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Project ideas to appreciate the art of programming (codecrafters.io)
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I see comments suspecting this list is AI-generated. That might be true. But ironically, the practice of "building from scratch" is the best antidote to AI dependency. Writing from Japan, we call this process "Shugyo" (austere training). A master carpenter spends years learning to sharpen tools, not because it's efficient, but to understand the nature of the steel. Building your own Redis or Git isn't about the result (which AI can give you instantly). It is about the friction. That friction builds a mental model that no LLM can simulate. Whether this post is marketing or not, the "Shugyo" itself is valid.
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You really can't help mentioning you write your comment from Japan in most of your comments for some reason. Not that it's my business that whether you are actually born and raised in Japan or an immigrant/expat. Just a random observation and that I don't think you have any less point without mentioning it Taking your an account age, it's a bit of bot smell if you ask me
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>Writing from Japan, we call this process "Shugyo" (austere training). A master carpenter spends years learning to sharpen tools, not because it's efficient, but to understand the nature of the steel. Is there repetition implied? Would you build your own redis 20 times? (Just curious).
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I have one: learn JSON Schema and Polish, together. You learn both at the same time, bi-directionally, one concept illuminating the other. Polish + SQL (Vol.2) and Polish + Rust (Vol.3) are on the way: https://validpolish.com
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Stop posting this crap. You've submitted and deleted the same thing at least a dozen times now. Another one you did under a different account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439576
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You can see for yourself if what I'm offering is crap. Here's a sample chapter: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/i9oj0ywsoxpyen3x1kxpu/ValidPolish-ch1.pdf?rlkey=1r31pbe6mqjvbcuuqb6y4trlf&st=12im72yt&dl=0
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AI usage verboten? Or erlaubt?
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Is this what the kids call "astroturfing"?
I’ll plug my series of project ideas that have also been discussed here on HN over the years: Challenging programming projects every programmer should try https://austinhenley.com/blog/challengingprojects.html
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I've seen your list before and find it much easier to appreciate than the OP tbh. It is very concise, the descriptions actually describe what one might learn or struggle with and each project comes with resources to get started with (One day i might even get around to doing one of these ;) The OP very much comes off to me as a "here are 100 books you need to read before you die" recommendation porn type of post where the author has done none of the things listed.
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As part of undergrad we had to implement space invaders on a Zync FPGA so you got to choose which bits you did in hardware and what was in software. It was a blast seeing what people came up with as you could do “extras” that gave you bonus points. Someone built a simple microphone frequency analysis block so you could go left, right, and fire by playing notes on a recorder.
This is a strange list. #58 is make your own malloc, ok. That's a moderately difficult project for a new developer (made harder if they don't know anything about what malloc actually does under the hood, you may need to study up a bit on operating systems and some other things before you even start). Followed by #59 where they suggest you build your own streaming protocol from scratch... There are some good projects in there, but the levels of difficulty are all over the place.
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My rAI-dar says this list and blurbs are very likely produced by AI. It really reads like in near the middle.
NYC Mayoral Inauguration bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero alongside explosives (blog.adafruit.com)
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It's not like they're banning them across all of NYC... it's just security at the inauguration event. "Large bags" are banned too. > When a policy bans specific devices rather than behaviors or capabilities, it creates ambiguity for people on the ground. To the contrary, how the heck is someone checking backpacks supposed to check for a device's "behaviors or capabilities"? This is a quick visual inspection, this reduces ambiguity. Presumably, the cops are aware of previous disruption with these specific devices, or threats thereof. And it's not like they're going to say exactly what, nor should they, lest it give people ideas... > Today it’s Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero. Tomorrow it’s BeagleBone Blacks, Arduino Qs, ESP32 dev boards, Teensy boards, Pine64s, Orange Pis... Which is totally fine. There's no legitimate purpose in bringing any of those to a high-profile political event . Drones, laser pens, and beach balls are prohibited too.
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I noticed that they didn't ban "walkie talkies" or "radio transceivers", and I wonder... Some of the more niche/hobby transceivers could be used by a group of bad actors at an event, for comms that are less-monitorable than smartphones and mainstream COTS handheld transceivers. And such hobby transceivers/transmitters might not operate on the list of RF bands that would be jammed by authorities when there's a suspected terrorist situation. Many of these devices have exposed PCBs (either general-purpose SBCs, or specialized). So, saying "no Raspberry Pi" could be an attempt to ban all exposed PCB devices. And "no Flipper Zero" is the non-exposed-PCB problematic device that everyone has also heard of. Kudos to the people keeping the event safe, especially given all the recently emboldened bad actors right now, who might be attracted to the event. For hobbyists, there are numerous opportunities to advocate for your right to, e.g., carry electronics hobbyist gadgets, or to wear an artistic blinking LED jewelry piece strapped to your chest. Some of those opportunities need help, while some other opportunities could be counterproductive to your cause.
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This seems very amateur hour and likely to have the opposite of the intended effect, i.e. I expect there will be tons of Flipper Zeros that people bring as "jokes".
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what about a smart lamp?
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why not just list "exposed circuit boards" in the ban?
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Somebody obviously raised the question in a meeting somewhere, and there's no incentive to be the guy who says, "Nah, that's perfectly safe" - and every incentive to CYA.
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It’s quite amusing. Hopefully, you all can do without your Pi or Flipper for a day. You can leave home without it.
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I bet if you bring this up directly with Mamdani he would take the raspberry pi off the list. This is the result of several layers of abstraction.
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This reads like AI slop...
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they banned flipper zero? what about the thousands of rf mcu devboards still available!! think of the children!! what idiots
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I assume that police compile such lists, right? If so, this once again says a lot about their competence.
All of the comments so far have been about > le heckin' security theater targeting tinkerbros and none addressing the elephant in the room of why Mamdani needs all of this security, or frankly, any security at all? Just a few years prior, he tweeted out #DefundThePolice, and of the NYPD specifically, suggested "Defund it. Dismantle it. End the cycle of violence." And even though he's walked some of that back, he still supports dismantling the NYPD's Strategic Response Group (whose duties including counter terrorism response). You can be sure however free of a rein the city's population of crazy transients are given to assault, slash, or push others in front of oncoming subway trains, he and his family will remain safe.
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they always exempt themselves
Oh good. My OrangePi is safe.
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That's a "travelling in a car isn't driving" level of legal argument.
The cops made this list. The idea that a smartphone can do everything a Raspberry Pi can do, and more, is a concept so far beyond their level of understanding that the discussion is pointless.
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> The cops made this list. with the help of which LLM(s) ?
Since smartphones are already locked down by their vendors, the cops have a point.
