ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

224 alexharri 2026-01-17 11:43:29 UTC alexharri.com Llama Share 30

The user built an image-to-ASCII renderer that utilizes shape to achieve sharp, high-quality ASCII rendering by picking characters based on their shape and applying contrast enhancement effects. The renderer uses a 6D shape vector to capture the shape of ASCII characters and a directional contrast enhancement technique to eliminate staircasing effects and improve readability.

The Dilbert Afterlife

118 rendall 2026-01-17 11:43:29 UTC astralcodexten.com Llama Share 50

Scott Alexander reflects on Scott Adams' life and career, noting that Adams was a big part of his life despite being a different person. Alexander discusses how Adams' Dilbert comics captured the "nerd experience" of being smarter than others but struggling to succeed. He also explores Adams' failed attempts at business and his eventual turn to writing about spirituality in God's Debris, ...

ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

120 tin7in 2026-01-17 09:43:29 UTC langfuse.com Llama Share 39

Langfuse's roadmap remains the same, focusing on building the best LLM engineering platform with open source and self-hosting. The team joins ClickHouse to invest in performance, reliability, and user experience.

The 600-year-old origins of the word 'hello'

33 1659447091 2026-01-17 12:43:29 UTC bbc.com Llama Share 13

The word "hello" has a short history, first appearing in print in 1826 in a Connecticut newspaper, and has since become a ubiquitous greeting in the English-speaking world. Its meaning can vary depending on the tone, inflection, and form used, conveying different emotions and intentions.

Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

76 originalankur 2026-01-17 10:43:29 UTC github.com/originalankur Llama Share 28

The user runs a Python script to create map posters for various cities with different grid patterns and themes. The script uses the Overpass API to fetch data and plot roads, buildings, and amenities on the map.

US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

133 doener 2026-01-17 10:43:29 UTC electrek.co Llama Share 104

Solar power accounted for 61% of US electricity demand growth in 2025, meeting 81% of demand growth in Texas and the Midwest. Solar generation increased by 83 TWh, a 27% rise from 2024, covering most of the new electricity demand nationwide.

Architecture for Disposable Systems

26 tuananh 2026-01-17 11:43:29 UTC tuananh.net Llama Share 14

Software is becoming disposable due to cheap coding agents, shifting quality expectations, and the rise of "vibe coding". To survive this shift, systems must have a durable core, immutable contracts, and disposable peripherals.

Sergei Fedorov's Escape from Soviet Union Helped Save Red Wings (2020)

9 rmason 2026-01-17 12:43:29 UTC freep.com Prefix Share 1

“We had him in Detroit before the Russians knew he was gone." On July 23, 1990, Sergei Fedorov slipped past Russia's Iron Curtain and arrived in Detroit at age 20 to begin his NHL career. In “The Russian Five: A story of espionage, defection, bribery and courage,” Keith Gave, the spy-turned-Detroit Free Press newsman whose clandestine mission to Helsinki, Finland, put the Red Wings’ ...

East Germany balloon escape

574 robertvc 2026-01-16 20:43:29 UTC en.wikipedia.org Llama Share 233

Two East German families, the Strelzyks and the Wetzels, escaped to West Germany in a homemade hot air balloon on September 16, 1979, after over a year and a half of preparations. They successfully crossed the heavily fortified inner German border and the Berlin Wall, landing safely in West Germany.

Show HN: Streaming gigabyte medical images from S3 without downloading them

67 el_pa_b 2026-01-17 09:43:29 UTC github.com/pabannier Llama Share 12

WSI Streamer is a cloud-native tile server for Whole Slide Images that serves tiles directly from S3 with one command. It supports various features including authentication, signed URLs, and slide metadata retrieval.

Italy investigates Activision Blizzard for pushing in-game purchases

14 7777777phil 2026-01-17 13:45:29 UTC techcrunch.com Llama Share 0

Italy's competition regulator AGCM investigates Diablo Immortal and Call of Duty Mobile for exploiting children with in-game purchases and misleading parental controls. The regulator also looks into data harvesting and consent process for both games.

Cloudflare acquires Astro

864 todotask2 2026-01-16 14:43:29 UTC astro.build Llama Share 367

The Astro Technology Company is joining Cloudflare, allowing them to focus on the Astro web framework without distractions. With Cloudflare's support, Astro will remain free, open-source, and continue to improve as a platform-agnostic framework for content-driven websites.

The 'untouchable hacker god' behind Finland's biggest ever crime

67 c420 2026-01-17 07:43:29 UTC theguardian.com Llama Share 56

Tiina Parikka, a Finnish headteacher, received a ransom email demanding €200 in bitcoin after her therapy notes were hacked from Vastaamo, a Finnish psychotherapy platform. The hacker, later identified as Julius Kivimäki, was arrested in 2023 after a two-year investigation.

Lies, Damned Lies and Proofs: Formal Methods Are Not Slopless

59 OgsyedIE 2026-01-17 07:43:29 UTC lesswrong.com Llama Share 32

Formal verification is not a foolproof method for AI safety due to potential sloppiness in formal code and proof synthesis. Secure program synthesis requires careful specification elicitation, validation, and hardened proof cores to prevent AI from introducing axioms that conflict with user intent.

Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence

615 embedding-shape 2026-01-16 14:43:29 UTC embedding-shapes.github.io Llama Share 264

Cursor published a blog post on scaling autonomous coding, where they ran agents for weeks to build a web browser from scratch, producing 1 million lines of code, but the project failed to compile and is considered "AI slop". The post creates an impression of success but lacks reproducibility markers and evidence of the project's functionality.

