AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Halide announced a public preview of Halide Mark III, a next‑gen camera app that introduces "Looks"—in‑camera film‑stock–inspired processing that shapes capture, not just edits. Default and HDR‑aware options like Process Zero II offer higher contrast, more detail, and the ability to shoot ProRAW and apply Mark III looks in RAW or in Night Mode. A Tone Fusion slider recovers highlights/shadows using non‑AI tech. New film looks include Chroma Noir with halation and HDR support. Final version due by summer; Mark II purchasers get a free upgrade; Cullen Kelly leads color looks development.
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A lightweight local web app (Org-Web-Adapter) that lets you browse and edit Org-mode notes with editing, backlinks, and rendered math. Implemented as a single Python server plus HTML/CSS/JS front end; scans a notes directory for .org files, builds a 3-pane UI, resolves file: and id: links, shows backlinks, supports editing and saving back to disk, and renders MathJax inline math. No authentication; configurable via config.yaml; notes can be symlinked; not a full Org parser; simple rendering; runs on 127.0.0.1:8000.
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A new Cochrane review of 22 studies (nearly 2,000 adults) finds intermittent fasting (e.g., 5:2, 8-hour windows) makes little to no difference in weight loss or quality of life over up to 12 months, vs standard dieting or no advice. It may improve some health functions, but evidence is uncertain and many studies are small or methodologically limited. Experts warn against hype and recommend personalized, case-by-case guidance. More research is needed on other health outcomes and how effects vary by gender, BMI, and country. Included studies span Europe, North America, China, Australia and South America.
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PlanckForth bootstraps a Forth interpreter from a handwritten 1KB ELF binary for fun, with no practical use. Build requires only xxd: clone, make, then xxd -r -c 8 planck.xxd > planck; chmod +x planck. Run examples like Hello World and bootstrap.fs (which can load a file such as example/fib.fs). The README lists built-in words, runtime semantics, and a handwritten i386-Linux ELF binary. Implementations in other languages exist. MIT license; several contributors.
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Discord disclosed a UK-only “experiment” with Persona, a Thiel-backed identity firm, as part of its age-verification rollout. Data from age checks could be stored on Persona’s servers for up to seven days, with most ID details blurred except for photo and birth date. Critics flag Persona’s Thiel-linked investors and Palantir’s surveillance history, highlighting privacy risks and Discord’s past third-party data breaches. The FAQ on data handling was removed, and Discord hasn’t explained the experiment’s purpose.
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A recently discovered photograph may be the only known portrait of 19th‑century British solar astronomer Richard Carrington, whose 1859 solar flare observations linked solar activity to geomagnetic storms—the Carrington Event. The image surfaced after Royal Astronomical Society archivist Kate Bond found an inscription on a Maull & Polyblank photo bearing Carrington’s name and the initials FRS, suggesting ownership by George Vincent Walker. Authentication, aided by UK libraries, confirms the photo’s provenance. Carrington’s work helped establish space weather as a science; the portrait now reappears in RAS archives.
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DSQL adds sequence support and explains how CACHE controls value prefetching. In distributed deployments, high CACHE values (≥65,536) let backends fetch large chunks, reducing IO and contention, making sequences scale similarly to UUIDs; CACHE=1 yields much lower throughput under concurrent load. Experiments show bulk inserts and multi-user tests favor large cache, with orders of magnitude speedups. Recommendation: use high CACHE for scalable use; use UUIDs if you don’t want coordination; you can ALTER SEQUENCE to adjust CACHE later. SERIAL is discouraged because it wraps a sequence with CACHE=1.
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Apple's iOS 27, code-named 'Rave', will focus on cleaning up internals—removing legacy code, rewriting features, and subtly upgrading apps to improve performance. Gurman says it could deliver a snappier, more responsive OS and efficiency gains that may boost battery life, though Apple hasn't said if gains will be marketed. The update also reportedly includes interface tweaks and advances in AI, with Siri updates arriving in iOS 27. The work aims to stabilize the software ahead of 2026 device launches, such as a touchscreen MacBook Pro and a foldable iPhone.
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Johan Halse contends that in 2026 the dream of building a tiny SaaS is effectively dead. AI boosterism, SEO advantages, and even basic quality don’t matter as platform gatekeepers, walled gardens, and giants control access to customers. The path forward is high‑touch enterprise sales and alignment with a few dominant players; indie developers should abandon solo ventures or join enterprise channels, while the AI hype burns out and leaves little payoff.
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Bluehood is a Python-based Bluetooth scanner that passively listens for nearby devices to reveal what you leak by keeping Bluetooth on. Motivated by privacy concerns and a recent Bluetooth vulnerability (WhisperPair), it demonstrates how observers can infer home presence, schedules, and relationships from device patterns, even with MAC randomization. Some devices can’t be turned off (hearing aids, pacemakers, fleet vehicles), and privacy tools like Briar and BitChat require Bluetooth to operate. Bluehood classifies devices, builds hourly/daily heatmaps, stores data in SQLite, and offers a Docker/web dashboard as an educational demonstration of Bluetooth’s privacy trade-offs.
