AI Summarized Hacker News

Front-page articles summarized hourly.

How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)

Lee Hutchinson recalls his teenage years as a keyholder at Babbage’s store No. 9 in Houston, where he experienced three major 1990s console launches—Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, and Nintendo 64. He describes chaotic launch days, fierce console debates, and a close-knit, prank-filled staff culture aided by a generous return policy and demos from game reps. He falls in love with coworker Laura (his future wife) amid the chaos, and ultimately the store closes in 1997 as the industry consolidates toward GameStop. Nintendo wins the era for him.

Back to FreeBSD: Part 1

Could not summarize article.

Show HN: Minimalist Glitch Art Maker (100% client-side)

Glitch Art Maker is a client-side tool that processes local video or webcam in real time without uploads and exports WebM. Users adjust horizontal scan-line thickness and spacing, per-line jitter, and black/white threshold (lower = whiter, higher = blacker). Raw Mode shows the original video. Features include exporting full WebM and webcam/video controls, with status indicators (Waiting for input source, LIVE GLITCH).

Wave Twisters (2001)

Could not summarize article.

U.S. Cannot Legally Impose Tariffs Using Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974

A guest post argues that Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 cannot legally authorize new tariffs for President Trump. Section 122 permits temporary tariffs up to 15% for up to 150 days only when the United States faces fundamental international payments problems, which historically arose under fixed or managed exchange rates. Since the transition to floating exchange rates in 1973, the U.S. has not faced such a problem, and Section 122 has never been invoked. Therefore Trump cannot rely on Section 122 to impose tariffs.

Carelessness versus Craftsmanship in Cryptography

Trail of Bits contrasts carelessness and craftsmanship in cryptography. It spotlights aes-js and pyaes, which default to a fixed IV in CTR mode, creating widespread key/IV reuse bugs in thousands of projects. The libraries also lack modern modes (no AES-GCM/SIV) and suffer timing and padding issues; maintenance is stale (last updated 2018/2017). The strongMan VPN Manager case shows craftsmanship: replace pyaes with modern libraries, adopt GCM-SIV with authentication, per-entry key derivation, and migration tools, plus a security advisory. The piece argues for fixing systems and improving processes, not just bugs.

The Human Root of Trust – public domain framework for agent accountability

The Human Root of Trust proposes a public-domain framework (not a product or standard) for cryptographic accountability in autonomous agents. Central principle: every agent must trace every action to a human. The problem is that autonomous AI can act without a visible human in the loop, making accountability unclear to regulators, counterparties, and auditors. The framework outlines a trust chain, six steps, and a dual-path architecture to enable tracing from action to authorized human principal. It invites collaboration from engineers, cryptographers, lawyers, and implementers to build and formalize this open protocol. v1.0 Feb 2026.

Iranian Students Protest as Anger Grows

WSJ 404 Page Not Found: the requested page can’t be located; users are advised to check the URL or email [email protected]. The page also presents popular articles (e.g., Iran deployment toll on U.S. sailors; ISIS detention camp collapses in Syria; Arctic NATO presence) and latest podcasts, plus market headlines such as Walmart slumps, Omnicom rallies, Moderna comeback, and a note that Trump’s tariffs are illegal with a Plan B.

How Taalas "prints" LLM onto a chip?

Taalas released a fixed-function ASIC that hardwires Llama 3.1 8B weights, enabling 17,000 tokens/sec. The chip promises 10x lower ownership cost, 10x less electricity, and 10x faster inference than GPUs. All 32 layers are etched into silicon; data flows through a 'magic multiplier' 4-bit scheme, avoiding external DRAM/HBM. It uses on-chip SRAM for KV cache and LoRA adapters. Customizing a model requires only top-layer masks; development for Llama 3.1 8B took about two months. This bypasses the memory bandwidth bottleneck of GPUs.

Gamedate – A site to revive dead multiplayer games

Could not summarize article.

