Unlurker

The death of social media is the renaissance of RSS (2025) (smartlab.at)

RSS only serves as a backbone of a product. There’s no commenting, summaries a sparse, i don’t even think there’s consistent posting dates. These evangelists want to make it sound like all we need to do is get everyone on board with RSS and we’ll all just hold hands and share the web. People don’t browse the web, there’s like 10 websites, that’s the whole internet. Everything else is just asteroids and abandoned space stations.

Stop trying to make RSS happen again. It's not going to happen again.

Actually I would have agreed with you 2 years ago. But now working with AI so much, maybe RSS "is" just the thing we need for some of the distrobution.

RSS is dead because it’s backwards. It requires everyone you want to follow to implement it since that is the best we could do a decade ago. We can do better than that: an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. You shouldn’t need someone else to comply with a protocol just to ingest their data. I don’t get why people keep fantasizing about a system that gave consumers no control. Scrape the website directly. You decide what’s in the feed, not them.

LLMs use up tons of energy and water.

I still mourn the loss of Google Reader. There are plenty of RSS reader apps, but there are very few with good cross-device sync - let alone self-hosted cross-device sync.

I don't think you could self-host Google Reader, so it sort of feels like these two sentences don't hang together.

Boy I hope so. I miss my RSS reader. I'd love to see one made with the modern UX that makes the doomscrolling apps so engaging. (Or maybe I wouldn't.)

I'm reading this on Feeder, which a free RSS app I found on F-Droid. Works for me

Claude helped select targets for Iran strikes, possibly including school (twitter.com)

Like so much war reporting in the past decade, there's a lot of low-effort moralising and low-confidence maybes being strung together to create headline narrative that the body text simply cannot cash. And it waves away the critical distinction between bad intelligence and actively targeting civilians. Surely nobody is arguing that an Anthropic AI, with perfect knowledge that it's a school, and that students would be present, chose to knowingly murder children. Assuming this was a US military strike and not a false flag, surely nobody is arguing that the failure here was in relying on outdated intelligence about an ex-military building. The use of AI here is simply not relevant. The criticism I have for the current US government is massive, and my disgust for the current leadership is as intense as anyone else here, I'd wager. But there's also no doubt in my mind that if they knew it was a school, they wouldn't not have targeted it. By contrast, Russia's government shows who they are when they target civilians in Ukraine. That distinction is important and we muddy it at our own peril.

"A Computer Can Never Be Held Accountable Therefore a Computer Must Never Make a Management Decision"

I remember this but I can't remember where it's from? IBM?

I mean, they've made the argument that their computer learns like a human, so should be able to get away with ingesting all the data it sees, the same way a human does. Why shouldn't it also go to jail, the same way a human does?

What? How? By putting the computer or robot that made mistake in a prison cell?

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

I'm porting Jetpack Compose to Rust. The Rust would be the future default ai language. Having the familiar well designed by Google UI API will help Android developers to be in a loop. https://github.com/samoylenkodmitry/Cranpose

I built chernoffOT for fun - https://github.com/ashinvinod/chernoffOT It basically pulls OpenTelemetry data from your infra and renders chernoff faces, so you can spot anomalies at a glance.

