HN Buddy

Daily digest of top Hacker News posts and comments

Subscribe to the HN Buddy Daily Digest

Your email will only be used for the HN Buddy Daily Digest. I will not share it with anyone.

HN Buddy Daily Digest

Monday, November 17, 2025

Hey buddy, You gotta hear about the stuff from Hacker News today, Monday. Some wild things went down.

Google and the Open Web

First off, there's this big article, "Google is killing the open web, part 2". It's basically saying Google's ditching some older web tech like XSLT, and people are worried they're just pushing their own stuff too hard. The comments were pretty mixed, some folks were like, "XSLT was ancient anyway, good riddance!" But others were more about how Google's just getting too much control. Someone even linked a way to make the old stuff still work in modern browsers, which is kinda neat.

Samsung App Controversy

Then, something a bit more... political. Samsung's apparently preloading some Israeli-founded app called 'App Cloud' on their phones, and it's causing a ton of controversy. As you can imagine, the comments section blew up, people getting into heavy debates. One guy even got a warning from the mods, which you don't see every day! Also, some other comments just brought up general privacy worries with Samsung phones backing up everything by default.

Windows 11 AI Spying?

Big news for Windows users: Windows 11 is apparently adding this new AI agent that just runs in the background and can snoop around your personal folders. Yikes. Everyone in the comments is freaking out, talking about security risks and how Microsoft keeps adding 'AI bullshit' with every update. Someone even joked that running old Windows games is easier on Linux now because Windows 11 breaks everything!

Azure DDoS Attack

Microsoft had a rough day on another front too: Azure got hit by a *massive* 15 terabits per second DDoS attack, using like half a million different IP addresses. Crazy scale! The comments were mostly about how hard it is to stop these things and some people just going off on tangents about international law enforcement and geopolitics, as often happens.

Open-Source Appliance Repair

Okay, here's a cool one for the 'right to repair' crowd: someone made 'FreeMDU,' which are open-source diagnostic tools for Miele appliances. Apparently, Miele stuff is super expensive to fix, so this is a big deal for people who want to fix their own dishwashers or washing machines without paying a fortune. Comments were all

All Stories from Today

Google is killing the open web, part 2 (wok.oblomov.eu)

Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy (www.sammobile.com)

Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders (www.windowslatest.com)

Azure hit by 15 Tbps DDoS attack using 500k IP addresses (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

FreeMDU: Open-source Miele appliance diagnostic tools (github.com)

Replicate is joining Cloudflare (replicate.com)

Project Gemini (geminiprotocol.net)

Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h) (hwisnu.bearblog.dev)

Building a Simple Search Engine That Works (karboosx.net)

WeatherNext 2: Our most advanced weather forecasting model (blog.google)

Compiling Ruby to machine language (patshaughnessy.net)

An official atlas of North Korea (www.cartographerstale.com)

Are you stuck in movie logic? (usefulfictions.substack.com)

Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings (neuburger.substack.com)

Show HN: ESPectre – Motion detection based on Wi-Fi spectre analysis (github.com)

How when AWS was down, we were not (authress.io)

People are using iPad OS features on their iPhones (idevicecentral.com)

A 1961 Relay Computer Running in the Browser (minivac.greg.technology)

Show HN: PrinceJS – 19,200 req/s Bun framework in 2.8 kB (built by a 13yo) (princejs.vercel.app)

The time has finally come for geothermal energy (www.newyorker.com)

Jeff Bezos creates A.I. startup where he will be co-chief executive (www.nytimes.com)

How to escape the Linux networking stack (blog.cloudflare.com)

Grok 4.1 (x.ai)

GCC 16 considering changing default to C++20 (inbox.sourceware.org)

Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies (angadh.com)

Living my best Sun Microsystems ecosystem life in 2025 (www.osnews.com)

Why don't people return their shopping carts? (behavioralscientist.org)

Ned: ImGui Text Editor with GL Shaders (github.com)

Show HN: Parqeye – A CLI tool to visualize and inspect Parquet files (github.com)

Run ancient UNIX on modern hardware (github.com)