Top 30 stories from Hacker News. Top 10 include comment highlights. Compiled at 20:10 UTC.
654 points by tomasol · 354 comments
DBOS recently argued that Postgres is all you need for durable execution: if you already trust your database, you do not need a separate orchestration tier. I a…
What HN said:
bitexploder: I started setting up my workflows using Temporal. It deploys as relatively light weight local app. For an isolated local installation it uses SQLite. It makes the process of dealing with API retries and organizing workflows and tasks really simple. I recommend giving it a try.
utopiah: The cycle of expertise : - what is X, I just do Y - wow I can see so many limits of Y, now I do X - I use X for literally everything - now that I properly understand the limits of Y but also the heavy constraints of X ...
levkk: I don't understand this obsession with SQLite for real, production apps. SQLite is an embedded database, completely unsuitable for managing concurrency. This is what database servers are for, e.g., Postgres, MySQL, etc.
faangguyindia: I've replaced all of these with Go + SQLite: 1. Intercom 2. Zendesk 3. Email marketing 4. Kanban 5. Todo 6. Our billing stack 7. Our issue tracker 8. Our forum 9. Uptime monitor 10.
445 points by vnglst · 196 comments
A few days in Paris for the Mistral AI Now Summit: open models, on-prem deployment, agentic harnesses, and why Mistral wants to be the European full-stack AI partner.
What HN said:
trouve_search: OK, I'm 100% rooting for both Mistral and task focused small models. But Mistral has fall really far behind since 2025Q3. It seems they can't get good reasoning models working at even medium context sizes, which is necessary to be at the table right now. Gemma4 and Qwen3.
antirez: I really want Europe to be part of the AI development and research. And I strongly cheered for Mistral. But they are accumulating too much technological delay. This needs to be fixed, otherwise it will turn into yet another proof we are not able to run large tech with good result...
simonw: > BNP Paribas runs Mistral models on-prem for KYC in Belgium, with sensitive data staying within the bank's walls. Abanca is using agent orchestration to handle sensitive customer information at a huge scale (2 million customers in their app).
tnolet: Regardless of the business. Their website design is :chefs-kiss https://mistral.ai/
372 points by nadis · 351 comments
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What HN said:
mxstbr: I run the team at OpenAI that's responsible for the ChatGPT App Store, Codex plugins, and all things MCP. The thing that all these "MCP is dead" posts are missing is that whether or not MCP is used as a transport protocol is actually completely irrelevant.
CSMastermind: Was this written by AI? MCP is essentially just JSON RPC with a few special fields that must be included. I have reservations about JSON RPC, but there needs to be some 'service discovery' layer for LLMs to interface with.
rixed: > Problem 1: It Devours the Context Window Like would running
linearcli --helpthennotioncli --helpthenslackcli --helpetc, or am I missing something? At least with MCP your harness could add in the context only the title of each tool and add full documentation on deman...
rgbrenner: The article has no date on it, but says deferred tool loading is a recent update that occurred after the article was written. Deferred tool loading was added in Nov 2025: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use So these numbers are at least 7 months out of date.
320 points by ankitg12 · 44 comments
What HN said:
ifh-hn: I used to use pandoc for my bachelors papers, which needed to be submitted as word documents. I never used templates but had a rather large "one-liner" pandoc command to convert my markdown files. At the time I'd not got round to understanding the yaml front matter etc.
ktzar: Pandoc is such an amazing piece of software. I used it to format my novel and made it part of a GitHub action to produce all the formats I required. I wasn't aware of templates, but some look really sleek.
chlaunchla: Pandoc is an impressive piece of software but I could never quite get PDF generation working nicely with it. Table layouts were often broken, with text overlapping into adjacent fields.
thibaut_barrere: Somehow related is https://www.metanorma.org/ (using Markdown to produce norms-compatible outputs).
298 points by tosh · 189 comments
What HN said:
brabel: I just upgraded some code to Zig 0.16.0 and I am actually really happy with the results. It impacted A LOT of things, but the changes were actually very good and seems to have set the language for a bright future, especially with the new IO mechanism which allows supper efficient...
portly: After having used Zig for a couple of months now I am convinced it is a fantastic tool language. You just pick it up to hack some idea together freely. Every time I hit a wall, I find the creators have thought of it already and offers comfort.
xngbuilds: After watching Andrew Kelley's interview video makes me want to pick up Zig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ
Decabytes: There is an idea I've been kicking around for a long time, which I'll just call dual programming. The idea is to develop a stack that consists of just two programming languages, 1 higher level language, and one lower level language.
