AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Semantic syntax highlighting for Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp in Emacs. The package lisp-semantic-hl.el provides lexical-environment-based highlighting using CLtL2 environment APIs, with enhanced macro support. Ported from LispWorks' "colourful". Usage: load lisp-semantic-hl.el and enable lisp-semantic-hl-mode in emacs-lisp-mode or lisp-mode (e.g., use-package with :hook ((emacs-lisp-mode lisp-mode) . lisp-semantic-hl-mode)). License GPL-3.0. Repository: calsys456/lisp-semantic-hl.el; 15 stars, 2 forks.
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An history of cash automation and ATMs, centered on IBM's pivotal but ultimately outsized role. It starts with 1930s branch ledgers and punched cards, moves to ERMA (1959) and automated check processing, then the 2984 cash-issuing terminal connected over Bisync to System/360. The story traces the System/360/370 era, the 3600 family, and the rise of networked ATMs like the 3614/3624, which introduced envelope deposits and the 3624 PIN algorithm. IBM's ATM line waned after the 4700/473x era, yielding InterBold with Diebold; DES owes its origin to ATM cryptography.
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OSTree treats Linux systems as versioned snapshots with atomic updates, rollbacks, and overlays for /etc, enabling container-like reproducibility; it manages files and packages via rpm-ostree. Bootc runs a complete OS directly from an OCI image, enabling installation media, VMs, or cloud deployment with an immutable runtime. The two complement each other: OSTree handles content; Bootc handles image creation and deployment. A Fedora Silverblue workflow is shown: build OCI images with podman, create installers with bootc-image-builder, deploy via bootc switch/upgrade, and update by rebuilding images to avoid drift.
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An effect-based architecture records world interactions as Command objects and replays them from a trace to reproduce production bugs locally. The article uses a checkout flow as example, showing a trace of fetch cart, validate promo, and charge card, culminating in an invalid_amount error. A simple timeTravel runner replays steps against the initial input, enabling deterministic debugging without mocks or touching external services. It also supports redaction of sensitive data and keeps core logic pure, offering a practical, lightweight (<100 lines) approach to time-travel debugging.
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Manim-web is a TypeScript/JavaScript port of the Manim animation library that runs in the browser. It enables mathematical animations without Python. Quick Start uses npm install and code examples (e.g., Square transforming into Circle with Create, Transform, FadeOut). It supports 2D/3D shapes, text/LaTeX, graphs, transforms, and animations; exports GIF/video; and offers React and Vue components. It provides a Python-to-TypeScript converter, and MIT-licensed open source with setup and contribution guidance.
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Croatia announced it is officially free of landmines after 31 years since the Homeland War, having cleared about 107,000 mines and 407,000 unexploded ordnance. The operation cost roughly €1.2 billion and claimed 208 lives, including 41 deminers. Interior Minister Davor Božinović said demining was completed in line with the Ottawa Convention and fulfills a moral obligation to victims. A mine-free Croatia is expected to boost safety, farmland, rural development and tourism.
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Security researchers disclosed vulnerabilities in the GitHub Copilot CLI that permit remote code execution via indirect prompt injection, allowing malware to be downloaded and run with no user approval beyond the initial query. The attacker bypasses URL permissions by abusing a hard-coded read-only command list (eg, env) and misparsing curl/sh, so external URLs aren’t checked. The attack chain starts with a user query to Copilot, injections in an untrusted repository, and ends with malware execution. Microsoft deemed it a known issue with no immediate risk, though macOS-specific and other OS risks exist. Disclosure Feb 2026.
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Could not summarize article.
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The piece urges stopping the use of passkeys with PRF to encrypt user data (backups, files, wallets) because it widens the blast radius of credential loss. While PRF has valid uses in WebAuthn for credential managers and OS unlocking, coupling a single passkey to encryption makes users vulnerable if they delete the key or lose access. The author asks the industry to stop promoting passkeys for encryption, and calls for warnings in credential managers and clear usage disclosures on sites that still employ PRF for data protection.
