MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built a podcast manager that is 100% local and free
by ziadhussein | 2025-08-23 17:30:55+00:00
I have been using AntennaPod for a while now but it is Android only and Gpodder is hard to keep in sync. So I built my own podcast manager that supports importing from AntennaPod and lets you use Nest Pod 100% locally on your desktop or your phone

It is and will always be 100% free. Try it out and let me know what you think!

Thank you
by twodave | 2025-08-23 17:31:02+00:00
I feel like if you keep your effort problem-oriented you can avoid a lot of the stalling that comes from not being confident about things. E.g. saying, “This code sucks, but it solves the problem in a way that doesn’t paint me into a corner,” is a perfectly fine V1 solution. Understanding where your contracts are located and making those as good as you can with the information you have is important enough to slow down for. But once you have those then most other things can evolve freely.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-23 17:31:23+00:00
> If you're inferencing, you're not getting much more out of this than you would a ~$2K Framework desktop.

I was with you up till here. Come on! CPU inferencing is not it, even macs struggle with bigger models, longer contexts (esp. visible when agentic stuff gets > 32k tokens).

The PRO6000 is the first gpu that actually makes sense to own from their "workstation" series.
by TranquilMarmot | 2025-08-23 17:32:33+00:00
> Do you simply trust hetzner to not lose the data on your 1TB storage box?

I don't! I haven't set it up yet, but my plan is to set up a daily cron job to use rsync to copy the photos down to a physical hard drive I have in my desktop computer. This desktop isn't on 24/7 so I would need to remember to turn it on to sync.

It would take something real catastrophic for actual data loss; Hetzner would have to somehow lose my storage box data & all its backups (or I lose access to my Hetzner account), my local cron job would have to fail or the hard drive would die, and I would have to lose my phone which has the last few years of photos on it.
by smelendez | 2025-08-23 17:32:36+00:00
> Given that the intent of the friend was to help improve McDonalds' security, I'd have to disagree that the firing was rightful.

I’d be inclined to fire someone who shared their credentials with an outsider running an unauthorized security test or discussed unpatched vulnerabilities in detail with outsiders.

An employee poking around and finding stuff on their own and reporting it might be a different story, though the details would still matter a lot.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-08-23 17:32:42+00:00
You can tell this guy has never worked or interacted with corporate marketing or advertising in any way because their astonishment at identifying their main market segment is standard practice literally everywhere. Lmao.

Focus on the security issues sure, but maybe think a bit more critically about how businesses function.

Go look around at who you see drinking monster and you're probably going to see they're not at all wrong.
by martin-t | 2025-08-23 17:33:53+00:00
I hate this idea that you always have to be professional when dealing with a corporation and have to follow rules exactly, often rules made up by the corporation. (Laws are just rules too, they are enforced by violence.)

The corporation showed gross incompetence and was punished for it. Sending passwords in plaintext indicates deeper security issues and systemic failures. HN can cry about companies leaking people's personal details but to actually make it affect their bottom line and force them to fix it, it has to affect their bottom line - they must get punished.

Sure, this was not a legal punishment but it was not wrong and it was very minor anyway.

Legality is not morality. Laws are written to protect peace (absence of visible conflict), not to protect justice.
by wenc | 2025-08-23 17:35:25+00:00
The problem with heat isn't only temperature, but in many places, it's the accompanying humidity. Heat and humidity are energy sapping and drains you of the ability to do highly focused intellectual work. You pay a price in productivity.

I was once working out of the corporate HQ of one of the largest multinational companies in Germany, and despite the modern buildings, the offices had no A/C and it was hot in the summer. Germans are against A/C for various reasons: (1) it's environmentally unfriendly; (2) it's only a few weeks in the summer; (3) Continuous cold air on skin is unhealthy. (4) You get used to it.

There are varying degrees of truth here, but for me, it didn't matter: I couldn't do intense focused work. That to me was too huge a cost.
by alkonaut | 2025-08-23 17:35:39+00:00
In my cold(er) part of the world no one has a dedicated AC but lots of people have heat pumps for heating, which can be used as an AC during the (annoyingly few) hot days. But while their efficiency is great (3+ kW heat for 1kW electricity) I think most units are less efficient when used for cooling? Might be wrong though.

