AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
ShannonMax is an Emacs Lisp tool that uses information theory to analyze your Emacs usage and suggest shorter, higher-value keybindings. It logs keystrokes via a keylogger, compares actual vs theoretical binding length, and guides rebinding of long commands or unbinding rarely used ones. Install by placing shannon-max.el and a standalone jar, configure load-path and jar path, start the logger, and run M-x shannon-max-analyze. It supports customization for cost, alphabet size, and filtered commands, with noted limitations.
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Bowdoin English professor Maggie Solberg explores how medieval bestiaries repurpose unicorn myths into Christian allegory around the Virgin Mary. In this lens, a unicorn is lured by a virgin, killed by hunters, and its horn valued for healing, paralleling Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion, with the hunter sometimes an archangel. The tale traces to the Physiologus and possibly rhino lore, reinterpreting the unicorn as a potent, tamed force. Solberg also reimagines Mary as proactive, a heroine who seduces God, not merely a passive vessel.
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A live offering from LatentScore.
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Pebble updates February production: Pebble Time 2 (PT2) is in Production Verification Test ahead of mass production (start March 9). Waterproofing improved to 30m; first PT2 units should ship April, with all pre-orders delivered by June. Index 01 also in PVT with 1m IPX8 waterproofing; a $10 ring-size kit and more sizes are being considered. Pebble Round 2 has completed DVT1; firmware remains aligned with PT2, with production planned for late May. Software advances include PebbleOS/mobile app updates: weather enhancements, WhatsApp call representation, iOS fixes, Open-Meteo fallback, native Appstore, and developer SDK improvements.
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RayMakie and Hikari add a GPU-based, Julia-backed path-tracing backend to Makie, enabling photorealistic rendering with global illumination, volumes, spectral materials, and camera-friendly workflow—no data export. Built on Hikari (pbrt-v4 port) and Raycore.jl, the system renders Makie scenes across AMD/NVIDIA/CPU via KernelAbstractions and uses Makie’s API for scene construction. Demos include Breeze (volumetric clouds from Oceananigans.jl), PlantGeom, ProtPlot, TrixiParticles, and Geant4.jl; plus a custom SpacetimeMedium black hole. Interactive mode overlays render progressively refine images. RayMakie is not fully released yet; early access via RayDemo.
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9 Exotic Coding Tricks used in the C64 game Seawolves:
- synchronizes interrupts to reduce raster stalls.
- torpedoes rendered as 24 7px slices.
- hi-res destruction via bit shifts.
- waves via bit-rotating; foreground ripples.
- vertical bands with y-expand and wobble.
- stall a line; re-align with Y-scroll.
- stream in only changed sprite gfx.
- booleans to test multiple conditions.
- conditional branches save a JMP byte.
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Bridging Elixir and Python with Oban demonstrates how to transparently exchange durable jobs between the two ecosystems using a shared Postgres-backed Oban jobs table. The article centers on a 'Badge Forge' demo where Elixir enqueues PDF-generation tasks (WeasyPrint) for a Python worker and Python enqueues confirmations back to Elixir. Both sides read/write the same oban_jobs table, coordinate via PubSub, and run their own leadership. A minimal bridge and sample code show enqueue_batch in Elixir and a Python GenerateBadge worker. Oban Web provides cross-ecosystem monitoring.
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Mini Diarium is an encrypted, local, cross-platform journaling app (Windows/macOS/Linux) built with Tauri, SolidJS, and Rust. It runs offline with AES-256-GCM encryption and no telemetry. Unlock with a password or multiple X25519 key files; each method wraps a master key used to encrypt all entries. Features include rich text, calendar navigation, JSON/Markdown import/export, automatic backups, themes, and preferences. Data never leaves the device; no recovery if you forget the password or lose all key files. Installers per platform; MIT-licensed.
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Lilush is a statically compiled LuaJIT runtime binary under 3MB that bundles networking, crypto, filesystem, terminal UI, and more into a single Linux x86_64 package with no dependencies. Drop it into a scratch Docker container or use as a busybox replacement. It includes a full HTTP(S) client and server with WolfSSL, modern cryptography, filesystem and process tooling, and a UTF-8 terminal UI with styling. It also supports Markdown, JSON, Base64, Redis protocol, embedded WireGuard and ACMEv2 clients, plus runtime docs. The Lilush Shell adds smart prompts, completions, built-in tools, and plugin support.
