AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)

Top comment by creakingstairs

An open-source, self-hostable app for sending out newsletter to your friends and families. I'm mostly making it for myself because I want to share what I've been up to and family photos, without uploading it to Facebook or whatnot.

At the moment, the flow goes like this:

1. During the week, write posts for things that have happened.

2. Posts can be assigned to groups. (family, friends etc).

3. At the end of the week (or month), the app automatically creates a newsletter for each group by pulling posts assigned to each group. Add some final touches yourself and send it off!

4. Every newsletter will come with a link to download all images.

I'm trying to design it to be as old people friendly as possible which meant making the experience as simple as it can get. This made me settle on email newsletters. Emails are ubiquitous, have been around and will be around for a while. It's easy to sign up and things are just pushed to you instead of having to go to another app.

Another thing I want is multilingual support as my family is Korean my in-laws are not.

I'm hoping to get an MVP working this week and get some testing done with my own parents and in-laws.

2. Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs?

Top comment by gyomu

There are two kinds of engineers.

Those who can’t stop raving about how much of a superpower LLMs are for coding, how it’s made them 100x more productive, and is unlocking things they could’ve never done before.

And those who, like you, find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best.

The only thing I don’t understand is why people from the former group aren’t all utterly dominating the market and obliterating their competitors with their revolutionary products and blazing fast iteration speed.

3. Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?

Top comment by neom

Here I am for the millionth time, on HN, reminding everyone of an amazing gift: 2016 report by Nadia Asparouhova - "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure"[1] - Please do take the time to read and share it, it's been almost 10 years since Nadia published this work with the hope of inspiring some change outside of the OSS world, I'd suggest we need her words now more than ever. Thank you!

https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...

4. Ask HN: What is the best LLM for consumer grade hardware?

Top comment by kouteiheika

If you want to run LLMs locally then the localllama community is your friend: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/

In general there's no "best" LLM model, all of them will have some strengths and weaknesses. There are a bunch of good picks; for example:

> DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B - https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B

Released today; probably the best reasoning model in 8B size.

> Qwen3 - https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen3-67dd247413f0e2...

Recently released. Hybrid thinking/non-thinking models with really great performance and plethora of sizes for every hardware. The Qwen3-30B-A3B can even run on CPU with acceptable speeds. Even the tiny 0.6B one is somewhat coherent, which is crazy.

5. Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?

Top comment by longnguyen

My friend Dmytro[0] has been running a screenshot API called ScreenshotOne[1]. He's been building it solo and has reached $20K MRR recently.

[0]: https://x.com/DmytroKrasun

[1]: https://screenshotone.com

6. Ask HN: Tired of all the AI, what other cool tech is out there?

Top comment by puppycodes

There is sooooo much cool tech right now.

major advancements in hardware especially. Low cost FPGA's, amazing 3D printing tech, drones, its endless. There are some really interesting things happening in headsets for brainwave computer interfaces as well. Theres radar, microwave and ultrasonic. Open source investigations, tons of security advances, zero knowledge systems, Theres handheld raman spectrometers. Don't forget all the wild ways we can connect socially right now with VR, AR, etc... Theres home lab genetic engineering with high voltage electricity, theres all kinds of new monetary tech, We are on the verge of creating a feasible cure for HIV. If your looking for software based ideas some of my favorite github accounts are @sindresorhus and @mafintosh are always doing something interesting.

In my opinion its harder to decide what not to dive into.

7. Ask HN: What HN posts inspired or changed your perspective the most?

Top comment by esperent

This [0] comment and discussion under it about how non technical businesses are very rarely run by technical people, and how if you apply your technical skills to such a business it can be a force multiplier.

Well, it so happened that my partner had started a small sourdough bakery the year before. I was thinking about investing in it. This comment provided some of the inspiration and now a few years later we're both working on it full time, we have three cafe branches, one production facility, 25 staff, thinking about opening another branch in a neighboring city. Our skills complement each other - she's great at baking and HR, I'm better at developing business processes, managing the tooling, researching equipment, making sure things are properly documented. We're both crap at marketing, but somehow we get by!

My old career as a graphics dev feels like a distant memory, but I do keep my skills sharp and might go back to it in the future.

It has by no means been an easy ride for me, I am forced to juggle a ton of jobs and many of them are way outside my comfort zone. But at the same time, I'm creating something in the real world, and providing employment for 25 people, whom I do my best to make sure are treated well and given a decent place to work. This feels far more impactful than my graphics work ever was.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24099409

8. Ask HN: What's your most unpopular dev opinion?

Top comment by zzo38computer

Programming languages (and many other programs) should not insist on using Unicode. Unicode string types (especially as the main string types and character types of the programming language) are harmful more than GOTO is, because GOTO won't affect API calls to libraries, while data types do affect API calls to libraries.

Although many programming languages try to avoid the problems of C programming language, some of these things that they try to avoid are not really so bad, and they often make it worse in other ways, anyways.

Computer programs should not have too many dependencies.

You should not use one character set for everything.

You should not use computers for everything, either.

ASN.1 DER is not a bad file format (and is often better than using other formats; I think DER is generally better than BER and CER, and is also generaly better than JSON and CBOR and others).

I also think that systemd is no good, but many people believe that (although also many people think that systemd is good).

Furthermore, HDMI is no good, and USB is no good, and UEFI is no good, and Unicode is no good.

X.509 client authentication would handle authentication better than 2FA, WebAuthn, OpenID, etc. (It can also be used for authorization as well as authentication, and this authorization can be partially delegated to yourself and/or others, therefore making fine grained personal access tokens unnecessary.)

TLS should not be mandatory for connections that do not require authentication (e.g. read-only access to public data), but TLS should still be allowed for any connections whether or not they require authentication. If you are only using the connection to download a file, and the contents of the file is not changing, then knowing the cryptographic hash of the data will be better than using TLS, although you can do both at once if you want to (these are not mutually exclusive).

For security within a computer, capability based security with proxy capabilities is a good way to do it, at the level of the operating system (rather than within a programming language or in a single program).

Programmers should not only program in modern computers, but should also program in old computers too.

9. Ask HN: Do you have a side project you're getting tired of?

Top comment by RadiozRadioz

Typically I get tired of a side project when I stop learning from it. There's a honeymoon period at the start when you're rapidly prototyping things and figuring it out. Then you get to the point where you've explored the problem domain, figured out what works, and have a clear path ahead - the rest of the work being to just implement the vision. This is the part I get bored.

Something switches in my brain when I've figured out how to solve a problem, it starts to seek a new problem because it considers that one "done", even though most of the work remains. Perhaps it's because that work is more "painting by numbers" after the problem is figured out. Does anyone else experience this?

10. Ask HN: Is anyone using AI conversation partners?

Top comment by vunderba

The ChatGPT mobile app in voice conversation mode works quite well for language practice with one important call-out: you have to give it a topic at the beginning otherwise it won't be able to drive the conversation forward and will stick to banal pleasantries.

So what I usually do is pick a random blurb in the news and paste the entire thing along with the Reuters link at the beginning and inform chatgpt that we'll be carrying on language practice specifically over that topic of discussion.

I've used this to carry an hour long foreign language practice in Spanish while walking my dog without even needing to look at my phone.