Hacker NewsSaturday, October 18

DigitalSociety migrated their cloud infrastructure from AWS and DigitalOcean to Hetzner, achieving 76% cost savings while tripling capacity. Their monthly bill dropped from $559 to around $134, increasing from 12 vCPUs/24GB RAM to 44 vCPUs/88GB RAM using Hetzner's ARM servers with Kubernetes.

meow.camera is an alternative viewer for cat feeders from the Hello Street Cat app, which provides a platform for cat feeders around China where users can dispense food through the app. The site features various feeders with cats like Happy Canteen, Lucky 7-Eleven II, Mr. Fresh, and many others, allowing viewers to watch live camera feeds of cats at feeding stations. The developers are not affiliated with the original app and created this viewer for fun.

The Ruby core team, led by Matz, is taking stewardship of RubyGems and Bundler from Ruby Central to ensure long-term stability. The projects will remain open source with unchanged licenses, and community-driven development will continue.

Amazon's Ring partnered with Flock, an AI surveillance camera company that shares footage with law enforcement. Police can now request Ring doorbell footage for investigations. Flock uses AI to scan license plates and identify people, though such technology has shown racial bias issues. The partnership could give agencies access to millions more cameras, raising privacy concerns given Ring's history of security problems including a $5.8 million FTC fine.

A visualization shows how 50 Cent's stage name, coined in June 1994, would be worth different amounts today when adjusted for inflation using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, created by Brian Moore.

In this podcast episode, Andrej Karpathy discusses why he believes we're in the "decade of agents" rather than the "year of agents," explaining that current AI agents lack key capabilities like continual learning and multimodality. He critiques reinforcement learning as "terrible," discusses why model collapse prevents LLMs from learning like humans, predicts AGI will gradually blend into existing economic growth rather than cause sudden disruption, explains why self-driving cars took so long to develop, and shares his vision for the future of education.

A user discovered what appears to be Gemini 3.0 during A/B testing in Google AI Studio by using an SVG generation task to test model quality. When prompted to create an Xbox 360 controller SVG, the suspected Gemini 3.0 model produced significantly better results than Gemini 2.5 Pro, though with longer processing time and output length.

The author discovered a live streaming camera at a Namib Desert water hole and now checks it every morning. Due to the 6-hour time difference, they observe various African animals like zebras, ostriches, giraffes, and elephants hydrating during the hot daytime hours.

Elixir v1.19 introduces significant improvements to the type system and compilation performance. The type system now supports full type inference for all constructs (except guards), better type checking of anonymous functions, and protocol dispatch validation that can catch more bugs at compile time. Compilation times have been dramatically improved, with up to 4x faster builds in large projects through lazy module loading and parallel dependency compilation, making development more efficient for large codebases.

Anthropic introduced Claude Skills, a simple feature that lets Claude access specialized instructions and scripts stored in Markdown files to perform specific tasks better. Skills are only loaded when relevant, making them token-efficient compared to alternatives like MCP. The system works within Claude's coding environment and can handle tasks from creating Slack GIFs to data journalism workflows. Skills are easy to create and share, essentially being folders with instructions and optional scripts that help Claude accomplish specialized work more effectively.