AI Summarized Hacker News

Front-page articles summarized hourly.

I Designed a Custom Protocol for My App

Rast is a system for detecting orthographical errors in Central Kurdish (Sorani). It uses K8, an 8‑bit Kurdish encoding designed to be efficient for non‑ASCII characters, with an optional footer for backward compatibility. K8 is used in Rast’s URL state and in the transport protocol. The transport streams errors as a header with error and detail counts, error positions, and then detail headers with title and description plus indexes mapping to errors. The title/description may be a cache index or human‑readable data already sent on the connection. Bit‑streaming was forgone for cost reasons; updates may follow.

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First impressions of Claude Cowork

Simon Willison previews Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s general agent UI built on Claude Code with a filesystem sandbox, showing end‑to‑end workflows and warning about prompt injections and sandbox security. He also covers Fly.io’s Sprites.dev, which combines developer sandboxes with a sandbox API for untrusted code: persistent VMs, checkpoints, SSH access, port forwarding, public URLs, and scale-to-zero billing, plus Skills integration. The newsletter includes his answers to questions about porting open‑source code with LLMs—ethical, legal, and licensing considerations—and reflections on how AI‑assisted development could reshape open source and tooling.

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Eigent: An open source Claude Cowork alternative

Eigent is an open-source cowork desktop to build, manage, and deploy a multi-agent AI workforce for automating complex workflows. Built on CAMEL-AI, it supports full local deployment with data control (zero cloud dependency) and also offers cloud and enterprise options. Features include 100% open source, multi-agent coordination (Developer, Search, Document, Multi-Modal), MCP tool integration, and human-in-the-loop. It supports customizable models and local backends, with setup guides and an Apache-2.0 license.

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New Safari developer tools provide insight into CSS Grid Lanes

Safari Technology Preview introduces CSS Grid Lanes, a masonry-style layout for CSS Grid that arranges content by columns or rows (not both) while preserving HTML order. New Grid Lanes Inspector features Order Numbers to visualize item flow, helping designers understand content order and accessibility. Flow-tolerance can be adjusted to reduce jumps, and Order Numbers apply to Grid and Subgrid as well. Shipped with previews 234/235; demos are available and feedback is invited.

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Project SkyWatch (a.k.a. Wescam at Home)

Project SkyWatch recreates professional EO/IR gimbal tracking for civilians using a low-cost PTZ camera. The AVKANS LV20N suffers from slow motors and latency, so most tracking is done in software. The system uses OpenCV CSRT for visual tracking, a Kalman filter to predict position/velocity (about 200 ms ahead), and a PID controller with feed-forward velocity. A digital stabilization layer provides a “virtual gimbal.” It also fuses optical lock with local ADS-B data (tar1090) to identify aircraft. The project promotes sousveillance and is MIT-licensed on GitHub.

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Show HN: Sparrow-1 – Audio-native model for human-level turn-taking without ASR

Sparrow-1 is a real-time, multilingual conversational-flow model for Tavus's Conversational Video Interface. It treats timing as a first-class problem, predicting floor ownership at frame-level to decide when to listen, wait, or speak. It supports interruption, overlap, and backchannels, uses audio-native streaming, and adapts to individual speakers without fine-tuning. Unlike endpoint-detection approaches, Sparrow-1 anticipates turns and can speculate about floor transfer. In 28 real-world samples it achieved 100% precision/recall, 0 interruptions, and median latency 55ms. GA via Tavus APIs; demo at tavus.io.

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The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

CreepyLink markets a URL shortener that makes links look suspicious on purpose, arguing that normal links are too trustworthy. It promotes “Make them creepy” and includes UI text like “Your suspiciously shortened URL: Copied to clipboard!”

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You Need a Kitchen Slide Rule

Kitchen work is all about proportions, and a slide rule makes scaling recipes effortless. By fixing a constraining proportion (e.g., 2:3.3), you can instantly read all other ingredient amounts without extra math. Bakers normalize recipes to flour weight to compare and identify fixed versus variable ingredients. The article uses a basil pesto example and argues everyone should keep a kitchen slide rule as a fast, mess-free calculator for cooking.

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Bubblewrap: A nimble way to prevent agents from accessing your .env files

The post argues for sandboxing coding agents (like Claude Code) with Bubblewrap instead of relying on vendor sandboxes or a dedicated host account. Bubblewrap creates a minimal jail around the agent, blocking access to secrets (e.g., .env, SSH keys), network, and sensitive files, while still allowing binary execution under your user. It compares Bubblewrap to Docker and Anthropic’s embedded sandbox, favoring a DIY, defense-in-depth approach. It provides practical how-to: install bubblewrap, a simple sandbox, and an example Claude run with --dangerously-skip-permissions and env-file blocking, plus a trust matrix.

