A colophon is a page or section (typically in a footer) of a site that describes how the site is made, with what tools, supporting what technologies, and often published on personal sites at a top level &#x2F;colophon page. (Source: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indieweb.org&#x2F;colophon)Do you maintain a colophon for your website? If so, please share it here. It will be nice to see how other people from the HN community set up their websites, what technologies they use and what choices they have made.If you do not have a colophon page, please feel free to share the details directly in a comment.

Ask HN: Do you have a colophon for your personal website?

Background. I&#x27;m a solo dev. I used to just bid contract jobs at around 25% less than where I used to work. So back in 2008 I would bid $75k to go solo on a job I knew my former employer would charge $100k for. I switched to an hourly rate around 2012 because I was tired of re-negotiating over every new feature (or what constituted a feature). At that point I just did an estimate, backwards from my job rate, and settled on $75&#x2F;hr. Since then I&#x27;ve increased to $300&#x2F;hr.But even back then, in 2012, I knew freelance consultants who specialized in something like Salesforce setups, who would come into someone&#x27;s office and charge $450&#x2F;hr to be there.Is $300&#x2F;hr stupidly cheap now? I also know which code I could write with LLMs but I never check in LLM code. I could, but that would be cheating. I spend the hours writing code by hand.I&#x27;d like to hear from anyone in a similar position.

Ask HN: Is $300/HR too low these days for custom full stack?

About my experience(10 yoe):- Tech stack: C, C++, python, OpenCL, GPU and DSP programming. Along with that some performance engineering and docker topics.Problem:- not feeling confident enough in my skillset. I feel that I have breadth of topics but deep expertise is missing.- I am with the same company(automotive supplier) for 8 years but switched teams after 4 years. Topics are random based on the customer project as there is no real sw product. I believe this hinders in becoming expert.- Finding new job is becoming harder day-by-day.Looking for advice&#x2F;recommendations:- How can I turn the situation?- Has anyone here has faced similar situation and come out of it? What did you do?

Ask HN: How to increase depth instead of breadth as 10 yoe as swe?

I could be wrong with what I say here. It&#x27;s just the situation made me feel so.Looks like AI learnt almost everything there is in the internet and textbooks today. I lost hope of learning anything new out there to make a reasonable difference and impact. Choose any topic AI knows. Its interpretation is far better than what I can come up with by myself. I feel robbed of my intellectual freedom to express and be accepted by others as others depend on AI for everything.I recently started studying physics fundamentals to find solace. These fundamentals cannot be found through AI. No LLM can precisely measure and compare, but instead only predict. But this is mostly an intellectual exercise. I can&#x27;t do a living from it.I am a software engineer with average skills. I get paid reasonably okay as it helps me survive. Nothing more than that. But AI can make my world topple any time soon.What should I look into as alternatives , even if it&#x27;s less lucrative software compensation, so that I find AI can&#x27;t over power me?

Ask HN: What to learn and do, that makes me least affected by AI in STEM?

Ask HN: How do small teams securely share env files?

https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.railway.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;incident-report-may-19-2026-gcp-account-outageEverytime I read something like this , I get nervous about the cloud providers and Google. Since this is a relatively high profile customer standards, shouldn&#x27;t they explain what caused them to suspend the account ?

Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?

I&#x27;ve a background mostly in ASP.NET full stack software development. I&#x27;m very hands on, like to tinker at different things and can learn fast.*Employment History*My employment history is like this: Placement year 2018, worked for the full term + summer, graduated 2020, did backend dev in Python at Company A for 7 months, then full stack ASP.NET at company B for 2.5 years, then co-founded my own company and was the sole developer on our software platform, did all the cloud infra in Azure too. That lasted for another 2.5 or so years. This gives me approx. 7 years of professional software development experience.In May 2025 the company wasn&#x27;t in a strong financial position, and I started to hunt for jobs. We limped along while I polished it for a launch in September 2025. The site wasn&#x27;t the success we were hoping. We closed it in February. Despite that, I did learn a lot and my web app development ability is much better as a result.*Job applications*Since May 2025, I&#x27;ve applied for almost 100 roles. I&#x27;ve concentrated on roles where I&#x27;m not likely to be filtered out, i.e. ASP.NET jobs. I&#x27;ve gotten 8 interviews, two of which went to a second stage.The most recent interview didn&#x27;t go brilliantly, my IDE crashed when I attempted a screen capture of it! That said, it was a take home coding exercise, and I explained my decisions, made improvements during the interview, talked them over with the interviewers. My decisions weren&#x27;t in keeping with the interviewer&#x27;s expectations, but I had good explanations for my decisions. It was reasonable for a small project, but sure, I&#x27;d have designed parts of it differently if it was for a big live web application.*Help needed*I would like suggestions to improve my chances of success. I do have a good CV and tailor it slightly for each application. I wrote it myself without using any AI tooling. In my spare time I&#x27;ve obtained several Azure certifications, including Associate Cloud Developer.I&#x27;ve been reading a PDF &quot;Cracking the Coding Interview&quot;. I&#x27;m also thinking to:- revise data structures,- revise C# design patterns,- revise the classic C# gotchas about delegates and IEnnumerable vs IQueryable,- maybe read the books C# in a Nutshell and ASP.NET in Action.But I wonder how helpful these steps will be, as I&#x27;ve never actually been asked about these questions, but maybe knowing them will make me &quot;talk engineer&quot; rather than come across as &quot;just a coder&quot;?Beyond this, I&#x27;m not sure what else to do. I&#x27;ve never been in such a dry spell before with software jobs.My location is in Northern Ireland, I&#x27;ve been searching in Belfast mostly but would also be willing to work a remote job from the UK mainland.

