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New ask Hacker News story: Governments ban self-custody crypto, require backdoors on all computers (2035)

Governments ban self-custody crypto, require backdoors on all computers (2035) 6 by EGreg | 1 comments on Hacker News. It started quietly. Governments didn’t outlaw cryptography or decentralized protocols outright. Instead they pressured Apple, Microsoft, Google, Intel, AMD, and every other major vendor of chips, operating systems, and browsers to "comply with national security". Phase 1, the AI backdoor: Every new device shipped with a mandatory Trusted AI Module (TAM). Officially it was marketed as anti-fraud and child protection. In reality, TAM was a resident AI agent with kernel-level hooks. It intercepted every program running on the machine, scanned for "dangerous math", and reported "anomalous behavior" upstream. People were told it was like antivirus. Few realized it was more powerful than any rootkit ever devised. Phase 2, obsolescence of the old machines: At first people clung to their older laptops, Raspberry Pis, and off-grid servers. But u...
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New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: When you imagine, do you see the distance?

Ask HN: When you imagine, do you see the distance? 2 by imvetri | 0 comments on Hacker News. Answer - No. It is an eye seeing the Imagination. Not two eyes. What do you think?
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New ask Hacker News story: Form16x – Simplify tax season: JSON output and regime comparisons from Form 16

Form16x – Simplify tax season: JSON output and regime comparisons from Form 16 2 by taxedo | 1 comments on Hacker News. I got tired of manually copying numbers from Form 16 PDFs into India’s tax filing portal every year. So I built *Form16x*, a Python CLI + library that parses these PDFs into structured JSON. Beyond extraction, it can: - Consolidate multiple Form 16s if you switched jobs - Calculate taxes under both regimes → recommends the better one - Show salary/deduction breakdowns directly in the terminal (tree view, colored output) - Suggest tax optimizations (80C, 80D, NPS, etc.) - Provide a Python API (`TaxCalculationAPI`) with multi-year tax rules (AY 2020–2025) *Repo:* https://ift.tt/rEoyTh0 Form 16 is similar to a W-2 in the US or a T4 in Canada — semi-structured PDFs with inconsistent layouts. Filing usually means manual data entry. Form16x tries to make that structured and automatable. Would love feedback from HN — both on the technical approach (PDF parsing + structure...
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New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: What do you recommend for test observability?

Ask HN: What do you recommend for test observability? 2 by vrm | 0 comments on Hacker News. I maintain an OSS project with a very involved CI setup. We're at the point where it is worth having observability into which tests are flaky, especially within intra-test-run retries. An ideal solution would be a managed service that takes junit.xml exports from cargo nextest, vitest, playwright, pytest, and go test. What do you all recommend?
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New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Why is enrolling in Apple's Developer Program so difficult in 2025?

Ask HN: Why is enrolling in Apple's Developer Program so difficult in 2025? 7 by thomas_witt | 2 comments on Hacker News. I recently attempted to enroll a small 1-person company in the Apple Developer Program, and the process turned into a surprisingly terrible journey. I expected a quick online sign-up and a $99 payment – instead I got weeks of identity checks and problem after problem. Frustratingly, the whole thing started because I wanted to use Sign in with Apple. Apple forces you into the developer program just to enable it, and charges €99/year for the privilege. Google and Amazon both offer their equivalent login services for free, set up in minutes. I can’t see how this policy benefits Apple’s ecosystem. So I needed: - D-U-N-S verification: Apple required a D-U-N-S Number for the company – very uncommon in the EU. Applying took several days and even a manual phone confirmation with an outsourced D&B subsidiary. - Document uploads: Apple support then asked me to uplo...
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New ask Hacker News story: What 30k Free Users Taught Me About Charging $10/Month

What 30k Free Users Taught Me About Charging $10/Month 6 by evermike | 5 comments on Hacker News. Two years ago we decided to test an idea. What if we built a small native Trello power-up — simple, clean, and entirely dependent on the marketplace? Could it turn into a small business? Could it be a model for side projects? It took off fast. 30,000+ installs, thousands of daily users, and today—over 500 paying customers. Sounds good, right? Not really. On the bright side — Trello is a fair ecosystem. Even small developers get discovered. No downranking, no hidden boost for “big players.” Clean UI guidelines, seamless integration, no middlemen, no 30% commission. Just connect Stripe and go. A perfect playground for a polished mini-product. But then reality set in. We priced it simply: $10 per workspace. Flat. Unlimited people, unlimited projects. Sounds fair? Turns out even $10/month was a huge barrier. When it was free, growth was fast and constant. Teams used us daily for months, som...
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New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Were programmers more surprised than general public by ChatGPT in 2022?

Ask HN: Were programmers more surprised than general public by ChatGPT in 2022? 3 by amichail | 2 comments on Hacker News. Maybe programmers were more skeptical about what AI could do before ChatGPT was released?
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