Hacker News Reader

asimpleusecaseon University Rescinds Offer to Activist Allegeded to Wipe Phone Before DHS Search

This fellow is free to be an activist but I don’t think that any employer, public or private, owes him a job. I respect the desire to push back against surveillance, and still see how such an employee could be a distraction for a company or institution. Hopefully he will find employment with a company or institution that is aligned with his advocacy.

asimpleusecaseon More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

Old Facebook trick - likely resetting that box each time the app is updated.

asimpleusecaseon Mistral raises €3B

So what happens when Mistral creates a collection of powerful AIs for different clients that have fundamentally different ethical frameworks from each other? Then those AI interact? Do they politely agree to disagree? Or do they goal seek against each other?

asimpleusecaseon Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

The UK is the counter example to this analysis. The NHS was a marvel in the early years, now however it is bogged down with so many layers of bureaucracy it is massively inefficient.

asimpleusecaseon ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

I wonder if there are plans to licence the content for AI training

asimpleusecaseon US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

Seems like a good start. Then ban this as an asset class for scale investors so they have to release existing inventory.

asimpleusecaseon Developers can now submit apps to ChatGPT

ITS A TRAP! If your app is successful their infrastructure will see all the traffic, your responses and will be able to mimic what you do and kick the husk of your app in the weeds. (Unless your function comes from some massive unique dataset they can’t by access to.)

asimpleusecaseon What do you think of my landing Page designed in Canva

Does not work so great on mobile. Site content just scales down to a small unreadable text.

Most of your uses will visit on mobile

asimpleusecaseon What's Hiding Inside Haribo's Power Bank and Headphones?

I’ve seen airline training videos about in flight battery fires. But I’ve never considered the risk of ear buds catching on fire. Normally, you should feel them heating up before they catch but they might just blow, that would be very sore. Also if you’re sleeping with buds in you could end up with a fire before you woke up.

asimpleusecaseon Fears of AI Bubble Grow, Bank of America Survey Shows

Pro Tip: see who is short selling

asimpleusecaseon Show HN: Night Vision App for iPhone Now Offers Free Basic Features

From the privacy page of the app developer

“ In addition, according to relevant laws, regulations and national standards, we may share, transfer, and publicly disclose personal information without your prior authorization and consent in the following situations:

Those directly related to national security and national defense security; Directly related to public safety, public health, and major public interests; Those directly related to criminal investigation, prosecution, trial and execution of judgments; In order to protect the life and property of the personal information subject or other individuals, but it is difficult to obtain the consent of the individual; Personal information subjects disclose personal information to the public on their own; Collect personal information from legally publicly disclosed information, such as legal news reports, government information disclosure and other channels.”

Under Chinese law everything is national security if the state asks for it.

The last sentence looks like they give themselves permission to collect as much information about there users as possible

In any case I can’t see any way they are compliant with GDPR.

asimpleusecaseon Harvard says it's been giving too many A grades to students

The issue that many schools face is that companies complain the grads - even with PhDs - are not able to do anything useful in the workplace. When my wife did her PhD more than 10 years ago (in the UK) she was required to take a stack of ungraded workshops under the label “professionalizing the PhD” it was totally annoying waste of time for her. The stuff was “basics of Excel”, “Research poster making”, “ intro to Adobe suite”, etc this was done because the university had received feedback that PhD grads could literally do nothing useful when hired.

From the article. “About 60% of the grades handed out in classes for the university’s undergraduate program are A’s, up from 40% a decade ago and less than a quarter 20 years ago, according to a report released Monday by Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education”

Harvard is currently under a lot of pressure from donors , courts ( loss of case on admissions), and political pressure from US administration.

Awarding 60% A’s does not help them make the case that they know what they are doing and should just be allowed to carry on.

asimpleusecaseon Roc Camera

Kinda interesting- of course until it hacked. But honestly it does not look like something I would want to carry around.

asimpleusecaseon Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

Thank you for your thoughtful and helpful reply.

asimpleusecaseon Why Is Stainless Steel Not Magnetic?

