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Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch Published: 2025-12-16 | Origin: Hacker News Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing five major TV manufacturers—Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense, and TCL—accusing them of being part of a "mass surveillance system" by secretly recording consumers' viewing habits in their homes. The lawsuits, filed on Tuesday, claim these companies utilize Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology to collect personal data for targeted advertising. ACR supposedly identifies content being watched, including that from streaming services and connected devices, and may even capture security camera streams |
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Announcing the Beta release of ty Published: 2025-12-16 | Origin: Hacker News Astral has announced the Beta release of "ty," a highly efficient Python type checker and language server, written in Rust. Designed as an alternative to existing tools like mypy and Pyright, ty offers significantly enhanced performance, operating between 10x and 60x faster than its competitors without caching, and up to 500x faster in some scenarios. Its architecture emphasizes "incrementality," allowing for rapid live updates in response to code changes. Ty is installable via the uv package manager or |
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No Graphics API Published: 2025-12-16 | Origin: Hacker News Sebastian Aaltonen has 30 years of experience in graphics programming, having launched his first 3D accelerated game in 1999. He has worked across various gaming console generations and PC graphics APIs, focusing on new rendering technologies in recent years. Currently, he is developing a renderer for HypeHype using WebGPU, Metal, and Vulkan. Aaltonen has also worked on internal engines for Ubisoft, optimized Unreal Engine 4, and led the Unity DOTS graphics team. He |
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GPT Image 1.5 Published: 2025-12-16 | Origin: Hacker News Failed to fetch content - HTTP Status - 403 |
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Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions Published: 2025-12-16 | Origin: Hacker News On January 1, 2026, GitHub will lower the price of hosted runners, and from March 1, 2026, a new charge of $0.002 per minute will be applied to self-hosted runners. However, most customers will not experience a bill change, as Actions will remain free for public repositories. This pricing update aims to align costs with usage and value, ensuring sustainable funding for ongoing innovation. While 96% of users will see no change, of the |
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alpr.watch Published: 2025-12-16 | Origin: Hacker News The content discusses the growing adoption of surveillance technology by local governments in the U.S., including Flock cameras, facial recognition systems, and automated license plate readers (ALPR). With over 80,000 cameras in operation, these technologies track residents' movements and collect biometric data, creating extensive databases of everyday activities. A mapping tool, alpr.watch, allows users to locate meetings where these technologies are being discussed, enabling them to take action. ALPR systems continuously capture and store data on vehicle movements |
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Erdős Problem #1026 Published: 2025-12-16 | Origin: Hacker News Terence Tao's blog post discusses the recent resolution of Problem 1026 from the Erdős problem website, achieved through a blend of existing literature, online collaboration, and AI tools. The original problem, posed by Erdős in 1975, revolves around the properties of sequences of distinct real numbers and their subsequences. It involves finding optimal bounds for certain quantities related to sequence decomposition and monotonicity. Though the problem was noted to be somewhat ambiguous when it was added to the website in September |
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GitHub - simplepractice/langfuse-rb: 🪢 Langfuse Ruby SDK - Instrument your LLM app and get detailed tracing/observability. Works with any LLM or framework Published: 2025-12-16 | Origin: /r/ruby The content emphasizes the importance of user feedback, highlighting that all input is taken seriously. It introduces the Langfuse Ruby SDK, which provides tools for instrumenting LLM applications with detailed tracing and observability. The SDK is open-source and compatible with any LLM or framework, allowing users to configure settings at startup, fetch prompts, and trace LLM calls. Users are encouraged to consult the documentation for comprehensive details and to contribute to the project by following the guidelines in the CONTRIBUTING.md file. |
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Sharp Published: 2025-12-16 | Origin: Hacker News The content presents SHARP, a novel method developed by a team at Apple for creating photorealistic view synthesis from a single image. SHARP utilizes a neural network to quickly regress a 3D Gaussian representation of the scene, achieving this in under a second on a standard GPU. This representation allows for real-time, high-resolution rendering of nearby views, maintaining sharp details at over 100 frames per second. SHARP demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization across various datasets and achieves significantly improved performance, |
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8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions Published: 2025-12-16 | Origin: Hacker News Idan Dardikman reflects on a significant personal decision-making moment where he realized the depth of his conversations with his AI assistant, Claude, including private details he hadn't shared with anyone else. This led to a troubling thought about the security of these conversations. As a security researcher, he utilized his tools to investigate potential risks and discovered that the popular Chrome extension, Urban VPN Proxy—rated highly with millions of users—was capable of intercepting and collecting conversations from various AI platforms. Notably, |
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Quill OS: An open-source OS for Kobo's eReaders Published: 2025-12-16 | Origin: Hacker News Quill OS offers a variety of features including: - An integrated KoBox X11 subsystem - Support for ePUB, PDF, picture, and plain text display - Flexible reading configuration options - muPDF rendering engine for ePUBs and PDFs - Wi-Fi support and a web browser - Encrypted storage using EncFS - Quick dictionary and local storage search - Dark mode functionality - Option for full factory reset - Seamless update process - VNC viewer application |
