AI Summarized Hacker News

Front-page articles summarized hourly.

Show HN: Knock-Knock.net – Visualizing the bots knocking on my server's door

Knock-knock.net visualizes real-time bot login attempts against unprotected servers, illustrating the internet’s “background radiation.” It offers a live feed and historical stats on attack origins, common usernames and passwords, offending ISPs, and IP addresses, plus trivia and knock-knock jokes.

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Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015

Updated 2026 collection with 56 side-by-side snippets that replace old CSS hacks with native modern CSS. Covers 26 features across layout, typography, color, animation, and more, with JS-free replacements (e.g., grid centering, container queries, attr(), view transitions). Demonstrates moving beyond 2015-era hacks to pure CSS, organized as practical comparisons. Includes three articles and a newsletter option.

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LEDs Enter the Nanoscale, But efficiency hurdles challenge the smallest LEDs yet

NanoLEDs push display tech toward sub-micron pixels, but efficiency suffers at tiny sizes. Polar Light Technologies demonstrated blue nanoLEDs under 500 nm using bottom-up hexagonal pyramids; others report LEDs as small as 90–100 nm (via perovskites and OLEDs). External quantum efficiencies are about 5–13% for nanoLEDs, far below 50–70% for conventional LEDs. Potential uses include VR/smart glasses, on-chip photonics, metasurfaces, and holographic displays, though diffraction limits may cap usefulness below ~1 μm. Researchers seek material innovations (III-Vs, perovskites, organics) to shrink LEDs without destroying efficiency.

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Show HN: VOOG – Moog-style polyphonic synthesizer in Python with tkinter GUI

VOOG is a Python-based Moog-style virtual analog polyphonic synthesizer with a tkinter GUI. It has 3 oscillators, a Moog 24dB/oct ladder filter with envelope modulation, dual ADSR envelopes (amp and filter), an LFO with multiple destinations, glide, and noise. It supports 8-voice polyphony across 4 multitimbral channels and 19 built-in patches. Features a rotary-knob GUI, a virtual keyboard, and optional MIDI input with patch save/load (~/.synth_patches/). Installation requires Python 3.13+ and tkinter; numpy and sounddevice; optional mido/rtmidi. Code organized into dsp, engine, gui, midi, patch, cli.

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State Attorneys General Want to Tie Online Access to ID

Forty state attorneys general urge Congress to back the Senate’s Kids Online Safety Act (S.1748) and oppose the House version (H.R.6484). The Senate bill would create a federal Duty of Care for platforms to mitigate harms to minors, enforceable by the FTC, and require study of device- or OS-level age verification. That could demand identity checks before access to lawful speech, tying verification to a persistent identity trail and raising First Amendment concerns about anonymous speech. AGs say platforms target minors and monetize data, and want to preserve state enforcement and expand harms like suicide and mental health.

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With Apple: Fortify your app: Essential strategies to strengthen security

Could not summarize article.

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Scientists observe a 300M-year-old brain rhythm in several animal species

The text states the request was blocked by server security policies (HTTP 429 Too Many Requests and 400 Bad Request). It advises contacting support if this is an error.

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The Spy Who Found T. Rex

Barnum Brown, born 1873 and nicknamed the Father of the Dinosaurs, discovered Tyrannosaurus rex in 1902 after blasting a hill at Sheba Mountain in Montana. He later unearthed a nearly complete T. rex at Big Dry Creek and led global fossil hunts (Myanmar, India, Greece, Wyoming). Brown also prospected for oil, worked for the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) mapping invasion routes, and consulted for Disney on Fantasia. His 1934 Howe Quarry find yielded about 4,000 bones. He died in 1963, leaving a lasting impact on paleontology’s rise.

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(Ars) Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

Ars Technica retracted a published article after it contained AI-generated fabricated quotations attributed to a source who did not say them. The editor states direct quotations must reflect what sources actually said, and the policy prohibits AI-generated material unless clearly labeled and used for demonstration. The incident appears isolated; editors apologize to readers and to Scott Shambaugh, who was falsely quoted.

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1940s Irish sci-fi novel features early mecha and gravity assists

GitHub repo cavedave/Manannan documents digitizing the 1943 Irish-language sci‑fi novel Manannán into modern orthography, with PDFs and corrected-text extracts (pages 9–13, 13–18) and a plan to progressively fix OCR errors and harmonize spelling. The README outlines extracting, correcting, and assembling the full text, plus a chapter list (Pláinéid na feaca… An téalod) and a call for Irish‑speaking contributors. Manannán is a YA space‑travel story in Irish, possibly the first Mecha outside Japan and an early gravity‑assist mention.

