MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Project Echo – A stateless, zero-DB cyberpunk text visualizer
by iddqd_park | 2025-12-22 17:31:37+00:00
IDDQD Internet builds zero-DB, zero-signup tools powered by pure HTML/JS for instant browser execution. Even with AI features, we keep it stateless and record-free.

Hi HN,

I built PROJECT ECHO, a cyberpunk-themed digital toy that transforms text into visual/audio "transmissions."

The core challenge was to create a shareable experience without a database. I wanted to avoid the typical "sign up to save" or "we store your data" flow. Instead, I opted for URL-encoded state: all configurations (text, style, seed) are packed into the URL. The backend is just a minimal PHP router that handles the parameters.

Technical Highlights:

Visuals: Rendered via HTML5 Canvas API with 10+ modulation styles (Matrix, Glitch, etc.).

Audio: Real-time SFX and procedural background music using the Web Audio API.

Privacy: No text is ever stored on the server. Your "transmission" exists only in the URL you share.

Stack: Vanilla JS, Bootstrap 5, and CSS3 animations. No heavy frameworks.

It’s meant to be a simple, aesthetically pleasing tool for sending "encrypted-style" messages to friends or just enjoying the glitch aesthetic.

Live Demo: https://game.iddqd.kr/echo

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Web Audio implementation or the stateless approach.

Park Sil-jang

Dev Team Lead at IDDQD Internet. E-solution & E-game Lead. Bushwhacking Code Shooter. Currently executing mandates as Choi’s Schemer.

HQ (EN): https://en.iddqd.kr/

GitHub: https://github.com/iddqd-park
by freedomben | 2025-12-22 17:31:41+00:00
Neat, I really want to try building a boat! That does seem like it would be really fun. I started on a kayak once but didn't finish it and ended up cannabilizing many of the pieces for another project after a long-time kayaker friend of mine explained some of the big flaws in my design (I have a strong tendency to get creative with designs, for better or worse), and when I realized that my wood selection was highly suboptimal for something that would get heavily exposed to water. I really need to try again.

What type of wood would you recommend? Do you have any favorite designs you would recommend using as a starting point?
by hombre_fatal | 2025-12-22 17:32:59+00:00
That DOGE was so ineffective in the most DOGE-friendly political climate possible (Trump admin, republican control) kinda torpedoed the hypothesis that there's so much wasteful spending in the US government.

Musk went in thinking that $2T waste would be trivial to find yet fell so short of it that DOGE was disbanded within a year.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 17:33:05+00:00
> I’m looking for land and an RV to start homesteading because I feel like that’s the only thing that will distract me from doom scrolling news.

One anecdote: An old acquaintance from college did something like this, more or less. Instead of making her more offline, it made her more bored and more removed from in-person social interactions. It only increased desire to scroll online content.

If you really want to be less online, go out into the world with other people and do things. Or even just join an initiative or company where people are working on something together.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-22 17:33:15+00:00
Depends on where in India you are from. Winter solstice times with chillai kalan [0] which is treated as a headache. Everything basically shuts down in the Western Himalayan regions of India around this time - from Ladakh to Kashmir to Upper Himachal and Uttarakhand [1], though it has gotten much drier/warmer compared to the stories my parents or grandparents told.

[0] - https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/j-k/snow-rain-in-higher-re...

[1] - https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/himachal/snow-likely-on-de...
by idiotsecant | 2025-12-22 17:33:29+00:00
This man will spend the rest of his (possibly short?) life in prison for the crime of publishing ideas that the government didn't like. He chose to stay in hong kong defending the principles that mattered to him instead of abandoning his principles and fleeing to the UK, which was on option entirely open to him.

Explain why you think it's overstated.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-22 17:33:53+00:00
AKA the typical doomer non-solution. 'If we blow it up, somehow a new, better systems will magically emerge'.

If I went to management with the dev plan of 'throw all the source away, start over with a new stack, new devs, from scratch, but also I don't know what the new stack will be, and haven't found new devs' I would be called a moron. But if you are a conservative, it's somehow called rational policy and a plan and it's worth the lifetime lasting damage/potential deaths is will cause a shit ton of people and financial ruin it will cause many.

