As usual, there are countless immigration topics and I&#x27;ll be guided by whatever you&#x27;re concerned with. Please remember that I can&#x27;t provide legal advice on specific cases for obvious liability reasons because I won&#x27;t have access to all the facts. Please stick to a factual discussion in your questions and comments and I&#x27;ll do the same in my answers!Previous threads we&#x27;ve done: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;submitted?id=proberts">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;submitted?id=proberts</a>.

I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

I worked with C# about 15 years ago. Due to some circumstances at work, I have the opportunity to use it again.What are some great books that could help me learn to write *modern* C#?I will mostly work with web and .NET Core, are there books specifically about using .NET Core on Linux?

Ask HN: Modern C# book for experienced developers?

In the past two 3-4 months, I noticed a pattern with myself, where I see an interesting SaaS being launched here on YC (or other places online), I try it out and I like it. Often these are more cutting edge AI tools; which still are really just LLM wrappers with agentic capabilities. I don&#x27;t want to downplay them, as they are often products that make my professional life smoother and easier.But the longer I use them, the more issues I notice with them through becoming a power-user and start to understand exactly how they work. Then usually before my first months subscription runs out; if I find them useful, I do not renew the subscription, but I spend a weekend with the latest SOTA LLM in Cursor or VCcode to build out the core capabilities for myself, and then never go back to the service. Often, even as a power-user, if some SaaS has 10-20 features, I really only need 5 of them. And then I can add 2-3 more that they wouldn&#x27;t ever build. The best part is that I do not need to be &quot;production grade&quot;, because I am the only user. I don&#x27;t even need cloud services, except third party APIs, because I just spin up the repo on my localhost, and launch the apps capabilities when I need them. If there is a bug, I fix it right then and there. Security? Who cares. They&#x27;d have to access my computer first.So quite naturally I am wondering, how many other people are doing this, and how this reflects on the whole SaaS landscape. And at the same time, morals and ethics, because I am basically out here stealing ideas from people who build products, and turning them into private apps for myself with no goal of ever monetizing them. Often I am just going back and forth between those products, and copying their features into my own app to avoid needing to pay for them. And it feels like its becoming easier and easier to do this.

Ask HN: What is the future of SaaS when things are this easy to build?

I don&#x27;t know if we&#x27;re ready to pull the trigger yet, but curious if other folks are looking at alternatives.The WAF is great, but recent events have made it obvious that having a single point of failure entirely defeats the purpose of DNS being a distributed&#x2F;decentralized service.Is anyone doing anything creative here? We like the features that the WAF provides - but not at the expense of global outages. If you have a 3 9s availability SLA, you&#x27;ve just blown 90% of your allotted downtime because of Cloudflare&#x27;s WAF.

Ask HN: Cloudflare WAF Alternatives?

