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HN Buddy Daily Digest

Sunday, February 8, 2026

Hey buddy,

Man, Hacker News today, Sunday the 8th of Feb, had some interesting stuff. Lemme quickly hit you with the highlights:

Vouch – A New Open Source Reputation System

First up, you know Mitchell Hashimoto, the HashiCorp co-founder? He put out this new project called Vouch. It’s basically a reputation system for open-source contributions. The idea is to make it harder for bots and spam to mess with traditional "karma" or star counts by having real people "vouch" for others. Some comments were pretty cynical, saying the whole open-source contribution model is kinda broken anyway, and maybe folks should just fork and compete.

AI Fatigue is Real

Then there was this article about AI fatigue. Apparently, a lot of people are feeling it – getting burned out from constantly using AI tools. One commenter mentioned how they used to juggle 4-5 AI projects, got totally burnt out, and now stick to 2-3. Also, apparently, those generic AI-generated images in blog posts are super annoying people!

Happier Writing Code by Hand

Sticking with the AI theme, someone wrote about being happier writing code by hand. They basically said they enjoy the act of programming too much to just hand it all over to a machine. A cool point in the comments was comparing AI to high-level programming languages – like, is natural language to code what high-level code is to assembly? Just another layer of abstraction?

Show HN: LocalGPT – Local AI Assistant in Rust

This was a cool "Show HN" (that's where people show off their projects). Someone built LocalGPT, which is a local-first AI assistant written in Rust that has persistent memory. So, it's an AI that runs on your machine and remembers stuff, which is pretty neat for privacy and personalized help. People were talking about how competitive the local LLM space is getting.

Real-Time 3D Shader on a Game Boy Color

Okay, this one was just plain awesome. Someone managed to get a real-time 3D shader running on a Game Boy Color! How wild is that?! The author even popped into the comments, which is always cool, and people were reminiscing about the old days of coding assembly on machines like the C64 and finding creative ways around hardware limits. Super impressive.

Why E Cores Make Apple Silicon Fast

There was a pretty interesting deep dive into why Apple's M-series chips are so fast. Turns out, it's not just the big performance cores, but the efficiency (E) cores doing a lot of heavy lifting in the background, making everything feel snappier. The discussion was all about how Intel missed the boat by focusing on fabs instead of competitive chips, and whether Apple's speed is just about new process tech and lots of cache.

Sad News: Dave Farber Has Died

And finally, some sad news: Dave Farber passed away. He was a huge figure in the early days of the internet, a real pioneer. Definitely a loss for the tech community.

Alright, that's the quick rundown! Catch ya later!

All Stories from Today

Vouch (github.com)

AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it (siddhantkhare.com)

DoNotNotify is now Open Source (donotnotify.com)

I am happier writing code by hand (www.abhinavomprakash.com)

Slop Terrifies Me (ezhik.jp)

Show HN: LocalGPT – A local-first AI assistant in Rust with persistent memory (github.com)

I put a real-time 3D shader on the Game Boy Color (blog.otterstack.com)

OpenClaw is changing my life (reorx.com)

AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder (www.blundergoat.com)

Omega-3 is inversely related to risk of early-onset dementia (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in USA (www.theguardian.com)

Beyond agentic coding (haskellforall.com)

Why E cores make Apple silicon fast (eclecticlight.co)

Dave Farber has died (lists.nanog.org)

GitHub Agentic Workflows (github.github.io)

Art of Roads in Games (sandboxspirit.com)

Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition (github.com)

Show HN: I created a Mars colony RPG based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books (underhillgame.com)

Vouch (github.com)

A GTA modder has got the 1997 original working on modern PCs and Steam Deck (gtaforums.com)

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization (2025) (arxiv.org)

Curating a Show on My Ineffable Mother, Ursula K. Le Guin (hyperallergic.com)

Running Your Own As: BGP on FreeBSD with FRR, GRE Tunnels, and Policy Routing (blog.hofstede.it)

Bun v1.3.9 (bun.com)

More Mac malware from Google search (eclecticlight.co)

Let's compile Quake like it's 1997 (fabiensanglard.net)

The first sodium-ion battery EV is a winter range monster (insideevs.com)

RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001) (datatracker.ietf.org)

Matchlock – Secures AI agent workloads with a Linux-based sandbox (github.com)

Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026) (news.ycombinator.com)