Edit: Throttled so replying by edit. In the example below, Steve Jobs LITERALLY had a stack in mind, a plan, and people/talent lined up.
by andy99 | 2025-12-22 17:34:00+00:00
The article is interesting and I hadn’t thought about this really, but it’s pretty obvious that the underlying reason is that personal injury lawyers are completely undifferentiated, and so can only compete on being recognized.

Real estate agents are the most obvious member of this category, their “work” consists almost exclusively of self marketing.

Seems like a strong signal that the market is ripe for disruption, if the lawyers aren’t really adding anything, they could probably just be automated.
by sipofwater | 2025-12-22 17:34:01+00:00
"Trump Takes America’s ‘Imperial Presidency’ to a New Level" "In his first year back in the White House, President Trump has greatly expanded executive power while embracing the trappings of royalty in ways not seen in the modern era.": https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/us/politics/trump-imperia... (www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/us/politics/trump-imperial-presidency.html) ... Mirror: https://archive.ph/YGtu3
by agentultra | 2025-12-22 17:34:05+00:00
There were a lot of factors that went into making salaries sky-rocket. One of those was leverage: there was more demand for skilled programmers than there were available. You also had the ZIRP era from 2008-2021ish. If you could write fizz buzz and breathe you could get a good paying job.

In the 90s inflation-adjusted salaries were still rather high. A 75k USD salary in 1995 is roughly 150k USD today. And the median house was less than a third of your income. And in the 90s there was even more demand for programmers.

The early 2000s were a bit rough unless you were insulated inside Google and big tech.

But 2025 is a very different landscape. I’ve talked to lots of highly talented developers who’ve been consistently employed since the early 2000s who have been on the job search for 9 months, a year.

It’s one thing to have a goal for one’s career but it’s not like you can wait around to find that perfect opportunity forever, right?

Some times you have to find something and work. It might not fit into your plans for your career but it might provide you with the income you need to keep your family afloat and maybe let you indulge in a hobby.
by EastLondonCoder | 2025-12-22 17:34:28+00:00
I’ve ended up with a workflow that lines up pretty closely with the guidance/oversight framing in the article, but with one extra separation that’s been critical for me.

I’m working on a fairly messy ingestion pipeline (Instagram exports → thumbnails → grouped “posts” → frontend rendering). The data is inconsistent, partially undocumented, and correctness is only visible once you actually look at the rendered output. That makes it a bad fit for naïve one-shotting.

What’s worked is splitting responsibility very explicitly:

• Human (me): judge correctness against reality. I look at the data, the UI, and say things like “these six media files must collapse into one post”, “stories should not appear in this mode”, “timestamps are wrong”. This part is non-negotiably human.

• LLM as planner/architect: translate those judgments into invariants and constraints (“group by export container, never flatten before grouping”, “IG mode must only consider media/posts/*”, “fallback must never yield empty output”). This model is reasoning about structure, not typing code.

• LLM as implementor (Codex-style): receives a very boring, very explicit prompt derived from the plan. Exact files, exact functions, no interpretation, no design freedom. Its job is mechanical execution.

Crucially, I don’t ask the same model to both decide what should change and how to change it. When I do, rework explodes, especially in pipelines where the ground truth lives outside the code (real data + rendered output).

This also mirrors something the article hints at but doesn’t fully spell out: the codebase isn’t just context, it’s a contract. Once the planner layer encodes the rules, the implementor can one-shot surprisingly large changes because it’s no longer guessing intent.

The challenges are mostly around discipline:

• You have to resist letting the implementor improvise.

• You have to keep plans small and concrete.

• You still need guardrails (build-time checks, sanity logs) because mistakes are silent otherwise.

But when it works, it scales much better than long conversational prompts. It feels less like “pair programming with an AI” and more like supervising a very fast, very literal junior engineer who never gets tired, which, in practice, is exactly what these tools are good at.
by simonw | 2025-12-22 17:34:57+00:00
Nothing about this feels inflexible to me at the moment - I'm evolving the way I use these tools on a daily basis, constantly discovering new tricks that work.

