Ask HN: How do you keep up with the latest technologies? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you keep up with the latest technologies?

1 pointciarcode3 comments

In my company, we're working on new "agentic" engineering topics. Some of my colleagues seem to anticipate topics or solutions that will become mainstream weeks later in my world.

So, my question for you is, how can I be more informed or where I can find better resources?

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This had been a real struggle for me in the past several months. I decided to make a completely automated daily podcast that just shows up in my podcast player every morning. Although it is publicly available, the whole thing is intended with just me as the audience. Every couple of days I make improvements or changes to make sure that I am not wasting my time or tokens/money. But I also still check HN and a few blogs every day too, just in case I'm missing things. Unfortunately, I still need to make several privacy related edits to my vibe-coded source code and automations before I can safely open-source it. But basically, it is a bunch of Python created by Claude Code based on me explaining the use-case to it. If you happen to have an interest in AI pentesting and AI security, and don't mind AI voices, you can find my podcast at:

- https://open.spotify.com/show/033gfO4y05bWfjOg77lpso - https://podcast.admin2x.org/rss.xml

But more importantly, if you do vibe-code your own podcast creator app, don't forget to:

- Sanitize and encode, or strip out non-printable and control characters from the sources you crawl/scrape. - Add structured delimiters to that same inbound text to avoid prompt injections. - First have Claude Code check each source site's `robots.txt` file to find out if you will be allowed to crawl their site in the first place. I found that most sites were surprisingly permissive. But one site required me to email to ask for permission first, which they granted.

The elephant in the room: this is costing me about $110 per month. That includes AI tokens and API calls to elevenlabs.io (for the AI voices). It feels totally worth it for now. I no longer have to doomscroll through LinkedIn and manually check a dozen blogs, etc.

This is interesting, I'm astonished that you've managed to rack up such a huge API bill though. I built a similar product called irisbriefings.com that makes people personalised briefings via podcasts and reports each week and sends it to their devices.

I recently moved away from Elevenlabs to Google TTS.

LOL. I think it was because, for the first month, I was buying Anthropic API credits in little batches ahead of time. Also, what did you find was better for you with Google TTS instead of ElevenLabs? Interested to know any ways of optimizing this thing. Thanks.

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