HackerNews Digest

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The article describes reverse‑engineering a parallel‑port copy‑protection dongle used by a 1990s RPG II compiler (RPGC.EXE) and its associated tools (SEU.EXE) for an accounting package running on Windows 98/DOS. The dongle, marked “Software Security Inc.” and “RUNTIME”, is required by the compiler, which embeds the same protection routine into every compiled executable. Disassembly with Reko revealed a 0x90‑byte routine in segment 0800 that performs IN/OUT operations on the LPT1 port, accumulates responses in BH and BL, and returns a constant value in BX. Since the routine takes no input, the result is fixed; BH is hard‑coded to 0x76, leaving BL as the only variable. Brute‑forcing BL (0–255) via a script in DOSBox identified the correct value (0x06), making the magic number 0x7606. Patching the first four bytes of the routine to “MOV BX,7606h; RETF” bypasses the dongle check for all compiler executables, enabling compilation and execution of the legacy RPG software without hardware. The author plans to release the patched compiler as a historical artifact.

The GitHub repository gavrielc/nanoclaw offers a personal Claude‑based AI assistant designed to run inside Apple‑specific containers. It emphasizes lightweight operation, security, and ease of understanding and customization for individual needs. The page currently shows a “You can’t perform that action at this time” notice, indicating limited or restricted access to the content. An accompanying image (alt text “NanoClaw”) likely depicts the assistant’s branding or interface. No additional technical details, usage instructions, or code excerpts are provided in the scraped excerpt.

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Xikipedia is a prototype social‑media feed that presents content sourced from Simple Wikipedia. It uses a basic, non‑machine‑learning algorithm that runs locally in the browser to infer a user’s interests from their interactions and then recommends similar articles. No user data is transmitted, stored, or shared; all processing occurs client‑side and data is cleared when the page is refreshed or closed. The project’s source code is publicly available on GitHub, with discussion channels on federated platforms such as fedi, Bluesky, and Twitter. Users may select predefined categories or add custom ones to seed the feed. Because the underlying articles are drawn randomly, the interface can display adult‑oriented (NSFW) material, and users are warned to proceed only if they are of legal age.

The Apple 1 is a single‑board microcomputer built around a MOS Technology 6502 CPU and includes an integrated video terminal and sockets for 8 KB of dynamic RAM. It ships fully assembled, tested, and with an onboard power supply for immediate use; the listed price is $666.66 (including the 4 KB RAM version). The video terminal connects to a monitor or TV (via an RF modulator) and displays 960 characters (40 × 24) with automatic scrolling, using a dedicated 1 KB video memory so all main RAM remains available to programs. A keyboard interface accepts standard ASCII keyboards, eliminating the need for a teletype. Memory uses sixteen 4‑pin 4 KB DRAM chips, occupying one quarter the space and power of earlier 2102 parts; the system is expandable to 65 KB through an edge connector and can be upgraded to 16‑KB chips for 32 KB onboard RAM. An attached cassette board provides 1 500 bps data transfer, allowing 4 KB to be read or written in roughly 20 seconds and works with generic audio cassette recorders. Software supplied includes Apple BASIC on tape, a disassembler, and several games, with additional tools such as a macro assembler under development. The product is marketed as readily available in major computer stores.

The HS2 railway construction has uncovered a diverse collection of archaeological artefacts now held in a secure warehouse. Items documented include: - Roman material: a detailed coin, a pottery head fragment, and a bone tag associated with gladiators. - Medieval and post‑medieval objects: a 13th‑14th century gold “three‑lions” pendant, a bone‑carved cubic die, 19th‑century gold dentures, and a glazed porcelain figurine of a pug. - Anglo‑Saxon and earlier finds: a decorated bone spindle whorl, an Anglo‑Saxon spinning whorl, and a Paleolithic hand axe. - Imported pieces: a French pipe likely made by Fiolet of St Omer. These discoveries were recorded along the HS2 corridor from London to Birmingham, with a mapped sequence of sites spanning Roman, Anglo‑Saxon, medieval, and modern periods. Critics of the project, citing cost overruns, delays, and environmental impacts, argue that the cultural and historic value of such finds does not justify continued construction.

The article presents a method for creating Time‑Machine‑style incremental backups with rsync. A shell script generates a timestamp (`date "+%Y-%m-%dT%H-%M-%S"`), defines `USER`, `SOURCEDIR`, and `TARGETDIR`, then runs: ``` rsync -avPh --delete --link-dest=$TARGETDIR/current \ $SOURCEDIR/$USER/ $TARGETDIR/$USER-$TIMESTAMP \ > /var/log/rsync/$TIMESTAMP.log 2>&1 ``` If rsync exits successfully, the script replaces the `current` symlink with the new snapshot (`ln -s $TARGETDIR/$USER-$TIMESTAMP $TARGETDIR/current`); on failure it renames the incomplete directory to `failed‑$USER‑$TIMESTAMP`. The `--link-dest` option creates hard links to unchanged files, so each snapshot stores only new or modified data, conserving space. A cron entry runs the script daily at 5 AM. The author notes that before deleting old snapshots a fresh full backup should be taken, and credits Mike Rubel for influencing the solution.

Adventure Game Studio features “Nothmere,” a game released 31 January 2026. The opening scenario places the player alone on a cold, rocky shore under a moonless sky, having been dragged from the sea through a sewer pipe with no memory of identity or circumstances. The site includes visual assets such as the Adventure Game Studio logo, a “Brainrot!” image, a “Nothmere” screenshot, artwork for “King’s Quest II+ VGA,” a “Whispers of a Machine” illustration, an award‑winner placeholder, and another Adventure Game Studio logo. The content provides minimal narrative detail, focusing on the game’s atmospheric premise and associated imagery.

The author discovered that an iPhone 16 Pro Max (A18 chip) produced nonsensical output when running MLX‑based large language models, while the same code worked on an iPhone 15 Pro, a MacBook Pro, and later on an iPhone 17 Pro Max. Debugging involved logging tensor values during inference with a quantized Gemma model on the prompt “What is 2+2?”. Initial layers produced identical inputs on both devices, but later tensors on the iPhone 16 differed by orders of magnitude, leading to incorrect generation. The discrepancy was traced to the Neural Engine’s Metal‑accelerated tensor computations, suggesting a hardware defect in that specific device rather than a software issue. The author concluded that the phone should be returned to Apple, noting that similar Apple Intelligence download problems reported by other users may share the same hardware cause. The episode highlighted the importance of considering physical hardware failures when debugging ML workloads on mobile devices.