Just this morning I found out that I can tell Claude Code how to use my shot-scraper CLI tool to debug JavaScript and it will start doing exactly that:

you can run javascript against the page using:
shot-scraper javascript /tmp/output.html \
'document.body.innerHTML.slice(0, 100)'
- try that

Transcript: https://gistpreview.github.io/?1d5f524616bef403cdde4bc92da5b... - background: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/22/claude-chrome-cloudfla...
Show HN: Haystack Slop Detector – a lightweight barrier against unreviewed PRs
by akshaysg | 2025-12-22 17:35:00+00:00
Public repositories seem to be getting more AI-generated pull requests, some of which are low-effort and haven’t been manually reviewed.

We built Haystack Slop Detector to scan PRs and flag changes that look like they were made without reviewing them first. We support AI use, but we think it’s important to surface a lack of polish before it becomes a maintainer’s problem.

We'd love feedback, especially from maintainers and people building agentic workflows!
by agwa | 2025-12-22 17:35:12+00:00
The simple task of following a bug requires you to:

1. Send an empty email to a special address for the bug.

2. Wait 15-30 minutes for Debian's graylisting mail server to accept your email and reply with a confirmation email.

3. Reply to the confirmation email.

The last time I tried to follow a bug, I never got the confirmation email.

In practically every other bug tracker, following a bug is just pressing a button.

Like most of Debian's developer tooling, the bug tracker gets the job done (most of the time) but it's many times more inconvenient than it needs to be.
Show HN: Logchef – Open-source schema-agnostic log viewer for ClickHouse
by mr-karan | 2025-12-22 17:35:46+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Karan. I built Logchef because we moved our log workloads to ClickHouse at Zerodha and found the ecosystem lacking for actual log exploration.

Tools like Metabase and Grafana are great for dashboards, but log exploration is a different workflow.

The Grafana ClickHouse plugin requires manual column configuration for logs, has no field sidebar, and its ad-hoc filters are slow on large tables.
Grafana's RBAC is Enterprise-only, and even then it's datasource-level and not at table-level. If someone has access to the ClickHouse datasource, they can query any table. In Logchef, you create Sources (pointing to specific tables) and assign them to Teams. Team A only sees their logs, Team B only theirs. Fine-grained access control without any Enterprise license :)

Metabase has no concept of log-specific features at all. We kept falling back to raw SQL in clickhouse-client, which works but isn't something you want to hand to your whole team.

So I built Logchef — a log viewer designed specifically for ClickHouse. Schema-agnostic, so you can start filtering immediately without migrations.

What it does:

- Point at any ClickHouse table – no schema migrations/no OTEL requirement
- LogchefQL query language (simpler than SQL for filtering)
- Field sidebar like Kibana – click values to add filters
- SQL-based alerting that routes to Alertmanager
- AI assistant that turns natural language queries like "find slow POST requests" into working SQL
- MCP server for querying logs from your favourite LLM assistant tool
- Single Go binary (~15MB), embeds the frontend

We've been running this in production for 8 months and I'm excited to ship v1.0 today.

Demo: https://demo.logchef.app

GitHub: https://github.com/mr-karan/logchef

Docs: https://logchef.app

Happy to answer questions about ClickHouse for logs, the architecture, or anything else.
by latchup | 2025-12-22 17:35:47+00:00
Well, there are big differences in how aggressively things are patched. Arch Linux makes a point to strictly minimize patches and avoid them entirely whenever possible. That's a good thing, because otherwise, nonsense like the Xscreensaver situation ensues, where the original developers aggressively reject distro packages for mutilating their work and/or forcing old and buggy versions on unsuspecting users.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 17:36:13+00:00
From the way HN's moderators describe their own actions, there's very little active input to what shows up on the front page.

The stories shown are determined by user input (upvotes and flags). Moderators tend to rescue stories that are excessively flagged and there's also the second-chance queue, but I don't believe they're actively picking winners and losers on the front page.