(1) PROJECT "AFFIRMATOR" - Start each day out right with chill jazz wake-up music, then life-success wisdom (Earl Nightingale, Tony Robbins, etc). In the evening, fun latin cooking music plays, and then lo-fi chill tunes. At night, your personalized vocalized affirmations & goals plays, and then drift to sleep with meditation music. Tech details: I found that used, small form-factor Dell Optiplexes are great for product protoytyping. I'm in Medellin Colombia, and found that you can buy these for about $200 USD - they are often former Point of Sale (POS) or office computers, from about 10 years ago. They have SSDs, run quiet, and are very reliable. For project Affirmator, I installed Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). Using Cron and Mpv to shuffle-play activity-specific folders of MP3s at the same time each day. For example, for the chill jazz music - I've got a folder of 40+ song MP3s. Cron plays those at 06:30. So it's like a calm, upbeat alarm clock. I'm not a morning person, so this is a "friendly" way for me to wake myself up! For the vocal affirmation part - I built a Python tool that reads 200+ text affirmations from a markdown/text file. It then uses AWS Polly text-to-speech API to vocalize the affirmations into MP3s. Next, I use `ffmpeg` to add a variable silent spacer gap to the ends of all the MP3s. This allows your to hear a voice affirmation ("I am fit, athletic, and strong!", "I am a confident piano player."), and then there is silent space for you to say it out loud, or repeat in your head. This project incorporates ideas & routines from: The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale, Tony Robbins Personal Power II, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and Atomic Habits by James Clear https://codeberg.org/jro/Affirmator-app (2) PROJECT "LINGOFREQ" - Language learning tool. Uses language-specific high-frequency word lists. Generates example sentences according to a theme/topic. Translates the word & example phrases to English / Spanish / Chinese. Uses Text-to-speech to vocalize the phrases into each language. These phrases are ordered by frequency. When you want to improve your language skills, you set a "window" range of frequency you want to practice, and Lingofreq will play audio files in this range. You can learn Chinese & Spanish while doing the dishes, at the gym, or before going to bed! Code: https://codeberg.org/jro/LingoFreq-app/src/branch/main/apps (3) Medellin COMMUNITY MAKER-SPACE / CREATIVE ENTREPRENEUR LAB I'm at Medellin Colombia - my mission is to create the best maker-space. I was a member of ASMBLY Maker-space in Austin Texas (great space!) and worked at Pivotal Labs (agile product prototyping / software lab) - so I'm aiming to combine the best ideas from those. BACK-BURNER projects: Documenting my Knowledge as "Public Knowledge Base" - https://codeberg.org/jro/Knowledge - Here are my notes on Python, Git - I'm bouncing between Obsidian Sync / Publish / Markdown (currently easiest way), and some sort of open-source knowledge base website (VSCodium + Markdown + FOAM + MkDocs + RClone). I haven't found a solution I'm happy with yet... Open-source CNC router tech stack: - I have a CNC router (robotic drill which can carve 3D shapes into wood). Last year I challenged myself to operate it completely through an open-source tech stack. This took me on a journey of learning Inkscape (2d vector design tool, SVG), FreeCAD (3D product design / CAD / CAM tool), G-code (format of text instructions which tell CNC tools where to move and what to do), Universal G-Code Sender (a tool which imports CAM - computer aided manufacturing - designs, connects to the CNC router tool, and actually operates machine. It's quite exciting to play with! Used Kiri-moto (web-based CAD / CAM tool) to convert 2D/SVG designs into 3D shapes). Used OBS (screen recording/streaming tool) and a bunch of web-cams to live-stream tool usage to PeerTube Live (similar to YouTube). Being "principled" about using open-source tools can be so challenging, but its quite rewarding on the long run. LEARNING SPANISH - What's working for me... trying to read spanish books before bed. Handwriting a few paragraphs from a book into journal. Highlighting words I don't know. Looking them up later. Reading a book while listening to its audio book at the same time. If anyone's interesting in contributing to these projects, I would warmly welcome that. Design, product, sales, project management, engineering/coding, marketing - need tons of help in all these areas. Gracias! // JRO

I’m recreating a tiny version of vLLM in C++ and CUDA from scratch (high throughput LLM inference server) https://github.com/jmaczan/tiny-vllm

Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix: https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations. https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic. https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".

I'm photographing wildflowers so much that I made a tool called Wildflower Witness to group the images into time series. I'm debating if I want to allow the user to create each flower in their collection or try to do it totally automatically. Also I've been using it already and I'm sad to say a ground squirrel ate one of my specimens.

