Hacker News Reader

asimpleusecaseon Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

If others find themselves in a similar situation you could look at https://once.com/campfire

asimpleusecaseon The Netherlands, a Small European Nation, Has a Big Explosions Problem

Really interesting. I am in the Netherlands on holiday with my family. Two nights ago there were a series of explosions that sounded like very large fireworks or military pratice of some type. We were doing many searches to see it it was some holiday, but could not find anything.

asimpleusecaseon Marines now have an official drone-fighting handbook

In some photos I have seen the charge looks like and RPG https://share.google/LUIxGYEC07ZDVMVgT

asimpleusecaseon Track and Contact Churning Users

Asks you to connect it to your stripe account to get “analytics” but is vague on exactly what those will be. There are no examples.

There is no privacy policy - no terms of service.

If you follow the link at the bottom of page it shows a list of small projects and they all appear to be done by one person.

asimpleusecaseon Show HN: I built this to talk Danish to my girlfriend – works with any language

I’m sure she is a lovely person, but I don’t really have a need to text your girlfriend.

asimpleusecaseon ASK HN: Why Google's Gemini 2.5 paper has 3295 authors?

Could also be a way to obscure the core team to make it harder to poach - right now the key scientists are worth 8 figures

asimpleusecaseon Biomolecular shifts occur in our 40s and 60s (2024)

My vision had started to decline in my 30’s. Not a ton but needed glasses for distance vision to be crisp. When I hit 60 I started to operate without my glasses more. It forced my eyes to work more. I just had an eye exam and I can legally drive without glasses. My eyesight improved. It’s not crisp at distance but I can grab my glasses when I feel the need ( use when driving at night for extra layer of safety)

asimpleusecaseon We increased Roblox game profits by 30% using overlooked economic patterns

This reads like a scam ad.

asimpleusecaseon Contact lenses that grant infrared vision

So when do I get my X-ray glasses promised in the back on comic books? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_specs

asimpleusecaseon Guardian journalists in revolt over 'miserable' website redesign

A real question is “ who is the customer?”

asimpleusecaseon Harvard's foreign students are stuck and scared

Harvard has more than $50 Billion in their endowment. So they don’t really need US grants or contracts.

As far as visas go, this seems to be part of the escalation over the past couple of months. Both Harvard and the US administration seem to have read the same book on negotiation - Never Split The Difference.

I suspect that there is a path to a deal , but we will see if anyone is willing to do that.

asimpleusecaseon Bill Gates tears into Elon Musk for 'the deaths of the poorest children'

It’s a great opportunity for Bill to step in and make sure that everyone who is being impacted by USAID cuts is taken care of. Bill has the money and the organisation to step in and take care of that need.

asimpleusecaseon Cuttlefish 'talk' with their arms, study reveals

“Well that,” said Polynesia, brushing some crumbs off the corner of the table with her left foot—“that is what you call powers of observation—noticing the small things about birds and animals: the way they walk and move their heads and flip their wings; the way they sniff the air and twitch their whiskers and wiggle their tails. You have to notice all those little things if you want to learn animal language. For you see, lots of the animals hardly talk at all with their tongues; they use their breath or their tails or their feet instead.

Dr Dolittle’s Parrot explaining how to learn “animal language”. Voyages of Dr. Dolittle , chapter 8

asimpleusecaseon Check out this cool tool for tracking VC-funded startups in real-time

Spam.

asimpleusecaseon All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding

Seems clear they have not been investing much of that 18B on Safari. Wow, can you imagine what Safari would be if Apple had invested a large fraction of that income on Safari?

asimpleusecaseon Ask HN: I am at a loss. What shall I do?

