZREe6 https://ift.tt/aCg2mDy https://ift.tt/JqruK0w

Saturday, December 27, 2025

Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations

Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
430 by astronads | 254 comments on Hacker News.
https://ift.tt/jfkqKd7

My insulin pump controller uses the Linux kernel. It also violates the GPL

My insulin pump controller uses the Linux kernel. It also violates the GPL
434 by davisr | 191 comments on Hacker News.

Friday, December 26, 2025

Rob Pike Goes Nuclear over GenAI

Rob Pike Goes Nuclear over GenAI
437 by christoph-heiss | 414 comments on Hacker News.

Maybe the default settings are too high

Maybe the default settings are too high
380 by htk | 112 comments on Hacker News.

Thursday, December 25, 2025

We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years
524 by rajeshrajappan | 116 comments on Hacker News.

Ruby 4.0.0

Ruby 4.0.0
367 by FBISurveillance | 73 comments on Hacker News.

Show HN: Minimalist editor that lives in browser, stores everything in the URL

Show HN: Minimalist editor that lives in browser, stores everything in the URL
345 by medv | 117 comments on Hacker News.
I wanted to see how far I could go building a notes app using only what modern browsers already provide – no frameworks, no storage APIs, no build step. What it does: Single HTML file, no deps, 111 loc Notes live in the URL hash (shareable links!) Auto-compressed with CompressionStream Plain-text editor (contenteditable) History support Page title from first # heading Respects light/dark mode No storage, cookies, or tracking The entire app is the page source. https://textarea.my/

Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig

Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
411 by snvzz | 196 comments on Hacker News.

Wednesday, December 24, 2025

Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

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

We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)

We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)
475 by quesobob | 275 comments on Hacker News.

X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents

X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents
454 by rendx | 85 comments on Hacker News.

Some Epstein file redactions are being undone with hacks

Some Epstein file redactions are being undone with hacks
421 by vinni2 | 304 comments on Hacker News.
Related: https://ift.tt/xEW5I9A https://ift.tt/wNxPSIy... https://ift.tt/xScGdqw...

Tuesday, December 23, 2025

GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability

GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability
405 by pretext | 217 comments on Hacker News.

The Illustrated Transformer

The Illustrated Transformer
443 by auraham | 80 comments on Hacker News.

Claude Code gets native LSP support

Claude Code gets native LSP support
406 by JamesSwift | 217 comments on Hacker News.

Monday, December 22, 2025

Cecot – 60 Minutes

Cecot – 60 Minutes
398 by lawlessone | 40 comments on Hacker News.

Show HN: WalletWallet – create Apple passes from anything

Show HN: WalletWallet – create Apple passes from anything
420 by alentodorov | 106 comments on Hacker News.
I got my Apple developer certificate and built a simple app to solve a problem I had. One shop I buy from doesn't have Apple Wallet passes. Since you need signed certificates to build these very simple things, I created a minimal app that signs them. It's available if you need it too. It won't scan cards with AI - you manually enter the barcode, which I think makes it less prone to error.

A guide to local coding models

A guide to local coding models
416 by mpweiher | 211 comments on Hacker News.

Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025
429 by seinvak | 158 comments on Hacker News.

I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone

I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone
422 by firefoxd | 386 comments on Hacker News.

Sunday, December 21, 2025

LLM Year in Review

LLM Year in Review
372 by swyx | 139 comments on Hacker News.

Privacy doesn't mean anything anymore, anonymity does

Privacy doesn't mean anything anymore, anonymity does
411 by ybceo | 268 comments on Hacker News.

Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize "cybercrime" takedowns to silence critics

Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize "cybercrime" takedowns to silence critics
463 by _a9 | 78 comments on Hacker News.

Saturday, December 20, 2025

Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files

Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files
413 by lukeigel | 89 comments on Hacker News.
Hi everyone! My name's Luke and I made the original Jmail here alongside Riley Walz. We had a ton of friends collaborate on building out more of the app suite last night in lieue of DOJ's "Epstein files" release. Please AMA!

Mistral OCR 3

Mistral OCR 3
593 by pember | 108 comments on Hacker News.

