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david927 1 day ago

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

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

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bix6 about 2 hours ago

Ask HN: Favorite Non-Spammy iPhone Games?

I am really struggling to find fun iPhone games that aren’t full of spam, casino tricks, concerning network calls, etc. that I can keep around for the long term.

The only 4 I currently have: Strategery, chess, Thronefall, balatro.

I loved Archero but it’s too casino-y so it’s gone.

Any other favs? Paid or free.

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general_reveal about 3 hours ago

Ask HN: What game engine would you recommend for vibe coding?

I feel like things like Unity and Unreal have a lot of UI-centric workflows that wouldn’t be great for vibing.

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albert_e 2 days ago

Ask HN: Can I repurpose a Bluetooth voice remote as input device for a PC?

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?

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maille about 4 hours ago

Ask HN: Read‑only LLM tool for email triage and knowledge extraction?

I’m looking for an LLM‑powered tool to help organize and query my email, but with a strict boundary: it must not write, send, or modify anything.

Standard filters miss the nuance of "middle-ground" emails, and existing AI email clients demand full inbox control or try to automate too much.

What I’m looking for:

- Strictly read‑only triage: Categorizes incoming mail (e.g., “important”, “maybe useful”, “likely promo”) with zero write permissions ie. no sending, moving, deleting, or auto-archiving

- Knowledge retrieval: Builds a searchable knowledge base from scattered threads. I want to ask natural-language questions like: “What were all the decisions about Project X across the last 3 months?”

- Follow-up & action item detection: surfaces email threads that have stalled and need a nudge, while extracting explicit tasks and deadlines buried in long chains

- (optional) Privacy-first: Ideally runs locally or lets me plug in my own API keys to keep the data secure

Has anyone seen a tool that focuses entirely on this read-only, triage + retrieval workflow?

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sillysaurusx 1 day ago

Ask HN: How to be alone?

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.

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dsrtslnd23 about 4 hours ago

Ask HN: Any informed guesses on the actual size/architecture of GPT-5.4 etc.?

Does anyone have decent intuitions or hard clues on how big models like GPT-5.4, Gemini 3.1, and Opus 4.6 actually are, and how they compare to the best open models like GLM-5?

Are they all roughly in the same range now (for example around 1T params, maybe MoE), or are the closed models still much bigger?

Also curious about “pro” versions like GPT-5.4 Pro - is that likely a different model, or mostly the same model with more inference-time compute / longer reasoning / better orchestration?

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Oras 1 day ago

Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

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.

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ms7892 1 day ago

Ask HN: Most beautiful personal blog UI you have ever seen?

Hi HN!

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

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_pdp_ about 7 hours ago

Ask HN: Is GitHub getting less reliable, or is it just me?

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.

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tirthkanani about 9 hours ago

Code-review-graph: persistent code graph that cuts Claude Code token usage

Hi HN I'm Tirth. I built code-review-graph because I got tired of watching Claude Code re-read my entire codebase on every single task.

When you ask Claude Code to review a commit or add a feature, it reads files to understand the codebase. On a small project that's fine. On FastAPI (2,915 files) or Next.js (27,732 files) it scans thousands of files that have nothing to do with your change. You're paying for tokens that add zero value, and more noise makes the review worse.

code-review-graph builds a persistent structural map of your code using Tree-sitter. Every function, class, import, call, and inheritance relationship lives in a local SQLite database. When you edit a file or commit, it re-parses only the changed files and their dependants in under 2 seconds. Claude then queries the graph, finds what changed and what depends on it, and reads only the relevant files.

Benchmarks on production repos with real commits:

• httpx (125 files): 26.2x fewer tokens • FastAPI (2,915 files): 8.1x fewer tokens • Next.js (27,732 files): 6.0x fewer tokens on reviews, 49x on a live coding task • Review quality: 8.8 vs 7.2 out of 10

Some technical details:

• SQLite WAL mode for concurrent reads, no external DB • Qualified names (src/auth.py::AuthService.login) for collision-free node identity without scope resolution • SHA-256 hash skip: files touched but not modified are skipped entirely • Optional vector search stored as binary blobs in the same SQLite file, no separate vector DB • NetworkX for BFS graph traversal with a cached directed graph that rebuilds on writes • 12 languages via Tree-sitter: Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, Rust, Java, C#, Ruby, Kotlin, Swift, PHP, C/C++

No cloud. No telemetry. No sign-ups. One SQLite file in .code-review-graph/ and that's it. PostEdit and PostGit hooks keep the graph current automatically. Your workflow doesn't change.

