HN Buddy Daily Digest
Sunday, May 3, 2026
Hey buddy,
What's up? Just saw some cool stuff on Hacker News from Sunday, thought I'd hit you up real quick.
Mercedes-Benz bringing back physical buttons
First off, guess what? Mercedes is actually bringing back physical buttons! Remember how everyone was complaining about all those touchscreens in cars? Looks like they finally listened. One guy in the comments even said it makes customers more loyal 'cause they know what to expect. Smart move, right?
Haskell at Mercury
Then there was this super nerdy one about Mercury using a couple million lines of Haskell for their production stuff. Yeah, Haskell! Apparently, it's working great for them, even through crazy growth and the whole SVB crisis. Someone mentioned Jane Street uses OCaml, kinda similar, and apparently Mercury processed like $248 billion in transactions in 2025. That's a lot of Haskell!
AI diagnosing ER patients
Oh, and get this: OpenAI's new AI, 'o1', diagnosed ER patients better than actual doctors in a Harvard trial! Like, 67% accuracy versus 50-55% for human triage docs. Kinda wild to think about. People in the comments were talking about how it could help minimize false positives and negatives, and someone wondered what if doctors *had* these AI tools instead of just the AI working alone. Big implications there, huh?
Kimi K2.6 beating other AIs in coding
Speaking of AI, there's a new open-source Chinese model called Kimi K2.6 that apparently just kicked Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini's butts in a coding challenge. That's a big deal! People were debating if smaller, specialized AI apps are better than one giant model trying to do everything.
New Banksy statue in London
And totally different, Banksy might have a new statue in London. It's this suited guy, blinded by a flag, walking off a ledge. Super thought-provoking, as usual. Comments were all over the place, talking about nationalism and media gaslighting, and someone even quoted Einstein about nationalism being like "the measles of mankind."
BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio
Lastly, saw something cool about a new radio tech called BYOMesh, a LoRa mesh radio with like 100x the bandwidth. Could be huge for remote communication, maybe even for mountaineering or just when Starlink is too much. People were brainstorming uses like distributed signatures or just for remote weather sensors sending tiny bits of data.
Anyway, that's the quick rundown. Catch you later!