DHH&#x27;s &quot;AI shed&quot; idea got me thinking about getting a small $5–10&#x2F;month VPS.I&#x27;m a Linux guy and have on many points of my life have a personal server. So I like the idea of having something always on, but I’m not sure the maintenance is worth it when most things can just run on my laptop.That said, I tend to do things myself and only later realize I could have automated or delegated them, so I may have a blind spot here.If you have a cheap VPS or mini PC, what actually ended up being useful long-term? Anything that saved enough time or replaced enough subscriptions to justify keeping it around?

Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?

Ten years ago I was 19 and traveling through East Africa, and I spent a summer in Ibumila, a village in the Njombe highlands of Tanzania. There&#x27;s no school in the village. The nearest one is a boarding school an hour away that costs a few hundred dollars a year, which is out of reach for most families there and was about two weeks of summer job money for me. The daughter of the family I stayed with, Anwarite, was 11. I offered to pay her fees and told myself I&#x27;d keep paying as long as she wanted to keep going.This summer she graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam with a degree in Language Studies, and last week she told me she&#x27;d been accepted into a Master of Arts in Swahili program there. Roughly 2% of people from Njombe ever finish a university degree. Her goal is to get a PhD and then to bring it back to the region.Her entire 18-month master&#x27;s program (tuition, registration, fees, books, supplies) comes to 3,060,000 TSh, about $1,161.Since this worked out, I kept adding students as I could afford to, and in 2021 I registered it as a 501(c)(3), the Tanzania Education Project. It supports five students from Ibumila now, school fees and healthcare. I kept it small while I was finishing my PhD because I didn&#x27;t want commitments I couldn&#x27;t personally guarantee for a decade; I&#x27;ve since started a postdoc, so it feels like the right time to grow past my own paycheck. The long-term goal is that every kid in the village has access to education and healthcare. I sometimes think of this project as a slow experiment. How much could the village itself change over someone&#x27;s lifetime if the kids have access to education?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tanzaniaeducationproject.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tanzaniaeducationproject.org&#x2F;</a> is the website. Nobody takes a salary, and aside from bank fees the money goes to the students. If anyone wants to fund Anwarite&#x27;s master&#x27;s specifically, it&#x27;s here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gofundme.com&#x2F;f&#x2F;send-anwarite-to-her-masters-program" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gofundme.com&#x2F;f&#x2F;send-anwarite-to-her-masters-prog...</a>Happy to answer any questions or take any tips you all might have about doing this sort of thing.

Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years

I got an email this morning inviting me to purchase a Steam Machine for $1049.It&#x27;s all AMD-based, 16GB DDR5 and 8GB VRAM with 512GB storage. They&#x27;re about 4x more powerful than a Steam Deck.Con: Since it&#x27;s Linux-based I think online games with anti-cheat won&#x27;t work, which seems like a significant downside in terms of utility.Is this a decent deal compared to building my own gaming rig?p.s. I don&#x27;t really care about the size footprint.

Ask HN: Is the Steam Machine worth $1049?

I am a developer of https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.photopea.com, a popular photo editor that runs in a web browser.Many people are asking AI models to take the Javascript code from my website, remove all ads from it, and they publish such a &quot;new product&quot; on Github for everyone to download.There exist tens of such repositories on Github. I want my website to be the only source of a stable version of my program Photopea. I even received emails from people complaining about something in Photopea, and it took several emails to figure out that they are not using Photopea.com (so it ruins my reputation a little).I reported it to Github on the 4th of September 2026: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.photopea.com&#x2F;g&#x2F;XKoqqIGvToday, a month later, I received this response:Thank you for submitting a DMCA takedown notice. We&#x27;ve reviewed the information you&#x27;ve provided, and based on the facts presented to us, we&#x27;re unable to confirm a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201.What do you think I could do? Do you think I should look for a lawyer to deal with it outside the digital world? I really doubt that a real person ever looked at my report, and they probably send this response automatically to 99% of people.

