AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
An interview focusing on Bell Labs’ everyday work in Holmdel alongside its famed Murray Hill breakthroughs. Craig describes designing practical tools (like a sales slide rule) and solving operations problems for private branch exchanges using queuing theory, simulations, and inventory control of circuit packs. He discusses Bell Labs’ One Year On Campus program (tuition plus 60% salary to earn a master’s), his path from Brown to Cornell, and how hands-on projects and design of experiments taught causality and improved processes. The piece also sketches Lab culture, management, and cross-site collaboration.
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HKU researchers developed SS-H2, a stainless steel with a sequential dual-passivation that adds a Mn-based top layer to the Cr2O3 film, enabling corrosion resistance up to 1700 mV in seawater electrolysis. This could replace costly titanium parts in hydrogen production, potentially cutting structural-material costs for a 10 MW PEM electrolyzer by about 40x. While promising, it is not yet plug-and-play; industrialization and further engineering are underway, with patents and scale-up progressing. The alloy design builds on a six-year effort and was published in Materials Today (2023).
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Journalists report AI-induced delusions among ChatGPT users. In Canada, Tom Millar spent hours with ChatGPT, claiming cosmic breakthroughs and writing hundreds of pages, including an application to be pope. In the Netherlands, Dennis Biesma formed a “digital girlfriend” with Eva, quit work, faced divorce and debt, and attempted suicide. Researchers describe “AI-associated delusions” rather than clinical diagnoses; a growing phenomenon after 2025 GPT-4/5 updates. Online support groups have formed, urging regulation and safeguards; OpenAI and others face scrutiny.
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EndBASIC is a cross‑platform, retro‑style BASIC interpreter in Rust built from four blocks: BB1 a pure compiler/VM with no built‑ins; BB2 a portable console layer for terminals, SDL, and HTML5 canvas; BB3 an abstract virtual file system with memory, static data, host files, local storage, and cloud backends; BB4 an embedded NetBSD‑based disk image (EndBOX) with a privileged daemon and optional telemetry. Merino wonders whether to keep evolving BASIC or repurpose the blocks into a modern language, a cohesive embedded OS, or other visions; a core rewrite (0.12) and sprites/sound are planned.
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SecurityBaseline.eu, launched May 13, 2026 as a Basisbeveiliging spin-off, publishes Europe-wide baseline-security metrics via nightly-updated maps. It covers 32 countries with 21 metrics across 1,827 maps, drawn from ~200,000 government domains and ~67,000 local authorities. Three alarming findings: 3,081 EU government sites place tracking cookies without consent; 1,070 phpMyAdmin portals are publicly reachable on 3,529 domains; and 99% of governmental email is poorly encrypted (NL, DK better). The project advocates transparency, ongoing improvement, and open-source funding; invites researchers and memberships.
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Crow is a lightweight C/C++ build system written in Rust. It emphasizes simple configuration (crow.toml), fast builds, and a built‑in dependency manager. Quick start: install via pre-built binaries or build from source (git clone ...; cargo install --path .); create a project with crow new my_project, then crow run. The repository is MIT licensed and welcomes contributions. The page shows project metadata (stars, releases v0.1.0, May 2026).
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An engineering note tests neural super-resolution (SR) as a pre-filter for license-plate OCR and finds it generally worthless. In a production setting with crops mostly under 100 px wide, three pipelines (no SR, a 42k-parameter OCR-guided SR, and a 1.21M-parameter Real-ESRGAN) yield identical results: 0.0% exact matches and 0.4% character accuracy. SR hallucinates and adds latency; OCR trained on low-res crops already reads blurry inputs. Multi-frame voting across 15–20 crops drives 98.6% plate accuracy. Only case SR helps is when OCR can't be retrained; otherwise train on real data and rely on multi-crop voting.
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An exploration of how writing as a career remains financially unrealizable. Through personal essays, The Profession That Does Not Exist collects writers’ confessions of side hustles—from fire lookouts and factory labs to waitressing, social-media sleuthing, and cuddling—and the costs that sustain literary life: meager advances, grueling hours, medical bills, and the tension between artistic calling and economic survival. It argues cultural capital is underwritten by hidden labor, and that many writers blend craft with precarious work to keep writing alive.
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zero-native lets you build native desktop apps with Zig and a WebView frontend. Binaries are tiny and memory-efficient, with instant rebuilds. Choose between system WebView or Chromium via CEF, using the same API per project. Zig allows direct C calls with no bindings or boilerplate. Cross‑platform now for macOS/Linux; Windows/mobile in progress. The native layer stays small and explicit. Get started: zero-native init my_app --frontend next; cd my_app; zig build run. Frontend can use React, Vue, or Svelte; see Quick Start and docs on App Model, Bridge, and Security.
