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HN Buddy Daily Digest

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Hey buddy,

Man, you gotta hear about some of the stuff on Hacker News today, Wednesday, July 9th. Some interesting reads popped up.

Tech Deep Dives

First up, there was this super technical one about something called "Tree Borrows." It's about tricky memory rules, like how Rust handles things compared to C or C++. People were arguing if Rust's way is actually harder. Someone in the comments even brought up Linus Torvalds and his old company Transmeta, which was kinda random but cool.

Then there was another deep dive, this one about how most APIs that say they're "RESTful" actually aren't. Like, they don't follow the original idea fully. The comments were a big debate about what "real REST" even means, and if it's practical or just something that looks good on paper but is messy to actually build.

Big Company Moves & News

Okay, this one was big news: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X, you know, the CEO who took over from Elon. Lots of comments on this one, as you can imagine. People were talking about non-disparagement clauses in her exit deal and speculating like crazy about what's next for X. Some comments were pretty blunt, calling X a "far-right psyops operation." Wild.

Also, IKEA is making a big move in smart home tech. They're dropping the old Zigbee stuff and going all-in on this newer "Matter" standard that uses "Thread." The comments were asking if this Matter thing actually "just works" now, or if it's still a pain for regular folks who aren't super techy.

And speaking of big moves, not tech but national scale, Bulgaria is officially joining the Euro currency zone next year, January 1st, 2026. People in the comments were debating if it's a good idea for them, and some brought up how countries like Poland are holding back because their own currency acts like a buffer in tough times.

Cool/Nerdy Stuff

Here's a fun one: Why do we say we "call" a function in programming? The article dug into the history of that phrase. The comments had some other interesting tidbits, like where the word "exception" came from in tech.

There was also a post about Astro, this web framework that's supposed to be a "return to the fundamentals". It sounds like it focuses on building faster websites by sending less JavaScript to the browser. Comments were discussing the term "hydration" which apparently only became a thing recently, and whether this kind of framework is good for non-techy users or still needs you to mess with the command line.

Oh, and someone made a DIY open-source clone of that little hacking gadget, the Flipper Zero. They called it FlopperZiro, haha. The comments were talking about how doing DIY electronics like this is often faster and cheaper than designing a custom circuit board from scratch, which is kinda surprising.

Anyway, just wanted to give you the quick rundown. Talk later!

All Stories from Today

Tree Borrows (plf.inf.ethz.ch)

Linda Yaccarino is leaving X (www.nytimes.com)

IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes (www.theverge.com)

Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful (florian-kraemer.net)

Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions? (quuxplusone.github.io)

Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web (websmith.studio)

Bulgaria to join euro area on 1 January 2026 (www.ecb.europa.eu)

RapidRAW: A non-destructive and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor (github.com)

Show HN: FlopperZiro – A DIY open-source Flipper Zero clone (github.com)

US court strikes down 'click-to-cancel' rule designed to make unsubscribing easy (www.theguardian.com)

A fast 3D collision detection algorithm (cairno.substack.com)

MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation (mcp-b.ai)

Frame of preference A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004 (aresluna.org)

Is the doc bot docs, or not? (www.robinsloan.com)

Biomni: A General-Purpose Biomedical AI Agent (github.com)

Helm local code execution via a malicious chart (github.com)

"Just Fucking Ship It" (Or: On Vibecoding) (coal.sh)

A Typology of Canadianisms (dchp.arts.ubc.ca)

SUSE launches new European digital sovereignty service to meet surging demand (www.zdnet.com)

Where can I see Hokusai's Great Wave today? (greatwavetoday.com)

ESIM Security (security-explorations.com)

Show HN: MCP server for searching and downloading documents from Anna's Archive (github.com)

Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations (retractionwatch.com)

Florida is letting companies make it harder for highly paid workers to swap jobs (www.businessinsider.com)

Let Kids Be Loud (www.afterbabel.com)

Hugging Face just launched a $299 robot that could disrupt the robotics industry (venturebeat.com)

Nuclear Waste Reprocessing Gains Momentum in the U.S. (spectrum.ieee.org)

Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system (www.newyorker.com)

Nvidia Becomes First Company to Reach $4T Market Cap (www.cnbc.com)

Evolution Mail Users Easily Trackable (www.grepular.com)