AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
BBC reports TikTok tracks people across the web via an expanded advertising pixel, collecting sensitive data (cancer status, fertility, mental health) even if you never use TikTok. The updated pixel enables cross-site tracking to attribute ad performance and follow users beyond TikTok, increasing data exposure as TikTok's US operations changed hands. Privacy researchers call it highly invasive. TikTok claims transparency and user controls; websites share data under privacy laws. Solutions: switch to privacy-focused browsers (DuckDuckGo, Brave) or use tracker blockers (Privacy Badger, Ghostery, uBlock Origin); avoid extensions from untrusted sources; stronger privacy laws are needed.
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South Korea's National Intelligence Service says Kim Jong Un has designated his daughter Kim Ju Ae, believed to be about 13, as his heir, citing her rising prominence at state events including the Korean People's Army founding anniversary and a Beijing visit. The NIS will monitor whether she attends the upcoming party congress. Ju Ae is Kim and Ri Sol Ju's only publicly known child; the reasons for a female succession in North Korea's patriarchal system remain unclear, though Kim Yo Jong is influential.
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scheme-rs has reached 0.1.0 after passing 2258 tests in the R6RS suite and now runs in both async and sync contexts. Notable incomplete areas: garbage collector, general performance, missing R6RS procedures/syntax, docs, and debugging. The author envisions building a new language atop scheme-rs, possibly with strong typing or calculus of construction. The project sparked a personal turnaround after job loss, boosting confidence and leading to a fulfilling career path; he encourages taking on challenging projects and points to OneChronos for careers.
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Apache Arrow marks its 10th anniversary, celebrating its 2016 founding and goal of providing agnostic, efficient columnar data exchange. From the initial 0.1.0 release in 2016 to stable formats, with only one breaking change (the Union top-level validity bitmap) and gradual IPC format evolution. The project reached 1.0.0 in July 2020, signaling formal compatibility promises. The ecosystem spans multiple language implementations and subprojects like DataFusion and nanoarrow, with third-party adoption alongside Parquet. The community remains governance-driven, welcoming contributions and progress, with no formal roadmap.
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Barbed wire fence phones formed an informal, cooperative rural telephone network from the 1890s, linking households along barbed-wire fencing with copper lines. Driven by cheap barbed wire and the erosion of Bell’s monopoly, farmers built independent, noncentralized systems with no operators or monthly bills; calls rang to all on the line, enabling quick communication about weather, prices, emergencies, and social chatter. The networks spread across much of the U.S. and Canada and persisted into the mid-20th century in some areas. The piece documents its history and a 2015 reinstallation at CU Boulder.
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Using Ikebukuro's Marunouchi platform as a microcosm, the piece argues that culture is the mass-synchronization of framings—stable ontologies that shape what exists and how we act. People adopt senpatsu/kouhatsu queues not because of rules but because shared framings create self-reinforcing feedback loops via imitation. Differences between Japan, Italy, and English-speaking cultures reveal how framings—like "standing out," simpatia, or sarcasm—govern perception and behavior more than explicit norms. Overimitation drives cultural cohesion; rules and laws arise from the friction and mutual benefit of following shared framings, not mere obedience.
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Apple patched a decade-old iOS zero-day (CVE-2026-20700) in dyld that could allow arbitrary code execution with memory-write, exploited in the wild in an extremely sophisticated attack against targeted individuals. The flaw, discovered by Google’s Threat Analysis Group, affected all iOS versions since 1.0 and could bypass security checks in the dynamic linker. Apple says it may be part of a larger exploit chain, and iOS 26.3 closes the door. The patch also fixes other bugs, but CVE-2026-20700 was the only one reportedly exploited in the wild.
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Could not summarize article.
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Viva.com, a major European payment processor, sends verification emails missing a Message-ID header, violating RFC 5322. Google Workspace rejects such mails as noncompliant, causing bounce. The author confirmed the bug with logs; Viva.com support gave a noncommittal reply. To sign up, he had to use a personal Gmail address. The piece argues this basic RFC flaw reveals weak European fintech infrastructure, notes poor developer UX versus Stripe, and urges Viva.com to add a Message-ID header for reliability, especially for Greek users relying on local rails like IRIS.
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Could not summarize article.
