AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Firebase and Google Cloud unveil Firestore's new Pipeline operations and a reworked, more expressive query engine in Firestore Enterprise edition. The engine supports over a hundred new features, including multi-stage queries, arbitrary aggregations, array unnesting, map operations, and regex matching, with optional indexes. A recipe-tag example shows unnesting tags to compute popular tags. Pipeline ops are available now in Android, iOS, web, and Admin SDKs; Flutter/Unity/C++ coming. Enterprise edition offers configurable indexing, different pricing (data chunks for reads/writes; free write tier), and export/import migration from Standard edition. Standard edition remains, but lacks Pipeline support.
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modetc is a Linux kernel module that transparently rewrites file paths so programs can access relocated dotfiles while keeping their original paths. Example: ~/.ssh can be redirected to ~/var/lib/ssh. Configurable via module parameters (homedir, default_rule, rules_file, debug) and a rules file with tab-separated match/replacement lines (up to 16 rules; comments allowed). Runtime control via /proc/modetc (e.g., pause). Built with Nix (nix-build), loaded with insmod; testable in a VM. Uses kprobes in the VFS to modify kernel-space path arguments. Linux-only, GPL-3.0. Latest v0.1.3 (2026-01-23).
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Cosmic Odometer is a client-side Space Travel Calculator that sums motion from Earth's rotation, Earth's orbit around the Sun, the Sun's motion around the Milky Way, and the Galaxy's motion relative to the cosmic background to estimate total distance since birth. It shows current totals, straight-line displacement, Moon trips, solar-system laps, and progress toward 1 light year. Speeds: rotation ~1,600 km/h; Earth around Sun ~107,000 km/h; Sun around Galaxy ~792,000 km/h; Galaxy relative to CMB ~2.1 million km/h. Privacy: calculations stay on-device. Created by @nemo7299.
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A Londoner demonstrates gigabit Ethernet over UK phone lines using gigacopper G4201/G4202 adapters. Frustrated with flaky powerline, he uses two- or four-wire phone wiring; the InHome variant supports up to 16 devices with sub-millisecond latency. After ordering from Germany, he faces Brexit import VAT hassles with Royal Mail/DHL. Tests show full speed on iperf3 (USB-C to Ethernet), suggesting the shared link could reach ~1.7 Gbps to multiple rooms, though wiring in UK homes is chaotic and inconsistent. The post flags a large untapped market for Ethernet over phone sockets.
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Connie Sherburne, widowed in 2020 when her husband died in a plane crash, initially tried to handle everything herself. An insurance clerk advised, after finishing the paperwork, that people would offer help and to let them. Heeding the prompt, she accepted meals, help with firewood, and other support from friends and neighbors for years. She later thanked the clerk, noting how a simple nudge can ease grief. The story is part of NPR’s My Unsung Hero.
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After a batch load, PostgreSQL can choose Merge Join on the first run and Nested Loop on the second, even with unchanged data. The cause: get_actual_variable_endpoint() aborts after inspecting many heap pages when join-key histograms don’t overlap, causing the planner to underestimate Merge Join cost. Once dead index tuples are cleaned and actual endpoints are known, the plan switches. The post includes a reproduction script and notes a 2022 patch that caps heap-page reads to prevent this planner quirk.
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Could not summarize article.
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Intel’s 80386 (Oct 1985) introduced the first 32‑bit x86, with a flat 4GB address space, virtual memory, and protected mode, enabling Windows/Linux. It boosted arithmetic by a datapath that processes MUL/IMUL/DIV at about one bit per cycle, reusing the main ALU; cycle counts: MUL 9–38, DIV 14–38, IDIV 19–43. It uses an add‑and‑shift multiplication (not Booth) with signs handled; early‑out optimizes. Division uses non‑restoring division on 64‑bit dividend and 32‑bit divisor, with final correction. IMUL variants yield single‑width results. Microcode is 37‑bit with RPT loops; modern CPUs rely on dedicated multiplier arrays; division remains slower.
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TrainTrackr offers live LED maps that visualize real-time train movements across transit networks, including a London Underground map. Designed in Somerville (USA) and London, developed from Cambridge Hackspace, these maps show line status and activity. The site promotes shipping to the US, UK, and EU, and a SALE2025 coupon for 10% off. It features testimonials, contact at [email protected], and social @TrackrTrain. Company: RGTec Ltd., England.
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Tracing civilian air traffic control's evolution from SAGE, an air-defense system, to NAS automation pursued in the 1960s, the piece explains how SATIN failed and the FAA shifted to NAS Enroute Stage A, contracting IBM directly. IBM built the IBM 9020—a multisystem of seven S/360s with Compute, I/O, and Storage Elements on a shared bus. Its System Console managed partitioning; the Control Program schedules tasks, while the OEAP handles diagnosis and reconfiguration across the system. The ARTCC data path ran via R/D/A controllers and a Raytheon Display Channel with PVDs. Replacements began in the 1980s (HOST) and, later, ERAM.
