Hacker NewsWednesday, January 7

This appears to be a simple game interface showing a score of 0, walls at 0 out of 10, and a best score of 0, likely from a horse-themed puzzle or strategy game where players need to build walls or enclosures.

Vietnam's new Decree No. 342, effective February 15, 2026, will limit unskippable video ads to 5 seconds maximum and require static ads to be immediately cancellable. The law also mandates clear ad-closing mechanisms and stricter regulations on ads for health and environmental products.

AWS quietly raised prices on EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML by approximately 15% over a weekend, breaking decades of conditioning customers to expect prices only go down. This marks a rare straight price increase rather than AWS's usual practice of changing pricing dimensions. The move affects GPU instances used for machine learning workloads and could signal a shift in AWS's pricing strategy, potentially impacting other services facing supply constraints in the future.

Author Jeff Starr describes his frustrating experience with Google's DMCA process in 2026. After years of Google promptly removing pirated copies of his books, Google suddenly began questioning his identity and copyright ownership despite providing extensive proof. After multiple exchanges where Google demanded unclear verification requirements, they ultimately refused to remove the pirated content and suggested he resolve the dispute directly with the infringing website, leaving him feeling betrayed by a once-trusted ally.

Cory Doctorow delivered a speech at Hamburg's Chaos Communications Congress about building a "post-American internet" that resists corporate control. He argues that Trump's policies have inadvertently created opportunities for a coalition of digital rights activists, economic competitors, and national security hawks to challenge Big Tech's dominance and create a more open, user-controlled internet free from American corporate influence.

Brave has significantly overhauled its Rust-based adblock engine to reduce memory consumption by 75%, saving approximately 45 MB of memory across all platforms. The improvements were achieved by refactoring the engine to use FlatBuffers format and various optimizations.

A study of 32,000 Hacker News posts found that negative content receives 27% more points than average, with nearly 65% of posts registering as negative across multiple sentiment analysis models. The negativity typically involves technical criticism, skepticism toward announcements, and industry complaints rather than personal attacks.

The author switched from VSCode to Zed IDE after becoming frustrated with VSCode's increasingly intrusive AI features, frequent crashes, and performance issues. Zed impressed them with its speed, stability, and familiar interface similar to VSCode. While setting up Python support required some configuration work with language servers, the author now prefers Zed for Python and Go development, appreciating its minimal AI interference and overall better user experience.

SQLite is coded in C because it provides the best performance, compatibility across all platforms, minimal dependencies, and stability. C enables SQLite to be fast, callable from any programming language, and reliable. While newer "safe" languages like Rust exist, C remains the optimal choice for a low-level database library.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) is a unified platform that combines AI assistance with familiar productivity tools like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It offers streamlined search, AI chat capabilities, content creation templates, and AI-powered features within classic Office applications to help users create, collaborate, and be more productive.