I recently found an old project I built with a friend around 2017–2018: a perk calculator for the game Firefall. The application allowed players to browse perks by category, drag them into a build, track the available perk points and automatically filter incompatible options based on the selected class. Looking at the code today, there are many things I would structure differently. The JavaScript could be better organised, responsibilities could be clearer, and the overall architecture would benefit from more modern practices. Still, I decided to preserve it as it is. Older projects are useful reminders that progress is not only visible in the technologies we use, but also in how we model problems, organise code and make technical decisions. It is not a showcase of how I would build the same application today. It is a snapshot of how I approached a real problem at that point in my career. Repository: https://github.com/lksvn/firefall-perk-calculator

Spent the week balancing deep p2p networking work in Python with some much-needed UI polish on my personal site. 11 commits and 6 PRs later, I hit a perfect 7-day streak and made the codebase a bit more secure. TL;DR This week was all about the "invisible" work that makes software feel solid. I spent a good chunk of time in the weeds of p2p networking, specifically hardening WebRTC implementations, while also carving out time to refine the typography and feel of my personal portfolio. With 11 commits across 5 repos and 6 PRs in flight, I managed to keep the momentum going every single day of the week. WHAT I BUILT Most of my direct commit activity this week was split between keeping my dev environment sharp and making my portfolio feel a bit more "me." Portfolio & Personal Branding I spent some quality time in yashksaini-coder/portfolio . If you're like me, you can't leave your personal site alone for more than a month. I pushed a few updates to the blog content, but the real fun was in the UI/UX tweaks. I swapped out the primary typography for JetBrains Mono —there’s just something about a good monospace font that makes a dev portfolio feel right. I also went through a "make-interfaces-feel-better" phase. I refactored the selectedwork section, specifically dropping a cursor-follow preview tile that felt a bit too "heavy" and replaced it with something more streamlined. I also polished the index rows to make the transitions feel snappier. It’s about +452/-279 lines of code, which is a healthy amount of churn for a week that was supposed to be about "minor" updates. The Maintenance Grind My nvim config is basically a living organism at this point. I have CI set up to automatically track plugin updates, and this week was particularly noisy with 6 commits just keeping the toolchain current. It’s [skip ci] territory, but it ensures that when I sit down to actually write code, my editor isn't lagging behind the latest Lua API changes. I also did a quick version bump for

Hi HN folks ! I am the author of AVA, a self hosted AI Voice Agent that plugs into Asterisk/Freepbx so you own all the aspects of an AI Voice agent in your own infrastructure. It uses Asterisk native Audiosocket/RTP with python engine to run STT,LLM and TTS loop. The project support several full providers openai, gemini, grok, elevenlabs out of the box and also provides options to build custom pipelines by choosing different stt tts and llm. It also supports full local agent if you have a GPU wi

I was sick of losing the Telemundo signal during World Cup, so I built a Web App that uses a local RTL-SDR dongle to analyze the HDTV signal and help you point your antenna... GOAAALLLL!

Should HN add the ability to flag articles as AI-generated? This doesn't have to act as a regular flag, i.e., it won't de-rank the article; it could just show up as an indicator, allowing others (like myself) who don't like reading AI-generated text, to skip it. Open questions: 1. Why is the regular voting system not enough? 2. Should HN change in response to the gen AI era? It has been successful not changing fundamentals.

A hands-on comparison where I tested BrowserAct and Agent Browser using the SannySoft browser...

36 Stratagems Series · Arc 2 (Against Enemy, #7-#12) Wrap-Up This article has 7 sections: I. The Stranger at the Door II. Full Interview Transcript III. The Reveal IV. Data · Character Map · Four Insights V. A Note VI. Arc 3 (#13-#18) Preview VII. Acknowledgments I. The Stranger at the Door On the evening of July 12th, I was staring blankly at the page for #12, Borrow Corpse, Return Soul . Twelve stories done. The 36 Stratagems series had reached the one-third mark, and Arc 2 (#7-#12) had just wrapped. Outside the window, a typhoon was passing through — howling wind, torrential rain. I didn't look outside. My phone buzzed. Not a message — a meeting invitation. The sender was "Ke Yuan," and the invitation note read: Interview invitation from Deep Lane Weekly , 15 minutes. I paused. I didn't remember scheduling any interview. But the tone, the phrasing — it didn't feel like a prank. I clicked "Accept." Three seconds later, an unfamiliar voice came through the speaker: "Hello, Xu Lingfeng. I'm Ke Yuan, a reporter from Deep Lane Weekly . Recently, a reader recommended your 36 Stratagems series to our editorial team — we read through it and found it really interesting. I'd love to talk with you about how this series came together." Before I could respond — the meeting had already begun. II. Full Interview Transcript What follows is the raw chat log pulled from that meeting. Nothing has been altered except formatting. Reporter: Xu Lingfeng, you've just finished the second arc of the 36 Stratagems series — #7 through #12, six stories in six days, posted back to back. Before we talk numbers, let me ask you something simple: over those six days, was there ever a moment you felt like stopping? Xu: Honestly, no — sometimes I even thought about posting two a day, since I do have a backlog. But I worried they'd cannibalize each other's numbers, so I stuck to one a day. Reporter: You've even considered posting two a day — so you actually do have a backlog. Let me rephrase: instea