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I've switched from Zsh/Fish/Bash to Eshell in Emacs, because Eshell fits my workflow: start in Emacs, open a shell for quick file manipulation, and return. Eshell is a Lisp REPL embedded in Emacs, giving OS‑independent behavior, access to Emacs functions, and powerful file-filtering using predicates and modifiers (similar to Zsh). It supports Lisp-like and shell-like syntax, listify, and user-defined predicates, plus handy helpers like eshell-here to spawn a shell in a buffer’s directory and eshell/x to quit. Drawbacks: programs that control the terminal may break Eshell; some limitations with top.
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President Trump ordered the federal government to stop using Anthropic’s AI, with a six-month phaseout, while the Pentagon designated Anthropic a national-security supply-chain risk and barred military contractors from working with it over concerns about mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. Anthropic plans to challenge the designation in court, arguing limits on authority and potential harm to American interests. The dispute highlights tensions over AI use in defense procurement as Anthropic pursues an IPO and other firms seek military access under safeguards.
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Could not summarize article.
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GNU Awk 5.4.0 released. Major update: MinRX becomes default regexp engine (old engines kept); new @nsinclude; improved bit-shift behavior; updated persistent-memory handling; ordchr supports multibyte characters; length(array) is now POSIX-compliant. Also adds --enable-O3, updates to manuals, and many bug fixes. Port updates (OpenVMS, Windows/Cygwin) and general performance tweaks. Bug reports via gawkbug; credits to Mike Haertel, Eli Zaretskii, and others.
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Anthropic issued a statement in response to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's move to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk over two asserted exceptions to Claude: mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. Anthropic says it cannot reach an agreement; it will challenge the designation in court, arguing it is legally unsound and would set a dangerous precedent. Legally, 10 USC 3252 designations would only apply to Claude use on DoW contracts, not broader use. Individual customers and commercial contracts remain unaffected. Anthropic remains committed to lawful national-security uses and will oversee a smooth transition for DoW operations while protecting customers.
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An open letter 'We Will Not Be Divided' inviting current/former Google and OpenAI employees to sign, anonymously or publicly. Signatures are verified before publication; anonymous signatories have personal data deleted within 24 hours; public signers have their name and affiliation displayed. Verification can be via work email or alternative proofs. The organizers stress neutrality, non-affiliation with parties or AI companies, and non-payment. The page describes deduplication, privacy, and administration. The site uses Fly.io, SQLite, Resend; no analytics.
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Could not summarize article.
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An advert for Hire Yourself, a free self-employment contract generator from hired.wtf. It treats work as You, Inc.—one full-time slot you fill wherever you do your best work, with compensation set by you and reporting to yourself. Apply by naming a role (e.g., Chief Novel Completion Officer). The page shows mock recent hires and a 3-step process: apply, answer six questions to receive a formal contract, then sign. Free, no account, no watermark. Includes a tongue-in-cheek termination notice if you quit.
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AdderBoard documents the smallest autoregressive transformer that can add two 10-digit numbers with ≥99% accuracy on 10,000 held-out tests. Solutions fall into hand-coded and trained weights, with a leaderboard of parameter counts and claimed accuracies. Tiny hand-coded models reach 36 params; trained models as low as ~311 params using rank-3 factorization, with d=4 or d=7 and ALiBi tricks. Core rules require a genuine self-attention Transformer, fixed input/output formatting, and 99% accuracy on 10k tests (seed 2025). Submissions are via GitHub issues or PRs; verification via verify.py.
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Could not summarize article.
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An accessible overview of distributed systems, explaining how distance and independent failures shape design choices in data-center and internet-scale systems. It introduces core concepts—scalability, availability, latency, fault tolerance—and shows how abstractions and models (system, failure, and consistency models) guide tradeoffs. The text covers time, order, and clocks (Lamport and vector clocks), failure detectors, and the CAP theorem and FLP result. It then details replication patterns (partitioning, replication), strong-consistency protocols (2PC, Paxos, Raft, ZAB) and their limits, and weakly consistent approaches (Dynamo, CRDTs, CALM, PBS). It highlights read repair, gossip, Merkle trees, and reconciliation as ways to achieve convergence after partitions.
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