AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
GitHub Pages 404: no site found; directs readers to documentation on setting up GitHub Pages for a repository/organization/user.
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Good Code is readable, maintainable, and purposeful—rare but worth pursuing. The author laments its apparent decline. A colleague’s attempt to rewrite a Linux kernel integration from C to Rust started acceptable but failed to be Good Code; after deeply understanding the subsystem and redoing the Rust, the result became elegant and self-explanatory, perhaps even better than the original C. Now coding agents draft first versions that are merely functional. The piece mourns the “silent death” of Good Code.
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The FDA announced it will take decisive steps to restrict GLP-1 active pharmaceutical ingredients used in non-FDA-approved compounded drugs marketed as alternatives to FDA-approved products (including by compounding pharmacies such as Hims & Hers). The goal is to protect consumers when FDA cannot verify quality, safety, or efficacy. The agency will crack down on misleading direct-to-consumer advertising, prohibiting claims that non-FDA-approved compounded GLP-1 products are generic versions or clinically proven. Violators face enforcement actions, including seizure or injunction.
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gitBlack traces America’s foundations through Black presence in everyday technology, highlighting hidden or commented-out commit histories. The project features 28 repositories, released at one per day, and includes works such as The Exhibit of American Negroes, followed by a sequence of similarly titled pieces (the rest of the text is garbled).
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Claim: LLM agents will supplant traditional languages as the new high-level programming paradigm. A human would build 10x more with autonomous agent fleets; output quality trade-offs are tolerated if productivity grows. The future stack comprises Documentation, Implementation, Dialogs, and Tasks, with agents constantly churning to produce and refine code and data. MCP enables tool calling to break silos and create a dynamic 'cell'—a grid of code/data plus docs and dashboards. Real-world concerns include quality, understandability, cost, and version control, requiring server-backed persistence.
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Marc Brooker argues that while coding costs have plummeted, building reliable, end-to-end systems remains hard. He presents two futures: Road One—the gradual end of programming as a distinct craft—and Road Two—the rise of transformative tools offering great economic and technical opportunities, albeit with risk. Progress will hinge on solving stubborn integration problems and pursuing new ideas. The second act of software will be more interesting and valuable, and he expresses excitement to be part of it.
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Tiny C Compiler (TCC) is a tiny, portable C compiler that fits on rescue disks (~100 KB) and can compile and execute C code with no linking or assembly. It generates x86 code directly (no bytecode) and is ~9× faster than GCC in tests. It supports any C dynamic library, aims for ISOC99 compliance, and can compile itself. Includes a full C preprocessor and GNU-like assembler, supports C scripts (#!/path -run), and can be used via libtcc as a backend for dynamic code generation. Offers an optional memory/bounds checker and LGPL (Fabrice Bellard).
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Suspected sabotage disrupted northern Italy’s rail network as the Winter Olympics began. Police linked three incidents to the Games: a fire damaging lines between Bologna and Venice causing up to 2.5-hour delays; severed cables and an explosive device found nearby; and a track switch set alight near Pesaro, with similar cables found near Bologna and a rudimentary explosive. Transport Minister Salvini called it serious sabotage, likening it to Paris 2024. Bologna’s high-speed line briefly closed; services were returning to normal by Saturday afternoon. No group claimed responsibility yet.
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Proposes a chroma compression method using YCrCb where chroma is predicted from luma in a block-wise linear model. For each block (16x16, or smaller), fit Cr = aY + b via least squares across Y, and store C1 = aYmin + b and C2 = aYmax + b (8 bits each). During decoding, Cr(Y) is recovered by linear interpolation between (Ymin,C1) and (Ymax,C2); same for Cb. Block sizes adapt via a split bit (0/1). Results achieve about 0.5 bpp with roughly no artifacts; smaller bitrates worsen quality. Optional deblocking: edge error compensation without extra data. Code in yuvlab repo.
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Windows Central's Ben Wilson was locked out of Notepad on Windows 11 by a Microsoft Store licensing error (0x803f8001), underscoring growing cloud-dependency as Copilot and other first‑party apps require online authentication. He argues the OS is becoming a thin client, urges offline usability, notes workarounds like launching Notepad via Run, and criticizes OneDrive syncing. He warns against forcing online access and calls for more user control, while acknowledging AI/Copilot’s inevitability.
