Ask HN: Beta testers for a free AI crawler analytics dashboard
I'm building a free dashboard to track AI crawlers and non-human visitors on websites. It's designed for developers, SEOs, and marketers who want to understand how AI agents (like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and others) interact with their sites.
I'm looking for beta testers to try it out, provide feedback, and help shape the tool. No cost, no commitment.
Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!
Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
Is anybody still using TUI applications for business?
My family company is a wholesale distribution firm (with lightweight manufacturing) and has been using the same TUI application (on prem unix box) since 1993. We use it for customer management, ordering, invoicing, kit management/build tickets, financials - everything. We've transitioned from green screen terminals to modern emulators, but the core system remains. I spent many summers running serial and ethernet cables.
I left the business years ago to become a full time software engineer, but I got my start as a script kiddie writing automations for this system with Microsoft Access, VBA, and SendKeys to automate data entry. Amazingly, they still have a Windows XP machine running many of those tasks I wrote back in 2004! It's brittle, but cumulatively has probably saved years of time. That XP machine could survive a nuclear winter lol.
I recently stepped back in to help my parents and spent a day converting many of those old scripts to a more modern system (with actual error-handling instead of strategic sleep()s and prayers) using Python and telnetlib3. I had a blast and still love this application. I can fly around in it. Training new people was always a pain, but for those that got it—they had super powers.
This got me thinking: Are other companies still using this type of interface to drive their core operations? I’m reflecting on whether the only reason my family's business still uses this system is because of the efficiency hacks I put in place 20+ years ago. Without them, would they have been forced to switch to a modern cloud/GUI system? I’m not sure if I’m blinded by nostalgia or if this application is truly as wonderful as I remember it.
I’d love to hear if and how these are still being utilized in the real world.
P.S. The system we use was originally sold by ADP and has had different names (D2K, Prophet21). I believe Epicor owns it now (Activant before).
P.P.S. Is anybody migrating their old TUI automation scripts to a more modern framework or creating new ones? I’m super curious to compare notes and see what other people are doing.
Open-source MCP Security scanner
Most MCP security scanners we have tried are noisy, endless alerts and false positives. We think developers deserve better. We are looking for early adopters who want to try and help shape something that actually works.
We are building an open-source security scanner to catch below issues:
- Prompt Injection
- Indirect Prompt Injection
- Cross-Origin Escalation
- Tool Poisoning
- Tool Name Ambiguity
- Command Injection
- Excessive Permission
- PIl Detection
If this sounds interesting, drop a comment.
Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not
Just saw the CEO of Substack celebrating traffic from X/Twitter shooting up thinking they stopped suppressing tweets with links[0]. Actually, this traffic is because now any time you open a tweet with a link, the in-app webview loads in the background, and displays when you press the link.
I run an ecom store that gets a lot of its customers from Twitter. I was also shocked to see my traffic double or triple overnight and thought the algorithm had blessed me and my business. Soon realized what was actually happening. Thought other traffic-monitors might appreciate this explanation.
Meanwhile Nikita Bier is pretending they never suppressed tweets with links to begin with, offering the alternative explanation: "a common complaint is that posts with links tend to get lower reach. This is because the web browser covers the post and people forget to Like or Reply. So X doesn't get a clear signal whether the content is any good"[1]. A bit of a rewriting of history since Elon and his mom both tweeted about how it wasn't fair to use his platform to promote other links/platforms, even banning people who shared profiles of other social networks (including Paul Graham for a period). They suppressed all links shortly after.
[0] https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985464687350485092
[1] https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1979994223224209709
Reuters.com no longer works with JavaScript disabled
It used to show a page with wrong-sized images, but at least you could read the headlines and click into the articles.
Now it just has the text "Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker"
Ask HN: What games let you simulate running a startup?
I've found leads here and there, nothing that really captures it though - specifically key aspects like hiring, raising funding, and such. I figured if any community knew of good ones I missed, it would be this one!
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)
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/, 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 this other fine thread: Who wants to be hired? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800464
Ask HN: Have people started to see cracks in the ChatGPT answers with time
Context: I have a co-worker who is used to execute the suggested scripts from Chat-gpt with high confidence. Lately one of the scripts to use Github API was not working and he asked me to debug. Turns out, Github had changed/updated the attribute names in the output and they no longer matched with the Chat-Gpt provided script. Hard part, this individual is really good engineer, however he/she was low on confidence about how to debug the Chat-gpt provided script
Ask HN: How much time do you spend reading books?
I have bought multiple books, but most of the time I don't find myself motivated to read them. Instead, I prefer to watch hour long documentaries/TED talks/programming tutorials on Youtube.
I feel that it's important to build the habit of reading books to improve my cognitive skills. Are there any tips for me please?
Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2025)
Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format:
Location:
Remote:
Willing to relocate:
Technologies:
Résumé/CV:
Email:
Please only post if you are personally looking for work. Agencies, recruiters, job boards,
and so on, are off topic here.Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.
There's a site for searching these posts at https://www.wantstobehired.com.
Ask HN: Startups should brag less and ship more (guilty as charged)
Every founder I know (including me) spends too much time on decks and demos instead of shipping. We justify it as “raising awareness” or “community building.” But I’ve never seen a pitch deck go viral-only real products.
Anyone else feel this trap?
Ask HN: A service for dating through escape rooms with strangers?
What if you could meet potential dates by teaming up with strangers in an escape room challenge?
You’d get thrown into a fun, high-pressure puzzle scenario with 4–6 other singles. You’d see how people actually think, communicate, and cooperate. This is way more revealing than a typical first date.
After the escape room, everyone fills out a private questionnaire about whom they’d like to go on a date with (if anyone). Only mutual matches are notified afterward. No awkward “asking out” moments, no pressure.
It’s kind of a blend between speed dating and team-based problem solving, but more memorable and revealing than either.
Do you think this would be a good idea?
Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today
MTurk was built by two two-pizza teams at AWS over the course of a year and launched on Nov 2, 2005. It took a few days for people to find it and catch on, but then things got busy.
At the time, AWS was about 100 people (when you were on call, you were on call for all of AWS), Amazon had just hit 10,000, S3 was still in private beta, and EC2 was a whitepaper.
What did you create with MTurk and the incredibly patient hard-working workforce behind it?
Ask HN: VC-funded startup lurking in my community Slack – how to respond?
I run a small bootstrapped open source startup in a niche space. Growth is slow but steady and we're starting to win larger customers as the product matures.
Recently, the leading vendor in this space ($50 million in funding, dozens of employees) has starting camping out in our community Slack and cold-emailing our community members, offering them thousands of dollars worth of free credits to switch to them. Emails are not exposed in our slack, so they are getting people's names and googling where they work to deduce their email.
The vendor's employees are registering under fake names so there's no straightforward way to ban them from the Slack.
Has anyone else been in this situation, if so what did you do?
Ask HN: Where to begin with "modern" Emacs?
Hi all,
I’m a longtime Neovim user who’s been EMacs-curious. The hold up for me has been that I’ve been unable to find a source of truth for what’s top-of-the-line as far as plugins are. With Neovim, it’s a safe bet to look at what folks like Folke are doing, but I have struggled to find a similar figure in the Emacs community who gives insight into what’s-what. I know Doom exists, but I want to fully “own” my config and not over complicate it.
Thanks!
The amount of fear in bullish investors and bubble companies is unreal
It’s like animal feral fear. The OpenAi post on Wallstreetbets had a mod delete it. All over they’ve been suppressing what was a freely given quote from their CFO. But you can also see it in the same way investors are acting in sheer terror when there is a tiny 1% drop. They’ve put gasoline and dynamite all over, so even the smallest stuff terrifies them. You should not be this terrified by these bumps, so if they are, what does that say about them.
Google flagged my site for phishing and won't tell my why
I was developing a web app on a domain ("secure.example.com") and I moved over to a newly-registered domain.
Chrome flagged it as phishing. I've (1) submitted a request to Google via Search Console and (2) added a link from the main domain.
Is there anything else I can do to prove I'm not a phisherman?
Ask HN: How did you find your job?
I appreciate the who's hiring / who wants to be hired posts. I am curious if we can flip this pattern a little and have some discussions on how people found jobs they are in, or jobs that were meaningful and impactful in their careers.
Locating: How did you find the job? Did it find you?
Interviewing: Was there anything you did that made a difference? Different strategies that might not be intuitive?
Surviving: Every job has its flaws, what have you done to maintain your ability to earn an income despite issues that had made previous jobs difficult / unpleasant / untenable.
Currently unemployed, quit my job working for one of the states in the US earlier this year because they were not treating software development as a first class citizen. It's hard to get work done when you can't get any testing, can't get any infra or PM support, have to do everything yourself in a vaccum. Have to run apps on a server in the closet.
First time in my life I "chose myself" and quit a job instead of staying in something that was very negatively affecting my mental health. It's been hard to find a way to get back into employment without addressing fears of hostile, toxic work environments.
Fingers crossed for some ideas or directions that can give me some new things to try instead of just doing the same shit that fails over and over again.
