AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Blade Runner (1982) Costume Design Archive surveys Charles Knode (lead) with Michael Kaplan, detailing a retro-futuristic noir wardrobe blending 1930s–40s styles with 1980s futurism. Deckard’s brown trench and patterned shirts; Gaff’s Edwardian dandy look; two LAPD uniforms; Roy Batty’s militaristic trench; Leon’s prison-then-vinyl coats; Chew’s fur coat; Rachel’s multiple outfits inspired by Adrian and power dressing; Tyrell’s blue tux and ornate gown; Pris, Zhora, Sebastian outfits; extras and photo notes; Ital Costume made many pieces; some garments may be vintage.
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A German study found Google’s AI Overviews cite YouTube more than medical sites for health queries. YouTube was the top cited domain, making up 4.43% of AI Overview citations in 50,807 health prompts; no hospital network, government portal or medical site came close. Researchers warn this matters because YouTube is not a medical publisher, with content ranging from licensed medical channels to influencers. Google says AI Overviews surface reputable sources and that 96% of the 25 most cited YouTube videos came from medical channels, but these represent less than 1% of all YouTube links cited. The study is region-specific.
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Thompson argues the AI hardware crunch is driven by TSMC’s conservative CapEx, not power. After a spike in 2021, TSMC’s CapEx declined in 2023–2024, creating a silicon bottleneck as hyperscalers demand more. The latest plan to lift CapEx to around $52–$56 billion yields a multi-year ramp with meaningful relief unlikely before 2028–2029. A true AI bubble requires competition to scale foundry capacity (Samsung/Intel); otherwise foregone revenue and pricing power stay with TSMC. Geopolitics heighten risk, but competition is the key lever.
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Colette Berends, a liberal Canadian living in California for 15 years, explains why she stays despite America’s rightward drift: she has built a family and community here, and leaving seems possible only if red lines are crossed. As a green-card holder she can’t vote, but she hopes to influence change by supporting causes and by voting with her feet. She champions trans and immigrant rights, cautions against dehumanization and gun violence, and has donated to nipnlg.org and ilrc.org, hoping for kindness.
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Vjeux ported Pokemon Showdown from JavaScript to Rust in about a month using Claude Code. Initial one-to-one translations produced buggy abstractions, so he restructured the effort with deterministic constraints, comments linking JS to Rust, chunked per-method files, and a Claude.md guide. He cycled through porting, cleanup, and end-to-end testing with a deterministic RNG to compare Rust and JS results. After ~5k commits, the Rust port compiled and ran faster, with only ~0.003% divergences on 2.4 million seeds. The lesson: AI-assisted coding helps, but still requires human direction and engineering discipline.
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After two years of vibecoding, the author returns to writing by hand. AI coding starts impressive but fails to adapt evolving specs, with design docs that can’t evolve quickly enough and code that looks good in isolation but is sloppy in the full project. They refuse to ship or charge users for AI-generated code and resume hand coding, finding themselves faster, more accurate, creative, and productive when accounting for all costs. A video version is available on YouTube.
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Apple unveils the second-generation AirTag with expanded range, louder speaker, and improved Precision Finding. An updated Ultra Wideband and Bluetooth deliver up to 50% farther locating and 50% louder audio; Precision Finding now works on Apple Watch Series 9+ or Ultra 2+. It uses Find My Network and Share Item Location with 50+ airlines to recover delayed luggage. Privacy protections remain. 85% recycled plastic and 100% recycled magnets and gold plating. Price: $29 single, $99 four-pack; engraving free; requires iOS 26+/iPadOS 26+.
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Bloomberg displays a bot-check page stating unusual activity was detected and asks the user to verify they’re not a robot, with guidance to enable JavaScript and cookies, links to Terms and Cookie Policy, a support contact with a reference ID, and a Bloomberg.com subscription pitch.
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SnapBench is a spatial reasoning benchmark for LLMs, inspired by Pokémon Snap. It simulates a drone in a 3D voxel world where a Rust controller orchestrates a Zig-based simulation and a Vision-Language Model processes frames to generate actions. The goal is to find and identify three creatures within 5 units. The README compares models (Gemini Flash, Claude Opus, GPT-5.2, etc.), finding that costlier models don’t guarantee better navigation and that altitude control matters; results are mixed. The repo provides setup, running instructions, and ideas for extensions (richer feedback, multi-agent runs, longer iterations) and notes rough edges.
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Treat clinical trials as discovery engines, not mere validation steps. To beat Eroom’s Law, Teslo advocates Clinical Trial Abundance: faster, broader, data-rich trials that learn from failures to inform the next design. Using CAR-T therapy as a case, early first-generation trials failed, but small, detailed in-human studies revealed the need for costimulatory signals (e.g., 4-1BB), enabling durable remissions and eventual approvals. Barriers include costly GMP for small studies and bureaucracy; Australia’s flexible manufacturing offers a model. The article calls for policy and tech changes to expand in-human data and create a continuous design-build-test loop.
