F-Droid 2.0 is the largest update to its Android app in 10 years

At the top of the Hacker News front page, with about fifteen hundred points: F-Droid two point oh, the new version of the app store for free and open source Android apps.

F-Droid two point oh is the largest update the official app has had in ten years: a complete redesign, with its core reworked in Jetpack Compose. Fourteen test releases came before it, and it reaches users over the coming weeks.

The app narrows to three places: Discover, Search, and My Apps. Search reaches descriptions and categories rather than names alone, and handles Chinese, Japanese and Korean far better. Filters combine, so a list can drop anything that leans on a non-free service.

One installer now covers every F-Droid install. On supported devices it uses Android's new pre-approval call, so the confirmation arrives when you tap install rather than once the download has finished. Updates arrive on their own by default.

Commenter idle_zealot dislikes the new look, calling it a refusal to draw lines between parts of the interface. The post does describe a Material Design pass, so this is a judgment about taste rather than a dispute about what changed.

Whiteboard is a desktop app where you and your coding agent share one workspace, pointed at your own checkouts. The agent draws diagrams there, and clicking one drops you on the code behind it. The diff viewer parses the code, so a large new function arrives as pseudocode.

Whiteboard calls itself an IDE, and its own limitations list says you cannot edit files in it yet. Commenter cjmcqueen calls that a big limitation for an IDE. The project states the same gap and asks for an issue.

Bastardica takes a base font and a mix-in font and swaps in every Nth glyph. What you download is a normal OpenType font whose swap rides on a contextual substitution, so browsers honour it. The build runs in the tab, so the fonts stay on your machine.

Commenter krelas wants Helvetica with every second or third character set in Arial, which is exactly what the stride control does. The tool's own notes warn that mixing two fonts makes a derivative work, so both licences apply. Why does the liver grow back?

The post argues the body is fragile on purpose. Telomeres wear down so a mutated cell line runs out of divisions. Regrowing a limb would mean leaving a growth switch on every cell. The liver regenerates because detoxifying keeps damaging it, and it pays for that in cancer risk.

The post puts cardiac muscle and neurons at near zero regeneration. Commenter senfiaj points instead to a slow turnover, about one percent of heart muscle cells a year in young adults. That figure is their reading of the literature, and the post argues the other way.

Search another Rust SIMD library for unsafe code and you find several thousand blocks. Fearless SIMD confines that to two small pieces, a macro that reaches intrinsics without unsafe and a safe transmute for loads and stores. Version 1.0 carries three years of security updates.

Commenter O3marchnative says the crate is what let their own fast Fourier transform library run on stable Rust. The post backs that up: it ships a standard-library equivalent that works on stable, and the standard one still wants nightly.