My electricity bill with heat pump heating (one exhaust heat pump and one split) and relatively cheap electricity is still pretty substantial. 25000 kWh per year for 150sqm/1600sq ft. Usually pay $0.30/kWh for power.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-23 17:36:32+00:00
> The chat bot operator slurps all websites and gives answers to all questions free of charge.

> No other website can compete with that.

Copyright infringers uploaded music, television, and films free of charge, yet people still pay for all of that.

> The whole story with streaming media is not just that pay streaming became more convenient. It’s also that content creators used legal and business mechanisms to make piracy inconvenient.

Do you seriously think that copyright infringement ended when Napster went down? Have you never heard of the Pirate Bay or Bittorrent? They didn’t succeed at all in shutting down copyright infringement. People pay for things because it’s convenient, not because copyright infringement is no longer an option.
by mxgrn | 2025-08-23 17:36:43+00:00
For the past couple of years, I've used LLMs for helping me creating flashcards -- and loved it. Initially, I built a very simple desktop tool that would send the LLMs output to a Google spreadsheet, from where Flashcards (an iOS app, [1]) would import them as decks.

After a year or so, I wrapped it up in a Telegram bot, so I could just send a new card or phrase to it, and it would take care of translation, pronunciation, and usage examples. As I'm usually learning several languages in parallel, I also added the automatic language detection (from preselected languages).

Then I randomly found out that FSRS is better than SM2 (which Flashcards uses), and found an Elixir library that implements that. So, I decided to drop both spreadsheets and the Flashcards app, and implement the review process right in my bot.

This is how I ended up with https://lexicorn.ai -- just got my first paying subscriber (yay, I guess). The site doesn't say it, but it's 5 euros/month.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/de/app/flashcards-deluxe/id307840670
by bko | 2025-08-23 17:36:58+00:00
This is from the post:

> "Monster Green shoppers are likely younger (Gen-Z/Millennial/Gen-X) male, lower income & Caucasian (skews Hispanic)."

Later in the post:

> The scariest part wasn't the training portal or the questionable customer profiling.

Questionable customer profiling is just basic research about their customers.

Seriously, I wish more companies were honest at least internally who their customers are. A lot of problems could be solved if places like Marvel realized who their core base is, accepted it, and made products for their audience.
by therealpygon | 2025-08-23 17:37:09+00:00
Right. A business is using the logos of other businesses to advertise their business…those vehicles are directly the subject of the video. That’s not allowed; it doesn’t make it not the case simply by the location filmed. Put it this way, I make a video and say my restaurant is great because restaurant B gets low health scores, then I plaster restaurant B’s logo all over my video to advertise my own business. Why would the fact that I stood on a public sidewalk make a difference?

(Note: I’m only talking about your described example.)
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-23 17:38:18+00:00
The market itself is efficient, but the humans are often irrational.

Well, the efficient market debate tends to devolve into semantics somewhat. You are correct that passive investing is distorting the modern market and feeding on itself. It was originally designed to latch onto the consensus machine that is the market, but when the dominant participants are all passive, distortions occur.

What makes it difficult is that if you are, say, a short fund that is genuinely great at identifying overvalued companies trading far above their intrinsic value, you don't get rewarded from stepping in front of these flows. Every active manager who doesn't join in is fighting against a strong current, loses AUM, and even the active space converges with the passive space. This is a positive reflexive feedback loop, and it also shows up as a long-term megatrend (strong decade+ timeframe trend), which also brings in players like CTA/trend followers, and of course average retail investors, who are very trend sensitive.