A music livecoding app[0], it's open-source[1] and it's been in the works for years in various iterations, but I've finally settled on the format and delivery. I'm now trying to make it as newbie friendly as possible by doing tutorials[2] and videos[3] and having ready-made instruments[4] to begin with. Thinking also to expand it as a general purpose creative editor in a standalone electron app and bundle in other livecoding languages as well, for graphics also. [0]: https://loopmaster.xyz [1]: https://github.com/loopmaster-xyz/loopmaster [2]: https://loopmaster.xyz/tutorials [3]: https://www.youtube.com/@loopmaster-xyz [4]: https://loopmaster.xyz/docs/synths/bongo

Our family is enjoying Flip7 card game lately and was playing almost every day. Created an app to make it more fun and engaging by creating an app to manage the daily score and to make it a weekly, monthly competition for leaderboard. https://flip7battle.com/ . Only available in apple store for now. It was fun to create and use this app.

https://securenote.app . Full encryption for notes (uses local encryption before you even sent the note to the server). I wanted a mixture of Github Gists (sans Git) and 1Password shares so I've been using it eitj great success at my current company to share snippets and private stuff. Might open source in the future, just need to gauge interest.

An alternative to Oracle's VBCS Plugin for Excel [1] Oracle's plugin allows you access Fusion REST Endpoints (your business data) from within an Excel workbook but it only works on Windows machines and has some other limitations. Also added a plugin for inspecting punchout payloads for RSSP [2] [1] https://vbcs-alt.com/ [2] https://vbcs-alt.com/inspect_punchout/

I've been writing interactive math and computer science articles at https://growingswe.com/blog . The past few months, I have been obsessed with interactive learning experiences and currently building https://math.growingswe.com for learning probability.

I’m building a decentralized Drone-as-a-Service (DaaS) orchestration layer that treats aerial robotics as a simple API endpoint. The system allows users to submit a JSON payload containing geocoordinates and mission requirements (e.g., capture_type: "4K_video" | "IR_photo"), the backend then handles the fleet logistics, selecting the optimal VTOL units from distributed sub-stations based on battery state-of-charge and proximity.

We are building an agentic ad tech system optimized for real time and scale. The process of making an ad, from ideation to distribution, is traditionally exceptionally labor intensive. We are making it possible to target, design, and distribute ads at scale and in real time. https://hawtads.com

Personalized ads enable personalized lying by advertisers. Politicians in the 2016 election would target voters for party with enraging content while the other got shadow posts that lied to them about their candidate in a way that would not be seen, to discourage them from voting (Source: Careless People book).

PC Part Picker for hi-fi stereos: https://buildhifi.com/ I've wanted this for a long time, so I finally started building it. I've had a lot fun! - Graph-based signal flow: Products become nodes, connections are edges inferred from port compatibility (digital, analog, phono, speaker-level domains) - Port profile system: Standardized port definitions (direction, domain, connector, channel mode) enable automatic connection inference - Rule engine: Pluggable rules check completeness, power matching, phono stage requirements, DAC needs, and more

I’m not a hi-fi guy but my dad is going to freak out!! He’s going to absolutely love this

Building a new kind of news site, featuring updates from primary sources. We're constantly pulling info from official sources, and using AI to group and summarize into stories, and continue to share reporting from trusted, vetted journalists. The result is news with the speed and breadth of getting updates straight from the source, and the perspective and context that reporting provides. Still ramping up, but I'd love to hear feedback: https://www.forth.news

Need is valid. The site is showing mostly flood watch warnings - maybe cluster topics? Also don’t mess with the scroll bar - maybe the ads are doing it, but it froze and wouldn’t move down for a while.

Im building https://trypixie.com to legally employ my 7 year old child, save on taxes and contribute to her Roth IRA. Im also building https://www.keepfiled.com , a microsaas to save emails (or email attachments) to google drive I almost forgot, I also built https://statphone.com - One emergency number that rings your whole family and breaks through DND. I love building. I built all these for myself. unfortunately I suck at marketing so I barely have customers.

Statphone is such a genius idea - very cool.

I changed gears and moved into the video games industry at the end of 2021. I started developing a city builder called Metropolis 1998 [1], but wanted to take the genre in new directions, building on top of what modern games have to offer: - Watch what's happening inside buildings and design your own (optional) - Change demand to a per-business level - Bring the pixel art 3D render aesthetic back from the dead (e.g RollerCoaster Tycoon) [2] I just updated my Steam page with some recent snapshots from my game. Im really happy with how the game is turning out! [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/ [2] The art in my game is hand drawn though

very cool

Ask HN: Most beautiful personal blog UI you have ever seen?

