AI Summarized Hacker News

Front-page articles summarized hourly.

Two-thirds of babies watch screens – some for eight hours a day

More than two-thirds of babies under two use screens, with some exposed to eight hours daily. A third of newborns watch more than three hours a day; about 20% of 4–11‑month‑olds exceed an hour. Government guidance says under twos should have no screen time outside communal activities, but researchers note a 'reality gap.' The study by the 1001 Critical Days Foundation and iAddict used surveys and focus groups (154 online responses, 18 in-person families). Screen time links to obesity, myopia, sleep and behavior problems, and poorer social skills. Tech firms should review ratings; parents need more support.

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HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'

Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub is no longer a place for serious work due to daily outages and plans to move his Ghostty project elsewhere. He has used GitHub extensively, but outages—recently an Elasticsearch incident—disrupted PR reviews and made shipping software difficult. He’ll keep a read-only Ghostty mirror on GitHub while migrating dependencies to other providers and may return if GitHub delivers tangible improvements. Hashimoto notes Microsoft’s GitHub acquisition and the broader AI-driven tooling shift as context, but must code and ship elsewhere for now.

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Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

Netherlands’ government has soft-launched code.overheid.nl, a government-wide, self-hosted platform for publishing and developing open-source software to bolster digital sovereignty. The pilot uses Forgejo, a European, sovereign alternative to GitHub/GitLab. Not all agencies can use it yet; developers are invited to contribute with the goal of a shared government Git platform. Initiated by the Open Source Program Office of the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, in collaboration with DAWO, Opensourcewerken, and developer.overheid.nl. Interested parties can join via [email protected]. More information in Dutch on developer.overheid.nl.

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Wire to Replace Signal as Standard in the Bundestag

Bundestag President Julia Klöckner urged MPs to switch to Wire to curb phishing, citing its BSI certification, end-to-end encryption, and registration by email (no private number or public email visible). The Bundestag administration offers Wire as an alternative to WhatsApp/Signal. The BSI approved a Wire Bund version for VS-NfD data until 2028, though post-quantum security is not yet available. Critics say it isn’t a panacea; phishing can still target official addresses. Some CDU/CSU MPs call for banning Signal, but experts emphasize digital education and responsible use to advance digital sovereignty.

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Germany Overtakes US in Ammunition Production Capacity

Germany’s Rheinmetall chief says Germany now outproduces the U.S. in ammunition, with medium-caliber rounds production quadrupled and artillery ammo at about 1.1 million, up from 70,000. A new plant will become Europe’s largest ammunition factory. The surge comes as European NATO members boost defense spending and stockpiles for Ukraine and potential conflicts with Russia, with Germany aiming to have Europe’s strongest conventional army by 2039, signaling greater European ammunition autonomy amid a U.S. focus on the Indo‑Pacific.

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Show HN: Rocky – Rust SQL engine with branches, replay, column lineage

Rocky is a Rust-based control plane for warehouse data pipelines that provides a trust system with branches, replay, and column-level data lineage, plus compile-time safety and per-model cost attribution. It can work alongside Databricks or Snowflake by managing the DAG. The project includes an engine (Rust core), Dagster integration, a VS Code extension, and playgrounds demonstrating schema drift detection, data-contract enforcement at compile time, and column-level lineage. It supports docs, releases, and is Apache-2.0 licensed. Install via scripts and run rocky compile/test/run.

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Withnail's Coat and I

Adam Scovell traces Withnail’s coat from Andrea Galer’s design for Withnail & I, where its dramatic, moving silhouette embodies sprezzatura. The tweed coat—Heather Brown from Liberty’s, echoing a pre‑war aristocratic look—was cut to look aged and worn. After production, the coats vanished into archives, then spawned replicas; Harris Tweed revival, aided by Prince Charles, enabled Galer to reproduce the fabric. The coat’s fame grew via charity auctions (Withnail for Waterford; Scrubs Glorious Scrubs) and later patrons like Reece Shearsmith wearing replicas. The piece became a modern cult icon beyond the film.

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When the Internet Was a Place

Author Raleigh Adams argues that the internet used to be a place you visited—a physical, embodied Web 1.0 experience with neighborhoods (GeoCities), a clear doorway, and explicit arrival and departure. Since around 2006, with infinite scroll and pervasive platforms, the web has become an omnipresent panopticon in our pockets—always on, always watched—eroding rootedness, attention, and private/public boundaries. A healthier digital culture requires boundaries: designating rooms for devices, intentional login times, screen sabbaths, and cultivating embodied community. Envision the internet as a neighborhood you enter and leave on human terms, not an endless everywhere.

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Building a Hamiltonian Path Puzzle

Number Trail is a Hamiltonian-path puzzle on a square grid: draw a path visiting every cell exactly once and touching clues in order. Built with plain HTML/CSS/JS, no frameworks. Puzzles are plain-text files with id, title, description, a grid of digits and dots, and a walls section; a small parser validates input and renders the board as a CSS grid. The path shows a central dot with four arms; drag or click updates it. Validation requires all clues visited in order. Random puzzles use Warnsdorff’s heuristic, with a snake fallback; walls on non-path edges. Files are Python-generated with IDs.

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We still don't have a more precise value for "Big G"

Physicists from NIST spent a decade refining Big G by replicating a 2007 BIPM Cavendish-type experiment. They built an eight-mass torsion balance with copper-beryllium ribbon, ran two datasets (gravitational torque and an electrostatic torque), and compared copper and sapphire masses to rule out material effects. The resulting value is G = 6.67387×10^-11 m^3/kg·s^2, about 0.0235% lower than the BIPM result. The work doesn't resolve the discrepancy in G, but adds a new data point and advances precision metrology; as co-author Stephan Schlamminger put it, measuring G brings order to the universe.

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Show HN: Auto-Architecture: Karpathy's Loop, Pointed at a CPU

An autonomous hardware-design loop tests a 5-stage RV32IM core. The orchestrator runs rounds; the agent proposes architectural hypotheses in YAML, an implementation agent edits rtl/, and a verifier pipeline checks correctness via formal checks, cosimulation, and CRC validation. Over ~9.5 hours, 73 hypotheses were tested; 10 were accepted, including predictors and ALU/memory changes. The final run reached 2.91 CoreMark/MHz (577 iter/s) at 199 MHz, vs 2.23 CoreMark/MHz baseline, with LUT4 ~5,944. The verifier, not the planner, is the bottleneck; next steps: population search and broader workloads.

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We decreased our LLM costs with Opus

Mendral reports that upgrading to a frontier model (Opus 4.6) cut CI-failure triage costs. They split work: a cheap Haiku sub-agent analyzes logs and narrow-errors, while Opus decides when to escalate to a full investigation. They avoid flooding prompts with 200k+ lines; instead, logs live in ClickHouse with materialized views, and queries are guided by the agent. Semantic search plus exact matches detect duplicates; four out of five failures never reach Opus. Sub-agents fetch precise error messages; the orchestrator curates context and keeps rounds finite. The approach scales to other high-volume event streams; Mendral is offered to try.

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