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New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?

Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha? 39 by Rooster61 | 46 comments on Hacker News. First off, this thread is NOT a petition to rally against the moderation team. Considering the deluge of trash they deal with every day, I think they are doing a valiant job and are to be commended. Consider it merely a place to discuss, which is what HN does best. That said, it's becoming more and more obvious every day that there is a tremendous amount of attempts by bots, and specifically AI agents, to inject slop into HN threads. I worry about the integrity of the discourse here and if the ever growing wave of garbage will overtake staff resources to deal with it. Is it time to implement captcha for HN? If so, should it be out of the box, or a new mechanism more tailored to the security and privacy-centric nature of the HN readership? Are captchas even still effective enough in the age of AI to warrant their use?

New ask Hacker News story: Cancelled 2x Cursor Ultra plans, here's why

Cancelled 2x Cursor Ultra plans, here's why 4 by throwawayround | 4 comments on Hacker News. Posting this because it took me way too long to figure out what was going on, and I wish I had seen a post like this earlier. I just canceled two Cursor Ultra plans. My usage went from a steady ~$60–100/month to $500+ in a few days, projecting ~$1,600/month. Support told me this was “expected.” I did not suddenly start doing 10x more work. Cursor shows a 200k context window and says content is summarized to stay within limits. Pricing is shown as $ per million tokens. Based on that, I monitored my call count and thought I was being careful. What I did not realise: - Cursor builds a very large hidden prompt state: conversation history, tool traces, agent state, extended reasoning, codebase context. - That state is prompt-cached. - On every call, the entire cached prefix is replayed. - Anthropic bills cache read tokens for every replay. - Cache reads are billed even if that content is late...

New ask Hacker News story: Developing a high level language over Zig

Developing a high level language over Zig 2 by ziyaadsaqlain | 0 comments on Hacker News. Hi everyone I saw zig is and intresting language I am learning it and also making a transpilied High level language over it I want some help with developing syntax. in my lang there are three types of var declaration 1) using local keyword this are added in arena of the specific function. 2) using let keyword this are on stack but i am finding solution to make strings easier here. 3) manual memory but my transpiler will automatically use defer keywords so they are safe and delete once block exit 4) using unsafe direct fully manual memory management but still my transpiler will not let compiler till once in code the are freed.

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: We built an air-gapped document vault with encrypted print and export

Ask HN: We built an air-gapped document vault with encrypted print and export 2 by KevinG777 | 0 comments on Hacker News. Hi HN, We are working on a document vault designed for people and organizations who cannot accept cloud exposure. The system is intentionally boring in some ways: • No required accounts • No cloud dependency for core functionality • Fully offline operation • Local encryption • Air-gapped storage • Encrypted export and controlled, encrypted printing The printing piece is why we started this. In many environments, printing is still unavoidable, and it remains one of the largest data-leak vectors. Most privacy tools stop at storage and ignore output entirely. This is not meant to replace cloud storage for everyone. It is for cases where the threat model assumes: • Networks are hostile • Cloud accounts will eventually be compromised • Convenience must sometimes be traded for control We are explicitly not claiming: • “Unhackable” • “Military-grade” • “Zero risk” We ar...

New ask Hacker News story: 50k people were dropped from one AI training project during the holidays

50k people were dropped from one AI training project during the holidays 3 by KyleW9 | 3 comments on Hacker News. During the holidays, 50k people were dropped from one AI training project without the story reaching the front page. That tells you how invisible this expert workforce still is. Right before the new year, the AI training community absorbed one of its biggest shockwaves: 50k contributors waking up to sudden removal and a one-line “quality requirements changed” message, with no real path to recover. For many, it meant losing time, momentum, and income. This isn’t a post against AI training, just more of a defense for experts’ contributions. RLHF and data annotation help make models reliable, effective, and safe in the real world, and scaling it will demand deep expertise across industries, languages, and edge cases. If we’re serious about scaling it, we need to start elevating the expert workforce that shapes AI across domains. We can’t treat them as disposable or erase th...

New ask Hacker News story: ProjectCLI: The Swiss Army Knife CLI for bootstrapping any project

ProjectCLI: The Swiss Army Knife CLI for bootstrapping any project 3 by dawitworku | 0 comments on Hacker News. Hi HN, I built ProjectCLI (@dawitworku/projectcli) — a universal interactive CLI for developers who are tired of juggling multiple project generators. Problem: Setting up a new project often requires learning dozens of commands: create-react-app, cargo new, poetry new, laravel new, etc. It’s tedious, error-prone, and repetitive. Solution: ProjectCLI lets you scaffold *any project in minutes*: - Multi-language support: JS, TS, Python, Rust, Go, Java, PHP, C#, Dart, Swift, Ruby. - Multi-framework support: React, Next.js, Vue, NestJS, Express, Django, Flask, Actix, Axum, Rocket, Laravel, Symfony, Spring Boot, etc. - Interactive CLI with fuzzy search, smart defaults, and context awareness. - Preflight checks for missing tools. - Remote templates: clone any GitHub starter kit for instant scaffolding. - One-click CI/CD & Docker setup. - Non-interactive mode for automation or...

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Launching niche service soon, how should I prepare?

Ask HN: Launching niche service soon, how should I prepare? 2 by thedangler | 1 comments on Hacker News. Hello, I've been working on a niche product MVP for little over a month and I believe its ready for beta testing. What are some steps to help with a solid beta launch? Here is my list before launching: 1. Web page demonstrates features and what problem it solves. 2. Join a beta wait list that adds to a community, for support, videos, feature requests. 3. Posting messages on specific communities on social sites like Reddit, discord. 4. Offer lifetime pass for decent price that will give the users a boosted plan. Current issues: I have no idea how to price it out. It will be broken down into 3 plans for most people, then special cases will have 2 additional plans. Some features have real measurable costs for example bots, SMS, etc. Not sure how to mark those up. Make them A-la-cart? I still need to build iOS and Android applications but won't do that without real feedback a...