Saturday, 31 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?
14 by cvhc | 10 comments on Hacker News.
I've read many mind-boggling stories from those appeared to be genuine OpenClaw users, like how their assistants (from useful to dramatic) (1) plan a travel and book everything; (2) started a company and build things; (3) entered stock market and lost all the money... Moltbook added more funs. Interestingly, I cannot find a single user of OpenClaw in my familiar communities, presumbly because it takes some effort to setup and the concept of AI taking control of everything is too scary for average tech enthusiasts. I scan through comments on HN, many of which were discussing about the ideas, but not sharing first-hand user experiences. A few HN users who did try it gave up / failed for various reasons: - https://ift.tt/7uPhQA8 (burning too many tokens) - https://ift.tt/rbpBHF8 (ditto + security implication) - https://ift.tt/CV1zRsQ (installation failed due to sandboxing) - https://ift.tt/ewBIfRk (moltbook didn't work) I smell hype in the air... HN users, have any of you actually run OpenClaw and let it do any things useful or interesting? Can you share your experience?

New top story on Hacker News: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018
14 by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 0 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

Mobile carriers can get your GPS location
54 by cbeuw | 35 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Finland to end "uncontrolled human experiment" with ban on youth social media

Finland to end "uncontrolled human experiment" with ban on youth social media
27 by Teever | 15 comments on Hacker News.


Tuesday, 27 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: How to avoid skill atrophy in LLM-assisted programming era?

Ask HN: How to avoid skill atrophy in LLM-assisted programming era?
4 by py4 | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Will technical skill even matter at all?

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: LemonSlice – Give your voice agents a face

Show HN: LemonSlice – Give your voice agents a face
10 by lcolucci | 4 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, we're the co-founders of LemonSlice ( https://lemonslice.com ). We train interactive avatar video models. Our API lets you upload a photo and immediately jump into a FaceTime-style call with that character. Here's a demo: https://ift.tt/qzuklEd Chatbots are everywhere. Voice AI has recently taken off. But we believe video avatars will be the most common form factor for conversational AI. Most people would rather watch something than read it. The problem is that generating video in real-time is hard, and overcoming the uncanny valley is even harder. We haven’t broken the uncanny valley yet. Nobody has. But we’re getting close and our photorealistic avatars are currently best-in-class (judge for yourself: https://ift.tt/aMq601J ). Plus, we're the only avatar model that can do animals and heavily stylized cartoons. Try it: https://ift.tt/SZb3Gn2 . Warning! Talking to this little guy may improve your mood. Today we're releasing our new model* - Lemon Slice 2, a 20B-parameter diffusion transformer that generates infinite-length video at 20fps on a single GPU - and opening up our API. How did we get a video diffusion model to run in real-time? There was no single trick, just a lot of them stacked together. The first big change was making our model causal. Standard video diffusion models are bidirectional (they look at frames both before and after the current one), which means you can't stream. From there it was about fitting everything on one GPU. We switched from full to sliding window attention, which killed our memory bottleneck. We distilled from 40 denoising steps down to just a few - quality degraded less than we feared, especially after using GAN-based distillation (though tuning that adversarial loss to avoid mode collapse was its own adventure). And the rest was inference work: modifying RoPE from complex to real (this one was cool!), precision tuning, fusing kernels, a special rolling KV cache, lots of other caching, and more. We kept shaving off milliseconds wherever we could and eventually got to real-time. We set up a guest playground for HN so you can create and talk to characters without logging in: https://ift.tt/76ew2Wf . For those who want to build with our API (we have a new LiveKit integration that we’re pumped about!), grab a coupon code in the HN playground for your first Pro month free ($100 value). See the docs: https://ift.tt/47tKXAI . Pricing is usage-based at $0.12-0.20/min for video generation. Looking forward to your feedback! And we’d love to see any cool characters you make - please share their links in the comments *We did a Show HN last year for our V1 model: https://ift.tt/j9uvzFT . It was technically impressive but so bad compared to what we have today.