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Article compares transferring large files using REST vs gRPC. REST streams efficiently when implemented carefully, avoiding full-file buffering and Base64-encoding. gRPC transfers large files by breaking them into chunks via a server-streaming method, sending metadata first; naive implementations copy buffers and inflate memory use, while optimized approaches reduce allocations. Kreya demonstrates reassembling chunks into a PDF. Benchmarks suggest optimized gRPC is slower and more memory-hungry than REST over HTTP/1.1; conclusion: REST is generally best; if using gRPC, consider presigned URLs or resumable protocols like tus.
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Wind Chimes Lengths Calculator: a DIY tool that converts tube dimensions and materials into required lengths for desired tones. Input material (Aluminum, Brass, Copper, Stainless Steel, Titanium, etc.) and tube inner/outer diameters; it outputs segment lengths, optimal suspension drill points to preserve resonance, material quantity, and a spacing/template for a support plate. It provides equal-tempered scale frequencies and lengths (with example values for Aluminum) and Solfeggio healing frequencies. Credits to base formulae, wav generator, and design consultants; ©2022 Larry Snyder.
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Yabir Garcia warns that AI/LLMs could trigger a new Dark Age. Drawing a parallel with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, he argues that modern economic fragility and political incentives threaten stability, risking collapse of knowledge and culture. As LLMs become a primary source of truth, people may stop reading original books, making access to knowledge scarce and unaffordable. He notes this exaggeration but plausible, referencing GeoHot and urging ownership of books, resources, and knowledge as a safeguard against erasure.
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Pete Goldsmith notes Show HN posts per month more than doubled over the last year, citing hn.algolia data. Jan 2025 had 1,727 Show HN posts; Jan 2026 (26 days) had 3,886 (+125%). Show HN’s share of total stories rose from 6.93% to 15.31% (+121%). The trend suggests more people are building and sharing projects, including with LLMs and agent workflows.
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MapLibre Tile (MLT) is a new vector-tile format, successor to Mapbox Vector Tile (MVT), optimized for large-scale geospatial data and modern hardware. It delivers up to 6x better compression and faster decoding via a column-oriented layout and lightweight encodings, with feature parity to MVT. Future goals include 3D coordinates, CPU/GPU-optimized processing, GPU-friendly loading, linear referencing for GeoParquet-like formats, and support for nested types. Both MapLibre GL JS and Native already support MLT; try it via demotiles, an MVT to MLT encoder, or Planetiler. Community-driven; note: no per-column type changes across features.
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Adam Mastroianni rebuts the “death of reading” claim, arguing reading remains robust even in a hyper-online era. 2025 book sales were higher than 2019, indie bookstores surged, and big chains survived. The National Endowment for the Arts and time-use data show only modest declines, with the sharp drops clustered around 2003–2011; technology’s impact is real but not catastrophic. He contends books are “Lindy”—they last—and that text remains essential for serious ideas. While other media diversify storage and attention, there is no replacement for reading: writing preserves knowledge and truth. Text is king.
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Filming ICE is legal in public but now part of a broader surveillance system. Eyewitness videos can be identified, traced, or bought, as ICE uses facial recognition like Mobile Fortify and location data from warrants, geofence warrants, and data brokers. A seized phone can expose messages and cloud data. To reduce risk: decide your objective; harden your device (long passcode, disable biometrics, limit previews); log out of accounts; avoid livestreaming; document context with wide shots; blur faces and metadata before posting; share with journalists or lawyers when possible.
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A long-time Apple user vents about iOS/iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe, listing numerous bugs and regressions that undermine the “it just works” ethos. Issues include iPhone storage bloat (system data) blocking updates and photos; UI missteps like widgets clashing with wallpaper, removal of the app launcher, and forced search; iPad search autofocus bug and aggressive Safari tab refreshing; Mac woes with missing folders; hardware faults (Magic Keyboard disconnects and rattling) and iMac screen flicker. The post questions Apple’s QA and quality control, echoed by reader comments about Music storage and other issues.
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A photo project titled “San Francisco Graffiti” showcases images taken by city inspectors documenting graffiti violations across San Francisco. The photographer, Riley Walz, scraped the pictures from the city’s website, framing street art through the lens of the law.
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UK House of Lords votes to extend age verification (age assurance) to VPNs and most user-to-user platforms under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, linking child safety to identity checks and expanding privacy-invasive measures. Amendments 92 and 94a passed: 92 requires UK-market VPNs to implement age assurance for UK users; 94a requires regulated services to verify users to prevent under-16s from joining. Amendments 93 (tamper-proof device CSAM scanning) and 108 (platform-specific minimum ages) were rejected. Critics say the move broadens digital identity checks and risks private communications; client-side scanning was not adopted for now.
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