AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Daniel Kennett laments Apple's Aperture, discontinued in 2015, arguing it offered a uniquely seamless, 'edit anywhere' workflow. Through HUDs, a map-based editing surface, an integrated book editor, and a loupe, Aperture let professionals edit images directly where they work, with minimal disruption. He contrasts it with Photos and Lightroom and praises Aperture’s quiet, powerful engineering. The piece frames the loss as part of broader design stagnation in macOS (Tahoe, Creator Studio) and ends with nostalgic anecdotes about his Apple interviews.
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TikTok has formalized a US-owned spinoff, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, to run TikTok for American users under national-security safeguards. US user data will be stored in Oracle’s secure US cloud and protected by a third‑party-audited privacy/cybersecurity program aligned with NIST CSF/800‑53, ISO 27001, and CISA standards. The venture will retrain the US user data–based content‑recommendation algorithm and oversee trust and safety. Most changes are behind the scenes, with potential shifts in US feeds for 200M+ Americans and 7.5M businesses.
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Access to opendemocracy.net is blocked by Cloudflare’s security service. The block may be triggered by certain inputs or requests; enabling cookies is suggested. To resolve, email the site owner with details of what you were doing and include the Cloudflare Ray ID (and your IP).
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Vercel Security Checkpoint is a browser-verification page that prompts users to enable JavaScript to continue and suggests a fix for the website owner.
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American climber Alex Honnold free-solo climbed Taipei 101, a 1,667-foot skyscraper, without ropes or safety gear, completing the ascent in about 1 hour 32 minutes. Netflix broadcast the live feed with a short delay. The stunt drew crowds below and praise from Taiwan’s president. Honnold, known for free-soloing El Capitan, said skyscraper climbing is more about stamina due to repetitive, fatigue‑inducing moves, especially through the eight 'bamboo box' sections. Afterward he celebrated with a break, a shower, and a meal; his wife waved from inside the tower.
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Windows Central reports Microsoft released a second emergency Windows 11 out-of-band update, KB5078127, on Jan 24, 2026 to fix Outlook and cloud-based apps (OneDrive, Dropbox) becoming inoperable after Patch Tuesday. The first OOB patch (Jan 17) fixed shutdown/hibernation and Remote Desktop issues but broke Outlook/OneDrive/Dropbox. KB5078127 bundles protections from the Jan 13 security update and prior OOB fixes for 24H2/25H2 and other editions. The workaround to uninstall updates is no longer needed; check the Windows Release Health dashboard for details.
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vm-curator is a Rust-based TUI for building and managing QEMU/KVM VMs on Linux without libvirt, enabling para-virtualized 3D acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs. It scans a VM library by folders with launch.sh, and offers a 5-step creation wizard with 50+ OS profiles, automatic UEFI detection, ISO browsing, configurable memory/CPU/disk, snapshots, a launch-script editor, USB passthrough, Vim-like navigation, search, and multiple boot modes. Settings live in ~/.config/vm-curator and the library in ~/vm-space with OS metadata and QEMU profiles. A lean, high-performance VM tool.
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Noam Chomsky revisits Dwight Macdonald’s call for the ‘responsibility of intellectuals,’ arguing that scholars must expose government lies and hold power to account, especially over Vietnam. He condemns the complacency and cynicism of leading public intellectuals (Schlesinger, Rostow, Kissinger) and the triumph of a self-serving 'expert' culture that claims only tactical validity while masking imperial aims. He critiques the ‘new frontiersmen,’ the idea of a value-free policy sciences, and Daniel Bell’s End of Ideology, arguing that elite technocracy erodes democratic critique. He urges a historically aware, courageous opposition to power, warning that if scholars stay silent, atrocities will continue.
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A bug report: nvidia-smi hangs indefinitely after ~66 days uptime when using driver 570.133.20 with OpenRM on a B200 under Linux kernel 6.6.0. Dmesg shows repeated NVRM knvlink/Rx detect link mask failures. Uptime shown as 67 days; an NVBug has been opened to investigate. Reproduction notes: nvidia-smi stalls after long uptimes; OS is openEuler 2.0; kernel 6.6.0-100. Issue tracked as NVIDIA open-gpu-kernel-modules #971; confirm if the problem occurs with the proprietary driver.