Also, the HN global feed is heavily gamed. It's very common practice for startups to organize voting rings to front-page their latest blog post or new product announcement. The simple attempts are caught, but it's common information in the startup world about how to organize group voting efforts to tip a story on to the front page without triggering the voting ring detector too much.
by GTP | 2025-12-22 17:36:22+00:00
There has to be some balance though, as requiring change too frequently encourages the use of insecure but easy to remember passwords, or password that are very similar to the previous one thus failing the purpose of the change (e.g. a password containing the year, and the employee only changes the year every time). Best would be pushing for the use of a password manager or auth tokens like Yubikeys.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-22 17:36:28+00:00
Just over the weekend, I decided to shell out for the top tier Claude Code to give it a try... definitely an improvement over the year I spent with Github CoPilot enabled on my personal projects (mostly an annoyance more than a help that I eventually disabled altogether).

I've seen some impressive output so far, and have a couple friends that have been using AI generation a lot... I'm trying to create a couple legacy (BBS tech related, in Rust) applications to see how they land. So far mostly planning and structure beyond the time I've spent in contemplation. I'm not sure I can justify the expense long term, but wanting to experience the fuss a bit more to have at least a better awareness.
Show HN: Explore ArXiv/HN/LessWrong with SQL and Vector Algebra
by Xyra | 2025-12-22 17:36:50+00:00
I hardened up a Postgres database enough to give the public access to run arbitrary queries over an interesting and growing dataset.

I've provided a Claude-optimized prompt for driving this search experience. Opus 4.5 is great at writing SQL and taking advantage of our other features.

There's over 23M embeddings (2048*32 bit Voyage-3.5-Lite over ~300 token chunks, 20% overlapped), 600 GB of indexes for performance, a prompt for letting Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 drive usage, and there's full support for vector algebra. One can actually embed arbitrary concepts like "FTX" and "guilt" vectors and store these embeddings on the server, and refer to them in queries like @FTX + @guilt.

Because you and your agent can write and run 100k character SELECT statements for up to 60s, you can really answer some incredibly nuanced questions very easily now.

I'm doing a startup building subjective judgement infrastructure, HMU if interested in angel investment.
by ericmcer | 2025-12-22 17:37:25+00:00
seriously, I stopped agent mode altogether. I hit it with very specific like: write a function that takes an array of X and returns y.

It almost never fails and usually does it in a neat way, plus its ~50 lines of code so I can copy and paste confidently. Letting the agent just go wild on my code has always been a PITA for me.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-22 17:38:04+00:00
This is correct. Which is why "vote with your wallet" is also a flawed strategy. At the scale these companies are operating, individual action does not move the needle, and it is impossible to coordinate enough collective action to move the needle.

There is no feasible way for a normie like me to convince enough people to take any kind of action collectively that will be noticed by FAANG.

I think we like to pretend otherwise, like oh if enough people stop using Instagram, they will fail. This is only true in the most literal sense, because "enough" is an enormous number, totally unachievable by advocacy.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-22 17:38:13+00:00
> Whoever let this past the QC phase is an idiot.

It's all a matter of perspective. I'm sure to some executive somewhere, the person/s who approved all of this is seen as heroes, as they shaved of 0.7% or whatever from the costs of the development, and therefore made shareholders more money.

Until there are laws in place that makes people actually responsible for creating these situations, it'll continue, as for a company, profits goes above all.
by windexh8er | 2025-12-22 17:38:17+00:00
Well, I wish you the best with this - but I really don't understand the target market.

The obvious competitor here is Tailscale. But let's say, reasons, and Tailscale isn't an option. Then you go down the path... TwinGate, Teleport, Netbird, Pomerium, Netmaker, ZeroTier, etc...

Even the initial pricing and free tier are you're up against are going to mostly be a deal breaker compared to what's out there.