256 points by sph · 115 comments
BSD-licensed implementation of rsync. Contribute to kristapsdz/openrsync development by creating an account on GitHub.
What HN said:
Panino: I've been using openrsync here and there since it was announced and it's definitely improved over time. I'm looking forward to when I can use it exclusively. The one place in my usage where it doesn't match Samba rsync is with the following: openrsync --rsync-path=openrsync -av -...
denysvitali: There's also a Go implementation by Michael Stapelberg / the Gokrazy team: https://github.com/gokrazy/rsync
salvesefu: For those needing context for the development of this package; this project is presently being developed as part of a RPKI validator. https://medium.com/@jobsnijders/a-proposal-for-a-new-rpki-va...
onedognight: They don’t support any recent rsync protocol, so there’s no 64bit timestamp support, so you can never actually sync metadata across newer filesystems.
204 points by freeCandy · 90 comments
OpenRouter has raised a $113M Series B led by CapitalG, with participation from NVentures, ServiceNow Ventures, MongoDB Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, Databricks
What HN said:
simonw: It took me quite a while to come round to OpenRouter. Originally I didn't understand why anyone would put a proxy between them and an LLM, but it actually adds some quite significant value: 1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models. 2.
CSMastermind: What's the business model? Their core functionality, while useful, seems like something that will just be an open-source package. I assume there will be some Saas layer on top of it?
minimaxir: As someone who uses OpenRouter extensively (and wrote an unintentional adjacent PR piece a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317294 ), it's definitely the best way to try out new models without fiddling with each providers distinct APIs which is becoming a recu...
sailfast: At what valuation? I’m a user and I like the routing layer and not having to change things up too much, but I’m not sure why a solid business model for this product would require this much money at this kind of valuation unless they’re trying to buy data center capacity to self-h...
200 points by davikr · 45 comments
Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code
What HN said:
nine_k: Technically this is not related to voxels ("volumetric pixels", so to say), which split the 3D space equally along all three axes. This is just a height map, a set of prisms, not entirely unlike a Doom map. Every prism has a regular fixed-size square base.
Panzerschrek: I used this approach in one of my demos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjbDxvboOjo. Plot twist: the highmap is dynamically-generated.
a1o: When this was first posted I made a game with a port of this approach to AGS Engine. Nowadays AGS is much faster since we have improved a lot of things, but this wasn’t the case at the time, so I had to make a few little tricks to make the rendering work well with the engine at t...
174 points by explosion-s · 38 comments
What HN said:
password4321: A nice weekend read that doesn't smell like AI but if you're short on time or interest: Though the locusts had a huge migratory range stretching all the way to the eastern seaboard, its reproductive range was only a handful of river valleys in Wyoming and Montana.
daoboy: My earliest introduction to locusts was as a biblical plague. These Sunday school lessons did not include pictures. I always imagined some twisted diminutive demonic swarm of insects, and was disappointed to finally discover they were just grasshoppers.
hankbond: Love the UI design. To OP: I have a very lateral thinking process during writing and I have been experimenting with how to format that in my personal site https://hankdoes.ai/posts/we-have-the-model-why-do-we-need-y...
dnnddidiej: Trigger warning: animated insect crawls on screen.
151 points by smartmic · 55 comments
An investigation into fabricated citations and broken references in EY's "Points of Attack" cybersecurity report on loyalty system fraud.
What HN said:
ilamont: The problem we're seeing across many professions is AI output is not getting vetted by knowledgeable people, whether it's an experienced analyst, senior engineer, expert attorney, or the resident physician.
biosboiii: I guess this is a great report, but the parallax landing page shenanigans disrupt my reading flow, you cannot easily scroll back to get a overview of the key facts, so I stopped.
cwillu: Is there any source with just the plain text? The css styling is headache inducing and reader mode doesn't work or has been defeated.
raro11: What a horrible page to navigate
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