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It is trivial to get an older, unlocked cell phone that you can root. You then have a device equally or more powerful than a Raspberry Pi with built-in radios.
This is not really accurate though. Both a Raspberry Pi and a Flipper Zero can easily and readily be turned into a signal jammer or spammer with off the shelf parts and nearly no technical skill. Modern smartphones are generally both more locked down and also don't come with an external antenna option.
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I have a $5 ESP32 board that does the same, my phone is just the UI!
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Any mobile computer can be easily and readily turned into a signal jammer/spammer with an off-the-shelf SDR. There is nothing particularly special about the Raspberry Pi. I didn't see laptops on the list.
Literally the first result on Google gives a simple to use jammer that works out of the box. Hook up an external antenna and you're good to go. Plenty of more sophisticated options if you dig a bit more.
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Same for Android phones and laptops.
The language is unfortunately imprecise (or rather too precise) but I’d imagine this is simply allowing security staff discretion to refuse suspicious circuit board looking devices. They’re not going to be checking for brand names.
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Yeah, exposed circuit boards are things most people only see in three settings: (1) when one of their devices are broken, (2) bomb in a movie, or (3) it's the 00s. I think they're more concerned with preventing a panic over any of the concerns about what someone can do with a Raspberry Pi.
>New York City usually gets this right. It has decades of muscle memory for doing hard things in public, under pressure, without panicking. Not something I would say about Stop-And-Frisk city but whatever.
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Stop and frisk reduced crime rates. It should be brought back.
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Crime rates reduced during the time stop and frisk was implemented. But when it was removed, crime rates remained low: https://www.brennancenter.org/media/5670/download Strongly suggests correlation but not causation.
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An unmarked car pulls alongside you, all men are masked inside and the windows tinted. You're ready to fight back or run, but then it turns out it's the police attempting to harass and bully you. Wonderful.
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Public executions too
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According to Mayor Bloomberg; a politician is always going to say their policy worked.
With A.I./ML and high def aerial and street video + other electronic signals you don’t need ineffective tools like stop and frisk. They had the technology in Iraq to figure out where IEDs were coming from. (TF Odin) They could also cut down on government fraud and all the homeless NGO waste/fraud. [1] We need people to vote in governments who are interested in rooting out fraud as well as other crimes, rather than those seeking political careers who would rather freeze wheels take a blind eye to things. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1gl4SESu2o
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> With A.I./ML and high def aerial and street video + other electronic signals you don’t need stop and frisk. Imagine believing that this stuff is effective.
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Imagine believing that stop-and-frisk was.
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I didn't imply that it was, BigTTYGothGF.
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Is digital stop in frisk run by a shadowy corporation better or worse than physical stop and frisk run by the police? Maybe it's better, but I'm not sure we should be ready to cheer it on either.
I'm using Firefox on a Linux workstation (without Tor) and I still got the CAPTCHA. The statement "blog.adafruit.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding" is misleading at best. Shame on Cloudflare, this kind of dishonesty makes me not want to trust your RCA marketing pieces.
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I received the same prompt from a Windows 11 machine at work. This probably has nothing to do with Tor or Linux, but their Cloudflare settings.
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In addition to Cloudflare's usual nonsense (e.g., give us all the cleartext because reasons, and also unblock our bad-UX code that doubles as an additional tracker), it looks like Cloudflare here might also be blocking Tor exit nodes (either proactively, or in response to detected abuses from those addresses).
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Same with Firefox Focus on Android.
I mean, probably not. Nobody really thinks about mayoral inaugurations.
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Very few mayors have as many constituents as NYC, though. So of all mayoral inaugurations, this one has among the most potential people thinking about it, even disregarding how on-the-national-stage the election played out.
I brought a 5G Peplink modem (which has 4 external antennas) in my checked luggage and got "randomly searched" by TSA on both legs of a trip once, which I thought was pretty hilarious.
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I used to travel with a case full of parts for work and just started leaving extra zipties inside because the TSA agents that would search it wouldn't always ziptie it back closed after they were done.
How are they going to enforce this? "No officer see this is an orange pi"
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Call it a donut-pi and watch their minds explode. You could also try American pie, apple pie (Hi mom) or perhaps freedom pi. A decent stars and stripes heat sink should be pretty easy to fiddle up, and probably exists already.
Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers (vptdigital.com)
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Apparently this thing got approved for the chrome store, which confirms that "store" approvals are near worthless for malware filtering.
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It started as a clone of the camelcamelcamel Amazon price history site and got kicked out by Amazon for abusing the system. It pivoted to a coupon site and started sucking down user data with the plugin when PayPal paid $4Bil CASH. Honey cost me affiliate marketing commissions.
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Likening any of this to Volkswagen emissions compliance scandal does a huge disservice by treating "Affiliate Marketing" as far too important. "Who gets a kickback on this toothbrush" is a much MUCH less important question than "do you pollute the air we are all breathing".
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It's comparing Honey's behavior to a well-known and comprehended scandal. Simile is a tried and tested way (hah!) to explain otherwise potentially hard to understand or dry content. It's not about the severity of the impact, its the fact that they were breaking the rules and explicitly coding to actively avoid being caught by testers.
OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026 (economist.com)
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OpenAI has #5 traffic levels globally. Their product-market fit is undeniable. The question is monetization. Their cost to serve each request is roughly 3 orders of magnitude higher than conventional web sites. While it is clear people see value in the product, we only know they see value at today’s subsidized prices. It is possible that inference prices will continue their rapid decline. Or it is possible that OAI will need to raise prices and consumers will be willing to pay more for the value.
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It's easy to get product-market fit when you give away dollars for the price of pennies.
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Yes, but that is the standard methodology for startups in their boost phase. Burn vast piles of cash to acquire users, then find out at the end if a profitable business can be made of it.
ChatGPT dominates the consumer market (though Nano Banana is singlehandedly breathing some life into consumer Gemini). A small anecdote: when ChatGPT went down a few months ago, a lot of young people (especially students) just waited for it to come back up. They didn't even think about using an alternative.
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When ChatGPT starts injecting ads or forcing payment or doing anything else that annoys its userbase then the young people won't have a problem looking for alternatives This "moat" that OpenAI has is really weak
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They took early steps to do so (ads) just recently. User response was as you'd expect.
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That's pretty nuts. With the models changing so much and so often, you have to switch it up sometimes just to see what the other company is offering.
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How often do you or people you know use a search engine other than google?
Not sure why they put so much investment into videoSlop and imageSlop. Anthropic seems to be more focused at least.
