AI Summarized Hacker News
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MitID er fortsat utilgængeligt. Det er i øjeblikket ikke muligt at logge ind med MitID for borgere og organisationer. Leverandøren arbejder på højtryk for at løse problemet og få MitID tilgængeligt igen. Publiceret 27-02-2026 kl. 10:40; opdateret kl. 11:40.
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Quadtrees partition 2D space by recursively splitting rectangular regions into four quadrants. Regions exceed a capacity and subdivide, so dense areas get fine granularity while sparse areas stay coarse. This enables fast point insertion, targeted searches, and efficient range queries by pruning large swaths of space. Nearest-neighbor searches visit promising branches first and prune the rest; average-case near O(log4 n). Quadtrees also support collision detection, image compression by merging uniform regions, and multi-resolution maps. Related structures include octrees, KD-trees, and R-trees used in GIS and graphics.
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Nominations are open for up to four F-Droid Board of Directors positions (two-year terms). Nominators may nominate themselves or others (with permission); Email [email protected] (one nomination per email) and copy the nominee. Deadline: March 16 AoE. Open to candidates from all backgrounds who support user freedoms, especially on mobile; no prior board or dev experience required. Include justification, links, and qualifications. Selection by the current Board (private discussion and vote), with new candidates weighted more. Directors commit ~1–3 hours/week plus a monthly 1-hour public video call; English required. Current members listed; terms ending: Sebastian Crane, Peter Serwylo, Hans-Christoph Steiner, John Sullivan.
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Dyson has settled a UK lawsuit by 24 migrant workers from Nepal and Bangladesh who alleged forced and abusive treatment at a Malaysian factory that makes Dyson parts, including threats, beatings, passport withholding, and long hours. Dyson denied liability. The settlement, which does not disclose compensation or admit liability, ends the case and reinforces that English courts can hear claims against foreign suppliers to British manufacturers. Dyson moved manufacturing to Malaysia in 2002 and HQ to Singapore in 2019.
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An open-source, browser-based Cambridge AS Level Chemistry Lab Simulator (9701 Paper 3). It lets students practice past-paper experiments at home with a complete virtual bench, real-time feedback, and automated marking. Features include 23 past papers (Feb/Mar 2021–2025), configurable glassware and reagents, observable color/ gas changes, measurement-precision hints, per-question answer boxes with inline tables/graphs, a free lab mode, and exportable PDF reports. The UI is multilingual, works offline, and running locally requires Node.js 20+. Licensed MIT.
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Explains the pain of remembering the Smalltalk rewrite engine syntax and introduces BPatterns, a Smalltalk-native DSL that wraps the rewrite engine with blocks as patterns. A bpattern is created by sending #bpattern to a block; any-prefixed names act as wildcards, others must match structurally. It preserves the engine’s matching while offering a friendlier interface usable with standard tools. You can search and rewrite with normal Smalltalk helpers, and refine patterns with #with:. Patterns can rename, swap keywords, or be filtered by blocks. Not all features are exposed yet; full method patterns are supported (#bmethod).
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Mozilla recently added AI controls to Firefox—a global 'Block AI enhancements' switch with per-feature toggles. The piece argues this kill switch is a trap: it shifts ethical responsibility for AI onto users and reframes the debate as one of opt-in vs opt-out, letting Mozilla sidestep concerns about AI in the browser. It claims translation models claimed to use open data are actually trained on copyrighted material, and that Mozilla partners with closed AI vendors, undermining open-source ideals and overwriting community contributions. In short, the kill switch is a distraction and turns AI into the user’s problem, not Mozilla’s.
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An article by antirez recounts a 'clean room' Z80 and ZX Spectrum emulator built with Claude Code. The author writes a detailed spec, forbids internet access, and has Claude Code first gather offline documentation, then implement Z80, then Spectrum (and CP/M). The Z80 emulator passes ZEXDOC and ZEXALL in about 1,200 lines of C code with minimal steering and extensive testing; Spectrum adds TAP loading and optional framebuffer; CP/M follows. Takeaway: provide agents with thorough design docs and rules; LLMs assemble knowledge rather than copy it, and future tests could omit documentation to compare results.
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Ubicloud is an open-source cloud offering an AWS-style alternative. It’s hiring mid-level software engineers (2–8 years, CS degree) to work on Postgres, GitHub Actions, and AI inference. Openings in San Francisco, the Netherlands, and Turkey (remote for NL/TR). Salary $95k–$250k with 0.15%–0.50% equity. Ubicloud serves 500+ customers, emphasizes growth mindset and autonomous problem-solving, and may include an AI-assisted project in the interview. The company can self-host or provide managed services on bare metal; founded 2023, ~15 employees.
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Agar, introduced in 1881, became essential as a microbial culture medium. During WWII, nations stockpiled Gelidium seaweed, harvested by volunteers, to keep vaccines and penicillin flowing. Fanny Hesse, wife of Walther Hesse, inspired Koch to switch from gelatine to agar, popularizing the plating method that proved microbes cause disease. Agar's chemistry—agarose and agaropectin, from red seaweeds and Gelidium as main lab source—yields heat-stable, transparent gels that are cheap and easy to use. Despite attempts to replace it with carrageenan, bacterial cellulose, or other colloids, no substitute matches its balance of performance, cost, and ecosystem.