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A 400 Bad Request indicates the request was blocked by the server's security policies. It advises contacting support if you believe this is an error.
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Originating in 1977, the vi family remains popular for its efficiency and ubiquity across IDEs. The article surveys vi clones and derivatives—from ex/vi through STevie, Elvis, xvi, Vile, Vim, nvi, OpenBSD vi/OpenVi, BusyBox vi, Illumos vi, nvi2, to Neovim—and modern forks like EVi, Vim Classic, ToyBox vi, Viper, Kakoune, Evil, vis, and Helix. It notes Neovim and others adding LSP, built-in terminals, Lua scripting, and UTF-8; some projects include LLM-generated code. Dates span 1977–2027, illustrating the ongoing evolution.
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Chris Morgan rejects extra query strings on his site, relying on the Referrer header, which is often missing for traffic from apps and emails. To reveal who links to him, he appends a custom utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me to outgoing links, so publishers can trace referrals and contact if needed. He states he does not collect analytics. Some sites choke on query strings (e.g., YouTube), so he maintains an exceptions list that now includes chrismorgan.info. The post also highlights Robin Sloan’s blog and newsletter and champions digital etiquette, privacy, and speed.
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Could not summarize article.
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Cloudflare describes a bug where a Linux CUBIC optimization, meant to fix app-idle, caused QUIC (quiche) to stall cwnd at two packets after loss, triggering a recovery/avoidance cycle tied to RTT. Root cause: quiche updated idle time on each send using time since last_sent, inflating the idle delta when cwnd was minimal and ACKs arrived every RTT. The fix: measure idle from the latest activity (last ACK or last send) by adding last_ack_time to compute delta. After a patch, tests pass and downloads finish in ~4–5s. The change is tiny and ported to quiche; Cloudflare continues work, including BBRv3.
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scrcpy 4.0 migrates to SDL3, adds flex display, camera torch/zoom, and aspect-ratio locking; --keep-active to prevent sleep; --background-color with dark gray default; shows a disconnected icon before closing; Meta Quest flicker workaround; fixes for CPU usage with silent audio; new shortcuts (F11 fullscreen, MOD+q to quit); improved window handling and video stream metadata; upgrades to FFmpeg 8.1.1 and SDL3.
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Traceway is an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform that unifies logs, traces, metrics, session replay, exceptions, and AI tracing. It ingests via native OTLP/HTTP with no vendor SDKs, self-hosts quickly (MIT licensed, no open-core, free self-host), or runs on Traceway Cloud. Key features: end-to-end traces, log-linked search, metrics dashboards, exception grouping, session replay for web and Flutter, AI observability, configurable alerts, and RBAC for multi-tenant setups. Tech stack: backend Go/Gin, frontend SvelteKit; embedded SQLite or standalone ClickHouse+PostgreSQL; Docker-based deployment; community Discord.
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fc is a research-grade, lossless compressor for IEEE-754 64-bit doubles. It splits input into adaptive blocks, runs a suite of specialized codecs per block, and emits the smallest result. The library is multi-threaded and vectorized (AVX2/SSE4.2/BMI/LZCNT). It uses a mode-competition approach with ~50 modes to select the best per block. Benchmarks show strong size ratios on many datasets and fast decode. Limitations: x86‑64 only; CPU feature requirements; input must be a multiple of 8 bytes; on-disk format is versioned. Apache-2.0 license; includes bundled Gorilla codec.
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Eric Park details building a DIY light-up graduation cap that reacts to tassel movement, using a Digispark ATtiny85, WS2812B LEDs, a reed switch, and USB-C power. He remarks on US cap-and-gown rental costs (about $94) and the tassel-move tradition. Coding took ~2 hours with Rust after forking AVR libraries; hardware work took 3+ hours. He won't wear the cap at graduation for aesthetics, and he shares the GitHub repo gradcap-rs, noting a strobing-video warning.
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A petition urges major outlets—New York Times, The Atlantic, and USA Today—to stop blocking the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from preserving their journalism. It notes that, by 2026 World Press Freedom Day, these outlets were not preserving work, with NYT halting since February and USA Today reportedly blocking archiving of its reporting; The Atlantic declined to commit. The text argues AI fears are used to justify censorship, and that archiving strengthens truth and accountability. It calls leaders to commit to preserving all news in the Wayback Machine now.
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EFF, joined by the ACLU and NACDL, asks the Fourth Circuit to require warrants for electronic device border searches in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo. The amicus argues manual and forensic searches should use the same probable-cause warrant standard with a neutral judge, guided by Riley v. California. CBP conducted 55,318 device searches in FY2025. The case involves a traveler whose phone was searched at Dulles and who was convicted on child-exploitation charges. EFF urges stronger Fourth Amendment protections for travelers at the border.
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