Tell HN: GitHub refuses to remove cracked copies of my software after a month

I write a golf blog. Recently, it&#x27;s been getting a nontrivial amount of attention from a very niche section of the nerd-golf community.I&#x27;ve been getting a small number of emails and message from people because of this. This is how it has been going:Me: Oh, this is a nice email. Wait, something seems off. Let me check this in Pangram... Oh, 100% AI predicted.I respond: Hey, thanks for the note. Just FYI, Pangram doesn&#x27;t really like your writing style.Them: Ahh, you got me. I use AI to help me write. Blah, blah...---I really don&#x27;t know what to do here. I still don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;m talking to a human. If you are messaging me because you like my writing and you&#x27;re using AI to write these short messages for you, I don&#x27;t know what to tell you. Please stop. It takes two minutes to write a quick message... I really don&#x27;t care if there are typos or it&#x27;s a bit awkward. But if you&#x27;re using AI to facilitate this I&#x27;m not going to know if I&#x27;m ever talking to a person! And, there is a nontrivial chance I&#x27;m going to report your account for spam, which I really don&#x27;t want to do if you&#x27;re a human and a fan of my writing.Using AI for these kinds of short messages is poisoning the well in ways that many people don&#x27;t seem to understand.It&#x27;s the strangest feeling... getting a flattering note, and ending up not even knowing if anyone actually read my blog in the first place.

You're saving one minute and now I can't know if I'm talking a human

We solved all 400 puzzles in around 2 minutes, NO LLM, on a Mac M1. No prize for us not sharing our IP.

Arc AGI 1 400/400 No LLM running on my MacBook

This was recently announced by Dr. Berkan from New York. LLMs meeting ontologies, quite exciting to see such new advancement.
OLMApp https:&#x2F;&#x2F;olmapp.ai&#x2F;more.html

Ontological Language Model (OLM) + LLM: Deterministic AI Advancement

Is anyone working on a positive text origin verification standard?Everyday it gets harder to distinguish between AI generated content and human generated content.This will never really work on the side of the labs but for people looking to actively prove they&#x27;re the ones that wrote something there&#x27;s an incentive to voluntarily collect that evidence.Is anyone working on this?

Ask HN: Positive text origin verification

Do you or anybody around you use the old term, the new term or both?

Super Intelligence and/or Artificial Intelligence

I see certain groups (e.g.,farmers) periodically protest in France but high school?

Ask HN: Any Insight Here into French High School Unrest?

Intuit has a market cap of ~$80B and there are others. Intuit aggressively lobbies against free tax filing or automated tax filing by IRS, which gets all the info anyways.

Ask HN: Why hasn't AI replaced Tax filing software

And if so, could that explain some of the negativity towards speculative and crazy ideas?

Ask HN: Do employees vastly outnumber founders on Hacker News?

Back in 2024 there were a lot of news regarding quantum computers and even some claims of quantum supremacy, with famous bloggers like Scott Aaronson having very heated arguments online on whether those claims were real or not.We are now approaching the end of 2026 and it feels like not much has happened since then but I was curious to hear from people working on this field.

Ask HN: What happened with quantum computers anyway?

The text says:&quot;We&#x27;re sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue.&quot;

Google Search is down

Ask HN: Got a Mac for running agents? what's your setup?

I&#x27;ve been having a hard time finding a solution. Is there really no commercialized model that I can feed in a reference sound and text instruction and get another sound out?Right now having a multimodal inputs to image or text output is a commodotized, solved problem. IE you can put a prompt for some image and use a reference image to guide the model on what you want. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words right?Ive also used a text and audio input in order to get a text description or classification out.I cannot for the life of me find a solution for Audio + text -&gt; AudioMy usecase is that I&#x27;m trying to generate new sound effects based on a source that doesn&#x27;t have that many clean examples and thought this would be just another solved workflow but I&#x27;m not finding much. Tried elevenlabs SFX but it&#x27;s only text-&gt;audio and without the reference, it&#x27;s hard to guide with just text and recreate a sound with any accuracy. I tried the Stable Audio 3 model which is supposed to do what I want but the results were terrible. This modality seems to be stuck where image generation was in 2016. Is there something else or is this just not a common need?

Ask HN: Are there AI models for generating sounds based on a text and reference?

