Hacker News Reader

ryanmcdonoughon A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous

I built https://getminute.me to help solve this issue, transcription, summaries, chapters all done on device using local AI models for Mac OS and iOS.

Seems to have had a good reception so far within the legal world who was my original target market for this.

Is it as powerful as the services using insane compute? No. Does it do a pretty decent job without using a third party? Yes.

ryanmcdonoughon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

https://getminute.me

A privacy first transcription and analysis app for iOS and native Mac OS (latter this week)

All AI runs on device, nothing ever leaves your device apart from syncing data via your iCloud.

ryanmcdonoughon Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes

The clean up costs were referenced in the article and noted that they made up around $130,000 of it.

ryanmcdonoughon AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

Now, I may well be naive - but isn't the point of these systems that you fail over gracefully to another data centre and no-one notices?

ryanmcdonoughon AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

Now, I may well be naive - but isn't the point of these systems that you fail over gracefully to another data centre and no-one notices?

ryanmcdonoughon KDE Linux

That KDE are making their own first party distribution to showcase KDE, as well as making the DE.

ryanmcdonoughon Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions

I reckon advertising the fact you're willing to pay to get around this, which I expect is probably against ToS and the employment agreement with the company name isn't the best choice.

ryanmcdonoughon Show HN: Icons.run – use 85,000 icons as PNG

Yeah, I suppose as part of a build process you could find references to the icons generated, download them, store locally and use those - the service itself is brilliant, super useful being able to generate those icons on the fly - it's just having it as a dependency for something so key is hard.

ryanmcdonoughon Show HN: Icons.run – use 85,000 icons as PNG

There's no guarantee of anything being around.

Anecdotally, I recently worked on a project that used a Flag CDN - worked fine for a long time, then started sporadically failing.

As such I don't think I'd used anything in production hosted on a none static copy CDN like Cloudflare, sure Cloudflare could do down, but we probably all have bigger issues then than my flags not working.

ryanmcdonoughon Show HN: The 2FA app that tells you when you get `012345`

Lovely stuff

ryanmcdonoughon Why is a second equal to the duration of 9,192,631,770 of radiations? (2016)

> and derive the length of the meter from that.

I would assume they meant meter since they wrote that.

ryanmcdonoughon Show HN: AirTracker – historical AirTag location tracking

I really hope people aren’t going to just share their AirTag with a random person on the internet.

ryanmcdonoughon The fascist state of Paw Patrol (2021)

There are elections.

There is farming.

There is definitely commerce (restaurants and animal parlours).

Only the dogs (and 1 cat) out of all the animals can speak so the chicken being unable to isn’t unusual.

I think those were the main things said in that article and they were all incorrect.

Source - a parent who watched them with their child.

ryanmcdonoughon Iconic tree at Hadrian's Wall's 'Sycamore Gap' has been 'felled'

Well, just that he’s been arrested in connection - not that he did it. He could have there with the people, he may have known who did it etc.

ryanmcdonoughon Two photographers captured the same millisecond in time (2018)

Does worry me sometimes that people just make those statements that they seemingly must believe but have no basis in reality.

ryanmcdonoughon Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses

I wonder if galleries will now have clauses like

“The artist shall utilise the bank notes to visually reproduce a specific artwork, such as the Mona Lisa. The bank notes should form the actual colours and contours of the artwork, and the final piece should not be a mere abstract interpretation.”

ryanmcdonoughon Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses

He said the work was taking their money, unless the contract specifically said

Maybe it did and that’s why they got the money back, but if not I’d side with the artist

ryanmcdonoughon Danish artist told to repay museum €67,000 after turning in blank canvasses

Museum director Lasse Andersson said that he had laughed out loud when he first saw the two blank canvasses in 2021, and decided to show the works anyway.

"He stirred up my curatorial staff and he also stirred me up a bit, but I also had a laugh because it was really humoristic," the museum's director, Lasse Andersson

So the museum director was happy, curators were interested and they were on display - feels like the money was his?

ryanmcdonoughon ‘One step at a time’: entrepreneur buys stairwell in London to help startups

The issue in the UK isn’t specifically a lack of housing, if a home builder built a new estate of houses, only a small proportion have to be affordable housing, the rest come in at the ridiculous prices already in place locally. A business building 200 new houses in an area won’t bring down the house prices down at all.

ryanmcdonoughon ‘One step at a time’: entrepreneur buys stairwell in London to help startups

Because his positive is providing a free space for people to build businesses not to immediately enrich himself. He said “I have a better plan than developing it” without having to say that and making a statement about the state of rent pricing in the UK.

What concerns you about this line of thinking? Without it we wouldn’t have food banks that could service 100s of people, why not just build another cafe where there is a food bank and give 5 people a job rather than 100s food?

Both need to exist (sadly for the food banks) in this world.

ryanmcdonoughon Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

They literally had hands on demos for journalists after the event...

ryanmcdonoughon Tell HN: Stripe killed my music locker service, so I'm open sourcing it

Right, so what is your alternative for paying musicians en masse for their music?

ryanmcdonoughon Tell HN: Stripe killed my music locker service, so I'm open sourcing it

"think Google Play Music, except we won't disappear. currently in early access."

You can't just give up at the first sign of a payment issue, otherwise you're no better than google ;)

ryanmcdonoughon Facebook owner Meta starts final round of layoffs

*for now.

ryanmcdonoughon Unionized Apple store workers want you to start tipping them

If it’s a real idea rather than a negotiation tactic with Apple, then it does start to make it into a sales commission of 3-5% meaning employees will have more of an incentive to upsell regardless of benefit to the customer for a higher % cut.

As to how many customers would look to pay an extra $45 on a $900 phone…

ryanmcdonoughon A thief who stole 106 rare clocks

Surprised he found the time to steal them all.

ryanmcdonoughon What is the minimal possible UK address?

Well it's all going to a central place in the flats, so without a specification on which flat how do we know which flat the letter belongs to - works well with a house you own but the minimalism could mean your post being inadvertently taken.

However it's a good show of how much ink/time is wasted normally on letters with useless data.

ryanmcdonoughon Deepfaked Tom Cruise and Paris Hilton by Metaphysic

It’s a deepfaked Tom Cruise, with the real Paris Hilton.

https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2022/10/21/paris-hilton-fans-conf...

Still super impressive but it’s not two deep fakes at the same time.

ryanmcdonoughon Ask HN: Share your personal site

Nice site!

On your CV there’s a dash at the start of the first bullet point, might need removing