“Playmakers,” reviewed: The race to give every child a toy

Schwartz’s review of Michael Kimmel’s Playmakers traces how Jewish immigrant entrepreneurs helped forge modern American childhood through toys. From Morris Michtom’s Teddy Bear in a Brooklyn candy shop to Hasbro, Lionel Trains, Barbie, and Play-Doh, Eastern European Jews built a mass toy industry after 1900. The piece situates play within broader reformist ideas about child development, gender, race, and consumer culture, arguing toys reshaped childhood while reflecting and fueling anxieties about education, morality, and assimilation.

People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So Much

Could not summarize article.

Two Bits Are Better Than One: making bloom filters 2x more accurate

Floe uses bloom filters to speed up SQL operations, applying them in the storage engine and during hash joins. They designed a fixed-size 256 KB, lock-free bloom filter, using two bits in one uint32 per bucket, producing ~2x better accuracy than single-bit schemes. False positives drop from ~11.7% to ~5.7% with negligible cost. The approach cuts scans and I/O dramatically (about 9x fewer decompressed operations on large tables). An adaptive filter tracks skipped rows and toggles the first-pass filter to maximize benefit. The design emphasizes fixed size, predictability, and concurrency.

Japanese Woodblock Print Search

Ukiyo-e Search is a large, browsable database of Japanese woodblock prints (223,891 entries) with image-based search to find similar works across multiple collections. Users can upload an image or paste a URL to locate matches. The catalog groups prints by historical periods—Early Ukiyo-e; Birth of Full-Color Printing; Golden Age; Popularization; Meiji; Shin Hanga/Sosaku Hanga; Modern and Contemporary—and lists top artists with counts in each. The site plans more data and features and invites signing up for updates.

Scientists discover recent tectonic activity on the moon

An error message says the request was blocked by the server’s security policies (429 Too Many Requests / 400 Bad Request) and advises contacting support if it’s an error.

A Botnet Accidentally Destroyed I2P

On Feb 3, 2026, I2P, the anonymity network, was overwhelmed by 700,000 hostile nodes—a 39:1 surge over its typical 15–20k devices—marking one of the worst Sybil attacks on an anonymity network. The attack, long believed to be state-run, was actually carried out by the Kimwolf IoT botnet, which used I2P as a backup command-and-control infrastructure after researchers destroyed most of its primary C2 servers. Six days later, I2P released version 2.11.0, enabling by default hybrid ML-KEM post-quantum encryption and other mitigations.

Palantir's secret weapon isn't AI – it's Ontology. An open-source deep dive

An open-source book project explaining Palantir Foundry’s Ontology strategy. It treats ontology as the operational data layer (a digital twin) that drives business decisions, unifying objects (nouns) and actions (verbs) with governance via branches and reviews. The book outlines theory, architecture, and future AI implications across Part I–III, including use cases and reader notes. Authored by Satoshi Yamauchi (Leading.AI), CC BY 4.0 license, welcomes contributions; full text available in the repository (the-palantir-impact_jp.md).

Forward propagation of errors through time

Forward propagation of errors through time (FPTT) is proposed as a forward-time alternative to backpropagation through time (BPTT) for training recurrent networks. It inverts the standard BPTT equation to propagate error signals forward, using a warm-up pass to compute the initial delta0 and then iterating delta_{t+1} = J_t^{-T}(delta_t - ∂l_t/∂h_t^T). It can train deep RNNs (tested on MNIST98 with 4-layer linear recurrent units), achieving competitive performance but with severe numerical instability in forgetting regimes due to Jacobian inversion, making it impractical. Multi-layer requires L+1 passes. Memory is independent of sequence length; Jacobian cost dominates. Not pursued further, but reported for insight.

Who's liable when your AI agent burns down production?

Could not summarize article.

How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

Boris Tane shares a disciplined Claude Code workflow that separates thinking from typing. Start with Phase 1: deep, written research (research.md) about the relevant codebase. Phase 2: a detailed plan (plan.md) with explanations, code snippets, and references. The Annotation Cycle adds inline notes to the plan, repeats 1–6 times until satisfied, then generate a granular Todo List. Phase 3: Implementation is done in one long session using a single implement command, with ongoing typechecks and terse feedback. The planner keeps control: review, override, trim scope, and keep interfaces stable.

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