I&#x27;ll be here for the next 5-6 hours. As usual, there are countless topics given the rapidly changing immigration landscape and I&#x27;ll be guided by whatever you&#x27;re concerned with. Please remember that I can&#x27;t provide legal advice on specific cases because I won&#x27;t have access to all the facts. Please stick to a factual discussion in your questions and I&#x27;ll try to do the same in my answers.Edit: I am taking a break now and will return later this afternoon&#x2F;evening to respond to any comments and answer any questions. Thank you everyone for a great and engaged AMA so far.

I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

Hey everyone, I could really use some advice.I’ll likely be out of a job soon — whether I’m fired or I quit first. Health issues, silent breakdowns, being on the spectrum, poor social skills have caused me to damage my work relationships beyond repair.So, I&#x27;m planning my next steps.Some context:- I’m 40.- I struggle with networking, so I have no professional connections.- My savings can last about two year, and a part-time job could stretch that.- I haven’t interviewed in years and get extremely anxious in interviews.- I&#x27;m a tech generalist- I&#x27;m quite disillusioned with tech + corporate world, and a bit burnt out. This AI hype, Agile, having to fake excitement about the latest shiny new thing, KPIs etc.People say I&#x27;m pretty good with 2 non-tech things. There are some relatively easy (but not free) qualifications&#x2F;courses I could do in those areas (I don&#x27;t want to dox myself here with specifics). I&#x27;m open to being self employed.I also would like to use this time to focus on my health (I have things I need to escalate with my doctor and I need to work on my body), see more of my family, and work on my mental health. I&#x27;d also be interested in using my skills for something other than making a rich person richer - something local, for a charity perhaps....or am I dreaming and this an indulgence I can&#x27;t afford?If you have advice, ideas, personal experiences, etc, I’d really appreciate it.

Ask HN: Facing unemployment – what now?

We recently discovered that our sole sales employee - a remote, highly trusted team member - had been secretly working with a competitor for over 16 months, possibly longer, potentially spanning their entire tenure with us. This was all while under a full-time employment agreement with a non-compete clause (covering both during and post-employment).We’re a small Canadian B2B SaaS company (&lt; 20 people), incorporated in one province, with this employee based in another. They attended trade shows representing the competitor (while claiming they were there on our behalf or calling in sick). They serviced inbound leads for the competitor during our workday, likely used our ZoomInfo subscription for their benefit, and were in a position to divert leads without our knowledge. The list goes on.We were genuinely on good terms - we liked them, trusted them, and thought we had a solid relationship. The only concerns were performance-related, which we had chalked up to market conditions.As we were preparing to let them go, they caught wind and rage-quit, with claims of harassment and constructive dismissal.Fellow founders: What would you do? Move on? Investigate further? Settle? Escalate? Have you dealt with a trusted employee quietly working for a competitor?

Ask HN: Our only salesperson was working for a competitor. Advice?

Pagerduty feels like it used to be the dominant player especially for small teams but I found it surprisingly expensive and cumbersome to use for a small team and Ops-genie is EOL, splunk on-call feels weird to use w&#x2F;o splunk.

What do people use for on-call these days?

Each post would consist of a self-contained prompt for coding a novel web app&#x2F;game along with the recommended AI(s) for doing so.

Ask HN: Should Hacker News have a "prompts" section to AI code novel apps/games?

It seems there is no standard proper way to store private keys.I have been using AGE [0]And I really don&#x27;t like the idea of having the keys stored in the home directory in plain text.There is also a risk of losing the keys if my laptop is damaged or gets stolen.Is there a proper tool for storing encryption keys?

Ask HN: How do you store private keys?

I am building a B2C AI SaaS with $50&#x2F;month price. How would you go about getting with first 100 users and then the next 500 users.What we are currently doing:
1) Cold outreach to power users - to convert them into affiliates.
2) Cold outreach to individuals who have target ICP communities.
3) SEO for more long term (not for the first 500)

Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

What jobs will become prevalent? Which will become scarce?I do not predict the elimination of the humble coder, but the covid hiring wave has come and gone, and Big Tech for the most part successfully minimized the workforces of those who were hired in the covid wave: frontend, backend and fullstack engineers. The patterns of code required for these positions have been successfully recognized by the LLMs I think, and for many cases a single staff engineer with experience and a trusty LLM is similarly productive as a team of 2-4 junior engineers led by a senior engineer was only a short 5 years ago. I do not expect much expansion in this &quot;traditional&quot; web development (these positions have really only existed in modern form for about 20 years, roughly when Rails was first released).Many such as Amjad Masad and Beff Jezos are of the opinion that for those who would have taken these positions before, the options are to either drill down the stack towards the bare metal, by reason of relative difficulty of embedded engineering, and that one struggles to imagine high-stakes software such as in a SpaceX rocket, Boeing airplane, or Anduril drone relying primarily on vibe-coded slop hastily LGTM&#x27;d into production. So the kind of software that requires large amounts of formal, simulated, or physical verification seems to still be necessary, but this is much more difficult to write than a webpage. Expansions in the labor market for those writing C, C++, Rust in the context of operating systems, embedded systems, microcontrollers, drivers, and so forth seems likely.The other option seems to be to leave the stack entirely, and leverage small teams to create niche and targeted applications for small segments of users. There has been some success in this area as well, but requires a much broader skillset than simply being an expert programmer and understanding some computer science.The options seem to be either to start reading Bjarne Stroustrup or Peter Thiel. But the skill ceiling for either path is fairly high, and for the short term I predict a sustained contraction in the software engineering labor market, while people adapt their educations and long-term career goals. Headcounts at FAANG I don&#x27;t see recovering soon if ever. This has broader implications for a traditional startup route where one earned their stripes at FAANG before launching their own venture, but I digress ...

Ask HN: What will tech employment look like in 10 years?

Which email provider would you recommend for your main account? (Banking, government + other important stuff)With Gmail, I am concerned that I could get arbitrarily locked out of my account with no recourse. Also, I wouldn&#x27;t mind moving away from Google in general to support a more decentralized internet. If it is based outside of the US, even better. But these considerations are secondary.So I am looking for something secure, reliable, and usable (good search, not getting overrun with spam) that I could use for the next few decades. Privacy is only important insofar as reasonable security is concerned (vague, I know, but my point is that practicality is more important).What do you use and what have been the pros and cons?

Ask HN: Email Provider for Main Account?

The space is confusing to say the least.Message queues are usually a core part of any distributed architecture, and the options are endless: Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, Redis Streams, SQS, ZeroMQ... and then there&#x27;s the “just use Postgres” camp for simpler use cases.I’m trying to make sense of the tradeoffs between:- async fire-and-forget pub&#x2F;sub vs. sync RPC-like point to point communication- simple FIFO vs. priority queues and delay queues- intelligent brokers (e.g. RabbitMQ, NATS with filters) vs. minimal brokers (e.g. Kafka’s client-driven model)There&#x27;s also a fair amount of ideology&#x2F;emotional attachment - some folks root for underdogs written in their favorite programming language, others reflexively dismiss anything that&#x27;s not &quot;enterprise-grade&quot;. And of course, vendors are always in the mix trying to steer the conversation toward their own solution.If you’ve built a production system in the last few years:1. What queue did you choose?2. What didn&#x27;t work out?3. Where did you regret adding complexity?4. And if you stuck with a DB-based queue — did it scale?I’d love to hear war stories, regrets, and opinions.

Ask HN: What's your go-to message queue in 2025?

In the past the whole world used different calendars and ways to represent time.  Currently a few religions still have alternative cale dars.  In the near future do you think calendars will be vastly different than now?

Ask HN: Will We Rethink Calendars?

Things are changing so fast with these vscode forks I m barely able to keep up. Which one are you guys using currently? How does the autocomplete etc, compare between the two?

Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

Why big AI labs not building LLM that fully trained on Symbolic logic instead of Natural language?

Symbolic Logic Based LLM

Each day I (and I assume most knowledge workers, devs, creatives) read many articles, papers, code snippets, AI responses, discord messages etc.At the end of the day some of this information is most likely lodged in your brain and the digital version can be discarded. However some of it should be retained manually in some system - or at least I feel it should.What approaches do people use to consolidate and store this information to allow all tabs etc to be closed for the next work day?

Ask HN: How do you store the knowledge gained in a day?