I Tested Direct Provider APIs vs Aggregators — Here's the Truth Six months ago I was staring at a $48,000 invoice from an AI provider that shall not be named. We had committed to a six-month contract because the sales rep promised "priority routing" and "negotiated rates." What we got instead was a rate hike, an outage during our biggest product launch, and a support team that took 72 hours to respond. That was the moment I decided to stop signing contracts with AI providers entirely. This is the playbook I wish someone had handed me on day one — the architecture decisions, the math, and the code that lets a small team punch way above its weight class without betting the company on a single vendor. The Trap Most Startups Fall Into When I started my last company, I did what every founder does. I read the docs, got an API key, shipped a feature. The model worked, the demo went well, the investors nodded. Then we hit production traffic and the bills started arriving like clockwork. Here's what nobody tells you about going direct to a model provider as a startup: The pricing page you see on the website is the retail price. The actual cost of running production workloads includes rate limits you didn't anticipate, caching you forgot to implement, context windows that blow up your token count, and prompt engineering iterations that look cheap per call but compound fast. I watched one team burn $20K in a single weekend because they were streaming completions without setting a max_tokens guardrail. Direct providers also lock you into their ecosystem. Their SDK, their tools, their prompt format, their authentication scheme. The moment you want to A/B test a different model — which you will, probably next quarter — you're rewriting integration code instead of shipping features. And then there's the geopolitical mess. Some of the best models in 2026 come from providers that don't accept US credit cards. I've personally lost an afternoon trying to sign up for an account that re

I run Claude Code most of my day. agent loops firing all day, one after another. the usage screen...

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition . During the World Cup , millions of people can watch the same match. But every stadium tries to say something different before kickoff. Sometimes it is belief. Sometimes defiance. Sometimes memory. Sometimes unity. I follow football closely, and some of the moments I remember most are not goals. They are the few seconds before kickoff when the camera pulls wide and an entire stand reveals one message at once. That was the idea behind Tifo Forge . It is an interactive experience that turns a team, a supporter emotion, and a symbol into an animated stadium tifo. Not another match tracker. Not another football chatbot. Tifo Forge turns supporter emotion into a stadium moment. What I Built Tifo Forge asks the user to make three choices: A national team A supporter emotion A visual symbol The emotions are simple on purpose: Believe Defy Unite Remember The symbols include ideas such as lightning, a phoenix, wings, a heart, and dawn. Once those choices are made, Gemini creates a structured design plan. The browser then turns that plan into an animated stadium display. I deliberately avoided uploads, accounts, and long setup screens. I wanted someone to open the page and reach the reveal in under a minute. Three choices are enough to raise the stand. The final result can be replayed, reset, or saved as an SVG poster. Demo Try Tifo Forge: https://tifo-forge.vercel.app/ I kept thinking about those few seconds before kickoff when everyone in the stadium knows something is about to happen, but nobody has seen the full picture yet. That became the interaction: Choose the team ↓ Choose the feeling ↓ Choose the symbol ↓ Raise the tifo When the user clicks Raise the Tifo , the stadium darkens. Rows of cards flip into place. The pattern spreads across the curved stand. The central symbol appears, and the chant locks into position. The user is not asking for a random poster. They are deciding what the stand believes, how it

You spent the afternoon writing that piece. Every claim sourced, every argument tight. You hit publish and watched the numbers. Twenty-four hours later: 41 views. Meanwhile, someone else posted a single sentence — "I quit coffee for 90 days and found something uncomfortable" — and collected 120,000 impressions before lunch. The difference was not effort. It was not even quality. It was a single decision made in the first three words of the title: which emotional circuit to activate. Viral content is not liked into existence. It is clicked into existence. And clicks are not rational — they are reflexive. Understanding the five neural mechanisms that drive that reflex, and knowing how to engineer them deliberately with AI, is the most asymmetric skill advantage available to content creators right now. TL;DR: Every high-CTR title activates one of five hardwired emotional responses. This guide decodes the neuroscience behind each, shows you before/after title rewrites, and demonstrates how a single AI prompt can generate all five variants from any content idea — so you stop guessing which trigger to use and start testing them systematically. Why "Good Writing" and "High CTR" Are Different Problems Before getting into the triggers, it is worth being precise about why these are separate problems — because conflating them is the source of most content creators' frustration. Content quality governs retention : how long someone stays, whether they finish, whether they return. CTR governs distribution : whether the platform's algorithm decides to show your content to more people at all. From a quantitative perspective, these are two entirely separate conditional probabilities that multiply together to determine your content's actual reach: P(Reach) = P(Click)P(Retention|Click) Most creators obsess over P(Retention|Click) — the quality of the experience after the click. But platform distribution algorithms gate on P(Click) first. A piece of content with a retention rate of 0.9

