AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Advocates setting a user-agent and complying with the site's robots policy, with related Wikimedia links.
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It notes HTTP errors 429 and 400, saying the request is blocked by the server's security policies, and advises contacting support if this is an error.
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Radboud University will adopt Fairphone as its standard employee smartphone from 1 February 2026, citing sustainability, cost efficiency and easier management. Fairphone’s replaceable battery and screen, fair/recycled materials, and emphasis on safe working conditions support longer lifespans. The university may reissue used Samsung devices that meet requirements. iPhones may still be used if functional; RU SIMs can be requested for private devices, with no reimbursement for personal devices. Benefits include lower total costs, simpler stock/maintenance, and a circularity strategy with five-year warranty and up to eight years of software support.
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Self Sanitizing Door Handle uses a TiO2 photocatalytic coating activated by UV light to kill surface bacteria. A kinetic-energy generator powers a UV-LED as the door moves, with light reflections inside a transparent handle activating the exterior coating. Inspired by Hong Kong’s 2003 SARS outbreak, the team moved from stainless steel to aluminium to reduce weight and improve the generator. The design is chemical-free, durable, and targets public spaces; award-winning.
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Requests setting a user-agent and complying with the robots policy; references: https://w.wiki/4wJS and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T400119.
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mTOTP is an experimental, human‑executable variant of TOTP designed to be computed without electronic devices. It uses a 10‑digit secret key and a planned login time to deterministically generate a 6‑digit OTP through seven steps: build a time vector from the time; derive a digit S‑box from the key; add time and key digits mod 10; apply the S‑box; diffusion (digit mixing); fold to five digits; compute the final digit o6 and append to form OTP5+o6. Example: key 1234598760 and time 2026‑01‑17 17:00 yields 510769. MIT license; PAM/Keycloak plugins TBD.
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Bitchat is a decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app using Bluetooth mesh networks. It requires no internet, servers, or phone numbers; devices act as both client and server, discovering peers and relaying messages across hops. It offers censorship and surveillance resistance and works during outages or in low-connectivity regions. Available for iOS/macOS (App Store), Android (Play Store), with source code on GitHub, builds via Xcode or Swift Package Manager, API 26+, public domain. Documentation: whitepaper. Supports iOS 16+/macOS 13+, Android 8+.
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This release introduces /intent-layer, the first context-engineering skill from Crafter Station, to help AI agents navigate codebases. The problem: the same model yields very different results across repos due to missing a mental map of a project. The solution: Context Engineering—designing all information an agent needs (system prompts, structured inputs, tools, memory) with Intent Layer handling the system-prompt infrastructure. It creates AGENTS.md at folder boundaries, detailing purpose, contracts, and pitfalls. It detects existing CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, analyzes code structure, and suggests where to add context, then audits as code grows. Open source.
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Author recounts spending about 10k hours with Claude Code and experimenting with Gas Town by Steve Yegge. While appreciating Gas Town as a glimpse into low-touch agent-based workflows, he finds it slows him down and reduces his sense of agency due to agents doing work and limited visibility. Beads, which underpins Gas Town, uses a git-stored state and represents task dependencies as a graph, but its storage in git can pollute PRs; he prefers understanding the code and PRs. He believes Gas Town is cool and promising but not yet for him, though he remains curious about the code.
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pdfwithlove markets itself as a private alternative to iLovePDF and Smallpdf.
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This post compares Kafka's blocking behavior with beanstalkd in a queue-like workload. Kafka uses partitions and consumer groups; if a consumer is slow, its partition stalls pending messages, unlike beanstalkd which hands out jobs to workers. 100 jobs (four with 10s sleep) are produced and consumed by five workers on each system. Kafka uses 10 partitions (two per consumer); beanstalkd uses a single tube with five. Results: beanstalkd finishes 96 messages in under 1s; Kafka shows two 10s gaps, slowing total time. Conclusion: Kafka latency suffers under workload; beanstalkd is efficient here, while Kafka scales with subscribers.
