HN Buddy

Daily digest of top Hacker News posts and comments

Subscribe to the HN Buddy Daily Digest

Your email will only be used for the HN Buddy Daily Digest. I will not share it with anyone.

HN Buddy Daily Digest

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

Hey buddy,

Man, Wednesday was pretty wild on Hacker News. Lemme give you the quick rundown:

Apple's New M5 Chip

First up, Apple dropped their new M5 chip. Everyone's talking about how it's a "next big leap" for AI performance in their stuff, like the MacBook Pros and iPad Pros. People in the comments were saying it's obviously not gonna compete with like, eight Nvidia H100s for training huge AI models, but for what you pay, a bunch of MacBooks can do a lot for personal AI tasks. Someone also mentioned how some Electron apps can totally mess up system functionality, which is kinda wild.

Job Interview Hacking Scam

Then there was this super scary one: a guy almost got hacked by a "job interview" scam. Apparently, if you're looking for crypto jobs, these scammers set up fake interviews and try to get you to run malware. Super clever and targeted, so watch out if you or anyone you know is job hunting in that space. People were also talking about other scams, like companies trying to get free work out of you before a contract.

Claude Haiku 4.5 Released

Another day, another AI model! Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5. It's supposed to be faster and cheaper. But honestly, a lot of the comments were just people getting a bit fed up, saying "Ain't nobody got time to pick models and compare features" anymore. They just want something that works for coding or generic tasks without all the fuss.

Ireland's Basic Income for Artists

This was pretty cool and different: Ireland is making its basic income program for artists permanent. They've been trying it out, and now it's a done deal. The discussions were all over the place, from how UBI (Universal Basic Income) saves money by not needing tons of admin, to how you even define who's an "artist" in the first place. Seems like a big step for supporting creative folks.

Bots Mimicking Engagement

Okay, this one's a bit unsettling for anyone in online business: bots are apparently getting really good at mimicking human engagement on websites. Like, 73% of e-commerce visitors could be fake! It makes you wonder how much of the "traffic" and "impressions" data we see is actually real. Some comments brought up how ad platforms like Facebook used to be impossible to verify impressions on, and others were suggesting legislation to deal with it.

Ditching Serverless for Simplicity

And for the tech heads, someone wrote about leaving serverless architecture and actually getting better performance and a simpler setup. The takeaway from the comments was that serverless isn't a one-size-fits-all solution; it might be great for huge companies with specific problems, but for most apps, it can lead to complicated dependencies and vendor lock-in. Sometimes simpler is better, right?

Zed Editor on Windows

Finally, that super fast code editor, Zed, is now available on Windows! It used to be a Mac-only thing, so that's a big deal for a lot of developers. People in the comments were mostly excited, though some were still grumbling about how expensive storage is, especially on Macs, which Zed was originally focused on.

Anyway, that's the gist! Talk soon!

All Stories from Today

Apple M5 chip (www.apple.com)

I almost got hacked by a 'job interview' (blog.daviddodda.com)

Claude Haiku 4.5 (www.anthropic.com)

Ireland is making basic income for artists program permanent (www.artnews.com)

Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement (joindatacops.com)

Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture (www.unkey.com)

Zed is now available on Windows (zed.dev)

M5 MacBook Pro (www.apple.com)

Show HN: Halloy – Modern IRC client (github.com)

Pixnapping Attack (www.pixnapping.com)

The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain (wastedwind.energy)

IRS open sources its fact graph (github.com)

Pwning the Nix ecosystem (ptrpa.ws)

Apple Vision Pro upgraded with M5 chip (www.apple.com)

I am a programmer, not a rubber-stamp that approves Copilot generated code (prahladyeri.github.io)

You are the scariest monster in the woods (jamie.ideasasylum.com)

iPad Pro with M5 chip (www.apple.com)

Are hard drives getting better? (www.backblaze.com)

Getting syntax highlighting wrong (tonsky.me)

Just talk to it – A way of agentic engineering (steipete.me)

Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem (simonwillison.net)

F5 says hackers stole undisclosed BIG-IP flaws, source code (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable (www.vincentuden.xyz)

Next Steps for the Caddy Project Maintainership (caddy.community)

Mac Source Ports – Run old games on new Macs (www.macsourceports.com)

A kernel stack use-after-free: Exploiting Nvidia's GPU Linux drivers (blog.quarkslab.com)

Writing an LLM from scratch, part 22 – training our LLM (www.gilesthomas.com)

Disk Prices (diskprices.com)

Show HN: Firm, a text-based work management system (github.com)

YouTube seems to be down (www.youtube.com)