https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2025&#x2F;07&#x2F;10&#x2F;ohio-data-centers-energy-costs&#x2F;

Energy costs are rising. This state says tech companies must pay more

In your opinion, who is the best paid email provider?Why are they the best?

Ask HN: Who Is the Best Paid Email Provider? Why?

Throwaway for obvious reasons. I’m a co-founder of a venture-backed startup currently valued at ~$20M. We raised a strong pre-seed, built a team, shipped v1, generated revenue, and recently pivoted into a related idea that I think could work—but I’m no longer the right person to lead it. My co-founder is passionate about the new direction and wants to take it forward. I want to step away cleanly and with integrity.I have ~10% vested. I led our early fundraise, worked unpaid for months, and contributed personal capital. I’m not trying to maximize my return—but I also don’t want to walk away empty-handed after 1.5 years of building.My question:
1. What’s a fair exit package in this situation? A formula&#x2F;rule I can use?2. Should I just keep the vested equity? Future investors may see this as dead equity.3. Is a cash buyout common or appropriate?How would you approach this with the board&#x2F;co-founder in a way that’s constructive and protects long-term relationships?Would love to hear from anyone who&#x27;s seen this play out—on the founder, investor, or legal side.

Co-founder exiting after pivot – what's a fair exit package?

Soham Parekh is all the rage on Twitter right now with a bunch of startups coming out of the woodwork saying they either had currently employed him or had in the past.Serious question: why aren&#x27;t so many startups hiring processes filtering out a candidate who is scamming&#x2F;working multiple jobs?

Ask HN: How did Soham Parekh get so many jobs?

Does this product exist?Why do people build solar panels on their roofs instead of investing money in large scale solar projects and then receiving a dividend proportional to the power generation built from their investment?Shouldn’t I be able to say, fund $10k of solar generation somewhere in the world and receive a check every month for the power I helped produce?This makes a lot more sense to me than building panels on my roofs instead with all of their extra costs.

Ask HN: How can I invest in Solar Power?

Last winter, my girlfriend was working on her university thesis and had to transcribe hours of interviews manually. I ended up helping her by running a local model of whisper and months later I decide to build a product out of it. It is a simple AI transcription tool that lets you upload audio or video and get clean, readable transcripts. It works well for thesis interviews, lectures, podcasts — anything spoken.- Free plan for up to 30 minutes&#x2F;month.
- Supports audio and video files
- Speaker Identification and labelling.
- AI insight and summary.
- Colorful tags to organize and filter your transcript
- Upload custom vocabulary to help improve your transcription
- Export to formats compatible with research tools like NVivo, Atlas.ti, MAXQDA, R &#x2F; RStudio and SPSS 
- Built with privacy in mind (no training on your data) and many other featuresThe app is available on www.verbatimly.comI’d love to get your thoughts — whether you&#x27;re a student, researcher, or just someone who’s had to type out long interviews by hand. Let me know what works, what doesn&#x27;t, and what would make it better.Also, we are proudly made in Germany.Happy to answer questions or help anyone get started!

I built a AI transcription app because my girlfriend needed one for uni

Small confessionI’ve been using Windsurf editor for about six months now, and it does most of the coding work for me.Recently, I realized I no longer enjoy programming. It feels like I’m just going through the pain of explaining to the LLM what I want, then sitting and waiting for it to finish. If it fails, I just switch to another model—and usually, one of them gets the job done.At this point, I’ve even stopped reviewing the exact code changes. I just keep pushing forward until the task is done.On the bright side, I’ve gotten much better at writing design documents.Anyone else feel the same?

Tell HN: I Lost Joy of Programming

Hi everyone,I recently found a high-criticality vulnerability in a listed consumer company in the UK. It allows unauthorized access to users’ private messages and even lets you impersonate other users on the platform.They’ve offered a €1,000 bounty, but only if I sign an NDA that prevents any public write-up—even after the issue is patched.I feel the bounty is too low for the impact, and asking to sign an NDA that prevents any public disclosure even post-fix feels like a big red flag.I’m leaning towards declining the offer and doing a public write-up once the issue is fixed—but I’d really welcome opinions from others on what the right thing to do here is.Thanks!

