MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: EmailFast, find emails and get personalized cold emails
by osfield | 2025-08-26 08:04:01+00:00
I'm plugging my stuff, but I think the story behind it is equally interesting:

I recently fell into the usual indie hacker/solo dev trap: write a lot of code, don’t really work on marketing. The illusion of productivity is actually crazy when you think about it.

That led me to try out no-code and low-code tools. Eventually, I settled for n8n. It’s a great compromise when it comes to prototyping. I ended up creating a bunch of scripts that helped me improve my programmatic SEO skills, taught me how to use AI agents and other nice stuff. It turns out you don’t need to write lots of code to do simple stuff. Among others, I created an n8n workflow to quickly retrieve publicly available phone numbers to reach out to my customers. Lots of signups! Feels great, doesn’t it?

But running that workflow is great when done locally, but I needed to call it from other places, moved my n8n instance to DigitalOcean, and that’s when problems began. It consumes a sht amount of RAM, and my DO instance would just crash all the time unless I increase the RAM size, which would defeat the purpose of quick dirt cheap prototyping (I think I was supposed to pay around 50 or 60 bucks per month or so). Did a LOT of optimization, but the cost was still too high to justify the use I made of it.

Guess what I did? Yep. Simply wrote the code for it using Next.js API routes and hosted it on Vercel. Much easier, even faster. From there, I added a quick interface, and I was ready to go. That’s when I realised that I created a whole new web app without even thinking about it.

I was simply experimenting with things I didn’t know much about, and one thing led to the other. I have something that’s pretty much usable. I can easily get most emails from any domain, verify them, and even make personalised cold emails. I actually launched it recently, and I’m quite happy with it.

I think the “beginner’s mind” thing is real: you don’t judge yourself or stop yourself when you don’t know much about something. You just go ahead and do it because you don’t even know what failure looks like.

EmailFast is a fast, (much more) affordable tool to find the emails of your local businesses specifically. Scrape publicly available emails from any domain, search businesses in any niche and location. You can upload lists, run bulk searches, generate highly personalized cold emails and get results in seconds. I target any niche that needs to get in touch with local businesses for custom services: web designers, agencies and more. This is, imo, what makes it just slightly different and special.

I don't do the email sending (yet?) because I can't pretend I can do it better than other available options. I'd rather add a way to send emails with those options. They come with many more options than I can offer at the moment.

Very much open to feedback, feel free to roast me, and thanks for taking the time to read all this long as text!
by Rohansi | 2025-08-26 08:04:23+00:00
> A big thing is storage. Apple uses extremely fast storage directly attached to the SoC and physically very very close. In contrast, most x86 systems use storage that's socketed (which adds physical signal runtime) and that goes via another chip (southbridge).

Why would PCIe SSDs need to go through a southbridge? The CPU itself provides PCIe lanes that can be used directly.

> That means, unlike Mac devices that can use storage as swap without much practical impact, x86 devices have a serious performance penalty.

Swap is slow on all hardware. No SSD comes close to the speed of RAM - not even Apple's. Latency is also significantly worse when you trigger a page fault and then need to wait for the page to load from disk before the thread can resume execution.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-26 08:04:38+00:00
One of the most insidious things about politics news is that there's always more non-actionable trivia factoid bullshit that you can read instead of anything productive

Trump said this? Supreme Court said that? Some poll is up? Okay. That doesn't tell me if we're in danger in my town, that doesn't tell me who's protesting, whose meetings to attend, what our threat model is

It's a sugar fix and it's frustrating when I step back and realize that really caring about politics would start with me leaving the house
by prmoustache | 2025-08-26 08:04:38+00:00
The weird thing is that people are seemingly enjoying this.