Garage – An S3 object store so reliable you can run it outside datacenters

Garage – An S3 object store so reliable you can run it outside datacenters
588 by ibobev | 127 comments on Hacker News.

GotaTun – Mullvad's WireGuard Implementation in Rust

GotaTun – Mullvad's WireGuard Implementation in Rust
578 by km | 122 comments on Hacker News.

Friday, December 19, 2025

GPT-5.2-Codex

GPT-5.2-Codex
554 by meetpateltech | 300 comments on Hacker News.

Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest

Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest
635 by keepamovin | 139 comments on Hacker News.

History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts
529 by iamwil | 229 comments on Hacker News.

Please just try HTMX

Please just try HTMX
523 by iNic | 425 comments on Hacker News.

Thursday, December 18, 2025

I got hacked: My Hetzner server started mining Monero

I got hacked: My Hetzner server started mining Monero
551 by jakelsaunders94 | 335 comments on Hacker News.

Coursera to combine with Udemy

Coursera to combine with Udemy
559 by throwaway019254 | 333 comments on Hacker News.

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo
583 by recvonline | 883 comments on Hacker News.

Thin desires are eating life

Thin desires are eating life
561 by mitchbob | 202 comments on Hacker News.

AI will make formal verification go mainstream

AI will make formal verification go mainstream
535 by evankhoury | 269 comments on Hacker News.

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

No Graphics API

No Graphics API
454 by ryandrake | 83 comments on Hacker News.

SHARP, an approach to photorealistic view synthesis from a single image

SHARP, an approach to photorealistic view synthesis from a single image
431 by dvrp | 95 comments on Hacker News.

Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment

Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment
441 by 1659447091 | 341 comments on Hacker News.

Secret Documents Show Pepsi and Walmart Colluded to Raise Food Prices

Secret Documents Show Pepsi and Walmart Colluded to Raise Food Prices
408 by connor11528 | 99 comments on Hacker News.

8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions

8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions
418 by takira | 134 comments on Hacker News.

Monday, December 15, 2025

Adafruit: Arduino’s Rules Are ‘Incompatible With Open Source’

Adafruit: Arduino’s Rules Are ‘Incompatible With Open Source’
311 by MilnerRoute | 157 comments on Hacker News.

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
268 by david927 | 847 comments on Hacker News.
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

Computer animator and Amiga fanatic Dick van Dyke turns 100

Computer animator and Amiga fanatic Dick van Dyke turns 100
269 by ggm | 88 comments on Hacker News.
Here's a video from 2004 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1J9kfDCAmU It's his 100th birthday today.

Sunday, December 14, 2025

Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
274 by thomascountz | 122 comments on Hacker News.

Europeans' health data sold to US firm run by ex-Israeli spies

Europeans' health data sold to US firm run by ex-Israeli spies
363 by Fnoord | 164 comments on Hacker News.

I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

I tried Gleam for Advent of Code
309 by tymscar | 171 comments on Hacker News.

Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
331 by lemonlime227 | 348 comments on Hacker News.
I've been working on a personal project recently, rewriting an old jQuery + Django project into SvelteKit. The main work is translating the UI templates into idiomatic SvelteKit while maintaining the original styling. This includes things like using semantic HTML instead of div-spamming, not wrapping divs in divs in divs, and replacing bootstrap with minimal tailwind. It also includes some logic refactors, to maintain the original functionality but rewritten to avoid years of code debt. Things like replacing templates using boolean flags for multiple views with composable Svelte components. I've had a fairly steady process for doing this: look at each route defined in Django, build out my `+page.server.ts`, and then split each major section of the page into a Svelte component with a matching Storybook story. It takes a lot of time to do this, since I have to ensure I'm not just copying the template but rather recreating it in a more idiomatic style. This kind of work seems like a great use case for AI assisted programming, but I've failed to use it effectively. At most, I can only get Claude Code to recreate some slightly less spaghetti code in Svelte. Simple prompting just isn't able to get AI's code quality within 90% of what I'd write by hand. Ideally, AI could get it's code to something I could review manually in 15-20 minutes, which would massively speed up the time spent on this project (right now it takes me 1-2 hours to properly translate a route). Do you guys have tips or suggestions on how to improve my efficiency and code quality with AI?