AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems showed that elephant trunk whiskers have a stiffness gradient—from a rigid base to a soft tip—and a porous base, enabling precise tactile sensing along each whisker. This gradient helps elephants locate contact across about 1,000 whiskers, compensating for thick skin and limited vision; cats show a similar gradient. The interdisciplinary team used 3D-printed analogs, micro- and nano-scale analyses, and developed robotic whisker prototypes. Findings, published in Science (2026) as Functional gradients facilitate tactile sensing in elephant whiskers.
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The Rev. Jesse Jackson, pioneering civil rights leader and influential political trailblazer, died at 84, his family said. A protégé of Martin Luther King Jr., he built the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, mounted two presidential campaigns, and helped reshape the Democratic Party into a multiracial, inclusive coalition. Known for his 'Keep hope alive' motto, he brokered releases of prisoners and hostages and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999. He faced health issues in later years and is survived by his wife Jacqueline and five children, plus a sixth, Ashley.
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Show HN isn't dead, but it's drowning in volume and noise. More weekend projects mean more posts and less engagement per post. The “Sideprocalypse”—indie devs squeezed by bigger players—raises the noise floor, causing cool projects to miss attention. Data shows exploding volume, a growing graveyard of posts, and a shrinking page-1 window, especially during US daytime. Some gems go unnoticed. Neohabit, OpenRun, and uForwarder are cited as examples, with a call to surface quality gems and keep Show HN as the coolest place for tech talk.
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Biomolecular networks can show agency and basic learning, suggesting mind-like properties may begin at simple life levels. In simulations, gene regulatory networks (GRNs) learned to associate a neutral stimulus with a functional drug, displaying Pavlovian learning without the drug. After learning, GRNs showed higher causal emergence (phi), indicating greater agency. The work links learning, agency, and evolution, with possible medical benefits like reducing drug tolerance. Caution: these are computer models; real cells may differ; and even forgetting can strengthen phi.
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GitHub Lines Viewed is a Chrome extension that adds an unobtrusive "lines viewed" indicator to GitHub pull requests, complementing "files viewed" and helping reviewers stay oriented during long AI PR reviews.
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Japan's ‘quirky’ social scene is framed as late-stage capitalism, not culture. The piece traces postwar reforms and a 1991 asset crash that sparked stagnation, irregular work, and wage decline, yielding “evil jobs,” a gig economy, single-person households, hikikomori, and a loneliness crisis. Convenience culture replaces domestic life; sex and relationships become transactional, aided by parasocial ties to idols and influencers. The US is seen heading the same way—overwork, inequality, falling birth rates, and fraying social ties—Japan’s decay serving as a warning unless structural changes occur.
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Could not summarize article.
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Western Digital and Seagate confirm 2026 HDD production is sold out or nearly so, driven by hyperscalers (AWS, Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI) for AI data-center storage. Nearline capacity is fully allocated through 2026; Seagate expects to begin taking 2027 orders. No production expansion is planned. Toshiba offers no outlook. HDD and SSD prices are rising in retail (roughly 20–50%), as data-center shortages push demand for high-capacity SSDs and production reallocations. WD SSDs are disappearing from the market, to be continued under SanDisk branding after the 2025 split.
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GrapheneOS is a privacy-focused, open-source Android-based OS that removes Google services and hardens the kernel, with Play Services in a sandbox. The author focuses on Google Pixel devices (Feb 2026), choosing a Pixel 9a for cost and longevity. Installation steps: factory reset, enable OEM unlock, unlock bootloader, flash the GrapheneOS image, then re-lock. The post covers using multiple user profiles and a Private space to separate apps with/without GMS, and using Obtainium and Aurora Store to run open-source or Google-dependent apps while preserving privacy. It ends with a call to support the project.
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Ruby Tandoh argues Brillat-Savarin invented modern food writing. In The Physiology of Taste (1825), written largely during exile, he treats eating as a social, philosophical pursuit, not just cooking. Through anecdote, physiology, and aphorisms—many about dinner etiquette and desire—he founded gastronomy and showed that thinking about food can be as revelatory as the meal itself. His dialogic "Tell me what you eat" line and the book’s meandering, personal style reshaped how writers discuss cuisine. He died soon after, but his ideas endure.
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Glitchy is a browser-based circuit-bent camera that captures photos and video locally; all processing happens in the browser and nothing is uploaded or seen by others.
