Hacker NewsThursday, January 1

A developer created HackerBook, an offline archive of 20 years of Hacker News content that runs in browsers using SQLite and WebAssembly. The complete dataset can be downloaded from GitHub and served locally, creating an unkillable static archive of all HN discussions and posts.

F-Droid has successfully upgraded its core server infrastructure thanks to community donations. The new hardware replaced 12-year-old equipment and significantly improved performance, enabling faster app builds and updates. The project now publishes updates twice daily instead of every 3-4 days, benefiting the entire ecosystem.

The MonoGame Foundation announced a new sponsor, ConcernedApe, on December 30, 2025. The announcement encourages community support through financial donations, purchasing merchandise from their store, contributing code via pull requests, helping in their Discord community, and participating in bounties to fix bugs and add features.

Discussion centers on AI becoming a capital-intensive commodity market where companies with similar resources produce similar results. The main evidence cited is that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others have achieved roughly equivalent performance despite massive investments, suggesting no sustainable competitive advantages exist.

FediMeteo is a weather forecasting service created by someone inspired by their grandfather's meteorological knowledge. The project provides regular weather updates for cities across multiple countries through social media timelines, using FreeBSD jails and snac software. Starting as a personal project during Christmas 2024, it unexpectedly gained popularity when announced publicly, leading to requests for additional cities and countries. The service emphasizes accessibility by providing forecasts in local languages with emojis, works without JavaScript, and follows Unix philosophy of simple, interconnected components.

Honey, a popular browser shopping plugin, has been caught using deceptive tactics to hide rule violations from testers. When Honey detects it might be under scrutiny through new accounts, low earnings, blacklisted users, or affiliate cookies, it properly follows stand-down rules that prevent it from hijacking commissions. However, for regular users, Honey deliberately violates these rules and steals commissions meant for other affiliates, similar to Volkswagen's emissions scandal where software behaved differently during testing.

Libsodium, a 13-year-old cryptography library, had a bug in its crypto_core_ed25519_is_valid_point() function that incorrectly validated certain elliptic curve points. The issue was fixed on December 30, 2025, but most users aren't affected since high-level APIs don't use this function. The maintainer recommends using Ristretto255 for new projects and asks for sponsorship support.

Austin Henley, a Carnegie Mellon professor, signed with a major publisher in 2023 to write a technical book about classic programming projects like compilers and games. Despite initial enthusiasm, the collaboration became frustrating due to constant pressure from editors to dumb down content, incorporate AI elements against his wishes, and follow formulaic approaches that stripped away his personal voice. After missing multiple deadlines and growing increasingly unhappy with the publisher's demands and lack of creative control, Henley ultimately decided to cancel the contract and pursue self-publishing instead, citing better financial prospects and creative freedom.

A research tool uses Claude AI to generate SQL queries for searching a database containing 1.4M posts and 15.6M comments from sites like Hacker News, arXiv, and LessWrong. It features vector search capabilities and email alerts for specific criteria, but expansion is limited by funding constraints.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio mandated a switch from Calibri back to Times New Roman for State Department documents, citing tradition and authority. However, the article argues this decision is primarily political, targeting diversity initiatives rather than genuine design concerns, as Times New Roman lacks the professional gravitas claimed and other government bodies use different, more ceremonial typefaces.