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An anecdote from SUNY Buffalo: secretarial-era travel reimbursements were seamless, but adopting Concur with audits turned submissions into a friction-filled hurdle. The piece argues friction arises when intention isn’t to help, and that both organizations and individuals can weaponize processes by nitpicking. If the aim is growth, friction dissolves; otherwise it hampers progress. It ties the idea to attitudes, momentum, and a high-agency mindset, urging a problem-solving focus over finding violations.
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- Fast mode speeds Claude Code Opus 4.6 responses; same quality, not a new model.
- Enable via /fast or settings; persists across sessions; best at session start; shows “Fast mode ON” and ↯.
- Uses higher-priced tokens: <200K input $30 / $150 output; >200K $60 / $225; 50% plan discount until Feb 16.
- Not on third-party clouds; requires extra usage; admin must enable for Teams/Enterprise.
- Separate rate limits; cooldown; auto fallback to standard; re-enable after cooldown.
- Ideal for rapid iteration and live debugging; not ideal for long tasks or cost-sensitive workloads.
- Research preview; may change; report issues via support.
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Fun with clip-path is a small CSS-only code exploration showing a menu revealed by a growing circle clip-path and a hardcoded polygon ray. The circle uses clip-path: circle(calc(1.42 * 100vmax) at 0 0), with 1.42 as sqrt(2) to scale to viewport. The second clip-path creates a ray. No JavaScript; the polygon could be dynamic with JS for responsive dimensions. MIT licensed; readme describes the approach.
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A Cloudflare security block prevents access to hpcwire.com, indicating the site protects against online attacks and that the block can be triggered by certain inputs. To resolve, contact the site owner with details of what you were doing and include the Cloudflare Ray ID (9ca5864f99c7fb38) and your IP address.
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SectorC is a C compiler written in 16-bit x86 assembly that fits in a 512-byte boot sector. It supports a fairly large subset of C: global vars, functions, if/while, many operators, pointers, inline machine-code, comments, and recursion. The project introduces Barely C, which tokenizes via space-delimited tokens and uses atoi as a hash, with a small code generator and a 64K hash-based symbol lookup. The author reduces the implementation from 468 to 303 bytes, leaving ~207 bytes for more features. It includes a runtime (rt/) and examples like hello, sine-wave animation, and PC-speaker tunes.
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Whiting argues that vanilla C is the best fit for his solo games due to reliability, portability, and long-term tool support. He values a simple, memorizable language with strict typing, strong warnings, fast compilation, and robust debugging. He rejects C++/Java/C# for complexity and OOP rigidity, and notes Go (GC) and web risks. While he appreciates other options like Haxe or making his own language, he sticks with C for its speed, portability, and established ecosystem.
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Nolan Lawson laments AI-driven code generation transforming programming, arguing tools may outpace humans and redefine the programmer’s role. He speaks to seasoned developers who may bow out while juniors advance, notes the practical costs for those with mortgages, and admits nostalgia for handcrafting code and the personal pride in a GitHub project. He neither celebrates nor resists the change, urging readers to mourn the craft as a potentially relic-like practice, even as AI‑assisted review and debt-payer roles emerge in the field.
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Could not summarize article.
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Selection Rather Than Prediction: generate many candidate solutions from multiple agents and pick the best. Their workflow: specify a task, run 18 agents in parallel, and humans review diffs to patch the winner. Across 211 tasks, they rate agent strengths with a Bradley-Terry/Elo-like model. Top-tier exists but is noisy. Cohort value: top-1 wins 24%; top-3 51%; top-7 91%. Gains plateau after seven. Conclusion: use a top-tier cohort rather than a single agent; run a few more for robustness when time and cost allow.
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A concise guide to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for language models. It covers origins and interdisciplinary roots, defines problems, data collection, and common mathematics, then details optimization stages: instruction tuning, reward modeling, rejection sampling, RL, and direct alignment. It concludes with advanced topics in synthetic data, evaluation, and open questions. The document includes a detailed changelog (2025–2026), acknowledgments, and a citation, presenting a practitioner-friendly update on RLHF methods and post-training workflows.
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