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Julia Desmazes documents designing a tiny open-source AI accelerator for a GF180 Tiny Tapeout shuttle, completed in two weeks. The project combines a 2×2 8‑bit systolic array for matrix-matrix multiplies with a JTAG TAP for in-silicon observability. Relying on OpenROAD, Librelane, Tiny Tapeout, and RP2040 firmware, she streamlines RTL-to-GDSII to meet the deadline. Key choices include Booth radix‑4 multiplier, in‑place 8‑bit weights, clamping, a two-clock design, and a dedicated array controller with an input/output buffer flow. The chip was taped out; plans include FP arithmetic and expanded debugging.
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Typography on Pencils, 1-5 is a Present & Correct Pencil Day post (Mar 30, 2023) featuring a roundup of pencil typography photos. It invites readers to view their current stock of new and vintage pencils and to credit the images if reused. The post includes shop navigation and London store contact details.
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Could not summarize article.
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Could not summarize article.
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ICE posted a Federal Register request for information seeking commercial Big Data and Ad Tech tools that could support investigations, signaling interest in data management, analytics, and location-data services. The agency aims to understand current and emerging products usable by federal investigators, with attention to privacy and regulatory constraints. The filing follows ICE’s history of using Palantir’s Gotham/FALCON systems and licenses for location data from Webloc (Penlink) and Venntel (Gravy Analytics). The move underscores growing government interest in ad-tech data for law enforcement.
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An artist-programmer says he no longer writes code from scratch but sculpts its outputs. AI coding tools draft implementations; he prunes, refactors, and stitches pieces into durable, reusable solutions aligned with the original goals. He emphasizes diffs, big-picture design, and how components fit together. He argues current coding AIs aren’t truly creative or decisive and tend to regurgitate proven abstractions instead of removing dead code. Without a sculptor, code becomes bloated and lacks a clear story. For now, he chips away at the work, guiding the AI rather than letting it dominate.
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A 403 Forbidden error from nginx indicating access to the requested resource is denied.
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Europe seeks digital sovereignty to reduce dependence on US cloud giants (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), which control ~70% of Europe’s cloud market; European providers ~15%. Outages—Oct 2025 AWS disruption and a Cloudflare incident—reveal vulnerability, as do 2025 power cuts. Initiatives include Helsingborg’s digital‑blackout drill, Schleswig-Holstein’s shift to open source, and cross‑border open‑source tooling in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy. The EU is pursuing a cloud‑sovereignty framework and a Cloud/AI Development Act to demand security, openness and interoperability. Individuals should consider data storage and portability. Complete independence is unlikely, but resilience can rise.
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Official SDKs for Qrystal Uplink to monitor IoT devices' health by sending heartbeats from ESP32 devices to the Qrystal Uplink service. SDKs available: Arduino ESP32, ESP-IDF native, and MicroPython. Features: lightweight heartbeat API, automatic TLS encryption, connection pooling, automatic NTP time synchronization, and comprehensive error handling. Quick start: obtain device credentials, choose an SDK, follow the setup guide, and start sending heartbeats. API returns status codes such as Q_OK, Q_ERR_NO_WIFI, Q_ERR_TIME_NOT_READY, Q_ERR_INVALID_CREDENTIALS, and more. MIT license.
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Amazon is set for another round of layoffs, aiming to cut about 30,000 jobs, with reductions possibly starting as soon as Tuesday. The cuts would affect AWS, retail, Prime Video, and People Experience and Technology, following October’s 14,000 layoffs. CEO Andy Jassy says generative AI will reduce Amazon’s corporate workforce in coming years. Amazon has ~350,000 corporate employees out of ~1.56 million total, and is investing billions in AI infrastructure, including a $10 billion campus in North Carolina and data centers in multiple states.
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Poland’s electric grid was targeted by a new wiper, DynoWiper, in late December, likely by Russia-linked Sandworm, aiming to disrupt communications between renewable installations and distribution operators. The attack did not succeed in taking down power; reasons aren’t explained. ESET analysts assign medium confidence to Sandworm attribution based on overlapping TTPs. The incident occurred on the 10th anniversary of Ukraine’s 2015 blackout, echoing past wiper campaigns; no outage occurred in Poland.
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