Just calling to quickly tell you about some of the cool stuff I saw on Hacker News yesterday, Sunday, June 14th. You know, just skimming through the tech news, and some interesting things popped up.

How to Get Rich (Paul Graham style)

First up, there was this classic Paul Graham article, "How to earn a billion dollars". Lots of discussion, as you'd expect. The big takeaway is basically: find a problem that affects a lot of people, build something useful to solve it, and then scale it up like crazy. Simple, right? But the comments were pretty wild. Someone brought up how the cafeteria workers at SpaceX apparently became multimillionaires because they got equity when it was "worthless." Imagine that! Another person was like, "Paul says a restaurant won't scale," and then someone else immediately shot back with, "Uh, McDonald's is worth like $200 billion, so..." Ha!

Shadowing Websites for Offline Viewing

Then there was this really neat "Show HN" project called Kage. It lets you "shadow" any website, basically packaging it into a single executable file for offline viewing. Super cool for archiving or if you just want to read something without internet. People in the comments were asking for features like making it a self-extracting archive instead of a full browser, or even automatically getting rid of annoying cookie banners and pop-ups. Pretty smart ideas, actually.

ePubs and Kobo Drama

There was a post called "Your ePub Is fine", and it was all about how Kobo and Adobe are being super finicky with ePub files, making it a pain for users. It sounds like a lot of it comes down to some weird DRM stuff. One comment actually corrected someone who said "the entire browser ecosystem started closed source," pointing out that the first web browser was public domain and Mozilla went open source way back in '98. Also, a bunch of people were recommending Koreader if you have a Kobo, apparently it's way better for managing your library.

Not Everyone's Drinking the AI Kool-Aid

Another big one was "Not everyone is using AI for everything." It's a nice counter-point to all the AI hype. The author basically says that while AI is cool, it's not the answer to every problem, and many people aren't rushing to adopt it for everything. The comments agreed, especially about LLMs for things like specific legal or tax advice – they're great for general stuff, but often hallucinate on specifics. Someone also called out "bait and switch" UIs that try to shove AI where it doesn't need to be, just to make you use it.

Honda Civics and Evil Valets

This one was a bit more niche but interesting: "Honda Civics and the Evil Valet." It's about security vulnerabilities in car infotainment systems. Imagine giving your car to a valet, and they could potentially install malware or mess with your car's software through the infotainment unit. Apparently, some VW units actually had fixed root passwords exposed over SSH, which is just wild. People were discussing the balance between security and a device being useful long-term, especially as cars age.

Indexing GoPro Videos with Local AI

This guy posted about how he indexed 669 GB of his GoPro videos using his M1 Max computer and local ML models. He basically made all his footage searchable by what's in it – faces, objects, audio, even transcribing dialogue. He's using something called RAG with an Ollama model. It's super impressive, turning a massive pile of raw video into a smart, searchable library. A lot of people in the comments were saying they want something exactly like that for their own personal photo and video collections.

Rio's "Homegrown" LLM Controversy

And finally, there was a bit of drama around Rio de Janeiro's new "homegrown" LLM. There were two posts, one claiming it beat another model in benchmarks, and then another one that exposed it. Turns out, Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model, not a completely new one they trained from scratch. The comments were pretty mixed, some people were like, "what's wrong with merging?" while others felt it was a bit misleading to call it "homegrown" if it's just a mash-up of other models. Always something with AI, huh?

Anyway, that's the quick download. Talk soon!