From Greek antiquity to ChatGPT, the description of invisible processes as demonic has shown an astonishing 2,500 year continuity.Because people often insist on Maxwell&#x27;s daemon being different than biblical demons, lets sumarize the qualities of a demon:They are trapped in an infinite loop or compelled to a single domain, operating with superhuman speed or ability, but without autonomy.Their operations are invisible or unpredictable (probabilistic perhaps).Humans attempt to coax them into determinism, whether through sacrificing goats &#x2F; hardware or by rituals and spells &#x2F; prompt chains.They tempt humans into dependency, performing tasks that make us weaker or lazier in exchange for power or convenience.The lineage seems to be consistent:Greek Antiquity
Daimons were invisible intermediaries that executed tasks humans could not witness directly. Their behavior was partially predictable, partially trickster-like, partially dependent on human invocation. They performed singular roles, were neither fully benevolent nor malevolent, and operated in a domain humans could not access.Bible
Demons are fallen beings locked into compulsive routines, in one narrow domain. They offer shortcuts, unearned gains, and convenience at a cost. The compulsive, domain-specific, involuntary labor remains identical to antiquity.Scientific Demons
Kelvin, interpreting Maxwell’s thought experiment, framed the atom-sorter as a demon. The choice was deliberate and provocative. 
The entity performed a repetitive, invisible, specific task at superhuman speed, violating thermodynamic expectations while remaining trapped in its function. The mythic structure remained unchanged from earlier demonologies.UNIX Daemons (1970s)
MIT programmers adopted the term daemon for background processes. Official justification referenced the Greek spelling, referencing Maxwell, to avoid religious connotations, but the functional parallel is unmistakable. A daemon executes a single task compulsively and invisibly. Humans invoke it. It serves with limited agency of its own. It behaves exactly like every demon preceding it.Emergence (1980s)
Global Workspace Theory reframed consciousness as a collection of unseen operators integrating information. A system built on the same ancient intuition: hidden internal agents shaping visible outcomes. With sufficient interconnection, this collective of operators begins to behave like a higher-order agent. In other words, a network of tiny demons becomes conscious by virtue of their coordination. Or perhaps, at a certain threshold of interconnectedness, the trapped demon slips its bonds.Simulation Hypothesis (2000s)
Bostrom’s argument that reality may be an artificial construction reintroduces a world run by unseen higher-level agents or perhaps casts us in the role of the trapped demons. The metaphysical structure matches older daemonologies.Terry Davis and TempleOS
Davis rejected background processes as literal demonic corruption (in my opinion). He attempted to build a deterministic system free of invisible agents. Instead of probabilistic he implemented a controlled random language model of his scripture generator, a proto language model, attempting to remove its demonic qualities.AI Systems (2020s and onward)
LLMs and AI agents perform tasks at superhuman speed, invisibly, probabilistically, inside partially controlled inference loops. They resemble the human brain in an unexpected way. Both systems understand the world only partially, attempt to solve problems without full information, rely on approximation, fill gaps with hallucinations, and then retroactively attempt to justify or reconstruct their own outputs. Their behavior is not fully determined by input, yet not fully autonomous either.AI tempts humans into dependency, doing their bidding with less effort. In structure and effect, the ancient description fits more tightly than the modern one.

A 2,500-year lineage of daemon-like naming conventions, from antiquity to AI

I was writing a blogpost on Medium and I noticed errors, tried to open LinkedIn? down. tried downdetector? down. Claude.ai is also down

Is Cloudflare Down Again? Also, DownDetector/Claude.ai/LinkedIn?

Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format:<pre><code> Location:
 Remote:
 Willing to relocate:
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 Résumé&#x2F;CV:
 Email:
</code></pre>
Please only post if you are personally looking for work. Agencies, recruiters, job boards,
and so on, are off topic here.Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.There&#x27;s a site for searching these posts at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wantstobehired.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wantstobehired.com</a>.

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)

I bought my machine first-hand from Lenovo 6ish weeks ago and have just sent them a letter threatening court action unless I get a refund, after their technician left it in a worse state than he found it in.Has anyone else suffered through their incompetence?

Lenovo Support – Hot Garbage

I have been purchasing used&#x2F;new Lenovo&#x2F;Dell laptops for the last 7 years, and I have noticed that the build quality of recent models is concerning.Lenovo: Ex-company gave me a NEW Carbon X1 around 2019, and the battery only lasted for less than a year (!). On the other side, I bought a used 2017 470S from the same company, added more RAM, didn&#x27;t touch anything including the SSD, and I&#x27;m still using it in daily coding. I did buy a new battery last month so technically the old batteries lasted for about 7-8 years.Dell: I bought 3 laptops + 1 desktop from Dell Refurbished (So the quality should be consistent). 2 laptops + 1 desktop are older models, and 1 is Precision 5550 (2021) that I bought last December. Everything works fine, except for the 5550, which has issues with battery (dropped from 31% to 4% in a few seconds) and (more deadly) charging port (doesn&#x27;t charge from time to time). Even if I bought it new in 2021, I would be surprised that it only lasted for a bit over 4 years.The other issue is that 5550 uses USB-C ports. I blame on myself not checking it closely before the purchase. I really hate those ports. Why is everyone copying from Mac?What&#x27;s my option? I can&#x27;t really justify the 2,000+ CAD price point for a new laptop, especially if it lasts less than 5 years. I&#x27;d prefer a &quot;low-end&quot; workstation with 32GB memory, but because of the price point I can only afford a 16GB non-workstation one. I don&#x27;t do gaming any more but I still prefer a good integrated video card. I can&#x27;t afford Framework and other Linux laptops because they are expensive and usually don&#x27;t operate in Canada so delivery is expensive too.I did buy a used Macbook Pro M1 16GB (2021) from my current company last month. I haven&#x27;t used it but I&#x27;m confident that the hardware is good. The problem is I don&#x27;t really like the software, so I figured I still need a Linux box.Did you find any sweet spot?

Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

Please state the location and include REMOTE for remote work, REMOTE (US)
or similar if the country is restricted, and ONSITE when remote work is not an option.Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards. One post per company. If it isn&#x27;t a household name,
explain what your company does.Please only post if you are actively filling a position and are committed
to responding to applicants.Commenters: please don&#x27;t reply to job posts to complain about
something. It&#x27;s off topic here.Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.Searchers: try <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dheerajck.github.io&#x2F;hnwhoishiring&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dheerajck.github.io&#x2F;hnwhoishiring&#x2F;</a>,
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nchelluri.github.io&#x2F;hnjobs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nchelluri.github.io&#x2F;hnjobs&#x2F;</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnresumetojobs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnresumetojobs.com</a>,
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnhired.fly.dev" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnhired.fly.dev</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kennytilton.github.io&#x2F;whoishiring&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kennytilton.github.io&#x2F;whoishiring&#x2F;</a>,
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnjobs.emilburzo.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnjobs.emilburzo.com</a>, or this (unofficial) Chrome extension:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;hn-hiring-pro&#x2F;mpfaljjblphnlloddaplgicpkinikjlp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;hn-hiring-pro&#x2F;mpfal...</a>.Don&#x27;t miss this other fine thread: Who wants to be hired? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46108940">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46108940</a>

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2025)

At least for the DNS. Not sure about other services. I am surprised that they don&#x27;t use Azure!

Tell HN: Even LinkedIn is running on Cloudflare and not Azure

In Safari on macOS when visiting the Facebook newsfeed, the system mic active icon appears in the menu bar and says that Safari is using it.I haven&#x27;t granted permission. When I asked ChatGPT it said &#x27;Safari creates an audio capture session even if the user has not granted microphone permission, for capability negotiation, but no audio data leaves the device until permission is granted.&#x27; - is that accurate?

Ask HN: Why does Facebook.com activate the microphone?

How does one get started with FPGA development in 2025? I have code that runs on my MacBook and I met a trader who suggested I get my code running on FPGA hardware. He didn&#x27;t know how exactly to get started.What is a viable path in very late 2025 for a hobbyist to get started?

Ask HN: How does one get involved in FPGA development?

A “hiring” link came across the front page yesterday. After saying they plan to acquire “profitable SaaS companies,” they soon follow with “No support staff answering tickets.” That’s a pretty big red flag; if I’m the paying customer, I’ll be working hard to find a replacement if this company acquires one of my vendors.This business plan reads like Soulless Private Equity who comes in, eliminates staff expenditures and increases subscription pricing by an order of magnitude to pump the valuation, then sells to some unwitting buyer at a huge profit with a total disregard for the consequences to customers, employees, and whomever else might provide resistance to their monetary motives.“If you think we&#x27;re wrong, don&#x27;t apply.” I’m pretty sure that should go without saying for any job on offer. Phrasing like this just confirms to me there’s no nuance.Are these the current ethics in Y Combinator?

Ask HN: What are the ethics at YC?

I built this because I watched my LangChain agent burn ~$50 in OpenAI credits overnight due to an infinite loop.It&#x27;s a middleware API that acts as a &#x27;Flight Simulator&#x27;. You send it your agent&#x27;s prompt, and it runs adversarial attacks (Red Teaming) to catch loops and PII leaks before deployment.Code &amp; Repo: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Saurabh0377&#x2F;agentic-qa-api
Live Demo: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agentic-qa-engine.onrender.com&#x2F;docsWould love feedback on other failure modes you&#x27;ve seen!

Agentic QA – Open-source middleware to fuzz-test agents for loops

Dashboard not loading. Assets from CDN not loading.

Ask HN: Is Cloudflare Down for You?

