Hey buddy,

Man, Saturday on Hacker News was pretty wild. Lemme quickly hit you with some of the interesting stuff:

Backing Up Spotify

Dude, you know how streaming services can be a pain? Well, there was this big post about backing up Spotify. It got a ton of comments, and people were talking about Anna's Archive – you know, that huge library of stuff. It sparked a whole debate about whether it's even "stealing" if people can't really afford to pay for everything anyway, calling it a "commons problem." Someone also pointed out how artists get paid way less from ad-supported streams.

Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files

Remember all that Epstein stuff? Someone actually made a "Google Suite" kind of tool called Jmail to go through his files. People are sifting through his Amazon orders and book purchases, trying to connect dots. It's pretty wild, though some in the comments were wondering if it's all just a big distraction or if anything substantial will actually come from it.

Go ahead, self-host Postgres

This was a classic HN debate. A post was basically saying, "Just self-host Postgres, it's fine!" Of course, people immediately jumped in. Some were like, "Nah, backups are a nightmare, and scaling is hard!" But then others countered, saying, "Actually, with Postgres 17's new incremental backups, it's easier than ever, and modern hardware is so powerful you probably don't even need fancy replicas for a small business."

NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

Okay, this was kinda wild: the atomic clocks that help keep the internet's time at NIST in Boulder lost power! Apparently, a scientist working on them was at a holiday party and said things were still shut down even after the power came back on. There was a big local power outage affecting like 25,000 customers, and people were worried because of high winds, reminded them of a past fire.

Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud

Airbus, the plane company, is apparently moving all its super critical software to a "sovereign Euro cloud." Basically, they don't want their sensitive stuff on US-owned clouds like Amazon or Microsoft. The comments were talking about what "sovereign cloud" actually means and how these European options are usually way more expensive.

Privacy doesn't mean anything anymore, anonymity does

This blog post was pretty thought-provoking. It argued that "privacy" is just marketing now, and true "anonymity" is what actually protects you. The gist was that if data exists, the government can subpoena it. People were debating if getting profiled by ad companies is really that bad, and how even with crypto for anonymity, payment processors can still be the biggest risk.

Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

This one's super nerdy but cool: someone built a demo on pure silicon with only 4,000 gates, no CPU, no memory! It's like old-school demoscene stuff, but on actual chips. People were really impressed, talking about how tricky it is to do analog signal processing without memory and the tools they use for this kind of low-level design.

Anyway, just wanted to give you the quick rundown. Talk later!