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Hi HN,

I just graduated from college and don’t have a job yet. I’m trying to figure out what to focus on next, and I’d love some advice.

A little about me:

– I contribute to open-source projects.

– I’ve done a few internships during college, mainly building full-stack web apps.

– Worked in a few startups, also mainly on full-stack projects.

– Built full-stack apps for clients.

– Ran a fun YouTube channel for a few months.

– Built some AI-powered apps using tools like OpenAI.

– Solved 100+ DSA problems to improve my coding skills.

With AI tools now, I can build full-stack apps by prompting and understand all the code. But I’m not sure what to focus on next: Should I deeply master a stack like MERN, or keep experimenting with AI and building different projects?

I’ve tried a lot of things — side projects, internships, open-source, AI apps — but I don’t feel like I’ve truly mastered anything yet.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? What would you do if you were me?

Thanks in advance.

Some background on me: I've reached a point where I quit my job of 11 years without notice due to sheer burnout. Shortly after I was hospitalized for a bit.

I'm trying to recover, getting back into healthy routines.

I'm also suffering quite a bit of imposter syndrome due to not having a 4 year degree.

I'm suffering from a lot of analysis paralysis trying to select a side project for a portfolio. Once I decide, I get another layer on how I'm going to implement it. And eventually it winds up feeling like I'm better off not doing any of them.

In my last job I was responsible for a mission critical service in the form of an apache module. Which I can attest is a rather hostile environment. So I'm pretty battle tested in the c/c++ arena.

In my spare time I've reveled in physically based rendering. So I've got enough trig & calc in my head to be dangerous.

My asks of HN:

- What are interviews like these days? How important is it to have a visable portfolio of working projects?

- How much of the AI hype is HN nerds nerding out about AI versus actually implementing AI, versus gluing AI apis together?

- How do you keep yourselves engaged with pet projects? My github is a field of projects 1/4 of the way completed before I lost steam on them.

I need some hope that future employment is possible.

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With all mobile ecosystems closing down, I am considering switching to dumb phone. It will be used for calls and SMS only. For all my personal computing and hobby projects I would like to have some additional device that runs open source software, and does not prevent me from building and running custom applications. It would be amazing to have some device similar to classig Palm Pilot, "handheld PDA". Maybe even with stylus, 4"-5" touchscreen that easily fits anywhere. Are there any similar devices available? Tablets are way too large and are using same closed mobile ecosystems.

I run a small business in Canada. Oddly, if you search my brand name, my own site doesn’t show up at all on the first page. Instead, Facebook, Instagram, and random sites that link to me outrank me.

I’ve submitted my sitemap to GSC, checked indexing, and built branded backlinks—but Google still ignores my homepage. It’s bad because people looking for me are funneled into other platforms where I lose control of the user journey.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is this Google punishing small/new sites, or do I need to approach brand SEO differently? At this point it feels like Google wants me to buy ads just to show up for my own name.

Does anyone know of good resources to make your own animatronic Halloween displays?

I'm a software engineer, and not skilled in hardware per se.

I would love to make some things together with my kids. For reference, they are 8, 10, 12 and VERY smart and they use Ubuntu as their desktop computers and can use flatpak from the command line. Not that I am bragging....

And, I would love to NOT spent $400 on just a single ridiculous junky thing from Lowes, and do that for multiple things. My budget is definitely tiny and the journey of building and troubleshooting is what I want for the kids, not necessarily a finished perfect project.

I found this site and it looks interesting but I am unsure how well this would work for someone like me and whether I would be able to get it working. The site says "Only 54 days until Halloween!"

https://www.frightprops.com/pneumatics.html

If anyone knows of good projects on GitHub, please let me know?

Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format:

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Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.

There's a site for searching these posts at https://www.wantstobehired.com.

Most people browse Hacker News through the front page (top / hot), since it's already filtered for quality by the community.

But the "newest" feed feels very different: it's raw, unfiltered, and often low-quality. Yet I notice some users clearly dig into it, upvote good posts, and bring hidden gems to the front page.

I'm curious: - Who here regularly reads the "newest" feed? - What kind of content are you looking for (early projects, research papers, niche blogs, etc.)? - Do you see yourselves as "content scouts" for the rest of the community, or just looking for things you personally enjoy? - How do you filter signal from noise?

I think this is an interesting part of HN culture that doesn't get discussed much.

I'm curious how effective it is and if it would be recommended or not.

Is it any different than normal online application process of getting hired?

I am exploring options for a headless CMS for a community website where a non technical admin will post details about events in the community like a meeting or volunteering done by the community. They don't have funding. What is the cheapest option out there?

Please state the location and include REMOTE for remote work, REMOTE (US) or similar if the country is restricted, and ONSITE when remote work is not an option.

Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no recruiting firms or job boards. One post per company. If it isn't a household name, explain what your company does.

Please only post if you are actively filling a position and are committed to responding to applicants.

Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about something. It's off topic here.

Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.

Searchers: try https://dheerajck.github.io/hnwhoishiring/, https://amber-williams.github.io/hackernews-whos-hiring/, http://nchelluri.github.io/hnjobs/, https://hnresumetojobs.com, https://hnhired.fly.dev, https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/, https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com, or this (unofficial) Chrome extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-hiring-pro/mpfal....

Don't miss these other fine threads:

Who wants to be hired? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45093190

Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45093191

On Sep 2, during a transfer at Istanbul SAW, Pegasus Airlines lost my checked baggage.

It contained: – OpenBCI brain-computer interface – Legacy engine with 30+ years of research and personal archives

I contacted Pegasus multiple times — email, WhatsApp, forms — no human response.

I’m outside Turkey, unable to visit the airport.

This isn’t regular luggage — it’s scientific and personal infrastructure. Still no reply.

I got tired of manually copying numbers from Form 16 PDFs into India’s tax filing portal every year. So I built *Form16x*, a Python CLI + library that parses these PDFs into structured JSON.

Beyond extraction, it can: - Consolidate multiple Form 16s if you switched jobs - Calculate taxes under both regimes → recommends the better one - Show salary/deduction breakdowns directly in the terminal (tree view, colored output) - Suggest tax optimizations (80C, 80D, NPS, etc.) - Provide a Python API (`TaxCalculationAPI`) with multi-year tax rules (AY 2020–2025)

*Repo:* https://github.com/ri-sh/Form16x

Form 16 is similar to a W-2 in the US or a T4 in Canada — semi-structured PDFs with inconsistent layouts. Filing usually means manual data entry. Form16x tries to make that structured and automatable.

Would love feedback from HN — both on the technical approach (PDF parsing + structured extraction) and whether this approach could extend to other countries’ tax forms.

I maintain an OSS project with a very involved CI setup. We're at the point where it is worth having observability into which tests are flaky, especially within intra-test-run retries. An ideal solution would be a managed service that takes junit.xml exports from cargo nextest, vitest, playwright, pytest, and go test. What do you all recommend?

If you want to take a look, it’s here: https://www.thewhisperninja.com/ Still very much in builder mode, so any feedback from this community would mean a lot! Thanks :)