AI Summarized Hacker News

Front-page articles summarized hourly.

Emerge Career (YC S22) Is Hiring a Founding Product Designer

Emerge Career, a YC-backed all-in-one re-entry and workforce platform, seeks a Founding Product Designer (Founding Design Engineer) in NYC. You’ll be the first engineer, building end-to-end features in React/TypeScript, shipping real software that helps students stay engaged and complete training. Responsibilities include direct user research, rapid prototyping, cross-functional collaboration, and measuring outcomes (completion, recidivism impact). Requirements: 3+ years, ability to ship code, strong design taste with low ego, empathy, and willingness to long hours. Compensation: $120k-$200k, 0.25%-1.00% equity, visa sponsorship. Interview includes paid 2-5 day work trial at $500/day.

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Same SQL, Different Results: A Subtle Oracle vs. PostgreSQL Migration Bug

During a Oracle->PostgreSQL migration, a seemingly minor expression revealed a deep semantic gap: Oracle silently coerces types, causing concatenation to mix with arithmetic, while PostgreSQL uses strict operator precedence. The example end_hr - 1 || TO_CHAR(varmonth,'MI') + 1 + 40 yields 1500 in Oracle but 14100 in PostgreSQL for the same input. The lesson: this isn’t a syntax issue but a behavioral one; tests and docs often miss it. The cure is explicit casting and parentheses to express intent, and using execution plans to verify. Migration should align semantics, not just syntax.

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LNAI – Define AI coding tool configs once, sync to Claude, Cursor, Codex, etc.

LNAI provides a unified AI configuration management CLI that lets you define project rules, MCP servers, and permissions once in a single .ai/ directory and synchronize to native tool formats across tools (Claude, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot, OpenCode, Windsurf). It keeps configs in sync with lnai sync and cleans up orphaned files automatically. Quick start: npm install -g lnai; lnai init; lnai validate; lnai sync. MIT licensed. Docs at lnai.sh.

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What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

Text explains why emails show equals signs: they come from quoted-printable encoding used to wrap long lines. A trailing = marks a line continuation; CRLF line endings get dropped when displayed on Unix, sometimes producing garbled text (e.g., losing a 'c' in 'cloven'). If decoding is wrong, equals signs can also be interpreted as encoded bytes (eg =C2=A0 for non‑breaking space). The post concludes the signs are a technical artifact and often the result of incompetent processing, not a deliberate code.

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Astrological CPU Scheduler

scx_horoscope is an experimental sched_ext-based Linux kernel scheduler that orders tasks using real-time planetary positions and astrology. It classifies tasks by planetary domains (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), applies element-based boosts and debuffs (Fire, Air, Earth, Water), and enforces retrograde penalties (50% time slice). Features include lunar phase scheduling, dynamic time slicing, and a cosmic weather report. It integrates via a Rust/BPF framework (scx_rustland_core) and builds with cargo; requires root to load into the kernel. Disclaimer: educational/entertainment; not for production.

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GitHub – BenjaminPoilve/minichord: A pocket-sized musical instrument

BenjaminPoilve's minichord repo bundles the source and documentation for a pocket-sized musical instrument. It includes: documentation with a user manual and assembly guide (built with MkDocs); a hardware folder with PCB files, BOM, 3D enclosure, and keycap routing under CC BY-NC 4.0; a firmware folder with Hex firmware, PlatformIO project, and minicontrol software under BSD 3-clause. Media includes a technical video, audio demo, Hainbach review, and an interview with SeeedStudio. Contact: [email protected]. Website: minichord.com.

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Flying Around the World in under 80 Days

This article analyzes Avis LXXX, a 4 m airship drone designed to circumnavigate the world in under 80 days using hydrogen lift and solar power. With a target cruise near 10 m/s (potentially 15 m/s in sun), it could cover roughly 500–800 km daily and finish in 7–9 weeks along winds that favor east-to-west routes. Design uses a carbon-polymer shell, a 0.5 m² solar array, a 1 kg LiPo battery, and a low-leakage hydrogen bag. The proposed route traverses Europe, the Atlantic, the Pacific, Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean. Legal, budget and reliability challenges remain, but it’s deemed feasible.

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Phenakistoscopes (1833)

Phenakistoscope (1833) is an early animation device considered a precursor to cinema. A spinning cardboard disc viewed in a mirror through moving slits creates moving figures—dancers, bowing figures, leaping animals. It emerged almost simultaneously: Joseph Plateau (Brussels) and Simon von Stampfer (Berlin) developed near-identical devices. McLean’s Optical Illusions or Magic Panorama published in 1833 produced some of the earliest mass-produced phenakistoscopes. It was later eclipsed by the Zoetrope and Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, fading into pre-cinema curiosity, yet echoed today in looping online animations.

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Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog?

Gyrovague reports that archive.today began using its users as proxies to mount a DDOS against his blog in January 2026. A CAPTCHA page executes a JavaScript every 300ms to fetch a random query to gyrovague.com, hogging resources; ad blockers can block the traffic. The post threads the incident through a longer saga—from a 2023 OSINT piece, to FBI interest in Nov 2025, a GDPR takedown request, to January 2026 exchanges and threats from archive.today’s webmaster and aliases. The author sees possible censorship and Streisand effects, but offers no definitive culprit or motive.

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50 years ago, a young Bill Gates took on the 'software pirates'

Fifty years ago, 20-year-old Bill Gates blasted software piracy in a 1976 “Open Letter to Hobbyists” after Altair BASIC was widely copied, arguing unpaid software harmed developers. The backlash helped spark a rift between proprietary and communal software, fueling the Free Software Movement (Richard Stallman, 1983) and the later Open Source era (1998 definitions). The shift reshaped licensing and contributed to Microsoft’s rise with MS-DOS, laying the groundwork for today’s open-software culture.

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