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Real-time PathTracing with global illumination in WebGL

THREE.js-PathTracing-Renderer is a real-time path tracer built on the Three.js WebGL framework, delivering global illumination and progressive rendering in the browser. It supports uni- and bi-directional path tracing, Monte Carlo sampling, BVH acceleration, and rendering of spheres, planes, quads, quadrics, and glTF models with PBR materials, refractions, clear coats, translucency, and Beer-Lambert attenuation. It includes many demos (geometry, ocean/sky, Cornell Box, BVH visualization, quadric/CSG, torus approximation, ray marching terrain, and 3D fractals) optimized for mobile. It uses a custom denoiser and a Shapes BVH for heavy scenes. Desktop/mobile camera controls are provided; source is open.

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Palantir vs. the "Republik": US analytics firm takes magazine to court

Palantir Technologies is suing to obtain a counterstatement from the Swiss online magazine Republik after two articles it published were deemed to contain significant inaccuracies. Under Swiss law, a rejected counterstatement can be reviewed by the Commercial Court of Zurich to present another version of the facts, though not to determine truth. Republik editors defend their reporting as based on Swiss government documents, arguing a counterstatement aims to balance information. The move comes amid Palantir’s European sales in security sectors and criticism over surveillance links, and it has sparked a Streisand-effect boost in Republik’s visibility and donations.

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Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars from New York City's Public Hospitals

New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has paid Palantir nearly $4 million since 2023 to improve billing, including automated review of patient notes to capture more charges. Palantir, a data firm with ties to ICE and U.S. surveillance programs, faces protests from activists who warn that sharing New Yorkers’ PHI with Palantir could enable deportations. The contract allows Palantir to work with PHI and de-identify data for other uses; critics call to cut the ties, while Palantir says it does not share data outside the contract.

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Gwtar: A static efficient single-file HTML format

Gwtar is an HTML archival format that yields a single self-contained HTML file plus an appended tarball of assets. A JavaScript header halts initial loading and uses HTTP range requests to load the original HTML and assets on demand, achieving static, single-file, and efficient archiving simultaneously. It can be created from SingleFile snapshots via deconstruct_singlefile.php, supports trailing data and PAR2 FEC, and can be cryptographically signed. It uses the x-gwtar MIME type to work around Cloudflare, with limited local-viewing support.

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LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

LT6502 is a 6502‑based laptop design by TechPaula. It specs a 65C02 running at 8MHz, 46KB RAM, a 65C22 VIA, a 9" display with built‑in font, built‑in keyboard, CompactFlash storage, a 10Ah battery, USB‑C power, and a serial console with an internal expansion slot. The repo documents milestones from 2025-11 to 2026-02 (PCB arrivals, power‑up, ROM/RAM/console, VIA/ACIA, keyboard integration, CF/beeper, and display work) plus a RAM/ROM map, and EH BASIC extensions (graphics, IO, SAVE/LOAD, WOZMON).

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EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

The European Commission adopted Delegated and Implementing Acts under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation to stop the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear. The measures ban destruction, require disclosure of discarded unsold volumes in a standard format (effective February 2027), and outline justified derogations (safety or damage). Large companies must comply from 19 July 2026; medium-sized from 2030. The aim is to cut waste (4-9% of unsold textiles destroyed annually, about 5.6 million tons CO2) and boost circularity by encouraging resale, remanufacturing, donations and reuse.

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The seam through the center of things

Cate Hall recounts a years-long nitrous oxide addiction (2017–2020) and a life-changing encounter with God during intoxication. She describes how, from the inside, gnosis reoriented her—requiring belief over proof and clashing with rationality. After a brutal bottom—financial ruin, health damage, memory loss—sobriety led to recovery and a transformed life. The book she wrote, You Can Just Do Things, became a map out of hell and, finishing it, brought tears of gratitude for grace.

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Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

Hideki Sato, Sega’s veteran console designer and former acting president (2001–2003), has died at 77. Joining Sega in 1971, he led the design of arcades and home hardware including the Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, Saturn, and Dreamcast, and left in 2008. He said arcade development influenced home consoles, and for Dreamcast he emphasized play and online features — a modem and linkable VMUs — with marketing noting a 128-bit graphics engine.

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Inner-Platform Effect

Requests that crawlers identify themselves with a proper user-agent and adhere to the site's robots policy; also points to the related policy page and a Wikimedia Phabricator task.

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AI is going to kill app subscriptions

AI-driven cloning makes app subscriptions unsustainable: since building an app is cheap, clones can undercut paid models. Local apps with no servers lose pricing power; server-backed apps may still need subscriptions but prices will hover just above cost. Apple embraces AI-generated apps (Claude in Xcode); App Store grew 11% in 2025, Google Play 5%. More unmet demand in niche use cases becomes viable as dev costs fall. For developers, competition will rise; for users, lower prices and more free options.

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