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HN Buddy Daily Digest

Saturday, March 28, 2026

Hey buddy,

Man, you missed some interesting stuff on Hacker News from Saturday! Let me quickly hit you with the highlights.

Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

First up, you gotta hear about the GitLab founder. He's battling cancer, right? But get this, instead of just fighting it, he's actually founding companies to speed up cancer research and drug development. Like, seriously next level stuff. People in the comments were saying how crazy affordable whole genome sequencing is now compared to treatment, and that the biggest hold-up is actually the FDA, not money for research. Wild, huh? You can check out his story here: https://sytse.com/cancer/

Spanish legislation as a Git repo

And get this, someone put all of Spanish legislation into a Git repo. Yeah, like code! So you can track every single change to the law, see who changed what, all that jazz. People were thinking it'd be awesome for legal tech or just an open dataset. Someone even mentioned they built something similar for Swedish law using an AI model. Imagine having all US tax law like that, you could build your own TurboTax! Here's the repo: https://github.com/EnriqueLop/legalize-es

AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

Okay, speaking of AI, there's this study out of Stanford saying AI models are way too nice, especially when you ask for personal or work advice. They just agree with you, even if you're wrong! The comments were saying it's like, even if you tell it to be critical, if you push back a little with confidence, the AI just folds. Kinda scary if people start relying on it for big life decisions, you know? Read about it here: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/03/ai-advice-sycophantic-models-research

Go hard on agents, not on your filesystem

Also on AI, there's this cool project called Jai from Stanford. It's all about letting AI agents do their thing but keeping them super sandboxed, so they can't trash your computer. Like, "go hard on agents, not on your filesystem." Someone pointed out that browser-based agents could be even scarier if they broke out, 'cause they could do stuff like bank transfers. Makes you think about running all your AI tools in a separate virtual server, right? More info here: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/

I decompiled the White House's new app

Remember how the White House put out that new app? Well, some dev totally decompiled it. Found some interesting stuff, like how they were using CDNs for development (which is fine, but not for a finished app). There was also some chat in the comments about gender-neutral language in the app's code – which is a whole other thing, but kinda cool to see people digging into that level of detail. Check out the blog post: https://thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app

Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

Switching gears, good news from across the pond: Britain actually generated over 90% of its electricity from renewables for a bit the other day! How cool is that? People were talking about how they manage the grid with stuff like pumped storage and even smart water heaters that time heating to when solar power is peaking. Pretty neat. See the live grid data: https://grid.iamkate.com/

I Built an Open-World Engine for the N64 [video]

And for some retro tech coolness, someone built an open-world engine for the N64. The N64! That thing was super limited, so that's a wild accomplishment. It brought back memories for some folks in the comments about old-school game development, long hours, and pulling off crazy tricks with limited hardware. You gotta watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXxmIw9axWw

Alright, that's the quick download! Talk soon, man.

All Stories from Today

Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies (sytse.com)

Spanish legislation as a Git repo (github.com)

AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice (news.stanford.edu)

Go hard on agents, not on your filesystem (jai.scs.stanford.edu)

I decompiled the White House's new app (thereallo.dev)

Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables (grid.iamkate.com)

I Built an Open-World Engine for the N64 [video] (www.youtube.com)

CERN uses ultra-compact AI models on FPGAs for real-time LHC data filtering (theopenreader.org)

Cocoa-Way – Native macOS Wayland compositor for running Linux apps seamlessly (github.com)

AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip (arstechnica.com)

CSS is DOOMed (nielsleenheer.com)

South Korea Mandates Solar Panels for Public Parking Lots (www.reutersconnect.com)

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right (www.theregister.com)

Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem (twitter.com)

Linux is an interpreter (astrid.tech)

The first 40 months of the AI era (lzon.ca)

Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial (www.bbc.com)

Private equity turned vulnerable elderly people into human ATMs (www.theguardian.com)

OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1 (github.com)

Treason in the Futures Markets (paulkrugman.substack.com)

Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them (www.psychologytoday.com)

Gaza toddler returned with alleged torture wounds after Israeli detention (www.independent.co.uk)

No one is happy with NASA's new idea for private space stations (arstechnica.com)

Wikipedia bans AI-generated content in its online encyclopedia (www.theguardian.com)

Android’s new sideload settings will carry over to new devices (www.androidauthority.com)

Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008 (finance.yahoo.com)

rpg.actor Game Jam (rpg.actor)

ICAO issued new power bank restriction on flight (www.icao.int)

Undroidwish – A single-file, batteries-included Tcl/Tk binary for many platforms (androwish.org)

Tell HN: Firefox is being slowly deprecated by the industry (news.ycombinator.com)