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Showing posts from December, 2025

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

Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite 378 by keepamovin | 123 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/SxDe2Gz ): 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: Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB

Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB 415 by quesomaster9000 | 95 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'. ...

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 you...

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your Linux system

Show HN: Witr – Explain why a process is running on your Linux system 436 by pranshuparmar | 85 comments on Hacker News. Hi HN, I built a small Linux CLI tool called witr (Why Is This Running?). The idea came from a situation most of us have hit: you log into a machine, see a process or port running, and immediately wonder why it exists, who started it, and what is keeping it alive right now. witr traces a process, service, or port back to its origin and responsibility chain and explains it in a way that’s quick to read, especially when you’re debugging under pressure. This is v0.1.0. It’s intentionally small and focused. Feedback, criticism, and edge cases are very welcome. Repo: https://ift.tt/TGcqmWb

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Vibium – Browser automation for AI and humans, by Selenium's creator

Show HN: Vibium – Browser automation for AI and humans, by Selenium's creator 385 by hugs | 109 comments on Hacker News. i started the selenium project 21 years ago. vibium is what i'd build if i started over today with ai agents in mind. go binary under the hood (handles browser, bidi, mcp) but devs never see it. just npm install vibium. python/java coming. for claude code: claude mcp add vibium -- npx -y vibium v1 ships today. ama.

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/2cAeBCn PyPI: https://ift.tt/BeY82Qu Would love feedback from terminal + Python folks

New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?

Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth? 417 by nishilpatel | 125 comments on Hacker News. I’m looking for examples of high-quality engineering blog posts—especially from tech company blogs, that go beyond surface-level explanations. Specifically interested in posts that: 1. Explain technical concepts clearly and concisely 2. Show real implementation details, trade-offs, and failures 3. Are well-structured and readable 4. Tie engineering decisions back to business or product outcomes Any standout blogs, posts, or platforms you regularly learn from?

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: WalletWallet – create Apple passes from anything

Show HN: WalletWallet – create Apple passes from anything 418 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.

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? 433 by embedding-shape | 257 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/UX6NpAw - https://ift.tt/5Nc0GyI - https://ift.tt/9rCbtwZ 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 b...