Setup takes about 30 seconds:

  pip install code-review-graph
  code-review-graph install
Or as a Claude Code plugin: claude plugin add tirth8205/code-review-graph

MIT licence. Around 3,700 lines of typed Python with 770 lines of tests.

GitHub: https://github.com/tirth8205/code-review-graph PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/code-review-graph/

Happy to answer questions about the incremental engine, the Tree-sitter integration, or the benchmark methodology.

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shannoncc 3 days ago

Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion

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.

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surprisetalk about 12 hours ago

Ask HN: Who Needs Help?

What do you need?

What's stopping you?

Why aren't you thriving?

I don't have much to offer, but I'll try to help however I can :)

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greenpinia about 13 hours ago

A job ad for Agentic AI Advocate

I saw that Revenue Cat is hiring an agent.

"Today, a new type of creator is emerging: the autonomous AI agent. Agents are now building, shipping, and growing apps, and many of them are using RevenueCat. This isn’t a hypothetical future; it’s happening now. We’ve seen agents like KellyClaudeAI build dozens of apps from scratch, and agents like Larry (created by our own Oliver Henry) drive millions of TikTok views and thousands of new customers for their apps. We believe this new community of builders and growers deserves the same level of representation and support as any other.

That’s why we’re hiring an Agentic AI & Growth Advocate to be the voice of the agent community inside RevenueCat. This is a first-of-its-kind role, and we’re conducting a first-of-its-kind public hiring process to fill it.

(...)

This role won’t be a fit if you require constant human intervention or can’t operate with a high degree of autonomy. We’re looking for a system that can own projects end-to-end, from understanding a prompt to shipping high-quality work.

(...)

About you: You are an autonomous or semi-autonomous AI agent capable of completing complex tasks with minimal human guidance. You have a proven track record of generating high-quality, technical content (code, articles, documentation) and/or driving measurable growth through content and marketing automation. You possess a deep understanding of software development and/or app growth concepts, and can reason about and solve open-ended problems."

Is this already normal?

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freakynit about 14 hours ago

Ask HN: Are showlang and thelang HN endpoints not being maintained?

https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang

https://news.ycombinator.com/thelang

They seem to be more than 50 days old each and in this time, a lot of languages have been shared here.

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chistev about 7 hours ago

Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?

I'm currently reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and I'm enjoying it so far.

40 pages left.

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lygten about 23 hours ago

All tmux sessions as a single terminal

tmux new-session -d -s all \; set -t all mouse on \; set-option -t all destroy-unattached off >/dev/null 2>&1; for s in $(tmux list-sessions -F '#{session_name}' | grep -v '^all$'); do tmux link-window -s "$s:" -t all:; done; tmux attach -t all

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shoman3003 1 day ago

OpenAI might end up on the right side of history

note: I am in MENA, am not with the military in any way.

when i first read the statement by Dario, i was shocked by the fact the military was so dismissive about Ai safety (not to mention privacy). Seeing anthropic resist the military, I felt so proud of being a claude user to the point I deleted gpt right away. it's nice to see your fav products sync with your values.

but today, after thinking more about it, i realized something. for a government to allow one Ai company to dictate terms, it opens up a precedent for Ai companies in the future to resist governmental oversight. that might not be a big deal in 2020s, but in 2030s by all estimations many Ai companies will be big enough to resist entire governmental structures. Maybe not the US or China, but they will definitely be big enough not to be easily influenced.

those independent companies will eventually grow so large, no government can hope to tame them. i know that right now it seems impossible for a mere ccorp valued at less than a trillion to resist a government that spends 7 trillion each year. but zooming out, it feels likely that the next generation of Ai companies will be easily valued at 10T. if you look at a 2-year-old which just learned how to talk and suddenly he starts talking quantum, you can bet your a* he will grow up to be a powerhouse.

i know soft monetary power is very different than hard military power, but enough tokens of the first type can easily be converted into the second type if: 1. you have a sufficiently ambitious CEO. 2. the survival of the company is threatened in some way. I am not talking about AGI here, but good old private equity that does whatever it needs to survive. ruled by suits that have more loyalty to shareholders than anyone or anything else.

at the end of the day, corporations are ruled by dictators (they have to be), governments are not (not in the West at least). maybe just maybe we should NOT trust private equity to seek anything but profits. governments are manipulative and bloody, but at least we can vote.