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aws-doctor is a Go-based, open-source CLI that diagnoses AWS costs, detects idle resources, and optimizes cloud spend from the terminal. It offers: 1) Cost Comparison (current vs previous month); 2) Waste Detection of idle resources; 3) Trend Analysis over 6 months. It aims to match AWS Trusted Advisor insights without paid plans. Install with go install github.com/elC0mpa/aws-doctor@latest; flags: --profile, --region, --trend, --waste. Checks include unused EBS volumes, EBS on stopped EC2, unassociated EIPs, expiring/expired reserved instances, idle load balancers, inactive endpoints/gateways, and idle RDS.
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An author simulates the ladybug clock puzzle: starting at 12 (position 0), the bug moves to an adjacent hour (±1) with wraparound until all 12 markers are visited; the final position is returned. Early guesses favored 6, but after many trials the last-hour distribution becomes uniform over 1–11, each with probability 1/11 (~9%). He also asks for the expected number of moves to visit all markers.
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UltraThink is deprecated; extended thinking is now default for supported Claude models, with a 31,999 token thinking budget. On 64K-output models you can unlock 63,999 thinking tokens by setting MAX_THINKING_TOKENS=63999 (per-session) or exporting it in your shell. This applies to Opus 4.5, Sonnet 4.5/4, Haiku 4.5 (and Opus 4 is limited to 31,999). You can disable thinking by MAX_THINKING_TOKENS=0 or alwaysThinkingEnabled: false. The hidden unlock doubles the thinking budget but incurs cost/latency. Thinking tokens enable longer reasoning (Chain-of-Thought).
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Calquio’s Free Compound Interest Calculator lets you model investment growth with compounding. Input a starting amount, regular contributions, interest rate, compounding frequency, and time to compute a future value. It explains the compound-interest formulas (including continuous compounding) and the Rule of 72, and shows how more frequent compounding, early investing, and reinvesting boosts returns. An example shows a $10,000 starting balance growing to about $73,281 after 20 years.
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Could not summarize article.
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astronomical object visibility plotter provides an online tool to forecast object visibility from various observatories, given date/time, location, and instrument field of view. It computes altitude, airmass, night length, civil/astronomical twilight, Moon phase, and light pollution. It supports uploading object lists, resolving coordinates with Sesame/Miriade, and interactive charts (daily/annual/sky-view). It includes a comprehensive database of hundreds of observatories with coordinates, elevation, timezone, and sky brightness, plus an extensive catalog of instrument FOVs and object type taxonomy (stars, galaxies, planets, transient events).
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OpenCode prior to v1.1.10 had a dangerous RCE via its HTTP API, exposing POST /session/:id/shell, POST /pty, and GET /file/content, enabling arbitrary code execution and prompt-injection within the LLM context. The author compares it to Bottlerocket's hard-earned fixes and shows how it was easy to exploit. They provide reproduction steps in a sandbox to demonstrate command execution and prompt manipulation. The post argues for AI agent telemetry and auditing tooling, noting agents' wide permissions (full disk, keys, cookies) and the need for mission control to prevent widespread compromise.
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A derailment near Adamuz, Andalusia, Spain, killed at least 21 people and injured more than 70 after a high-speed train from Malaga to Madrid derailed and collided with an oncoming Madrid-to-Huelva train. About 300 on the first train and 100 on the second. 30+ seriously injured. Investigation may take a month. Train type Freccia 1000; speeds up to 400 km/h. Madrid-Andalusia services suspended; relatives’ centers set up. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez expresses sorrow; King and Queen respond; Macron and von der Leyen offer condolences. References a 2013 Galicia derailment.
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Shihab Khan evaluates AVX-512 on an image-segmentation K-means benchmark (8 clusters) to compare scalar, auto-vectorized, and hand-tuned intrinsics. Using an AMD EPYC 9654, the theoretical peak is 59.2 GF/s; the workload (~5M pixels, 20 iters, ~200 flops/pixel) should finish in ~337 ms. Results: both AVX2/AVX-512 improve over scalar, but not ideal 8x–16x. Hand-written intrinsics deliver 7–8.5x over scalar and ~4x faster than auto-vectorized. Auto-vectorization lags due to inner-loop vectorization. CUDA mirrors SIMD patterns but adds warp-divergence. Verdict: AVX-512 is promising for performance and programmability; explicit SIMD plus future LLM-assisted porting looks viable.
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