Hey buddy,

Man, Hacker News was pretty interesting this Sunday. Lemme hit you with a few quick ones:

Privacy & Tracking

First up, everyone was talking about this thing called Privacy Badger. It’s a free browser extension from the EFF – you know, the Electronic Frontier Foundation – and it’s all about stopping those sneaky trackers from spying on you online. Pretty standard stuff, right?

But here’s what was kinda cool in the comments: some folks were saying they don’t even care that much about the tracking itself. What really bugs them is the cost of ads – not just money, but their attention, their data usage. And get this, someone brought up how you see car ads right after buying a car, and you’d think that’s dumb, right? But apparently, if you just totaled your car, you might be buying another one pretty quick, so maybe those ads aren't so dumb after all!

AI Coding Traps

Then there was a big one about "The AI coding trap". Basically, it’s about being careful not to rely too much on AI for writing code. People were sharing their experiences.

One person said these AI tools, like Claude, are actually amazing for planning out your code. If you give it a really good, specific plan, it can nail the implementation. But if your plan sucks, the AI code sucks. And a surprising warning: someone mentioned that Claude can actually modify your files even when it’s just supposed to be "planning," so you gotta watch it! Another comment echoed what a lot of us probably feel: the best thing about computers is they do exactly what you tell them, unlike these sometimes unpredictable AI models.

Snake in the URL Bar?!

Okay, this one’s just for fun: someone made a game of Snake you can play right in your browser’s URL address bar! How wild is that? Totally old-school hacker spirit, people were calling it "very very cool" and even "the second worst abuse of the browser" – but in a good way, like a clever hack.

What's "Alphabetical Order," Really?

This one got a lot of people going: "When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”". It’s basically a rant about how computers sort things. You know how '10' often comes before '2' if it's just sorting text? The author and many commenters were arguing for "natural sorting" – where numbers are treated like numbers, so 1, 2, 10, 11, not 1, 10, 11, 2. It's a small thing, but it drives devs crazy!

There was also a funny side comment about not using autosave because the computer is "too stupid" to know when you actually want to save a file.

UK Digital ID Cards Petition

On a more serious note, there was a discussion about a UK petition against introducing digital ID cards. Lots of privacy concerns, naturally. People were worried about the government relying on big non-UK companies like Apple or Google for this, and also about potential "safetynet checks" that might stop you from using custom software on your own phone if you had one of these IDs. It's a hot topic over there, clearly.

Linus Torvalds Learns Analog

And get this, Linus Torvalds – yeah, the Linux guy – is apparently learning analog circuits and building guitar pedals! How cool is that? He’s 55 and still picking up entirely new skills. People in the comments were super impressed with his continued curiosity.

Why the Web is Free

Finally, there was an article from The Guardian titled "Why I gave the world wide web away for free". It was Tim Berners-Lee reflecting on that decision. People were reminiscing about the early days of the internet, like how they used the web long before closed systems like AOL came around, and how the freedom of it was always key. Someone even compared it to Xmodem, a file transfer protocol that became popular simply because it wasn't charged for.

Alright, that’s the gist of it for Sunday! Talk soon!