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Crafting Interpreters

Crafting Interpreters guides building a full-featured scripting language, from parsing concepts to low-level details like bytecode and garbage collection. It leads from main() to a language with dynamic typing, lexical scope, first-class functions, closures, classes, and inheritance, in a few thousand lines of readable code you write yourself. Available in print, eBook, and PDF in many formats, with free samples online. Author Robert Nystrom, known for Game Programming Patterns, later worked on Dart at Google; the book embodies his hands-on, craft-focused approach.

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Media Player Classic Qute Theater

mpc-qt is Media Player Classic Qute Theater, a Qt6-based reimplementation of MPC-HC using libmpv. It reproduces MPC-HC’s interface and functionality while adding features such as multiple playlists with last-played tracking, video thumbnail previews on seekbar, online video playback via yt-dlp, quick queuing, multi-threaded playlist search, customizable metadata and screenshot templates, and cosmetic theme options. Releases exist for Windows and Linux; compiling from source is via CMake/Ninja with prerequisites (Qt6, libmpv). The project welcomes contributions and translations.

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How can I build a simple pulse generator to demonstrate transmission lines

Could not summarize article.

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Is passive investment inflating a stockmarket bubble?

Could not summarize article.

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Rubik's Cube in Prolog – Order

Could not summarize article.

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Billion-Dollar Idea Generator

Promotional copy for PivotGPT claiming to spark your next billion-dollar pivot powered by AI, with a 'Generate Idea' button and a Share option, and a note that it’s not actually powered by AI.

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Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

FuriosaAI debuts the NXT RNGD Server, a turnkey AI inference system built on RNGD accelerators for data-center workloads. It ships with Furiosa SDK and LLM runtime, runs over standard PCIe, and uses 3 kW per system. Up to 8 RNGD cards (4 petaFLOPS FP8) with dual AMD EPYC, 384 GB HBM3 plus 1 TB DDR5, NVMe storage, and 2×25G networking. Includes secure boot, TPM, BMC attestation, and Kubernetes/Helm integration. The design targets air-cooled data centers, lowering TCO and enabling on-prem or cloud deployment. LG AI Research validated: 60 tokens/s (4K) and 50 tokens/s (32K). Availability January 2026.

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Anthropic Explicitly Blocking OpenCode

Bun-based script testing Claude OAuth prompts shows Anthropic blocks the second system block containing "You are OpenCode" (and "You are opencode"), while other identities like Cursor, Pi, and Droid are allowed. First block must be "You are Claude Code, Anthropic's official CLI for Claude." Conclusion: targeted blocking of OpenCode branding in Claude Code prompts.

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Training my smartwatch to track intelligence

An author cross-referenced Garmin sleep/exercise data with daily chess results to predict daily ELO changes. Using sparse logistic regression on ~20 signals, REM sleep duration and certain stress signals correlated with winning; deep sleep had little effect; exercise fatigue reduced performance; stress helped performance per Yerkes-Dodson. He built a Garmin watch app that outputs the daily probability of an ELO increase, updated weekly. The model often outperforms Garmin’s morning review. Behavior changes: prioritize REM sleep, cut alcohol, use a weighted blanket. Garmin marketplace access is limited, so a local version is offered.

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US, for first time in 50 years, experienced negative net migration in 2025

Brookings Institution reports the U.S. posted negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in at least 50 years, due to far fewer entries and stricter enforcement. Net migration is estimated between -295,000 and -10,000 for 2025. Removals are projected at about 310,000–315,000, similar to 2024, with most removals initiated by CBP from within the U.S. rather than ICE. The authors forecast another negative year in 2026, and say the 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act' would boost enforcement. Economically, weaker employment, GDP, and $60–$110 billion less consumer spending are expected.

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Generate QR Codes with Pure SQL in PostgreSQL

An experiment to generate QR codes in PostgreSQL using a single pure-SQL statement, with no extensions. The pqr.sql script encodes QR codes; pqrsafe.sql raises an error if the payload is too long. Usage shows passing payloads like 'Hello, World!' via psql. The author says it’s for fun and learning, not production, and notes PostgreSQL 17 runs faster than 16. He also hints at upcoming video/course material and shares a playful anecdote about using OpenAI Codex.

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