AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Eat Real Food advocates a real-food Dietary Guidelines framework and introduces The New Pyramid to replace the old Food Pyramid. It prioritizes high-quality protein (1.2–1.6 g/kg/day), healthy fats, vegetables and fruits, and whole grains, while limiting refined carbs and added sugars. Servings: vegetables 3/day, fruits 2/day; grains should be whole or traditionally prepared. Hydration with water. The plan is flexible, supports cultural traditions, and aims to reduce chronic disease and healthcare costs by focusing on minimally processed, nutrient-dense foods.
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Calvin Tomkins, aging journalist and longtime New Yorker contributor, writes a year-in-his-life diary as he nears his hundredth birthday. Through entries from February to December 2025, he logs aging, memory and vision decline, his reliance on wife Dodie, and a shifting writing process aided by dictation. He revisits a lifetime in art journalism, recounting his New Yorker career and friendships with editors and artists (O’Keeffe, Rauschenberg, Duchamp, Angell). The centennial year unfolds amid health setbacks—macular degeneration and a stroke—with plans to continue the chronicle.
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Official CPI shows SF inflation cooling to 2.5% y/y, but residents face much higher costs. Electricity (PG&E) more than doubled since 2014, energy up ~40% 2022–2025, rents up 11.5% in 2025, and basic items like burritos and lattes up double digits; Uber prices nearly triple. Healthcare premiums rise as enhanced ACA subsidies expired. The BLS stopped metro electricity data, and hedonic adjustments understate living costs. Transit fares are contained but service declines. A 2026 IPO wave could widen wealth gaps between asset owners and workers.
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Tom's Hardware reports that a Commodore History channel video shows the 1982 Commodore 1541 5.25-inch floppy drive contains a 1 MHz MOS 6502 CPU with its own RAM, ROM and I/O, enough to run as a self-contained computer, though with limited I/O. Enthusiast Dave wired a KIM-1 kernel and Tiny BASIC to the drive, interfaced via USB-RS232 and a serial teletype, and even produced a Hello World. However, without major hardware mods the 1541 remains a constrained general-purpose machine, highlighting the drive controller’s surprise computing potential.
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Dell's CES 2026 pre-briefing was refreshingly free of AI hype. Dell executives framed AI as an in-device capability, not a marketing driver, noting consumers aren’t buying based on AI. The company showcased consumer-focused updates—XPS laptops, new Alienware ultraslims, updated Area-51 desktops, and fresh monitors—emphasizing practicality over AI buzz. The piece praises Dell’s not AI-first approach and hopes other OEMs follow suit, arguing AI should prove real value before dominating marketing.
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A home worker builds a Do Not Disturb device with an ESP32 and 1.8-inch OLED to show when they’re in a meeting. Since calendars aren’t reliable for the mom, they hack Mac camera status by watching AVCaptureSessionStart/Stop events and feed updates to the ESP via a local server. To survive dynamic IPs they use mDNS, and move from HTTP polling to BLE for real-time updates. They design a custom binary protocol (DoorFrame) and a 3D-printed case with snap-fit tolerances, deploying it on the door frame and powering from the monitor USB. They hint at further over-engineering ideas.
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PR #2388 proposes /llms.txt: a build-time, text-only, concatenated version of all Tailwind docs optimized for LLMs. It would extract text from MDX, drop JSX and standalone HTML blocks, preserve code blocks, pull content from custom components, and include 185 docs in order. A refactor to a markdown-to-jsx AST parser was discussed. The feature sparked debate about AI’s impact on the business; ultimately maintainers closed the PR due to sustainability concerns, despite arguments it would be complementary to the docs.
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IDHS says a data breach left names and addresses of thousands of patients publicly viewable due to privacy-setting errors on maps used to plan offices and resources. About 32,000 Rehabilitation Services customers were exposed from April 2021 to September 2025. About 670,000 Medicaid/Medicare Savings Program recipients had addresses, case numbers, demographics and plan names publicly visible from January 2022 to September 2025. IDHS cannot identify viewers or any misuse. After discovery on Sept. 22, it restricted map access, adopted a secure-map policy, and will notify affected people with a helpline.
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Steven Sinofsky explains Bill Gates’ management approach at Microsoft: he avoided micromanaging a vast, fast-changing product line by steering at a high level, fostering an open, software-centric platform, and a portfolio-driven strategy. Gates balanced innovation with shipping, guided the Windows strategy and Office 4 launch, and engaged via reviews and email rather than hands-on micro-management. The result was an empowered, multi-faceted organization with durable growth, valuing architecture and shared APIs over hardware and maintaining a broad, cohesive product portfolio.
