AI Summarized Hacker News
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
OpenAI says a Chinese law enforcement official used ChatGPT as a diary to document a broad influence operation targeting Chinese dissidents abroad. The effort involved hundreds of operators, thousands of fake accounts, impersonating US immigration officials to warn dissidents, and forged documents to remove accounts. It included faking a dissident’s death and attempting to denigrate Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi. OpenAI banned the user after detection. The report shows how authoritarian regimes can harness AI for surveillance and information operations amid US‑China AI competition.
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Rob Grant, co-creator of Red Dwarf and longtime Spitting Image writer, has died at 70. Tributes from Craig Charles and others praise his humor and legacy. Grant and Doug Naylor launched Red Dwarf in 1988; he later created The Strangerers and Dark Ages, wrote for Carrot's Lib, and authored novels, including Titan, co-credited to Andrew Marshall and slated for July publication. Cause of death has not been released. Bruce Dessau reported for Beyond The Joke on 26 February 2026.
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Apple’s Sleep Indicator Light, the breathing light, debuted with the iBook G3 (1999) and later appeared on iMacs and Power Macs. The green LED was replaced by a white one; the pulsating 12 breaths-per-minute animation was designed to feel comforting. A light sensor on the iMac G5 dimmed the glow in dark rooms, and later MacBooks eliminated the opening, with the aluminum perforated to imply light emanating through. An unadvertised feature synced the display’s sleep light with the Mac’s. By the 2010s breathing light disappeared, and the author laments its loss as a meaningful detail that signaled safe sleep.
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DOS memory management is simple but often counterintuitive. DOS 1.x had no explicit management, fitting RAM near 64K; DOS 2.0 added per-process memory with an arena of MCB-described blocks, sized in 16-byte paragraphs. Each block has an MCB header with signature (M/Z), owner (0 free, else PSP/PID), and size. Blocks are chained by position, not pointers. Allocation uses ALLOC; deallocation uses DEALLOC; resizing uses SETBLOCK. Coalescing occurs during ALLOC and via SETBLOCK; DEALLOC does not. DOS 2.11 added AllocOper (first/best/last fit). DOS 5.0 added UMB support with dual arenas and enhanced AllocOper for UMBs.
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Browser Use built a secure, scalable agent sandbox for web agents. They moved from Lambda-based bots with code execution to Pattern 2 isolation: the entire agent runs in a sandbox, while a control plane holds credentials and proxies all outside calls. Production uses Unikraft micro-VMs; development uses Docker. Hardening: bytecode-only execution, privilege dropping, environment stripping. The stateless control plane validates tokens, handles LLM calls, and storage via presigned URLs; sandboxes have no AWS keys. Scaling uses ECS Fargate for the control plane and distributed Unikraft sandboxes. Takeaway: the agent should have nothing worth stealing or preserving.
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Left Google in early 2026 after Google added AI features to search and Gmail; switched to Proton and other services. Argues Google's presence is habit-driven, search quality is worse, and Brave and DuckDuckGo outperform Google for over 90% of searches. The move rekindled 'surfing the web' instead of 'Googling,' improved digital hygiene, and reduced ads and privacy intrusions, though YouTube remains due to lack of real alternatives. Highlights open-web benefits and urges others to quit Google.
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Cloudflare blocks access to dignitymemorial.com, asking to enable cookies. The block may be triggered by certain words, a SQL command, or malformed data. To resolve, contact the site owner with details of what you were doing and include the Cloudflare Ray ID: 9d4a65041efb2a56.
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An in-depth look at sandbox isolation layers, arguing that isolation is a boundary, not a binary. Namespaces are visibility walls; cgroups handle accounting; seccomp filters syscalls but still exports to the host kernel. Privileged mode undermines security. gVisor introduces a user-space Sentry kernel, shrinking the host attack surface (~70 host syscalls) and enabling defense-in-depth within a sandbox. MicroVMs deliver hardware-bound isolation with snapshotting; WASM offers kernel-free, memory-safe execution but limited language support. The piece stresses layering (per‑job namespaces, seccomp, privilege drops, ephemeral storage, network controls) and considers local dev sandboxes (Seatbelt/Landlock) and Apple's container VM approach as evolution.
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Payment required; deployment disabled (ID: sfo1::vgsl8-1772223736682-69de43203088).
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Many think device identity equals having certificates, but long-lived, exportable certs aren’t bound to a device. The UK NCSC requires unique identities for users, services, and devices. Portable device credentials let attackers replay access, masking breaches in logs. Strong device identity means: unique per device, cryptographically verifiable X.509s, hardware-bound private keys, short lifetimes, automated issuance/ revocation, and full end-to-end auditable lifecycle. Smallstep offers automated, certificate-based device and workload identity with hardware-bound keys, continuous renewal, and deep visibility, tying identity to the device across endpoints and containers. Five posture questions: lifetime, binding, automation, coverage, visibility.
