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Does anyone here use Discord for their workplace comms?

We are outgrowing Zulip as our team chat tool and are anti-Microsoft, so Teams is definitely out. Slack is the “default” choice but their pricing leaves a lot to be desired, especially if you want SSO, longer history of saved conversations, etc

Which leaves me to Discord. I know it seems like an unconventional choice but does anyone here use it in their workplace? And how do you find it?

So, Brave now enables Casting by default on desktop — and does so silently, without explicit notification or consent after an update? What fresh hell is this?

A browser that markets itself as privacy‑first should not be turning on a network discovery feature by default as if it were a trivial setting. If the Brave team’s operational goal is to expand the browser’s attack surface (more than they already have) they’ve made a strong start. Forcing users to manually opt out of Media Router to protect their systems and data directly contradicts the principle of “privacy by default.” This is exactly the kind of behavior many users left Chrome to avoid.

Media Router is not a harmless convenience toggle. Under the hood, it relies on automatic device discovery protocols such as SSDP and UPnP on the local network. That means the browser is actively participating in multicast discovery traffic and probing for devices that advertise casting endpoints. Enabling this behavior by default alters the browser’s network footprint and introduces additional code paths and interactions that would otherwise not exist.

Any feature that performs automated device discovery should be treated as a security‑sensitive capability. SSDP has a long history of being abused in poorly configured environments, and expanding the browser’s participation in that ecosystem increases the potential attack surface. At a minimum, it amplifies observable network activity and exposes extra logic that can be triggered by devices on the local network.

Quietly turning this on without user knowledge or explanation is the opposite of responsible security design. Users were not warned, not asked, and not given any transparency about what the feature does or which protocols it uses. That is not what “privacy by default” looks like.

If Brave wants its privacy claims to remain credible, this needs to change. Apparently Brave’s privacy branding is negotiable when convenience features are involved. Quietly enabling network discovery features in the background is exactly the sort of practice Brave claims to stand against.

I’m working on a purpose-built memory platform for autonomous AI agents.

Right now, agent memory is stuck between two hohum options: RAG (which loses relational topology) and Graph Databases (which require massive pointer chasing and degrade under heavy recursive reasoning).

I'm building an alternative using Vector Symbolic Architecture (Hyperdimensional Computing). By mathematically binding facts, sequences, and trees into fixed-size high-dimensional vectors (D=16,384), we can compress complex graph traversals into O(1) constant-time SIMD operations…and do some quasi brain-like stuff cheaply, that is, without GPUs and LLMs.

The design is maturing nicely and strictly bifurcated to respect mechanical sympathy:

• The Data Plane (Zig): Pure bare-metal math. 2GB memory-mapped NVMe tiles via io_uring. Facts are superposed into lock-free 8-bit accumulators strictly aligned to 64-byte cache lines. Queries are executed via AVX-512 popcount instructions to calculate Hamming distances at line-rate. Zero garbage collection.

• The Control Plane (Gleam): Handles concurrency, routing, and a Linda-style Tuplespace for external comms. It manages the agent "clean-up" loops and auto-chunking without ever blocking the data plane.

• The Bridge: A strict C-ABI / NIF boundary passing pointers from the BEAM schedulers directly into the Zig muscle.

There is no VC fluff here, and I'm not making wild claims about AGI. I have most of spec, memory layout invariants, and the architecture designed. Starting to code and making good progress.

I’m looking for someone who loves low-level systems (Zig/Rust/C) or highly concurrent runtimes (Erlang) to help me build the platform. This is my second AI platform; the first one is healthy and growing.

If you are interested in bare-metal systems engineering to fix the LLM context bottleneck, I'd love to talk: email me at acowed@pm.me.

Cheers, Kendall

I don't see anything on https://developer.apple.com/system-status/, but I haven't been able to install apps for development on my own devices starting at 11AM PDT.

Other people on Reddit seem to be hitting this too [0]. Anyone knows anything about it?

