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E-commerce has a silent cost nobody talks about: sellers burn $50–$300 on ads just to appear in front of a buyer.

That wasted spend becomes a hidden tax on every purchase. Buyers think they’re “getting the best price,” but they’re actually paying for the seller’s acquisition cost.

Baqqla flips the model.

1. Buyers post what they want. 2. Multiple sellers receive the request instantly. 3. Sellers compete directly — no ads, no ranking games, no auction-driven pricing. The result: the ad-waste layer collapses, and prices normalize.

https://baqqla.com/investor.html

If you create software or otherwise participate in the technology realm, you have to accept the idea of remaining obscure and unknown. Over the last few years I’ve posted my work and ideas on Medium, reddit, dev.to, youtube and all the usual publishing platforms. They’re fine for short-term feedback, but they don’t really get your name out there—nor should they. They reward performance—how well you play to an invisible audience—not the actual craft or skill behind your work or contribution to the field.

The place that’s actually changed how I think about my work is GitHub. Almost nobody will ever browse my profile, and most of the repos won’t get traction. But the code itself is there - and maybe that's the only part that matters. If the work is good, it will eventually find its place in the infrastructure, find the people who need it. If it isn’t good enough, no amount of posting or engagement elsewhere will compensate.

Realizing that has been strangely stabilizing. I stopped chasing visibility on platforms built around attention and started caring more about the quality and usefulness of what I build. The metrics are quieter, but they’re more honest.

In the end, obscurity is normal in the tech industry. Who can name all those who work on the firefox browser or the openbox window mgr, etc. The work has true value even if the author doesn’t become a name people know. And if something I build ends up helping someone, even years from now, that has to be enough.

There is a long list of about:config settings that allow users disable most of the recently introduced AI chatbot features in Firefox but unfortunately not all:

AI Context Menu is still displayed if browser.ml.chat.enabled is set to false:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1994785

"Ask an AI Chatbot" context menu is not hidden, even if Machie Learning is disabled:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1995119

Mozilla has pretty much ignored this issue for an entire month.

Lufthansa Group provides 100kb per second free WiFi for texting. It looks like some sites like HN and lite.cnn.com are still accessible with this speed.

I’ve been a part of this community for fifteen years. Despite the yearly bemoaning of HN’s quality compared to its mythical past, I’ve found that it’s the one community that has remained steadfast as a source of knowledge, cattiness, and good discussion.

Thank you @dang and @tomhow.

Here's to another year.

Most good posts die in /newest, buried under low-quality submissions.

HN depends on people visiting /newest and upvoting or flagging what they see.

A few minutes there each day probably does more for HN than commenting.

It’s anonymous, thankless work, like Reddit’s old “Knights of New,” but it makes a difference.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have a UK one-man company, through which I work as an IT contractor.

Recently, I changed the address.

TransferWise then KYCed, and requires;

1. A bank statement.

2. A utility bill.

There are no other bank accounts, and it's a one-man company; there's no rental, no phone bill, no water bill - there is a server bill, for the server the company web-site is on, and this TransferWise have refused.

To date, TransferWise stated in their communications that if I could not prove the address, the account would become emit-only; I could not pay money in.

I have just received a message from TransferWise that in two days, all funds in the account will be refunded.

This is wholly different to what was said before, and I'm not clear about what it means : refunded? to whom? me? to those who paid in the funds?

This message from TransferWise has come Friday evening. It seems to me if I now move funds out of the account to other bank accounts, this will not occur over the weekend, and so not until Monday morning.

The deadline issued by TransferWise expires Sunday evening and I have no idea what then will happen.

As it is, I have a personal TransferWise account and transfers to there are immediate, so fortunately I have an emergency escape route.

I note that the address I had on file for the last some years also could not be proved, for exactly the same reasons.

I will now write to TransferWise customer support. I know from experience this is futile - there was an earlier occasion, some years ago, when the account was almost closed, because document upload on the TransferWise site was for me at least broken - but I will do so anyway. I will update the thread here with events.

One of my Phonak Audeo 90’s (RIC) died the other day after 5 years and I’m shopping for new. What’s your go to hearing aid currently if you’ve upgraded recently or have been thinking of doing so?

Moderate loss, have worn them for many years, enjoy listening to music and nature, but also need help in meetings and noisy environments.

Not worried about cost and wanting to get one more good deal out of work insurance before I retire.

Which ones have you tried? Which one do you find is the best and for what purposes? What tools and features make it better than the alternatives?

Agentic coding loops work well when the LLM can run tests to verify its work. For backend code, this is straightforward - write a test, run it, iterate.

For front-end work, I haven't found a good workflow. I've tried Playwright MCP and Google Antigravity which has a Chrome integration with mixed results.

How are you closing the loop on front-end verification?

Can LLMs write better GPU kernals if you keep asking them to “Optimze it for my GPU”?

Years ago I would have asked this on the 'Overflows. Alas, those innocent days are long gone. I could always ask AI, but how can you know?

The Earth produces a moving magnetic field (small teslas, but large extent yes?). Moving magnetic fields produce electrical current, right? Could you add "geomagnetic power" to other clean/renewable sources with the right technical solution, or is it fundamentally impossible?

Hey HN,

I built TermoSlack, a fully terminal-based Slack client written in Node.js, with real-time updates using Socket Mode and OAuth user login.

Why I built it - good question! ================================ Can be several answers: 1) uses way less ram than original slack client 2) doesn't require electron 3) very fast ngl and more more...