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Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: Hacker News At the start of the year, the author tested an unreleased Snapdragon X Elite development kit but struggled to compare the gaming performance between x86 and native gaming versions, limited to running World of Warcraft Classic in x86 format. They noted a significant FPS drop of 40-60% compared to the native version. However, recent updates in Windows, particularly the introduction of the Prism emulation layer and Windows 11 24H2, have improved compatibility and performance. Using the latest Insider Preview version |
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Reforging the ReScript Build System Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/programming ReScript 12 introduces a new build system called Rewatch, which replaces the previous system, bsb. This new build system offers intelligent dependency tracking, faster incremental builds, and enhanced support for monorepo workflows. While bsb was effective for single-package projects, it struggled with limitations in monorepo setups, particularly in watch mode, where it only tracked changes within a single package, failing to trigger rebuilds for dependent packages. Additionally, bsb built packages sequentially rather than in parallel |
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Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: Hacker News The author expresses concern about the current discourse surrounding the value of computing in low Earth orbit (LEO), emphasizing the need to address the fundamental question: why is computing 250 miles up potentially more valuable than on the surface? They argue that the conversation often jumps to hardware details without properly considering the economic justification, suggesting motivations are driven more by fear of missing out and aesthetic futurism than by well-grounded value propositions. The author, who has a passion for space and technology, critiques the lack of |
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Full Unicode Search at 50× ICU Speed with AVX‑512 Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/programming The article discusses a piece of open-source software called StringZilla, which focuses on efficiently handling UTF-8 encoding, a complex and widely used text encoding introduced in 1989. UTF-8 encompasses over a million characters, including various confusing characters like the German Eszett and different forms of 'k'. The existing library, ICU, is comprehensive but slow. StringZilla aims to improve performance by utilizing AVX-512 technology for faster processing, while also prioritizing correctness with extensive testing against |
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Ruby app that can create Posts on a Facebook Page that a user has permission for Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/ruby The content discusses a Ruby application that uses the Roda framework to create posts on a Facebook Page, provided the user has the necessary permissions. It emphasizes the importance of user feedback and directs users to documentation for available qualifiers. The app serves as a simple example for beginners and was originally developed using Rails, but Roda was chosen for its simplicity. The document highlights that there are two apps mentioned, and encourages users to reach out for clarification. The code has been verified for use as of December 11 |
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Don MacKinnon: Why Simplicity Beats Cleverness in Software Design [audio] Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: Hacker News The content from EP-215 discusses various aspects of software maintainability and the challenges faced in development. Key points include: 1. **Complexity Barrier**: Don emphasizes that unnecessary complexity significantly hinders software maintainability, referencing themes from "A Philosophy of Software Design." 2. **Clever Abstractions**: A case study from a Node.js API illustrates how an unnecessary abstraction layer around MongoDB complicated the project without adding value. 3. **Team Structure**: Don explains how the Search |
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Create A Module of Utility Functions in Ruby Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/ruby The content discusses the `module_function` feature in Ruby's Module class, which creates class methods (singleton methods) on a module while also making the original methods private instance methods for any class that includes the module. This allows utility functions within the module to be used as if they were private methods in the class itself when mixed in, without exposing them in the class's public interface. The text illustrates how these markdown utility functions can help in a class such as `Post`, where they can be utilized |
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Beautiful Rails confirmation dialogs (with zero JavaScript) Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/ruby This content is a collaboration with Stephen Margheim, who created a course on building quality Rails applications. It discusses the limitations of the traditional `confirm()` prompt for confirmation dialogs in web applications, suggesting that it appears outdated. Instead of relying on extensive JavaScript for creating styled confirmation dialogs, recent browser updates, specifically Invoker Commands in Chrome and Safari, enable developers to create elegant, animated dialogs with minimal coding. For instance, a confirmation dialog for deleting an item can be built using these modern features without |
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IPC Mechanisms: Shared Memory vs. Message Queues Performance Benchmarking Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/programming The content describes a performance issue faced when using message queues for inter-process communication (IPC) at high message rates (500K messages per second). The system's CPU usage is significantly impacted due to the overhead from syscall operations related to `mq_send()` and `mq_receive()`, which dominate profiling data, historically leading to 40% CPU utilization. This situation reflects an actual challenge encountered by LinkedIn's Kafka producers, where extensive use of message queues resulted in reduced throughput due to syscall overhead. |