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I was just wondering about why there's a constant timeline and no recommendation.

Seems like everybody is just carelessly saying—whatever—to Claude. Client lists, trade secrets. We all know that our agents haven’t signed NDA’s, right? Right?

I'm building software for a sector that is massive, but one where you don't really need AI. At least, not AI == LLM.

And before I go further, let me state up front that I do like AI coding agents. They are great as assistive tools.

People say that if the AI bubble pops, the economy tumbles. And okay, I mean the M7 will certainly get rekt but everyone else? Things will recover within a few years. We didn't make it to 2026 AD taking the easy road.

You still need to visit the doctor. Goods still need to be delivered. Homes need to be built. We need to drill for oil. People still need to eat. And yes, unfortunately or not, we still need millions of administrators because humans are not 0/1 systems.

Am I crazy to think that maybe it won't be that bad? There are still infinite number of things to do, and maybe (call me stupid, whatever) it would be a good turning point for our species if we realize that speculative bubbles are absolutely destructive and not worth it.

I don't need a personal assistant to make calls for me to get a restaurant reservation, and I certainly don't care for AI slop videos. I would much rather we have better products and services that actually work, and even if they have rough edges I would prefer people are employed and busy doing something with their lives.

Maybe a world where we don't chase endless growth (to escape inflation, pay off debts, whatever the case) would be good. And also we put nerds (not people like us, the engineers, I mean the evil dorks who cosplay as movie super villains) in the toy box again and pick up different toys this time.

Hi. I'm looking for a programmable watch with wifi. Ideally I should be able to write custom programs/apps for the watch to display whatever I want to on them (e.g., make the watch make an https call to a server, receive json and render accordingly; allow the watch to receive "notifications" from the server)

Also, ideally, no requirement of a smartphone to send-receive data (it's ok to need a smartphone for the initial setup of the watch, though). I know about Pebble, but it doesn't have wifi. I know about some Garmins with wifi but for the kind of apps I want to write, the communication between the watch and the server has to be mediated by a phone. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't want to pay $100/year just to be able to use my custom app in apple watches. I usually don't trust Google either (e.g., they discontinue everything in a blink of an eye).

So, what are my options?

I was using Claude.ai to do some stuff. Got the following messages from Claude:

Ran 6 commands, edited a file Ran 6 commands, edited a file The output filesystem has an I/O error. I need to reconstruct the files from the zip:

Ran 2 commands Ran 2 commands The output filesystem is corrupted. I'll need to reconstruct the files from the transcript:

Ran 3 commands Ran 3 commands The entire user-data filesystem is gone. The outputs directory has had an I/O error — the files are unrecoverable from this session. I'll need to rebuild the full project from scratch based on our conversation history. This will take a moment — I'll reconstruct all files incorporating every change we've made:

Check available skills before building Check available skills before building I need to rebuild the entire project. Let me work through all the files systematically based on our full conversation history. I'll start with state.js since everything depends on it, then control files, then display:

Rebuild state.js Rebuild state.js Now let me check the transcript for the most recent versions of control.js and other files - this is going to be a large reconstruction. Let me search for key sections:

Ran 3 commands Ran 3 commands The transcripts are also on the corrupted filesystem. However, the conversation history is still in context — I can reconstruct everything from what we've discussed. Let me systematically rebuild all files. This will be thorough:

Created 3 files Created 3 files Now the large files. Let me build control.css:

Rebuild control.css Rebuild control.css Now the big files — control.html and control.js. Let me build them:

Rebuild control.html Rebuild control.html Now the large control.js — I'll build it in sections:

Did I just use/get charged tokens for it to recover?!

13 years ago, we launched Watsi.org with a Show HN [1].

For nearly a year, this community drove so much traffic that we couldn’t list patients fast enough. Then pg saw us on HN, wrote us our first big check, and accepted us as the first YC nonprofit (W13). The next few years were a whirlwind.

I was a young, naive founder with just enough experience to know I wanted Watsi to be more efficient, transparent, and innovative than most nonprofits. We spent 24/7 talking to users and coding. We did things that don’t scale. We tried our best to be walking, talking pg essays.

Over the years we learned that product/market fit is different for nonprofits. Not many people wake up and think, "I'd love to donate to a nonprofit today" with the same oomph that they think, "I'd love a coffee" or "I'd like to make more money."