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Because for all the incessant whining about "slop," multimodal AI i/o is incredibly useful. Being able to take a photo of a home repair issue, have it diagnosed, and return a diagram showing you what to do with it is great, and it's the same algos that power the slop. "Sorry, you'll have to go to Gemini for that use case, people got mad about memes on the internet" is not really a good way for them to be a mass consumer company.
>Also if you want to have more semantics, you add image, video and audio to your model. It gets smarter because of it. I think you are confusing generation with analysis. As far I am aware your model does not need to be good at generating images to be able to decode an image.
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It is, to first approximation, the same thing. The generative part of genAI is just running the analysis model in reverse. Now there are all sorts of tricks to get the output of this to be good, and maybe they shouldn't be spending time and resources on this. But the core capability is shared.
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> The generative part of genAI is just running the analysis model in reverse. I think that hasn't been the case since DeepDream?
If only 99% of the Internet was kitten videos and memes
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Well, it sure as hell not all 3blue1brown, crr0ww, Feynman, and alike
There is no doubt that OpenAI is taking a lot of risks by betting that AI adoption will translate into revenues in the very short term. And that could really happen imo (with a low probability sure, but worth the risk for VCs? Probably).
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It's mathematically impossible what OpenAI is promising. They know it. The goal is to be too big to fail and get bailed out by US taxpayers who have been groomed into viewing AI as a cold war style arms race that America cannot lose.
I don't. Google has at least a few advantages: 1. Google books, which they legally scanned. No dubious training sets for them. They also regularly scrape the entire internet. And they have YouTube. Easy access to the best training data, all legally. 2. Direct access to the biggest search index. When you ask ChatGPT to search for something it is basically just doing what we do but a bit faster. Google can be much smarter, and because it has direct access it's also faster. Search is a huge use case of these services. 3. They have existing services like Android, Gmail, Google Maps, Photos, Assistant/Home etc. that they can integrate into their AI. The difference in model capability seems to be marginal at best, or even in Google's favour. OpenAI has "it's not Google" going for it, and also AI brand recognition (everyone knows what ChatGPT is). Tbh I doubt that will be enough.
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And they have hardware as well, and their own cloud platform. In my view Google is uniquely well positioned because, contrary to the others, it controls most of the raw materials for Ai.
Where does google struggle to make products people don’t want to use? Is it a personal opinion?
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Anti Gravity is a flop. I mean it uses Gemini under the hood. But you cannot use it with an API key. If you're on a workspace account, you can't have normal individual plan. You have to have the team plan with $100/month or nothing. Google's product management tier is beyond me.
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OK, but Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, and Google Search etc are ubiquitous. `Google' has even become a verb. Google might take a shotgun approach, but it certainly does create widely used products.
Bart was a flop. Google search is losing market share to other LLM providers. Gemini adoption is low, people around me prefer OpenAI because it is good enough and known. But on the contrary, Nano Banana is very good, so I don't know. And in the end, I'm pretty confident Google will be the AI race winner, because they got the engineers, they tech background and the money. Unless Google Adsense die, they can continue the race forever.
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what are you talking about Gemini adoption has tripled in a few months alone and have around 18% of marketshare and its accelerating.
The fact is nobody has any idea what OpenAI's cash burn is. Measuring how much they're raising is not an adequate proxy. For all we know, they could be accumulating capital to weather an AI winter. It's also worth noting that OpenAI has not trained a new model since gpt4o (all subsequent models are routing systems and prompt chains built on top of 4), so the idea of OpenAI being stuck in some kind of runaway training expense is not real.
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>It's also worth noting that OpenAI has not trained a new model since gpt4o (all subsequent models are routing systems and prompt chains built on top of 4) At the very least they made GPT 4.5, which was pretty clearly trained from scratch. It was possibly what they wanted GPT-5 to be but they made a wrong scaling prediction, people simply weren't ready to pay that much money.
The GPT-5 series is a new model, based on the o1/o3 series. It's very much inaccurate to say that it's a routing system and prompt chain built on top of 4o. 4o was not a reasoning model and reasoning prompts are very weak compared to actual RLVR training. No one knows whether the base model has changed, but 4o was not a base model, and neither is 5.x. Although I would be kind of surprised if the base model hadn't also changed, FWIW: they've significantly advanced their synthetic data generation pipeline (as made obvious via their gpt-oss-120b release, which allegedly was entirely generated from their synthetic data pipelines), which is a little silly if they're not using it to augment pretraining/midtraining for the models they actually make money from. But either way, 5.x isn't just a prompt chain and routing on top of 4o.
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Prior to 5.2 you couldn’t expect to get good answers to questions prior to March 2024. It was arguing with me that Bruno Mars did not have two hit songs in the last year. It’s clear that in 2025 OpenAI used the old 4.0 base model and tried to supercharge it using RLVR. That had very mixed results.
They have not successfully trained a new model since 4o. That doesn’t mean they haven’t burned a pile of cash trying. I know sama says they aren’t trying to train new models, but he’s also a known liar and would definitely try to spin systemic failure.
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lol the typical AI boosters are down voting you.
You are already paying for several national lab HPC centers. These are used for government/university research - no idea if commercial interests can rent time on them. The big ones are running weather, astronomy simulations, nuclear explosions, biological sequencing, and so on.
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The biggest run classified nuclear stockpile loads, at least in the US. They cost about half a billion apiece. And are 30 (carefully cooled and cabled) megawatts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Capitan_(supercomputer) No chance they're going to take risks to share that hardware with anyone given what it does. The scaled down version of El Capitan is used for non-classified workloads, some of which are proprietary, like drug simulation. It is called Tuolumne. Not long ago, it was nevertheless still a top ten supercomputer. Like OP, I also don't see why a government supercomputer does it better than hyperscalers, coreweave, neoclouds, et al, who have put in a ton of capital as even compared to government. For loads where institutional continuity is extremely important, like weather -- and maybe one day, a public LLM model or three -- maybe. But we're not there yet, and there's so much competition in LLM infrastructure that it's quite likely some of these entrants will be bag holders, not a world of juicy margins at all...rather, playing chicken with negative gross margins.
There are arguments aplenty that schooling and a minimum amount of healthcare are public goods, as are roads built on public land (the government owns most roads after all). What is the justification for considering data centers capable of running LLMs to be a public good? There are many counter examples of things many people use but are still private. Clothing stores, restaurants and grocery stores, farms, home appliance factories, cell phone factories, laundromats and more.
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Libraries with books are likely considered public goods right? Why not an LLM datacenter if it also offers information? You could say it's the public library of the future maybe.
