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

649 alexharri 2026-01-17 12:10:24 UTC alexharri.com Llama Share 74

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.

We put Claude Code in Rollercoaster Tycoon

263 iamwil 2026-01-17 15:10:24 UTC labs.ramp.com Llama Share 142

Ramp built Claude Code, an AI agent, to manage a park in RollerCoaster Tycoon, demonstrating its strengths and weaknesses in automating tasks. The project highlights the importance of environment legibility and feedback loops in agent design, showcasing the potential and limitations of coding agents in real-world applications.

An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm

63 Tachyooon 2026-01-17 17:10:24 UTC bbc.com Llama Share 69

Hardwick Hall's design, built during the Little Ice Age, uses clever techniques to keep warm, such as orientation and thermal mass, which can be applied to modern homes. These Elizabethan building secrets can help reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and create more efficient heating and cooling systems.

The Olivetti Company – By Bradford Morgan White

45 rbanffy 2026-01-17 18:10:24 UTC abortretry.fail Llama Share 10

Camillo Olivetti, a Jewish-Italian engineer, founded Olivetti in 1908, producing high-quality typewriters and office equipment, and his son Adriano expanded the company into computers, developing the ELEA 9003, a mainframe computer, in the 1950s. Adriano's vision for a more democratic and participatory society led him to become mayor of Ivrea and a member of the Italian parliament, while his ...

The recurring dream of replacing developers

151 glimshe 2026-01-17 15:10:24 UTC caimito.net Llama Share 150

Business leaders and developers are stuck in a 50-year cycle where new tools promise to make software development simpler, but ultimately, specialized knowledge and intense focus remain essential. The recurring pattern reveals that software development is constrained by intellectual complexity, not mechanical tasks.

There's no single best way to store information

52 7777777phil 2026-01-17 17:10:24 UTC quantamagazine.org Llama Share 32

Computer scientists design data structures like hash tables and heaps to balance insertion and retrieval times, and space usage. These data structures help manage information efficiently, but each has its trade-offs and limitations.

Show HN: Minikv – Distributed key-value and object store in Rust (Raft, S3 API)

31 whispem 2026-01-17 20:10:24 UTC github.com/whispem Llama Share 25

minikv is a Rust-based distributed key-value store with strong consistency, durability, and observability, suitable for learning and experimenting with distributed systems. It's a reference implementation for engineers learning Rust and distributed systems.

Common misunderstandings about large software companies

25 otoolep 2026-01-17 18:10:24 UTC philipotoole.com Llama Share 11

Large software companies face coordination challenges due to their size, not technical limitations. Criticisms of these companies often miss the structural reasons behind their processes and behaviors.

Counterfactual evaluation for recommendation systems

43 kurinikku 2026-01-17 15:10:24 UTC eugeneyan.com Llama Share 2

The author discusses the limitations of offline evaluation in recommendation systems, treating recommendations as observational problems when they are actually interventional problems.

M8SBC-486 (Homebrew 486 computer)

40 rasz 2026-01-17 16:10:24 UTC maniek86.xyz Llama Share 5

The M8SBC-486 is a 486 homebrew computer motherboard made from scratch with compatibility to run Linux, DOOM, and other older x86 PC software. It has a PGA-168 socket for 5V 486 CPUs and a 24 MHz FSB, making it compatible with DX2 CPUs.

East Germany balloon escape

651 robertvc 2026-01-16 21:10:24 UTC en.wikipedia.org Llama Share 275

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: What if your menu bar was a keyboard-controlled command center?

47 pugdogdev 2026-01-17 18:10:24 UTC extrabar.app Full Share 28

ExtraBar brings Mac users a customizable menu bar with instant access to apps, deep links, and custom actions. Requiring zero permissions to work.

The Dilbert Afterlife

371 rendall 2026-01-17 12:10:24 UTC astralcodexten.com Llama Share 237

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, ...