One I like is Tom Macwright’s blog [1], which somewhat famously loads insanely fast thanks to having a sort of the web equivalent of a brutalist design while still looking nice [2]. [1] https://macwright.com/ [2] https://macwright.com/2016/05/03/the-featherweight-website

Tom is the best

Tasteful: https://colly.com/ Artsy: https://anhvn.com/ Simple yet elegant: https://www.lkhrs.com/ and https://arun.is/blog/ Maximalist: https://henry.codes/ and https://garden.bradwoods.io/ and https://blog.maximeheckel.com/ Old-school / indie web: https://ribo.zone/ Text mode / ASCII art: https://adelfaure.net/ Typography: http://davidcole.me/ and https://www.petemillspaugh.com/ I have more. You can keep rolling the dice on https://indieblog.page/random and eventually you'll stumble across some pretty sites. Usually the nicest ones are from frontend / design engineer types of people. EDIT - oh and the sites in the internet phone book! https://internetphonebook.net/ as well as browsing screenshots at https://personalsit.es/

I hadn't seen arun.is before; I really like this one! Thanks for the share!

Some of these sites - wow. I literally can’t fall asleep right now (reading this in bed) scrolling through all these. So many good resources. Thank you for sharing. This is why I love HN

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

PCB devboard the size of a USB-C plug (github.com/Dieu-de-l-elec)

I recently got my hands on an M5Stack NanoC6 ( https://docs.m5stack.com/en/core/M5NanoC6 ), it's also quite small and I'm pretty happy with it. It has onboard IR and a Grove connector, good enough for IoT projects at home.

I dream of an open board like the yubikey nano. This is very nice!

If it helps, I've used earlier Atmel AVR chips, as well as the ESP32-S3. 8-bit AVR is an extremely clean, relatively simple instruction set that can be viably hand-coded. It's fairly straightforward to calculate the exact number of cycles your code will use, which is handy for applications requiring deterministic timing and for knowing worst-case execution time of interrupt handlers. If the C3 instruction set is anything like the S3, I'm willing to bet it's not as straightforward. Atmel also tends to do a better job of their documentation. I've lost count of how many confirmed errata I've reported to Espressif, and the time (and steam) I lost troubleshooting them in the first place. I like the S3, and it's heaps powerful, but for small projects that don't need advanced peripherals like Wifi, DMA, etc. I can envision that AVR as being a fine choice.

I'll second this. Doing asm on the AVR is beautiful, you can count clock cycles easily and then observe them on the scope. I wrote a bit banging serial interface for an AVR once and had a mystery when I was testing it from a PC just with a basic echo. Every Nth character would be wrong. Was able to figure out a timing problem by counting clock cycles and found the bug in my code. Was cool to see it align with what I was seeing on my oscilloscope.

Most of the US economy is in a recession (businessinsider.com)

Question - has any previous bubble been so thoroughly called out as a bubble? The dotcom and 2008 real estate ones sure weren’t. Some people did, but not “everyone.”

Could be thanks to the Internet and that most of the adults today use Internet and have experienced a bubble before.

Less: "its a bubble" More: "labor market and consumer spending is less meaningful than ever before" The masses are unable to truly internalize the latter.

Less meaningful, or less represented? If you sell your foundation out beneath yourself, the entire structure might come down. No matter how valuable it is to sell that rebar out of the concrete now, or how many additions that money allows you to add on top, it is likely not a sound strategy long term.

So what? Regardless of mythical "efficiency" calculations, consumers are wasting actual dollars on conveniences that they can't really afford.

The original comment was lamenting people not buying their own cars and driving to pickup food. Which is again, incredibly inefficient on every possible level and actually pretty damn expensive.

Lots of us got pizzas delivered now and then especially in college and, if you lived somewhere like NYC, maybe Chinese. But this idea that you'd starve without food delivery in general is simply odd.

Who is saying people would starve? Holy strawman batman! But if people are going to get judgy about food delivery then they can rather put the effort in to explore why they feel that way. But there's nothing efficient about hundreds of people making short distance car trips to restaurants, which is what was proposed as an alternative that is somehow "better". And when you factor US style urban construction in, it's pretty likely a lot of people also don't have walkable access to local outlets anyway.