{

"scraped_date": "2026-02-27",

"source": "hacker_news",

"total_scraped": 129,

"nontech_count": 37,

"posts": [

{

"id": "47163885",

"title": "Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users",

"link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47163885",

"domain": "news.ycombinator.com",

"author": "miki123211",

"score": 600,

"comment_count": 224,

"created_ts": 1772098508,

"is_internal": true,

"post_text": "Hi HN,<p>I recently noticed that an YC company (Run ANywhere, W26) sent me the following email:<p>From: Aditya &lt;[email protected]&gt;<p>Subject: Mikołaj, think you&#x27;d like this<p>[snip]<p>Hi Mikołaj,<p>I found your GitHub and thought you might like what we&#x27;re building.<p>[snip]<p>I have also received a deluge of similar emails from another AI company, Voice.AI (doesn&#x27;t seem to be YC affiliated). These emails indicate that those companies scrape people&#x27;s Github activity, and if they notice users contributing to repos in their field of business, send marketing emails to those users without receiving their consent. My guess is that they use commit metadata for this purpose. This includes recipients under the GDPR (AKA me).<p>I&#x27;ve sent complaints to both organizations, no response so far.<p>I have just contacted both Github and YC Ethics on this issue, I&#x27;ll update here if I get a response.",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

"purpose"

],

"comments": [

{

"top": "Martin from GitHub here. This type of behaviour is explicitly against the GitHub terms of service, when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, and it's not just start-ups that take part in this sketchy behaviour to be honest. I've been plenty of examples in my time across the board.\nThe fundamental nature of Git makes this pretty easy for folks to scrape data from open source repositories. It's against our terms of service and those folks might want to talk with some lawyers about doing it - but as every Git commit contains your name and email address in the commit data it's not technically difficult even if it is unethical.\nFrom the early days we've added features to help users anonymise their email addresses for commits posted to GitHub. Basically, you configure your local Git client to use your 'no-reply' email address in commits and that still links back to your GitHub account when you push: \nhttps://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/reference/ema...\nI think that's still probably the best route. We want to keep open source data as open as possible, so I don't think locking down API's etc is the right route. We do throttle API requests and scraping traffic, but then again there have been plenty of posts here over the years from people annoyed at hitting those limits so it's definitely a balancing act. Love to know what folks here think though.",

"author": "martinwoodward",

"replies": [

{

"text": "> when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts.\nThis isn't my experience. I requested that you looked into a spammer in July 2025, you ignored my reply and the account is still active.\n----\nThank you so much for the report. We're sorry to hear you're receiving unwanted emails, but it's always a possibility when your public contact information is listed on the web. You can keep your email address private if you wish by following the steps here:\nSetting your commit email address\nWe do expect our users to comply with our Terms of Service, which prohibits transmitting using information from the GitHub (whether scraped, collected through our API, or obtained otherwise) for spamming purposes. I'm happy to look into it further to see if we can contact the reported user and let them know that this type of activity is not allowed.\nPlease let us know if you have any other questions or concerns.\n----\nMy reply which was ignored:\n----\nI understand it will happen from time to time. I'd rather be contactable (I've received legitimate emails today because my email is on my profile).\nPlease take further action. My email is public with the expectation that the ToS will be enforced. If GitHub isn't discouraging spammers then it makes it much harder to justify being contactable.\nAll the best,\nDavid",

"author": "david_allison",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I reported spammers ~5 times to GH, and every time the account went down in a couple of hours. Obviously mileage may vary, but I don't want the whole HN to think this process is completely broken.\nPlease keep reporting spammers, usually it works.",

"author": "gettingoverit",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "To confirm: is this email spammers, or spam on GitHub?\nI've had decent success with on-GitHub action (I'd wager ~80% action taken), but the effort to report email spammers doesn't seem worthwhile.",

"author": "david_allison",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "It's impossible for them to stop if you list your email on there. They could make it harder of course. But if you put your email out there for a human to find, then a script or bot or also find it.\nAnd yes of course they can also stop a specific spammer. But that spammer may pick up another account and email.",

"author": "tom_m",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "The grandparent post wasn't asking for them to do the impossible and stop all spamming, only to take action against the particular user that spammed them.",

"author": "angoragoats",

"depth": 3

}

]

},

{

"top": "YC is a proud investor in Flock, what YC Ethics thing are you talking about?",

"author": "scottydelta",

"replies": [

{

"text": "And that Optifye.ai demo with the sweatshop surveillance software",

"author": "otherayden",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "And Cluely",

"author": "cassonmars",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Cluely is not YC.",

"author": "tasn",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "he might be thinking of chadIDE \"the first brainrot ide\"",

"author": "fantasizr",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "the same Cluely that's on IG? I thought that was a fictional satire.",

"author": "insane_dreamer",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "I've spent a lot of my career marketing to developers, and spamming their GitHub account might be top 1 or 2 worst marketing tactics you can use.\nCold emailing rarely works by itself. Cold emailing \ndevelopers\n via emails you pulled from their GitHub accounts? At that point, you're actively harming your brand, and may as well just send them spam diet pill ads.",