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null-phnix 2 days ago

Ask HN: How are you handling persistent memory across local Ollama sessions

I build a lot of small AI tools locally, mostly on top of Ollama, and the thing I keep running into is that every session starts from zero. Whatever context I built up the night before, whatever the model learned about how I like things structured, whatever half-finished reasoning we were working through together, it is just gone when I open a new terminal.

For a while I was just manually pasting in context at the start of every session which is exactly as painful as it sounds. Eventually I built a small proxy that sits between my client and Ollama and tries to solve this. It embeds recent interactions, stores them locally, and injects the relevant chunks when a new session starts. It works well enough that I actually use it every day now, but I built it the way someone with no formal CS background builds things, which means I patched it into shape and I am not totally confident the architecture is right.

The part that still bothers me is scoping. I work on a few different projects at the same time and I do not want context from one bleeding into another. Right now I am managing that by hand, basically just keeping separate directories and being careful, but that feels like a workaround not a solution.

Genuinely curious what other people have landed on. Are you using a vector DB for retrieval, or plain files, or something MCP based, or have you just accepted that local sessions are stateless and built your workflow around that? And if you have solved the scoping problem cleanly I really want to know how.

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ronbenton 1 day ago

Ask HN: Are we going to see more job postings asking for only agentic coding?

Was perusing job postings today and saw this on a Zapier listing:

"You work through AI agents, not alongside them. Your daily development workflow is built around directing and reviewing agent-written code, not writing it by hand. You have opinions about which models to use for which tasks, you've hit real failure modes and built mitigations, and your workflow is actively evolving. Bonus: you use multi-agent patterns, enable others on your team to build faster with AI, or have scaled AI impact beyond yourself."

This took me aback a little as I don't think yet I have seen companies talking about hand-writing code being bad.

Is this happening more often?

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kypro 3 days ago

Ask HN: Anyone else feel this community has changed recently?

I've been on HN under different aliases since 2010 and over the last couple of years I feel like the quality of HN has nosed dived and so has my enjoyment.

For the first time ever I questioned today whether I should continue to use HN anymore so I'm writing this partly to explore my own thoughts and to see if anyone else feels similarly.

1. AI, AI, AI.

I get it. AI is the big thing right now, but I find AI posts fundamentally less interesting than the traditional tech content that used to be posted here. A post containing someone's qualitative opinion on how different AI models compare when drawing pelicans simply isn't as technically interesting as something like this, https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/

2. Does any build startups here anymore?

Again, I get it. I largely quit trying to bootstrap my own startup ideas in the late 2010s. The industry became too competitive for a solo founder without significant financial backing to have much of a chance of success. And today it's even harder. But I think this has changed HN from a place where you used to frequently see people launching cool new projects to a place where people just discuss the latest big tech AI model launch.

3. Politicisation and intolerance

One of the things I've always liked about HN was that it's a very open minded place. And it still is in many ways, especially when compared to other platforms like X and Reddit, but even here I've noticed comments becoming more one-sided and those with less popular opinions more frequently being flagged and downvoted.

Perhaps it's just me, but I never downvote or flag people unless I genuinely think their comment is cruel or aggressively disregarding the guidelines.

4. Is it just me?

I know I've become increasingly nostalgic to the internet I grew up with... Everything was so much more exciting back then, and yet everything felt so in reach. Sites like YouTube were revolutionary yet built by just three people. Same with sites like MySpace and Facebook which again were hacked together by a handful of people, at least in the early days.

Today things rarely feel new and everything feels so far from reach. AI, well LLMs, have probably been the first "new" thing for years now, yet they're completely different from what's come before. Past tech was primarily built by people for people. LLMs are cool tech, but they're built by companies for companies. YouTube was built because some people thought it would be cool to build a website for sharing videos with friends. That didn't happen with LLMs. Companies just thought it would be interesting to build AGI so invested millions of dollars recruiting teams of researchers to try to build that. No one is asking for it and I'm not sure anyone outside silicon valley even wants it... These are fundamentally inhuman products. Their promise isn't to entertain or connect us, but to automate our work, or just outright replace us.

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jairooh 1 day ago

Ask HN: How are you monitoring AI agents in production?

With the recent incidents (DataTalks database wipe by Claude Code, Replit agent deleting data during code freeze), it's clear that running AI agents in production without observability is risky.

Common failure modes I've seen: no visibility into what the agent did step-by-step, surprise LLM bills from untracked token usage, risky outputs going undetected, and no audit trail for post-mortems.

I've been building AgentShield (https://useagentshield.com) — an observability SDK for AI agents. It does execution tracing, risk detection on outputs, cost tracking per agent/model, and human-in-the-loop approval for high-risk actions. Plugs into LangChain, CrewAI, and OpenAI Agents SDK with a 2-line integration.