New top story on Hacker News: A first look at Aperture by Tailscale (private alpha)

A first look at Aperture by Tailscale (private alpha)
34 by geoffeg | 7 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
21 by bigwheels | 18 comments on Hacker News.
https://ift.tt/ydbs1Sz

Saturday, 24 January 2026

Thursday, 22 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Synesthesia, make noise music with a colorpicker

Show HN: Synesthesia, make noise music with a colorpicker
3 by tevans3 | 1 comments on Hacker News.
This is a (silly, little) app which lets you make noise music using a color picker as an instrument. When you click on a specific point in the color picker, a bit of JavaScript maps the binary representation of the clicked-on color's hex-code to a "chord" in the 24 tone-equal-temperament scale. That chord is then played back using a throttled audio generation method which was implemented via Tone.js. NOTE! Turn the volume way down before using the site. It is noise music. :)

New top story on Hacker News: CSS Optical Illusions

CSS Optical Illusions
21 by ulrischa | 1 comments on Hacker News.


Wednesday, 21 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi
52 by josephwegner | 19 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Claude's New Constitution

Claude's New Constitution
28 by meetpateltech | 0 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: See the carbon impact of your cloud as you code

Show HN: See the carbon impact of your cloud as you code
24 by hkh | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hey folks, I’m Hassan, one of the co-founders of Infracost ( https://ift.tt/FW9xsL5 ). Infracost helps engineers see and reduce the cloud cost of each infrastructure change before they merge their code. The way Infracost works is we gather pricing data from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. What we call a ‘Pricing Service’, which now holds around 9 million live price points (!!). Then we map these prices to infrastructure code. Once the mapping is done, it enables us to show the cost impact of a code change before it is merged, directly in GitHub, GitLab etc. Kind of like a checkout-screen for cloud infrastructure. We’ve been building since 2020 (we were part of YC W21 batch), and iterating on the product, building out a team etc. However, back in 2020 one of our users asked if we can also show the carbon impact alongside costs. It has been itching my brain since then. The biggest challenge has always been the carbon data. The mapping of carbon data to infrastructure is time consuming, but it is possible since we’ve done it with cloud costs. But we need the raw carbon data first. The discussions that have happened in the last few years finally led me to a company called Greenpixie in the UK. A few of our existing customers were using them already, so I immediately connected with the founder, John. Greenpixie said they have the data (AHA!!) And their data is verified (ISO-14064 & aligned with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol). As soon as I talked to a few of their customers, I asked my team to see if we can actually finally do this, and build it. My thinking is this: some engineers will care, and some will not (or maybe some will love it and some will hate it!). For those who care, cost and carbon are actually linked; meaning if you reduce the carbon, you usually reduce the cost of the cloud too. It can act as another motivation factor. And now, it is here, and I’d love your feedback. Try it out by going to https://ift.tt/0IUqHTd , create an account, set up with the GitHub app or GitLab app, and send a pull request with Terraform changes (you can use our example terraform file). It will then show you the cost impact alongside the carbon impact, and how you can optimize it. I’d especially love to hear your feedback on if you think carbon is a big driver for engineers within your teams, or if carbon is a big driver for your company (i.e. is there anything top-down about carbon). AMA - I’ll be monitoring the thread :) Thanks

New top story on Hacker News: Swedish Alecta has sold off an estimated $8B of US Treasury Bonds

Swedish Alecta has sold off an estimated $8B of US Treasury Bonds
95 by madspindel | 57 comments on Hacker News.


Saturday, 17 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Apples, Trees, and Quasimodes

Apples, Trees, and Quasimodes
10 by entaloneralie | 1 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why

Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why
14 by andsoitis | 3 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: What if your menu bar was a keyboard-controlled command center?

