HN Buddy

Daily digest of top Hacker News posts and comments

Subscribe to the HN Buddy Daily Digest

Your email will only be used for the HN Buddy Daily Digest. I will not share it with anyone.

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!

All Stories from Today

Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower (supercarblondie.com)

Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength (nickvsnetworking.com)

Why Nextcloud feels slow to use (ounapuu.ee)

Google suspended my company's Google cloud account for the third time (www.agwa.name)

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025) (news.ycombinator.com)

The Case Against PGVector (alex-jacobs.com)

Htmx – The Fetch()ening (htmx.org)

AI's Dial-Up Era (www.wreflection.com)

Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024) (needleful.net)

First recording of a dying human brain shows waves similar to memory flashbacks (2022) (louisville.edu)

Israels top military lawyer arrested after she admitted leaking video of abuse (www.theguardian.com)

China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show (www.bbc.com)

State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions (www.jeffquast.com)

Things you can do with diodes (lcamtuf.substack.com)

Why we migrated from Python to Node.js (blog.yakkomajuri.com)

OpenAI signs $38B cloud computing deal with Amazon (www.nytimes.com)

I analyzed 180M jobs to see what jobs AI is replacing today (bloomberry.com)

Oxy is Cloudflare's Rust-based next generation proxy framework (2023) (blog.cloudflare.com)

'No idea who he is', says Trump after pardoning crypto tycoon (www.bbc.com)

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2025) (news.ycombinator.com)

The Case That A.I. Is Thinking (www.newyorker.com)

The problem with farmed seafood (nautil.us)

Python Steering Council unanimously accepts "PEP 810, Explicit lazy imports" (discuss.python.org)

VimGraph (resources.wolframcloud.com)

A friendly tour of process memory on Linux (www.0xkato.xyz)

The Mack Super Pumper was a locomotive engined fire fighter (2018) (bangshift.com)

Skyfall-GS – Synthesizing Immersive 3D Urban Scenes from Satellite Imagery (skyfall-gs.jayinnn.dev)

No Socials November (bjhess.com)

Update and shut down no longer restarts PC, 25H2 patch addresses decades-old bug (www.windowslatest.com)

ECL Runs Maxima in a Browser (mailman3.common-lisp.net)