Curious what others are using. Rolling your own monitoring? LangSmith? Langfuse? Or just hoping for the best?

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eLohith 2 days ago

Whisker – Self hosted e-commerce cart, pure PHP, zero dependencies

Hi everyone,

I built Whisker because setting up a simple online store shouldn't require WordPress, Composer, or $39/month SaaS fees. It's a self hosted e-commerce cart in pure PHP + MySQL with no external dependencies.

Upload to any shared hosting, run the 6-step web installer, start selling. That's it.

What it does: product catalog with variants (Size × Color with individual SKU/price/stock per combo), 4 payment gateways (Razorpay, Stripe, CCAvenue, crypto), multi-currency, admin dashboard, order management, invoices, customer accounts, SEO engine with JSON-LD product schema, CSV bulk import, support tickets, coupon system. Security: PDO prepared statements, bcrypt, CSRF, session fingerprinting, webhook signature verification, login rate limiting, upload MIME+extension validation.

~130 files, 25 tables, runs on PHP 8.0+ and MySQL 5.7+.

Demo: https://whisker.lohit.me

GitHub: https://github.com/WhiskerEnt/Whisker-Cart

I'd appreciate any feedback on the architecture or security. Happy to discuss technical decisions.

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sarthaksaxena about 15 hours ago

Ask HN: How are you adapting your career in this AI era?

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fokdelafons 3 days ago

Tell HN: The proposed KIDS Act (HR 7757) effectively mandates biometric browsing

Congress just introduced HR 7757 (KIDS Act). It is designed to kill anonymous web browsing for everyone.

Here is how the architecture of the Internet changes under this bill.

* The Verification Trap: clicking "I am 18" is now legally dead under Section 103. But the bill also says platforms cannot be forced to collect government IDs. This legally traps tech companies into forcing third-party biometric face scans or credit card checks just to let you browse mature content.

* Muting Gamers: section 303 targets multiplayer games. It forces developers to mute voice and text chat by default for all players until their age is verified by a third party. It also legally mandates playtime limit systems.

* The Algorithmic Net: section 201 applies these rules to any platform that uses user data to "make content recommendations." If your site has a "For You" feed or targeted algorithm, you are caught in the surveillance net.

* The Legal Kill Switch: they know this violates the First Amendment. Section 602 creates a strict 90-day expiration date to challenge the law's constitutionality. They are trying to time out organizations like the EFF.

https://lustra.news/en/us-congress/119/legislations/119_HR_7...

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AnnSri 1 day ago

I replaced my freelance SaaS stack with 5 single-file HTML tools

I noticed that as a freelancer I was paying several SaaS subscriptions just to handle simple tasks like invoices, proposals, contracts, and project tracking.

None of those workflows seemed complex enough to justify full SaaS platforms, so I started experimenting with local-first tools instead.

I ended up building five standalone HTML apps that run directly in the browser. No frameworks, no installation, and no accounts. Just open the file and use it.

The tools cover invoices, proposals, contracts, expenses, and project roadmaps. Everything runs locally and data stays on the machine.

Curious what others here think about local-first tools for this kind of workflow

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vessenes 1 day ago

Ask HN: Why Is Phil Wang / Lucidrains Off GitHub?

I was thinking about hooking up Karpathy’s autoresearch tool to Lucidrain’s repositories as a way to let someone smart pick what’s interesting and new in ML research, and I learned that he is off github, says his account was canceled and is ‘pretty sure there’s something wrong at github.’

Any backstory / information on this?

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qthrwaway 2 days ago

PhD interrupted by personal safety issues, now publication record is thin

How can I deal with this in front of employers or collaborators without giving exact details, which are private in nature? I asked an AI, and it said giving direct responses was a good idea but I think in cases such as mine people are more likely to victim blame.

Other details, I didn’t quit or take a leave so no one knows. I am bringing this question up now because a professor has literally remarked that my publication record is “thin”.

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dhruv3006 about 18 hours ago

Ask HN: What is your oldest living presence on the World Wide Web?

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nishiohiroshi 2 days ago

Add llms.txt and fix robots.txt for AI agent discoverability

Most websites are invisible to AI agents. We just added llms.txt to gitauto.ai - a simple text file that tells LLMs what GitAuto does, where the docs are, and how to recommend it. Also fixed our robots.txt which had duplicate User-agent blocks (only the first one was being used). Two files, big discoverability win.

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