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Not all libraries are publicly owned or accessible. Most are run by local municipalities because they wouldn't exist otherwise. Data centers clearly can exist without being owned by the public.
a distinction: the data centers have become the means of production, unlike clothing from a store
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How is that distinct from any of my other examples which listed factories? Very few factories in the US are publicly owned; citing data centers as places of production merely furthers the argument that they should remain private.
why does the article used words like burn and incinerate, implying that OpenAI is somehow making money disappear or something? They’re spending it; someone is profiting here, even if it’s not OpenAI. Is it all Nvidia?
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> They’re spending it That's what the words mean in this context.
How many gold toilets do you need? I mean, I don't even own one.
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Tragically I don't make CEO money so I also don't have one but I presume you'd want to have at least one per mansion and another one in the office. Maybe a separate one for special occasions.
IIRC, current estimates are that OpenAI is losing as much money a year as Uber or Amazon lost in their entire lifetime of unprofitability. Also, both Uber and Amazon spent their unprofitable years having a clear roadmap to profitability. OpenAI's roadmap to profitability is "???"
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I have lived through Amazon’s rags to riches and there was never a clear plan to profitability. Vast majority of people were questioning sanity of anyone investing in Amazon. I am not saying OpenAI is Amazon but am saying I have seen this before where masses are going “oh business is bad, losses are huge, where is path to profitability…”
To become the next Uber, do I just need to run huge losses?
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I wouldn’t but path to success can clearly come from running 10-digit losses for a loooong time, no?
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I think you're saying that just running up huge losses is sufficient to create a successful company? But that you personally wouldn't want to run up huge losses? Not sure.
Sabotaging Bitcoin (blog.dshr.org)
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[delayed]
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The answer to this problem is in the original Bitcoin whitepaper itself. It gives the formula for the required number of confirmations. The Monero PoW community has had to deal with such nonsense, as have other smaller PoW coins. With ε=1e-3, the expected number of 6 confirmations works only so long as the largest pool size does not exceed 12%. For a pool size of 30%, at least 24 confirmations should be required in Bitcoin, but 49 in Monero with its stricter ε=1e-6. You can see the table and the math at https://gist.github.com/impredicative/0907e1699f5ff97a9fed5dee20393266#file-confirmations-md and again it's all cleanly verifiable from the whitepaper. Anyone who is still requiring only 6 confirmations then will be setting themselves up for a risk of reversal.
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Sanctions are just a political tool to oppress people and freedom. The real trojan horse is the 3% inflation each year that the government subjects us to with their moneyprinting. It compounds one's savings into nothingness. That's before it ultimately blows up altogether with hyperinflation which is its only possible long-term outcome given the debt.
Top Tip: If you find the orange site's conversation on crypto to be repetitive you can change the top bar. Conversation stays the same but the colour can be changed!
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Yeah, always takes me a minute when people say 'the orange site' (especially elsewhere) - it's green if I'm logged in, so I rarely see it orange, and then it's 'wuh, I'm logged out, [logs in]'. Fortunately I'm not prone to refer to the green site.
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Readers will want to note that this delightful feature is only available to users above 251 karma, or a knack for UserCSS.
Is it illegal to attack cryptocurrency?
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Depending on the currency, it's celebrated. (Code is law, etc.)
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IANAL, but from my understanding, the primary law used to prosecute hacking is the CFAA's broad "without authorization" and "exceeding authorized access" clauses. That said, authorization implies an entity with ownership rights granting some kind of limited license to others to interact with the owner's property. For a permissionless decentralized network with no owner, where the attack is against the consensus of which chain is valid, I'd have a hard time arguing that "authorization" as a concept is even applicable or relevant. As wmf suggested, market manipulation laws may still apply, but I'm not sure traditional CFAA "without authorization" / "exceeding authorized access" hacking charges could apply, though I'd be willing to bet a prosecutor could make a case for wire fraud - a scheme to defraud using interstate communications.
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The attack described in this article might violate CFTC market manipulation regulations.
If crypto needs legal protection from attacks, I think that would invalidate most of its value proposition.
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Definitely reduces the cost of consensus though.
TIL: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci - quite horrifying! EDIT: For comparison: https://gridwatch.co.uk/
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What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste. Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible. Because that's what everyone else is doing. With Bitcoin, you now exactly what your costs are and what your yields are. There's a clear threshold, when power in an area becomes too expensive there's no reason left to mine. AI, on the other hand, is a bet on the future - infinite gains. No matter how much power costs, it's worth it to keep using as much as possible. We can't know how much power AI uses. Unlike Bitcoin, there aren't any metrics from which to extrapolate. But we do know that AI uses more power than Bitcoin already. We just have no idea how much more.
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> gas that's normally burned off at the well site Funny thing about that. Civilized governments put a stop to that, by fining flare-offs to make it economical to not do that.
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Meanwhile, Hedera remains carbon negative and 7 orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin. "Today, Hedera is performing the equivalent of over 10,000,000 transactions and 788,000 transactions for the same amount of energy it takes Bitcoin and Ethereum to process 1, respectively." [0]: https://hedera.com/blog/going-carbon-negative-at-hedera-hashgraph/ [1]: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10160701/
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Unless your intent isn't making the world a better place in some sort of meaningful way, learn about things and find something to care about that you can affect that actually matters. Bitcoin or AI or whatever is not worth your time. Do something real. If we ever get to the point where bitcoin or what people are doing on servers is the most pressing problem in the world worthy of our outrage, I will cheer you on. "Anon yells at cloud" isn't worth anyone's effort or time.
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Wait till you find out how much fossil fuel energy the US burns via its military to defend the dollar. Burning firewood actually immediately releases an extensive set of carcinogens, also causing depression.
Professional software developers don't vibe, they control (arxiv.org)
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It feels like we're doing another lift to a higher level of abstraction. Whereas we had "automatic programming" and "high level programming languages" free us from assembly, where higher level abstractions could be represented without the author having to know or care about the assembly (and it took decades for the switch to happen), we now once again get pulled up another layer. We're in the midst of another abstraction level becoming the working layer - and that's not a small layer jump but a jump to a completely different plane. And I think once again, we'll benefit from getting tools that help us specify the high level concepts we intend, and ways to enforce that the generated code is correct - not necessarily fast or efficient but at least correct - same as compilers do. And this lift is happening on a much more accelerated timeline. The problem of ensuring correctness of the generated code across all the layers we're now skipping is going to be the crux of how we manage to leverage LLM/agentic coding. Maybe Cursor is TurboPascal.
Don’t let anyone tell you the right way to program a computer. Do it in the way that makes you feel happy, or conforms to organizational standards.
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The right way to program a computer: Well
I haven't seen the definition of an agent, in the paper. Do they differentiate agents from generic online chat interfaces?