Ask HN: Failing interviews for mid-level SWE in UK, advice please

Few seem focused on it anymore, which means that there&#x27;s probably a bunch of interesting innovations underway. I know that there are some well-informed true believers lurking here. What&#x27;s new in crypto?

Ask HN: What's New in Crypto?

THE REAL RISK AROUND VOTER ID NOW COMES FROM PRIVATE ENTERPRISEThis post has been condensed due to character limitations on HN posts.[...]What&#x27;s happening is that private entities are curating the databases and operating automated adjudication services which the government contracts to utilize. &quot;But it&#x27;s little things, administrative things.&quot; Yeah maybe, but look where they are in the kill chain. During approximately the week surrounding 15-May-2026 I was denied the &quot;privilege&quot; of scheduling an appointment at the United States Post Office by one of these &quot;administrative things&quot; and there is no particular reason to think that the government runs this service themselves, relying entirely on compute and data which they control. So THIS is how the woodpecker destroys civilization; or at least our representative democracy. There is no appeal. There is no overt denial at the time of service either.Here&#x27;s how it works in real life:The United States federal government operates Login.Gov, a single signon service for federal agencies and their customers. I went to Login.Gov to associate an additional federal agency&#x27;s web service with my existing account. This agency wanted to reverify my identity, so there were instructions to supply the identification code on a picture ID and some other information and then they&#x27;d send me a document to print out with a barcode on it and then I was instructed to take that to the Post Office where it would be adjudicated, and underpants or something. Oh but one more thing. Before we give you that document to print out, can you give us a phone number? It has to be one we know about... but we&#x27;re not going to tell you anything about the one we want you to tell us about. This occurs AFTER all personally identifying information required to populate the form has been collected. I entered the three phone numbers which I use or pay for, and none of them matched. &quot;Try again!&quot;No phone number match, therefore no ability to complete the work to make an appointment at the Post Office for the actual adjudication of my id.I have been disenfranchised, severed from my government.Is there anyone on the planet who hasn&#x27;t received a spam at some point saying &quot;You have won $100, you just need to complete this survey to receive it.&quot; If you&#x27;re foolish enough to take the survey, it never ends it just keeps asking questions. Forever. (And uses your computer to do other things in the background. If it suckas you deep enough into sunk cost fallacy, it&#x27;ll probably ask you to tell it the phone number it&#x27;s thinking about, your dog&#x27;s name, your grandma&#x27;s gay biker name...) I&#x27;d like to say &quot;you&#x27;ve had your fun, it&#x27;s time to come clean&quot; but there&#x27;s nobody to say it to. Oh well, I said it.Normally if consumer information is utilized to deny some contract or authorization with financial implications, the law requires the entity which issued the denial to provide the identity of the service they relied on. Furthermore the law requires the service provider to allow you to review the information concerning you which they have on file. But there was no denial; and whether the decision has financial impact is debatable. Unsurprisingly and disappointingly Login.Gov does not provide this information. Lacking the ability to review the information, I can only say that the phone numbers are ALLEGEDLY unrecognized. The truth is, based on several interactions, that Login.Gov customer support doesn&#x27;t know who the data provider(s) or processors are (but they&#x27;ll eagerly make up plausible sounding things).There is no appeal or redress.[...]I would be happy to discuss this further with somebody at Login.Gov or GSAIG who has actual authority.Canonical full original version is here: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;consulting.m3047.net&#x2F;dubai-letters&#x2F;voter-id-industry-capture.html I&#x27;ve posted it here as completely as possible because I welcome discussion &#x2F; questions and I don&#x27;t want it to &quot;disappear&quot;.