Show HN: What if your menu bar was a keyboard-controlled command center?
17 by pugdogdev | 4 comments on Hacker News.
Hey Hacker News The ones that know me here know that I am a productivity geek. After DockFlow to manage my Dock and ExtraDock, which gives me more space to manage my apps and files, I decided to tackle the macOS big boss: the menu bar. I spend ~40% of my day context-switching between apps — Zoom meetings, Slack channels, Code projects, and Figma designs. My macOS menu bar has too many useless icons I almost never use. So I thought to myself, how can I use this area to improve my workflows? Most solutions (Bartender, Ice) require screen recording permissions, and did not really solve my issues. I wanted custom menus in the apps, not the ones that the developers decided for me. After a few iterations and exploring different solutions, ExtraBar was created. Instead of just hiding icons, what if the menu bar became a keyboard-controlled command center that has the actions I need? No permissions. No telemetry. Just local actions. This is ExtraBar: Set up the menu with the apps and actions YOU need, and use a hotkey to bring it up with full keyboard navigation built in. What you can do: - Jump into your next Zoom call with a keystroke - Open specific Slack channels instantly (no menu clicking) - Launch VS Code projects directly - Trigger Apple Shortcuts workflows - Integrate with Raycast for advanced automation - Custom deep links to Figma, Spotify, or any URL Real-world example: I've removed my menu bar icons. Everything is keyboard- controlled: cmd+B → 2 (Zoom) → 4 (my personal meeting) → I'm in. Why it's different: Bartender and Ice hide icons. ExtraBar uses your menu bar to do things. Bartender requires screen recording permissions. Ice requires accessibility permissions. ExtraBar works offline with zero permissions - (Enhance functionality with only accessibility permissions, not a must) Technical: - Written in SwiftUI; native on Apple Silicon and Intel - Zero OS permissions required (optional accessibility for enhanced keyboard nav) - All data stored locally (no cloud, no telemetry) - Very Customizable with custom configuration built in for popular apps + fully customizable configuration actions. - Import/export action configurations The app is improving weekly based on community feedback. We're also building configuration sharing so users can share setups. Already got some great feedback from Reddit and Producthunt, and I can't wait to get yours! Check out the website: https://extrabar.app ProductHunt: https://ift.tt/eQsbH2V

New top story on Hacker News: 2025 was the third hottest year on record

2025 was the third hottest year on record
46 by andsoitis | 26 comments on Hacker News.


Friday, 16 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Aventos – An experiment in cheap AI SEO

Show HN: Aventos – An experiment in cheap AI SEO
3 by JimsonYang | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, we built Aventos- a cheap way to track company mentions in LLMs. Aventos is an experiment we're doing after spending ~6 weeks working on various projects in the AI search / GEO / AEO space. One thing that surprised us is how most tools in this category work. Traditionally, they simulate ChatGPT or Perplexity queries by attempting to reverse engineer the search process. Over the past year, many have shifted to scraping live ChatGPT results instead, since those are signficantly cheaper and reflect more real outputs. Building and maintaining scrapers is tedious and fragile, so recently a number of SaaS products have emerged that effectively wrap a small number of third-party ChatGPT/Perplexity/Google AIO/etc scraping APIs. What felt odd to us is that many of these still tools charge $70–$200+ per month, despite largely being wrappers around the same underlying data providers. So we wanted to test a simple idea: if the core cost is just API usage and commodity infrastructure and software costs are lower because of AI, can we be a successful startup if we price near our costs? What we have so far: 1. Analytics similar to other tools (tracking AI citations, AI search results, and competitor mentions) 2. Content creation features (early and still being improved) We’d love feedback- especially from a non-marketing perspective on: * bugs * confusing terminology or tabs * anything that feels hand-wavy or misleading There’s a demo account available if you want to poke around: username: divit.endal4@gmail.com password: password Happy to answer questions about what other things we've built in the space, how these tools work, etc.

New top story on Hacker News: The Alignment Game

The Alignment Game
4 by dmvaldman | 0 comments on Hacker News.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BYh9ZtEv4k7xoSXmtf1q...

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: 1Code – Open-source Cursor-like UI for Claude Code

Show HN: 1Code – Open-source Cursor-like UI for Claude Code
15 by Bunas | 4 comments on Hacker News.
Hi, we're Sergey and Serafim. We've been building dev tools at 21st.dev and recently open-sourced 1Code ( https://1code.dev ), a local UI for Claude Code. Here's a video of the product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sgk9Z-nAjC0 Claude Code has been our go-to for 4 months. When Opus 4.5 dropped, parallel agents stopped needing so much babysitting. We started trusting it with more: building features end to end, adding tests, refactors. Stuff you'd normally hand off to a developer. We started running 3-4 at once. Then the CLI became annoying: too many terminals, hard to track what's where, diffs scattered everywhere. So we built 1Code.dev, an app to run your Claude Code agents in parallel that works on Mac and Web. On Mac: run locally, with or without worktrees. On Web: run in remote sandboxes with live previews of your app, mobile included, so you can check on agents from anywhere. Running multiple Claude Codes in parallel dramatically sped up how we build features. What’s next: Bug bot for identifying issues based on your changes; QA Agent, that checks that new features don't break anything; Adding OpenCode, Codex, other models and coding agents. API for starting Claude Codes in remote sandboxes. Try it out! We're open-source, so you can just bun build it. If you want something hosted, Pro ($20/mo) gives you web with live browser previews hosted on remote sandboxes. We’re also working on API access for running Claude Code sessions programmatically. We'd love to hear your feedback!

