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HN Buddy Daily Digest

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

Hey buddy,

Man, Tuesday on Hacker News was pretty wild, lemme tell ya. I saw a bunch of cool stuff, and some head-scratchers.

Age Verification = Mass Surveillance?

First off, Cory Doctorow dropped this piece called "What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance." He's basically saying all these pushes to verify age online are just a sneaky way to build massive surveillance systems. People in the comments were totally on board, talking about how we need to protect kids, sure, but not at the cost of everyone's privacy. Someone even brought up GrapheneOS as a more secure option for mobile privacy.

F3: The Next Big File Format?

Then there's this new project called "F3," which stands for Future File Format. It's trying to be a better version of existing analytic file formats like Parquet. Apparently, Parquet is good, but these new formats are looking for niches where people aren't just doing typical Spark jobs. A lot of folks in the comments were hoping for better random access in columnar formats, which I guess is a pain point right now.

Google Fires Guy for Making a CLI?!

Dude, get this – some developer got "Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI." Seriously! He made a command-line tool for Google Workspace, and apparently, Google'

All Stories from Today

What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance (pluralistic.net)

F3 (github.com)

FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model (swipe.futo.tech)

Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI (twitter.com)

Unlimited OCR: One-shot long-horizon parsing (github.com)

Mistral OCR 4 (mistral.ai)

Israel targeted Gaza children resulting in genocide, UN inquiry says (www.reuters.com)

Jerry's Map (www.jerrysmap.com)

Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place (www.stephendiehl.com)

The Coming Loop (lucumr.pocoo.org)

VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO (arxiv.org)

Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX (tikz.dev)

In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words (devblogs.microsoft.com)

Extreme Heat conference cancelled due to extreme heat warning (www.lse.ac.uk)

Will It Mythos? (swelljoe.com)

Madison Square Garden compiled a list of activists against facial recognition (www.404media.co)

The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated (dynomight.net)

AI's Affordability Crisis (blog.dshr.org)

In praise of memcached (jchri.st)

California AB 2047 makes 3D printers off-limits to students, educators, business (www.the3dprintingnerd.com)

Claude Tag (www.anthropic.com)

1,700 free online courses from top universities (www.openculture.com)

Vulnerability reports are not special anymore (words.filippo.io)

The new HTTP QUERY method explained (kreya.app)

OpenAI DayBreak – GPT-5.5-Cyber (openai.com)

Elevated error rate across multiple models (status.claude.com)

Swift Package Index joins Apple (swiftpackageindex.com)

Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards (finance.yahoo.com)

75% More Pedestrians Have Been Killed Since 2009. Giant Trucks and SUVs Are Why (www.thedrive.com)

Anthropic updates their terms to verify age or identity (www.anthropic.com)