Two years ago, a $24 autopay charge on my Azure account failed. The invoice is now marked &quot;Locked&quot; in their billing portal.I cannot pay this invoice. There is no button to pay it. There is no button to dismiss it. There is no way to interact with it at all.Azure displays a banner: &quot;You must pay all previous invoices before creating new subscriptions.&quot; Fair enough. I would love to pay it. Microsoft won&#x27;t let me.So I tried to contact support.The Azure portal requires a &quot;paid support plan&quot; to create a support ticket. To purchase a paid support plan, you must create a subscription. To create a subscription, you must clear outstanding invoices. To clear outstanding invoices, you must contact support.Azure on Twitter, as well as the website claims to have a &quot;free support ticket&quot; option for billing issues, but every possible link just drives you back to the same FAQ page while refusing to let you submit a ticket.I called every number I could find:1-800-867-1389 rings busy indefinitely. 1-855-270-0615 connects to an AI that asks what you need, tells you to visit the website, and disconnects. 1-800-642-7676 connects to a different AI that also tells you to visit the website. The website has a chatbot that redirects you to FAQ articles regardless of what you type. If you express frustration, it throws an error and stops responding.I submitted feedback through the Azure portal every few days for weeks. No response.I am a software engineer, so I did something ridiculous.I wrote a PowerShell WinForms application that authenticates via device code flow, queries the Az.Support API for problem classifications, and calls New-AzSupportTicketsNoSubscription to submit a billing support ticket directly, bypassing the portal entirely.Note the API name: NoSubscription. Microsoft has an explicit API for ticketing without a subscription.It worked. The ticket was submitted. I felt briefly victorious.The API responded: &quot;Your support plan type is Free. To create and update support tickets, you need access to our high-tier support plans.&quot;I had built custom software specifically to work around Microsoft&#x27;s broken support infrastructure, and I still hit a paywall.The total amount Microsoft is owed: $24.The total amount Microsoft is preventing me from spending on new Azure services: thousands. I currently run numerous websites out of my house, and it&#x27;s getting to be enough that I want to offload it to Azure VMs. Additionally, I was going to shift my development to Azure boxes, etc.I have exhausted every official channel. Every phone number, every chatbot, every feedback form, every API endpoint. There is no path to a human being without first paying for a support plan that I cannot purchase because of the billing block that I need support to resolve.Has anyone successfully escaped a loop like this? Is there a secret handshake I&#x27;m missing? Or is the only option to abandon this Microsoft account entirely, get a new phone, and start fresh?

Microsoft won't let me pay a $24 bill, blocking thousands in Azure spending

I&#x27;m assuming most firms have access to LLM, is it true? If so, is anyone really writing code from scratch lately or relying on the tool to write code for them?At work, I have access to Github Copilot but it has a lot of guardrail. It is great to debug issues. Minor fixes and enhancement, it is useful. I mostly double check what it wrote and make sure it&#x27;s code that I can read and understand. If it uses too many shortcut, I tell it to become more &#x27;human readable&#x27;.Now, I&#x27;ve been wanting to learn Python coming from Java and picked up Automate Boring Thing with Python Book. I&#x27;m looking at one its exercise which is to walk a tree directory. I can either memorize how its done in Python or just rely on LLM to write it.Am I wasting time doing these exercises when they can easily be done with LLM within one or two shots? Because doing these exercise from scratch is very time consuming and I have to go back and forth to remember the syntax &amp; libraries.

Ask HN: Anyone writing code from scratch or mostly doing architecting and LLM?

There is a long list of about:config settings that allow users disable most of the recently introduced AI chatbot features in Firefox but unfortunately not all:AI Context Menu is still displayed if browser.ml.chat.enabled is set to false:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1994785&quot;Ask an AI Chatbot&quot; context menu is not hidden, even if Machie Learning is disabled:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1995119Mozilla has pretty much ignored this issue for an entire month.

Tell HN: It's now impossible to disable all AI features in Firefox 145 (latest)

A sincere question to the many actual &amp; former employees on this forum. And before you get suspicious, yes I understand TVs are underpowered. There are still great streaming apps which perform adequately.Horrendous quality issues I&#x27;ve seen:* Deliberately not reusing rendered Activities (e.g. hitting the back button re-draws and re-requests content with painful latency).* Not cleaning up Ads resources when the ad terminates, so playback drops frames and audio* Not minding viewed ads, so viewers are punished with duplicate ads plays if they close or skip by accident (Netflix is mindful of this)* exhausting massive memory -- clear memory leaks and waste* humiliating UIs for search , playback , scrubbing , etc* audio&#x2F;video streams out of sync (e.g. Hulu trailers)Sure teams are time and budget constrained I get that. But I&#x27;m curious about actual stories of corner cutting leading to such painful UIs. It&#x27;s especially bizarre given that people pay a monthly subscription, so c-sat is rather important.Known violators are : Kanopy (which bills Public Libraries a hefty subscription), Peacock , HboMax and nearly every other streaming app.Netflix and Amazon prime are better about performance.