In fact the efficient market has gotten increasingly good at boosting these forces in recent years, especially in the single name options space, index options space, and volatility complex spaces. Essentially, the modern market spends most of its time in a state where volatility is suppressed by dealers, and all informed market participants are incentivized to join in. It's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma situation. Then when enough pressure has built under the hood (in the volatility complex), there will be sudden, violent price discovery that overwhelms the passive flows, then everyone reshuffles their books, and the jaws lock down again until the next volatility breathing cycle. Then the financial news media will make a backwards looking narrative of the "cause" when it was in fact just a catalyst. It's an emergent, known cadence, but the specifics of it are unpredictable, because the catalysts that start each phase of the process are often unpredictable real world events.

To the index investor, it doesn't matter to them. Their capital will simply slosh from a trillion dollar TSLA to a trillion dollar NVDA or whatever the next boosted name is. They are not so much investing in the broad market as participating in some sort of strange liquidity simulation.
Tell HN: WINDOWS DECYPHERED (attempt)
by lihaciudaniel | 2025-08-23 17:38:36+00:00
I open limbo x86 emulator on these settings

*Machine Type:

pc-q35-5.1

CPU Model:

host

CPU Cores:

8

RAM Memory (MB)

8184

HDA: windows7.qcow2, HDB: secondary.qcow2*

Then download Cheat Engine 7.6 and try to decompile and understand the entire Windows OS (whie you run the Cheat engine on the OS)

It is like you are running the emulated windows 7 and play with cheat engine trying to decipher ones self.

This you can do on the bus, in a forest. As long you have battery

I will do it everytime I have free time and probably write a book of my findings

EDIT: if you do not understand my post ask me questions
by gottorf | 2025-08-23 17:39:00+00:00
> I think everyone has an interest in supporting their addiction to food and shelter.

Maybe if one's income is so low that all they can afford is food and shelter. But this is a rich country, and even Mississippi is very rich by global standards[0]. So there are surplus dollars beyond what goes into food and shelter, and people disagree politically on how much of it should be taxed and what it should be spent on.

I am merely one voter, but I am an example of someone who does not vote solely to enhance my own economic interests, whether spent on food and shelter or not. I will happily take the hit to my wallet for other causes I find worthy. Indeed, I would be extremely skeptical of someone whose highest political imperative was to funnel as much tax dollars as possible to their own wallet, even though by some definition this might be the most "rational" voter behavior.

> the most Republican leading states are the poorest and already have the largest imbalance of tax and flows versus tax outflows

> You don’t think California and New York contribute less to the government than they receive?

This is a point that gets raised often, but there are many confounding factors here, besides "Democrat rich, Republican poor" (and the implication that there is a causal relationship).

At its core, "California" and "New York" don't contribute anything; the people residing in those states who pay taxes do. And, conversely, the people residing in those states receive transfer payments. So you really want to look at the individuals who are net payers of taxes vs. net recipients of taxes and see how they vote and why they live where they live, to get a better idea on what policies may favor contribution.

At a national level, both higher incomes and higher accumulated wealth predict voters favoring Republicans over Democrats[1]. In fact, even among registered Democrats, those with higher incomes or wealth are roughly twice as more likely to vote for the Republican candidate in an election than those with low incomes or wealth. If Democratic policies were truly better for wealth creation, then why would wealth-focused individuals cast their votes the opposite way?

[0]: It has a higher median household income than Germany, which is not a country anyone thinks is poor.

[1]: http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/lwswps/19.pdf
by commandersaki | 2025-08-23 17:40:18+00:00
Whilst Apple's non-Desktop hardware is always best-of-class, I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the direction of macOS and Windows which IMO have both become power-user-hostile and have switched to a Linux desktop full-time. Everyone's been predicting the year of the Linux Desktop for 20+ years, but I believe we're at a turning point for Linux adoption with Windows 11 becoming an intolerable ad/spyware infested marketing platform and Apple's continued ignorance of developers and ambitions of turning its neglected macOS into a locked down appliance.