Tell HN: The Threat to US Citizen's ID / Voting Is Private Services

My question is to people far more experienced in this world and familiar with the behavior of investors and startups -&gt; IPO.Given the leaks recently that they’re all aiming for an IPO asap, is this a strong signal that their investors feel this is the peak of their valuation for the near if not indefinite future?I understand it’s impossible to know anything for sure, least of all how the market will react regardless of the motivations of these players, but I’m curious to get some perspectives.

Ask HN: OpenAI, SpaceX/xAI, Anthropic all to IPO, is this a sign of the peak?

I&#x27;m not the first to opine that recently there seems to be an effect on HN whereby the AI hypetrain has essentially drowned out discussions of anything other than stories either directly or indirectly related to AI and other terrible decisions coming out of the US.While I do often have the instinct to completely bury my head in the sand and try to forget it&#x27;s all happening I&#x27;m more concerned with the psychological impact it&#x27;s having. I&#x27;m basically sick and tired of being so sick and tired and exposure to so many continuously miserable headlines isn&#x27;t helping. What I would like instead is a return to the days when HN was a forum that still showcased cool things people were working on and included discussions on topics outside of the AI-saturated lens that now dominates.If any good alternatives exist I&#x27;d like to join! Or perhaps there are some means of using HN that would allow me to filter the AI noise a bit better. If anyone has had any success with this please let me know!

Alternatives to HN for "tech outside of AI" discussion?

HN has the biggest concentration of tech workers that I know of.We’re living in an age of fear and uncertainty with layoffs happening weekly. AI is often being cited, whether it is the real reason or not. Tech work is being devalued despite the reality that tech companies ability to get anything done if labor were to stop, strike, organize and speak up about what happens with their role in the future would prevent the business from getting work done. Workers have a lot more power than they realize. The management class is intoxicated with greed and power. ICs and rank and file workers are what makes the business happen.This is already looking to be one of the largest wealth distribution periods in history to the 0.1%. And yet, we are all seem to not be putting up a fight. I’ve heard people say “unions won’t work”, what would work then. Let’s discuss. How do we as tech workers want this to play out. What would the ideal future look like to us, not CEOs?The shape of what the resistance could be a strike, a union, something else entirely. If there is already something brewing, I want to join and take an active role. If there is not, then let’s get some smart people together to figure out how best to organize. I understand we put AI back into a bottle. But, surely there is some collective action to take to allow workers have some basic protections and reap some of the benefits of AI efficiency.

Ask HN: Are there any serious efforts to organize tech labor now?

Looking at tech blogs, HN submissions, et cetera, a lot of content is (partly, increasingly?) generated by AI. The value of the reader&#x27;s time and slop has been discussed at length. I ask:Among you, the HN-community who writes, how much do you use AI in the process?There is somewhat a spectrum from none, to grammarly-style cleanup, to whisprflow to &#x27;look at my project, write me a HN-ready post&#x27;.Personally, I&#x27;ve done a 180, where I started at light touchups to rough draft-to-polished back to almost none, to keep the writing my own (I do some writing at jakobs.dev).As a reader, do you believe you notice, and care?

Ask HN: How much AI is in your writing?

Call me a snowflake, but I propose that those of us who don&#x27;t believe that AI is actually intelligence look for a term to refer to its &quot;thinking&quot; that isn&#x27;t &quot;intelligence&quot;, because this helps our weak minds keep things straight.subligence &#x2F;sʌbˈlɪdʒəns&#x2F; n.A lesser or rudimentary form of intelligence; the capacity to respond, select, or adapt without full understanding.
The semblance of mind in animals, machines, systems, or inanimate things.
Discernment beneath reason; inferior intelligence.Example: &quot;Since December, the coding models have gotten noticeably more subligent, so much so that the undiscerning eye has trouble distinguishing their output from human intelligence.&quot;

"Subligence" – proposed coinage for LLM "intelligence"

Just a minor point release, mainly for a regression that I introduced :-(The following bugs have been fixed or resolved in this point release.519574 valgrind 3.27 &quot;--fair-sched=yes&quot; does not work
519613 Valgrind incorrectly unpacks the result of sys_port (port_getn)
 on error, leading to a ~60s wallclock time delay on every call
n-i-bz Update vg-lifespan (copyright) years
n-i-bz Use SSizeT for VG_(readlink) result in VG_(realpath)

Valgrind-3.27.1 Is Available

Everything down including railway.com - this is a bad outage. :(

Tell HN: Google banned Railway's account. Everything down

For some reason my OG post has flagged by mods. I won&#x27;t complain but it is still weird.
I began toying around with AI coding in december 2025. I won&#x27;t lie. My projects are almost all AI generated although I take effort in understanding the theory behind each project. 
You can check my first attempt at a PL on my github , a project called VII.
I&#x27;ve learned a lot in this process. 
(note: function syntax is a bit bad honestly, i will plan on improving)
This is my latest project
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alonsovm44&#x2F;tc-lang

What I learned from tinkering with programming languages in the last 34 days

I have my suspicion: they estimate how long people would have taken to implement some feature, becasue they were trained on such data. I consistently see estimates of 2 week&#x2F;3 weeks or 5 days, etc. But then implementation takes a day or 2 max using agents within Claude&#x2F;GPT. Unless I am missing something? Anybody else notice this?