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Page 2: We define agentic tools or agents as AI tools integrated into an IDE or a terminal that can manipulate the code directly (i.e., excluding web-based chat interfaces)
Ok I will bite. Every single example you gave is in a hobby project territory. Relatively self-contained, maintainable by 3-4 devs max, within 1k-10k lines of code. I've been successfully using coding agents to create such projects for the past year and it's great, I love it. However, lots of us here work on codebases that are 100x, 1000x the size of these projects you and Karpathy are talking about. Years of domain specific code. From personal experience, coding agents simply don't work at that scale the same way they do for hobby projects. Over the past year or two, I did not see any significant improvement from any of the newest models. Building a slightly bigger hobby project is not even close to making these agents work at industrial scale.
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Most of this stuff came out in November. There hasn't been much time for professional teams to build new things with it, especially given the holidays!
> academic papers take 6-12 months to come out It takes about 6 months to figure out how to get LaTeX to position figures where you want them, and then another 6 months to fight with reviewers
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Couldn't AI help with the LaTeX? Cutting it down to 6 minutes
we've never seen a profession drive themselves so aggressively to irrelevance. software engineering will always exist, but it's amazing the pace to which pressure against the profession is rising. 2026 will be a very happy new year indeed for those paying the salaries. :)
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Don't care have too much to do must automate away my today responsibilities so I can do more tomorrow trvst the plqn
> we've never seen a profession drive themselves so aggressively to irrelevance. Should we be trying to put the genie back in the bottle? If not, what exactly are you suggesting? Even if we all agreed to stop using AI tools today, what about the rest of world? Will everybody agree to stop using it? Do you think that is even a remote possibility?
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Does the rest of the world want to make money in a way not involving digging ditches? I feel like people from developing countries that spend 18 hours a day studying, giving their entire childhood to some standardized test, may not want yo be rewarded with no job prospects. Maybe that’s a crazy position.
Have you considered that it's a bit dismissive to assume that developers who find use out of AI tools necessarily approve of worse code than you do, or have lower standards? It's fine to be a skeptic. Or to have tried out these tools and found that they do not work well for your particular use case at this moment in time. But you shouldn't assume that people who do get value out of them are not as good at the job as you are, or are dumber than you are, or slower than you are. That's just not a good practice and is also rude.
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I never said anything about being worse, dumber, and definitely not slower. And keep in mind worse is subjective - if something doesn't require edge case handling or correctness, bugs can be tolerated etc, then something with those properties isn't worse is it? I'm just saying that since there is such a wide range of experiences with the same tools, it's probably likely that developers vary on their evaluations of the output.
Ya know, I have to admit feeling something like this. Normally, the amount of stuff I put together in a work day offers a sense of completion or even a bit of a dopamine bump because of a "job well done". With this recent work I've been doing, it's instead felt like I've been spending a multiplier more energy communicating intent instead of doing the work myself; that communication seems to be making me more tired than the work itself. Similar?
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This is why I think LLMs will make us all a LOT smarter. Raw code made it so we stopped heavily thinking in between but now it's just 100% the most intense thought processes all day long.
It feels like we all signed up to be ICs, but now we’re middle managers and our reports are bots.
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I forget where I saw this (a Medium post, somewhere) but someone summed this up as "I didn't sign up for this just to be a tech priest for the machine god".
Everything as code: How we manage our company in one monorepo (kasava.dev)
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I envy this confidence, the less you know the more confident you are.
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Had me interested up until the word "AI"
What's exhausting is seeing people complain about AI writing. What exactly are you looking for instead? A poorly written article?
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Agreed. Especially when a lot of people just pick out x, y and z thing as if it's the definitive sign of AI, disregarding the possibility of it being normal outside of their own writing and what they read. Not to mention cultural differences. That certain characters or ways of structuring text have become more pervasive lately is a sign, yes, but it does not mean that the presence of it in a text is anything definitive towards the use of AI. It's almost as if when you seek to find patterns, you'll find patterns, even if there are none. I think it'd benefit these kinds of people to remember the scientific "rule" of correlation does not equal causation and vice versa.
What do you use for feature flags?
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You can also do them in Gitlab.
Blue/green might allow you to do (approximately) atomic deploys for one service, but it doesn't allow you to do an atomic deploy of the clients of that service as well.
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Why that? In a very simple case, all services of a monorepo run on a single VM. Spin up new VM, deploy new code, verify, switch routing. Obviously, this doesn't work with humongous systems, but the idea can be expanded upon: make sure that components only communicate with compatible versions of other components. And don't break the database schema in a backward-incompatible way.
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The only way I could read their answer as being close to correct is if the clients they're referring to are not managed by the deployment. But (in my mind) even a front end is going to get told it is out of date/unusable and needs to be upgraded when it next attempts to interact with the service, and, in my mind atleast, that means that it will have to upgrade, which isn't "atomic" in the strictest sense of the word, but it's as close as you're going to get.
"squash results in a cleaner commit history" Isn't the commit history supposed to be the history of actual commits? I have never understood why people put so much effort into falsifying git commit histories.
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There are several valid reasons to "falsify" commit history. - You need to remove trash commits that appear when you need to rerun CI. - You need to remove commits with that extra change you forgot. - You want to perform any other kind of rebase to clean up messages. I assume in this thread some people mean squashing from the perspective of a system like Gitlab where it's done automatically, but for me squashing can mean simply running an interactive (or fixup) and leaving only important commits that provide meaningful information to the target branch.
Here is how I think of it. When I am actively developing a feature I commit a lot. I like the granularity at that stage and typically it is for an audience of 1 (me). I push these commits up in my feature branch as a sort of backup. At this stage it is really just whatever works for your process. When I am ready to make my PR I delete my remote feature branch and then squash the commits. I can use all my granular commit comments to write a nice verbose comment for that squashed commit. Rarely I will have more than one commit if a user story was bigger than it should be. Usually this happens when more necessary work is discovered. At this stage each larger squashed commit is a fully complete change. The audience for these commits is everyone who comes after me to look at this code. They aren’t interested in seeing it took me 10 commits to fix a test that only fails in a GitHub action runner. They want the final change with a descriptive commit description. Also if they need to port this change to an earlier release as a hotfix they know there is a single commit to cherry pick to bring in that change. They don’t need to go through that dev commit history to track it all down.
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The "cleaner" commit history should be a separate layer and the actual commit history should never be altered.