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition What I Built Hi! My name is Dave and my background is webmaster/front-end web developer. I have long been curious about creating desktop apps, and I figured this was the perfect opportunity to build one. I also am a novice player of contract bridge, also known as just "bridge", so I figured I would make a bridge app since I am passionate about it. In bridge, many people like to do a double dummy simulation where all 52 cards are visible between the four positions (North, South, East, and West). This allows them to see how many tricks are possible with a given contract and deal. This allows them to improve their declarer (offensive) play as well as their defensive play and improves analytical decision-making. It also allows them to perform an effective post-mortem analysis (i.e., what went wrong). Since this is a weekend challenge, I didn't get the chance to add some more functionality like I wanted. In addition to improving the UI, I'd also like to actually be able to play through different hands and add a scoring mechanism that you see on bridge score calculators online. I think combining that with a way to play full hands would be where I would want to go from here. Demo Code DaveH1981 / double-dummy-bridge-calculator An app for contract bridge players that uses the double dummy method to find the best card play sequence. double-dummy-bridge-calculator An app for contract bridge players that uses the double dummy method to find the best card play sequence. Front end, C++ wrappers, and engine callers are mine. This app connects to the DDS bridge solver written by Bo Haglund, Soren Hein, and Martin Nygren. They reserve all rights as per the Apache 2.0 license. View on GitHub How I Built It My background is mostly front end, so that was pretty straightforward for me. The most difficult part was figuring out how to link to the DDS double dummy bridge engine. I went with Electron and GYP as a wrapper, linking

Last month, an AI coding agent handed me a beautiful fix. Five lines. Elegant. It reused an existing helper, matched the codebase style, compiled on the first try. Exactly the kind of diff we've all learned to praise since "make the agent write less code" became the standard advice. It was also completely untested, and it sat on a password-recovery path. That diff taught me something I now consider the central problem of AI-assisted coding in 2026: we've spent a year teaching agents to write less code, and almost no time teaching them to prove the code they kept actually holds. The two failure modes Every AI coding agent fails in one of two directions. Failure mode #1: the over-build. You ask for a date comparison; you get a new dependency, a ValidationService class, and a config layer. This one is well known — it's why minimal-code prompts and skills became popular, and they genuinely work on it. Failure mode #2: the confidently small diff. Minimal, clean, written after reading half the flow, verified never — dropped onto a path that handles money, auth, or user data. It compiles. It demos. It detonates in week three. Here's the uncomfortable part: fixing #1 aggressively makes #2 more likely. When the objective function is "shortest diff," the first things to quietly disappear are edge-case handling, failure-path tests, and the guard clause that looked optional. The diff gets smaller. The blast radius doesn't. A five-line change to a payment path is more dangerous than a four-hundred-line internal script that runs once. Code size is not risk. Blast radius is risk. Yet almost every skill and prompt in this category optimizes for size alone. What a guard does differently This is why I built Guardsman 💂 — an open-source skill that behaves less like a minimalist and more like the royal guard in front of the palace: nothing passes the post unchallenged, and the level of challenge depends on what's behind the gate. Three duties, on every task: 1. Read the standing orders

For a full quarter, our feature velocity significantly dropped after we re-implemented a Go service using Rust. The performance improvements actually happened. Why we did it in the first place We are a small startup. Each engineer is important, and each week is even more important. Our backend was built using Go, which was performing well. It was fast, reliable, and we could easily find resources to hire. However, we became infected with that fever. The phrase "Rewrite it in Rust" was being used in all kinds of situations, and it sounded very appealing with its promises of memory safety, no garbage collector pauses, and blazing speed. We told ourselves it was an investment in the future. What we actually bought was a quarter of silence. The numbers nobody warns you about I may not have the exact metrics we use internally, but I can direct you to an individual who shared accurate calculations transparently. In a retrospective from November 2025, engineering manager Noah Byteforge wrote that a Node.js-to-Rust backend rewrite "dropped API response times from 340ms to 28ms. That's 12.1x faster." And the other metric. A 65% decrease in sprint velocity. They didn't deliver a single story point for three weeks. The time it took to send out new features increased by 185%. The time it took for pull requests to be processed increased by 320%. Additionally, scores from the "I feel productive" survey dropped from 8.2 to 4.1. Most importantly, the kicker is what he says in his own words: "We'd won the technical battle and lost the war that actually mattered." He also admits that if he had been forthright about the 6-12 month per engineer ramp, "the business case would've fallen apart immediately." That retrospective was so relatable, it read like our own diary. The battles with the borrow checker and the compile times just snuck entire weeks away from us. The wins were real. That's the trap. I must give credit to Rust because the safety benefits are not exaggerated. The rewrite