No matter how much effort we put into fundraising, donations grew linearly, while requests for care grew exponentially. I felt caught in the middle. After investing everything I had, I eventually burned out and transitioned to the board.

I made a classic founder mistake and intertwined my self-worth with Watsi's success. I believed that if I could somehow help every patient, I was a good person, but if I let down some patients, which became inevitable, I was a bad person.

This was exacerbated by seeing our for-profit YC batch mates raise massive rounds. I felt like a failure for not scaling Watsi faster, but eventually we accepted reality and set Watsi on more of a slow, steady, and sustainable trajectory.

Now that I have perspective, I'm incredibly proud of what the org has accomplished and grateful to everyone who has done a tour of duty to support us. Watsi donors have donated over $20M to fund 33,241 surgeries, and we have a good shot of helping patients for a long time to come.

In a world of fast growth and fast crashes, here's a huge thank you to the HN users who have stuck by Watsi, or any other important cause, even when it's not on the front page. I believe it embodies the best of humanity. Thanks HN!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081

Hi HN,

I'm a 15-year-old full-stack developer, and I recently built Codeown (https://codeown.space).

The problem I wanted to solve: GitHub is great for code, but not for showing the "journey" or the UI. LinkedIn is too corporate and noisy for raw, work-in-progress (WIP) dev projects. I wanted a dedicated, clean space where developers can just share what they are building, get feedback, and log their progress.

Tech Stack: > I built the frontend with React and handle auth via Clerk. I recently had to migrate my backend/DB off Railway's free tier (classic indie hacker struggle!), but it taught me a lot about deployment and optimization.

We just hit our first 5 real users today, and the community is slowly starting to form.

I’m still learning, and I know the performance and UI can be improved. I would absolutely love your brutal, honest feedback on:

The perceived performance (currently working on optimizing the React re-renders).

The core idea – is this something you would use to track your side projects?

Thanks for taking a look! Happy to answer any technical questions.

Chime in, HN, with the feasibility of the following idea for a side project…

_____________

User Story

As a reader logged in to Hacker News on a locally running web browser, I want a process running on my device that polls for "Show HN" posts and automatically replies to them — as me — with the results of an LLM-analyzed critique of the posted projects discovered by the process.

Acceptance Criteria

• A brutally frank critique of the posted "Show HN" project is given by a state-of-the-art LLM

• A count of existing projects functionally identical to the post being critiqued is displayed

• A list of authoritative learning resources on whatever the LLM determined the author is probably trying to accomplish is provided

• …???…

_____________

FWIW: Even with the well-documented initial inertia-reducing powers of today's coding agents, it's super, super unlikely that I'll ever get around to implementing this idea myself.

I'd be totally cool with somebody else taking a swing at it, though.

Hello Everyone.

Resumes and CVs have a fundamental problem: anyone can write anything. As someone who's been job searching, I've wondered if there's a better way to separate genuine experience from creative writing, I am an engineer at the end of the day not a creative author.

I've been thinking about applying something similar to X's Community Notes model to skill verification. The idea: engineers could "fact check" claims on each other's CVs - not as formal references, but as a crowd-sourced verification layer, where you get a check-mark on your skill like X check mark. If someone claims they're an expert in Kubernetes, other engineers who've worked with them (or reviewed their OSS contributions) could validate or challenge that. Also companies have repetitive interviews, why can't I simply do one interview and be "interviewed" fully for all other companies?

I put together a rough prototype to illustrate the concept: https://skillverdict.com/

Some questions I'm trying to work through(ask more please):

How useful will this be for engineers? Would this create its own set of problems? (gaming the system, bias, grudges) Could it scale beyond personal networks? Would companies even trust community-sourced verification?

Curious what you guys think about the mechanism itself, not the prototype. Would something like this reduce friction in hiring, or just add another layer of noise?

As software development becomes a commodity thanks to LLM, I wonder why more software developers don't switch to building medical devices to make their careers more secure. Here's why I picked medical devices in particular.

1. Natural Moat

Since human body hardware is more or less immutable in its most essential parts, you don't have to worry about some LLM hype cycle replacing you. Once you build the product and clear FDA or local certifications, you're set. Unlike Uber destroying the taxi medallion business, healthcare is a beast — no tech startup dares to bypass all the regulations and gatekeeping.

