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📖 Read In Depth
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Using AI to write better code more slowly
A practitioner's honest take on AI-assisted coding: using AI as a deliberate, slower design partner rather than a fast autocomplete produces better results. The comments thread (845 points) adds real signal from engineers describing their own workflows — talking through design with AI before touching code, then implementing carefully. Directly relevant to how someone who builds things from scratch to understand them should think about integrating AI into their craft.
hn/Best Stories
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Magnifica Humanitas
The full text of Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical — the most-discussed document on HN this week (1509 points). The substantive argument is that 'technology is never neutral' and that builders bear ethical responsibility for what they create. Worth reading as a primary source rather than through media summaries; the HN comment thread contains sharp responses from engineers on the specific claims about AI governance and human dignity.
hn/Best Stories
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Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
Uber's COO says it's increasingly difficult to justify AI token spend because there's no clear link between inference costs and meaningful product improvements — one of the first explicit statements from a major operator that the ROI math isn't closing. This is the 'tokenmaxxing' problem: using token volume as a proxy for productivity rather than measuring actual value delivered. Significant signal on where enterprise AI adoption is hitting friction.
hn/Best Stories
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Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training
Norway is using 2PB of Huawei flash storage for LLM training — an interesting intersection of AI infrastructure, storage architecture, and geopolitics of compute. At the scale where memory dominates chip cost (per the HN comments on memory now being ~2/3 of AI chip costs), this storage choice signals real hardware tradeoffs being made outside the US-centric supply chain narrative.
hn/Best Stories
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One of the authors of "Attention is All You Need" just argued we should move past it. Pathway’s Post-Transformer debate is worth watching
One of the original 'Attention Is All You Need' authors is arguing publicly that the field should move past the transformer architecture. Pathways' post-transformer debate is the kind of first-principles challenge that matters — worth tracking what the argument actually is, not just the headline.
reddit/r/singularity
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Microsoft Copilot Cowork Exfiltrates Files
A demonstrated prompt injection attack against Microsoft Copilot that exfiltrates files from enterprise environments. As AI agents get write/read access to organizational data, this class of attack becomes a critical architecture concern — especially relevant for ML engineers building or evaluating agentic systems in enterprise settings.
hn/Best Stories
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How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works
A clean explainer on Shamir's Secret Sharing — the cryptographic scheme for splitting a secret into n shares where k are needed to reconstruct it. The kind of foundational cryptography that's worth understanding from first principles; the math is elegant and the applications (key management, distributed trust) are practical for anyone building secure systems.
hn/Best Stories
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The Average Guys Outsmarting Wall Street on Prediction Markets
A deep look at how retail 'sharps' on Polymarket are consistently beating institutional players on prediction markets — wagering on wars, elections, Rotten Tomato scores. Interesting systems-level question: what does it mean when decentralized crowd forecasting outperforms Wall Street on information aggregation, and what are the incentive structures that make it work?
nyt/Top Stories
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A fundamental principle of aeronautical engineering has been overturned
A foundational aeronautical engineering principle has been empirically overturned — the kind of 'things we knew that weren't true' story that matters beyond aviation. The specifics of what principle and what the new evidence shows make this worth reading; these are the moments that quietly reshape design assumptions across an entire field.
hn/Best Stories
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The 1999 shot-for-shot remake of "Psycho" shows us exactly why Hitchcock is remembered so fondly as an auteur
A TrueFilm essay using Gus Van Sant's 1999 shot-for-shot Psycho remake as a lens to examine what auteur direction actually contributes — essentially a controlled experiment isolating the 'Hitchcock variable.' The framing is analytically interesting for anyone who thinks carefully about what craft looks like when you remove the variables one at a time.
reddit/r/TrueFilm
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⚡ FYI
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OpenRouter, an Exchange for A.I. Models, Raises $113 Million
OpenRouter, which lets developers route queries across hundreds of AI models, raised $113M with Alphabet backing. The business model is essentially a model exchange — it wins if fragmentation persists and no single model dominates. Interesting moat question: does this become infrastructure or get disintermediated when major providers consolidate?
nyt/Business
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Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
Motorola phones are silently injecting affiliate codes into Amazon app traffic — a supply chain trust violation baked into the device firmware. Classic incentive misalignment: the hardware margin is thin, so the OEM monetizes the software layer at the user's expense. If you or anyone you know uses a Motorola device, this is worth flagging.
hn/Best Stories
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EngineAI shared a view of its Shenzhen Intelligent Manufacturing Base, claiming an output of one humanoid robot every 15 minutes - that's 35,000 humanoid robots per year, the highest production rate publicly claimed by a Chinese humanoid robotics company
EngineAI claims one humanoid robot every 15 minutes out of their Shenzhen facility — ~35,000/year, the highest public production rate from a Chinese humanoid robotics company. The comparison to China's EV industry trajectory is the right frame: this is the scale-up phase, and the economics change fast once manufacturing volume builds.
reddit/r/singularity
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Sonny Rollins, Giant of the Jazz Saxophone, Is Dead at 95
Sonny Rollins, one of the towering figures of jazz saxophone, died at 95. Even for non-jazz listeners, his approach — extended improvisation, playing in the moment, his famous sabbatical practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge — is a study in what it means to develop a craft with full commitment.
nyt/Arts
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