AI Summarized Hacker News

Front-page articles summarized hourly.

Thinking Hard Burns Almost No Calories–But Destroys Your Next Workout

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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DBASE on the Kaypro II

An in-depth look at dBASE II on the Kaypro II under CP/M, a pivotal 1980s data-management era. It covers hardware (Kaypro II, 64K RAM, Z80, CP/M 2.2), dBASE II v2.4’s dominance, and data entry at the dot prompt—defining fields, editing, and basic analytics. It explains modifying structures, two work areas, joins, deletes, and indexing, plus exporting to text. It also outlines compatibility headaches across CP/M disks, transfer methods (Kermit, cpmtools), and notes its legacy and limited modern viability.

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Why Affordability and the Vibecession Are Real Economic Problems

Real incomes rose above 2019 levels by 2024–25, yet affordability remains a real concern. The piece highlights five channels: essentials squeeze (groceries, shelter, healthcare, and transport rise faster than overall inflation, squeezing budgets especially for low‑income households); housing tilt (inflation raises nominal mortgage rates, front‑loads real payments, and tightens credit for first-time buyers); planning under uncertainty (price volatility raises cognitive budgeting costs); the cost of money (borrowing costs affect lived affordability not in official inflation); wage conflicts (inflation drives costly job switching and wage negotiations). Policy should acknowledge the vibecession and target housing, healthcare, and food costs rather than broad austerity.

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Facing a demographic catastrophe, Ukraine is paying for troops to freeze sperm

Ukraine faces a demographic crisis intensified by Russia's war. Since 2022, private clinics have offered free cryopreservation of sperm/eggs for soldiers; in 2023 Parliament funded and regulated the programme. Initially samples could be destroyed on a donor’s death, but the law was amended to keep them for up to three years after death and allow use with consent. The aim is to preserve the nation’s future amid war-driven losses and displacement. A slow take-up is expected, with stories from soldiers like Maxim and a widow, Katerina Malyshko, who fought to access her husband’s embryos.

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Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI

FastTab is a fast, daemonized OpenGL task switcher for X11/KDE, built in Zig to respond instantly to shortcuts. Frustrated by the Gallery view, the author used AI (Claude/Code, OpenCode, Gemini) to plan, spec, and implement it. Start with a problem-space conversation, craft a detailed spec with milestones and pseudocode/diagrams, then iterate. They ran LLMs in locked-down containers and used git for safe, incremental changes. The prototype emerged in days, then was refactored for maintainability. The article argues AI-assisted coding can help finish side projects, though human coding expertise remains essential, especially for larger codebases.

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Hear the "Amati King Cello", the Oldest Known Cello in Existence

Believed to be the oldest surviving violin-family instrument, the Amati 'King' cello (c. 1560) was made by Andrea Amati in Cremona for King Charles IX of France; part of a 38-instrument set decorated in Limoges porcelain. The piece would have been considered a bass viol, not a cello by its maker. It stayed at the French court until the Revolution, then was drastically reduced in size around 1801, with a new neck and four strings, altering its original form and acoustics. Now housed in the National Music Museum (Vermillion, SD), it can be heard in its state via recordings.

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Show HN: Andrej Karpathy's microgpt.py to C99 microgpt.c – 4,600x faster

MicroGPT-C is a minimal, zero-dependency C99 implementation of a GPT-style character-level language model that runs on bare metal/MCUs without Python or GPUs. It replicates the microgpt.py architecture: a single-layer decoder-only Transformer (16-dim embeddings, 4 attention heads, context length 16) with ~4.6k parameters, fitting under 50 KB RAM. Designed for education and rapid prototyping, it trains on a small dataset (names.txt) to generate realistic names and demonstrates attention, backprop, and Adam. It offers SIMD auto-vectorisation, INT8 quantisation, and multiple build options; MIT license; authors Ajay Soni and Enjector.

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Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

BBC Eye Investigations shows how DHS investigator Greg Squire helped rescue a girl, Lucy, by a plain clue in a bedroom photo on the dark web. The wall’s Flaming Alamo brick allowed investigators to narrow a list from tens of thousands to about 40–50 addresses within 100 miles of the brick plant. One address matched Lucy’s case; her mother’s boyfriend, a convicted sex offender, was arrested and jailed for more than 70 years. The story highlights how tiny image details can crack cases and the toll on investigators.

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Show HN: Journey – A Custom 2D ECS Game Engine Written in Rust and WGPU

The page flags an incompatible browser, noting Safari is too old. It requires modern browsers: iOS Safari 16+, Chrome/Edge 90+, and Firefox 88+. It also states JavaScript must be enabled and the system is initializing.

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Nvidia with unusually fast coding model on plate-sized chips

OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, a fast coding model that runs on Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine 3 chips, delivering over 1,000 tokens per second—about 15x faster than its predecessor. The text-only, speed-optimized Codex-Spark is a research preview for ChatGPT Pro and select partners, with a 128,000-token context window. This marks OpenAI’s move to diversify from Nvidia, leveraging Cerebras and other partners (AMD, AWS) as it tunes for speed over depth; benchmarks show strong speed, though independent validation is limited.

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Rise of the Triforce

This Dolphin blog post explains the Triforce arcade platform (Sega/Namco/Nintendo) built around a GameCube, its storage (GD-ROM, NAND), saves (magcards/IC cards), JVS I/O, Segaboot, and how arcade hardware differed from home consoles. It reviews Triforce titles (Mario Kart Arcade GP 1 & 2, Star Fox, Gekitou Pro Yakyuu, Virtua Striker 3/4, F-Zero AX, Avalon) and notes their hardware quirks. After years of experimental work, Dolphin has integrated Triforce emulation in builds (2512-395) thanks to crediar, with a roadmap for improvements (input, netplay, Avalon, touchscreen) and plans for hobbyist arcade use.

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Building a model that visualizes strategic golf

Matthew Schoolfield built a golf-simulation tool that visualizes golf course architecture by computing a strokes-to-hole map for every point on a hole and comparing it with an idealized, distance-only benchmark. The result is heatmaps (Broadie maps and a 'penalty' map) that show how hazards and contours affect difficulty beyond distance. He uses Woking #4 as a case study and discusses limitations (computational complexity, resolution, lack of putting/trees, single skill level). The aim is to help architects communicate design ideas to clients and explore strategic design; future work includes lidar integration and broader datasets.

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