Ask HN: Bug Bounty Dilemma – Take the $$ and Sign an NDA or Go Public?

https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberglaw.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;v1&#x2F;public&#x2F;download&#x2F;X7QEMPLP9PM8MTA9A06HJHGH0V8&#x2F;11?public_link=FrascovFloHealthIncDocketNo321cv00757NDCalJan292021CourtDocket

Google fails to dismiss wiretapping claims on SJ, settles with app users

Hi HNI&#x27;m doing some field research on unique ways on-call rotations can be unhealthy. It would be great to hear some anecdata from the community about &#x2F;why&#x2F; you feel your on-call rotation sucks - and I figure it would be even better to experience it firsthand :)I do understand asking to join&#x2F;shadow your rotation is probably not practical however I am 100% serious and happy to sign whatever.Cheers &amp; may your pager stay silent

Ask HN: Does your on-call rotation suck? Can I join it?

What&#x27;s your schedule like?How do you motivate yourself to work?Is caffeine&#x2F;sleep&#x2F;food an issue?

Ask HN: People who work different timezones than your company. How sched?

We are a startup of almost 40 people now; as the first engineer, I started building up our corp infrastructure and am managing that on the side ever since. We use Entra ID as our central identity provider, manage devices using Intune, use Teams Telephone for PSTN calls, office suite, Sharepoint for file storage, and so on. While we’re at GCP for the business infra, internally we’re pretty entrenched in Microsoft services—which works pretty well so far, I might say.Recently, however, we hired a RevOps guy that set out to discover optimisation potential, apparently, and today I got a surprise meeting where he demonstrated his big idea of switching from Microsoft to Google Workspace and Slack. He suggested that would be a great idea since everyone hates using Teams, nobody knows where to find files in Sharepoint, many SaaS products only support Google SSO out of the box, and Gemini would be included and we need that to be an AI driven company. Also, new hires only knew Gmail and Drive, but had to be educated on Outlook and Excel, and having everything in the browser would be way superior anyway; Workspace apparently is way better integrated with other tools (although I’m not sure what this means).Now… before going into engineering, I started in systems administration. I’m in tech since 14 years now. I managed to scale our infrastructure and product from day one, with no breaches, downtime, or major productivity issues. It has been clear for a while that we’ll need someone to take care of internal IT management and support, but this was the first time I even heard of major complaints. I’m usually fairly confident in my skills, but this time I started to doubt myself:Either I’m not up to date anymore, and too deep into my niche knowledge that I’m sticking to stuff that isn’t relevant any longer—or this is just young people disliking something they aren’t used to and thus not comfortable with. I’m really open to improving things that cause friction, but I can’t help the feeling this is just a young sales team that prefers Slack over Teams and has poorly organised folders in Sharepoint.From a migration perspective, this is going to be a nightmare; finding replacements, making sure we don’t loose anything, keeping emails and telephones running, third party tools available, and so on. But maybe it’s worth it, and Google Workspace and Slack are so much better that we’re gaining it all in efficiency? Has anyone made such a move, or an opinion on it? Has the tech world simply moved to Google, and I didn’t get the memo?

Ask HN: New RevOps guy wants to switch us from M365 to GSuite+Slack

I’m doing this myself to a pretty far extent while building two agents for my workflow automation. It’s been fun and surprisingly productive, but I’m also worried I might be stacking up technical debt.

Ask HN: What's Your Experience with Vibe Coding?

My company is increasingly pushing prompt engineering as the single way we &quot;should&quot; be coding. The CEO &amp; CTO are both obsessed with it and promote things like &quot;delete entire unit test file &amp; have claude generate a new one&quot; rather than manually address test failures.I&#x27;m a &#x27;senior engineer&#x27; with ~5 years of industry experience and am considering moving on from this company because I don&#x27;t want1. Be pushed into a workflow that will cause my technical growth to stall or degrade
2. Be overseeing a bunch of AI-generated spaghetti 2-3 years from nowFeel free to address my specific situation but I&#x27;m interested in more general opinions.

Ask HN: Worth leaving position over push to adopt vibe coding?

It&#x27;s been a few months since Lynx JS (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lynxjs.org&#x2F;) was open-sourced. It seems to offer a lot with regards to speed, but it doesn&#x27;t use real HTML elements, and seems to cater to the React crowd.Has anyone used it for anything serious, and what are your thoughts? How does it compare to e.g. Flutter, Ionic + Capacitor, React Native etc.?