Sounds like you have done your best, if you have any invested funds left - return them to your investors. Seek some employment and healing. Grow strong and try again with a fresh idea and a wealth of experience another day.

asimpleusecaseon Tarpit ideas: What they are and how to avoid them (2023) [video]

The tarpit idea is very descriptive in hindsight. What makes something a tarpit is an idea that sounds cool on the surface and is accessible (don’t have to be one of a kind founder to do it) and when you talk to your friends and people who might be customers you get very positive feedback. So it all starts to feel like a slam dunk. However, if you are a VC you will have seen this exact idea or close variations in it a hundred times and they all flamed out to a zero. As the VC you have visibility into common failure modes ( not able to charge enough, no scaled market, not sticky enough, etc) what is hard from the founder side of things is all those issues and many more are common to almost any venture until you crack the problem and get market fit. So the tarpit concept is more a description of VC scare tissue than a fully operational definition for founders ,because a former tarpit can become a blue ocean of opportunity ( uncontested market) if some element of the equation changes ( technology shift, culture shift, deep founder insight etc)

So as a founder how can you tell if you are about to jump into a tarpit?

1) do a lot of research on the problem and see what has been done in the space in the past and who is working on the problem now. If you find lots of failure - dig in and try to understand what the core failure modes were. 2) work on something that people will pay you for, even a very ugly early product. Income is a strong validation. 3) reconsider your idea if it requires the incineration of mountains of cash to get people’s attention.

But at the end of the day Tarpit is really a descriptive heuristic that VCs can find to be useful but not absolute.

asimpleusecaseon The Insecurity of Telecom Stacks in the Wake of Salt Typhoon

I would dare to whisper that the lack of security suits the NSA just fine. However you can add just about every technically competent nation state, organised crime, major corporations, and a collection of non-state actors. About the only group besides us nomies who I think might really care about this are the payment rails folks as this insecurity facilitates more fraud.

asimpleusecaseon Tesco trials giant trolley scales in Gateshead

In the UK there has been a big push for self checkout. Tesco is a leading food market and has hand scanners you can carry around with you to scan as you shop. I have used them for a couple of years now. I almost stopped going to Tesco as it seemed every time I would check out my basket/trolley of goods was selected for a random “ check scan” where a worker came and scanned items until the check out gave a green checkmark and indicator. I always passed the test. So it became really annoying to have this “random check” happen ten times in a row. However it appears they have now built my profile and I have not had a “random check” in almost a year. I think this giant scale is silly. If you are trying to play the system you could scan a lower priced good and take the name brand of the same weight. If I were pulled over to have my whole basket/trolley load rescanned I would quickly get fed up with that. There are just too many ways to get a false positive.

I thought that RFID was supposed to solve this 20 years ago. All stores have anti theft scanner that are the last line of defense but I never see anyone approached if that alarm goes off any more.

So what is a technically sane way to solved the self scan problem, and avoid replicating the security theatre at airports?

asimpleusecaseon Substance in broccoli, celery inhibits graying of black hair

lead acetate. I worked in an environmental lab and one day all our water samples were spiking outrageously high in lead. As we began to check for contamination we traced it to my boss. He used Grecian Formula and had a habit of touching his hair. We were testing for ppm of lead at the time in waste water but this batch of samples was peeking out our equipment. Turns out Grecian Formula has %’s lead ! So just touching and equipment or glassware after touching his hair totally contaminated all the samples. So yeah, stay clear of that stuff unless you would like a measurable drop in IQ from nerve damage.

asimpleusecaseon Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

I worked in a factory during university- made playground equipment out of metal. Every task had a reporting system and the company knew exactly who was producing what. This was a long time ago - they still used desktop calculators with paper tape to do calculations. I was only there for a relatively short time, I just wanted to work and make money for school. We were promised productivity bonuses - my section of the factory achieved 147% of expected production. Another had done almost 180%, but when the bosses did the bonus talk they added in the trucking division and showed a 30% productivity due to excessive “dead heads” ( empty trucks ) returning from equipment delivery. It was a management issue- they were not very good at finding return loads for those trucks. So the production bonus was calculated on the total score of the enterprise- so we got almost nothing on the factory floor for bonus. When my time there was done a friend in accounting told me that I had rated as the most productive in the factory, he had seen the numbers as there was a ranking sheet that was calculated every week. ( remember paper tape calculators ) no one ever told me at the company, no real reward, no approach about coming back to the factory. The point of this post is that this type of thing - monitor the employees- has been a thing for a very long time. It is the humans running the factory that decide to reward, encourage , promote those who work hard - or not.

asimpleusecaseon "the Zooms don't show up" Jamie Dimon

We have a small team that is remote by design. Yet everyone has commented that those rare times we can gather see massive uplift in productivity.

