AI Summarized Hacker News

Front-page articles summarized hourly.

Mercury 2: The fastest reasoning LLM, powered by diffusion

Mercury 2 is Inception’s diffusion-based, real-time reasoning LLM designed for production latency. It generates tokens in parallel via iterative refinement, delivering >1000 tokens/sec on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. Price: $0.25/1M input tokens and $0.75/1M output tokens. Features include tunable reasoning, 128K context, native tool use, and schema-aligned JSON output. Targets latency-sensitive apps: coding/editing, agentic pipelines, real-time voice, and multi-hop search/RAG. OpenAI API compatible and available now, with enterprise evaluation options.

Fed's Cook says AI triggering big changes, sees possible unemployment rise

Could not summarize article.

Stripe reportedly makes offer to acquire PayPal

Could not summarize article.

The history of knocking on wood

Benjamin Breen uses knocking on wood to explore gesture as a boundary between nature and nurture. He surveys cross‑cultural variants and sparse written evidence, skeptical of ancient origins or a single source, and, with data visualization, identifies two linked traditions—wood and iron—centered around the Mediterranean, likely rooted in ancient apotropaic practices rather than a 19th‑century English game. He argues most gesture is tacit, embodied knowledge humans carry, which AI cannot fully learn, and urges historians to participate in technical debates about future technologies.

Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid

Cape is a privacy-first mobile carrier that minimizes data collection and deletes data quickly. It offers IMSI rotation, two free secondary numbers, last-mile encrypted texting, encrypted voicemail, private payment, SIM swap protection, and network lock. It includes secure global roaming in 50+ countries with 5GB/month and unlimited talk/text/data with throttling after 50GB; no contract. A $30 first-month trial (TRYCAPE30) auto-renews at $99/month. Partnerships with Proton and support for GrapheneOS; bring-your-own-device or Pixel/GrapheneOS devices; referrals can cut bills.

We Are Changing Our Developer Productivity Experiment Design

METR is changing its developer productivity experiment design after a second study (Aug 2025) with 57 developers across 143 repos and 800+ tasks. The 2025 work found AI tools slowed tasks by 19% in the original study, while the newer results for later participants show speedups of -18% and -4%, but selection effects—more developers opting out without AI and a lower pay rate ($50/h vs $150/h)—and timing/multi-agent measurement issues likely make the estimates unreliable and possibly biased downward. Plan: shorter, intensive experiments; fixed-task designs; developer-level randomization; more observational data, surveys, evaluations, and alternative measures.

Show HN: Recursively apply patterns for pathfinding

Could not summarize article.

Optophone

It instructs to set a user-agent and respect the robots policy, with links to w.wiki/4wJS and Wikimedia Phabricator ticket T400119.

Dream Recorder AI – a portal to your subconscious

A title about recording dreams and speaking them aloud.

Pi – a minimal terminal coding harness

pi.dev is a minimal, extensible terminal coding harness you tailor to your workflow. Extend it with TypeScript extensions, skills, prompts, and themes, packaged as pi packages via npm or git. It offers four modes (interactive TUI, print/JSON, RPC, SDK) and supports 15+ providers and many models (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Hugging Face, etc.) with API keys or OAuth and mid‑session model switching. Sessions are tree‑structured with context engineering, auto‑compaction, export/share options, and per-project prompts and templates. Core is extension-driven; no sub‑agents, plan mode, or built‑in to‑dos—only extensibility.

Show HN: Moonshine Open-Weights STT models – higher accuracy than WhisperLargev3

Moonshine Voice is an open-source, on-device ASR framework optimized for live, streaming speech on edge devices. It ships with fast, private transcription and command recognition without cloud access, supports Python, iOS, Android, MacOS, Linux, Windows, and IoT, and includes a portable C++ core with language bindings. It offers multilingual and language-specific models, incremental audio streaming with input caching, and an event-driven API (Transcriber, MicTranscriber, Stream, Transcript, IntentRecognizer). It aims for sub-200 ms latency, lower compute than Whisper in live use, and easy model downloading and benchmarking.

