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Wishing everyone here a wonderful 2026.

But more than that, I would like to wish this forum, this space, this virtual reality on the internet, another wonderful year. For broadening horizons, for piquing curiosity, for reminding all of us to celebrate and rejoice at the wonder and awe in the world around us.

Happy New Year!

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’ve been utilizing Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro via the AI Studio front-end to develop a new platform. The 1M+ context window is, technically speaking, a game-changer for "stitching" together a 55,000-line codebase. However, I recently discovered a predatory billing architecture that I’m calling the "Context Tax."

If you use the AI Studio UI, you might be walking into a massive bill without a single warning.

Here is how it happened, and the UK/EU privacy "pro-tip" I found in the fine print.

In AI Studio, you start on the Free Tier. You upload your codebase (say, 700k tokens) and work for free until you hit the daily quota. At that point, the UI suggests adding an API key to "continue the conversation."

The Trap: Most users (myself included) assume that after adding the key, they will be billed for incremental usage (the 10-100 tokens they just typed).

The Reality: The AI Studio UI does not use Context Caching by default. Instead, it re-submits the entire 700k token history for every single "turn." Crucially, even though that history was built up for "free," you are now "back-taxed" for it at the Paid Tier rate on every subsequent message.

Message 1: (700k history + 10 new tokens) = Billed for 700,010 tokens. Message 2: (700k history + 20 new tokens) = Billed for 700,020 tokens.

Within 10-15 "turns," I was billed for 170,000,000 tokens. The total? £121.29.

The AI Studio UI is, frankly, deceptive about this, and subsequent communication with Google was not helpful. Instead, they updated the terms.

The Token Counter: The counter at the top of the page remains incremental (e.g., it goes from 700,000 to 700,010). It never warns: "Your next message will cost $5.00."

Batch Billing Lag: Google batches these charges and reports them hours later. You don't see the "bleeding" in real-time. By the time you get the notification, you’re already £100 in the hole. The Evidence Gap: In my support case, Google’s own itemized "evidence" showed only £0.25 of SKU-level usage, but a total subtotal of £121.29. They couldn't explain where 99% of the bill came from.

A Bonus Gimmick: The UK/EU Privacy Loophole While fighting this bill, I dug into the Gemini API Additional Terms of Service (Updated Dec 18, 2025, just after I submitted my dispute). I found a fascinating "Pro-tip" for those of us in the UK or EEA.

Under the new terms, Google has decoupled "Paid Service" status from spending money. The Clause instead reads: If you have an active Cloud Billing account linked to your project, your AI Studio usage is legally classified as a "Paid Service," even when you are using the free quota. The Benefit: "Paid Services" have a strict non-training policy. Google does not use your prompts to improve its models if you are in the Paid Tier.

The Loophole: If you are in the UK/EEA and link a billing account to your project, you get Enterprise-level privacy (No training) on your free-tier usage by default.

My Recommendation:

Link your account for privacy, but NEVER use the API key in the UI to extend an existing chat which reaches the free quota limit. If you hit the free quota limit, stop. Do not "upgrade" the existing session. If you must continue, start a fresh session to avoid the "Context Tax" on your history.

Use Context Caching via API: If you actually need to work on a 1M token codebase commercially, avoid the AI Studio UI entirely. Use the API with explicit context caching to avoid paying for the same 700k tokens 100 times over.

I am currently disputing the bill based on the lack of "Informed Consent" for the transaction and the retroactive application of the Dec 18 terms.

TL;DR: Google AI Studio's UI is a "Financial Biohazard" for long-context developers. It back-taxes your free history the moment you plug in a key, with zero real-time cost transparency.

Many people talk about vibe-coding and about the different ways to use this development "methodology" successfully. I wonder though if anyone really managed to push to production anything that has been fully or almost fully created through LLM assisted coding. Do you have anything to share, whether you or someone else created it? Possibly something more complex than a static webpage.

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 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?

Times change, and as they change so do communities you interact with. I used to like coming to HN because the discussions were often far away from the stresses of the world (politics, local news tragedies, etc.)

Lately though its article after article on LLMs. Pro LLM or Anti LLM. These discussions come closer to the stresses of the world than the typical HN post did historically. Well, at least to me.

They often quickly become “AI is bad” or “AI is amazing” in the discussions. I want to mention, I’m not pro or against either way. There doesn’t need to be sides to pick.

Do these posts that dominate the top make you happy? For me it’s turned HN into a place that stresses.

PS. I’m not asking for coping mechanisms, I’ve already cut my time here reading down a bunch :)

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

I'm a full stack engineer. Pretty smart one, but I don't think that's enough to distinguish myself in this market. I'm wondering if anyone here has done things in particular to make yourself more marketable.

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 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?

I feel like I change what "tool" I use to manage/juggle my projects on a monthly basis these days.

That's likely a me problem; getting bored with the tool itself, but I often find myself reverting back to a pen and notepad, paper, notecard, etc.

This usually happens after using an app/software that is needlessly complex and ends up requiring me to manage it rather than it providing any organizational or "productivity" value. (A lot easier to write a task at the top of a notecard rather than assigning 27 "priority" tags, deadlines, location, categories, etc. to the thing)

I know everyone is different in this realm, but very interested in what's been working for you.

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.

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?

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 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.

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

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.

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

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?

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’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?

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'

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?

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.

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.