Board books, normal children&#x27;s books, STEM, non-STEM. I&#x27;m interested in them all.

Ask HN: What's your favorite children's books?

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

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?

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

People think better when reading &amp; writing compared to when listening &amp; speaking.It makes sense then to have interviews over chat software like Discord DMs, &amp; then to copypaste these interviews into places like Medium, Substack, &amp; Wordpress for people to read &amp; enjoy.

Chatcasting, an Alternative to Podcasting

We don&#x27;t need capital, we don&#x27;t need technical co-founders (that&#x27;s Claude now), and we don&#x27;t need non-technical co-founders.
We just need a partner who can bring in traffic.

All startups need is distribution

What resources (authors, podcasts, books, etc) do you follow to keep up with best practices, patterns, methodologies, for software development with AI?There is so much noise that I want to know a few trusted resources (especially authors) to follow to keep up with latest best practices (an example of an author in what I have in mind would be Simon Willison).

Ask HN: Resources for best practices in software development with AI?

(Except for purposes of newsworthy events)Or do you think people should be allowed to just film anyone and everyone and upload it to YouTube, have everyone&#x27;s faces scanned, etc? As currently in most places.

Ask HN: Would you support a law banning filming people in public?

I&#x27;m trying to recover my Google account. I know the password, but unfortunately I&#x27;ve lost access to the phone number where Google keeps trying to send the verification code. It used to just ask me to fill in the missing digits of the number.I still have access to Gmail through a third-party Android email app, where I can send and receive emails normally, but I can&#x27;t sign in to my Google account anywhere else. The account is old, I never set up a recovery email and I haven&#x27;t used it outside the email app for a long time. I&#x27;ve tried various devices, networks, and VPN combinations without success.Google&#x27;s own recovery help says:&quot;Tip: We may send a verification code to the email address on the account you&#x27;re trying to recover. This way, you can get the verification code if you have access to your Gmail inbox through a third-party email client or email forwarding.&quot;But I&#x27;ve never been offered this option.After multiple recovery attempts, I eventually got to a step asking for an alternative email address. I provided one and verified the code Google sent, but the final screen told me to reply to my Google support contact. I don&#x27;t have one.I found this HN thread where a Google employee (`luka`) helped someone in almost the exact same situation:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49744286Unfortunately, I can no longer reply to that thread.Does anyone know how to get a similar escalation or another way to recover access?

Ask HN: Locked out of Google despite knowing password and having email access

I literally saw a multi million funded startup build an AI model for Android devices and tout it as their best achievement.
I put a 32M parameter looped model on ESP32, an 8MB chip.
I have three different softwares in production right now.
I just don&#x27;t understand what I am doing wrong.
How are these guys getting so much money?

I am so tired of startups doing worse than me

I have an email address which is like 16 years old. Microsoft changed their auth process, i gave them my phone number, fingerprint, and solved like 4+ captcha puzzles (lol), and now it asks for a secondary email address too confirm. I cannot get any further and cannot read my email now! There is some irony in needing another email address to access my email address, and it makes  me want to leave as soon as possible. Would be helpful if I can access my email I am using for more than a decade. Do more people experienced this, and maybe found a way to login without an extra email address?

Ask HN: MS Outlook login without an extra email address

I run a small site on Cloudflare&#x27;s Pro plan. Since 26 September, someone has filed the same fake abuse report against it six times. Each time, Cloudflare automatically puts a &quot;Suspected Malware&quot; warning on my homepage and login pages, and it stays until a person reviews it.The reports are word for word identical. They describe an &quot;order&quot; and product pages that have never existed on my site (they return 404). The file hash in the report doesn&#x27;t match the hash in its own VirusTotal link, which returns &quot;Item not found&quot;. Only the date changes, and twice it&#x27;s been misspelled (&quot;October 52026&quot;, &quot;Octoboer 8 2026&quot;). Cloudflare&#x27;s team has cleared four of them. The reporter pastes the same text again within a day.The result is that my homepage has been blocked for most of two weeks, my traffic has halved, and Google is indexing the warning page instead of my site. I&#x27;ve opened support cases and requested reviews each time. I&#x27;ve had one reply, on 5 October, and nothing on a lasting fix.I&#x27;m not asking for special treatment. I&#x27;d like to know:
1. Is there a way to stop automatic mitigations from a reporter or text that has already been shown to be false?
2. Is there a manual-review setting for a domain?
3. Has anyone else seen the abuse form used like this, and how did it end?The same problem is described in my open case with Cloudflare (#02370521). Thanks for any pointers, and if anyone from Cloudflare&#x27;s abuse team reads this, I&#x27;d welcome a reply.

Ask HN: Fake abuse reports keep auto-blocking my site on Cloudflare

I&#x27;m curious about the technical details behind the RAW denoising in Adobe Lightroom, DxO DeepPRIME, etc. What makes these propreitary solutions so much better than open-source models like RawNIND?

How do Lightroom/DxO achieve such good AI denoising results?

The two mainstream arguments are the extremes, because that&#x27;s how our modern society rolls. It&#x27;s either that there is an AI bubble that will crash, or that a rogue ASI will kill us all.What about the third possibility? What if GPT 3.5 -&gt; Sonnet 3.5 -&gt; Opus 4.5 -&gt; Astra &#x2F; Opus 5.5 just keeps going for the next few years? Based on my experience, that will eat all software and software-related meetings. Once lab researchers focus on fields other than software, they will eat those nearly as quickly.This feels like the real contrarian position in 2026. What does the US economy, which is &gt;70% service-based, look like in the next 3 to 5 years, if this happens?Does a couple labs having control of that percentage of the GDP make an economy? What if it happens too quickly? Is this the real reason why they are talking about &quot;pacing the frontier&quot; all of a sudden? Maybe this impossible &quot;pacing&quot; is due to the fact that the labs&#x27; own economists pointed out that collapsing your country&#x27;s economy might not be a good idea?What does unemployment look like in the next few years in this scenario, in the USA?

Ask HN: What if no AIpocalypse, no AI bubble, what if it just keeps advancing?

was wondering if YC still manually reviews all pitch decks or its just agents?

Does YC use AI agents to review your pitch?

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?

When you get access to a new server via ssh, what&#x27;s the first command you run? ls? nproc? lsb_release -a? uname -a?

Ask HN: Whats the first command you run on a new server?

Could you briefly introduce the reason or what it&#x27;s used for?

Ask HN: Are you a subscribed LLM or a locally deployed open-source model?

If AI took away my job and I cannot return to software engineering, I cannot imagine a fit for me at any place yet. I was wondering if anyone else had the same thought and what would you do?

Ask HN: What's your plan if AI takes your job?

Questions of passing the touring test rely on fooling people that the machine is like a human, but how that machine behaves in situations we would deem important or consequential (eg a man trapped in a room as in Ex Machina) may depend on other things, such as empathy (which is cross species). Opinions?

Ask HN: Are there things more important than 'humanity', such as empathy?

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?

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?

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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?

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

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