How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

Cloudflare rebuilt Next.js as vinext, a Vite-based drop-in replacement that implements the Next.js API and deploys to Cloudflare Workers with one command. In under a week, aided by AI, an engineer and Claude wrote most code; benchmarks show production builds 4x faster and client bundles ~57% smaller than Next.js 16.1.6. vinext supports ISR, uses Traffic-aware Pre-Rendering to pre-render only frequently visited pages, and includes a Cloudflare KV cache. It’s experimental and open-source at cloudflare/vinext, with extensive testing and early production use.

Why High FOV Sucks – Fixing It with Panini Projection

Could not summarize article.

Variable interpolatable smooth curves and outlines

An overview of building variable-width, interpolatable curves for font design using a two-parameter spline (Raph Levien) that yields cubic Béziers with G^2 continuity inside segments and G^1 at joins. The workflow: (1) preprocess points, (2) optimize tangents to minimize curvature mismatch with a damped Newton method and an ellipse-weighted error, (3) render. For outlines, it uses a linear offset B_offset = B + w D to create stroke outlines that stay interpolatable when width varies. To fix joins, a skeleton-guided, multi-stage correction (classification, skeleton checks, re-fit) enforces G^1 continuity. Demonstrations on Malayalam and notes on variable-font constraints and Kurbo.

Pentagon threatens to make Anthropic a pariah

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned Anthropic to drop guardrails on its Claude AI for military use or face termination of its roughly $200 million Pentagon contract and possible government blacklist. The Pentagon seeks “all lawful use” of the model; Anthropic refuses to drop protections around autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, citing safety and lack of regulation. Officials warned of possible actions under the Defense Production Act or a supply-chain risk designation, which could disrupt government and enterprise work. Talks have been ongoing; Anthropic stresses safe, responsible use and has positioned itself as a safety-focused frontier AI company.

Manjaro website off-line again due to lapsed certificate

A 403 Forbidden error indicating you don’t have permission to access the resource.

Looks Like it is Happening

Peter Woit reflects on Sabine Hossenfelder’s claim that AI could end the “end of theory” by rapidly producing papers, reshaping the grant-driven system. He samples arXiv hep-th submissions and finds recent counts rising sharply (e.g., 12/2022–12/2025: 634, 684, 780, 1192; early 2026: 1137 in two weeks), suggesting AI-enabled writing could inflate output. He doubts his ability to do deeper analysis yet and invites others to investigate, while noting the difficulty of distinguishing human and AI comments and promising to moderate for relevance but not delete non-human input.

Apple Accelerates US Manufacturing

Apple announces a major U.S. manufacturing expansion in Houston: Mac mini production will begin later this year at a new Houston facility, alongside expanded AI-server manufacturing and a 20,000-square-foot Advanced Manufacturing Center for hands-on training. The plan, part of Apple’s $600 billion U.S. investment, will create thousands of jobs and strengthen domestic chip and hardware production. Apple has already sourced 20+ billion U.S.-made chips, and related projects include GlobalWafers’ Sherman wafer facility, Amkor’s Peoria packaging plant, Corning’s Kentucky cover-glass facility, and Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit.

Build Your Own Forth Interpreter

A guide to building a Forth-like interpreter (stack-based, RPN) with a seven-step progression. Step Zero sets scope (CLI/web/desktop) and learns Forth. Step 1 builds a basic REPL with bye. Step 2 adds integers and arithmetic. Step 3 introduces stack words: dup, drop, rot, over, swap. Step 4 adds IO words for printing and strings. Step 5 enables defining new words and handling unknowns, plus comments. Step 6 adds conditionals and loops (comparison operators, invert, if/then, do). Step 7 supports running code from scripts. Going Further covers resources and examples (FizzBuzz, Fibonacci) and sharing solutions.

Hacking an old Kindle to display bus arrival times

Repurposes an old Kindle (Touch 4th Gen) into a live bus-arrival display that refreshes every minute. Steps: jailbreak, install KUAL & MRPI, enable SSH, run a server that serves an HTML endpoint and a generated PNG image of bus times (pulled from NJ Transit GraphQL), using wkhtmltoimage in Docker to refresh every few minutes. A custom KUAL app starts the dashboard; pressing the menu button exits, restarting the Kindle UI when needed. Battery lasts ~5 days; color bleed and optimization remain areas for improvement.

Made by Johno Whitaker using FastHTML