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Julia performance hinges on writing performance-critical code inside functions, avoiding untyped or abstract globals, and ensuring type-stability. Measure with @time and inspect allocations; preallocate outputs; prefer in-place operations and views; use dot-broadcast fusion to fuse loops but beware over-fusing. Use memory-friendly patterns: access arrays in column-major order, preallocate, and consider StaticArrays for small fixed-size data. Break code into kernel functions and monitor captured variables; precompile packages to reduce startup cost; manage BLAS threads; consider alternative backends (MKL, Accelerate). Minimize string allocations and I/O overhead; use @inbounds, @fastmath, and @simd when safe; beware of multiple-dispatch explosions.
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Rendered 1,418 TR39 confusables across 230 fonts; 96.5% not visually confusable, but 82 pairs are pixel-identical in at least one font. Using 48x48 greyscale renders and SSIM, same-font pairs are most dangerous; cross-font risk is lower. Cyrillic homoglyphs (а, е, о, р, с, у, х) and Roman numerals map to identical glyphs in many standard fonts; Greek ο and Hebrew Paseq cause hits. Web risk depends on font choice and rendering context; address bars and web fonts matter. Recommends weighting max same-font SSIM, separating same vs cross-font, script thresholds namespace-guard. Limitations: macOS-only fonts, no context, single weight. Repro steps provided.
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The 80386 uses two-stage protection: segmentation (selector+offset to linear) and paging (linear to physical), with segmentation always active and paging optional. A dedicated Protection Test Unit (Test PLA) evaluates all privilege/limit rules in parallel, returning continue, fault, or gate-dispatch signals. LD_DESCRIPTOR with PTSAV/PTOVRR lets different callers apply different tests via a shared path. The design uses three delay slots to overlap protection work with instruction flow. A hardware page walker runs the paging state machine while a 32-entry TLB speeds translations (misses ~20 cycles). Virtual 8086 mode enables real-mode DOS apps under protection, with trap-and-emulate for I/O and privileged instructions.
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Graydon2 humorously argues that computers should have stopped in 1993, using four pillars: 1) hardware—the MIPS R4000 era (about 1.2M transistors) as ideal complexity, with ARM6, SH-2, Alpha as alternatives; 2) distributed OS—OSF/1 with DCE, Kerberos, RPC and distributed FS, alongside Windows NT and Plan 9; 3) languages—Modula-3, Sather, Dylan, avoiding Java, PHP, JavaScript; 4) the web—still niche in 1993 (Gopher, IRC, FTP, NNTP, WAIS). Semi-satirical; no questions accepted; suggests a different tech path might have been better.
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Demystifies how to implement instruction-level stepping and breakpoints by layering a control loop over a Windows debugger loop. Starting from a basic debugger that launches a process via CreateProcessA with DEBUG_PROCESS and processes WaitForDebugEvent/ContinueDebugEvent, it adds user commands (Resume, Quit, InstStep, SetBreakpoint) and a loop that reads commands, then waits for and handles debug events. The debugger decides when to pause or resume based on events (e.g., exceptions or a completed step/breakpoint) and when to terminate the debuggee. The result is a design that couples stepping/breakpoints to the event loop.
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After the State of the Union, House Republicans introduced H.R. 7661, the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, to modify the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to bar funds for programs or materials for under-18s that include sexually oriented material. Led by Rep. Mary Miller with 17 cosponsors, the bill defines sexually oriented material broadly to include references to gender dysphoria or transgenderism and would effectively ban LGBTQ+ books in public schools and potentially libraries. It follows a wave of anti-trans legislation; the article urges readers to contact lawmakers to veto the bill and notes ongoing lawsuits.
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OpenLDK’s Java mapping makes SBCL dispatch behave as multi-method, slowing Clojure bootstrap through thousands of <init>() methods. The fix: implement Java-style single dispatch inside the MOP. A java-generic-function metaclass adds dispatch-cache and invoke-special-cache with a lock; compute-discriminating-function now does a per-receiver-class hash lookup and caches the resulting effective method, avoiding full MOP dispatch on hits. update-dfun is intercepted to clear caches and reinstall the fast discriminating function instead of rebuilding the net for every class addition. Hot generics are pre-created (e.g., <init>(), clone()); an extra invokespecial cache is added. Bootstrap drops from ~2h45m to ~2m40s; ~120 LOC in openldk.
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Proposes moving the test suite from the open-source tldraw/tldraw repo to a closed-source repository. The monorepo contains about 327 tests (vitest unit/integration and Playwright e2e) across packages/tldraw, editor, store, utils, sync-core, tlschema, validate, sync, and apps. Scope: move all vitest unit/integration tests, all Playwright e2e tests, test configurations and helpers; ensure CI runs the full SDK test suite in the closed repo; remove test files from the open-source repo.
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