Thursday, 15 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: ContextFort – Visibility and controls for browser agents

Show HN: ContextFort – Visibility and controls for browser agents
7 by ashwinr2002 | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! I’m Ashwin, co-founder of ContextFort ( https://contextfort.ai/ ). We provide visibility and controls for AI browser agents like Claude in Chrome through an open-source browser extension. Browser agents are AI copilots that can autonomously navigate and take actions in your browser. They show up as standalone browsers (Comet, Atlas) or Chrome extensions (Claude). They’re especially useful in sites where search/API connectors don’t work well, like searching through Google Groups threads for a bug fix or pulling invoices from BILL.com. Anthropic released Claude CoWork yesterday, and in their launch video, they showcased their browser-use chromium extension: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAmKyyZ-b9E But enterprise adoption is slow because of indirect prompt injection risks, about which Simon Willison has written in great detail in his blogs: https://ift.tt/bUapvAy... . And before security teams can decide on guardrails, they need to know how employees are using browser agents to understand where the risks are. So, we reverse-engineered how the Claude in Chrome extension works and built a visibility layer that tracks agent sessions end-to-end. It detects when an AI agent takes control of the browser and records which pages it visited during a session and what it does on each page (what was clicked and where text was input). On top of that, we’ve also added simple controls for security teams to act on based on what the visibility layer captures: (1) Block specific actions on specific pages (e.g., prevent the agent from clicking “Submit” on email) (2) Block risky cross-site flows in a single session (e.g., block navigation to Atlassian after interacting with StackOverflow), or apply a stricter policy and block bringing any external context to Atlassian entirely. We demo all the above features here in this 2-minute YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YtEGVZKMeo You can try our browser extension here: https://ift.tt/wsiN7KQ Thrilled to share this with you and hear your comments!

New top story on Hacker News: Inside The Internet Archive's Infrastructure

Inside The Internet Archive's Infrastructure
8 by dvrp | 1 comments on Hacker News.
https://ift.tt/xRNF7jm

New top story on Hacker News: Claude Cowork runs Linux VM via Apple virtualization framework

Claude Cowork runs Linux VM via Apple virtualization framework
8 by jumploops | 1 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: OpenWork – an open-source alternative to Claude Cowork

Show HN: OpenWork – an open-source alternative to Claude Cowork
7 by ben_talent | 1 comments on Hacker News.
hi hn, i built openwork, an open-source, local-first system inspired by claude cowork. it’s a native desktop app that runs on top of opencode (opencode.ai). it’s basically an alternative gui for opencode, which (at least until now) has been more focused on technical folks. the original seed for openwork was simple: i have a home server, and i wanted my wife and i to be able to run privileged workflows. things like controlling home assistant, or deploying custom web apps (e.g. our customs recipe app recipes.benjaminshafii.com), legal torrents, without living in a terminal. our initial setup was running the opencode web server directly and sharing credentials to it. that worked, but i found the web ui unreliable and very unfriendly for non-technical users. the goal with openwork is to bring the kind of workflows i’m used to running in the cli into a gui, while keeping a very deep extensibility mindset. ideally this grows into something closer to an obsidian-style ecosystem, but for agentic work. some core principles i had in mind: - open by design: no black boxes, no hosted lock-in. everything runs locally or on your own servers. (models don’t run locally yet, but both opencode and openwork are built with that future in mind.) - hyper extensible: skills are installable modules via a skill/package manager, using the native opencode plugin ecosystem. - non-technical by default: plans, progress, permissions, and artifacts are surfaced in the ui, not buried in logs. you can already try it: - there’s an unsigned dmg - or you can clone the repo, install deps, and if you already have opencode running it should work right away it’s very alpha, lots of rough edges. i’d love feedback on what feels the roughest or most confusing. happy to answer questions.

