Hey buddy,

Man, you wouldn't believe some of the stuff popping up on Hacker News yesterday, Sunday, January 18, 2026. Had to give you a quick call about it.

First off, remember jQuery? Yeah, that old library! Well, jQuery 4 just dropped! People in the comments were getting all nostalgic, talking about how it unfairly gets blamed for "spaghetti code" when really it was just people not knowing how to use it right. Someone even brought up this old Stack Overflow question about "am I using too much jQuery?" which is pretty funny to look back at now. It's wild how much that library shaped the web back in the day, and it's still kicking!

Then there was this super cool tech story about Gaussian Splatting being used in an A$AP Rocky music video called "Helicopter." You know, that 3D tech that makes scenes look super realistic? People were amazed at how fast this went from a research project to a mainstream music video. The cool thing is, apparently, it means they can create different camera angles and paths *after* they've already shot the video. Someone in the comments even mentioned this old movie, "Enter the Void" from 2009, saying it had a similar vibe visually. Pretty neat seeing cutting-edge stuff hit pop culture so quickly.

There was also a big discussion about someone trying to predict OpenAI's ad strategy. It really got people talking about how AI companies are gonna make their money. A lot of the comments were diving into economics, like how ads for things like medicine don't necessarily make people buy more, but just drive up costs for everyone, creating a kind of zero-sum game. Makes you wonder how it'll all play out.

Okay, switching gears a bit, there was this pretty heavy piece: a joint statement from Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK. As you can imagine, the comments section was a firestorm of political debate. Lots of back and forth about international relations, internal divisions in Europe, and even some historical references to past political events in the US. It was a pretty intense read, showing how much people care about global politics.

Also caught an interesting post from Dan Abramov (you know, the React guy) about a concept called "A Social Filesystem." It's a bit more theoretical, but he's basically talking about a new way to think about how we store and share our digital stuff, especially for social media, that could give users more control. The comments were buzzing about identity, moderation, and how it relates to new decentralized social platforms like Bluesky. It's a pretty brainy take on how the web could evolve.

And here's a blast from the past that's still relevant: an article from 2014 titled "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster." It resurfaced and got a ton of attention. It's basically a reminder that sometimes simple, well-optimized command-line tools can absolutely smoke big, complex distributed systems for certain tasks. People were reminiscing about the old Hadoop days and talking about how modern tools like DuckDB or even just big cloud VMs with GNU Parallel can achieve similar or better results with less overhead. It's a good kick in the pants to remember that bigger isn't always better.

Finally, another cool tech one: Antirez (the guy who made Redis) released "Flux 2 Klein pure C inference." This is pretty wild – he's built a super lightweight AI inference engine entirely in C. People were really impressed by the low-level optimization and how much he's managed to squeeze out of pure C for something as complex as AI. It's a testament to what you can do when you really get down to the metal.

Anyway, just wanted to give you the rundown. Catch you later, man!