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Crane extracts Rocq specifications into modern, memory-safe, thread-safe C++ code. It provides Quick Start, Getting Started, Design Principles, Examples, Reference Manual, Crane Base Library, Roadmap, and related papers (e.g., Crane Lowers Rocq Safely into C++). Latest version is alpha; hosted on GitHub by Bloomberg L.P. © 2026.
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David Rosenthal highlights Bruce Li’s deep dive into Internet Archive’s storage: the PetaBox evolution from 1U 2004 to 4U-density racks, reaching about 1.4 PB per rack by 2025 with 8–22 TB drives. The Archive cools with ambient SF air and waste heat, mirrors data across multiple sites, and designs for drive failure. Rosenthal argues long-term preservation is primarily economic, not technical, noting a $25–30M/year budget yields storage far cheaper than cloud storage via tiering. He cautions against simplistic AWS comparisons and sketches Kryder’s vs. Moore’s law in magnetic storage.
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SEC.gov states that the request rate threshold was exceeded and automated access must comply with its Privacy and Security Policy; it directs users to the developer resources and Fair Access guidelines and to the Privacy Policy (Reference ID: 0.8f2d3e17.1769228067.8f62c0f7).
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Overview of building an in-memory rate limiter for a Next.js app router using a fixed-window algorithm. It tracks client requests with an in-memory cache keyed by getOptsFn(), which returns key, maxTries, and expiresAt; a once-per-minute cleanup removes expired entries. For the reset-password-init endpoint, generateOptions creates key post.reset-password.{email}, expiresAt five seconds ahead, maxTries 1. The limiter allows one request every five seconds, returning 429 with Retry-After when exceeded. It includes Artillery load tests showing 12 successful requests per 60 seconds and a UI for testing.
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Simon Willison profiles Wilson Lin’s FastRender, a research browser built by thousands of parallel agents. At peak ~2,000 agents ran concurrently on large machines (≈300 per machine), producing thousands of commits per hour. The agents form a planning/worker tree to implement rendering and CSS. FastRender began as a personal side project and became Cursor research, using GPT-5.1/5.2 rather than coding-specialist models. It's not production-ready; the system runs autonomous weeks. Key ideas include task partitioning to minimize conflicts, feedback loops, specs submodules, and tolerance for small errors to sustain throughput.
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Comma.ai offers openpilot, an AI driver-assistance upgrade (comma four) that enables hands-off driving in 325+ car models across 27 brands. It provides lane centering, adaptive cruise, dashcam, 360° vision, and OTA updates by plugging into your car. The system is advertised as an active driver aid with vast usage (300+ million miles driven, 20k users; GitHub ~50k stars). The site promotes buying comma four, setup guides, support, and blogs (e.g., openpilot 0.10.3, 0.10.1) and lists hiring in product, autonomy, and operations.
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Andrew Nesbitt surveys why package managers across ecosystems have workspaces and what they solve. Workspaces wire local dependencies so changes in one package are visible in others without publishing; monorepos keep code in one place. He sketches implementations: npm/Yarn/Bun use a workspaces field and symlinks; pnpm isolates node_modules and uses workspace:*; Cargo shares a lockfile; Go uses go.work; Bundler/Composer/SPM/Swift/pub/Mix/NuGet offer local-path or umbrella approaches. Common problems: phantom dependencies from hoisting, version mismatches, tooling/CI divergences, and publishing coordination. The piece argues coordination is the hard part.
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Noora Health India is hiring an AI/ML Engineer in Bengaluru (INR 2.5–3.5M). Requirements: 4+ years in AI/ML, Python, cloud (GCP/AWS/Azure), deep learning (CV/NLP/RL); CS/AI degree or equivalent. Responsibilities: build end-to-end AI systems from data curation to deployment, define metrics, deploy and monitor, optimize performance, integrate into product, document findings, collaborate with engineers, PMs, designers, and clinicians. About Noora Health: trains family caregivers to improve patient outcomes; 30+ million trained across 12,400 facilities; CCP reduces complications; Skoll/WHO partners; YC-affiliated. Diversity valued; apply via link.
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WIRED reports TikTok, now operated by the US-based TikTok USDS Joint Venture (backed by Oracle), updated its privacy policy after the ownership transition to collect more user data. The three biggest changes: 1) precise location tracking if users enable location services; 2) explicit collection of AI interactions (prompts, inputs, outputs, and related metadata); 3) expanded advertising network to include advertisers, publishers, and measurement partners to measure and deliver ads off the platform. Users see a consent pop-up before continuing.
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Could not summarize article.
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