"author": "keiferski",

"replies": [

{

"text": "If someone took the time to look through my GitHub contributions then pitched me with a job relevant to that work I would absolutely consider them. That's \nexactly\n the kind of recruiter I would like to work with.\nIf it's obviously just a bot scraping emails and sending generic job requests, that's very different.",

"author": "RandallBrown",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Yeah this - I got one of these emails someone sniffing around my GitHub not that long ago and it wasn't immediately obvious that it was a scammy recruiter, so I responded to sound out if they were actually interested in one of my projects. Got the same generic response about let's work together on something so I didn't respond.",

"author": "jamesfinlayson",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "> If it's obviously just a bot scraping emails and sending generic job requests, that's very different.\nIt's not even that nice. They scrape emails and send cold calls to try to get you to purchase their services.",

"author": "devmor",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "Wait why? That seems like the high effort and high specificity thing that I'd love to get.\nYou searched for people who do what you need to have done, found me, looked at what I've worked on and determined I'd be a good fit and you reached out? That's the number one way to get me to want to work for you.",

"author": "polishdude20",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "> You searched for people who do what you need to have done, found me, looked at what I've worked on and determined I'd be a good fit and you reached out? That's the number one way to get me to want to work for you.\nNo, their email templating tool finds an old throwaway repo you did 6 years ago, templates its name into a form email, and invites you to join a cattle call to be whiteboarded along with the rest of the shmucks",

"author": "woah",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "Ever wonder why YC has the \"Describe a time you most successfully hacked some system to your advantage\" question? It's because they select for founders that are willing to take advantage of legal gray areas. Airbnb repeatedly violated Craigslist terms of service and called it \"growth hacking.\" Reddit stole content from Digg and faked users. OpenAI trains their models on copyrighted content.",

"author": "an0malous",

"replies": []

},

{

"top": "I also had unsolicited spam from Vincent Jiang of Aden, another YC company.\n Hi Daniel,\n\n I just came across your profile on social media and wondered if you'd be interested in joining our Discord community for AI agent development. Currently, we see that agents break, loop, get lost, hallucinate, and cost a fortune, and therefore built a space where developers can share challenges and insights.",

"author": "unfunco",

"replies": [

{

"text": "…and more from Backdrop.\n Hi Daniel, I found your GitHub profile while searching for anthropic projects, and got your email from your profile.\n\n I'm part of an online program for builders called Backdrop Build, and I think that program would be a great fit given what you are building. We have a track for builders in AI like you, it's fully online/remote and costs nothing to participate. It also works if you have a day job, it's light on time and perfect for side projects!\n\n\nAnd then another after I marked the first one as spam and ignored it.\n Checking in one last time to see if you have any questions about the program or the application. If it's not for you, all good - just ignore the email because I won't be pinging you again :)\n\n Joey from Backdrop\n\n\nBoth companies have guaranteed that I won't use their services nor procure them for any organisation I work for.",

"author": "unfunco",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Hey it's Joey checking in again. We noticed you mentioned our company, let me know if you have any questions about our (free!) program. I'll go ahead and email you some more info, just in case.",

"author": "agmater",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "I had a similar one from that guy asking me to make open source PRs to some repo of theirs for, err, $25-50/hour. I replied explaining that senior software engineers in the UK aren’t \nquite\n as desperately poor as that, and got a canned response saying that they were looking forward to reviewing my PRs :D",

"author": "foldr",

"depth": 1

}

]

}

]

},

{

"id": "47148454",

"title": "Claude Code Remote Control",

"link": "https://code.claude.com/docs/en/remote-control",

"domain": "code.claude.com",

"author": "empressplay",

"score": 536,

"comment_count": 315,

"created_ts": 1772004176,

"is_internal": false,

"post_text": "",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

"remote"

],

"comments": [

{

"top": "This is an extremely clunky and buggy prerelease, so don't try to hot fix prod from the toilet without a different mobile frontend.\nRight now:\n- You can't interrupt Claude (you press stop and he keeps going!)\n- At best it stops but just keeps spinning\n- The UI disconnects intermittently\n- It disconnects if you switch to other parts of Claude\n- It can get stuck in plan mode\n- Introspection is poor\n- You see XML in the output instead of things like buttons\n- One session at a time\n- Sessions at times don't load\n- Everytime you navigate away from Code you need to wait for your session to reappear\nI'm sure I'm missing a few things.",

"author": "fny",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Struggled with it also, given up (for now).\nI thought coding was a solved problem Boris?",

"author": "monkeydust",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I have little doubt where things are going, but the irony of the way they communicate versus the quality of their actual product is palpable.\nClaude Code (the product, not the underlying model) has been one of the buggiest, least polished products I have ever used. And it's not exactly rocket science to begin with. Maybe they should try writing slightly less than 100% of their code with AI?",