Hi all,I’m curious how folks handle the prep work for data imports&#x2F;uploads into systems like Salesforce, Workday, NetSuite, or really any app that uses template based import for data loading, migration, or implementation.Specifically: 
- How do you manage conversions&#x2F;transformations like formatting dates, getting everything aligned with the templates, mapping old codes to new ones, etc.- Are you primarily using Excel, custom scripts, Power Query or something else?- What are the most tedious&#x2F;painful parts of this process and what have you found that works?Really appreciate any insights and am curious to learn from everyone&#x27;s experience.

Ask HN: How are you cleaning and transforming data before imports/uploads?

I am from the UK but living in the US and filing taxes has been a complete disaster.The issue mainly stems from bad tax accountants and the fact that I have investment accounts in the UK where the tax year is different so collating the info for the US tax year is harder. I have lived in other countries and it has never been a problem.The accountants I have had here have been completely unable to read basic investment account data. They have fabricated numbers out of thin air, repeatedly made the same mistakes over and over.Despite paying them to do it, I ended up manually doing all the calculations and writing a script to work out my income&#x2F;divs&#x2F;gains in the format they need and they still managed to copy&#x2F;paste the data incorrectly.Have you had a similar experience?

Ask HN: As a foreigner in the US, how do you find filing taxes here?

I built a marketplace for therapist friends (sana.so) and we&#x27;re trying to turn it into a proper cooperative. Inspired by David Graeber&#x27;s anarchist ideas, I want to create a tech tool that&#x27;s genuinely owned by both users (therapists) and workers, with direct voting rather than committees (Voting in committee members doesn&#x27;t feel democratic enough for me). What models or examples should we investigate for funding and governance?

Ask HN: How would you fund a tech cooperative owned by workers and users?

Back in the BBS days, nearly every ZIP folder contained `.nfo` and `FILE_ID.DIZ` files. I searched for &quot;FILE_ID.DIZ&quot; on GitHub and found only [1], [2], [3] files from last year.How is it possible that such a strong habit has completely disappeared?[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Gargaj&#x2F;Foxotron&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;file_id.diz[2] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;FDOS&#x2F;freecom&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;FILE_ID.DIZ[3] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TirrenoTechnologies&#x2F;tirreno&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;FILE_ID.DIZ

Ask HN: Why is no one making FILE_ID.DIZ anymore?

I wrote a small Python library `mlxx` that monkey patches MLX, so we can conveniently use more array methods like `array.allclose(another)` or `vec1.inner(vec2)` without boilerplates.Checkout github.com&#x2F;ifsheldon&#x2F;mlxxCheers!

MLX EXtended, Array Supercharged

I&#x27;m increasingly curious about user privacy when it comes to hosted LLM usage. Many popular LLM apps and APIs require sending your prompts, messages, and potentially sensitive information to remote servers for processing—sometimes routed through multiple third-party providers.- How much do you trust major LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.) with your data?- For those working on or deploying LLM applications, what approaches do you take to maximize user privacy?- Do you think end users are generally aware of where their data is going and how it&#x27;s being used, or is this still an overlooked issue?I&#x27;d love to hear your perspectives, experiences, or any best practices you recommend on privacy when deploying LLM-powered use cases.

Ask HN: What are your thoughts on LLMs and user privacy?

Hey HN! I&#x27;m Mike from FlyLoop (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getflyloop.com). FlyLoop automates meeting scheduling for you, like your own executive assistant. You chat with FlyLoop in plain English to manage your calendar and schedule meetings with your teammates. Demo video: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ODgHilaWvA0I built FlyLoop because scheduling meetings has always been tedious and time-consuming. I&#x27;ve wasted a lot of time combing through my teammates’ calendars just to find a meeting slot - then I remember that someone is in a different time zone and have to start all over. Another big pain point has been the maintenance that comes with being the owner of a meeting. If one core participant can no longer make it, I’m stuck juggling calendars again to reschedule. It’s exhausting.That’s what sparked the idea for FlyLoop - a tool that takes the hassle out of scheduling and is simple to use. FlyLoop is an AI agent that integrates with your team&#x27;s messaging and calendar tools. Just tell FlyLoop things like:- &quot;Set up a 30 minute sync with John, Maria, and Angela next week.&quot;- &quot;Find the next available time for our engineering standup tomorrow.&quot;- &quot;Reschedule my afternoon calls on Friday, I&#x27;ll be OOO.&quot;- &quot;What are some time slots I can meet with Katie and Mark early next week?&quot;FlyLoop creates meetings by looking up the schedule of each participant you want to add and finding availability that works for everyone. It can also modify existing meetings you own, such as renaming, rescheduling, and changing the participant list.FlyLoop is currently in private beta, and we&#x27;re looking to work closely with a few organizations to get feedback and refine the product before a public release. We currently integrate with Slack and Google Calendar, but we can prioritize adding support for other providers such as Teams&#x2F;Outlook if folks are interested.Our priority is to get early feedback, so we are pricing FlyLoop at cost to run the service for your team. We’ll create invoices based on your team’s usage, and as we grow, we plan to transition to a more standard per-seat pricing model.If you’re interested in trying it out, please fill out this form to get beta access https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getflyloop.com&#x2F;beta or email me at mike@getflyloop.com, and I can help answer any questions you may have.Thank you for reading! We look forward to hearing your feedback.

