AI Summarized Hacker News

Front-page articles summarized hourly.

Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)

Make-look-scanned is a CLI tool (and a browser WASM build) that converts a PDF into an image-only, scanned-looking document by applying skew, grayscale, warm paper tone, scanner grain, defocus, edge shadows, and JPEG artifacts. It rasterizes pages, reassembles into a new PDF with text removed. Build requires Go and a C toolchain; MuPDF via go-fitz is bundled. Usage: make-look-scanned input.pdf [flags], outputs input.scanned.pdf by default. Flags include --dpi, --skew, --grayscale, --paper-tone, --noise, --blur, --edge-shadow, --jpeg-quality, --seed, --preset, --force. Presets in config.toml; deterministic output per seed; browser mode uses PDF.js; license AGPL-3.0 for CLI, Apache-2.0 for browser.

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Show HN: Tiny – An interpeted dynamic langauge with inline Go native functions

Tiny is a lightweight, Go‑written programming language and VM focused on high performance and concurrency. It compiles source to stack-based bytecode (.tbc) run by a multi‑threaded VM with an interpreter and a JIT. Features include dynamic typing with optional hints, structural typing, destructuring, composition over inheritance, pattern matching, defer, and OS‑level parallelism with mutexes. It supports WebAssembly extensions, native Go blocks, and a WASM backend. The standard library covers validation, HTTP, timers, and UI; a built‑in LSP aids editors. Prebuilt binaries are available; installation is by placing the tiny binary on PATH.

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PostgresBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Postgres Services

ClickHouse presents PostgresBench, a public, reproducible benchmark of managed Postgres services using a pgbench-based, TPC-B-like workload. It emphasizes NVMe-backed, single-node performance and uses 256 clients, 16 threads, and two scales (≈100 GB and ≈500 GB) to report TPS and latency (P95/P99). The first cohort tests five services in us-east-2; results show Postgres managed by ClickHouse delivering strong throughput and low latency thanks to co-located NVMe storage, compared with shared-storage rivals. The benchmark is open source at github.com/ClickHouse/PostgresBench, with runnable instructions.

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The ability to regrow body parts is dormant in mammals, not lost

Texas A&M researchers report a two-step treatment that may unlock dormant mammalian regenerative powers. After initial healing, applying fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) encourages a blastema-like cellular response; days later, bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP2) drives rebuilding of bone, joints, ligaments and tendons. In animal amputations, regenerated tissues included skeletal and connective components arranged in plausible anatomy, though not exact replicas. The strategy redirects healing from scar formation without adding external stem cells, suggesting mammalian regeneration can be activated and offering potential for improved wound healing and scar reduction.

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Show HN: We post-trained a model that pen tests instead of refusing

ArgusRed is a dual-mode CLI for security assessment (Audit your code or attack it). In Security Scan mode it analyzes code read-only, with modules for dependency vulnerabilities, secret detection, input validation, auth flows, and more; outputs a single Markdown report with severity, location, cause, and fixes. In Pen Test mode it performs authorised exploits against booked targets, producing an engagement summary. The tool runs locally (read-only harness blocks mutations by default) and can run with Docker or Live FS. Install is free; first run signs up for Cosine with 2M tokens.

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S‑CURVES a field guide to technology adoption · 1825–2026

Field guide by Nikunj on S-curves of technology adoption (1825–2026). Shows two centuries of adoption curves with a single, shared shape. Draws on Our World in Data, US Census, Pew, and primary financial-press archives; quotes vetted against Quote Investigator & Snopes; last fact pass June 2026.

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Bun has an open PR adding shared-memory threads to JavaScriptCore

Experimental PR to add Shared-memory threads to JavaScriptCore. Proposes a shared-heap design where multiple threads share the same heap/objects via a heap server, per-thread VM-lite, TID-tagged butterflies with segmented copies, and an API (Thread, join/asyncJoin, Thread.current, ThreadLocal, Atomics on properties). Aims to give true parallelism without postMessage by sharing the object graph; staged approach: Phase 1 runs under a GIL for deterministic behavior and TSAN safety; Phase 2 (ungil) would remove the GIL to enable real parallelism. Includes THREAD.md, tests, and benchmarks; per-thread memory costs ~150KB–1MB; still experimental and not yet ready to merge.

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Agency stole bestselling author's book, used AI to relaunch as their own

Andy Baio highlights an unauthorized reboot of John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by Qontour, which hosts the full book text, generates AI art for each word, and lets users submit new ‘sorrows’ via GPT-4. The site, with CC Zero for user content, ranks above official pages and uses Amazon affiliate links. Koenig says he had nothing to do with it; the publisher has DMCA’d pages but the bootleg persists. Baio frames this as part of a broader AI-driven reuse of human-created work without consent or compensation.

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Ember, a native iOS Hacker News reader I built around accessibility

Ember is an iOS native Hacker News reader built in SwiftUI with no third‑party dependencies. It provides threaded native comments, smart onboarding, full dark mode and accessibility‑first design, and offline saved stories. Features include feeds (Top, New, Best, Ask, Show, Jobs), full‑text search via Algolia, bookmarks, read‑tracking, in‑app Safari/Reader, and user profiles with color‑blind cues. Architecture is pure SwiftUI using @Observable, async/await, UserDefaults and a JSON save‑state, backed by Hacker News Firebase and Algolia. Requires Xcode 16+; MIT license.

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Show HN: Microcrad – Micrograd Reimplemented in C

microcrad is a C re-implementation of Andrej Karpathy's micrograd: a tiny scalar-valued autograd engine. It represents every computation as a graph of Value nodes, each storing a double, its operands, operation, and gradient, with reference counting for memory management. It performs a backward pass via a topological sort to compute dLoss/dInput. It includes a small neural network (neuron, layer, MLP) built on the engine and demonstrates forward, backward, and gradient descent. It’s educational, not production-grade, and emphasizes simplicity over performance.

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SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. June 17, 2026 — SMPTE announces its entire Standards catalog is freely accessible to the global media-technology community, including all published standards, practices, guidelines, and future releases. The move aims to boost interoperability, accelerate adoption, and spur innovation amid IP workflows and AI authentication shifts. SMPTE is modernizing publication with GitHub workflows, HTML authoring, and a streamlined publishing pipeline. Diamond-level members (Amazon AWS, Apple, Blackmagic, Disney, Google, Sony, etc.) back the effort; donors may be named as inaugural supporters. Full catalog at the SMPTE Standards Library.

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Vacation With An Artist – Mini-Apprenticeships with Artists in Their Studios

VAWAA offers mini-apprenticeships with master artists worldwide, available in-person or online, letting travelers learn crafts—from Argentine tango to Japanese calligraphy and street art—through live sessions or from home. Prices and durations vary by artist and locale. The site shares guest stories and blog posts about travel-as-craft, highlights artist profiles, and invites booking, newsletters, and press mentions.

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Cargo-Geiger

cargo-geiger is a Rust cargo plugin that reports statistics on unsafe Rust usage in a crate and its dependencies. It aids auditing rather than deciding security. Install via cargo install --locked cargo-geiger (with vendored OpenSSL) or use pre-built binaries. Usage: run from a Cargo.toml directory with cargo geiger. The project provides three libraries (cargo-geiger, cargo-geiger-serde, geiger) and originated from icefoxen/cargo-osha and sfackler/cargo-tree.

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