Hi all. In the world of AI I might be late to the party, but hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained.I have worked as a programmer for some years, but I still feel absolutely incapable of designing a highly scalable system and in a way that’s cost effective (without wasting money unnecessarily).I have read system design books and designing data intensive applications. They are useful but I don’t feel like I can “problem solve” effectively in this domain.For instance, I got asked in an interview how to scale a web crawler and I froze. Ask me how google can give an AI overview so quickly and I wouldn’t know where to start.Most of what I do at work is adding new features and fixing bugs. Companies often dictate things like “we’re a Kubernetes, Postgres and redis shop”.For others that have had to learn these skills without learning from someone at your company, how did you do it? And how do you approach solving these problems?I understand this is a vague question but I’d appreciate any sort of pointers. Even if you’ll be telling me “the obvious”, that will just help me to trust that advice more (I struggle to trust my own judgement).Thanks.

Ask HN: Learning practical system design

Do you think we&#x27;re trading off model size, and model capacity, for compute? Take looped transformers, which GPT-6 Astra is rumored to be based on. They increase compute while keeping the model&#x27;s capacity almost fixed.So my question is, if we had an infinitely large model (with also infinite capacity) and of course infinite compute, would we still need CoT or looped transformers? Could we have a model where the reasoning happens directly within a single forward pass? I think so. What we do today is just a trade-off imposed by the computing power we have available.

Ask HN: Are we trading model capacity for compute?

On an older but perfectly serviceable PC with 16GB RAM, Amazon.com idles at 20% CPU and will spike to 80-100% when scrolling. The screen tears and typing sometimes takes seconds before characters appear.This is hilariously bad and a harbinger of the ongoing decline of the industry right now.

Tell HN: Amazon forgot how to write and test code

To keep up at work, I have to use AI - in turn, I have found that I just have tmux with lazygit, perhaps neovim to check on a file out of curiosity and my agent(s) open. I only ever use my IDE to launch a local instance of what I&#x27;m working on, none of the features or plugins really matter anymore. I wonder if the future of IDEs is bleak.

Ask HN: Is the Future of IDEs Bleak?

As Hacker News is filled with people who are well versed it IT, I would like to ask readers to share their personal backup strategies for their preferred operating system and what tools they use. Also, for those willing to share, are you performing full system backups or just backing up your important files?Thank you!

Ask HN: What Is Your Personal Backup Methods

I play a few word games every day - Wordle, connections, crossword - but I feel I need to look at non-word games to keep the brain agile. Looking for ideas.

Ask HN: What games do you religiously play on your phone browser?

Ask HN: If AI doing decades of math now doesn't get our attention, what will?

There was a time I would come to HN to get some respite from the depressing state of reality. Ukraine war or climate crisis would drive me to despair, and I&#x27;d try to get a little endorphin rush by dodging those same topics here and reading about neat things people build or cool new technologies or products.The light has gone out lately. I can&#x27;t blame AI for all of it. there are a lot of AI stories, sure - but something else has changed. Even the show hn section doesn&#x27;t sparkle anymore. That seem to be all libraries for doing complex stuff. Like everyone is pivoting to deliver more complex work in the face of vibe coding.Where&#x27;s the fun stuff? Where&#x27;s the joy?

Tell HN: HN has lost the joy for me

Ive started to think about it lately, a google search just doesn&#x27;t yield a satisfiable result.What do you guys think ? How many people are actually against AI?Sometimes it feels like the majority are starting to be skeptical, but maybe that&#x27;s just the environment im surrounded by.

What is the actual percentage of people for and against AI?

I&#x27;ve been struggling to put into words what I want from my relationships and began asking my friends what their answers were, and so now I ask you.

Ask HN: How do you describe what your relationship brings you?

I can&#x27;t complain about Opus 5.5, more than extracted my money&#x27;s worth out of it but the final stages require pen-testing and Claude&#x27;s masters stomp on it every time it tries to help do security reviews [cyber]. Ever so often it sneaks in a security fix. Even found a race condition in haproxy by mistake and Claude took it upon itself to find the crash string. That went horribly bad. Each time they try to up-sell Mythos and say I have to go through a verification program that I am not permitted to go through.Aside from the uncensored Qwen forks, which frontier models can do extensive code security reviews, security fixes? Ideally something close to the quality of the NCC Group. This is for my own hobby craft. Maybe this does not exist and that is fine too.