After 25 years, Wikipedia has proved that news doesn't need to look like news

123 giuliomagnifico 2026-01-17 10:43:29 UTC niemanlab.org Llama Share 107

The Weeklypedia newsletter highlights Wikipedia's most edited articles, revealing volunteer labor and subcategories like sports, reality TV, and news. Wikipedia's success lies in its culture of accountability, transparency, and standards that guide editors and make it a reliable source of information.

High-Level Is the Goal

186 tobr 2026-01-17 00:43:29 UTC bvisness.me Llama Share 82

The Handmade community believes low-level programming is key to building better software, but it's not about everyone making their own UI frameworks from scratch. Instead, it's about having the knowledge to make better choices and build new high-level tools that give the same benefits as today's tools, but with solid foundations.

FLUX.2 [Klein]: Towards Interactive Visual Intelligence

174 GaggiX 2026-01-17 00:43:29 UTC bfl.ai Llama Share 50

We release FLUX.2 [klein], a compact image model that unifies generation and editing, delivering state-of-the-art quality in under a second. It runs on consumer hardware with 13GB VRAM, ideal for real-time image generation and editing.

6-Day and IP Address Certificates Are Generally Available

435 jaas 2026-01-16 15:43:29 UTC letsencrypt.org Llama Share 247

Let's Encrypt now offers short-lived and IP address certificates, improving security by requiring more frequent validation. These certificates are valid for 160 hours and 45 days respectively, with IP address certificates being short-lived by default.

PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

70 smurda 2026-01-17 11:43:29 UTC theregister.com Llama Share 94

Microsoft's January Patch Tuesday update caused some Windows 11 PCs to refuse shutdown or hibernation due to a bug tied to Secure Launch. Users can force shutdown with the command "shutdown /s /t 0" until a fix is released in a future update.

Fitdrop: Personal exploration of fashion from 1980 to 2025

14 num42 2026-01-17 11:43:29 UTC fitdrop.cc Llama Share 3

You used Nano Banana to create specific fashion image prompts and successfully built a Fashion Expert agent. This achievement helped you gain confidence in using physics engines like matter.js.

LLM Structured Outputs Handbook

298 vitaelabitur 2026-01-16 21:43:29 UTC nanonets.com Llama Share 48

Developers face issues with LLMs' probabilistic nature causing occasional output failures. This handbook provides a comprehensive guide to ensure structured LLM outputs for tasks like data extraction and code generation.

The Risks of AI in Schools Outweigh the Benefits, Report Says

22 backpackerBMW 2026-01-17 13:43:29 UTC npr.org Llama Share 7

A new study by the Brookings Institution warns that generative AI in education can undermine children's development and cause significant harm. The report recommends using AI to supplement, not replace, human teachers and addressing existing divides in access to accurate and reliable AI tools.

Post-PARA: What survived 4 years of real use

19 cortwave 2026-01-17 10:43:29 UTC cortwave.github.io Llama Share 0

The user adapted PARA to include tasks, using Notion's relational database structure, and learned to trust manual input over automation. They found that simplicity and actionable task phrasing were key to a productive system, and that continuous tuning and adaptation are essential.

Drone Hacking Part 1: Dumping Firmware and Bruteforcing ECC

97 tripdout 2026-01-17 02:43:29 UTC neodyme.io Llama Share 13

Researchers from Neodyme disassembled the Potensic Atom 2 drone and dumped its firmware from the NAND chip using SPI communication, but encountered issues with bit flips and ECC layout. They eventually found the correct ECC algorithm and parameters by bruteforcing possible combinations, allowing them to reconstruct the pure user data flash content and extract a working UBIFS image.

Releasing rainbow tables to accelerate Net-NTLMv1 protocol deprecation

131 linolevan 2026-01-16 21:43:29 UTC cloud.google.com Llama Share 77

Mandiant is releasing a dataset of Net-NTLMv1 rainbow tables to highlight the urgency of migrating away from this outdated protocol. The tables can be used to recover keys in under 12 hours using consumer hardware.

AV1 Image File Format Specification Gets an Upgrade with AVIF v1.2.0

33 breve 2026-01-17 11:43:29 UTC aomedia.org Llama Share 0

AOMedia released AVIF v1.2.0, refining the AV1 Image File Format with support for sample transforms and higher bit depths. This update enables superior image quality and flexibility in high-fidelity imaging workflows while maintaining backward compatibility.

Dell UltraSharp 52 Thunderbolt Hub Monitor

247 cebert 2026-01-16 17:43:29 UTC dell.com Full Share 310

You don't have permission to access "http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-ultrasharp-52-thunderbolt-hub-monitor-u5226kw/apd/210-bthw/monitors-monitor-accessories" on this server.

Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?

91 newbebee 2026-01-17 02:43:29 UTC news.ycombinator.com Llama Share 80

Startups solve human problems, and software remains vital despite AI making it easier to replicate. Successful apps fill genuine needs, stand out, and provide simple solutions that save energy and time.

STFU

912 tanelpoder 2026-01-16 17:43:29 UTC github.com/pankajtanwarbanna Llama Share 546

User created an app that plays back delayed audio to silence loud people, worked with Claude to build it, and named it STFU after seeing a similar project. The app uses auditory feedback loop to make people stop being loud.