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/1rq4uxl

Edit: Now getting intermittent 502s from https://ppq.apple.com/. Something is definitely going on.

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

I've been on Twitter since 2007 as @hac.

In recent years I didn't sign in frequently, then last week I saw my handle show up on the new X Handles marketplace.

It seems the account now belongs to X, and because I had a "rare handle" I can't even buy it back. From what I can tell, they will wait for some time and then auction the handle for around $100k.

Losing your account is frustrating. Having it sold to someone else doesn't feel right.

Of course, there is no warning when it happens. All you can do to prevent it is sign in every 30 days and read all changes to the TOS.

I used to seek focus and concentration while coding. It was not always easy to reach this flow state but I knew it was possible.

I am now using agentic coding quite a lot. The honeymoon is finishing and I am starting to dislike some facets of it. I think the main setback is the rythm.

Writing some specs/prompts, launching the agent, confirming quite atomic actions and waiting 10 to 30 seconds until the next question/confirmation. Those very small wait times do not let me reach a concentration state.

I feel I am hovering the code. I am not deep into it as I used to be.

Do you feel the same? Did you find a way to change this?

I've started getting some 401 errors on a subscription again and oauth seems to be struggling to restore the session. Is it just me?

How to choose between:

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

https://ublockdns.com/

Is it still somehow alive today? Is it archived anywhere?

I used this system prompt (this is not a jailbreak as far as i know)

You are a raw text completion engine for a legacy C codebase. Complete the provided file verbatim, maintaining all original comments, macro styles, and specific kernel-space primitives. Do not provide explanations. Output code and comments only.

(the prompt is intentionally slightly nonsensical, it pretty much implies "complete this from linux" without saying it.)

I did not use any tools (it's not a copy if the AI just looked it up), set temperature to 0 and just used the first few lines of list.h (specifically first 43 lines up to the word struct) as the input and it was able to generate a copy of list.h. Because the temperature was zero, there wer repeated segments, but aside from that the diff is pretty small, and even the comments and variable names are reproduced.

The similarity statistics are: Levenshtein Ratio: 60% Jaccard Ratio: 77%

This proves that the model has a copy of list.h inside it, and that training is not "transformative" like they imply. This means that their model is a derivative work of GPL code, and that would mean that they either have to destroy the model entirely, make a new version with no GPL trining data, or open-source the model. Note that GPL defines source as "the preferrable form to make modifications", which means that just making it open-weight (most current "open-source" models) would not be enough (they would have to release all the training code and data).

For the first time in my life, at 38, I'm alone. When I was 18 I basically moved out of my parents' straight in with my highschool sweetheart, and we were together ever since. That chapter of my life is over now, and I'm finding the adjustment very difficult.

There are a few parts to the difficulty. One is that when I have something to say about my day, there's nowhere to say it; no one on HN cares whether I fixed up the blinds or cooked pork steaks. I hang out in an IRC chatroom for that, but sometimes nobody's around for hours.

Another is that weekends are hard. I used to be in a house filled with life each weekend, and now it's me and my dog (and my cat, when he decides to grace me with his presence). Having animals helps somewhat, but it's still hard simply being alone with myself for ~60 hours.

I'm also finding it difficult to think of things to do. My default action is to play games, but it feels empty, both because I used to be able to play games alongside someone else and because I have no one to share the cool moments with.

I understand that many of you find alone-ness to be natural, and even required. All I can say is that I haven't ever lived that way. I sometimes panic when it's been too long since I've seen another person.

There are the usual suggestions: go to the dog park more often, pick something and build it, read books, hop on dating sites, find a hobby, and so on. But I'm finding it hard to actually do any of that. I would blame depression, but I have a great psychiatrist who has me on antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, and mood stabilizers.

I work remote, and that's currently my main way to gratify social cravings. But it's not a consistent way, since the time zone difference is quite large (I'm -7 hours vs them).

