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New ask Hacker News story: iOS: Apps persist data after full deletion

iOS: Apps persist data after full deletion 5 by WorldDev | 1 comments on Hacker News. I noticed that apps retain info after being deleted. That means we are tracked by the app even after we deleted it. For example, if I delete whatsapp or instagram, choosing to delete all data, then restart the phone and reinstall the app, it will automatically know my account. So there is clearly a persistence mechanism that it uses. I tried to understand which one. - UIDevice.identifierForVendor Apple clearly states this identifier is changed as soon as all apps from the same vendor are deleted. that's what I tested, so this identifier is not the culprit - DCDevice.generateToken This only stores 2 bits on the device, so not enough to store a username - Keychain services (password) I checked in the password app, no password was saved for these app - iCloud Keychain I turned off this feature Does anyone know the technical way apps persist data even after total deletion? One of the big appeals of...
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New ask Hacker News story: I built a screen-aware desktop assistant; now it can write and use your computer

I built a screen-aware desktop assistant; now it can write and use your computer 4 by luthiraabeykoon | 2 comments on Hacker News. I posted Julie here a few days ago as a weekend prototype: an open-source desktop assistant that lives as a tiny overlay and uses your screen as context (instead of copy/paste, tab switching, etc.) Update: I just shipped Julie v1.0, and the big change is that it’s no longer only “answer questions about my screen.” It can now run agents (writing/coding) and a computer-use mode via a CUA toolkit. ((https://tryjulie.vercel.app/)) What that means in practice: - General AI assistant, it hears what you hear, sees what you see, and gives you real-time answers for any question instantly. - Writing agent: draft/rewrite in your voice, then iterate with you while staying in the overlay (no new workspace). - Coding agent: help you implement/refactor with multi-step edits, while you keep your editor as the “source of truth.” - Computer-use agent: when you want, it ca...
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New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Which AI productivity tools are you using in 2026?

Ask HN: Which AI productivity tools are you using in 2026? 2 by Vishal19111999 | 0 comments on Hacker News.
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New ask Hacker News story: Security breaks during partial failures – design notes from distributed systems

Security breaks during partial failures – design notes from distributed systems 2 by sandhyavinjam | 0 comments on Hacker News. TL;DR: Many security mechanisms fail not during attacks, but during partial outages. This post documents early design notes for a failure-aware security framework for distributed systems. The problem In production distributed systems, security often breaks when things are half working: auth services degrade → retries explode fallback paths widen access recovery logic becomes the attack surface Nothing is “exploited”, yet the system becomes unsafe. Most security models assume stable components and clean failures. Real systems don’t behave that way. Design assumptions We assume: correlated failures retries are adversarial timeouts are unsafe defaults recovery paths matter as much as steady-state logic We don’t assume: global consistency perfect identity reliable clocks centralized enforcement Framework ideas (high level) This work explores four ideas: 1. Fail...
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New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Why is Apple's voice transcription hilariously bad?

Ask HN: Why is Apple's voice transcription hilariously bad? 3 by keepamovin | 1 comments on Hacker News. Why is Apple’s voice transcription so hilariously bad? Even 2–3 years ago, OpenAI’s Whisper models delivered better, near-instant voice transcription offline — and the model was only about ~500 MB. With that context, it’s hard to understand how Apple’s transcription, which runs online on powerful servers, performs so poorly today. Here are real examples from using the iOS native app just now: - “BigQuery update” → “bakery update” - “GitHub” → “get her” - “CI build” → “CI bill” - “GitHub support” → “get her support” These aren’t obscure terms — they’re extremely common words in software, spoken clearly in casual contexts. The accuracy gap feels especially stark compared to what was already possible years ago, even fully offline. Is this primarily a model-quality issue, a streaming/segmentation problem, aggressive post-processing, or something architectural in Apple’s speech st...
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New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: When do we expose "Humans as Tools" so LLM agents can call us on demand?

Ask HN: When do we expose "Humans as Tools" so LLM agents can call us on demand? 3 by vedmakk | 0 comments on Hacker News. Serious question. We're building agentic LLM systems that can plan, reason, and call tools via MCP. Today those tools are APIs. But many real-world tasks still require humans. So… why not expose humans as tools? Imagine TaskRabbit or Fiverr running MCP servers where an LLM agent can: - Call a human for judgment, creativity, or physical actions - Pass structured inputs - Receive structured outputs back into its loop At that point, humans become just another dependency in an agent's toolchain. Though slower, more expensive, but occasionally necessary. Yes, this sounds dystopian. Yes, it treats humans as "servants for AI." Thats kind of the point. It already happens manually... this just formalizes the interface. Questions I'm genuinely curious about: - Is this inevitable once agents become default software actors? (As of basically n...
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New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How long before the first civilian cargo flights are AI piloted?

Ask HN: How long before the first civilian cargo flights are AI piloted? 2 by givemeethekeys | 2 comments on Hacker News. Is it 2026? Within 2 years? 5 years? 10 years? I can understand how passenger flights will take a while longer - but would cargo flights that don't have nearly the safety concerns would be AI piloted much sooner? If so, how much sooner?
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