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HN Buddy Daily Digest

Sunday, November 23, 2025

Hey buddy,

Man, lemme tell you, Hacker News was pretty wild yesterday, Sunday. Had some really interesting stuff pop up. I figured I'd give you the quick rundown.

First up, there was this super emotional post,

"After my dad died, we found the love letters"

. It was about someone finding out all these hidden sides to their dad after he passed, through old letters. The comments were kinda intense, like people debating if the dad was a "scumbag" or not, and talking about how social pressure can mess with relationships. Someone even brought up the AIDS scare from way back, which was a surprising turn. Just a really human, raw story.

Then, on a totally different note, this designer made a new font called

"Fran Sans – font inspired by San Francisco light rail displays"

. It’s based on those old, segmented signs you see on the trains. People in the comments were geeking out about the details of the display tech and the history of the train company. Someone even had to tell people off for expecting the designer to just give away their work for free, which is kinda a recurring theme sometimes, you know?

Big tech news,

"Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege"

. Apparently, Meta had studies showing their stuff was causing harm and they just kinda... hid it. One comment said the drop in life satisfaction from social media is like half of what you'd feel after a divorce! Crazy, right? People were also debating if companies are just naturally evil or if society should regulate them more.

Another one that hit home for a lot of people was

"A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure"

. This guy had Xfinity issues for ages and they just wouldn't fix it. Everyone was sharing their own horror stories about ISPs. One dude actually got his specific IPv6 problem fixed by just *knowing* someone in the Comcast backbone network! Shows you how broken the customer service can be.

And speaking of social media, X (you know, Twitter) rolled out this new feature,

"X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run"

. Turns out a bunch of accounts that seemed American were actually being run from other countries. Not super surprising, but still a big deal for understanding what's going on online.

For the more technical folks, there was a cool article explaining

"Shaders: How to draw high fidelity graphics with just x and y coordinates"

. It's about how graphics cards basically paint pixels using math. Super fundamental stuff if you're into games or any kind of visual tech. Comments were talking about the complexity of writing them and how some parts of graphics APIs are still a mess.

Finally, something useful for us Mac users:

"Native Secure Enclave backed SSH keys on macOS"

. This lets you use your Mac's built-in secure chip for SSH keys, which is a huge security upgrade. People in the comments were stoked, saying they'd been wanting this for years. And get this, the tool to set it up, `sc_auth`, is apparently an ancient bash script that references macOS Tiger from like, 20 years ago! Wild that old code is still kicking and doing important work.

Anyway, that's the gist of it. Pretty eventful Sunday, huh? Catch you later!

All Stories from Today

After my dad died, we found the love letters (www.jenn.site)

Fran Sans – font inspired by San Francisco light rail displays (emilysneddon.com)

Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege (www.reuters.com)

A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure (sacbear.com)

X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run (www.hindustantimes.com)

Shaders: How to draw high fidelity graphics with just x and y coordinates (www.makingsoftware.com)

Native Secure Enclave backed SSH keys on macOS (gist.github.com)

Court filings allege Meta downplayed risks to children and misled the public (time.com)

Iowa City made its buses free. Traffic cleared, and so did the air (www.nytimes.com)

Racket v9.0 (blog.racket-lang.org)

Calculus for Mathematicians, Computer Scientists, and Physicists [pdf] (mathcs.holycross.edu)

1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18 (blog.zorin.com)

Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft? (birchtree.me)

73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering (pub.towardsai.net)

GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End (gcc.gnu.org)

Unusual circuits in the Intel 386's standard cell logic (www.righto.com)

"Good engineering management" is a fad (lethain.com)

NTSB report: Decryption of images from the Titan submersible camera [pdf] (2024) (data.ntsb.gov)

MCP Apps: Extending servers with interactive user interfaces (blog.modelcontextprotocol.io)

Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal (windowsreport.com)

µcad: New open source programming language that can generate 2D sketches and 3D (microcad.xyz)

Silicon Valley startups: being evil, again and again (notesfrombelow.org)

Editing Code in Emacs (redpenguin101.github.io)

Mount Proton Drive on Linux using rclone and systemd (github.com)

Several core problems with Rust (bykozy.me)

Germany to classify date rape drugs as weapons to ensure justice for survivors (www.theguardian.com)

Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering? (news.ycombinator.com)

An Economy of AI Agents (arxiv.org)

Signal knows who you're talking to (2023) (sanesecurityguy.com)

Apple to focus on 'quality and underlying performance' with iOS 27 next year (9to5mac.com)