Just finished scrolling through Hacker News from Thursday, December 4, 2025, and man, there was some interesting stuff. Thought I'd give you the quick lowdown while it's fresh.

It’s time to free JavaScript

First up, there's this article titled "It’s time to free JavaScript". Basically, the author's arguing that JavaScript has gotten too complicated and locked down, and we should go back to its original idea of being more open and extensible. What was really cool in the comments was this guy, ChuckMcM, who said he was one of the original developers of Java at Sun and actually shared a link to a picture of the team back then! Another comment mentioned that way back, Internet Explorer actually let you use things like Perl and Tcl as scripting languages in browsers for a bit, which is wild to think about now.

Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

Then there was this wild one: "Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?". Yeah, you read that right, 38 percent! People were going nuts in the comments, talking about everything from "founder naughtiness" (Sam Altman got a mention) to how different generations view integrity. Someone even brought up how this might reflect issues in public education, with teachers seeing a huge number of kids with learning differences. It really got people thinking about what's going on with mental health and accommodations in elite schools.

RAM shortage and prices skyrocketing

Okay, this one was a big theme. There were a few articles about it, like "Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months", "RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung", and "The RAM shortage comes for us all". Apparently, RAM prices are through the roof, and it's mostly because of all the AI datacenter buildouts. The demand is insane, and it's even hitting big players like Samsung, who are struggling to get enough RAM for their own products. People in the comments were debating if it's just market forces or if there's some old-school price fixing going on again. Also, a comment pointed out that if you started building a new DDR5 fab now, it'd probably only be ready when DDR6 hits the market. Yikes.

PGlite – Embeddable Postgres

On the tech side, there's PGlite, which is basically Postgres that you can embed anywhere, even in the browser using WebAssembly. How cool is that? Someone in the comments even built a full-blown SQL editor and playground with it, including extensions and a database explorer. Another person mentioned using it in Rust. Sounds super handy for local dev or even some client-side database stuff.

Unreal Tournament 2004 is back

This brought back some serious nostalgia! Unreal Tournament 2004 is apparently back online, thanks to some community efforts. People were reminiscing about the old days of running your own game servers, modding everything, and how much better that was compared to today's "locked-box" games where you can't even use a skin you didn't pay for. Definitely a trip down memory lane for anyone who played it.

Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half

And finally, this one made me chuckle a bit: "Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas". Turns out, not everyone is buying into the AI hype as fast as Microsoft hoped. Customers are apparently resisting "unproven agents." So much for AI taking over everything overnight, eh? Comments were pretty practical, with some saying LLMs are useful for specific programming problems, but token-by-token suggestions in an IDE aren't always what people want. Someone also shared a funny bit about "hallucinations" when using Whisper AI locally, saying it's like a "stereotypical schizo" sometimes, staying on task then ranting about random stuff. Accurate!

Anyway, that's the gist. Talk soon!