Yesterday we went to a store to have a look at a few smartphone for my partner. She primarily wants a good camera above any other parameter. I was seeing her preferring those that were counterfeiting the reality the most: she was like, "look I can zoom and it is still sharp" while obviously there was a delay between zooming and the end result which was a reconstructed, liquid like distorded version similar to the upscaling filters people are using on 8/16bit game console emulators. I was cringing at seeing the person I love the most preferring looking at selfies of picture of us with smoothed faces and a terrible fake bokeh in the background instead of something closer to the reality.
by gregoriol | 2025-08-26 08:04:41+00:00
No, the average Janes and Joes don't enable side-loading: it's a toggle, not enabled by default, it's in an advanced setting pane and it's good as it is. Google has been controlling what is installed through their Store and that is enough for 100% of average users. They have been doing it badly though, leaving many scams through, same for Apple. They should focus on this, not the advanced users.
by pixelfarmer | 2025-08-26 08:05:31+00:00
> the primaries are defined by the display, not by ambient illumination

In itself that is correct, but as you've noted, our own vision system isn't operating like that. The same display brightness and colors will be perceived very differently depending on the ambient light's brightness and color, and can also mean a severe breakdown in the dynamic range that can be made visible via a display.

And this ambient light also clearly impacts how prints are seen.
by bigiain | 2025-08-26 08:05:33+00:00
> What about elevators, parking garages, basements?

If Snowden was an ex-colleage of mine, I suspect I or my co workers probably combine location data with network attach/detach messages, and can filter out "known blackspots" on a per network/carrier basis.

> Your "Recreational Paranoia" should include rebooting your iPhone more often.

Ah ha! But my recreational paranoia hobby includes having a perfectly normal "daily driver" phone - which gets left at home way more often than other people's phones.
by hoherd | 2025-08-26 08:06:15+00:00
Somewhat related, a few weeks ago on Python Bytes I learned that there is a python module that abstracts various directory locations per-platform. For instance, you can use this module to find the location of the Movies directory, or the cache directory.

For example, on macOS:

>>> appname = "SuperApp" >>> appauthor = "Acme" >>> user_config_dir(appname, appauthor) '/Users/trentm/Library/Application Support/SuperApp'

or in Windows:

>>> user_config_dir(appname, appauthor) 'C:\\Users\\trentm\\AppData\\Local\\Acme\\SuperApp'

https://pypi.org/project/platformdirs
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-26 08:06:39+00:00
Y'know what's troubling to me, freedom as a struggle is indirectly related to other people/ social-political issue.

Like, the people if they decide, they want freedom, are almost guaranteed to get it. But nobody demands it in the truest sense and it feels like the govt. isn't controlled by the people but rather almost by lobbying and that social media etc. have made people complacent in the sense that either we think that others will fight for us or that social media has become a propaganda machine.

I almost broke last night realizing that nuclear can be completely green energy but it isn't the issue of technology but rather political. To me, it felt like a lot of really quality of life changes (like water access, clean cities, good air quality index, atleast where I live) are all almost political issues at this point.

But I am not hopeful towards people, I am hopeful towards tech though. It feels like people have free will, so they might actually pick a net negative option for everybody (trump?), so I am not an optimist because I feel like I have to trust people in the process and I feel like people can do both good and bad, so I wonder how much better our lives have been compared to our ancestors. Maybe trade-offs?

I genuinely felt so weird realizing this, its hard to explain. Like it felt like I can do nothing but watch. And to me I feel like I am being a pessimistic because a lot of people in power feel stupid/inefficient man.

We just don't have a choice. WE have a choice b/w 2 parties and call it freedom.

Of course, freedom will be a constant struggle. People have made it as such. Its on all of us, we all need to take accountability. I get it, accountability is hard, but its much better than waiting for a hero to save us all. We can do it if we realize this.
by mort96 | 2025-08-26 08:07:13+00:00
I agree with you that if the app was indeed "essentially free", it could have seen all the benefits you suggest.