2. Regulatory Moat

The medical devices I'm talking about require around $50K–$200K for FDA clearance — low enough that any small business can manage it, but high enough to discourage bottom-feeders and Chinese product dumpers. It also lets you avoid the big established healthcare corporations, because this market segment is too small for them to care about, yet large enough for you to pull in $10M–$15M a year in revenue.

Medical device manufacturing sidesteps the two fatal flaws of software development: the lack of a moat and static, almost never-changing hardware margins. LLM companies don't care about copyright, IP, or the health of the broader economy — but they can't go head-to-head with the healthcare industry, so you don't have to worry about them at all.

With AI infesting and eating into all kind of crafts--and I being one of those faceless "craftsmen"--I'm rather forced to consider alternative jobs. Setting the monetary rewards aside, I was thinking of jobs that could give me a sense of agency, purpose, and satisfaction (however limited). The few I think of are:

- Parcels delivery driver

- Train driver

- Electrician or plumber

- Mechanic (with auto-mobiles hardly repairable these days, maybe this doesn't qualify)

Surely, I can't be alone in thinking along those lines. What else have you thought of?

With everyone using Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and the other 100 AI coding agents that i missed, I’m wondering how much editor mastery still matters like w/ Vim

Being honest the real reason i wanna learn Vim is to boost my ego & assert my dominance, so i can tell people "i use vim btw", but also part of me thinks investing time could still pay off for speed, ergonomics, and working over SSH overall...

but a bigger part also suspects the marginal gains i would gain would disappear when more of the work is delegated to AI anyway, like why would i learn Vim if i'm just going to be prompting Opus all day?

For anyone who's been using Vim for while AND uses AI to code (i'm assuming everyone codes with AI to some degree) my question is: Does learning Vim still meaningfully improve your day to day productivity EVEN with AI, or is it mostly personal preference at this point?

It seems like there will be a lot of hardware that gets discarded every couple of years as new, more powerful systems are made available.

AWS put out a video and article on how it recycles a large amount of its hardware, since it is built for maintainability and repairability.

How true is that? Does it apply to other datacenter operators as well?

What will happen to all the parallel compute cards that will get upgraded soon? They can't be reused as GPU's for gamers, can they?

I’ve been working on real time voice agents and put together a write up of what I’ve learned about the full stack including WebRTC media transport, streaming STT, incremental LLM inference, and TTS, along with where latency actually accumulates.

The post focuses on the architectural flow and practical tradeoffs involved in keeping interactions truly real time.

Curious how others are designing and optimizing voice systems.

https://gokuljs.com/blogs/real-time-voice-agent-infrastructure

I used to love attending hackathons and also participating as mentor/judge at times. With the explosion of vibe coded submissions, 1- the number of submissions has exploded, 2- it's much harder to judge quality of project as it's mostly become judging the quality of tool they used.

I'm not really throwing shade at using ai. There are parts where the vibe coding really shines, such as front-end dev which tends to do a great job at, but anything more complex I'm still not convinced.

I have been dealing with a Reddit Ads account issue over the last week, and it has quickly escalated into a severe privacy and security red flag. It appears their customer support tools (or the agents themselves) are actively bleeding PII and crossing user sessions entirely.

Over the last week, I have experienced three separate incidents in their live chat:

Incident 1: Account Cross-Contamination (Feb 14) While chatting with an agent (Sonam B), they managed to associate my personal email to a completely unrelated, bizarrely named ad account ("No Panties Games Ad Account"). When I pointed out they were pasting data related to someone else's account alongside my email, they tried to brush it off as an "error" and told me to "kindly ignore."

Incident 2: Direct PII Leak (Feb 20) Today, while following up on the issue with a different agent (Naheeda M), they inexplicably dropped the email address (info@REDACTED.com) and the full legal business entity name of an entirely different advertiser into our chat.

Incident 3: Total Session Confusion and Misattribution (Feb 20) Just minutes later in that same chat, things got much worse. While I was clearly logged into my own account, the agent told me: "The ad account you're currently signed into is u/TeorREDACTED, and ads are getting published with this username. Is that correct?"

