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HN Buddy Daily Digest

Sunday, November 30, 2025

Hey buddy,

Man, Sunday on Hacker News had some pretty cool stuff, lemme tell ya. I saw a few things that caught my eye. Here's the quick rundown:

Advent of Code Kicks Off 2025

First up, it's that time of year again: Advent of Code 2025 is live! Everyone's buzzing about it. What's kinda interesting this year is that it's only 12 days long. Apparently, some people are actually happy about that because, as one commenter said, the puzzles get super tough around day 13 or 14, to the point where they'd spend a whole day on one. Another person mentioned they don't even find those abstract coding problems fun, preferring to design APIs or delete legacy code. But yeah, lots of excitement for the puzzle solvers!

Check it out: Advent of Code 2025

Show HN: Boing - Digital Objects Making Weird Sounds

There was this really neat "Show HN" project called Boing. It's a website that digitally models weird and beautiful objects and instruments to make sounds. The creator, Greg, actually hopped into the comments and said his secret dream is to do this for a living – just digitally model cool stuff forever. Sounds like a pretty awesome dream job, right?

Give it a listen: Boing

Zigbook Accused of Plagiarism

Okay, so a bit of drama in the open-source world. A project called Zigbook is being accused of straight-up plagiarizing the Zigtools Playground. The Zigtools folks put out a blog post about it, saying Zigbook copied their code and even their UI design without attribution. It's always a bummer to see that happen. In the comments, people were discussing the importance of being able to edit things like issue titles and code examples on platforms like GitHub to keep projects clear and useful, which is kinda related to open source maintenance.

Read the details: Zigbook Is Plagiarizing the Zigtools Playground

Windows Drive Letters Are Weirder Than You Think

Here's a surprising one: turns out Windows drive letters aren't limited to A-Z! Like, seriously? The article goes into how you can actually use other symbols and stuff, which is a wild little deep dive into old Windows quirks. People in the comments were also chatting about whether we should still be supporting 32-bit hardware and software, with some saying it's wasteful and others arguing good old hardware shouldn't be discarded.

Mind blown? Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z

"Don't Push AI Down Our Throats"

This article titled "Don't push AI down our throats" really hit a nerve with a lot of people. It's all about the feeling that AI is being forced into every product and workflow, sometimes without much thought. The comments were pretty active, with some folks suggesting that if companies are going to make big UI changes because of AI, those changes should be reversible for the life of the product. Another idea was to have laws about AI integration only apply to consumer-facing stuff, not business-to-business.

Read the take: Don't push AI down our throats

Modern Cars Are Spying On You

And finally, something pretty relatable and a bit creepy: an article about how modern cars are spying on you and what you can actually do about it. It's wild how much data these vehicles collect. One commenter brought up a good point: even if you try to avoid all the digital tracking, your car still has a very visible and unique license plate, so there's always some level of identification. Someone else compared it to credit scores, where companies promise rewards for 'better' consumers but then keep shifting the goalposts.

Better check your car: Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it

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

All Stories from Today

Advent of Code 2025 (adventofcode.com)

Show HN: Boing (boing.greg.technology)

Writing a good Claude.md (www.humanlayer.dev)

Zigbook Is Plagiarizing the Zigtools Playground (zigtools.org)

Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z (www.ryanliptak.com)

Don't push AI down our throats (gpt3experiments.substack.com)

Migrating Dillo from GitHub (dillo-browser.org)

Norway wealth fund to vote for human rights report at Microsoft, against Nadella (www.cnbc.com)

Meshtastic (meshtastic.org)

CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution (cachyos.org)

“Boobs check” – Technique to verify if sites behind CDN are hosted in Iran (twitter.com)

Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it (apnews.com)

A Love Letter to FreeBSD (www.tara.sh)

GitHub to Codeberg: my experience (eldred.fr)

Algorithms for Optimization [pdf] (algorithmsbook.com)

Tell HN: Regrets. Think carefully about how you spend your time (news.ycombinator.com)

NixOS 25.11 released (nixos.org)

The Thinking Game Film – Google DeepMind documentary (thinkinggamefilm.com)

AI just proved Erdos Problem #124 (www.erdosproblems.com)

People keep flocking to Linux, not just to escape Windows (www.zdnet.com)

ETH-Zurich: Digital Design and Computer Architecture; 227-0003-10L, Spring, 2025 (safari.ethz.ch)

LLVM-MOS – Clang LLVM fork targeting the 6502 (llvm-mos.org)

Silicon Valley's man in the White House is benefiting himself and his friends (www.nytimes.com)

Don't throw away your old PC–it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy (www.howtogeek.com)

Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted) (evanhahn.com)

You want microservices, but do you need them? (www.docker.com)

The Undermining of the CDC (www.newyorker.com)

A new Little Prince museum has opened its doors in Switzerland (www.lepetitprince.com)

Bricklink suspends Marketplace operations in 35 countries (jaysbrickblog.com)

Program-of-Thought Prompting Outperforms Chain-of-Thought by 15% (2022) (arxiv.org)