Show HN: Zanagrams
Promotional header for Zanagrams, a free daily word puzzle, announcing its first edition.
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Jonas Hietala describes designing a personal Pebble Time 2 watchface to aid ADHD-like symptoms and daily task management. He prototypes features to visualize a day: calendar overview, non-uniform event wedges, moving events toward “now” at 12 o’clock, countdown timers, a work timer with warm‑up, and alarms requiring steps to dismiss, plus different alarm types. He favors a comic-book style, prototypes with Claude for rapid iteration, and integrates a next-task display (Todoist) with edge markers for alarms, reminders, and sunrise/sunset. He notes openness to copying ideas and roughly two weeks of battery life without HR monitoring.
Promotional header for Zanagrams, a free daily word puzzle, announcing its first edition.
Critiques QED Score, an AI-based single-number measure of paper quality from QED Science. While faster than traditional peer review, the validation is weak and biased. Three case studies fail: Case 1 lacks data/methods transparency; Case 2 has inconsistent field correlations; Case 3 relies on uncontrolled variation. The score shows clear geographic bias, with African and South American leadership underrepresented in the top 1%. A sanity check on the white paper itself revealed concerns. Conclusion: the evidence does not support QED as a reliable, less biased quality measure; transparent, independent validation is needed.
A Michigan bill, Senate Bill 948 (Workplace Employee Boundaries Act), would curb after-hours employer contact by prohibiting access or responses to work matters outside assigned hours, unless compensated or within set availability windows. Emergency state/federal messages would be allowed. Violations could be reported to the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, with possible fines or overtime pay. The bill, introduced by Sen. Erika Geiss, is before the Labor Committee.
California’s legislature agreed to fund and revise state law to upload information from all driver’s licenses and IDs to the SPEXS national ID database operated by AAMVA. The budget deal with Gov. Newsom and DHS pressure includes guardrails intended to protect data, but the author calls them a sham. Once transferred, DHS or other law enforcement could obtain it via court order, possibly with gag orders, leaving Californians unaware and unable to challenge. Data could be misused, especially against immigrant and transgender residents. REAL-ID compliance is optional; California could resist to defend travel rights.
Civil liberties activist Patrick Breyer warns of a "double threat" to private communications as EU leaders push renewed Chat Control: EP President Metsola allegedly seeks to resurrect Chat Control 1.0 despite Parliament’s rejection, while the Council/Parliament advance a permanent 2.0 trilogue with mass, warrantless scanning and end to anonymous messaging. In response, fightchatcontrol.eu is relaunched to mobilize citizens to contact EU officials. Breyer argues effective child protection exists with targeted, privacy-respecting measures and calls for democratic safeguards.
The author uses a personal story about infantile amnesia—triggered by a talk with his wife about early memories—to explore how memory before age 3-4 is unreliable or absent. He recalls vivid fragments from around 6-8 months, including crawling on cold tiles, playing with fridge cables, milk switched from plastic to glass, and a nightmare after being moved from his crib. Questioning their truth, he verifies details with his mother and reflects on how emotionally charged experiences may anchor memories even if overall recall remains shaky.
Automated license plate readers from Flock Security are proliferating across the U.S., but they do far more than read plates: their AI-enabled cameras can search for people and objects, potentially tracking innocent individuals. The system is deployed via local governments and has expanded to a nationwide network; ICE and other federal agencies can access through data-sharing arrangements. Security researchers have found serious vulnerabilities, and there have been numerous misuse cases by police, including stalking ex-partners and spying on civilians. Cities struggle to exit contracts; backlash has spurred some cancellations.
Open-TYNDP, a collaboration between Open Energy Transition (OET) and ENTSO-E, provides an open-source workflow to interface Open Energy System Planning with ENTSO-E models and contribute to the Ten-Year Network Development Plan (TYNDP). Built as a soft-fork of PyPSA-Eur, it aims to replicate key TYNDP 2024 figures, support scenario building and cost-benefit analysis, and promote transparency and stakeholder participation. It supports open data, data interoperability, and dynamic visualizations, with ongoing development toward the 2026 cycle. MIT license and invites contributions.