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Tyr is a Rust GPU driver project for Arm Mali aimed at upstream in 2026. After a prototype and a LPC demo, the team plans to replace legacy C paths and work toward Vulkan drop-in via PanVK, while ensuring upstream compatibility and performance. Key blockers are power management, GPU hang/recovery, and missing Rust infrastructure (GEM shmem, GPUVM, io-pgtable) plus a robust device initialization flow. A new JobQueue concept may replace drm_gpu_scheduler, enabling firmware-assisted scheduling and C interoperability. The roadmap focuses on upstreaming, stabilization, benchmarking, and expanding Mali and embedded support.
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The piece argues that the bottleneck for coding with LLMs is the harness, not the model. By swapping only the edit tool in the oh-my-pi harness, the author benchmarks 16 models and three edit tools, showing that interface engineering can shift performance. He tests patch, str_replace, and a new hashline approach that tags each file line with a short content hash and lets edits reference those tags. Hashline improves reliability and cuts tokens wasted on retries; Grok Code Fast 1 jumps from 6.7% to 68.3%, Gemini gains +8%, and other models also improve. Conclusion: open, community harnesses are high-leverage.
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The article highlights Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit from The Demon-Haunted World (1995): nine diagnostic principles to discern pseudoscience from good science, including independent confirmation, skeptical scrutiny, avoiding appeals to authority, considering multiple hypotheses, testing, quantitative measures, falsifiability, and recognizing biases; advocates applying these tools to one’s own arguments and to evaluate explanations; notes the toolkit helps reduce cognitive biases but can be misused; emphasizes its enduring value for critical thinking and safeguarding civilization.
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Robert Tinney, Byte magazine’s iconic cover artist, died Feb 1 in Baker, Louisiana, at 78. As Byte’s primary illustrator from 1975 to the late 1980s, he defined personal-computing visuals with airbrushed paintings for topics like AI and networking, producing more than 80 covers—each taking about a week. Born 1947 in Penn Yan, NY, he studied at Louisiana Tech, served in Vietnam, and met Byte’s Carl Helmers. After Byte, he did electronics art, Borland covers, oil portraits, and Photoshop work. He is survived by his wife Susan, three children, nine grandchildren, and one great-grandchild; life celebration planned for May 2026.
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A global, world-spanning race by Geo Racers.
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PR: Replace np.column_stack with np.vstack().T in Matplotlib to gain performance. It's a targeted optimization that only transforms safe cases where the inputs are 1D arrays of the same length or 2D arrays of the same shape; cases with mixed dimensions are not changed to preserve behavior. Benchmarks show notable speedups: with broadcast from 36.47 µs to 27.67 µs (24% faster) and without broadcast from 20.63 µs to 13.18 µs (36% faster). Changes affect 3 production files (lines.py, path.py, patches.py); no functional changes, tests pass; closes issue #31130.
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Scott built a “Crown of Nobles” desk display of five noble-gas tubes (Neon, Helium, Argon, Krypton, Xenon) on a 3D‑printed stand. It’s powered by a high‑voltage RF source from a plasma ball, capacitively coupling energy through glass via foil hats and a tube selector switch. A CAD frame держs the tubes; a high‑voltage probe confirmed ~1.5 kVpp at tens of kHz. Neon lights easily; Xenon often needs grounding touch. Crosstalk and RF coupling can affect neighboring tubes and nearby electronics. A visually striking, educational toy for exploring ionized gases.
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AudioConvert's Free British Accent Generator turns text into natural-sounding British speech using AI. Users paste text (up to 500 characters), choose from a library of British voices, then generate and download an MP3 in seconds. It emphasizes authentic pronunciation and rhythm and covers uses from videos and podcasts to e-learning, storytelling, advertising, and games. The browser-based tool is free, provides instant downloads, and claims secure processing with no subscriptions, plus FAQs and user testimonials.
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Huesnatch is a free, in-browser color-tool suite for designers and developers. It can extract palettes from images or URLs, generate gradients, simulate color blindness, and more, with no login and no data upload. All processing happens locally in your browser. Features include Image Color Picker, Color Image Generator, Explore Palettes, UI Palette Visualization, Color Matching Game, Web Color Extractor, and Color Blind Simulator. Supports HEX, RGB, HSL, CMYK, LAB, XYZ. Export palettes via copy or download. MIT-licensed.
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WordPress.com reports a 429 error from a small system issue; refresh the page and contact support if the error persists.
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