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Could not summarize article.
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Roya Pakzad argues multilingual AI evaluation reveals guardrails can be steered by hidden policies, shaping summaries and safety. In a Bilingual Shadow Reasoning demo, English and Farsi prompts altered framing of a Iran human-rights report, showing how system prompts can mask violations or propagate propaganda. Through Mozilla’s Multilingual AI Safety Evaluation Lab and guardrail testing, she finds non-English outputs lag in actionability and factuality, while guardrails hallucinate and biases persist. She advocates an evaluation-to-guardrail pipeline—expanding multilingual, voice, and retrieval-enabled guardrails with NGO partners to ensure safer, fairer AI across languages.
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This piece inventories 12 red flags of AI writing (and the green-flag fixes) to help readers spot and fix machine-like content. Flags include overuse of em dashes, corrective antithesis, dramatic pivots, soft hedging, staccato rhythm, cookie-cutter paragraphs, gift-wrapped endings, throat-clearing, perfectionist punctuation, repetitive metaphors, overexplaining, and generic examples. It argues that several red flags imply AI authorship, and promotes a deslop prompt—testable in ChatGPT or Claude—to restore human, natural prose.
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Guimarães contends that AI agents are converging on the BEAM/Erlang actor model: isolated processes, message passing, supervision, fault tolerance, and distributed runtime. BEAM’s lightweight 2KB processes, preemptive scheduling, per-process GC, and hot code swapping are ideal for long‑running, thousands‑concurrent agent sessions. Python and TypeScript offer partial concurrency (GIL limits, non-preemptive threading, no native isolation or live upgrades), while libraries like Akka/Orleans only approximate BEAM. For new, production-scale agent systems, Elixir/BEAM provides a proven runtime; ecosystem patterns (LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI) resemble actors but lack BEAM’s guarantees.
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Thomas Germain explains how he tricked ChatGPT and Google into propagating a false claim that he is a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion. He says it was the dumbest thing of his career, done to prove a serious point about how AI can be manipulated to spread lies, and he promises to reveal how he did it.
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An error message states the request was blocked by security policies (429 Too Many Requests / 400 Bad Request); it advises contacting support if the block is believed to be a mistake.
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Web page cannot load because JavaScript is disabled. A required site component failed to load, possibly due to browser extensions, network issues, or browser settings. Users are advised to check their connection, disable ad blockers, or try a different browser.
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US funding for Internet Freedom, run by the State Department and USAGM, supported grassroots tools to circumvent censorship, totaling over $500m in the last decade (including $94m in 2024). Under Trump, staff left, programs were cut, and no grants were issued in 2025. The Open Technology Fund won a partial restoration in court; the administration is appealing. The January withdrawal from the Freedom Online Coalition weakens global digital rights support. The cuts threaten Iran protests tools, China circumvention tech, and risk a broader 'digital iron curtain.'
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Tempus-Word, once ahead in the 1990s for Atari GEM, survives as a niche historical project. With Atari’s demise and OS evolution, it’s effectively obsolete on modern systems, though emulators allow limited use for long documents with footnotes. Updates stopped decades ago; version 5.4 is likely the last and is offered only to former users to preserve legacy documents. A trial exports to RTF, but new users are advised to use LibreOffice/OpenOffice. Authors: Norbert Simon, Claudio Kronmüller; hosted by Bitpalast.
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Old School Effects: The Cloud Tank explains a practical VFX technique: a large water tank with as two layers (salt water beneath fresh water) where paint or dye is injected to form cloud-like shapes. Shots were filmed from outside or inside the tank and combined with live-action or models, yielding organic but unpredictable results. Used on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, The Wrath of Khan, Flash Gordon, Independence Day, and more, it waned in the late 1990s as CGI advanced. The process required enormous effort, such as 9 tons of salt for Raiders.
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