AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
KeePass's KDBX 4.x, built on XML, is brittle: adding features often breaks older clients; features like TOTP, passkeys, and app data are shoehorned into custom attributes, creating incompatibilities. Base64-encoded icons blow up sizes; full-file rewrites and memory loading hurt performance; governance is fragmented across forks. The author argues for an SQLite/SQLCipher backend. A relational schema would house features in proper tables, support new methods without breaking others, enable delta sync, easier merges, and better tooling. Migration would be a data map; advocate for a democratic, open spec and broad community collaboration.
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Denver will end its contract with Flock Safety for automated license-plate readers and award the new ALPR contract to Axon. The move follows a year of controversy after 9NEWS investigations showed Flock shared Denver’s license-plate data with a national network tied to immigration enforcement and had a secret Border Patrol pilot. Mayor Mike Johnston had previously extended Flock’s contract without City Council approval; the new deal will require council sign-off as the current contract expires at end of March. Axon is not part of the same data-sharing network, unlike Flock.
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An engineer recounts a seven-year, ghost bug in a railway safety inverter that would randomly trip its fuse; despite endless lab tests, it was never reproducible. A bored lab technician used a 400-meter spool of cable, connected it to the device, and reproduced the fault immediately. The culprit was inductive noise coupling into the safety-detection circuit; the solution was a larger capacitor to filter the noise. Three minutes of soldering fixed it. Lessons: real-world conditions differ from labs; persistence + a bit of luck can crack 'impossible' problems; sometimes the fix is simple.
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Caleb Leak taught his 9‑lb cavapoo Momo to influence Claude Code into making games, using a DogKeyboard that streams Momo’s keystrokes (via Raspberry Pi) to Claude and a Zigbee feeder to reward her. After refining a prompt that treats cryptic input as meaningful design notes, he built automated QA tools (screenshots, input sequences, scene/shader linters) and tooling to guide Claude. Godot 4.6 with C# was used for the games. Momo produced several playable titles (DJ Smirk, Munch, Oracle Frog of Rome, Quasar Saz). The key insight: effective feedback loops and tooling trump input quality.
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Catherine of Braganza (born 1638) married Charles II in 1662 to seal a Portugal–England alliance. The union secured Portugal's aid and England gained Bombay, Tangiers, and access to Brazil; a cash payment was promised but not fully paid. Catholic and an outsider at court, she endured a difficult marriage marked by Charles’s infidelity, yet she presided over the queen’s circle and won respect. Importantly, she popularized tea in England, turning it from medicine to a social pleasure. After Charles’s death she returned to Portugal, later serving as regent (1704) and dying in 1705; her tea legacy endures.
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An open letter from civil society and tech groups opposing Google's plan to require central developer registration to distribute Android apps outside Google Play. It argues this would extend Google’s gatekeeping, raise barriers to entry, threaten privacy, enable arbitrary enforcement, and raise antitrust/regulatory concerns, harming openness. It contends current Android security measures (sandboxing, permissions, Play Protect, signing) suffice and urges Google to rescind, collaborate on safer, open alternatives, and maintain Android as an open platform. The letter lists many signatories.
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Kansai Airport in Osaka has never lost a piece of luggage in 30 years since 1994 and has been named 'World’s Best Airport for Baggage Delivery' in World Airport Awards 2024, the eighth time. It handles up to 30,000 checked bags daily during peak periods, sorting by destination and using sensors plus patrols to prevent loss. Ground staff manually align handles after arrival. Despite a strong baggage track record, the airport faces staffing shortages ahead of the 2025 Osaka-Kansai Expo and plans system upgrades to boost efficiency.
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Prolog and C offer complementary strengths: Prolog excels at pattern matching, unification, backtracking, and knowledge representation; C handles IO and system interfacing. The article outlines how to build a Prolog–C interface where C executes Prolog as a database and Prolog calls into C for services, enabling environment-independent Prolog code. It uses IRQXS, an expert system that resolves IRQ conflicts, to illustrate data flow: C supplies current IRQ facts to Prolog; Prolog applies rules and advises actions; a C wrapper calls the Prolog advisor. The piece also discusses applications (natural language front-ends, tax/config, help desks) and cross-platform availability.
