Hey buddy,

Quick HN Catch-up (Tuesday, July 1, 2025)

So I was just scrolling through Hacker News from today, July 1st, and saw a few interesting things. Thought I'd give you the quick rundown.

First off, there was this wild post about the Fed being way off on their picture of a million dollars in cash. Like, their cube model for $1M is apparently half a million short! People in the comments were getting into how money works, even talking about ancient stuff like Rai stones and other weird examples. Pretty funny mistake for the Fed, huh?

Big news from Cloudflare – they're gonna start making AI bots pay to crawl websites. This is a pretty big deal for how websites might make money off AI training data. The comments were all over the place, arguing if it'll make things worse or better, and some folks were really against the idea of using crypto for these tiny payments.

Speaking of AI and code, Claude Code added "hooks." Basically, you can set it up to run other tools or do stuff automatically after it finishes coding a task. Kinda cool, lets you automate more. People were joking about how AI was supposed to replace coders, but now you need coders to set up the AI hooks. Someone made a good point that regular people might start using AI for complex tasks kinda like how non-programmers used Excel back in the day.

Then there's this totally wild Show HN project called Spegel. It's a terminal browser, but it uses AI to rewrite webpages, basically stripping out all the ads and junk and just giving you the clean text. Sounds resource-heavy, but the idea of getting a super clean version of a website is neat. Someone in the comments compared it to the sunglasses in that movie "They Live" that let you see through the propaganda, which was a funny take.

Looks like Figma is planning their IPO, going public. Whenever a big tech company does this, people immediately start worrying about the service getting worse, you know, the whole "enshittification" thing. Comments were already predicting the free plan would get less generous. Bummer.

Also, Fakespot, that tool for finding fake reviews, shut down after nine years. Makes you think about how hard it is to trust online reviews now. People were sharing stories about companies bribing customers for good reviews or just politely asking everyone, which floods the system. Someone noted they've seen 5-star reviews where the actual text is negative, which is messed up.

And finally, classic tech drama: Sam Altman is apparently complaining about Meta poaching his AI talent and called the people leaving "mercenaries." Kinda rich coming from him, right? Comments were quick to point out the irony, given the history of tech companies hiring away talent and some of Altman's own business moves.

Anyway, that's the quick digest for today. Catch up later!