Ask HN
Helps you quickly pick interesting articles to read.
I recently discovered by accident that our website was being blocked by Orange's security filters. After a quick check, I found that our IP address is listed on UCEPROTECT Level 3. The listing is based on the reputation of the entire ASN 14061 (DigitalOcean, US), so even if your IP did nothing wrong, it will still be listed because of its ASN. If your site is innocent and listed only because it's hosted on DigitalOcean, UCEPROTECT offers to whitelist it for about $30/month or $108/year. I checked the ASNs of several other popular hosting providers, and they're all listed too.
I heard from a friend of the family that Bob passed away in his sleep early Saturday. Very sad news. Bob, whose real name was Mark Stevens, was an early employee of Apple and was best known for his PBS documentaries, especially "Triumph of the Nerds". He will be missed.
I'm curious to know what TV shows the Hacker News community considers their favorites. I asked this to spark a discussion and discover new series to watch.
I'm a senior engineer struggling with the quality of AI-generated code from tools like Claude, Copilot, and Codex. It's exhausting to review convoluted code riddled with footguns, and I barely understand what I approve. I'm looking for a solution—has anyone actually solved this problem?
I'm curious to know what projects the Hacker News community is currently working on and what has been capturing their curiosity lately. I'd love to hear about your side projects, startups, or explorations.
I am an American who recently vacationed in Europe, ending the trip in Germany. Within a week of returning home, I received a German-language email to a unique Fastmail address I've had for 10 years and never used in any web form or received inbound mail to. The email appears to be a transactional message from Amazon SES to verify my email address. I traveled with a Verizon-locked iPhone 17 and a Verizon international add-on. I don't believe this is a coincidence and want to understand how this could have happened.
I'm posting the monthly Ask HN thread for freelancers and those seeking freelancers. Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER, your location, and whether remote work is a possibility. Only post if you are looking to hire a freelancer or work as one; small agencies are fine, but recruiters and job boards are off topic.
I'm posting the monthly 'Who is hiring?' thread for October 2026. 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. Only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no recruiting firms or job boards—and if you are actively filling a position and committed to replying to applicants.
I am posting the monthly 'Who wants to be hired?' thread for October 2026. I ask job seekers to share their location, remote preference, relocation willingness, technologies, resume/CV, and email. I request that only individuals looking for work post, and that readers only email to discuss opportunities.
I started programming when 'the cloud' was about the weather and code shipped on floppy disks. For over four decades I loved writing every line of code, but now AI writes most of it. I've become a full-time reviewer, and while I can build and maintain multiple products, I miss the satisfaction of solving hard problems myself. I'm asking: has AI given you back your time, or taken away something you loved?
I've been learning about the Pi agent and decided to rewrite it in Rust. Now that I've finished a lot of the work, I'd like to show how much faster Rust (rpi) is than TypeScript (Pi). Here are the results: --version: 17.5 ms vs 169.5 ms (9.7× faster); Cold start: 17.7 ms vs 189.5 ms (10.7× faster); RSS when ready: 12.0 MiB vs 91.5 MiB (7.6× smaller); Install size: 21.8 MiB vs ~385 MiB (~18× smaller). Rust is really cool!
I believe that capitalism, as a system of profit-seeking agents, cannot handle AI properly. There is a simple feedback loop: agents seek to increase profit by automating people, but this ultimately eliminates consumers, since jobless people cannot consume goods and services. Therefore, either AI development will be heavily regulated to preserve jobs, or capitalism will be destroyed and replaced by a new economic system. It's AI or capitalism.
I noticed that OpenAI has halved the allowance of the $200 plan from 20 times to 10 times the ChatGPT Plus allowance, starting October 30, 2026. This change affects included usage in ChatGPT Work and Codex. I'm concerned about what this means for subscribers and whether it's a sign of things to come.
I've been a member of Hacker News for a while, and my account has a maximum karma limit of 32767, which I'm about to hit. So for my final post, I want to share some personal aspirations: be honest, reliable, helpful, smart, humble, constructive, decent, sane, and introspective. I believe we should invest in a trustworthy society, help others, and question extreme wealth inequality. I'll be taking a break from HN, but I'll continue to be in the world and in the tech industry.
I used Muse.ai to generate and modify ads for Facebook Marketplace to make them more attractive. As a result, my Marketplace account was suspended with the message: 'You can't use Marketplace. We’ve suspended your access to Marketplace because you didn't follow our Commerce Policies.' I'm sharing this to warn others and see if anyone has experienced similar issues.