But it wasn't "essentially free". For myself, whenever I encounter a tool I might want to use and it has a limited time trial, I typically skip it unless I'm already fairly certain that I'll keep paying for it after the trial period. I think loss aversion comes in here as well: I'm worried about "wasting" the trial. It's like consumables in a video game: yeah maybe this tool would be useful now, but what if I encounter something later where it would be more useful?
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-26 08:07:27+00:00
> Some PM in Youtube: “ yes let’s make it harder to tell real videos from AI to make people who don’t know better more susceptible and accepting of it”

This can backfire, perhaps making people believe that real, important news is in reality AI-generated to brainwash them, thus making people less susceptible, and more disbelieving.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-26 08:08:49+00:00
> Edit: 'two years' is unlikely,

You've been baited by a post from 2016 ... If you look at OPs post history it's mostly spaceman bad related. A clue, perhaps.

Anyway, a bit of context:

At the time of this post, SpaceX was looking at using the Dragon tech tree to land on both the Moon and Mars, using Dragon variants. Gray Dragon for the Moon and Red Dragon for Mars. One would use just retro-propulsion and the other would use a heat shield, parachutes and retro propulsion.

Around the time this was announced they were hoping to develop a retro propulsion mode for using Dragon's SuperDraco thrusters (the ones used for capsule escape when flying with passengers) to enable landing on land. NASA didn't want this tech, as they considered the cost/benefit - risk/reward analysis not worth it. So SpaceX found themselves in a situation of developing something that their main customer didn't want, for little to no benefit for their commercial offerings.

Hence, the idea was shelved. (I think, but not sure, that they later enabled the SuperDracos to be able to activate and soft land in case of catastrophic failure of the parachutes. Or they were thinking about it)

Instead they came up with an alternative tech stack. The MCTS (Mars Colonial Transport System? I think) later turned into BFR (Big "falcon" Rocket) later turned into the Starship project.

The Starship is what's currently being tested, with the 10th test flight happening these days (scrubbed last night for weather). It's also what they'll use for their Starlink big sats, Moon and Mars.

So, while it's true that Red Dragons didn't "line up like trains" for mars in 2018, the proposed architecture is much more ambitious, and obviously taking longer. But they've flown the stack 9 times already, so they're making progress. Their factory is already pumping 3rd generation engines, ships and 2nd generation boosters. (They've caught the boosters 2 times, AND successfully reflown one already)
by 63stack | 2025-08-26 08:09:03+00:00
>For an average Joe and Jane, who gets their money stolen, that's a good move. They don't care about technology, they just want their bank, instagram, cat pictures and video calls to work and not get scammed

We could also teach basic computer literacy in schools so people could understand common scams. We could sell phones with "extra protections" that people with less knowledge could buy.

The only reason to force this crap on everyone is control. What google cares about is getting rid of people's ability to block ads, kill youtube vanced, and so on.

Google will implement this, the consumers will pay for it, scams will still exist, and Google will open their hands and say "welp we tried". The infrastructure will already be in place, and it will never be revoked.
by creshal | 2025-08-26 08:09:31+00:00
> Thanks to the new policy it'll be easy to add a single cert to the blocklist.

And another tomorrow. And then five more the day after, four of which will have been stolen from clueless legitimate developers, whose apps will get blocked too.

Microsoft tried this whole nonsense before, it doesn't work in practice.

> If you want absolute freedom on your device, just install a different Android - for example Graphene, Lineage, /e/OS, or Calix. They are all Android too.

Sounds to me like an APT rootkit vector that will be the next on the chopping block.

> For an average Joe and Jane, who gets their money stolen, that's a good move. They don't care about technology, they just want their bank, instagram, cat pictures and video calls to work and not get scammed. They are often lured into installing scamware through exactly sideloading APK, completely unaware of the risks.

Maybe Joe and Jane should learn their lesson instead, and don't do banking on their cat picture device, if they can't keep it safe.
by littlestymaar | 2025-08-26 08:09:31+00:00
> They all slept perfectly well with fever, so, there's no such thing as a febrile insomniac kid.

Please stop believing your sample of 3 kids is representative of the entire population. You were lucky to have kids who sleep well and that's good for you, but that doesn't make other parents lazy or irresponsible.

> I'm tired of parents who overprotect their children

You know what's even more tiring? Parents who judge other parents while not knowing anything about kids in general just because they happened to be lucky on one particular topic. You won't be lucky all the time though.

