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Hi HN,

I’m building OSSAIX (https://ossaix.com ) — a curated directory for open-source AI projects.

The goal is to make it easier for developers to discover and evaluate OSS AI tools (LLMs, RAG/agents, local AI, image/audio/video, etc.) without digging through endless GitHub repos.

Each project is reviewed and includes basic signals like categories and GitHub activity to help assess usefulness quickly.

This is still early, and I’d love feedback from the HN community:

Is a curated OSS AI directory useful?

What signals/features would help you decide faster?

What’s missing or unnecessary?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts

I am a college student and for my entire life I have been lonely. This is probably taken a very heavy toll on my mental health but that’s another story. I’ve never been able to make friends and keep meaningful connections that last a long time. In fact I’d go as far as saying I have never had a friend, and I currently don’t have any. My phone is empty, when I go to school nobody talks to me and when I do find people who seem to have some kind of interest in me, it usually doesn’t last very long since they don’t prioritize whatever we have. As far as I’m aware I am tolerable to be around. People find me funny and when I do talk to people we have decent conversations (though small talk tends to bore me). However that doesn’t lead anywhere and doesn’t bring me any kind of comfort or fulfillment. I’ve attributed my lack of friends to something that places all the blame on me. Maybe I’m ugly, maybe I’m not funny enough, maybe I’m dumb. I don’t know if that’s the right approach. But I’ve tried so many different things, I’ve read so many different books and yet I still can’t get anyone to even bother to ask me how my day was or care to actually do something and hang out with me when I ask if they’d like too.

What am I supposed to do? Be lonely and without any kind of company and human connection my entire life?

Thread for 2025: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42509408

Thread for 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782613

Thread for 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33873800

Here are mine:

Technical skills:

- Among my last year's goals was to take on VR dev, which sadly I did not get to. Punting it to 2026. I'm thinking to get the Samsung Galaxy XR and experiment with some VR apps and learn the fundamentals of spatial computing. As an Android mobile developer, that feels like a natural extension.

- Complete the "UCSanDiegoX: Computer Graphics II: Rendering" computer graphics course. I did the first course in the series and found it enlightening (no pun intended)

- Create an e2e project that earns money as a side gig. It's time to put my product and technical knowledge to practice and actually build something people want.

- Leverage AI across all my endeavors. AI tools are here to stay and the more I know how to use them effectively, the better. The speed boost in learning a new framework/concept is phenomenal.

Non-technical skills:

- Expand my social circle - the unstable tech climate made me realize the importance of maintaining a healthy social network. My goal is to connect with more people both inside my company and outside, by both proactively reaching out and going to meetups in my area. In fact, I invite fellow NYC-based HN-ers to contact me at cybercreampuff at yahoo dot com, in case you want to meet up!

I mostly read newspapers and technical journals, but two books that I read that made an impression: "The Changing World Order" and "The Gulag Archipelago".

I’ve been thinking about how trust in online platforms is formed today. Beyond marketing claims, what signals really matter to users in 2025?

Curious to hear perspectives from others here.

I am acutely aware that if I were targeted by a non sophisticated actor (like a very motivated hacker, or a phone/laptop thief with programming knowledge), I would be toast if they figured out, e.g my windows password, as that is the key to my Chrome keychain, for e.g, which allows them into a pandora's box of accounts.

Even more likely, if I were to get a laptop stolen while unlocked, they could get access to my primary email(s), which could lead them to getting access to accounts via password reset. There were a lot of similar other failure points I used to keep enumerated mentally, but now there's too many to count. The biggest ones are email access however.

Is there a process or method I can use to enumerate/track and fix those kids of failure points in my personal cybersecurity?

TP-Link Tapo C100 model only works with a permanent connection to their servers. The second you cut internet on the camera it powers off. Why would anyone put a "security" camera in their house with a forced connection to TP-Link servers? And what does it transmit? So my question is does anyone have a TP-Link camera that works without internet? TP-Link has a ton of cameras but I don't want any that connects to the internet. Thanks.

Different cultures celebrate Christmas at different days and time zones are a thing. But it's Christmas here, so:

Merry Christmas to everyone. I hope you get some rest and can spend time with people who are dear to you and get to focus on what's important rather than getting lost in stressing about everything having to be perfect.

Also much love to everyone who cannot spend their Christmas with dear people.

To make sure this post meets the relevancy criteria, here is a Wikipedia article about some Christmas (more precisely advent) tradition which I personally really like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_market

My kids are just getting to the point where I need to manage several internet accounts (iCloud, Google, Amazon Kids) and parental controls settings across several devices (iPad, Alexa, Apple Watch).

It’s getting a bit confusing between passwords, content settings, notifications, payments, PINs etc.

What system do you use to keep this manageable in your household?

There is no visible scrollbar for https://gemini.google.com on Chrome and Edge -- though I see it on Firefox. (desktop)

I also checked the smartphone apps -- Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, NotebookLM -- none of them show a scrollbar (even as an obligatory visual indicator of yor position in the scroll)

Are we regressing in acessible design and standards?

I built Gitmore. Connects via webhooks, tracks commits and PRs, and gives you one dashboard. AI answers questions about activity, sends weekly reports to Slack/email. Connect agent to slack which answers your questions directly from your workspace. https://gitmore.io (free for 1 repo) Anyone else juggling multiple Git platforms?

I’m looking for examples of high-quality engineering blog posts—especially from tech company blogs, that go beyond surface-level explanations.

Specifically interested in posts that: 1. Explain technical concepts clearly and concisely 2. Show real implementation details, trade-offs, and failures 3. Are well-structured and readable 4. Tie engineering decisions back to business or product outcomes

Any standout blogs, posts, or platforms you regularly learn from?

I’m getting back into comics this year and have been working through my back-log.

