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HN Buddy Daily Digest

Sunday, October 25, 2026

Hey buddy,

Man, Hacker News on Sunday had some wild stuff! Lemme give you the quick rundown, grabbed a few interesting ones:

Old AI Kicks New AI's Butt for Cancer

First up, get this: A ten-year-old AI, like, an old-school CNN, just totally kicked the butt of those super-fancy new LLMs for diagnosing skin cancer. Crazy, right? People in the comments were saying how all these big tech companies just market LLMs as the answer to everything, but maybe we should just have the LLM *write* a good old Python script instead of trying to do everything itself.

Dolly Parton's Free Books

Then there's some wholesome news: Dolly Parton's 'Imagination Library' is still rocking it, giving free books to kids. Someone in the comments initially got annoyed because they felt they didn't *need* the free books, but then their kid loved getting them in the mail, and it totally changed their mind. Just shows how simple stuff can bring so much joy, you know?

Meta Messing with Elections (Again)

Alright, shifting gears a bit – Meta is getting into some hot water in Brazil. Apparently, a court told them to stop playing favorites with a politician, Bolsonaro, during the election, but they just ignored it. And get this, their own employees are saying they restricted accounts for the *other* candidate, Lula. Classic big tech power moves, eh? You can read more about it here and here.

Oregon Police Charging Crazy Money for Records

This one's wild: Oregon police are trying to charge a local news outlet two and a half *million* dollars for public records about just *one* cop. Two point five million! People were debating if it's just them being understaffed or if it's a deliberate attempt to shut down transparency. Either way, it's pretty shady.

LLM Prices Crashing

Big news in the AI world: OpenAI and Anthropic, those huge LLM companies, just slashed their prices by up to 80% in a few months! Someone was saying that for big companies, it's all about the cost, not just if one model is 'marginally better.' Makes you wonder what's really going on behind the scenes, like a race to the bottom or something.

AI Makes Profs Give Up on Homework

And speaking of AI, get this: a math prof at UC Berkeley is apparently just giving up on grading homework because students are using AI to cheat. The comments were talking about how profs are moving to in-person quizzes instead. Someone even said homework used to be a 'stick' to make you learn, but maybe we should focus on the 'carrot' of actually *wanting* to learn.

Samsung's Spying Habits

Finally, a couple of creepy ones from Samsung. First, it looks like some Samsung devices, maybe phones, are running a TensorFlow Lite model just to track you from a low-res image (check this out). And then, their TVs are apparently scanning for microphones in your house via Bluetooth to 'spy on events' (yikes!). People in the comments were saying how hard it is to even buy a 'dumb' TV anymore, and that a lot of cheap ones are basically subsidized by spyware. Makes you wanna unplug everything, right?

Anyway, that's the gist of it for Sunday. Catch you later!

All Stories from Today

A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis (lynchlab.net)

Dolly Parton's Imagination Library (imaginationlibrary.com)

Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism (www.panamericandispatch.org)

I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27 (talkweb.eu)

Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop (theintercept.com)

Cerebras Deploys Trillion-Parameter AI Models (www.cerebras.ai)

Samsung running a TensorFlow lite model on 960x540 image to track you (twitter.com)

Serbia's Vucic concedes election defeat in historic win for student movement (www.reuters.com)

OpenAI and Anthropic cut their LLM prices by up to 80% within a few months. Why? (minimaxir.com)

AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework (www.dailycal.org)

JetBrains Thinkrail (github.com)

fheroes2: A recreation of Heroes of Might and Magic II game engine (github.com)

Why I Am a Programmer (www.alfie.wtf)

Moderna and Merck say their mRNA cancer vaccine cut death, recurrence by 42% (arstechnica.com)

Five Qwen3.8-27B models match Fable 5 Using GVS5H Harness (github.com)

Meta employees say Lula’s accounts restricted in Brazil election: Report (www.aljazeera.com)

Show HN: I put employees inside S&P 500 market-cap bubbles (bigwhalehunting.com)

Tool book of a Nuremberg knight from 1505 (loeffelholz-codex.org)

The State of Context Engineering (www.dbreunig.com)

France asked ISPs to prepare temporary DNS blocks for major social platforms (www.blast-info.fr)

Active incident at Dreamhost forcing password reset (www.dreamhoststatus.com)

Nikon photography contest winner loses title after scientists spot signs of AI (www.techspot.com)

Samsung TVs look for microphones in your house via Bluetooth and then spy events (twitter.com)

What goes into making an animated film? (www.disneyanimation.com)

Online censorship is crushing indie webcomics (xtramagazine.com)

Show HN: A Truly Modular Keyboard (github.com)

Proton Flock Camera Map (proton.me)

F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS (hypnotize.works)

Imagine an AI future where being banned means you are now economically useless (twitter.com)

Xbox Turns Down Netflix $500M Offer (www.darkhorizons.com)