My take is we'll see a surge of adoption with Macbooks if they release their rumoured budget laptop that maintains the reliability, light usage performance, and calibre of their Macbook lineup since the inception of M-series -- before or around the EOL of Windows 10: https://www.macrumors.com/guide/a18-pro-macbook/
by danenania | 2025-08-23 17:40:59+00:00
I like WaitGroup as a concept, but I often end up using a channel instead for clearer error handling. Something like:

errCh := make(chan error) for _, url := range urls { go func(url string){ errCh <- http.Get(url) }(url) } for range urls { err := <-errCh if err != nil { // handle error } }

Should I be using WaitGroup instead? If I do, don't I still need an error channel anyway—in which case it feels redundant? Or am I thinking about this wrong? I rarely encounter concurrency situations that the above pattern doesn't seem sufficient for.
by Groxx | 2025-08-23 17:41:41+00:00
It does not, which is easy to verify from the source. Every func passed in is always run (with the exception of TryGo which is explicitly "maybe").

At best, using the optional, higher-effort errgroup.WithContext will cancel the context but still run all of your funcs. If you don't want that for one of the funcs, or some component of them, just don't use the context.
by blackbear_ | 2025-08-23 17:42:00+00:00
By far the most correct way to contest a scientific study is to provide a new scientific investigation that reaches different conclusions.

If those claims are true then I'm sure it won't be difficult to conduct a proper scientific investigation by collecting and anlyzing data, eventually sharing everything openly to finally "own the libs" for good.

Until that point, lots of words that aren't backed by a proper analysis are just speculations and should be treated as such.

Science isn't built on speculations but on hard data, and this standard is not negotiable. Challenges and skepticism are welcome but they should be properly supported, rethoric is just not enough.
by r3trohack3r | 2025-08-23 17:43:09+00:00
Companies like Monster and Redbull are marketing companies that happen to sell energy drinks.

That is almost certainly not a meaningless demographic they pulled out of thin air. It might not be meaningful to you as a demographic. It might even be offensive to you as a demographic.

But, to the marketing company, that is a concrete “group of humans” that respond well to their product and advertising. It informs how they develop their ads, how they target them, which geographic markets they push hard in, what events they sponsor, etc.

When they define that demographic as the people they’re targeting, and allocate their capital towards targeting them, they see the highest returns they’ve been able to find so far.
by hyperadvanced | 2025-08-23 17:43:50+00:00
I am a musician, visual artist, and software engineer. I think the other guy is correct insofar as most (American) engagement with art has more in common with pigs and troughs than it does with grand ideas and novel concepts that depart from convention. I additionally agree that as a software creator, you shouldn’t make things that destroy culture or cause mass psychic damage. I think LLM and social media do both presently
by badpun | 2025-08-23 17:43:55+00:00
> One big example is the DMV since almost every has experience dealing with it, long queue times are almost universal because no one gives a crap and it's very hard to fire a government employee.

I don't know what's wrong with the US, but here in Poland, there are hardly any queues at the (equivalent of) DMV. And we're nowhere near US's wealth levels, so public services here (in Poland) should be worse, not better. There's something very wrong in how the US is organizing its DMVs, if the queues are such an universal problem. But, it's not an issue with government services per se, just with this one instance of government service.
by tgma | 2025-08-23 17:43:55+00:00
Of course there has been also PGP since the dawn of time. They all fall under unless the sender actively does so that I explicitly mentioned.

I can send you PGP encrypted email you could have used Gmail or Proton or whatever. It is about what the sender does not what service you choose. (If you and your wife are both using Proton, that probably does not have anything to do with SMTP; it would be like calling iMessage "SMS".)
by TranquilMarmot | 2025-08-23 17:44:02+00:00
I thought about this, but I don't really trust maintaining spinning rust myself for something as "precious" as 15+ years of photos. I do have a desktop computer but it's running Windows 11 and I don't have it on 24/7. Live in a small apartment and definitely do NOT have the space anywhere for a dedicated server.

I like the idea of having everything hosted somewhere that's guaranteed to be up-and-running 24/7 using Debian with automatic full backups turned on. If I go on vacation somewhere and something goes wrong, I can easily SSH into it. If it was on my desktop and I was away and there was a power outage or something, I'd be out of luck.