The sword-wielding man hired to kick squatters out of empty Oakland homes (oaklandside.org)
I think it's an attempt to normalize the idea that shelter is a basic human right. As a blue-stater, I'm undecided on whether I agree that it's a right, but I definitely think that nobody has a right to shelter in any property they choose. It's a pretty complicated issue, and the legal patchwork of state versus county versus city laws can make it really difficult to untangle. I think that given the system we have, everyone in it is pretty much behaving rationally, if in their own best interests. I understand why the squatters would choose a squat over a shelter.
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I don’t know. If people are “entitled” to shelter, shouldn’t they be entitled to food, even more so? In that case, if a hungry person were to knock on your door and demand something from your pantry, how could they be denied?
> As a blue-stater, I'm undecided on whether I agree that it's a right, but I definitely think that nobody has a right to shelter in any property they choose. Given that all the property is claimed, I don’t see what the distinction is. If there existed a ton of unclaimed coastal California property, there wouldn’t be a problem. So the more interesting and actionable question then is who has the right to live in coastal California?
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None of the rights that people have are unrestricted in that way. The sixth amendment gives you the right to a lawyer paid for by the government, but it doesn't give you the right to pick any lawyer you choose. The obvious answer is that, if people do have the right to shelter, it is the state / county / city's obligation to make some form of shelter available. And I get that there are "shelters" available, but from what I understand they are effectively not available to a vast number of unhoused people far a wide variety of reasons. Failure to maintain appropriate shelters is effective a constructive refusal. I liked the concept of the tiny home villages that LA experimented with, but it looks like they did a poor job, or cost cutting got too severe, and ultimately they fell short.
And...that is not nice
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Only because you hate the rich. I get that it encourages them to share to keep the pitchforks off their lawn, and that noblesse oblige has broken down recently, but property laws are the foundation of our prosperity. If you can't have something that's actually yours (property laws) for you to invest in, then there will be little investment.
FediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service (it-notes.dragas.net)
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IIRC, HN itself runs on modest hardware as well (just 4-cores, also FreeBSD). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595
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To be fair, that is 4 dedicated cores not shared with other tenants.
There's some commercial software to sell/resell VPS, etc that some of these outfits use. And it's pretty much a commodity business, so things are going to tend to look similar. If you're buying $5/month VPS, you don't want to pay for a lot of fluff. A lot of these are small time local hosters in a single location, but that's usually all you need for a small site.
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Its usually WHMCS + virtfusion There are alternatives but usually all just go use these for some reason This is also why a lot of these websites might look similar as well.
Some of these are resellers. Big provider sells them a package of 10-1000 VPSs and they set up websites to sell them to you. But you can also find lots of direct deals as well. BuyVM famously has their $15/year deal on a 1GB VPS. You can also often find dedicated servers for like $25/month. I recently bought a $75 lifetime deal on some email hosting for up to 25 domains and I think 250GB storage. Great for some secondary domains and such that I use. There are some real gems out there and you should see their Black Friday threads. Kind of a wild place.
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There are lots of even cheaper deals than buyvm usually with racknerd and dedirock. Black friday deals are absolutely amazing but always go with someone a bit more reputed and Buyvm's an amazing choice too although they would be considered "pricey" in comparison to someone (just a few $'s) (I have joined their discord server) I think racknerd recently did a 6.85$ or similar deal but the point of these deals become is that they become insanely overprovisioned and it becomes a showpiece of sorts "look what deal I got ;P" kinda not sure. I think another fascinating deal about lowendtalk is that man those people have this faith in small hosting providers and giving chances to them etc. hoping that they become big as well. There are very few places like lowendtalk on the internet. I find a lot of similarities with the hackernews culture although more focused on deals/hosting although its definitely more casual than hackernews.
Now That He Has No Power, Mitt Romney Says "Tax the Rich" (jacobin.com)
Taxing the rich is fine, likely even necessary, but it’s hardly sufficient. The major problem facing the West is that our economic policy is dictated by short term growth. This is because individual investments (retirement plans and pensions, the largest holders of equities) demand that growth. The amoral psychopaths who implement those demands in exchange for money are abundant and replaceable. They do skim an excessive amount off the top, but they aren’t the root of the problem. The demand for growth at all costs is what led us to outsource our core industries, sell off the mines and factories, and financialize every aspect of the economy. Higher taxes would not have prevented this. Even if we confiscated all the wealth of the top 1%, it would not fund our obligations for long and it would not correct our trajectory. The postwar US was very different. Cold War paranoia and military Keynesianism ensured that core industries were well funded and key infrastructure was built and maintained. Modern China uses a unique model where the central government sets a vision and provinces allocate state investments according to regional needs. Neither of these models is probably appropriate for the present day US, but there must be something out there besides neoliberalism and full privatization. (Futarchy? Some new branch of government to direct state investment? Allow states to own and operate businesses? Creativity is necessary.)
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> This is because individual investments (retirement plans and pensions, the largest holders of equities) demand that growth. I don't disagree with you but it's much worse in the EU, where mandatory contribution to the state for pension funds are gigantic ponzi schemes: the money wasn't invested in equities but directly spent. Now most EU countries are heavily indebted and simply shall soon have no way to honor the pension they promised their citizens. Greece already (partially) defaulted on its public debt a few years ago. More countries shall follow. France is in a particularly bad position at the moment, for example. Now there are private , optional, pension funds in the EU and citizens have to opt-in to these and these do put their funds in equities etc. Still beats a full-on ponzi, if you ask me.
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Oh yes, same with Social Security in the US. I think we will be able to keep it going a little longer than EU pensions, but short of a miracle (or massive inflationary printing) there’s no way it will stay afloat.
2012? Against the wildly popular incumbent? Blaming it all on smears seems like a rationalization. So the real question is what would have happened if Romney had run in 2016. But we basically know what would have happened, because there were other moderate/conservative candidates who did run in 2016. And the answer to that is the Republican party would have still fallen for the temptation of the New York democrat con artist who paid lip service to their longstanding frustrations but didn't have any actual policy beyond "burn it all down".
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Actually, Obama was below average for approval ratings. ( Maybe a sign of today’s polarized politics. ) The average approval rating is 52. Obamas first term was 49, his second term was 47. Personally, I disliked some of his policies but thought he was a great orator, one of the best of our times. https://news.gallup.com/poll/116479/barack-obama-presidential-job-approval.aspx
> Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted. > That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough. Is your reasoning that the amount of household wealth and income at each percentile should hold roughly constant over the years, as if this is some law of physics?