What's your experience using Lynx (mobile framework)?

Mirror Question: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=44503952

Ask HN: What are some cool or underrated tech companies based in Australia?

My washing machine broke down. I need a replacement. I must avoid getting a &quot;smart&quot; one though. Are there any lists of products that arent &quot;smart&quot; so I can know which models are viable options to buy? Or other resources?  I&#x27;m based in Ireland.

Ask HN: Any resources for finding non-smart appliances?

Do you use any, do you find them valuable, do they do something the foundation model companies are not doing?I wondered this about a year ago and wanted to revisit the question.Today I did some research on Product Hunt and also looked through various recent YC companies. What hit me immediately was - wow! - there are some really good designers (or maybe it&#x27;s with AI now) putting together slick product demos and 1-3 min vids. Most of the products I came across are AI for various things like creating office docs, sending emails, creating presentations, web scraping, making mobile apps, managing meetings and relationships, etc.However, when I get past the flashiness and start investigating a bit, I don&#x27;t really see what&#x27;s special or setting these products apart from a foundation model + rudimentary RAG in some cases. In fact, many file-related and memory-dependent applications can be done perfectly well via the base Open AI chat website today. To give credit where it&#x27;s due, I think some of these products have better &#x27;flows&#x27; via various prompt engineering tricks. Enough to justify a big monthly stipend over my existing OAI&#x2F;Anthropic subscriptions, I don&#x27;t know.But my overall take when I see many of these, is that they are probably not startups, at least not ones that I see lasting. They have to go more and more niche to get away from the tentacles of increasingly capable foundation model capabilities. The big ones that seem to be enduring and doing well are Perplexity and Cursor, they seem to have grown quickly enough in the early days to attract a lot of resources and talent to keep building features. So maybe the foundation models can only do ~60% of what they do, while for the products&#x2F;startups I described above, that number is more like 90%. My conclusion is to be somewhat bearish on &#x27;GPT wrappers&#x27;, perhaps until more creative ideas (e.g. physical-world use cases) come to fruition, because the SaaS space seems rough.

Ask HN: What's the verdict on GPT wrapper companies these days?

Was very inspired by a hacker space on a trip to Seattle. In Sacramento CA where we used to have an amazing enormous space &quot;Hacker Lab&quot;. We still have one but it&#x27;s more crafts oriented which is fine but trying to think about a more computer-oriented one for kids specifically. Thinking about overhauling our garage to be a space for my kid&#x27;s &#x2F; kid&#x27;s friend&#x27;s little nascent computer club and feeling it out from there. Just wondering if people have any wisdom &#x2F; advice.

Ask HN: Advice for Starting a Hacker Space?

Hey HN,If there is a pocket-sized compact hardware that hosts large-size open-source LLMs that you can connect offline, wouldn&#x27;t it be helpful?The benefits:- You can use large-size open-source LLMs without using up your PC or smartphone&#x27;s compute- You can protect your privacy- You can use high performance LLM offline

Pocket LLM Server Just Like a Pocket WiFi

Hi HN,
I&#x27;m curious if anyone else had a similar journey learning English.I&#x27;m from Ukraine and started reading Hacker News about five years ago. At first, I understood almost nothing. I didn’t use a translator — partly because I was lazy, and partly because I wanted to see how much I could figure out just from context.So I kept reading. I would see the same words appear in different posts and comments, and slowly, I began to understand their meaning. Sentence structures became clearer, and I started to “feel” the language. Eventually, I stopped being afraid of reading in English altogether.I didn’t learn from a teacher or a course — just from the internet, and mostly from here.Now I write posts, share my projects, and even chat with other devs here — all in English. It still feels surreal sometimes.Have any of you learned English (or another language) in a similar way — just by immersion, without formal study?Also: thank you, HN. You taught me more than just tech.

Ask HN: Has anyone else learned English just by reading tech posts (like HN)?