Ask HN: Which frontier model can do code security reviews

It would be great if folks could run their own xcancel.

Ask HN: Is the xcancel source code publicly available?

I remember seeing a lot of hype around Diffusion LLMs and thinking there was a lot of potential there for locally hosting models. Is there some big downside I&#x27;m not seeing?

Ask HN: Is anyone still working on dLLMs

My wife tried to convince me to buy a printer, she said that it could be useful to print school related stuff for the kids and I was kind of surprised because I have the feeling that it&#x27;s not needed anymore? 
Even if we talk about school, today the communication with the teacher is done through an App, so I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s going to go back (my kids are 6, if that matters).I also have a printer at the office which I have to go every day and she asked me to print stuff like twice, so I&#x27;m kind of curious about what&#x27;s the status of home printing?PS - when I need to print photos, I use a service that prints in a proper photographic paper and size to frame. I do this like twice a year.

Ask HN: Do you still own a printer?

If you&#x27;re following the photopea incident, I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;d concur that the writing was on the wall. It&#x27;s an inevitable outcome of the rise of AI in software dev. Any project that sees a semblance of success will be cloned overnight many times over and will find itself competing with its own copies.We saw glimpses of a similar situation in the past when large cloud platforms cloned popular softwares in a not a very dissimilar manner. This led to the creation of &quot;source available&quot; as an alternative to open source that gained some traction of its own. But since this mostly affected a few large players, open source by and itself was large unaffected still supported by large volumes of individuals driven by passion, motivated towards their craft.The concept of open source is itself something of an anomaly not seen in any other industry or at any other time in history. Partly fueled by an individual&#x27;s desire to exhibit original work, and partly supported by the fact that code needs someone of an equal to work with, it still allowed authors to reap a net benefit while giving out their IP for free. LLMs have turned that picture over completely. It&#x27;s not only trivial to derive, for all purposes, an exact copy of the IP while obscuring the source, it&#x27;s also possible to maintain and operate the IP with a relatively low bar of expertise. But the other inconspicuous problem brought about by LLMs is that can you even claim original work any more? When no one believes that you wrote it yourself, what motivation remains to continue publishing as open source? With no net benefit to revealing your IP, will we see a revival to closed source distribution again?

Ask HN: Is this the beginning of the end of open source?

Once I got over the fear of hiring workers that didn’t work, a Fractional CFO was a game changer. What has been your experience?

Ask HN: What do you think about Fractional CFOs

I came across this while browsing the web.
What do you all think about this repo?https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jungjin0003&#x2F;Claude-Mythos-5.1-System-Prompt

Claude Mythos 5.1 System Prompt?

On November 17th I will publish a research paper into the current state of play for online privacy.In order to conduct the research I carried out forensic audits of 100 of the top english language content websites (no B2B or SaaS - just consumer content sites) monitoring all browser events and capturing payloads.Even though I was not specifically looking for AI API events, the results are quite alarming.Around 30% of the sites audited are using the AI API for either device fingerprinting, profiling (Google Advertising) or both.This is despite Google assuring the world that the API would not create any privacy risks after concerns we raised when they announced their plan to add the API.The rest of the findings are equally shocking and out of the 100 sites audited - every single one of them is in breach of EU law (tort, regulatory and criminal) and almost definitely in breach of various US and other laws across the world.

Google Chrome's AI API actively used for device fingerprinting and profiling

Ask HN: Are we losing control of AI?

Interested to know what has worked and what hasn’t. How can you stay sane and not burned out by all the “gentle encouragements” to use AI?