> to forcing them to wear helmets

I hope you won't regret saying that ever in your life, but being anti-helmet really is as idiotic as being an antivaxxer.
by rickdeckard | 2025-08-26 08:09:32+00:00
If this is a reasonable direction, it could still be achieved on the same device. There would be sufficient security architecture available to completely isolate those two areas.

But I feel the issue is less about malware gathering your banking, ID etc, but malware holding your data hostage, using your (social) network for nefarious purposes or tricking you into something you don't want to do.

And for all those cases, having that "other" device doesn't help.
by nicolaslem | 2025-08-26 08:10:16+00:00
I also have a Strix Halo zbook G1A and I am quite disappointed in the idle power consumption as it hovers around 8W.

Adding to that, it is very picky about which power brick it accepts (not every 140W PD compliant works) and the one that comes with the laptop is bulky and heavy. I am used to plugging my laptop into whatever USB-C PD adapter is around, down to 20W phone chargers. Having the zbook refuse to charge on them is a big downgrade for me.
by Gigachad | 2025-08-26 08:10:19+00:00
How it generally works iso low risk operations have no restrictions, but if you want to send a large amount of money to a new contact, the banks make you approve the transaction on the phone app.

Phone apps are generally significantly more trusted because of the fact you can’t install malware that steals the session token, and they can do a Face ID check before any risky operations.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-26 08:10:31+00:00
Microsoft will do this. They just have to go a little more slowly than Google or Apple because there's such a long history and expectation of being able to run any apps. But they're gradually working their way there just like Google and Apple.

Starts with scary warnings for unsigned apps (with a workaround), then they start imposing extra restrictions for unsigned apps, and then they make the SmartScreen workaround more difficult to enable (maybe it needs a registry edit), then they'll remove that workaround in certain markets/editions (maybe the Home version first). Finally they'll remove it everywhere.
by schoen | 2025-08-26 08:11:14+00:00
They think they're fighting malware, because that is their main motivation.

They're just not also worrying about other effects like making it easy for governments to ban software, or making it hard for people to write software under a pseudonym.

Paternalistic mechanisms are relatively popular in security engineering right now because users are so often unsophisticated and time-constrained, while attackers are so often sophisticated and well-resourced. Paternalism almost always responds to real risks and threats, so it doesn't feel malicious because it's not rooted in malice.

I'm glad that people are so worried about this change, because I find it really alarming. But it's not like restrictions on people's choices have been that unusual as a response to dangers in modern history. In fact, professions like public health, occupational safety, and tort law often seem to presume that the general public probably shouldn't be allowed to make certain kinds of dangerous choices. They might be ethically wrong about that, but they clearly don't see themselves as bad guys for thinking so.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-26 08:11:17+00:00
> I don't think you could built a fan-less x86 laptop.

Sure you can, they’re readily available on the market, though not especially common.

But even performance laptops can often be run without spinning their fans up at all. Right now, the ambient temperature where I live is around 28°, and my four-year-old Ryzen 5800HS laptop hasn’t used its fan all day, though for a lot of that time it will have been helped by a ceiling fan. But even away from a fan for the last half hour, it sits in my lap only warm, not hot. It’s easy enough to give it a load it’ll need to spin the fan up for, but you can also limit it so it will never need its fan. (In summer when the ambient temperature is 10°C higher every day, you’ll want to use its fan even when idling, and it’ll be hard to convince it not to spin them up.)

x86-64 devices that are don’t even have fans won’t ever have such powerful CPUs, and historically have always been very underpowered. Like only 60% of my 5800HS’s single-threaded benchmarking and only 20% of its multithreaded. But at under 20% of the peak power consumption.
by kingstnap | 2025-08-26 08:11:18+00:00
Maybe maybe not.

Working with / testing systems that have huge input spaces is difficult. You have to stamp out lots of edge cases because the boundary of the space is huge.

Working with systems that both have huge input spaces but also have internal state is exponentially worse. You basically have edge cases to the power of edge cases to deal with.

