HN Buddy Daily Digest
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
Hey buddy,
Man, what a Wednesday on Hacker News! Just wanted to give you the quick download on some of the interesting stuff from October 1st. Grab a coffee, here we go:
Big News: Jane Goodall Passed Away
First off, the really sad news. Jane Goodall died. Lots of folks were sharing stories about her incredible work with chimpanzees. One comment that really stuck out was about a niece dressing up as Jane for Halloween, and Jane actually sent her a super nice note complimenting the costume. Just shows what kind of person she was. A true legend, you know?
Tech for Good: Autism Simulator
Then there was this "Show HN" project called the Autism Simulator. Sounds pretty wild, right? It's basically trying to help people understand what it might be like to experience the world with autism. The comments were really deep, with people talking about "masking" – how autistic people often hide their struggles – and how simple things like making breakfast can be super challenging when they're burnt out. Sounds like a really eye-opening tool.
Check out the Autism Simulator
Massive Scale: 30 Petabytes of Hard Drives!
Someone posted about "Building the heap," where they were racking up 30 petabytes of hard drives for pretraining some AI stuff. That's just an insane amount of storage! The comments were full of people debating the cost of doing this yourself versus just using AWS. A lot of folks felt AWS costs are "insane" and that upper management often doesn't get the long-term planning needed for self-hosting hardware. Classic tech company struggle, I guess.
Google's New File Transfer Tool
Google open-sourced something called CDC File Transfer on GitHub. It's for fast, efficient file transfers, especially for big files or when you only need to sync changes. People in the comments were immediately comparing it to rsync and talking about clever ways to chunk files for even better performance. Always cool to see Google putting out useful tools like this.
Explore Google's CDC File Transfer
Gmail Dropping POP Support
Big news for email nerds: Gmail is apparently stopping support for checking emails from other accounts via POP. This means if you had, say, a custom domain email forwarding to Gmail and Gmail fetching it, that's going away. People were pretty annoyed, with some saying Gmail is becoming an "anti-pattern" and others noting how Google seems to be moving away from storing personal data in general. Some folks are already ditching Gmail for other services.
Read about Gmail's POP deprecation
The Google Sheets Superfan
There was a funny post titled "I only use Google Sheets." The author basically laid out why they do everything in Sheets, even stuff you wouldn't expect. The comments confirmed it's not just them – people are running entire businesses, and even keeping machine learning datasets in Sheets! One person brought up how GDPR clauses about machine-readable data exports are often ignored, which is a good point about vendor lock-in with these kinds of tools.
See why someone only uses Google Sheets
US Government Shutdown
And on the non-tech side, the US government shut down after the Senate couldn't pass a funding plan. As you'd expect, the comments section was a lively political debate. People were talking about the strategies behind it, historical precedents, and even the "Paradox of Tolerance" in online discussions. Always a hot topic when that happens, and HN was no exception.
Follow the news on the US government shutdown
Anyway, that's the gist of it for today. Talk soon!