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The post argues for Nushell as an alternative to Bash/Zsh, Fish, and PowerShell, claiming POSIX shells are outdated due to text-based pipelines, brittle flags, and limited data types. Nushell combines a fully typed scripting language, interactive shell, and data processing engine, processing structured data rather than text, with pattern matching, IDE support, clear errors, cross-platform consistency, and a plugin system. It shows Nushell’s design favors readable pipelines (SQL-like style) and portability, and suggests that broader adoption could significantly improve shell usability. The author concludes it's okay to move beyond past designs.
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An open‑source post on building a WebDAV/CalDAV client/server for Homechart. The team found go-webdav lacking (e.g., server‑side sync) and built their own MVP. After attempting RFCs (2518/4918), they pivoted to reverse‑engineering real traffic from clients/servers (Apple Calendar, DavX, Thunderbird; iCloud, Google Calendar, Radicale) to map required API calls. They spent time on XML in Go, creating a wrapper to marshal/unmarshal. Testing showed RFCs drift in practice; Apple/Google provide only MVP support and vary by client (sync-collection often missing). They conclude standards are fragile and discourage building a WebDAV/CalDAV library.
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Target’s Minneapolis-based Forensics Lab, created in 2003, is one of America’s most advanced retailer forensics facilities, analyzing store and smartphone surveillance to identify shoplifters, frauds, injuries, and other incidents. Its expertise has aided law enforcement beyond shoplifting, solving murders, arsons, abductions, rapes, and mass robberies—sometimes in cases the FBI couldn’t crack. The lab trains government agencies, helps undercover investigations, and assists U.S. customs in verifying overseas imports. With cameras in many stores since the 1980s, Target’s extensive surveillance underpins these capabilities.
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Kastelic argues that many problems once labeled LLM failings are now common in human conversation. People ramble after simple prompts; long prompts lose context; discussions reveal narrow or misaligned knowledge; repeating mistakes is frequent; applying general principles to specific situations often fails; and persistent falsehoods (“hallucinations”) occur. He suggests AI is already reshaping human dialogue and may replace or heavily augment reasoning. He adds newer AI-like pathologies also seen in humans: instruction drift, mode collapse, reward hacking, overfitting to prompts, safety overrefusal, inconsistent reasoning, and fluctuations in thought across turns.
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RepoReaper is an autonomous agent for architectural analysis and semantic code search of a GitHub repo. It builds an AST-based symbol map, prefetches key files, and uses a dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Generation cache to answer questions. If context is lacking, it issues a JIT command to fetch missing files from the GitHub API, updates the cache, and re-infers. It blends dense embeddings (BAAI/bge-m3) with BM25 + RRF, supports English/Chinese, and runs on Python 3.10+, FastAPI, ChromaDB. Deploy with Docker/Gunicorn/Uvicorn; includes a local demo and quickstart.
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Quake Brutalist Jam III is a community-made total conversion for Quake with an entirely new arsenal, monsters, powerups, and a brutalist visual overhaul across 77 maps. Developed from winter 2024 and released January 2026 after a closed development phase, it requires the Ironwail source port (0.8.1+) and a Quake install; standalone install is possible. The project credits a large team of modders and map authors. Downloads: 6,236; views: 31,069; rating 4.81 from 21 reviews. Praise for audio, weapons, and map design.
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Could not summarize article.
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The piece argues Stack Overflow’s toxic culture drove developers away, citing a long decline in questions since 2017 and a Reddit sense that AI can provide faster, albeit unverified, answers. It references Stack Overflow’s 2018 admission of unwelcoming behavior and argues that communities must be welcoming to stay relevant; otherwise, they’ll be abandoned when something better arrives.
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Shipmap.org is a Kiln–UCL project that visualizes the global merchant fleet’s movements (2012) on a bathymetric map. It shows animated ship positions, routes, a CO2 emissions counter, and maximum freight carried, with timeline controls. Users can pan/zoom and filter by five vessel types: Container, Dry bulk, Tanker, Gas bulk, and Vehicles. Data come from exactEarth AIS and Clarksons; emissions follow the Third IMO Greenhouse Gas Study 2014. Built with WebGL on GEBCO/Natural Earth; funded by European Climate Foundation. High‑res print maps are available and embedding is supported.
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Bloomberg blocks access after detecting unusual activity and asks users to verify they’re not a robot via a CAPTCHA-like check. It instructs enabling JavaScript and cookies, reviewing the Terms of Service and Cookie Policy, and contacting support with the block reference ID if needed. A Bloomberg.com subscription prompt is also shown.
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The author experiments with meditation as wakeful relaxation, showing relaxation and alertness can coexist while relaxation remains hard—tension shifts across the body and can provoke anxiety. They introduce vasocomputation and “stances”—discrete vascular-muscle tension patterns that stabilize neural dynamics and shape experience. A core claim is that latched smooth muscle can hold tension with low energy, potentially driving much suffering. Practical avenues include sauna + cold exposure, attuning to latched tissues, and deliberate clenches/releases (via ultra-slow body scans). Psychedelics are noted as another route; the aim is to tailor practice to relax smooth muscle.
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