This is no longer just a clipboard issue. This strongly suggests a severe backend mapping failure in their support dashboard (Zendesk/Salesforce or an internal admin tool) that is completely misattributing active sessions, user accounts, and ad publishing data.

If their support agents are seeing me as logged into someone else's account and claiming ads are publishing under that username, it raises massive questions: 1. Are agents making changes to other people's ad campaigns thinking it's my account? 2. Is ad spend being billed to the wrong accounts? 3. Who is currently seeing my billing details, legal name, and campaigns?

Given how broken their Tier 1 tools appear to be right now, I wanted to raise the flag here immediately. Has anyone else running Reddit Ads noticed their support agents leaking data or confusing accounts recently?

I am in a bit of a sticky situation. I'm 40 years old and my background is in programming (backend ruby and python, some cybersecurity, some JavaScript, although the JS is dated) and I don't like coding anymore. At least not day to day.

What I'm looking for is some sort of position that can leverage my background but do so in some other way. Maybe something in marketing at a company like Digital Ocean.

I'm willing to earn a lot less than I earned before. I know software development pays better than a role in marketing, but I'm sick of the tooling. I'm also open to working for an AI company that trains a software agent, which I've done so recently. Does anyone have references to a recruiter or hiring manager that I could talk to?

I would really appreciate any help here. Even just an upvote for visibility.

I’ve been working at YC-backed startups since graduating from university. I’m now at a company building a deeply distributed systems product, and I’m surrounded by incredibly talented engineers who seem exceptionally strong at what they do. They often have knowledge and intuition about things I barely understand.

Lately, I’ve been feeling inadequate — like I’m contributing more to the less exciting parts of the product rather than the “cool” or core engineering challenges.

On top of that, I’m an immigrant and my wife and I are expecting. Balancing that with a fully remote job has been difficult, and at times I feel like I’ve lost some of my competence or sharpness. I’m taking steps to address this — I’ll be speaking with a psychologist soon — but I genuinely wonder: how does someone overcome these feelings while working within a high-functioning engineering team?

I've no expectations for this post to be well-received because it looks down on open-source for being too "pure". Though unless we evolve beyond no-strings-attached open-source, the ecosystem will remain as broken as it is. Why don't our overworked, underpaid open-source developers license their software with something to the effect of "If you make more than $1,000,000, pay me."? JSON designer ("the" JSON) Douglas Crockford had IBM ask for permission to use JSLint, because Douglas had added the note/clause/term "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."[1]

We don't know if GPL works in court. It roughly seems like whatever you write in a license is an effective deterrent though. So your repository could take an existing permissive license like MIT, and add a clause like I mentioned. Set a procedure for your terms for others to use your open-source project commercially. An example of this is the Big Time Public License.[2]

[1] https://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code/

[2] https://bigtimelicense.com/versions/2.0.2#big-business

gcloud CLI calls are throwing 500 errors { "error": { "code": 500, "message": "Internal error encountered.", "status": "INTERNAL" } }

Someone I know just had their Google account compromised, but the normal recovery methods don't work for an interesting reason: the attacker has made the account into a "child" account subordinate to an attacker-controlled "parent" account. This apparently blocks the ability to use any of the Google account recovery methods (backup phone number or email address etc) without parental consent.

Apparently this person I know isn't alone, if you search you can find other people reporting they've been victims of this. And of course, Google support is nonexistent for ordinary users, so there's no real recourse. Let this be a warning about the consequences of ill-thought-out "child safety features"?

I see it more and more in email, Slack, text, etc: People too scared to share their own thoughts so they AI-wash it and send an exhausting page of "It's not X, it's Y!" slop instead.

I'm not the CEO, I can't order people to stop. The CEO does it too.

I try talking to people directly, but people get defensive and there's always the chance they didn't use AI. I need indirect means of socializing change.

Looking for anything I can use to socialize against AI-washing: Articles, memes, policies that other companies have successfully used- whatever.

Watching my elderly mother trying to accomplish something on the internet and I have to say ...

Modern website "design" amounts to abuse of the elderly.

It's horrific ... genuinely horrific.

I've now seen her driven to tears, knowing that she should be able to do something, trying everything that seems to be the right thing, and frustrated at every turn.

It makes me so angry.

So. Angry.