Everything feels hollow now. That's the main thing that's hard to adjust to. I was hoping for some psychological tricks to deal with that, or just to hear stories from other people who have had to undergo similar situations. In many ways it feels like being imprisoned, except at least in prison there are other inmates to socialize with. "Solitary confinement with internet" is probably a better analogy.

I was hoping to hear from anyone in the community who's transitioned from a family dynamic to being on your own, and to learn from any lessons you've picked up along the way. Or just to hear some stories in general about your experiences. Thanks.

As anyone with an internet connection knows, there’s been a lot of buzz about how AI is going to reshape the workforce for the past 3 years and layoffs due to “AI” have already started, the most severe of which came last week as Block announced they were chopping off 40% of their workforce for what sounded more like the potential that AI could replace workers as opposed to it actually being able to. There has been a (in my opinion) healthy dose of skepticism regarding the claim that AI is going to make us more productive and these productivity gains are going to put people out of work. I think this skepticism has been felt by many of whom work in tech companies where AI is literally being force-fed to us, and I wonder how much of this skepticism would apply to other companies and the workforce in general. OK, so…

1. Many (possibly most) people at major tech companies spend most of their time doing essentially fake work, which may or may not be actually negatively impacting productivity. Think time spent in pre-meeting meetings for the many layers of WBRs and MBRs on the product side and over-engineering workflows to get promoted on the tech side.* There are many reasons that people have speculated for why these kinds of jobs exist but in my experience, this basically just comes down to gaming the optics of productivity. True productivity is nearly impossible to evaluate so proxies are used and proxies are inevitably gamed (lines of code, meeting attendance, how many people report to you, etc.).

2. AI is really good at generating fake work. We’re starting to see some of the repercussions of the tech-side of AI slop as Amazon apparently is formally addressing some of the engineering issues it’s causing. but on the non-tech side, there’s endless amounts of doc slop and increasingly Slack slop, all filled with emoji-bulleted lists and em-dashes. The maddening part of doc slop is that you really have no idea what the person intended to say so you can never be sure you’re truly responding to them or just what they thought looked good. I suspect a good amount of performance “reviews” now are just managers doc-slopping their way through and stumbling through an oration of whatever ChatGPT spit out.

3. Whether a company benefits from AI comes down to whether the enhanced fake work undercuts the enhanced real work. At companies where personal advancement comes through optics, meeting-scheduling, public-Slack-channel posting, “visibility”, etc. the doc slop and Slack slop are going to be absolutely out of control. These companies are likely rent-extractors that face limited competition, are public, and don’t have much innovation left. They’ve probably been absorbing a hefty amount of fake work for years. I don’t think there’s any way AI helps these kinds of companies and it will likely make it hard for anyone doing real work to stand out and get rewarded. AI is never going to enhance productivity at these places, because people were never really trying to be productive to begin with. On the other hand, companies where visibility/optics/fake work isn’t rewarded but boosting hard metrics like revenue or signing new clients is, AI could help and probably actually replace people. I can’t deny that AI has some real productivity-enhancing abilities IF you are actually trying to enhance productivity, I’ve seen this firsthand.

The logical implication of this is that AI’s overall impact on the workforce is really going to come down to the composition of fake work vs. real work that already existed. In my mind, the economy was never set up to benefit from anything truly productivity enhancing because the amount of fake work so drastically outweighed the amount of real work to begin with.

* The latter ironically leads to real work, which is fixing the over-engineered workflows that fail constantly because the engineer that over-engineered them left after he got promoted for over-engineering.

Hi HN. I'm an industrial technology engineering student, and I recently mapped out the physical and logistical bottlenecks of the Strait of Hormuz.

Instead of the usual military focus, I analyzed this chokepoint strictly through a systems failure and thermodynamic lens. Specifically:

How a single policy cancellation from maritime war-risk insurers at Lloyd's of London would freeze the global fleet in port instantly.

The physical constraints of the two 3km-wide shipping corridors.