I just trained a physics-based earthquake forecasting model on a $1000 GPU
So I've been working on this seismic intelligence system (GSIN) and I think I accidentally made data centers kind of obsolete for this type of work. Let me explain what happened. The Problem: Earthquake forecasting sucks. The standard models are all statistical bullshit from the 80s. They don't understand physics, they just pattern match on historical data. And the few ML attempts that exist? They need massive compute clusters or AWS bills that would bankrupt a small country. I'm talking researchers spending $50k on cloud GPUs to train models that still don't work that well. Universities need approval from like 5 committees to get cluster time. It's gatekept as hell. What I Built: I took 728,442 seismic events from USGS and built a 3D neural network that actually understands how stress propagates through rock. Not just pattern matching - it learns the actual physics of how earthquakes trigger other earthquakes. The architecture is a 3D U-Net that takes earthquake sequences and outputs probability grids showing where aftershocks are likely. It's trained on real data spanning decades of global seismic activity. Here's the crazy part: The entire training pipeline runs on a single RTX 5080. $1000 GPU. Not a cluster. Not AWS. Just one consumer card.
Pre-loads all 15GB of training data into RAM at startup Zero disk reads during training (that's the bottleneck everyone hits) Uses only 0.2GB of VRAM somehow Trains 40 epochs in under 3 hours Best validation Brier score: 0.0175
For context, traditional seismic models get Brier scores around 0.05-0.15. Lower is better.
Ask HN: Is this the fast take off?
Imagine you read an article in Wired in 1996 envisioning the following:
(1) Stock market keeps rallying while the only growth and capex is in AI
(2) Mass layoffs of human workers
(3) Giant spike in resource consumption caused by explosive growth in datacenters
Would you think humans and their error-prone systems had led to this by a series of accidents and greedy investments? As I think we are primed to believe after tulips, railroads, junk bonds, Web 1.0, etc?
How different would it look right now in November of 2025 if Sam had an AGI in pocket that was using all that money to grow itself?
Ask HN: How opiniated Is HN?
I am long time lurker here and recently I got fed up of the overall pro BigTech sentiment.
So I am curious. Where are you at home and who do you work for? Is HN really just made out of Silicon Valley tech workers?
I built sbsh: Persistent terminal sessions with discovery, profiles, and an API
Needing a better way to share how to access Kubernetes and Terraform environments with my team, and to set clear prompts for each environment so that I completely avoid mistakes, I built sbsh.
sbsh provides persistent terminal sessions with built-in discovery, environment profiles, and an API for automation.
*The problem:*
- Complex configuration required to access multiple Kubernetes clusters and Terraform workspaces, including setting visual prompts to identify production environments and avoid mistakes
- Manual setup of environment variables and credentials for each environment
- No easy, shareable way to reproduce those configurations across a team
- Lack of structured logs or visibility into existing sessions
- SSH sessions that die in the middle of debugging or long tasks
*How it works:*
sbsh separates the terminal session (your shell and environment) from the supervisor (the controller). Terminals continue running even if the supervisor stops or the network connection drops.
*Key features:*
- Terminal session discovery: sb get lists all sessions, sb attach mysession reconnects instantly
- Profiles: YAML-defined environments for Kubernetes contexts, Terraform workspaces, or Docker containers, identical in local dev and CI/CD
- Multi-attach: Several users can connect to the same live session
- API access: Control and automate sessions programmatically
- Structured logs: All input and output are recorded for replay or analysis
*Use cases:*
- DevOps: Persistent kubectl or Terraform sessions
- Developers: Long-running tests and builds over unstable connections; launching Python environments, npm projects, and more
- CI/CD: Identical profiles in local and pipeline environments
sbsh is a single Go binary (busybox-style) that can also be used as a login shell. It runs on Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD.
Repository: github.com/eminwux/sbsh
I have been using it for some time now, and it completely changed how I manage infrastructure. I would love to hear feedback and see how others might use it.
Ask HN: Lawyers of HN, how do you deal with AI slop?
What is your strategy when working with the other party that sends through ChatGPT arguments and lengthy responses to each of your real, well-thought-out, and grounded-in-decades-of-experience requests?
I have a friend that recently complained about the other party wasting time by generating huge lists of things that need to be evaluated and refuted. Does this happen with opposing counsel from larger firms that deal with bigger cases where the lawyers generally communicate directly? Do you have any experience dealing with this in smaller cases?
Is there a better way to install Windows drivers?
I find windows auto-update nearly always ignores about half of my new hardware whenever I build a PC. I note Snappy Driver Installer Origin is ok, but it's not consistent either. (NOT snappy driver installer which is now a malware site) Is there a better way than trawling through some godawful marketing website?
Ask HN: Why I rarely see game dev startup here?
Do investors despise game development companies, and do you have to go solo? If so, I would have expected to see at least one on Show HN. Or maybe I missed it—definitely not as popular as other apps.
Also, why haven’t LLM wrappers penetrated this sector? Is it because OpenAI and other “parasites” haven’t had the opportunity to access source code to build their wholesale theft, so they don’t have the code to instruct you to build games? Or maybe there are a lot, and I just missed them.