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This article explores the surprising prevalence of anthropomorphism, the tendency to attribute human traits and behaviors to non-human entities. It discusses how people commonly personify animals, objects, and even abstract concepts, highlighting the cognitive biases and psychological factors that contribute to this phenomenon.

The article discusses how law enforcement can access individuals' private online data, such as emails, messages, and browsing history, without a warrant through various legal and technological means. It examines the challenges to privacy and civil liberties posed by these practices and the need for stronger legal protections.

The article provides an introduction to Lazygit, a user-friendly Git client that simplifies command-line Git operations. It highlights Lazygit's ease of use, its ability to streamline common Git tasks, and its potential to improve the Git workflow for developers.

The ASUS Ascent GX10 is an ultra-small AI supercomputer designed for edge computing applications, offering powerful AI processing capabilities and a compact form factor.

Ryanair is moving to 100% digital boarding passes, requiring passengers to have their boarding passes on their mobile devices before reaching the airport. This change will take effect on Wednesday, November 12th.

The article explores the implementation of an SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) routing system on an iCE40 FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) using Verilog HDL (Hardware Description Language). It discusses the design process, challenges encountered, and the resulting performance of the SPI routing system.

The article explores how spatial intelligence, the ability to understand and navigate the physical world, can be developed through various activities and experiences. It discusses how spatial skills can be improved and how they are crucial for various aspects of life, from problem-solving to creative pursuits.

The article presents a comprehensive captcha benchmarking framework that evaluates the security and usability of different captcha systems across various dimensions, including human effort, automated bypass, and accessibility. It provides insights into the trade-offs and considerations for designing effective and resilient captcha solutions.

The article discusses the programming language Zig, highlighting its design philosophy of simplicity, performance, and safety. It covers Zig's features, such as its low-level control, compile-time execution, and error handling, and how these contribute to its potential applications in systems programming and beyond.

The article introduces LibreChat, an open-source, modular, and extensible data stack that provides a set of tools and services for building conversational applications. LibreChat aims to offer a flexible and scalable alternative to proprietary chatbot platforms, empowering developers to create customized conversational experiences.

The article discusses the use of generative AI in content production, highlighting its potential benefits and challenges. It covers the integration of AI tools into various stages of the production process, considerations around ethical and responsible implementation, and the changing role of human creators in this evolving landscape.

Hi HN, we’re Sai and Aayush and we’re building Hypercubic (https://www.hypercubic.ai/)!

Hypercubic is an AI platform that helps Fortune 500 companies understand, preserve, and modernize their mainframe systems. These are the systems that run COBOL from the 1960s that still quietly power banking, insurance, airlines, and governments today.

70% of the Fortune 500 still run on mainframes, but the engineers who built and maintained them are retiring. Today, the average age of a COBOL/mainframe engineer is about 55 and rapidly increasing. What’s left behind are opaque, black box systems with almost no one who understands how they work. Modernization projects often fail, documentation is decades out of date, and critical institutional knowledge lives only in the minds of a few senior subject matter experts who are now leaving the workforce.

Current “AI for code” tools focus on codebases and repositories, so they miss the unwritten rules, historical context, and architectural reasoning that live in human minds. In the COBOL/mainframe world, that institutional knowledge is the key missing piece.

What we heard from modernization leaders is that the hard part is not the code analysis. The challenge is the institutional knowledge that never made it into code or documentation and has walked out the door. Modernization projects fail not because no one can parse COBOL, but because no one can answer “why was this billing edge case added in 1995 and what breaks if we remove it.”

Hypercubic is building an AI-native maintenance and modernization platform that learns how legacy mainframe systems actually work and captures the human reasoning behind operating them. We’re doing this with two initial tools, HyperDocs and HyperTwin.

HyperDocs ingests COBOL, JCL, and PL/I codebases to generate documentation, architecture diagrams, and dependency graphs. Enterprises currently spend months or years hiring contractors to reverse-engineer these systems; HyperDocs compresses that work to take much less time.

COBOL was designed to resemble English and business prose, making it a good fit for LLMs today. Mainframes have decades of consistent patterns (COBOL, JCL, CICS, batch jobs) and a finite set of recurring tasks (such as payroll, transaction processing, billing).

For example, here’s a billing fragment that would be run nightly in production at large insurance companies for moving money, closing accounts, and triggering downstream reports:

  EVALUATE TRUE
      WHEN PAYMENT-DUE AND NOT PAID
          PERFORM CALCULATE-LATE-FEE
          PERFORM GENERATE-NOTICE
      WHEN PAYMENT-RECEIVED AND BALANCE-DUE = 0
          MOVE "ACCOUNT CLEAR" TO STATUS
          PERFORM ARCHIVE-STATEMENT
      WHEN OTHER
          PERFORM LOG-ANOMALY
  END-EVALUATE.

Our other tool, HyperTwin, tackles the “tribal knowledge” problem. It learns directly from subject-matter experts, observing workflows, analyzing screen interactions, and conducting AI-driven interviews to capture how they debug and reason about their systems. The goal is to build digital “twins” of the experts on how they debug, architect, and maintain these systems in practice.

Together, HyperDocs and HyperTwin form a knowledge graph of legacy systems linking code, systems, and human reasoning.

Here’s a demo video of our HyperTwin product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-tNtl9Z_jY

You can explore our documentation platform, including examples from the AWS Card Demo (a widely used COBOL codebase example) and a dummy insurance project here: https://hyperdocs-public.onrender.com/.

e.g. Developer perspective docs - High level system architecture of credit card management: https://hyperdocs-public.onrender.com/docs/aws-carddemo-with...

We’re curious to hear your thoughts and feedback, especially from anyone who’s worked with mainframes or tried to modernize legacy systems.

The article discusses the European Union's efforts to amend the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in order to promote the development of artificial intelligence, which involves relaxing some privacy protections to facilitate the collection and use of personal data.

A study suggests that acetaminophen (Tylenol) use during pregnancy may be associated with an increased risk of ADHD and autism spectrum disorder in children. The findings indicate that pregnant women should be cautious about using this common pain medication.

The article discusses the differing views on millennials held by tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, with Zuckerberg emphasizing the potential of young people and Thiel criticizing what he sees as a lack of innovation and initiative among millennials.

The article discusses a new technique for generating high-energy X-rays using a compact terahertz-driven electron accelerator. This innovative approach could enable the development of smaller and more affordable X-ray sources for various applications, including medical imaging and materials analysis.

The article discusses the concept of renewable energy cooperatives (RECs), which are community-owned and -operated renewable energy projects. It examines the benefits and challenges of RECs, as well as their potential to democratize energy production and distribution.

The article examines the potential impact of the $45 trillion in global assets managed by the top 10 asset managers, highlighting their influence on the global economy and the need for increased transparency and accountability in the investment industry.

Hi HN,

We’re Ruben, Afnan, and Theo, and we’re building Davia to solve a common problem: documenting and explaining large codebases is complex. It takes too long to generate even a first draft of a wiki, visuals are essential to understand the structure, internal docs should be editable in the IDE, and most solutions aren’t open.

Davia is an open source tool. You enter the path of your repo, and it generates a visual wiki you can explore and edit. Diagrams are created automatically, and you can update everything either in your IDE or in a Notion-like editor.

The project is still early, and we’d love to hear feedback, ideas, or experiences from anyone interested in documenting and sharing code internally.

GitHub: https://github.com/davialabs/davia

The article explores the potential impact of AI-powered chatbots on the dating landscape, highlighting concerns about authenticity, emotional connection, and the ethical implications of using AI assistants for romantic interactions.