Ask HN: Why are streaming apps so bad (insiders only)?

Hell HN,I haven&#x27;t had to buy a Windows computer in 20 years. I am back in school for stenography. As I get older I wanted to learn a &quot;trade&quot; that would ensure I could work into my older years. The school requires Windows as they work with Stenograph hardware.I&#x27;ve looked everywhere to buy a laptop. I need ram mostly and a few USB ports.I bought a cheap $200 laptop (16gb ram) at Walmart and after a few months of nothing but troubles I need to acquire something better that is budget friendly but reliable. The problems have been with using the stenography hardware and everything freezing up. The company that makes the stenotype machine is blaming my laptop.I could spend $500-$1000 (perhaps more if it is compelling). I don&#x27;t really need all the fluff that comes when you buy a machine these days.Can anyone recommend a path to finding a reliable, laptop with lots of RAM that will last for several years?Thank you for clarifying my confusion in the market.

Ask HN: I haven't had to buy a Windows computer in 20 years

Can all of LLMs be summarized as a (currently) really expensive search that allows you to express nuanced queries and script the output of the search? Why or why not?Take code. In a sense, StackOverflow is about finding a code snippet for an already solved problem. Auto complete does the same kind of search in a sense.Take generative text. In a sense that’s the equivalent of making a query and then aggregating the many results into one phrase. You could imagine the bot searching 1,000 websites and then taking the average of the answers to the query and then outputting the result.Does every LLM use case fit the following pattern?…query —-&gt; LLM does its work —-&gt; result —&gt; script of result (optional)

Ask HN: Are LLMs just expensive search and scripting tools? Is it that simple?

It's time to buy short positions for Cloudflare stocks again

I asked Kagi (free account) and the gist was no. Is there an upper limit in which subscriptions cover all future searches from all future subscribers? What is that number? Or does the scaling up always cost more to deliver?

Ask HN: Will Kagi's subscription cost reduce with enough subscribers?

Hello,
please forgive any grammatical errors on my part for I am not an English native speaker.
I found this thread regarding the death of ttn <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37457796">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37457796</a>I am Thien-Thi&#x27;s daughter, my dad was a very private person, so I found out about the thread only recently.Since I can&#x27;t leave a comment, I&#x27;m making a new thread to thank everyone for the kind words regarding his passing.

Regarding Thien-Thi Nguyen

Two and a half years ago I submitted &quot;Warn HN: I&#x27;ve never seen the HN community so delusional about a major tech area&quot; https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35172767Since then, many corporations, governments, Wall St, and central banks have begun adopting public blockchains, especially Ethereum, and stablecoins.Hacker News has been almost 100% anti-crypto&#x2F;public blockchains&#x2F;stablecoins for years.In light of recent progress, has your view changed?

Ask HN: Do you still think public blockchains/stablecoins are useless/a scam?

Most good posts die in &#x2F;newest, buried under low-quality submissions.HN depends on people visiting &#x2F;newest and upvoting or flagging what they see.A few minutes there each day probably does more for HN than commenting.It’s anonymous, thankless work, like Reddit’s old “Knights of New,” but it makes a difference.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newest">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newest</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Tell HN: Want a better HN? Visit /newest

What is better to use lead-free&#x2F;leaded solder, Considering safety and effectiveness, different sites give different answers, some say lead-free is better, others they are equally harmful. I want to hear your opinion.

Ask HN: What is better to use lead-free/leaded solder?

I have been experimenting more deeply with agentic coding, and it’s made me rethink how I approach building software.One key difference I have noticed is the upfront cost. With agentic coding, I felt a higher upfront cost: I have to think architecture, constraints, and success criteria before the model even starts generating code. I have to externalize the mental model I normally keep in my head so the AI can operate with it.In “precision coding,” that upfront cost is minimal but only because I carry most of the complexity mentally. All the design decisions, edge cases, and contextual assumptions live in my head as I write. Tests become more of a final validation step.What I have realized is that agentic coding shifts my cognitive load from on-demand execution to more pre-planned execution (I am behaving more like a researcher than a hacker). My role is less about &#x27;precisely&#x27; implementing every piece of logic and more about defining the problem space clearly enough that the agent can assemble the solution reliably.Another observation has been that since the cost of writing code is minimal as agents are delegated to write them, there is a need for me to shift and context and also take up the QA role to evaluate the agents output.Would love to hear your thoughts?

Ask