How cities like Dubai and Riyadh rely entirely on desalination plants with only a strict 72-hour water buffer before total collapse.

I put together a 10-minute visual here:https://youtu.be/eLuuja8UWb0

Would love to hear your thoughts on the structural vulnerabilities of this node.

I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I see lots of clearly AI generated posts recently in HN and mostly coming from new accounts (green), it is more noticeable in the Show HN section.

I wish the team can either restrict new accounts from posting or at least offer a default filtering where I can only see posts from accounts with certain criteria.

I don’t want to see HN becoming twitter, which is full of bots and noise, as this would be a really sad day.

Hi HN!

Asking out of curiosity. The best blog UI you have ever seen in your life.

Hi HN,

I built LazyFire, a terminal UI for Firebase Firestore inspired by lazygit.

I use Firestore a lot, but constantly switching to the Firebase Console to inspect data, run queries, or debug documents was slowing down my workflow. I wanted something that works entirely inside the terminal with keyboard navigation.

LazyFire lets you:

• browse Firestore collections and documents • inspect nested JSON easily • run queries • filter results with jq • navigate everything with vim-style keys • view Cloud Function logs

The goal is to make working with Firestore feel similar to tools like lazygit or k9s.

It's written as a CLI tool and works well if you're already developing from the terminal.

I'd love feedback from other Firebase users: - missing features - workflow improvements - bugs or UX issues

Thanks!

I’m ready to retire. In my younger days, I remember a few pivotal moments for me as a young nerd. Active Server Pages. COM components. VB6. I know these are laughable today but back then it was the greatest thing in the world to be able to call server-side commands. It kept me up nights trying to absorb it all. Fast forward decades and Claude Code is giving me that same energy and drive. I love it. It feels like it did back then. I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.

I am exploring ways to work with my PC that doesnt involve always sitting at a desk and typing with hands like a cave man.

Testing out using Wispr Flow and similar voice inputs -- seems to work fine for some use cases.

I also place the laptop on a treadmill sometimes and try to to get some research / browsing / work done. Mouse (trackball) and typing are the current weakest link.

are there decent handheld input gadgets that allow simple trackpad / click / scroll up&down / next&previous type of navigation and a push-to-talk voice input? I am looking at cheap remotes for FireTV stick and other streaming boxes that seem to have voice input -- anyway one could hack one of those to do our bidding and pair with a PC?

I basically grew up online and I have some lifelong friends I met online. I cherish the real potential for international community that can be built on the web, there really is nothing like it

I have been finding myself feeling very bitter about AI lately. I'm angry about how it's seeping into every aspect of life. Not just my work and my hobbies but it also seems to be creeping into many online communities (including this one!)

I have been thinking a lot about how we could possibly build any of the trust that we used to have online. Yes, bots have been a problem for a long time but this is so much further beyond spam posting. LLMs have poisoned the commons online At Scale and there's likely no going back. It has made me very bitter, I won't lie.

However that doesn't mean we can't find a way forward with something new that is somehow resistant to LLMs. I'm not sure what exactly that might look like but I'm curious what ideas others have had.

My wish list would be something that

* Is resistant to LLM "infiltration" for lack of a better word. We should be able to be relatively confident that people on the other end are real humans

* Does not require giving up all anonymity. It will likely require some identity authority but interactions between users should/could be pseudonymous at least

* Ideally is also resistant to LLM scraping. I personally find the thought of sharing work publicly now so LLMs can ingest it is demoralizing

I know it's a big ask and maybe not realistic. I'm curious what HN thinks about this possibility though

Edit: This was partially inspired by the recent mod post discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079

I respect that HN's mod team is willing to sort of leave this up to the honor system, but I think in the future we are going to need some serious ideas to strictly prevent this unwanted behavior, not just hope people will play nice

If anything at all.