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Ghidra is an NSA-maintained software reverse engineering framework that analyzes compiled code across Windows, macOS, and Linux. It offers disassembly, decompilation, graphing, scripting, and supports many processor architectures. Users can create extensions and scripts in Java or Python, and it supports interactive and automated use. The project provides installation and build guides, development workflows (Eclipse/VS Code), and contributor resources. Security advisories exist for certain versions. Ghidra is Apache-2.0 licensed, and NSA invites developers and researchers to contribute or pursue cybersecurity roles.
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Danny documents running a self-hosted XMPP server with Prosody in Docker for federated messaging, file sharing, voice/video calls, and OMEMO. He moved most messaging to Signal but wants federation and data control. The guide covers prerequisites (Docker, domain, Let’s Encrypt TLS via Cloudflare DNS SRV records for client and server, an A record for xmpp.example.com, optional upload/conference subdomains), docker-compose setup, Prosody config (carbons, smacks, cloud_notify, mam), security (encrypted connections, internal_hashed auth, disabled registration, OMEMO), HTTP file uploads (port 5280, reverse proxy), MUC and file sharing, TURN/STUN with coturn, account creation, firewall rules, and diagnostics (prosodyctl check, XMPP compliance tester).
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UK’s Ministry of Justice has ordered the deletion of Courtsdesk, the country’s largest court‑reporting database used by about 1,500 journalists across 39 outlets. A cessation notice for alleged unauthorized sharing prompted the archive’s wipe within days. Courtsdesk founder Enda Leahy says the service improved transparency by flagging hearings that courts often didn’t notify the press, while critics warn essential cases could go unreported. HMCTS says press access to court information will continue and listings/records remain available.
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Paragon Solutions, an Israeli mercenary spyware maker behind Graphite, briefly exposed its dashboard on LinkedIn, revealing a surveillance empire targeting journalists, activists, and others. The company’s $900 million sale to AE Industrial Partners, with Ehud Barak among investors, shows private capital profiting from digital insecurity. Graphite provides device‑level intrusion, accessing apps, messages, and media, defeating end‑to‑end encryption once compromised. Researchers say Paragon’s ‘ethical’ framing masks pervasive access, underscoring how surveillance capitalism and state buyers—like ICE—drive global surveillance.
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Western Digital says it has sold out its hard-drive capacity for 2026, with most space spoken for by its top seven customers, including some with 2027–2028 deals. AI firms have sharply driven demand for memory and storage, pushing up prices and creating industry-wide shortages. With consumers accounting for only about 5% of WD revenue, PC RAM and game-console makers face ongoing shortages and price hikes, and some launches could be delayed until supply normalizes.
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Author shows how to roll a GPU-accelerated, serverless OCR using Modal in about 40 lines of code. They deploy a FastAPI app on an A100 GPU container powered by NVIDIA CUDA, loading DeepSeek OCR via transformers. The system batches pages from PDFs (rendered at 2x for accuracy), runs batched inference, decodes with a deterministic setting, and strips grounding tags to produce per-page multimodal Markdown outputs. A local client supplies PDFs, and the server returns text. For a 600-page book, ~45 minutes on A100, costing ~ $2. Useful for searchable archives and math-heavy content.
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Anthropic updated Claude Code to hide file names and specifics of files touched. Version 2.1.20 collapses output to "Read 3 files (ctrl+o to expand)," removing which files and lines were read. Developers say they need file-level visibility for security, auditing, and catching context mistakes. Anthropic’s Boris Cherny calls it UI simplification and notes verbose mode exists; paths can be shown when verbose mode is used, but default remains condensed. The change sparks debate over opacity and trust, with tweaks likely forthcoming.
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vim-pencil rethinks Vim as a writing tool by focusing on prose editing. It enables prose-oriented buffers for text, markdown, mail, reST, TeX, and more, with hard or soft wrap, auto-detection, and optional modeline control. Features include buffer-local initialization by file type, concealment of markup (Markdown), a status-line indicator of mode, and configurable textwidth, joinspaces, and cursor wrap. Autoformat can be suspended in tables or code blocks via blacklists/whitelists; manual reformatting commands are provided. It's pure Vimscript with no deps and integrates with other writing plugins.
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This GitHub repo hosts the Unicode MessageFormat Working Group’s editor copy for the Unicode MessageFormat Standard, a CLDR-supported specification for localizable message strings. It defines an interoperable syntax, data model, and processing to support fluent, locally adapted messages (including gender, inflection, and speech) across frameworks. The standard, part of CLDR and approved by the CLDR Technical Committee, is the normative TR35 specification and supersedes ICU’s earlier formatting. The project invites feedback (issues, discussions) and community contributions, which require a Contributor License Agreement; Invited Expert status may apply. © Unicode, 2019–2025.
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