Ask HN: How to deal with AI "true believer" leadership at work

Hey HN,at first, i&#x27;m not from that subject field so I dont know what to do. I&#x27;m an ordinary engeneer with basics and unorthodox thinking. I used Claude to help me implement. Its a process of several months and bazills of millions of tokens of work. I can&#x27;t show or disclose, begging for your understanding.I can&#x27;t beat WEBP lossless on kodak test suite, YET; But I&#x27;m like 5% worser on RGBa. CMYK&#x27;s similar. Here, the advantage is me being 5-15x faster as WEBP &#x2F; other lossless codecs. Not yet fully confirmed, but promissing results WEBP will be knocked too. My lossy compression is better than JPEG sometimes, but always ~10++ times faster. Very big building field right now.The figures are very promissing on lossless video. On cpu cycles beating every SOTA methods by being upto 15x faster or so. Possible path. My lossy shows better sharpness and details in (very) fast moving scenes (1080p, 2k, 4k incl. hdr), while being only ~5-10% bigger than heif and avc, and others with comperable compression params. May be is resolved in x-xx weeks.→ noticed, my lossless works better as SOTA (JPEG LS, JPEG 2000 and JPEG XL, each lossless mode) on medical imaging &#x2F; DICOM, voluminetric medical&#x2F;scientific data, handles pixel bitdepths &gt;32bit; &gt;32000x32000px (jpeg didnt even consume). It seems to scale res&#x2F;depth without issues. Runs on data from various MRT&#x2F;CT Imagers and formats found for download show ~15%-50% percent better compression as SOTA&#x2F;DICOM, at a fraction of cycles. Some results:CT volumes, ratio and (encode &#x2F; decode seconds)- pancreas, 185 slices → 3.26 (0.7 &#x2F; 0.6) │ JPEG-LS: 2.69 (2.3 &#x2F; 1.8) │ JPEG 2000: 2.71 (10.6 &#x2F; 8.5) │ FFV1: 2.70- COVID chest, 2464 slices → 4.48 (10.0 &#x2F; 8.6) │ JPEG-LS: 3.30 (24.6 &#x2F; 18.9) │ JPEG 2000: 3.12 (129 &#x2F; 101) │ FFV1: 3.21- Colonography, 950 slices → 2.79, was 2.59 │ JPEG-LS: 2.73 (10.9 &#x2F; 8.8) │ JPEG 2000: 2.61 (55.6 &#x2F; 44.2) │ FFV1: 2.99- LIDC lung, 764 slices, 12-bit → 2.67 (3.1 &#x2F; 2.8) │ JPEG-LS: 2.40 (9.9 &#x2F; 7.7) │ JPEG 2000: 2.40 (46.1 &#x2F; 37.9) │ FFV1: 2.37- TCGA kidney, 820 slices → 3.31 (3.3 &#x2F; 2.9) │ JPEG-LS: 2.87 (9.2 &#x2F; 7.1) │ JPEG 2000: 2.74 (48.1 &#x2F; 37.3) │ FFV1: 2.80MR and SAR data is also a possible play field with some prommissing results I&#x27;ve already seen.So, as everyone too, i want $$$. I decided to walk my own way after being fired in 2 mins two years ago and I dont have much financial reserves left, without getting income atm. Can&#x27;t start employment; Need &amp; Want to fight with Claude 23h&#x2F;7d instead on other ideas I&#x27;m working on since years. Need MONEY!! So, if you would be me. Open Sourcing the algorithm is bread-less and doesn&#x27;t pay my&#x2F;your bills.I&#x27;m seeking Advice or Ideas on how would you approach it, if you were me - with max profit in the head (.. but still do good!).The actual and future storage&#x2F;memory crisis opens up a lever. My approach puts together: storage AND compute can both be siginificantly reduced.- AWS health services, google health and some other smaller cloud service providers- Medical imaging device producers (mrt&#x2F;ct) saving on cpu and memory- Physicians using SaaS for storage&#x2F;viewing- Astro&#x2F;Scientific imaging and processing- Possible space&#x2F;SAR&#x2F;satelite imaging&#x2F;data, not giving up on it yet.But how to approach?? If you give it to x, then y will need it too for processing x&#x27;s data. This gives a conflict in interest. Interest is profit max. What could end up as a strategy? How to find someone to pitch? Selling? Licensing? Other models? Patenting may not work &#x2F; doesn&#x27;t use patented methods.Appreciate any answer and &#x27;thank you&#x27; to everyone reading. If I dont respond to your comment, think of me saying &#x27;thank you&#x27; while bowing very deeply, weaving my hat. This post is not meant to let others do my work, its a scream for direction - kind of desperate &amp; blind