That was a very interesting discussion. I had seen last week a magnet fail to stick to a stainless camping cup and was puzzled. I have worked in metal forming in the past but did not do a lot with stainless. So really interesting

asimpleusecaseon Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

I see a lot of comments here about using some browser that will allow ME to see sites I want to see, but I did not see a lot about how do I protect my site or sites of clients from being subjected to this. Is there anything proactive that can be done? A set of checks almost like regression testing? I understand it can be a bit like virus builders using anti virus to test their next virus. But is there a set of best practices that could give you higher probability of not being blocked?

asimpleusecaseon Starcloud

I could see gov imaging satellites with a direct encrypted laser communications to GPU’s in orbit being attractive. Images processing, movement pattern analysis, multi spectral, and as they mentioned radar.

asimpleusecaseon How to save your Claude chats

I have found that Claude is not keeping some of my chats in the chat list and when I search I get bits of my conversation but not all of it. I found this solution to this problem. What have you found that works well?

asimpleusecaseon DoorDash and Waymo launch autonomous delivery service in Phoenix

Ballistic food , not so great. Years ago we went to an ice hockey game with our children.subway sandwich was there with their sandwich gun. They can shoot 6 inch sandwiches into the crowd. They got carried away and some sandwiches hit the ceiling of the arena, some disassembled on route to the crowd but most made to happy sports fans. My oldest son was quite young still and he was so distraught/ disgusted by the bits of sandwich flying around he has never entered a subway sandwich shop since then.

asimpleusecaseon [dead]

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147217

The UN, not a great champion of Isreal, found compelling evidence of abuse.

asimpleusecaseon Google Announces First AI Hub in India

Is this in part a response to HB-1 visa costs?

asimpleusecaseon Kirigami-inspired parachute falls on target

How long before we see these attached to bombs dropped by drones? It would reduce time over target and likely increase accuracy.

asimpleusecaseon Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

Here is the results of the following Google search “uk coverup of rape gangs” and the results

https://www.thefp.com/p/muslim-grooming-gangs-cover-up-keir-...

https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/06/18/the-grooming-ga...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/17/what-is-the-casey-r...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/16/grooming-gan...

https://news.sky.com/story/grooming-gangs-scandal-timeline-w...

How the grooming gangs scandal was covered up https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/f247768ad7912bdc

https://theweek.com/crime/the-grooming-gangs-scandal-explain...

https://womenagainstrape.net/statement-rape-and-grooming-gan...

asimpleusecaseon Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

I was providing evidence that there was an issue.

Not trying to take a side.

You can retract your f**.

Yes there is a debate now and it is very open, and there are many reports that it was not so open and people were hurt for a long time. Was that political cover up? Each can decide - but I think the debate shows there was a real issue.

asimpleusecaseon Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2025-04-28/debates/2E7...

Rather than jump into the raging press coverage or as some see it raging press coverup - here is a link to debate in UK Parliament that indicates there is an issue.

asimpleusecaseon Imgur is geoblocking the UK

I’m in the uK and confirm - it’s blocked

asimpleusecaseon Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

The UK gov will force the ID cards on everyone, knowing full well that people don’t want them. Then china will hack the Uk and steal all the data.

asimpleusecaseon Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

There is so much online to help jumpstart a young entrepreneur- they can have some small sense of what they are in for. As far as start a company vs get a job, just being told that is an option can be super empowering. I agree that burning up a few years in a failed company as a young entrepreneur does not have a good monetary outcome, but it does help them gain a ton of real world experience that can serve them well their whole life.

asimpleusecaseon China to launch K-Visa for global talent

So, we have two tales. In the USA, H1B visas are critical to acquire talent for tech because of critical shortage of talent OR they are used to suppress salaries and replace American workers with less expensive indentured servants who have very limited rights.

In both cases those workers come and there is a large pool of those willing to come, because they view the opportunity to work in the USA as a way to potentially live there long term. The is still the view that the USA presents a unique opportunity to have personal freedom and be rewarded for hard work.

I’m not aware of China having those characteristics or being perceived as having those characteristics by technical talent globally.

It will be interesting to see the outcome

asimpleusecaseon I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

Great write up! This is nice nerd catnip. And sharing a failed project teaches so much. Please, more should share the projects that absorbed tons of time yet never really delivered.