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HN Buddy Daily Digest

Monday, April 13, 2026

Hey buddy,

Man, you won't believe the stuff on Hacker News from Monday! Had to call you real quick.

WordPress Backdoor Mess

First up, get this: someone actually bought 30 WordPress plugins and then stuck a backdoor in all of them! Can you imagine? Total nightmare for anyone using those. The article is here. One of the comments was wild, saying how crypto has actually made malware "more benign" for them, because crypto miners or wallet stealers don't affect them since they don't use crypto. Kinda twisted logic, but I get it.

GitHub's New Stacked PRs

Then, GitHub launched something called Stacked PRs (check it out). It's basically making it easier to break down big changes into smaller, reviewable chunks. People were talking about how it helps with commit hygiene and if it's good to get too dependent on a single provider's feature. Makes sense, right? We've been doing something similar manually for ages.

Apple's "Accidental Moat" in AI

There was a cool article about Apple, called "Apple's accidental moat: How the 'AI Loser' may end up winning" (link). The gist is Apple is kinda hanging back on AI, letting others make mistakes, and then they'll swoop in with their own polished version. One comment nailed it, saying "The early bird might get the worm, but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese." Also, someone complained about Google Maps pushing AI-generated stuff over human reviews, which is so true and annoying.

Polymarket Bot: "Nothing Ever Happens"

This one's a bit quirky: someone built a bot for Polymarket (those prediction markets) called "Nothing Ever Happens" (repo here). It just always bets "No" on non-sports markets. The idea is that most big, dramatic things just... don't happen. Comments were debating insider trading and if "smart people can predict things by doing research." Pretty interesting thought experiment!

Servo Browser Engine on Crates.io

Good news for Rust folks: Servo is now available on crates.io (blog post)! Remember that browser engine Mozilla started? It's been a long journey, but now you can use parts of it in Rust projects. Someone in the comments confirmed it *does* execute JS and supports WebGL, which is pretty important for a web engine. There was also some weird talk about "vibe coding" and LLMs, which I guess is just where the tech world is heading.

Michigan's Privacy Bills Pulled

And finally, a win for privacy: Michigan pulled some "digital age" bills (article) after people raised privacy concerns. It sounds like they were trying to ban kids from social media, but maybe went too far. Good to see some pushback on overreaching tech laws.

Anyway, thought you'd want to hear about that. Catch you later!

All Stories from Today

Someone bought 30 WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in all of them (anchor.host)

All elementary functions from a single binary operator (arxiv.org)

GitHub Stacked PRs (github.github.com)

Servo is now available on crates.io (servo.org)

Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning (adlrocha.substack.com)

Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets (github.com)

The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind (www.viktorcessan.com)

US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional (nypost.com)

Make tmux pretty and usable (2024) (hamvocke.com)

Android now stops you sharing your location in photos (shkspr.mobi)

Microsoft isn't removing Copilot from Windows 11, it's just renaming it (www.neowin.net)

This year’s insane timeline of hacks (ringmast4r.substack.com)

The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety (aphyr.com)

Building a CLI for all of Cloudflare (blog.cloudflare.com)

Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone (techcrunch.com)

Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised (www.thecentersquare.com)

I went to America's worst national parks so you don't have to (substack.com)

AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing (thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com)

Show HN: I built a social media management tool in 3 weeks with Claude and Codex (github.com)

How to make Firefox builds 17% faster (blog.farre.se)

Show HN: Ithihāsas – a character explorer for Hindu epics, built in a few hours (www.ithihasas.in)

WiiFin – Jellyfin Client for Nintendo Wii (github.com)

Claude.ai down (status.claude.com)

They See Your Photos (theyseeyourphotos.com)

Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal (www.politico.com)

GAIA – Open-source framework for building AI agents that run on local hardware (amd-gaia.ai)

Who's Been Impersonating This ProPublica Reporter? (www.propublica.org)

Tax Wrapped 2025 (taxwrapped.com)

The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet) (economist.com)

New Orleans's Car-Crash Conspiracy (www.newyorker.com)