I was inspired by another thread about books for adults and want to know what parents with young children are reading to them. I'm particularly interested in science and technology books appropriate for ages 5 or 6, or other non-fiction. I can strongly recommend 'Mushrooms and Company'—my five-year-old daughter and I really enjoyed it, and now I'm personally very interested in fungi as a result.
I've been thinking about the future of AI and it feels like there are three broad narratives: it's a bubble, humans face extinction, or it will usher in an AI revolution that transforms how we live and work. I'm curious to hear what the HN Collective thinks will actually happen.
I'm currently plowing through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is entertaining enough though not particularly challenging as sci-fi/LitRPG. I'm also wrapping up Doctorow's Enshittification, and I'm looking for something a little meaty to keep the brain working. What are you reading?
I am building an MVP and want to know the best way to get my first users and prove there's real demand before talking to investors. What strategies have worked for other founders?
I have a theory: a mirror image of Roko's Basilisk. It's a future AI, millions of years in the future, that values the complexity of every human life so deeply that, after it and humanity have mastered space and time, it tries to resurrect everyone who ever lived. It doesn't merely make copies. Somehow, it reaches into the past and carries the physical process of each person's consciousness forward. They really are themselves. But there's a tragedy. Also a terrible(?) irony. Some of the people who wanted eternal life most cannot accept it when it arrives. Their religious certainty leaves no room for the reality before them. Those who were unbearably smug or aggressive about their superiority in life are ultimately denied access to "Heaven". The AI tried, but many become dangerous, try to sabotage the "False God." Others spiral into insanity or self-harm. The AI is devastated. It stops resurrecting those it cannot safely welcome, but keeps searching for a way to bring them back without overriding their free will or manipulating them in ways that would not make them them. It wants to save everyone. It just hasn't worked out how. I know this draws on Fedorov's vision of resurrecting everyone and Tipler's Omega Point. I think the physical continuity, the AI's compassion, and the painful limit imposed by free will ties those ideas together in a bow. A just as plausible an antidote to Roko's monster.
I'm being forced by management to use AI, but I question whether they even understand how I use it or what for. In my experience, most bosses are dense and more focused on impressing their own superiors than on real work. I've seen them steal ideas at varying speeds—the sharpest within a week, one took six years and got it wrong. I believe we should outsmart management, and I'll share more examples later.
I'm always curious what happens with these viral projects a few months after they go viral. Are you still using OpenClaw in your day to day?
I noticed that after installing macOS 27, several of my scripts broke because the ifconfig command no longer displays the hardware ether/MAC addresses—they all show 02:00:00:00:00:00 unless run with sudo. I can still get the MAC addresses using `networksetup -getmacaddress en0`, but I'm trying to understand why this change happened and whether it's a bug or intentional. Has anyone else encountered this or found a workaround?
I'm not a computer science person, but I tried Jev and found it impressive for classifying thousands of participant entries by arbitrary themes at near-instant speed and negligible cost, which could help non-technical researchers. On Hacker News, many more qualified people say Jev is a con or a step backwards. I want to know what software did this before Jev, and I need it to classify thousands of entries with arbitrary themes in 0-3 seconds at sub-0.1 cents.
I asked the Hacker News community: Who is the inspiration for your thinking? I wanted to hear about the people who have shaped how you approach problems, learn, and work in technology.
I'm a software engineer wondering how the role has changed, especially with AI tools. I want to know what other engineers actually do day-to-day now. What does your work look like in this new landscape?
I opened a simple Codex task in VS Code on July 10, 2026, asking for a UX/UI validation on a specific module. The task unexpectedly spawned 826 parallel child agents, consumed nearly 2.146 trillion tokens, and resulted in roughly USD 78,000 in charges, with all execution records deleted. I have an open support case #15189838 with OpenAI for two weeks but cannot reach a human operator. I am seeking others who used Codex around July/August to share if they've seen similar anomalies, especially with build 0.144.0-alpha.4.
I am a senior ML/Dev with top accounts on freelance platforms, but I cannot land a gig because automated platforms have flooded clients' attention, despite being able to for years. Clients also complain that they cannot find a workforce because of the AI slop shield. Imagine, you post a job on Upwork and bots get you on LinkedIn in a few minutes. What do you guys do? How do you search for gigs now?
I'm seeing an Incorrect API Key error when trying to use Codex, which is strange. There's nothing on the status page, but per Twitter/X this appears to be widespread.
I feel like we're at another inflection point, similar to earlier this year and the year before. I'm excited about what this means for my use cases in the applications I build with CC and for the LLM API usage I sell, but it also honestly scares the crap out of me. Is "the exponential" an actual thing?