I&#x27;ve came accross a good but quite hard problem to solve which is to translate HTML pages into whatever human langage.I&#x27;ve started tinkering with DeepL which proposes this feature but results are quite off the rails because you cannot provide any context to it.So well, it was a clear case for an LLM to me. After crafting a good context prompt, I&#x27;ve tried o4-mini from OpenAI and it&#x27;s results are nearly perfect.However came business around and I need to be able to this WAY faster, as a ~100ko page will take like a minute to generate, which is way too long for the end user.I&#x27;ve optimised content a little (sending only html parts that are interesting) but it&#x27;s still quite slow in the end (more than 10s).
I&#x27;m thinking about translating html to json and do it back after translation, so it might be faster.Does anyone do this as well ? Or has any insight of a better performing API&#x2F;LLM for this problem ?

Ask HN: Do you use LLM for HTML translations?

Agentic terminology doesn&#x27;t make any sense. Why are actions = set of tools. Actions is a more granular word than tools. An action is to jump, to run, to hit, to walk. A tool, meanwhile, is something that can do multiple things. If I asked you to name a tool, you might say &quot;hammer&quot;. A hammer can nail something, pull out something, smash something. It&#x27;s less granular than action.But for some reason, we chose a significantly more granular word (action) to describe a combination of a less granular word (tools).end rant.

Agentic terminology doesn't make any sense

It seems like every &quot;great&quot; piece of software, e.g. the operating systems of Apple and Microsoft, the search engine of Google, AWS inside Amazon, Facebook etc was dogfooded.What&#x27;s the biggest exception to this rule?

Ask HN: What's the greatest piece of non-dogfooded software?

Inspired by the latest Brandon Stanton X post I&#x27;m curious what dream did the HN community give up on?

Ask HN: What dream did you give up on?

Saw this question posted 8 years ago, and loved some of the responses. Would love to see what people have to say about it now.Copying from the post: things you avoid while persevering?

Ask HN: What inspires you to persevere through adversity?

I was curious if anyone ever had any luck with a brick and mortar dev agency?There are so many physical contracting, manufacturing, food, etc businesses around me that are so used to doing business in person that I was wondering if it could be successful to have an in person agency to help businesses automate things.

Ask HN: Brick and Mortar Dev Agency

Hi everyone,I&#x27;ve been wrestling with MCP, and keep finding the same weaknesses:
- the middleware server feels completely unncessary and overly complex
- it has too many security flaws due to what feels like a rushed out standard
- it&#x27;s just so poorly undocumented and confusingI&#x27;ve been thinking of doing a new protocol, but am too aware of that ol&#x27; comic (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgs.xkcd.com&#x2F;comics&#x2F;standards_2x.png)Yet was curious to ask you guys - is there value in trying to build a new scalable, secure version of MCP?Or should I just stick to the protocol that&#x27;s currently popular?

Ask HN: Do you think a new alternative to MCP would be useful?

After testing out Cluely with my team, we suspect that the easiest way to detect interview cheaters is to set simple &quot;hallucination traps&quot; where you ask a question that sounds plausible, but any knowledgeable person would instantly identify as a joke, fake, or just simply say they don&#x27;t know. Vibe coded a simple app demonstrating the concept - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beatcluely.com&#x2F;Here are some examples of this class of prompts which currently work on Cluely and even cause strong models like o4-mini-high to hallucinate, even when they can search the web:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;6865d41a-c720-8005-879b-d28240534751
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;6865d450-6760-8005-8b7b-7bd776cff96b
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;6865d578-1b2c-8005-b7b0-7a9148a40cef
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;6865d59c-1820-8005-afb3-664e49c8b583
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;6865d5eb-3f88-8005-86b4-bf266e9d4ed9Link to the vibe-coded code for the site: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Build21-Eliot&#x2F;BeatCluely

Super Simple "Hallucination Traps" to detect interview cheaters

I have an existing handwritten knowledgebase with screenshots of an app, a codebase with standard CI&#x2F;CD pipelines, and an API whose docs are autogenerated against an OpenAPI spec.Is there a convenient way these days to chain software together so that product documentation, including screenshots, is completely autogenerated on new codebase commits? Anyone tried some chain of tools, including paid ones, that works successfully in the wild?

Ask HN: How to generate product docs E2E?