OpenAI to test ads in ChatGPT as it burns through billions

66 Terretta 2026-01-17 20:10:24 UTC arstechnica.com Llama Share 58

OpenAI will test ads in ChatGPT for some US users, appearing at the bottom of answers in the free and $8 per month versions. The ads will be labeled and separated from the conversation history, with no influence on ChatGPT's conversational responses.

ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

179 tin7in 2026-01-17 10:10:24 UTC langfuse.com Llama Share 80

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'

82 1659447091 2026-01-17 12:10:24 UTC bbc.com Llama Share 51

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.

Canada's deal with China signals it is serious about shift from US

99 breve 2026-01-17 20:10:24 UTC bbc.com Llama Share 91

Canada has made a significant shift in its policy on China by easing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in exchange for lower retaliatory tariffs on Canadian agricultural products. The deal is seen as a recognition by Prime Minister Mark Carney that the future of North American free trade remains unclear and Canada needs to be prepared.

16 Best Practices for Reducing Dependabot Noise

35 zdw 2026-01-17 16:10:24 UTC nesbitt.io Llama Share 20

To manage Dependabot at scale without sacrificing velocity, optimize dependency workflows by implementing strategies such as cooldowns, batching updates, and adding review requirements. By doing so, you can reduce risk, improve stability, and increase productivity in your enterprise team.

Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

187 originalankur 2026-01-17 11:10:24 UTC github.com/originalankur Llama Share 50

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.

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

122 el_pa_b 2026-01-17 09:10:24 UTC github.com/pabannier Llama Share 41

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.

Below the Surface: Archeological Finds from the Amsterdam Noord/Zuid Metro Line

6 stefanvdw1 2026-01-17 20:10:24 UTC belowthesurface.amsterdam Full Share 1

Show HN: I built a tool to assist AI agents to know when a PR is good to go

27 dsifry 2026-01-17 16:10:24 UTC dsifry.github.io Llama Share 10

AI coding agents struggle with determining completion due to unclear review comments and unresolved threads. A tool like gtg helps by combining CI and commit statuses into a single state, distinguishing between unresolved discussions and addressed issues.

Apples, Trees, and Quasimodes

13 entaloneralie 2026-01-17 17:10:24 UTC systemstack.dev Llama Share 2

Jef Raskin's humane computing vision aimed to create machines that were simpler, kinder, and more aligned with human thought. His designs, such as the Canon Cat, embodied humane ideals but also narrowed them, raising questions about the balance between protection and openness.

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

676 embedding-shape 2026-01-16 21:10:24 UTC embedding-shapes.github.io Llama Share 294

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.

The Resonant Computing Manifesto

35 sinak 2026-01-17 17:10:24 UTC resonantcomputing.org Llama Share 9

Technology can either expand our capacity or alienate us, and we're at a crossroads with AI. To build a resonant future, we must resist hyper-scale and prioritize individual and collective flourishing through principles like privacy, dedication, and adaptability.

2025 was the third hottest year on record

159 andsoitis 2026-01-17 18:10:24 UTC economist.com Llama Share 131

2025 was one of the hottest years on record despite initial expectations of a relatively cool year. Climate reports from Europe and America show an acceleration in global warming.

6-Day and IP Address Certificates Are Generally Available

473 jaas 2026-01-16 21:10:24 UTC letsencrypt.org Llama Share 260

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.

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

129 c420 2026-01-17 08:10:24 UTC theguardian.com Llama Share 134

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.

High-Level Is the Goal

219 tobr 2026-01-17 01:10:24 UTC bvisness.me Llama Share 108

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.

The thing that brought me joy

7 monooso 2026-01-17 19:10:24 UTC stephenlewis.me Prefix Share 2

I’ve been using Neovim (and before that, Vim) for 20 years, and as such spend most of my day in the terminal. I like it there. As dumb as it sounds, it makes me happy. That doesn’t mean I’ve mastered Neovim though, much less the other tools that make the terminal so powerful. The esoteric superpowers of sed and awk still elude me. The dream of effortlessly piping text through a series of ...