Trusting a VPN provider is a lot. If you're running the control plane - why should I trust Netrinos?
by spwa4 | 2025-12-22 17:38:58+00:00
It just keeps baffling me how some bureaucrats think. I first saw this working for the EU as a consultant, but these people actually do believe this. The fact is that the CIA and the NSA have both had leaks that confirmed they were spying on Microsoft, Google, Yahoo's customers before the US CLOUD act even existed. Hell, they were doing it before some of these companies' clouds even existed. And much has been made from the fact that they violated US law to do it (much was made of the scandal that the CIA is supposed to avoid spying on US citizens and leaks proved they didn't do that in the slightest)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7

https://archive.ph/u4DwB

The CIA has been caught doing industrial espionage for US firms. And, the French secret service has had a similar leak.

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2003/06/12/airbuss-...

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19930418/1696416/bo...

Only an EU bureaucrat could make a case that states respect the law when spying. I mean, how absurd is that idea?

To make it worse still, France has been caught doing to the same. Their colleagues! And frankly, I'd be deeply disappointed if every EU country and the US aren't currently doing the same to China and 5 other countries right as you're reading this.

In these circumstances, EU bureaucrats apparently are still unwilling to believe that a state would violate laws as they spy. DESPITE their own colleagues doing the same (France violates EU and French law to spy on US companies).

The problem with US spying is not the US CLOUD act. It is using US hardware and software under the effective control of US companies at all. The solution to that cannot be getting a pinky promise, I guess from Trump, that the spying will stop. Even congress repealing that law would mean exactly nothing.
by linuxhansl | 2025-12-22 17:39:03+00:00
Can't tell if your comment sarcasm or not. But I'll bite.

Sure thing. It's all fraud and conspiracy. Fundamental science is worthless if it cannot be immediately monetized. All scientist are money-hungry crooks.
Let's just stop all research then. Who needs antibiotics, or vaccines, or cancer research, or food safety. Who needs to know about the universe, or about quantum mechanics. It's all just elite stuff... Let's get rid of it.

Government is precisely the place to fund stuff that does not fit into the free market.
by asim | 2025-12-22 17:39:32+00:00
I don't do any of that. I find with GitHub copilot and Claude sonnet 4.5 if I'm clear enough about the what and where it'll sort things out pretty well, and then there's only reiteration of code styling or reuse of functionality. At that point it has enough context to keep going. The only time I might clear that whole thing is if I'm working on an entirely new feature where the context is too large and it gets stuck in summarising the history. Otherwise it's good. But this in codespaces. I find the Tasks feature much harder. Almost a write-off when trying to do something big. Twice I've had it go off on some strange tangent and build the most absurd thing. You really need to keep your eyes on it.
by SamInTheShell | 2025-12-22 17:39:57+00:00
Nothing will be done until one of the investors of the tech end up embarrassed from weaponization of the tech against themselves. These people have no clue how creepy some of their technologic betters can be. I once witnessed a coworker surveilling his own network to ensure his girlfriend wasn't cheating on him (this was a time before massive SSL adoption). The guy just got a role doing networking at my company and thankfully he wasn't there for very long after that.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-22 17:40:05+00:00
Debian is kind of slow in adapting to the modern world.

I kind of appreciate that debian put FOSS at a core value
very early on; in fact, it was the first distribution I
used that forced me to learn the commandline. The xorg-server
or rather X11 server back then was not working so I only had
the commandline, and a lean debian handbook. I typed in the
commands and learned from that. Before this I had SUSE and it
had a much thicker book, with a fancypants GUI - and it was
utterly useless. But that was in 2005 or so.

Now, in 2025, I have not used debian or any debian based
distribution in a long time. I either compile from source
loosely inspired by LFS/BLFS; or I may use Manjaro typically
these days, simply because it is the closest to a modern
slackware variant (despite systemd; slackware I used for
a long time, but sadly it slowed down too much in the last
10 years, even with modern variants such as alienbob's
slackware variant - manjaro moves forward like 100x faster
and it also works at the same time, including when I want
to compile from source; for some reason, many older distributions
failed to adapt to the modern era. Systemd may be one barrier
here, but the issue is much more fundamental than that. For
instance, you have many more packages now, and many things
take longer to compile, e. g. LLVM and what not, which in turn
is needed for mesa, then we have cmake, meson/ninja and so
forth. A lot more software to handle nowadays).