Bloomberg shows a bot-detection page flagging unusual activity and asking the user to verify they’re not a robot, with steps to enable JavaScript and cookies, links to Terms of Service and Cookie Policy, a support contact with a reference ID, and a subscription prompt for Bloomberg.com.
SwiftII brings a Swift-like language to the Apple II via a bytecode VM. It’s a deliberately small subset of Swift (no floating point; 16-bit Int; ASCII strings) designed to fit in 40,704 bytes of main RAM. It ships as two binaries (REPL and compiler/runner) plus a launcher across nine disks, with memory banking to use Saturn/IIe RAM for larger programs. It includes an in-launcher editor and file browser, adapts input/output to the II keyboard and displays, and runs Swift-like programs from disk. Code and docs are on GitHub.
An issue on Medium showed Polish Ś wouldn’t type. The reason was a four-way convergence: Polish diacritics and scarce keyboard real estate; 1980s–90s Polish layouts (typist vs programmer) with heavy Alt usage; a long-rooted Ctrl-S autosave habit; and Windows AltGr mapping that made Right Alt act as Ctrl+Alt. Medium’s Ctrl-S blocking clashed with the Right Alt→Ctrl+Alt path, so Ś was suppressed. The fix: block Ctrl+S only when Alt isn’t pressed. A concise look at how language, hardware, and UI conventions shape software behavior.
An introduction to the 1976 MUMPS standard: a string-based language with a built-in, hierarchical persistent database (globals). The primer covers line-oriented syntax, no operator precedence, and everything-as-a-string, plus local vs global variables and subscripts forming trees. It details 19 commands (SET, WRITE, READ, IF, FOR, DO, GOTO, QUIT, etc.), 12 functions ($LENGTH, $PIECE, $TEXT, $FIND, etc.), and 7 special variables ($HOROLOG, $IO, $JOB, $STORAGE, $TEST, $X, $Y). It also explains indirection, routines, post-conditionals, and offers a phone-directory example using globals as the database.
GitHub issue proposes a feature to explicitly mark files/paths that must not be read or sent to the model, at repository and global levels (repo .codexignore and a global ignore file). Goal: blacklist sensitive data (env files, keys, credentials) while allowing others (e.g., node_modules for checks). Config should be deterministic, shareable, and support user defaults, not rely on docs. Discusses two use cases (prevent data leakage; exclude large/irrelevant files), references a previous codex-rs approach, and seeks design consensus; as of 2025-08-28 no equivalent feature exists in codex-rs.
Douglas Yao posted on X that he invented PAC-832, a new Alzheimer's drug and the world's first selective GalR1 antagonist, designed and synthesized in a garage lab.
EFF argues the KIDS Act, a package that adds KOSA with other bills, would force broad age-verification across online services, pressuring platforms to know users’ ages and adopt cautious moderation for teen and under-17 users. Even though proponents claim it doesn’t require age checks, the bill’s language makes age the basis for liability, pushing services to collect more data or deploy age-estimation tech. This risks privacy, chills lawful speech, restricts private messages and encrypted communications, and risks biased errors harming people of color, disabled, and trans/nonbinary users.
This post explains how Galois conjugation in the golden field (containing the golden ratio) sends regular pentagons to regular pentagrams, and why this underlies a geometric relation among the icosahedron, dodecahedron, and Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra. By applying the field automorphism (phi -> -1/phi) to coordinates, a regular pentagon’s vertices in cyclic order become a regular pentagram with the same order; the reverse also holds. The idea extends to higher dimensions and to other polygons via other quadratic fields, with links to quasicrystal phasons.
Part 1 explains a Windows crash pattern where memory corruption forcibly frees a DLL (combase.dll) from memory, not via FreeLibrary. A user-mode crash trace shows a recursive exception loop (RtlLookupFunctionEntry → KiUserExceptionDispatch) culminating in a stack overflow. The original fault points to combase!CoTaskMemFree, whose memory region had been freed even though the loader kept combase as pinned and supposedly loaded. In short, shell32 acted as a victim, not the cause. This form of bucket spray accounts for about 46% of the crashes observed, with the root culprit still unknown. Part 2 will continue the investigation.
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