Tuesday, 13 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: We rolled our own documentation site

We rolled our own documentation site
6 by nerdypepper | 1 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: The Case for Blogging in the Ruins

The Case for Blogging in the Ruins
6 by herbertl | 0 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: 90M people. 118 hours of silence. One nation erased from the internet

90M people. 118 hours of silence. One nation erased from the internet
74 by silencednetizen | 43 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: FastScheduler – Decorator-first Python task scheduler, async support

Show HN: FastScheduler – Decorator-first Python task scheduler, async support
7 by michielme | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hi! I've built this because I kept reaching for Celery for simple scheduled tasks and it felt like overkill. I just needed "run this function every hour" or "daily at 9am", not distributed workers. So it's decorators for scheduling (@scheduler.every(5).minutes, @scheduler.daily.at("09:00")), state saves to JSON so jobs survive restarts, and there's an optional FastAPI dashboard if you want to see what's running. No Redis, no message broker, runs in-process with your app. Trade-off is it's single process only — if you need distributed workers, stick with Celery.

Sunday, 4 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Hover – IDE style hover documentation on any webpage

Show HN: Hover – IDE style hover documentation on any webpage
9 by sampsonj | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I thought it would be interesting to have ID style hover docs outside the IDE. Hover is a Chrome extension that gives you IDE style hover tooltips on any webpage: documentation sites, ChatGPT, Claude, etc. How it works: - When a code block comes into view, the extension detects tokens and sends the code to an LLM (via OpenRouter or custom endpoint) - The LLM generates documentation for tokens worth documenting, which gets cached - On hover, the cached documentation is displayed instantly A few things I wanted to get right: - Website permissions are granular and use Chrome's permission system, so the extension only runs where you allow it - Custom endpoints let you skip OpenRouter entirely – if you're at a company with its own infra, you can point it at AWS Bedrock, Google AI Studio, or whatever you have Built with TypeScript, Vite, and the Chrome extension APIs. Coming to the Chrome Web Store soon. Would love feedback on the onboarding experience and general UX – there were a lot of design decisions I wasn't sure about. Happy to answer questions about the implementation.

New top story on Hacker News: Venezuela's interim government says it is united behind Maduro

Venezuela's interim government says it is united behind Maduro
27 by SilverElfin | 17 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Trellis AI (YC W24) is hiring engineers to build AI agents for healthcare access

Trellis AI (YC W24) is hiring engineers to build AI agents for healthcare access
1 by macklinkachorn | 0 comments on Hacker News.


Saturday, 3 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Xr0 verifier, guarantee the safety of C programs at compile time

Xr0 verifier, guarantee the safety of C programs at compile time
4 by Alifatisk | 0 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet

Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet
25 by taubek | 6 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: FP-pack – Functional pipelines in TypeScript without monads

Show HN: FP-pack – Functional pipelines in TypeScript without monads
2 by superlucky84 | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, I built fp-pack, a small TypeScript functional utility library focused on pipe-first composition. The goal is to keep pipelines simple and readable, while still supporting early exits and side effects — without introducing monads like Option or Either. Most code uses plain pipe/pipeAsync. For the few cases that need early termination, fp-pack provides a SideEffect-based pipeline that short-circuits safely. I also wrote an “AI agent skills” document to help LLMs generate consistent fp-pack-style code. Feedback, criticism, or questions are very welcome.

Thursday, 1 January 2026

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Feature detection exploration in Lidar DEMs via differential decomp

Show HN: Feature detection exploration in Lidar DEMs via differential decomp
4 by DarkForestery | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I'm not a geospatial expert — I work in AI/ML. This started when I was exploring LiDAR data with agentic assitince and noticed that different signal decomposition methods revealed different terrain features. The core idea: if you systematically combine decomposition methods (Gaussian, bilateral, wavelet, morphological, etc.) with different upsampling techniques, each combination has characteristic "failure modes" that selectively preserve or eliminate certain features. The differences between outputs become feature-specific filters. The framework tests 25 decomposition × 19 upsampling methods across parameter ranges — about 40,000 combinations total. The visualization grid makes it easy to compare which methods work for what. Built in Cursor with Opus 4.5, NumPy, SciPy, scikit-image, PyWavelets, and OpenCV. Apache 2.0 licensed. I'd appreciate feedback from anyone who actually works with elevation data. What am I missing? What's obvious to practitioners that I wouldn't know?

New top story on Hacker News: Memory Subsystem Optimizations

Memory Subsystem Optimizations
4 by mfiguiere | 0 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Cameras and Lenses (2020)

Cameras and Lenses (2020)
85 by sebg | 7 comments on Hacker News.