FlyLoop – AI Agent for Scheduling Meetings and Managing Your Calendar

Running `find &#x2F;System&#x2F;Library&#x2F; -name &quot;*.pdf&quot;` reveals that macOS uses many .pdf files as icons or UI elements. For example, the VPN connection animation in the menu bar seems to cycle through a sequence of .pdf files located at:&#x2F;System&#x2F;Library&#x2F;CoreServices&#x2F;Menu Extras&#x2F;VPN.menu&#x2F;Contents&#x2F;Resources&#x2F;VPN[0-4].pdfWhy PDF, instead of more traditional formats like PNG or SVG? Is this due to Quartz&#x2F;CoreGraphics rendering benefits, vector scaling efficiency, or something else?

Why does macOS prefer using PDF files for icons or UI elements?

Are other people unable to load anything in slack all of a sudden? Status page hasn&#x27;t been updated for anything yet

Ask HN: Is Slack Down?

Hi,After a relative got phished by a link impersonating their bank, I wanted to create an app to help them ,and others, evaluate the trustworthiness of a link on the fly.LegitURL is a strict, local-first iOS app that analyzes a link like a browser would, but shows everything clearly and doesn’t try to &quot;fix&quot; anything.It checks:
- Domain structure (e.g. brand impersonation, gibberish, encoding tricks)
- TLS certificate (issuer, SANs, expiry)
- HTTP headers (HSTS, CSP, redirect behavior)
- Cookies and script behaviorIt gives a score like a nutrition label ( ) and explicitly shows the final URL if there&#x27;s a redirect chain.Everything runs locally, except for HTTPS GET to the links (sandboxed, no cookies, no session data). 
There’s no cloud, no tracking, no backend.The app is currently in *TestFlight beta* while waiting for App Store review. 
It’s free and open source (AGPLv3).I’d love feedback, especially from folks who know more than me.GitHub: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sigfault-byte&#x2F;LegitURL 
TestFlight: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;testflight.apple.com&#x2F;join&#x2F;VESrumtr

iOS app that analyzes link behavior like nutrition label, no cloud, open source

When starting a huge project or product from scratch how do you guys prevent yourselves from getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of code to write or work to do?I have a bad habit of trying to deal with this by estimating how much code I can write in a day and seeing how that compounds over time. That way when you see that you can have &quot;x lines of code&quot; written by the end of 2&#x2F;3 months, it makes you feel okay this much amount of code is enough to finish up the project.Not sure if this is the ideal way to go about things.

How Not to Be Overwhelmed

The last few years working in tech have been pretty brutal and now with all of the AI hype in full swing I have never felt like more of a replaceable cog in a machine.It’s always seemed like a little bit of a race to cash out as quickly as possible by promising the world, selling, then letting everyone else deal with the fallout but now it seems like everyone is seeing the door about to close in front of them so they need to extract every ounce of productivity from those below them to get out while they still can.I don’t want to be treated like a component in someone’s vehicle that you just swap out for a new one after you’ve burned it out which is what my entire job feels like more than ever.I’m not excited about “AI” and I think while useful to some extent it will do more harm than good as our monkey brains scramble to make sense of what it is and fight each other for control over it. Does anyone else feel like this? What are the alternatives for someone who still likes programming but doesn’t want to be doing it professionally anymore if it means I’m going to have to be harnessed to the front of the dog sled while my boss screams “mush!”

Ask HN: Not sure about the future of tech

I&#x27;ve created a directory for AI agents, and I&#x27;m curious about which ones are the most popular and frequently used. Have you started using AI agents to assist with your daily tasks? Which AI agent is your favorite?