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Claude-devtools is an open‑source desktop app that reconstructs Claude Code session traces from local logs (~/.claude/). It shows exact file paths, tool calls, diff outputs, and token usage, restoring context that Claude Code hides. It provides a per‑turn breakdown across seven categories (CLAUDE.md breakdown, skills, @-mentions, tool I/O, thinking, teams, user text), plus compaction visualization, notifications, and a rich tool-call inspector. It also visualizes subagents, teammates, and session histories, supports SSH remotes, multi‑pane layouts, a command palette, and Docker/Electron deployments. No API keys required.
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Brandon Li surveys rendering the visible spectrum on computers, noting common rainbow images misrepresent the spectrum due to perceptual and gamma/gamut issues. From spectral power S(λ) he uses color matching functions to map to a 3D color space, then converts via XYZ to sRGB with gamma. He discusses chromatic adaptation and color profiles (sRGB, P3) and color-appearance effects (Bezold–Brücke, Helmholtz–Kohlrausch, Abney). To counter Abney distortions, he adjusts effective wavelengths. He presents a practical spectrum renderer and a periodic table of spectra with open-source code at brandonli.net/spectrumrenderer.
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SvarDOS is an open-source, rolling-release DOS distribution for PCs from the 1980s–2000s. It aims to gather DOS software and provide a network-enabled package manager (like apt-get for DOS on an 8086 PC). The core is minimal: a DOS kernel, a shell and basic admin tools; users add packages. SvarDOS itself is MIT-licensed; auxiliary packages may have GPL/BSD/Public Domain/Freeware licenses. It supports many languages, has a community forum and bug tracker, and offers various installation images (floppies, CD, USB) and a talking BNS version. Development uses SVN with a GitHub mirror; it forks the Enhanced DR-DOS kernel.
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The post pits Drucker’s management-by-objectives (OKRs) against Deming’s systemic leadership and statistical process control. It argues Drucker’s approach is easier for bandwidth-limited managers, with key results distilling the system’s complexity. Deming criticizes management by numbers, urging a study of the system and leadership to drive real improvement, using statistical process control to distinguish between in-control variation and needed systemic change. A thermostat analogy illustrates classical vs. statistical control. The author leans Deming but concedes Drucker’s ideas persisted due to practicality.
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Explains a four-column ASCII table to reveal its 7‑bit structure: two high bits form four groups, five low bits form the character; the first 32 entries are control characters. CTRL clears the high bits, selecting the 5‑bit code; for example, CTRL+[ yields ESC (11011). This accounts for ^J newline, ^H backspace, ^I tab, and why Windows text shows ^M. Highlights the bitwise relationship between CTRL, ESC, and ASCII.
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Thinking is metabolically cheap, but mental fatigue raises perceived effort and can cut endurance ~15% with no physiological change. Mentally fatigued subjects quit earlier in endurance tasks due to adenosine buildup in the ACC, not depleted energy. Caffeine and sleep loss modulate the effect. For training, cognitive load can blunt VO2 max gains by making hard intervals feel harder. Fixes: schedule hard sessions on low cognitive-demand days or mornings; use caffeine 3–6 mg/kg 45–60 min before training; protect easy Zone 2 days; brief cognitive resets between work and exercise.
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PHOENIX is a portable x-ray system enabling stop-motion radiographs in the field. Developed over seven years at LANL by Scott Watson and team, it upgrades 1896-era tech by combining a Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier and a vacuum-compatible Van de Graaff storage dome. A laser-triggered pinhead cathode releases stored energy to generate x-rays; a heavy metal target produces pulses captured by a detector. Stored in a million-volt vacuum, PHOENIX can produce nanosecond to continuous radiographs. Two versions exist: a 150-pound commercial model and a trailer-mounted design for national security. Applications include pipeline/bridge weld imaging and small-scale explosions.
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Could not summarize article.
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Reverse-engineers Apple's .car asset catalogs (Assets.car). .car uses a BOMStore container with named blocks (CARHEADER, KEYFORMAT, EXTENDED_METADATA) and B+ trees (RENDITIONS, FACETKEYS, APPEARANCEKEYS). The RENDITIONS tree maps asset keys to CSI data blocks; each rendition has a 184-byte CSI header, TLV metadata, and pixel data. Renditions cover RAW data, RAW JPEG/HEIF, theme colors, and complex ARGB/RGBW/GA formats. It details pixel formats, color spaces, and multiple compression schemes (zlib, LZFSE, KCBC). Also explains asset-name resolution and internal linking, plus a browser-based WebAssembly parser demo.
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