AI Summarized Hacker News

Front-page articles summarized hourly.

AI is going to kill app subscriptions

AI-driven cloning makes app subscriptions unsustainable: since building an app is cheap, clones can undercut paid models. Local apps with no servers lose pricing power; server-backed apps may still need subscriptions but prices will hover just above cost. Apple embraces AI-generated apps (Claude in Xcode); App Store grew 11% in 2025, Google Play 5%. More unmet demand in niche use cases becomes viable as dev costs fall. For developers, competition will rise; for users, lower prices and more free options.

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Build Gaussian Splat Experiences with SuperSplat Studio

PlayCanvas launches SuperSplat Studio, a new app to author Gaussian-splat experiences. It lets you place annotations (up to 25 per scene) with a title, description and saved camera viewpoint; viewers can navigate annotations via a bar or hotspot clicks. It adds post effects (Bloom, Sharpen, Vignette, Color Grading, Chromatic Fringing) with real-time previews. Tonemapping options include Linear, Filmic, ACES/ACES 2.0, Hejl and Neutral, plus a customizable background. HDR effects require High Precision Rendering. To use it, upload/publish in the SuperSplat Editor, edit on the Manage page, then add annotations and effects and share.

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An Enslaved Gardener Transformed the Pecan into a Cash Crop

Beronda L. Montgomery recounts how Antoine, an enslaved gardener, transformed the pecan industry by pioneering inosculation to create the Centennial pecan variety. Seed-grown pecans were slow and variable; grafted trees produced uniform, high-quality nuts, fueling a multistate commercial crop by the 1920s. After the enslaver Roman’s death, sugarcane profits supplanted the project. Montgomery highlights enslaved Black and Indigenous botanical knowledge, critiques its erasure in popular histories (e.g., Jane Goodall, Pocahontas), and calls for recognizing enslaved caregivers’ contributions to American biology and cuisine.

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RynnBrain

RynnBrain is an open embodied foundation model from Alibaba DAMO Academy, available in two dense variants (2B, 8B) and a 30B-A3B MoE, plus post-trained models Plan, Nav, and CoP. It excels at egocentric video understanding, fine-grained reasoning, localization, OCR, and physics-aware planning, integrating object/affordance data into planning to produce spatial trajectories, pointing, and actions. Built on a unified encoder–decoder for dense and MoE, it uses rich spatio-temporal data for robust embodied capabilities. Model zoo includes RynnBrain-2B/8B/30B-A3B, CoP-8B, Plan-8B/30B-A3B, Nav-8B. Quick start, cookbooks, RynnBrain-Bench. Apache-2.0. Release 2026-02-15 (report and checkpoints).

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Amazon, Google Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State

Greenwald argues that the U.S. surveillance state is now ubiquitous, driven by Ring and Nest and reinforced by AI, facial recognition, and massive data consolidation by firms like Palantir. Ring's "Search Party" ad exposed how neighborhood cameras could form a city-wide dragnet, prompting backlash and a Ring–Flock policy split. In the Nancy Guthrie/Nest case, footage from an unsubscribed Nest camera was later accessed by the FBI, highlighting that data aren't truly deleted. The piece ties these developments to weakened privacy protections since Snowden and urges renewed vigilance against state-corporate surveillance.

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Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)

Starflight-Reverse is a project to reverse-engineer Starflight (1986). It covers the game's sandbox gameplay and the Forth-based reverse-engineering approach, describing the 16‑bit indirect-threaded code and how content is reconstructed. The README lists game files (STARA.COM, STARB.COM, STARFLT.COM), code/data structure, and how to build/disassemble to outputs in starflt1-out/starflt2-out by placing originals in starflt1-in/starflt2-in and running make. It notes the code is slow but space-efficient.

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Show HN: Perlin Noise Terminal Animation in Rust (60 FPS, Truecolor)

Beautiful Perlin noise animation for your terminal—truecolor, 60fps, multiple themes. Renders smooth 24-bit color gradients with ▀ blocks for double vertical resolution. Themes: Ocean, Fire, Aurora, Matrix. Multi-octave Perlin noise, responsive to terminal resize, clean exit. Install: cargo install --git https://github.com/denisepattenson/perlin-terminal or build from source. Usage: perlin-terminal [--theme ocean|fire|aurora|matrix] [--scale X] [--speed Y] [--fps Z] [--seed N]. Quit with Q, Esc, or Ctrl+C. Requirements: 24-bit truecolor terminal; Rust 1.70+. MIT.

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Show HN: Copy-and-patch compiler for hard real-time Python

Copapy is a tracing-based copy-and-patch compiler for Python delivering deterministic, low-latency realtime computation with automatic differentiation, aimed at embedded hardware (robotics, aerospace, SDR, bare-metal RTOS). It preserves Python ergonomics, requires no cross-compile toolchain, and outputs high-performance, memory-safe code run by a small C runner. The generated binaries avoid libc and are architecture-portable via relocation-based patching. It currently supports x86_64, ARMv6/7, and AArch64 (Thumb on ARMv6/7-M in development). A Python module and cp.jit offer testing and on-demand compilation. PoC stage.

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Inspecting the Source of Go Modules

Go's Checksum Database ensures every build uses the same module source by recording cryptographic checksums in a transparent log. This guards against tampered or mismatched versions, even in a decentralized ecosystem. However, code hosts may still show unverified content, so local review is recommended (e.g., go mod download -json MODULE | .Dir). A go mod verify -tag feature is in progress to check local repos against the Sumdb. pkg.go.dev links can mislead; alternative viewers like go-mod-viewer.appspot.com and Geomys (pkg.geomys.dev) fetch canonical sources via HTTP Range from the module zip, with future proof checks.

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No Coding Before 10am

An early 2026 startup rewrote its engineering playbook for the AI agent era, banning coding before 10am. Teams start day pairing prompts, defining a one-sentence objective and constraints; agents then do the work, with humans shaping outcomes. Core tenets: build for agents not humans; code is context; data is the interface; maximize agent utilization; specify outcomes, not processes; review outcomes against objectives; kill old code paths; automate repetitive tasks; standardize data patterns and metadata; design modular systems with minimal lock-in. The article warns most teams will be outpaced unless they rewrite their playbooks.

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A practical guide to observing the night sky for real skies and real equipment

Stargazing Buddy is a practical night-sky observing guide offering curated targets for naked eye, binoculars, and telescopes, with concise, real-observing notes. It emphasizes doable planning tools and clear guidance on brightness, structure, and difficulty tailored to your location and sky conditions. It provides month-by-month guides and focused calculators to explain tradeoffs (seeing vs pixel scale, surface brightness, FOV, timing). Aimed at both beginners and seasoned observers, it forgoes theory-heavy content in favor of a field-guide mindset for meaningful, achievable observing rather than a general astronomy encyclopedia.

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Git is a file system. We need a database for the code

The piece argues git’s blob-based, merge-heavy model struggles in the LLM era, where browsing, understanding, and collaboration dominate. It advocates CRDT-based revision control with AST-aware structures, enabling deterministic, reversible split/join/merge, overlay branches, and modularization beyond monorepos. The vision uses RDX (a JSON-like CRDT) as the storage substrate to create a code database with versioning built into the data model, rather than a simple content-addressable filesystem. It outlines Part II (CRDT revision control), Part III (outer interface), Part IV (experiments), and Part V (vision), noting alternatives like Pijul.

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