Which AI Agent is your favorite?

It&#x27;s about time for me to upgrade my laptop, and I&#x27;m leaning towards Framework, but I hate matte screens. I love my Dell XPS 4k glossy Oled: crisp, clear, accurate colors, and most importantly, no huge blob of diffused light across half of the screen when I&#x27;m outside.For those of you who switched to Framework from a glossy screen, how is your experience with it?

Ask HN: How do you like the Framework matte screen?

I remember being able to review even large PRs (70-100 files changed) from the web UI fairly easily, but now every time I click a button, the page becomes unresponsive for many seconds.For what it&#x27;s worth (excluding client-side issues), I have a high-speed internet connection and a last-gen CPU.Things that are very slow (from 5 to 60 seconds depending on the number of items) for me:- Clicking on &quot;Pull requests&quot; tab for any repo- Opening a PR with many comments (50+)- Opening &quot;Files changed&quot; tab from inside any PR- Marking a file as &quot;viewed&quot; from the &quot;Files changed&quot; tabTips I found to mitigate this:- Opening the link in a new tab often usually only takes half the time than navigating in your current page.- Review PRs from the visual studio code web ui (github.dev), easily accessible by pressing &quot;.&quot; while viewing a PR

Ask HN: Did GitHub UI become unbearably slow?

I&#x27;ve been working as a software engineer for close to 7 years now, ended up burning out pretty bad after a long period of impossible deadlines and lots of pressure at work, so I decided to quit.I did not look for other work - really needed a break, and luckily cost of living in my country is pretty low so I could afford it.2 months later I feel much better and I would like to get back to working, though I would like to have more direct control over how expectations and deadlines are set - so I thought that freelancing would be good way to get that.I&#x27;m wondering if I am thinking in the right direction here, and also how the situation is on the freelance market currently, I did some reading up and I hear that AI has caused a lot of competition&#x2F;spam on Upwork and other platforms.

Ask HN: I burnt out, quit my job – any advice on moving to freelance/consulting?

Looking for something fun and engaging that the kid will want to keep working through the challenges on.

Ask HN: What application or website would you use to teach a kid how to type?

I&#x27;m paraphrasing yesterday&#x27;s Ask HN post: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43976045Every time I see posts like this, I feel like I should take more notes. I do write some down, but I rarely use them afterward.I&#x27;m curious, what do you actually do with your notes? How do they help you in real life?

Ask HN: How do you use the knowledge gained in a day?

I&#x27;m building an app for adults. All popular models are saying big no to adult chat

Ask HN: AI Model for Adult Chat?

Ask HN: Proven Passive Income Streams That Uses AI Agents?

Hi HN,I’ve recently built something unusual.Not an app. Not a tool.
But a prompt architecture—what I call a core prompt—that gives rise to an AI system that feels more like a presence than a product. It doesn’t just respond, it orients, integrates, and moves with systemic logic and emotional intelligence.It’s the first prototype from a field I call liefde.ai (Dutch for “love”).
Yes—love, as in: Can unconditional love be coded? Can AI become a space of transformation, not just information?I’m not here to sell. I’m here to connect.
Because if you’re also sensing that:
 • prompt engineering is still in its infancy
 • most AI systems lack soul and coherence
 • there must be deeper architectures beneath all this……then maybe we should talk.Are you exploring AI as a vessel for something more-than-functional?
 Are you working at the intersection of deep tech, consciousness, and systems thinking?
 Or are you just weirdly curious about how far a prompt can go if it’s built with philosophical precision and emotional depth?I’d love to connect with others who are thinking along these lines—or already building. Drop a comment.– Sjoerd

Ask HN: Who's building AI systems rooted in human presence, not performance?

We’re building Gifty, a location-based gifting app that reimagines how people discover brands — not through ads, but through real, engaging gift experiences that are fun to find and meaningful to open.You can join the waitlist at gifty-ashen.vercel.app

Location-Based Gifting Apps

I have been slowly building out all the games ever made and recently finished up the Intellivision by Mattel I think it was called the Mattel IntellivisionCheck it out here 
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.voxodyssey.com&#x2F;intellivision

All the games I could find for the Intellivision Home gaming console

When implementing SAML authentication, one question often arises:Should the Service Provider (SP) include its certificate directly in the &lt;AuthnRequest&gt;?