For us being in a central location is not possible. But for companies with an office building I can see the human dynamic of being together is very powerful.

Even with all the chat, trackers, conference tools etc “context” is the hardest thing to do remotely.

asimpleusecaseon Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?

I worked in environmental chemistry - commercial lab. We did not do tests on humans nor animals but we were constrained by federal law and commercial liability . If the test you were doing was covered by federal law appeared in the CFR ( code of federal regulations) you needed to make if you said you were doing a test that was detailed in law that you followed that procedure in a documented way. If you changed it in a significant way you were engaging in a felony. Then you had some Tests that were not covered by federal regulations- so how do you protect yourself from lawsuits ? ( the fact you could do a test that would cost $100 but the client was making a million dollar decision with the results meant there could be a lot of liability risk)so in those cases where there was no clear regulation you would opt for “industry best practice “ using processes, equipment, reagents that were commonly used for that test by others in the Industry. If you did that then your insurance provider would defend yourself. If you had good documentation you could prove you did the right thing the right way and win the lawsuit. Based on that background I suspect the biggest reason for review boards is liability protection.

asimpleusecaseon Thousands of Danes sign petition to buy California from U.S.

According to google gdp of Denmark is $0.4 trillion the gdp of California is $4.0 trillion.gdp of Greenland is $0.003 trillion.

Trump likes to do deals- maybe he would just do an even swap.

asimpleusecaseon Stanford, Harvard Warn of 'Deep Impacts' from Trump Funding Cuts

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/10/18/harvard-endowm...

I think they are OK. They have loads of money and would have more if they had not alienated some of their most generous donors.

asimpleusecaseon Static analysis of the DeepSeek Android app

It would be good to do this kind of analysis on apps that have more than 10 million users - but in the mean time , has someone done this analysis on TicTok?

asimpleusecaseon Launch HN: Pinch (YC W25) – Video conferencing with immersive translation

Please just keep a list of supported languages on the site. The FAQ only gives a few and the bubble on your site that says more than 29 languages was not clickable on my iPhone - I won’t go any further until I can see supported languages - bonus points if you listed languages that are coming - in order of future of availability

asimpleusecaseon EV charging in less than 10 minutes: Zeekr 7X test confirms fastest charging SUV

The whole fast charging thing and the massive amounts of energy that is being transferred has caused me to “see” afresh the crazy amount of energy that is transferred when we refuel an ICE car. I can recall as a child seeing stories about stations exploding from time to time - I just did a search and saw this report that says there over 5,000 station fires a year. https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/stations.pdf

It easy to forget that refuelling is really dangerous - we just don’t think about it as it is normalised. I recall a gas station explosion being attributed to a man with a nylon jacket refueling and having a static discharge - I could not find that story but found this one with a video https://m.jpost.com/israel-news/watch-static-electricity-fir... of fire stated by static at a pump.

Here is a compilation about static caused fires at filling stations https://ehso.emory.edu/sso/documents/toolbox-training-static...

So I think that there is the potential for there to be a massive reduction in refueling fires by moving away from petroleum but as with any new form of mass behavior we are likely to find all the low probability failure modes for this new way of refueling.

asimpleusecaseon Power generation challenges could overshadow Stargate AI initiative

This start up might have a scalable answer with no limit on power generation https://www.lumenorbit.com/

asimpleusecaseon Ontario rips up $100M Starlink contract ahead of U.S. tariffs

Self inflicted harm - I’m doubtful that will get the outcome they are hoping for