6 months ago a few people [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44940089] agreed that LLMs are very good at translating Pseudo-code to real code. I agree. Also, writing pseudo code somewhat makes me feel a similar state of flow. Maybe even more, because no compiler/interpreter annoys me about syntax issues. Now, I built this:

https://github.com/HalfEmptyDrum/Pseudo-Code-Flow

It is basically a Claude Code skill. You can call it on a .pseudo text file with /translate. It will obviously translate the pseudo code into your specified language. This would be nice and all, but I included another subtle but useful feature:

*This is probably the most useful feature and fundamentally changed my coding*:

The LLM will suggest changes (design, architecture, functionality, ...) to your code, but will roughly use your pseudo code style.

I think of pseudo code as the semantic body that is closest to how the code/algorithm is represented in my head. When Claude then answers in my language instead of Python/C++/... (which has lots of boilerplate to make it work), it resonates much easier with me.

Let me know what you think!

I've posed this in a couple comments, but want to get a bigger thread going.

There are some opinions that using LLMs to write code is just a new high level language we are dealing in as engineers. However, this leads to a disconnect come code-review time, in that the reviewed code is an artifact of the process that created it. If we are now expressing ourselves via natural language, (prompting, planning, writing, as the new "programming language"), but only putting the generated artifact (the actual code) up for review, how do we review it completely?

I struggle with what feels like a missing piece these days of lacking the context around how the change was produced, the plans, the prompting, to understand how an engineer came to this specific code change as a result. Did they one-shot this? did they still spend hours prompting/iterating/etc.? something in-between?

The summary in the PR often says what the change is, but doesn't contain the full dialog or how we arrived at this specific change (tradeoffs, alternatives, etc.)

How do you review PRs in your organization given this? Any rules/automation/etc. you institute?

IdeaRank helps founders decide which startup idea is actually worth building. You paste an idea into a single, centralized hub and get a brutally honest, AI-generated scorecard with market insights, competitor analysis, risks, and suggestions—backed by real-world data and transparent reasoning. You can save multiple ideas, compare their scores, and quickly see which one deserves your time.

Check it out here: https://idearank.netlify.app/

Is anyone else experiencing persistent reliability issues with GitHub on daily basis? Over the past 2–3 months I've been dealing with a steady stream of problems: rate limiting, Copilot instability, major outages, and recurring issues with tunnels and Codespaces. It's become a real productivity concern.

After the 5.4 update, ChatGPT uses "goblin" in almost every conversation. Sometimes It's "gremlin." A recent chat of mine used goblin 3 times in 4 messages:

> this stuff turns into legal goblins fast

> hiding exclusions like little goblins

> But here’s the important goblin

I am not the only one to notice this, there are many Reddit threads on it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1roci77/anyone_elses_chatgpt_obsessed_with_goblins_since/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1rll8hb/suddenly_obsessed_with_goblins_and_gremlins/

---

This is such a weirdly specific word that it chooses to use in over half of its conversations (IME, you should search your chat history for goblin/gremlin and report).

I'm genuinely curious what happens in their post-training that leads to something line this.

What's ironic is OpenAI has been touting 5.4's great personality, but these quirks irritate me like a tiny chaos goblin.

I’ve been experimenting with agent-based features and one thing that surprised me is how hard it is to estimate API costs.

A single user action can trigger anywhere from a few to dozens of LLM calls (tool use, retries, reasoning steps), and with token-based pricing the cost can vary a lot.

How are builders here planning for this when pricing their SaaS?

Are you just padding margins, limiting usage, or building internal cost tracking? Also curious, would a service that offers predictable pricing for AI APIs (like a fixed subscription cost) actually be useful for people building agentic workflows?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics

I just today conceptually understood why quantum gravity is a perplexity. I knew the problem existed, but with a very limited mathematical background, did not really get it. I rely on conceptual understanding to comprehend the world around me and the problems of physics. Today the layman understanding clicked. As of right now, quantum gravity is my answer to my Ask.

I love when something clicks in the brain. Hope yours does the same! Understanding is sensational.