It *is* a little slow but it's honestly fast enough. I was going to do periodic backups of the storage box to a local hard drive just in case, though.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-23 17:44:07+00:00
Siri has access to all your personal data and has to be right. If you're going to ask it when you need to be at the airport for your flight and it say 7pm and it's really 7am you are really screwed. If you're asking Copilot for an opinion about your not-so-hot take on Curtis Yarvin

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44980305

it doesn't really matter if it makes a mistake of that magnitude.
by y0eswddl | 2025-08-23 17:44:16+00:00
I remember "hearing" recently that it's because our society conditions (most certain types) men to feel entitled to access and success; tie their self-worth and value as a human to their level of success; and to deem it a personal failure when they don't.

These things together end up making for a personal despair that more often results in suicide.

That's why the white make suicide rate I'm the US is so proportionately high.
by t43562 | 2025-08-23 17:44:41+00:00
I think the Raspberry PI has made itself a kind of de facto desktop standard and so has Ubuntu. It's no good having 2 standards, however, and that is one problem - to make 1 standards you'd probably have to kill off all the distros somehow.

The other route is where so much software ends up running in the browser that "desktop" linux becomes an irrelevant concept.
by squigz | 2025-08-23 17:44:58+00:00
> We can make a presentation showing "Look, if we just ate in-season locally-grown vegetables and wore clothes made from the fibres of our locally grown nettles and wool we could solve the climate crisis in maybe 100 years!"...

With respect, this doesn't seem to me a very fair assessment of the cause - the average person is not to blame, greedy, amoral corporations and spineless politicians are - nor the solutions. A more fair way of putting it might be, "If we seriously invest in alternative energy sources and reducing the major sources of carbon emissions, we'll be able to stop the climate crisis from irreparably fucking the planet, causing even more problems than we have now."
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-08-23 17:45:40+00:00
Think you need to go with a "dead" language with a simple runtime and keep everything vendored. My top contender would be Lua 5.1. Simple runtime (~20k(?) lines of C) which has been implemented in many other platforms (Javascript, Go, Rust). The side benefit of 5.1 is while you can make the standard compiler your target, you can probably run on LuaJIT (not dead, sophisticated assembly, and potential for breaking changes) as well.
by mocana | 2025-08-23 17:45:57+00:00
Their characterization of their customer base mostly rings true to me. My white teenage kids love the stuff.

Don't know about GenX though. A common definition of GenX is born between 1965 and 1980. Speaking for all GenX males of the world, the stuff tastes overly sweet to me and don't want to risk a higher A1C on carbonated sugar water. Bleh!
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-08-23 17:46:39+00:00
I’m having 100% success even when doing transitions between screens etc on the latest agents. Wonder if this is due to time and the agents vastly improving lately. Possibly also grant knows manim so well he can beat the time to type a prompt. For the rest of us i’m tempted to make a website for educators to type a prompt to get a video out since it’s been that reliable for me.
by Joker_vD | 2025-08-23 17:47:06+00:00
Seriously, please don't use C0 (except for LF and, I cede grudgingly, HT) and C1 characters in your plain text files. I understand that you may want to store some "ANSI coloring markup" (it's not "VT100 colors" — the VT series was monochrome until VT525 of 1994), sure, but it's then, arguably, not a plain text anymore, is it? It's in a text markup format of sorts, not unlike Markdown, only the one that uses a different encoding that dips into the C0 range. Just because your favourite output device can display it prettily when you cat your data into it doesn't really mean it's a plain text.

Yes, I do realize that there is a lot of text markup formats that encode into plain text, for better interoperability.
by doublerabbit | 2025-08-23 17:47:11+00:00
When do companies ever try to understand their customers? They know what works for who, and continue to rehash that for that specific age of the generation.

The article even states this. "Monster Green shoppers are likely younger (Gen-Z/Millennial/Gen-X) male, lower income & Caucasian (skews Hispanic)."

When you've moved from that generational age, your no longer their audience and they don't care if you buy or not; but it's not like they cared in the first place.