As both the economy and policy of the US shift rapidly and show signs of accelerating, I hear more and more of my colleagues voicing the desire to up stakes and relocate to somewhere more stable and in line with their own values--an opinion that I share. But getting visa sponsorship in much of the developed world is a scattershot effort; best I can tell, it&#x27;s almost something you have to track down on a per-company basis, prioritizing the larger ones for access.This feels like a hole in a quickly growing market--are there firms or orgs that help consolidate visa-sponsoring job info for high-demand professions, particularly in tech? Most of what I&#x27;ve seen out there is generic guidance and https:&#x2F;&#x2F;relocate.me, or is EU-focused for folks already in the EEU.

Ask HN: Is there a business for extracting US tech talent?

I looked at a lot of posts, but I didn&#x27;t see anyone mentioning the C programming language, I hope I&#x27;m the only one here?

Ask HN: How many communities HN it devs in C language?

Linkedin seems to have lost its charm in the last 1-2 years. I&#x27;m noticing creators moving to substack but it still doesn&#x27;t seem to be a 1:1 match. Just like there&#x27;s Bluesky as a prominent X alternative, have you come across any for LinkedIn?

Are there any noteworthy LinkedIn alternatives?

I&#x27;m based in Canada and curious to learn more about interesting or up-and-coming tech companies here — not just the usual big names like Shopify or Lightspeed, but also smaller startups, bootstrapped companies, or niche players doing great work in software, hardware, AI, sustainability, fintech, etc.

Ask HN: What are some cool or underrated tech companies based in Canada?

We’re building an AI-powered reading assistant that lives inside Zotero.Users can ask questions, get answers with source highlights, and see visual summaries.Looking for Zotero users who want to test and give feedback. In return: *lifetime free access.*https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;forms&#x2F;d&#x2F;e&#x2F;1FAIpQLScOTMnXAVZoEf0YwXrBa0yAkAEAX_5LPjEkEMjpR8IawAXaTA&#x2F;viewform?usp=dialog

Looking for Early Testers for a AI Assistant Inside Zotero

I left my job a few months ago after ~10 years as a software engineer. Burnout kind of forced the decision — I didn’t plan it well, just hit a wall and stepped away. I’ve recovered a bit and now I’m trying to figure out what to do next.I’m in my 30s, single, and have saved about $3M across taxable and retirement accounts. Mostly index funds, some cash, and a chunk in RSUs. I spend around $50K&#x2F;year living in a HCOL area, and don’t own a home. So I’m in a position where I don’t have to work right away, but that hasn’t really made things clearer.Friends have brought up FIRE, but I’m not sure early retirement would feel fulfilling. Honestly, having more options has made things feel more paralyzing, not less.The burnout wasn’t really about long hours. It came more from feeling ineffective and having no clear direction. My role felt fuzzy, leadership was inconsistent, and I started feeling like I was falling behind while other people kept progressing. That wore me down over time and chipped away at my confidence.Now I’m considering a few paths:Return to my old job — I left on good terms and could probably go back. I’ve been wondering if this was more of a me problem than a company problem, and going back might help clarify that.
Extend the sabbatical — travel or focus on non-career interests for a few more months, then reassess.
Start job searching now — not super motivated, but with the current job market, it might take a while anyway.
Career change — no clear direction or passion, just vague curiosity about doing something different.If you’ve taken a break, pivoted careers, or dealt with burnout like this — how did you figure out your next step? Especially curious how people figured out whether the problem was the job… or themselves.

Ask HN: Took a break after burnout – what now?

Recently there was a post [1] about numpy being not easy to work with when using arrays of shape greater than 2.<pre><code> One of the problems mentioned in [1] is that you can not use python loops because they are slow. In J you can solve for example 100 equations using the rank concept, this is a simple example:

 a=: 2 2 $ 1 1 1 _1
 b=: 10 2 $ ? 20 # 10
 solutions =: b %. &quot;(1 _) a
</code></pre>
That code solve the systems a * v_i = b_i for ten random vectors. I think a similar concept could be developed in numpy. The syntax &quot;(1 _)&quot; indicates to take the rows from the left operator and all (_ is infinite) of a apply solve (that is %. in J). In this case the system is x+y=y0, x-y=y1.So I would suggest somthing like numpy.linalg.solve(a,b,rank=(1,inf))[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43996431