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HN Buddy Daily Digest

Thursday, October 29, 2026

Hey buddy,

Long time no talk! Just saw some wild stuff on Hacker News today, figured I'd give you the quick rundown.

Patrick Stewart has died

First off, super sad news, Patrick Stewart died. Man, Captain Picard, Professor X... legend. What was wild though, in the comments, people were talking about how his passing made them think about AI and how we fear it, and then somehow it spiraled into a debate about how even poor people today live better than medieval kings. Like, totally off-topic but kinda deep for a comments section, you know? Check it out.

Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance

Then, get this, Binance got hit for a massive $5.6 *billion* dollars! Yeah, *billion*. Sounds like it was probably an inside job, or at least someone with way too much access. People in the comments were saying if one engineer can just walk away with that much, the company's security was already totally messed up. Wild stuff. Here's the link.

We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4

On the tech side, Mistral, that AI company, just open-sourced their new 'Large 4' model. That's a big deal for folks who want to run powerful AI locally. What's interesting is how quickly people in the comments brought up how politics can already influence these models, like asking about Tiananmen Square and getting different answers from different AIs. Shows you how deep that stuff runs. Read more here.

Qwenputer: A functioning, deterministic RISC-V CPU inside Qwen3.5

And this one's mind-blowing: someone built a *functioning RISC-V CPU inside an LLM*! Like, a real computer running *inside* an AI. It's called 'Qwenputer'. People were saying this really shuts down the argument that LLMs are 'just predicting the next word' because, well, a CPU isn't just predicting words, right? It's actually computing! Super cool project.

Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model

Speaking of AI, there's some buzz about Claude Code, that coding assistant. Apparently, it's constantly sending transcripts of what its background agents are doing back to its main model. Kinda raises some privacy eyebrows, you know? Commenters were worried about what other info it could be pulling out. Definitely something to keep an eye on. The details are here.

DoorDash to acquire Instacart

In business news, DoorDash is buying Instacart. So, get ready for even fewer options for food and grocery delivery. People were griping in the comments about how DoorDash drivers can be jerks and the whole tipping culture thing. Classic delivery app drama, but it's a big consolidation. Official announcement.

Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue

Oh, and guess what? Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet's total money. Wild, right? Commenters were saying AI has totally changed their ad spend – some companies dropped Google Ads to zero because AI platforms are doing the job now. Big shift in the tech world! Check out the numbers.

Anyway, that's the gist of it. Talk soon!

All Stories from Today

Patrick Stewart has died (www.nytimes.com)

We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4 (mistral.ai)

Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance (arkm.com)

Qwenputer: A functioning, deterministic RISC-V CPU inside Qwen3.5 (divagr.com)

Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model (gist.github.com)

DoorDash to acquire Instacart (about.doordash.com)

LLM Voice (martinfowler.com)

‘You Are Done’: The letter sent to King by the F.B.I (2014) (www.nytimes.com)

Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue (www.kadoa.com)

H.264 Is Magic (2016) (sidbala.com)

Gemini 4 Carbon is the new #1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5 (artificialanalysis.ai)

Alleged Chinese spy had 'close relationship' with Nvidia boss Jensen Huang (nypost.com)

Zero click, silent, remote Android DoS (smsofdeath.com)

Chained PHP2Shell exploit roots 25 servers, including US Government servers (dreamgroup.com)

I went to Mexico to test-drive the cars Americans can’t buy (www.washingtonpost.com)

If IPv4 were land (iptrust.co)

The US added a record 20.2 GWh of battery storage in just 3 months (electrek.co)

Hackers expose the identities of more than 40k DHS employees (text.npr.org)

We ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry (labs.ycombinator.com)

Forging a Microsoft Edge Full Chain with Logic Bugs Only (blog.orange.tw)

How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008) (publicpolicy.googleblog.com)

A tiny world model running games on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W (github.com)

What we know so far about Spain train crash (www.bbc.com)

We won't "just hang out" (borretti.me)

NetBSD adds a new text editor called atto (mastodon.sdf.org)

Tomáš Mikolov awarded the Medal of Merit by the President of the Czech Republic (www.vut.cz)

Zombie stats: Where the numbers AI quotes come from (trakkr.ai)

Manifestos, Fear, and 'Loser Thinking': Inside Proton's AI Reckoning (www.404media.co)

Grace Blackwell needs a new scheduler: 27% more usable GPUs from the same racks (skypilot.ai)

Show HN: Auto Dismiss Mac OS "Allow to find devices on local networks?" (github.com)