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Stripe’s 2025 annual letter announces a tender offer to provide liquidity to current and former employees at a $159B valuation, funded by Thrive Capital, Coatue, a16z, and Stripe. The letter cites $1.9T in payments volume (up 34%) and ~1.6% of global GDP, with the Revenue suite nearing a $1B run rate. More than 5M businesses run on Stripe; 90% of Dow Jones and 80% of Nasdaq 100 use Stripe. The 2025 cohort was the strongest, with 57% overseas, faster growth, and rapid Atlas monetization. It highlights agentic commerce progress (ACP, Shared Tokens, machine payments) with OpenAI/Microsoft, and stablecoins volumes (~$400B).
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Samsung announced Galaxy Upcycling in 2017 to turn old Galaxy phones into smart-home sensors or Linux PCs, with bootloader unlocks and an open app marketplace. By 2021's Upcycling at Home, only two functions—sound detection and brightness sensing—were shipped on a limited device list, with no unlockable bootloader or marketplace. Samsung won Reuters' Circular Transition Award for the effort, yet the initiative conflicted with selling new phones; iFixit ended its partnership in 2024. Today, users can repurpose via LineageOS, Upcycling Android, or apps, but the original vision remains largely unfulfilled.
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Software 3.1? - AI Functions introduces a Strands SDK-based approach where LLMs generate and execute code inside your Python process at call time. Outputs are native Python objects (DataFrames, models), not JSON, with post-conditions that validate results and trigger automatic retries on every invocation. Using the @ai_function decorator, developers supply a natural-language spec and optional post-conditions; examples include translate_text, summarize_meeting, and import_invoice. It supports structured output via Pydantic, multi-agent workflows, async execution, and configurable models. Execution is opt-in local with restricted imports for security; experimental and open-source.
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After acquisition, the company installed key cards, turnstiles, and elevator readers, but the system caused chaos—from long parking lines to elevator bottlenecks during mock days. Meanwhile, Jira authentication was insecure: credentials stored in cookies (base64-encoded) with no proper token storage. Turnstiles were eventually shut down; elevators remained with readers off, yet management touted security in mass emails. Security theater satisfies optics; real security is proper authentication, token management, and secure engineering—often invisible, not celebrated with ribbons or emails.
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At 10 in 1978, Kevin Glikmann pitched a four-loop roller coaster, the Quadrupuler, to Disneyland after being inspired by Space Mountain. He built a scale model, mailed a letter to WED Enterprises, and received a reply from Tom Fitzgerald praising the concept and referencing Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. This early validation boosted his confidence and resilience to invent, even as later ideas like a Rubik’s Cube modification were rejected by Ideal Toy Company. Now an actor, he views invention and acting as related quests, and keeps going one piece at a time.
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Discord cut ties with Persona Identities, a Peter Thiel–backed verification vendor, after researchers found publicly accessible frontend code on a U.S. government endpoint. The files revealed 269 checks—ages, watchlists, politically exposed persons, adverse media—and risk scoring, with about 53 MB of data exposed. The test lasted under a month and any submitted data could be stored for up to seven days. Persona’s CEO said the exposure was not a vulnerability and data were redacted; Discord says the partnership is dissolved and Persona is pursuing FedRAMP authorization.
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Researchers at TU Wien etched the smallest QR code yet onto a thin ceramic film using focused ion beams, shrinking to 1.98 square micrometers with 49-nanometer pixels. Readable only with an electron microscope, the code earned a Guinness World Record. In collaboration with Cerabyte, they aim for durable, high-density data storage—an A4 sheet could hold over 2 TB. They plan to explore other data structures and materials for long-term storage and real-world use, challenging other approaches like DNA in amber or laser-etched glass.
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