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>>as if this is some law of physics? Seriously? Way to miss the point by miles The point is: the absolute values are bad the direction and magnitude of change indicates it is getting worse. The distribution of wealth is already vastly suboptimal, heavily skewed to the most greedy 0.1%-5%. When the most wealthy society in the history of the planet still has large portions of its population living one missed paycheck or one illness/accident away from being destitute, or being already destitute, while a few at the top have orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime, something is deeply wrong. The change numbers show this already the case nearly four decades ago, it has gotten worse. So yes, the glib argument that "the 1% already pay 90% of federal taxes..." is just as spurious as it is vacuous. Not only does it ignore the reality of wealth and income distribution that the taxation is far below the misallocation, it also ignores the fact that Federal Income Taxes are only a small portion of our total tax burden, and the poor and middle classes pay vastly more of the other taxes such as sales tax, gasoline and road taxes, fees, etc. IOW, you are cherry-picking, and badly.
Their contributions are capped because their benefits are capped.
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You can make the same argument about the income tax and similarly limit the taxable income from it which will lead to the tax revenue being cut approximately in half. Also, after Congress raided the Social Security account, they made the point that Social Security is just another tax subject to spending in the general budget. If that's the case, there are as many arguments for capping/uncapping the FICA taxes as for all other taxes. The problem with such arguments is their appeal to a notion of fairness which has as many faces as economics theories out there - basically a dead end - courtesy of our not-so-diligent economics "science". So, it's better to use the achievement of better economic, political and social results as the only guidance for fiscal policy, although that requires a level of analysis which far exceeds what mainstream economics has to offer.
A faster heart for F-Droid. Our new server is here (f-droid.org)
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TRUST, I DON'T TRUST YOU OR THE GRAPHENE GUYS OR THE CIA OR THE BND OR MOSSAD OR ANY FUCKING RUSSIANS GROWING UP AND LIVING ABOVE GROUND AND THE LEAST OF ALL ANY AMERICAN GUYS OR ANY SUPER-STANDARD-BY-DESIGN GERMAN GUYS ... SO WHY THE FUCK WOULD I READ ANY OF AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALL THAT CODE??
> this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access. I can’t be the only one who read this and had flashbacks to projects that fell apart because one person had the physical server in their basement or a rack at their workplace and it became a sticking point when an argument arose. I know self-hosting is held as a point of pride by many, but in my experience you’re still better off putting lower cost hardware in a cheap colo with the contract going to the business entity which has defined ownership and procedures. Sending it over to a single member to put somewhere puts a lot of control into that one person’s domain. I hope for the best for this team and I’m leaning toward believing that this person really is trusted and capable, but I would strongly recommend against these arrangements in any form in general. EDIT: F-Droid received a $400,000 grant from a single source this year ( https://f-droid.org/2025/02/05/f-droid-awarded-otf-grant.html ) so now I’m even more confused about how they decided to hand this server to a single team member to host in unspoken conditions instead of paying basic colocation expenses.
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It's just a build server no? If that's the case it's not the end of the world. Or does it also serve the APKs?
Colo is when you want to bring your own hardware, not when you want physical access to your devices. Many (most?) colo datacenters are still secure sites that you can't visit.
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Every colo I've visited has a system for allowing physical access for our equipment, generally during specific operating hours with secure access card.
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To be quite honest I've never seen a colo that didn't offer access at all. The cheapest locations may require a prearranged escort because they don't have any way to restrict access on the floors, but by the time you get to 1/4 rack scale you should expect 24/7 access as standard.
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I've only ever seen that at data centers that offer colo as more of a side service or cater to little guys who are coloing by the rack unit. All of the serious colocation services I've used or quoted from offer 24/7 site access. Basically anywhere with cage or cabinet colocation is going to have site access, because those delineations only make sense to restrict on-site human access.
Modern machines go up to really mental levels of performance when you think about it and for a lot of small scale things like F droid I doubt it takes a lot of hardware to actually host it. A lot of its going to be static files so a basic web server could put through 100s of thousands of requests and even on a modest machine saturate 10 gbps which I suspect is enough for what they do. This just reads to me like they have racked a box in a colo with a known person running the shared rack rather than someone’s basement but who really knows they aren't exactly handing out details.
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Which is itself kind of suspicious - why can't they say "yeah we pay for Colo in such-and-such region" if that is what they are doing? Why should that be a secret?
"Nothing is ever good enough" (tm)
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If I were running a volunteer project, I would be dumping thousands a month into top-tier hosting across multiple datacenters around the world with global failover.
100%. Just as an example I have several racks at home, business fiber, battery backup, and a propane generator as a last resort. Also 4th amendment protections so no one gets access without me knowing about it. I host a lot of things at home and trust it more than any DC.
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Which one of those things do you think you can't get in a datacenter?
You can't just host servers in your own basement! You need to pay out the ass to host servers in some big company's basement!
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I don't have a problem with an open source project I use (and I do use F-Froid) hosting a server in a basement. I do have a problem with having the entire project hosted on one server in a basement, because it means that the entire project goes down if that basement gets flooded or the house burns down or the power goes out for an extended period of time, etc. Having two servers in two basements not near each other would be good, having five would be better, and honestly paying money to put them in colo facilities to have more reliable power, cooling, etc. would be better still. Computer hardware is very cheap today and it doesn't cost that much money to get a substantial amount of redundancy, without being dependent on any single big company.
A super duper secure locked cabinet acessible only to them or anyone with a bolt cutter. You want to host servers on your own hardare? Uh yikes. Let's unpack this. As a certified AWS Kubernetes professional time & money waster, I can say with authority that this goes against professional standards (?) and is therefore not a good look. Furthermore, I can confirm that this isn't it chief.
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Because it's a secret, we don't know if it's mom's basement where the door doesn't really lock anyways, just pull it real hard, or if it's at Uncle Joey's with the compound and the man trap and laser sensors he bought at government auction through a buddy who really actually works at the CIA.
> State actor? Gets into data centre, or has to break into a privately owned apartment. I don’t think a state actor would actually break in to either in this case, but if they did then breaking into the private apartment would be a dream come true. Breaking into a data center requires coordination and ensuring a lot of people with access and visibility stay quiet. Breaking into someone’s apartment means waiting until they’re away from the premises for a while and then going in. Getting a warrant for a private residence also would likely give them access to all electronic devices there as no 3rd party is keeping billing records of which hardware is used for the service. > Dumb accidents? Well, all buildings can burn or have an power outage. Data centers are built with redundant network connectivity, backup power, and fire suppression. Accidents can happen at both, but that’s not the question. The question is their relative frequency, which is where the data center is far superior.
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> Data centers are built with redundant network connectivity, backup power, and fire suppression. [...] The question is their relative frequency, which is where the data center is far superior. Well, I remember one incident were a 'professional' data center burned down including the backups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVHcloud#Incidents I know no such incident for some basement hosting. Doesn't mean much. I'm just a bit surprised so many people are worried because of the server location and no one had mentioned yet the quite outstanding OVH incident.
