Hey buddy,

Man, Saturday on Hacker News was kinda wild. A lot of heavy stuff, but some cool tech too. Let me give you the quick rundown.

Minneapolis ICE Shooting Drama

Okay, so the biggest thing everyone was talking about was this whole situation in Minneapolis where federal agents shot and killed a guy. There were like, four different articles on it. Apparently, it was during an immigration crackdown by ICE. The comments were going nuts, debating if the shooting was justified, especially since some folks were saying ICE officers usually deal with civil, not criminal, stuff, so their authority might be fuzzy.

What's really wild is that there was also talk about the White House releasing a manipulated video of an activist's arrest related to this, and ICE itself is apparently looking for new user tracking tools. So, it's a messy situation with lots of layers, you know? People are really fired up about government transparency and actions.

WhatsApp Gets a Buddy in Europe

This was pretty cool: a European chat app called BirdyChat is now the first one to actually be interoperable with WhatsApp. So, you can use BirdyChat to talk to your friends on WhatsApp without them needing to switch apps. This is a huge deal, probably thanks to those new EU tech regulations pushing for more open communication. Comments were saying it's great for competition and could help people separate their work chats from personal ones if businesses use WhatsApp a lot. Kinda makes you think about how we used to hope XMPP (Jabber) would do this for everyone, but it never really took off.

Microsoft Giving FBI Your BitLocker Keys?

Alright, this one's a bit scary for privacy. It came out that Microsoft will reportedly hand over your Windows PC data encryption keys (like for BitLocker) to the FBI if they get a legal order. Yikes. The comments were, understandably, pretty alarmed. Some people were saying it makes encryption feel less secure, while others pointed out it still helps against a regular thief, just not a government agency. It just reinforces that whole "cloud privacy" debate, right?

AI Coders Getting Smarter with "Swarms"

On the AI front, Claude Code apparently has a new hidden feature called "Swarms." From what I gathered, it sounds like it lets multiple AI agents work together on a single coding task. Instead of one big AI trying to do everything, they break it down into smaller parts for specialized "sub-agents." People in the comments were pretty excited about this idea of "subagent orchestration" without needing heavy frameworks. It's like AI is learning to be a team player, which is pretty neat for tackling complex projects.

Gigabit Ethernet Over Old British Phone Wires

This was a fun one. Some dude managed to get gigabit Ethernet speeds running over his old British phone wires using a tech called G.hn. It's a pretty impressive hack, showing you can squeeze a lot out of old infrastructure. People in the comments were all like, "How'd he do that?!" and also wondering why in 2026, gigabit Ethernet is still the standard when we have faster stuff out there. Goes to show, sometimes the old ways can still surprise you.

Gmail's Spam Filter Going Rogue?

Heads up on this one: a lot of people were on HN asking if Gmail's spam filter suddenly went crazy and started marking everything as spam. Sounds like a pretty widespread issue, probably a bad update from Google. Naturally, this led to a big discussion about people ditching Gmail, self-hosting their email, or moving to services like Mailbox.org or Fastmail. It's a good reminder that relying on one big company for something as critical as email can have its downsides.

How to Actually Estimate Work (for us tech folks)

Finally, there was a pretty popular post about "How I estimate work" in software development. It covered different ways to approach task estimation, which is always a hot topic, right? The comments were a mixed bag, with people debating story points, the difficulty of maintaining estimation systems, and how the pressure of a deadline totally changes your approach – you know, refactor elegantly vs. just getting it done. Super relatable if you've ever had to give a timeline for anything.

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