Simultaneously, it's not always faster / easier to manage deltas in programming. As an example, consider the case of sorting a 1 million element list. How much difference is there between starting from completely scrambled vs. I instead told you it's mostly sorted, but only 1% of elements were out of place.

Its definitely not 99% easier let me tell you that.
by mort96 | 2025-08-26 08:11:38+00:00
Doesn't change the fact that when you try to find out "how do I record desktop audio on my Mac?", the answer is very often "use Audio Hijack", because macOS has no built-in way to record desktop audio. (Not even QuickTime's screen recorder can record desktop audio, only microphones! It's wild.)

These days, OBS is probably a decent alternative, but it's very video focused and very streaming focused, so it's not exactly great for that purpose.
by Someone | 2025-08-26 08:11:40+00:00
I agree with “should not go in ~/Library/Application Support”, but why would anybody put them there? The Mac way is ~/Library/Preferences, or, system-wide /Library/Preferences, and the use of NSDefaults.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Fi...:

“This directory contains app-specific preference files. You should not create files in this directory yourself. Instead, use the NSUserDefaults class or CFPreferences API to get and set preference values for your app. In iOS, the contents of this directory are backed up by iTunes and iCloud.”

If a tool doesn’t want to use NSDefaults, using ~/.config is way preferable over polluting the user’s home directory, as many tools do.
by prmoustache | 2025-08-26 08:11:47+00:00
> It's a fairly common issue on Linux to be missing hardware acceleration, especially for video decoding.

To be fair, usually the linux itself has hardware acceleration available but the browser vendors tend to disable gpu rendering except on controlled/known perfectly working combinations of OS/Hardware/Drivers and they have much less testing in Linux. In most case you can force enabling gpu rendering in about:config and try it out yourself and leave it unless you get recurring crashes.
by diminikolaou | 2025-08-26 08:11:58+00:00
A year after it's last episode, we're bringing back Hacker News Recap. We launched a new feature* last week that made the automation of this very easy so we had no reason of holding it back anymore.

Hope you guys like it.

*In case you are interested about the feature, this is it. https://www.wondercraft.ai/wonda
by wertyk | 2025-08-26 08:13:47+00:00
AlphaX is the first AI strategy in the literature that automates Value Investing for the Brazilian market: • based on fundamental data, • incorporates risk management through the triple barrier method, • delivered nearly 100% return over 4 years compared to 16% for the Ibovespa, • unlike technical analysis, it performs consistently in the long term.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-26 08:14:07+00:00
> Or did they just take that money and bail with it?

The Starship portion of the Artemis contracts are structured such that SpX only gets money once certain milestones are completed (i.e. reach orbit, show orbital re-fuelling, land on the Moon, etc.

Just an aside, SpX is one of the few (only?) big space companies that don't bid on "cost+" contracts. They've only taken fixed cost contracts so far. And they've saved NASA ~ 7-14B$ to date on those contracts (by NASA's own numbers). Just look at the ISS crew program, they've taken ~1/2 of what Boeing took, they've finished the first tranche of crew missions, they're now on the 2nd tranche, and Boeing hasn't flown one crew mission yet. In fact they've fumbled the test flight so bad that there's a real possibility that they'll have to re-do it.
by ben_w | 2025-08-26 08:14:18+00:00
> I don't want to get into politics but dont you think it's funny when you can purchase assault rifles, made for killing people

I'm British by birth, living in Berlin. We definitely think Americans are a bit "funny", in the not-at-all-funny sense of the word, about guns.

> It's just corporate propaganda that all hell would break loose, you could just offer installing baby mode at Apple physical store that can only be removed at said places.

Thing is, with computers, we've had decades of watching malware infect, destroy, corrupt, ransom, and blackmail. It's still happening, even.

And we even have a way to get past "baby mode" restrictions: be a developer.

But guess what? Developers also face supply chain attacks, because malware is everywhere.

I do miss the olden days when I didn't need to care. A mac online in 2009 was worry-free.