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HN Buddy Daily Digest

Thursday, July 16, 2026

Hey buddy, Man, Thursday on Hacker News was pretty wild, some really interesting stuff popped up.

Kimi K3: New AI on the Block

First up, everyone's buzzing about this new AI model called Kimi K3. It's got like, a ton of points and comments. People are talking about how insane its cost is, with one guy joking about rendering the "most expensive pelican" he's ever seen with it. There was also a big debate in the comments about what the most important technology in human history is – some saying writing, others industrialization, agriculture, or even fire. Deep stuff for an AI post, right?

Check it out: https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3

The Lost Joy of Music Piracy

Then there was this article about the lost joy of music piracy. Remember the good old days of grabbing music? The article was saying streaming kinda killed that unique experience. But here's the kicker: a bunch of people in the comments were actually saying that streaming services, especially like Spotify's Discover Weekly, helped them find *more* new music they loved than piracy ever did. Kinda flips the article's premise on its head!

Read it here: https://www.pigeonsandplanes.com/read/music-piracy-what-cd-oink-nine-inch-nails-streaming

Sony Deleting "Bought" Movies Again

This one's super shady: Sony apparently deleted more movies from people's accounts that they thought they "bought." Man, this keeps happening! People in the comments are, rightly, furious. They're saying if Sony wants to revoke a license, they should have to buy it back at the original price. It just highlights how digital "ownership" is really just licensing, and it's a mess.

More details: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/07/15/sony-deletes-a-bunch-more-movies-from-the-accounts-of-people-who-bought-them/

Microsoft Comic Chat is Now Open Source

Get this: Microsoft open-sourced their old Comic Chat program! Remember that weird IRC client that turned your chat into a comic strip? Total blast from the past. Some people in the comments were just happy to see Microsoft embracing open source, even for something so old and quirky. It's a fun bit of nostalgia.

Check out the blog post: https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2026/07/16/microsoft-comic-chat-is-now-open-source/

OnePlus Pulling Out of USA and Europe

Big news in the phone world: OnePlus is halting operations in the USA and Europe. That's a pretty significant move. The comments were interesting – some folks pointed to the intense "996" work culture (9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week) in Chinese tech companies as a contributing factor. Others felt OnePlus had alienated its loyal developer-friendly customers over the years.

Official announcement: https://community.oneplus.com/thread/2170715118587871237

Decoy Font: Tricking AI with Text

There's this super cool experiment called Decoy Font. It's a font that shows different text depending on how zoomed in or out you are, designed to trick AI. The idea is you could hide messages from LLMs. But a smart person in the comments pointed out that LLMs could probably just learn to *downsample* the image and read the "real" text anyway, which kinda defeats the purpose. Also, some talk about potential ADA compliance issues if used widely.

See it in action: https://www.mixfont.com/experiments/decoy-font

SpaceX Stock Slides Below IPO Price

Lastly, not so great news for Elon: SpaceX stock has dropped below its IPO price in intraday trading. Ouch. What's wild is that someone in the HN comments mentioned they had actually run a poll months ago asking if the OpenAI and SpaceX IPOs would fail, and people generally voted *against* them succeeding. Talk about a crystal ball! Also, someone else commented about Elon's other companies getting to "turducken levels of nested bad companies."

Article here: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-07-16/spacex-stock-erases-gains-slides-below-ipo-price-in-intraday-trading

Anyway, that's the quick rundown. Catch you later!

All Stories from Today

Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence (www.kimi.com)

The lost joy of music piracy (www.pigeonsandplanes.com)

Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source (opensource.microsoft.com)

Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them (www.techdirt.com)

OnePlus halts operations in USA and Europe (community.oneplus.com)

Decoy Font (www.mixfont.com)

How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going (rtfeldman.com)

NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook (blog.google)

At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic (joinedanthropic.com)

SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading (www.latimes.com)

Ente – Opening Our Books (ente.com)

$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol (www.tryai.dev)

1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored (www.openculture.com)

If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe (madcampos.dev)

LM Studio Bionic: the AI agent for open models (lmstudio.ai)

The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway (www.theocharis.dev)

Immersive Linear Algebra Book with Interactive Figures (2015) (immersivemath.com)

Guerrilla London bus ads mock Kylie Jenner’s Meta glasses campaign (hyperallergic.com)

Detecting LLM-Generated Texts with “Classical” Machine Learning (blog.lyc8503.net)

Bluesky Trademarks ATProto (atproto.com)

Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode (www.spaceweather.gov)

Reynard: A real Firefox web browser for iOS 13 or later (github.com)

Making 768 servers look like 1 (planetscale.com)

42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support (www.cnbc.com)

My car’s OTA update broke Android Auto (imdanielkendall.com)

Mathematics of Data Science (arxiv.org)

Let's Build PlanetScale from Scratch: Infrastructure (onatm.dev)

German AI consortium releases Soofi S, an open 30B model that tops benchmarks (the-decoder.com)

British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply (www.bbc.com)

How to Train a Gen AI Kick Drum Model on Your Old Linux Desktop with 6GB VRAM (www.zhinit.dev)