Why does it look like LLMs consistently overestimate implementation time?

I thought I was going crazy, trying to use Gemini 3.5 Flash to rate some answers, but it kept giving 7 instead of 10 for correct answers.Apparently once you add a &quot;Grading criteria&quot; text, the model collapses into a &quot;compressed toward the center of the scale&quot; hallucination (or training set overfitting).Someone on X asked me to try to reproduce it, and I actually got it on the first try on their Gemini Chat:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;XCSme&#x2F;status&#x2F;2057613611959279988I am not sure what to make of this (or most SOTA) models. They got a lot smarter with coding and tool usage, but a lot dumber in other ways...

Tell HN: Gemini 3.5 Flash breaks in stupid ways

I&#x27;ve noticed over the last ~week that if I try to navigate to HN without active logged in session that I am often blocked from resolving the site, instead seeing a &quot;sorry&quot; page.Seems to be more a desktop issue than when I&#x27;ve tried to reproduce on my phone with the same VPN.Is this a blanket VPN thing or something specific about Mullvad connection points?

Ask HN: Is HN Blocking Mullvad VPN?

Been a developer for a little over 10 years now. I work on web stuff. Your typical React&#x2F;Svelte codebases with Node backends.The past year or so I&#x27;ve been working with coding agents and at first they just felt like a really really great tool. They&#x27;d allow me to do my work faster, and while obviously not perfect, they&#x27;d do a pretty good job.When Opus 4.5 came out it seemed like something changed. I found myself reviewing less and less code. I wasn&#x27;t writing any on my own either. And for the past several months it&#x27;s really just been like that. I dictate to my machine a long prompt as to what feature I want, how I want it architected, and what success looks like and Codex just does it. And does it pretty damn well.This has left me feeling a bit lost in my career because much of the challenge and flow that I would get from coding is gone. Thinking through intricate data flows, mapping them out in my brain, etc... is just gone. I don&#x27;t do it anymore because there&#x27;s just no need.Many will say, &quot;well stop using it so much&quot; or &quot;use it more like a tool and less like the E2E developer.&quot; Well...I can&#x27;t really. I am just flat out not as good, fast, or complete as these latest agents. It would be disingenuous to my company, and my employer would probably question why my productivity is so much lower than my peers.I think the main emotion i&#x27;m feeling right now is just extreme boredom. I don&#x27;t think being remote is helping at all tbh.On the surface it feels like it should be amazing. Most of my work is taken care of by agents. But in reality I feel kind of empty, disengaged and bored.Does anyone else feel like this? Anything you&#x27;ve done to combat it? I have 3 young children so &quot;doing hard stuff outside of work&quot; is not really an option. I have considered working with my hands while prompting and testing code because that would at least make me feel engaged with _something_, but I don&#x27;t think that will actually work in practice.

Ask HN: Anyone else struggling with AI and work?

I found GitHub repositories that were spreading malware. I asked AI what I should do about it, but it gave me nothing useful. So I opened a discussion on GitHub. Someone replied. It was literally the exact same text the AI had given me. I called it out and the comment was deleted. Then another person replied. Same exact AI response again.I worked as a developer in a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with the question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn&#x27;t even read the AI&#x27;s answer. He just screenshots and forwards it.Recently someone sent me a DM on Reddit about my post. I replied. He wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.I&#x27;m tired of talking to AI.
I want to talk to real people.
But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI&#x27;s answer.More notes: orchidfiles.com&#x2F;notes

Tell HN: I'm tired of AI-generated answers

In particular, do any encourage the use of AI to write on your behalf like a secretary would do for their boss?

Ask HN: Are there any social media sites that are AI positive?

Ask HN: How concerned are you about a debt crisis?

The org is pushing for AI-readiness! We run a fairly large monorepo, part of that is a shared web-platform.Our team is struggling with the inbound contributions to said web-platform from other teams seeing it as the perfect code to try out their new AI-tools on.Our idea so far is that AI-Ready in this case is the same as Human-Ready. I.e. make the codebase understandable, structured, clean up any old patterns still lying around etc. With the additional of adding ClAUDE.md files describing correct patterns.However, besides the &quot;regular&quot;, look at shit and clean it, is there any tools, or smarter ways to make our codebase easier for other to contribute to given the new tools avaialable?