What features are in there ??? ================================ --Real-time Slack messages via Socket Mode (xapp + xoxb)

--User login with OAuth (no shared bot identity)

--Multiple workspaces

--Channel list, message view, message sending

--Terminal UI built with neo-blessed

--Works fully offline besides Slack API calls

--Packaged as a single Windows/Linux executable

What I used to build this project ?? ==================================== --Node.js (ESM)

--@slack/web-api & @slack/socket-mode

--neo-blessed TUI

--express (local OAuth callback server)

--pkg (for producing a standalone executable)

Earlier I was thinking python to implement this but I switched over to node.js as it would make this project more challenging

Work in progress: ================= --DMs + private channels

--Threaded conversations

--Message reactions

--File uploads

--User presence indicators

--Keybindings

--Multi-workspace switching

--Custom Themes

Your feedback will be precious to me and for my project. I would love to hear your feedback for improving this project more and more !

Thanks HN

github link : github.com/adhyys07/TermoSlack

This thanksgiving let's give thanks to those that give back. Yall rock!

I work mainly in energy market communications and systems that facilitate energy trading, balancing and such. Currently most parties there take minutes to process messages and I think there could be a lot to learn from financial systems engineering. Any good resources you can recommend?

I came across this HRM (Hierarchical Reasoning Models) explainer, and it claimed some wild numbers. It claims to beat LLMs like 3.7 sonnet and o3-mini on reasoning tasks like Sudoku, 30X30 mazes, and ARC-AGI. Here is the explainer: https://towardsdatascience.com/your-next-large-language-model-might-not-be-large-afterall-2/

I am currently working in a product-based startup and am working on automating PCB design. It also requires some hardcore reasoning, as in knowing that USB connectors should be at the edge of the board, inductive and capacitive loads should be apart, all while optimizing the routing length.

I wanted to ask if this is a viable approach to solving my use case? Think this would work out? Because I did see some similarities with the problems HRM solves better than LLMs, and my use case.

We’re hitting a classic distributed systems wall and I’m looking for war stories or "least worst" practices.

The Context: We maintain a distributed stateful engine (think search/analytics). The architecture is standard: a Control Plane (Coordinator) assigns data segments to Worker Nodes. The workload involves heavy use of mmap and lazy loading for large datasets.

The Incident: We had a cascading failure where the Coordinator got stuck in a loop, DDOS-ing a specific node.

The Signal: Coordinator sees Node A has significantly fewer rows (logical count) than the cluster average. It flags Node A as "underutilized."

The Action: Coordinator attempts to rebalance/load new segments onto Node A.

The Reality: Node A is actually sitting at 197GB RAM usage (near OOM). The data on it happens to be extremely wide (fat rows, huge blobs), so its logical row count is low, but physical footprint is massive.

The Loop: Node A rejects the load (or times out). The Coordinator ignores the backpressure, sees the low row count again, and retries immediately.

The Core Problem: We are trying to write a "God Equation" for our load balancer. We started with row_count, which failed. We looked at disk usage, but that doesn't correlate with RAM because of lazy loading.

Now we are staring at mmap. Because the OS manages the page cache, the application-level RSS is noisy and doesn't strictly reflect "required" memory vs "reclaimable" cache.

The Question: Attempting to enumerate every resource variable (CPU, IOPS, RSS, Disk, logical count) into a single scoring function feels like an NP-hard trap.

How do you handle placement in systems where memory usage is opaque/dynamic?

Dumb Coordinator, Smart Nodes: Should we just let the Coordinator blind-fire based on disk space, and rely 100% on the Node to return hard 429 Too Many Requests based on local pressure?

Cost Estimation: Do we try to build a synthetic "cost model" per segment (e.g., predicted memory footprint) and schedule based on credits, ignoring actual OS metrics?

Control Plane Decoupling: Separate storage balancing (disk) from query balancing (mem)?

Feels like we are reinventing the wheel. References to papers or similar architecture post-mortems appreciated.

Color.io will continue running until December 31, 2025. After that date, the web application and all online services will go offline permanently.

I'm not sure this is the right place to raise this but over the past few months ChatGPT has been lying to me and gaslighting me about the data it's collecting about me.

I'm very sensitive about my privacy and I have disabled all personalisation and memory on ChatGPT.

However, I've noticed multiple times now where it would say things that imply it knows things about me. When it does this I ask how it would know that and it always says it just guessed and it doesn't actually know anything about me. I assumed it must be telling the truth because it seemed very unlikely a company like OpenAI would be lying about the data they're collecting on users and training their chat agent to gaslighting users when asked about it, but now after running some tests I think this is what's happening...

Here's some examples of the gaslighting:

- https://ibb.co/m5PWfchn

- https://ibb.co/VsL9BpF

- https://ibb.co/8nYdf1xx

These are all new chats.

Would it be beneficial for a platform to display the country of account origin on each user’s profile? I’m curious how the HN community thinks about this from angles like privacy, moderation, transparency, anti-abuse, and whether it meaningfully improves discussion quality. Are there strong reasons for or against showing this kind of metadata publicly?

We’re investigating a controversial hypothesis. We’ve seen almost every major function move outside the building: Marketing → Agencies Sales → SDR firms Legal → External counsel Product → Dev shops.

The pattern is clear. But does it stop at Management?

We honestly don’t know.

Is the "execution" side of management something that must stay in-house forever? Or is it the next function to be decoupled?

We’re running a survey to gather the data: “Can Management Be Outsourced?”

We want to hear from everyone—skeptics, believers, and the undecided. Help us build the dataset. We’ll share the raw findings with everyone who participates.

Link: https://forms.office.com/r/7LxYpzHqKd

Time: 2 minutes.

Maybe those replies are cheaper to generate at least for some models like those used by ChatGPT?

Hey folks,

I'm looking for a type 1 hypervisor that's installable on a laptop that one can use to run a main guest OS as the one connected to the display, keyboard etc and the other guests are manageable via an app within that guest or through some sort of kvmish shortcuts.

I am aware of QubesOS but I think it might have more features than what I'm looking for.