HN Buddy Daily Digest
Monday, November 3, 2025
Hey buddy,
Man, you wouldn't believe the stuff popping up on Hacker News today. Had to give you a quick ring, some pretty wild things went down.
Crazy Powerful Motors & Lying Phones
First off, get this: there's this new tiny electric motor that can apparently crank out over 1,000 horsepower! Like, seriously small but super powerful. Some folks in the comments were saying that for supercars, you don't even need a massive battery range anyway, since they're mostly for short, fun drives. Makes sense, right? You can check it out here: supercarblondie.com
Then, there was this other wild one: apparently, your phone might be lying to you about signal strength! The article says it's a "simple trick" to make you think you have better coverage than you actually do. People in the comments were saying phones are never truly idle anyway, always doing stuff in the background that needs a connection. And some were just fed up with apps showing endless loading screens instead of just admitting the internet sucks. Super relatable, right? Find the full scoop here: nickvsnetworking.com
Nextcloud Woes & Google's Suspension Spree
For the self-hosting crowd, there was a big discussion about why Nextcloud feels so slow. The article dives into it, and the comments totally agreed. A lot of people pointed fingers at the database being the main bottleneck, especially if you're running everything on one machine. But hey, some said the newer versions are way better with rewritten frontends. Still, makes you wonder why there aren't more good alternatives, right? Here's the deep dive: ounapuu.ee
And speaking of tech headaches, this one was a shocker: a company had its Google Cloud account suspended for the third time, just out of the blue! No clear reason, just boom, shut down. The comments section was flooded with similar horror stories – people losing access to everything from YouTube Premium accounts to entire businesses, all because of automated systems with no human support. It's a real cautionary tale about relying too much on big tech. Read the whole ordeal here: agwa.name
The Vector Database Debate & AI's Early Days
For the more technical folks, there was a "Case Against PGVector." It's basically saying that while PGVector, which lets you do vector embeddings in PostgreSQL, is cool for smaller projects, it might not be the best for huge, production-level AI stuff. Dedicated vector databases are probably better for that. The comments highlighted how a lot of blog posts don't really reflect real-world, large-scale use cases. If you're into that, check it: alex-jacobs.com
Then there was this interesting piece called "AI's Dial-Up Era." The main idea is that we're still super early in the AI game, kinda like the internet was back in the dial-up days. People were debating if the comparison to the dot-com bubble's infrastructure build-out really holds up. Some were skeptical about Apple being the big disruptor here. But a lot of us agreed that even now, AI is already super useful for daily problems, even if it feels a bit clunky sometimes. Good read here: wreflection.com
OpenAI's Big Amazon Deal
And finally, the big news: OpenAI just signed a massive $38 billion cloud computing deal with Amazon! Yeah, thirty-eight BILLION. This got everyone talking about whether the AI bubble is gonna burst and how much these companies are actually making. Some comments were quick to point out that Google pretty much invented LLMs and is making huge profits, while OpenAI is still losing a lot of money. Wild times, right? Here's the NYT article: nytimes.com
Anyway, just wanted to give you the heads-up. Catch you later!