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“Blue Light” shows how TOC exposes hidden capacity by challenging assumptions. A welding bottleneck plant claimed 93% efficiency, but upon watching, productive “blue light” was only about 10%. Rather than expanding the plant or hiring more welders, they moved a non-constraint worker in as a helper to welders, coordinating parts, staging jobs, and increasing blue-light time. Within three weeks the backlog cleared and a record shipping month followed. Lesson: assumptions mask solutions; TOC seeks to reveal true capacity and unlock improvements without large expansions.
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Debian has removed FPC/Lazarus from its unstable repo because Debian is dropping GTK2 support, and FPC and Lazarus rely on GTK2 for building/units. This has broad distro implications since many distros derive from Debian. Proposed fixes include: create a GTK2-free FPC package and move GTK2 units to Lazarus/LCL; ship a Linux-only FPC release; Debian could exempt or allow an alternative repo; others argue GTK2 headers will remain needed or suggest reorganizing packaging. No consensus; the thread centers on how to preserve FPC/Lazarus functionality on Debian-based systems.
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A note requesting a proper user-agent and compliance with the site’s robots policy; cites related policy discussion.
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OpenClaw is a self-hosted AI agent with broad host access, posing security risks (prompt injections, exposed instances). Don’t run it on your main machine; isolate it in a cloud VM. Isolation options include Docker, dedicated hardware, or a cloud VM—the latter offering the strongest containment. It provides a setup flow (script + SkyPilot) to provision a VM, install OpenClaw, generate a token, and run the gateway behind an SSH tunnel (WebChat on localhost). Channel integrations, credentials, and state stay on the VM. Manage lifecycle with SkyPilot; persist state to S3 or via rsync. Costs are modest.
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Kyber is hiring an Enterprise Account Executive in New York to drive enterprise insurance workflows with its AI-native document platform. Compensation: $220k-$260k base plus 0.05%-0.25% equity. Responsibilities include owning the full sales cycle, outbound prospecting, multi-stakeholder engagements, events, and GTM refinement (Hubspot). Requirements: proven quota attainment, strong communication, resourceful, owner mindset. Kyber has driven >30x revenue growth, is profitable with multi-year contracts, and partners with Guidewire, Majesco, Lob; YC-backed. Apply by sending resume/LinkedIn with endorsement to [email protected].
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Red Blob Games recounts building an SDF fonts guide. After learning SDF rendering in 2024 and noting incomplete work, they aimed to create a top search result. Through multiple redesigns they narrowed scope to msdfgen, focusing on concepts and tradeoffs (atlas size, antialias width, shader derivatives, smoothing) and testing, then shifted from code-heavy pages to a pure concepts page. They settled on a final approach combining explanations with CPU and GPU illustrations, published the page, and invite readers to view it and comment, with links and contact.
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UNF is a local, always-on filesystem recorder that snapshots every save in real time (no commits needed). It stores deduplicated content in ~/.unfudged using Blake3 hashes and SQLite, watches FSEvents on macOS and inotify on Linux, respects .gitignore, and uses a retention policy of 24h full, 7d hourly, 30d daily. You can rewind to any second, diff, restore files (or entire dirs), or recap a session. Commands include unf watch/log/diff/restore/cat/recap. Use cases: recover from AI mass-refactors or accidental deletions. Desktop app + CLI, no cloud, no telemetry.
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Legal notice: California residents may no longer use DB48x after Jan 1, 2027, and Colorado residents after Jan 1, 2028. DB48x is likely an operating system under these laws, but it does not, cannot, and will not implement age verification.
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Asked what was the first life restoration of a sauropod, the post notes Knight’s 1897 Amphicoelias as a commonly cited early restoration, but earlier ones exist: Hutchinson’s 1892 Extinct Monsters (Brontosaurus) and Culver’s 1892 The Californian Illustrated Magazine (Amphicoelias). Most notably, Camille Flammarion’s 1886 Le Monde Avant la Création de l’Homme includes Jules Blanadet’s Atlantosaurs restoration, which may be the oldest known. The author invites older examples and notes Mark Witton independently reached similar conclusions in 2021.
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Go aims to reduce heap allocations and GC overhead by moving more allocations to the stack. In Go 1.25–1.26 the compiler automatically uses a small stack backing store (currently 32 bytes) for certain slice allocations, so small slices can be created without heap allocations. Examples show startup allocations can become zero, and escaping slices force heap moves via runtime.move2heap. If the data never escapes or remains small, most allocations are avoided. You can disable or tune these optimizations with -gcflags. Upgrade to Go 1.26+ to benefit.
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