In 2025 I read

- Invincible (around to the same point as the show, no spoilers please)

- Blacksad (I’m simply in love with the art)

- Fables (picked it up many years ago but didn’t finish, really dig the “originality” of using fairy tale characters)

- Absolute Batman

- Absolute Martian Man-hunter

- Absolute Superman

What’s everyone reading or planning to read in the next year?

Is it an idea you had for a long time? Is it something totally random and weird?

I have been a paying Spotify customer for many years now. Thanks to the yearly wrapped event, I am reminded how my use pattern is listening to a limited amount of tracks on repeat.

I'm curious if any of you has made the switch back to listening to mp3s? If you did, which apps are you using?

I've seen people rely on built-in sandboxes, use git worktrees (sometimes inside devcontainers), or run the whole agent inside a Linux VM with minimal host mounts. On Linux, I’ve also seen firejail/bubblewrap mentioned.

For folks actually using these tools day-to-day:

What’s your default setup?

Have you had any "learned the hard way" moments?

What tradeoff (safety vs convenience vs parallelism) has mattered most in practice?

I'm less interested in theoretical best practices than what's actually holding up under real use.

Hi, I built a small tool that I have used daily for a long time. A few friends and classmates also use it and they keep telling me it is genuinely useful. But I am stuck on distribution. I am a student, I have no budget for ads, and I am not good at marketing (i try but i'm super bad). When I mention it in other communities it often gets treated as self promotion and I get blocked.

If you were starting from zero today, how would you get the first 100 real users in a clean way? I would love specific ideas like where to share, what kind of write up works, how to approach niche communities, or what you would build into the product to make sharing natural.

Thanks.

I have been doing software for a living for the past 10 years or so.

I can call myself an average senior engineer. Cannot really pass the DSA rounds at Tier 1/Tier 2.

Somehow was able to keep the jobs I had so far via pure bruteforce and hard work.

These days I am pair programming with AI to write a lot of code. Probably checking in about 10 to 15k lines of code per month on average. I know it may not be a good metric, but if I compare myself to an earlier verision of me, that person would be checking in a 2 or 3 k lines of code at best per month.

I can get the work done, probably can do a bit of good judgement when AI writes sloppy code.

But, I am not sure till when these skills will be relevant

Like what if that judgement is not needed anymore, like 2-3 years down the line?

Is anyone else in the same boat? How are you dealing with this?

It seems there are many solutions for social media these days, but only one LinkedIn. Why are we still putting up with it? I’m surprised there’s not been a contender yet, or maybe I am not aware and perhaps that could be the rub; the challenge of acquiring enough traffic for the network effect to take hold.

I have rated hundreds of books in Goodreads and it still gives me crummy recommendations. For example, other books by the same author, or just books in the same genre with high ratings. Always the same collection of classics or things I can easily find myself. I would much rather have a service which sees a pattern in books I have rated highly in the past and surprises me with books it thinks I will like. Does anyone know of an actually good recommendation service? Surely this must be possible with today's AI capabilities.

And what IT issue will you (probably) fix today?

Hi HN,

I’m not trying to build a unicorn or a scalable SaaS.

I’m offering a highly personalized, manual service priced at $49. My goal is very specific and limited:

Get exactly 200 paying customers. Not 2,000. Not VC-scale. Just 200.

Once I hit that, I’m happy.

Given this constraint: • What distribution channels make the most sense when volume is small but personalization is high? • Would you bias toward 1:1 outreach, niche communities, or something else entirely? • If you were optimizing for speed to first 200 sales, what would you avoid doing?

I’m intentionally keeping the scope small and realistic and would love advice from people who’ve done similar “small but profitable” launches.

Thanks — and happy to share results back.

HN puts the Christmas banner and alternating colors. I am curious what percentage of HN community celebrates Christmas vs. not at all, another religion, or born Christian but doesn't celebrate etc.

Note: When I was in college (years ago) I asked an admin this and he said point blank 'face it it's a Christian world'

Hey all, didn't want to pay for Strong or Hevy so I started building my own lifts journal app.

It's free and always will be.

https://stronk.app

Source Code (open to contributions). If you find bugs, add it to the issues. If you don't use it now but plan to after I build out the features, please star the project so I know to keep working on it.

https://github.com/alshdavid/stronk

There a lot to do still, gotta add things like;

- Strava/Facebook Sync

- Import/Export

- Charts

- Set type (warmup/drop)

- Timers

- Online backups (right now it's saved to your phone)

- Programmable custom routines using JavaScript (like 5-3-1, progressive overload)

- A suite of default routines

It's a web app because I'm not paying Apple and Google to publish it on the app store.

We talk a lot about shipping features, but I want to hear the war stories.

I spent almost a month chasing a silent data corruption issue that turned out to be floating-point non-determinism between x86 and ARM chips. It completely changed how I look at "reliable" memory.

What was your "white whale" bug of the year?

Dear all,

do we have an statistics on visitor location/country here?

Would be curious: Is it US-centered? How much people from LatAm or SEA? EU?

Maybe there was a question like this in the past, but I couldnt find it.

(Maybe this is a question for @dang?)

A time for family, or avoiding family, depending on the family. ;-)

If you have fond memories of misspending entirely too much of your youth on web-based message boards, or you would like to misspend more of your nights and weekends on them now, Google has you covered. Simply add

  inurl:viewtopic.php

  inurl:"index.php?topic="

  inurl:showthread.php

  croissant AND (inurl:viewtopic.php OR inurl:showthread.php OR inurl:"index.php?topic=")

I downloaded it and compiled it and ran some toy programs. I have no idea how to use it for an actual project even though I have a stack of dusty rpi's and esp32s in the drawer.

Any one want to share their inspiration?