AI Summarized Hacker News

Front-page articles summarized hourly.

Coding Is When We're Least Productive

The article argues that productivity isn’t measured by lines of code. Real value comes from understanding problems and learning from users. A POS upgrade story shows how observing a live system and talking with staff allowed three lines of code to fix a costly issue, illustrating that coding can be less productive than problem understanding. If developers write code faster than they validate or learn, they accumulate costly assumptions. Productivity should be about net value and learning feedback, not code volume.

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My Ridiculously Robust Photo Management System (Immich Edition)

Jaisen Mathai explains using Immich to manage a photo library by storing metadata (albums, descriptions, locations, dates, favorites) in EXIF and backing up to a Synology NAS and Dropbox, aiming to avoid a separate database. He emphasizes preserving, unifying, and enhancing the experience, with Elodie as the canonical EXIF organizer. He built a simpler Immich-exif plugin and adjusted workflows to leverage external libraries while syncing with Immich, despite Immich typically using a Postgres DB and XMP sidecars. He describes challenges with Elodie's updates and eventual consistency, linking to GitHub issue 496 for progress.

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Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)

Archaeology Worlds discusses a 5,500-year-old Sumerian Planisphere (British Museum No K8538) that records a celestial event on 3123 BC. Although long misattributed to the Assyrians, the disk-shaped tablet is Sumerian astronomy: half shows constellations and planetary positions, half notes a large object in the sky. Modern simulations link it to the Köfels impact in Austria on 29 June 3123 BC, caused by an Aten asteroid over a kilometer wide. The asteroid exploded after clipping the Gamskogel, creating a massive five-kilometer landslide with no crater; the plume may have reached the Levant.

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An anecdote about backward compatibility

An anecdote about backward compatibility: the author recalls debugging on IBM System/370, wanting color highlighting on a black‑and‑white display. With no online manuals, they combed yellow binders for the WRTERM macro description. Coworkers, especially Matthew, buried or photocopied manuals, making retrieval costly. Eventually they found the IBM REXX/WRTERM reference (SC24-5239), revealing an optional COLOR parameter: default BLACK, with RED only on two‑color ribbons. The tale shows how documentation and hardware limits shape software and backward compatibility.

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Naples' 1790s civil war was intensified by moral panic over Real Analysis (2023)

Massimo Mazzotti uses Naples around 1800 to show mathematics and politics are entangled, not neutral. The Neapolitan synthetic school, led by Fergola, defended pure geometry against the 'very modern' analytic calculus, seen as dangerous for social order. Neapolitan Jacobins framed analysis as a revolutionary tool to reorganize politics, while counterrevolutionaries weaponized the 'Jacobin machine' to defend the old order. After 1806, modernization was recast as a technical project, sidelining revolutionary math. Cauchy’s rigorization then institutionalized a neutral, disciplined view of mathematics. Thus math governs what counts as reason and political action.

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Designing a Passively Safe API

Designing a Passively Safe API argues for APIs that fail gracefully when external calls or async tasks misbehave. It shifts from a synchronous monolith to a passively safe, idempotent design using an outbox/inbox and a message broker, so failures don’t cause duplicate work or inconsistent state. Key ideas: isolate foreign state mutations from DB transactions; deliver messages at least once with dedupe; use idempotency keys to replay safely; split requests into atomic phases with recovery points; handle abandoned/replayed keys with completers; apply exponential backoff with jitter and clear transient vs final errors.

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The novelist who took on the Italian mafia – and lived to tell the tale

Caroline Moorehead's A Sicilian Man profiles Leonardo Sciascia, the Sicilian writer whose detective fiction and essays exposed mafia reach and state corruption. From his Racalmuto childhood to The Day of the Owl and The Moro Affair, Sciascia used lucid prose to reveal how the mafia intertwined with politics, church, and power. Moorehead ties his life to Italy’s anti-mafia campaigns, including the Maxi Trial, and argues that Sciascia’s moral clarity helped shape public understanding of crime and governance. The biography positions him as a pivotal, under-read figure whose work remains urgent.

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Target director's Global Entry was revoked after ICE used app to scan her face

Nicole Cleland, a Minnesota protester who observes ICE/CBP activity, says her Global Entry and TSA Precheck were revoked three days after an incident in which an agent used facial recognition to identify her and warned she was impeding their work. She followed the agents to monitor activity and alleges the revocation is intimidation/retaliation for documenting enforcement actions; the government cites unspecified violations. The piece notes extensive ICE use of facial recognition and other tech to monitor protesters, with several citizens reportedly recorded without consent.

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Show HN: Phage Explorer

Phage Explorer is a tool for visualizing bacteriophage genomes.

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Show HN: Foundry – Turns your repeated workflows into one-click commands

Foundry is a self-writing meta-extension for OpenClaw.ai that observes user workflows, researches docs, writes new extensions, skills, and hooks, and upgrades itself by crystallizing repeated patterns into dedicated tools. It runs as a plugin on OpenClaw, with an Overseer that autonomously discovers, validates, and deploys improvements, and can publish patterns to the Foundry Marketplace. It includes built-in patterns and skills (browser automation, API skills, hooks), a sandbox validator, and a setup/install process via cloning and npm install.

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