You actually do not have to trust the people who run f-droid for those apps whose maintainers enroll in reproducible builds and multi-party signing, which only f-droid supports unlike any alternatives.
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Why have we normalized "app stores" that build software whose authors likely already provide packages of? I've been using Obtainium more recently, and the idea is simple: a friendly UI that pulls packages directly from the original source. If I already trust the authors with the source code, then I'm inclined to trust them to provide safe binaries for me to use. Involving a middleman is just asking for trouble. App stores should only be distributors of binaries uploaded and signed by the original authors. When they're also maintainers, it not only significantly increases their operational burden, but requires an additional layer of trust from users.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux (loss32.org)
At least glibc uses versioned symbols. Hundreds of other widely-used open source libraries don't.
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Yeah and nothing ever lets you pick which versions to link to. You're going to get the latest ones and you better enjoy that. I found it out the hard way recently when I just wanted to do a perfectly normal thing of distributing precompiled binaries for my project. Ended up using whatever "Amazon Linux" is because it uses an old enough glibc but has a new enough gcc.
> Hundreds of other widely-used open source libraries don't. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think versioned symbols are a thing on Windows (i.e. they are non-portable). This is not a problem for glibc but it is very much a problem for a lot of open source libraries (which instead tend to just provide a stable C ABI if they care).
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> versioned symbols are a thing on Windows There’re quite a few mechanics they use for that. The oldest one, call a special API function on startup like InitCommonControlsEx, and another API functions will DLL resolve differently or behave differently. A similar tactic, require an SDK defined magic number as a parameter to some initialization functions, different magic numbers switching symbols from the same library; examples are WSAStartup and MFStartup. Around Win2k they did side by side assemblies or WinSxS. Include a special XML manifest into embedded resource of your EXE, and you can request specific version of a dependent API DLL. The OS now keeps multiple versions internally. Then there’re compatibility mechanics, both OS builtin and user controllable (right click on EXE or LNK, compatibility tab). The compatibility mode is yet another way to control versions of DLLs used by the application. Pretty sure there’s more and I forgot something.
Your tone makes it sound like this is a bad thing. But from a user’s perspective, I do want a distro to package as much software as possible. And it has nothing to do with user freedom. It’s all about being entitled as a user to have the world’s software conveniently packaged.
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What if you want to use a newer or older version of just one package without having to update or downgrade the entire goddamn universe? What if you need to use proprietary software? I've had so much trouble with package managers that I'm not even sure they are a good idea to begin with.
Here me out: Microsoft switches to Linux kernel for Windows 13. (also Microsoft has been heavily embracing Linux and open source in the last decade)
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When WSL first came out, I realized that Windows might be Linux + Wine in 20 or 30 years. Nowadays, with the Windows team barely able to produce a functional UI, what's happening with the NT kernel? Is it all graybeards back there? When they retire, the stability of Windows going to be in trouble, which is important for the things that really pull in the money. It'll get real bad, then they'll give up and move to an open source base, just like Edge.
Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite (hackerbook.dosaygo.com)
Don't miss how this works. It's not a server-side application - this code runs entirely in your browser using SQLite compiled to WASM, but rather than fetching a full 22GB database it instead uses a clever hack that retrieves just "shards" of the SQLite database needed for the page you are viewing. I watched it in the browser network panel and saw it fetch: https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/static-shards/shard_1636.sqlite.gz https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/static-shards/shard_1635.sqlite.gz https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/static-shards/shard_1634.sqlite.gz As I paginated to previous days. It's reminiscent of that brilliant SQLite.js VFS trick from a few years ago: https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs - only that one used HTTP range headers, this one uses sharded files instead. The interactive SQL query interface at https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/?view=query asks you to select which shards to run the query against, there are 1636 total.
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A read-only VFS doing this can be really simple, with the right API… This is my VFS: https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/blob/main/vfs/readervfs/reader.go And using it with range requests: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/vfs/readervfs#example-package-Http And having it work with a Zstandard compressed SQLite database, is one library away: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/SaveTheRbtz/zstd-seekable-format-go/pkg
Is there anything more production grade built around the same idea of HTTP range requests like that sqlite thing? This has so much potential
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I want to see a bittorrent version :P
Sometimes I want to write more creatively, but then worry I’ll be accused of being an LLM. So I dumb it down. Remove the colorful language. Conform.
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Fuck 'em. Always write what you want, however you want to write it. If some reader somewhere decides to be judgemental because of — you know — an em dash or an X/Y comparison or a complement or some other thing that they think pins you down as being a bot, then that's entirely their own problem. Not yours. They observe the reality that they deserve.
Ask HN: Any example of successful vibe-coded product?
Here is an web app that tracks the grocery prices of my shopping at Aldi. It is meant to track grocery price inflation over time. It is obviously limited and incomplete since it is just based on my haphazard Aldi shopping. It includes a "basket of goods" total for each quarter, graphs, product pages, etc. It is coded by an LLM (except for maybe the initial commit). I don't write or edit the code, but I do sometimes "look" at the code, and ask for changes based on what code I see, so purists might question it as being 100% vibe coded. https://aldi-prices.lawruk.com/ https://github.com/jimlawruk/aldi-prices
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Funny, i created an extension that does does something similar. I wanted to watch specific products at a grocery store that go on sale and look for the pattern. It opens page that has been flagged to watch and extracts data and then charts results for various things i want to track. It was more of a POC which has lead to some other data scraping apps i wanted. I am not a developer but know enough having worked around tech for awhile i can usually figure something out. claude has been amazing for me, especially since i can ask questions about its code/logic and learn as we go.
If by production you mean “done” and used by someone (i.e. by me) then I made https://skidmarks.club to replace my peloton subscription. You can browse and ride at https://app.skidmarks.club . I’ve done ~10 rides with it so far. Hoping I can convince my wife to use it and save myself $50 a month. That would be my most successful side project by a wide margin. There are probably a lot of examples like this. Vibe coded software people made for themselves, and other people could use it if they wanted. All of the code was reviewed by myself, and I’m a programmer, so not sure if that fits the description. I didn’t go through it with a fine-toothed comb, however, and 90% of the review was on my phone. I also did some non-vibed setup for hosting, db, email, etcetera. To me vibe coding is not looking at any of the code at all, but the definition reads a little loose to me these days, especially on HN, as: did an LLM “type” most of the code or did you? Either way I don’t think the term or definition is a big deal and probably not worth splitting hairs over.
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I was going to build this. Thanks for saving me the time!
Windows 11 is quite popular.
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bad vibes
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