"author": "rfw300",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "More generally, Anthropic's reliability track record for a company which claims to have solved coding is astonishingly poor. Just look at their status page - \nhttps://status.claude.com/\n - multiple severe incidents, every day. And that's to say nothing of the constant stream of bugs for simple behavior in the desktop app, Claude Code, their various IDE integrations, the tools they offer in the API, and so on.\nTheir models are so good that they make dealing with the rest all worth it. But if I were a non-research engineer at Anthropic, I wouldn't strut around gloating. I'd hide my head in a paper bag.",

"author": "rfw300",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "I don’t think that’s fair. ChatGPT and Gemini also seem to suffer random outages. They’re dealing with high load on a new type of product.\nBut it’s also true that Anthropic products are super buggy.",

"author": "rhubarbtree",

"depth": 4

},

{

"text": "It's almost as if a lot of anthropic's stuff is vibecoded",

"author": "jaapz",

"depth": 5

}

]

},

{

"top": "Posted elsewhere but will copy here. Been doing this for a while.\n- - -\nget tailscale (free) and join on both devices\ninstall tmux\nget an ios/android terminal (echo / termius)\nenable \"remote login\" if on mac (disable on public wifi)\nmosh/ssh into computer\nnow you can do tmux then claude / codex / w/e on either device and reconnect freely via tmux ls and tmux attach -t <id>\n- - -\nYou can name tmux and resume by name via tmux new -s <feature> and tmux attach -t <feature>",

"author": "jasonjmcghee",

"replies": [

{

"text": "I have just today discovered zmx [1] which is like tmux but I always hated the tmux terminal emulation and how it hijacks scrolling, especially on Termius on my phone. It does session persistence but I think without the terminal emulator side of things, so scrolling works normally.\nBeen testing it today with Claude Code and it seems to work quite well switching between my laptop and phone.\n[1] \nhttps://github.com/neurosnap/zmx",

"author": "madjam002",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I also hate how tmux uses alt mode and can never remember all the shortcuts, copy paste is a PITA and just today I had to look up how to dump the scrollback buffer to a file. Named sessions without window management makes a lot more sense these days. Similarly, I'm not a fan of all the ANSI escape codes that CC uses to jump the cursor around and rewrite the display to look like a GUI. I prefer a TUI that doesn't mutate rows after writing them, that's what alt mode is for. CC often clears whatever was in the scrollback buffer before you opened it, it hides bracketed paste, and goes crazy sometimes when content overflows the window and I have to resize the terminal or get blasted with a wall of glitching characters--extra annoying if I'm working from a low bandwidth link. I develop my own agent framework and code agent, and while some features aren't as polished as CC, one of my explicit goals is to preserve the traditional CLI feel, like the python REPL (that's what it's based around). I'll give zmx a try tonight :)",

"author": "jacob019",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "Thanks for the tip. Other ppl are saying \"most of us started out like this\" but if you haven't played with tailscale etc. (like me). Then this is new and good for learning imo",

"author": "nebben64",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I think everyone started out with this",

"author": "zeppelin101",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I think people familiar with tmux/screen and tailscale or how to setup their own VPN might have.\nBased on my experience many people don't know this is a thing you can do.",

"author": "jasonjmcghee",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "Opencode's 'web' command makes your local session run on the browser with same access rights as the cli. It's a pretty slick interface too. I sometimes use it instead of the cli even when I can access both.\nYou can test it right now if you want with the included free models.\nhttps://opencode.ai/docs/web/",

"author": "dizhn",

"replies": [

{

"text": "I was having too many bugs using it with my phone, I gave up and went back to Termux",

"author": "rubslopes",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "It's changing super fast. I am using it on the desktop mostly and when I tried on my phone there were issues yes. But do try it out again in a few weeks.\n(I am actually using zellij on the remote and using various CLIs more than I am using only opencode on the web. I was using wezterm mux until about a week ago but the current state of the terminal is not very good for this scenario. It seems like almost all the CLIs are choking because of nodejs ink library)",

"author": "dizhn",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "There's \nhttps://happy.engineering/\n which already does this with many fewer bugs and supports codex.",

"author": "Fizzadar",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Happy is buggy af and is in the middle of a rewrite (see its Discord).\nA fork named Happier looks promising, but is alpha-stage and is also a mystery-meat vibe-coded security roulette.",

"author": "quinncom",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I was using this religiously but there’s a bug currently that makes the initialization fail and/or throws an error on the phone client. \nAbsolutely great piece of software otherwise, free, anonymous, encrypted and so on. Really hope the team can fix this soon - I would hate to switch back to tmux tunneling.",

"author": "tor0ugh",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Set it up and never managed to have it work. Only thing it did was renaming my sessions on my main cc instance. Mobile did nothing, not even an error message.",

"author": "crashabr",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "I feel like a lot of folks are saying this kills the Code on your Phone opportunity some start-ups are building for. I don't agree. I feel like coding agents are like streaming services, we will subscribe to multiple and switch between them. So for one there's value in a universal control plane. The other is that mobile as a coding interface should offer more than a remote control to the desktop. I think there's still some space to cook, especially if people are investing 8 hours a day talking to agents, the interface surely matters.",

"author": "raunaqvaisoha",

"replies": [

{

"text": "I don't know a single person who is satisfied with the status quo on streaming services where you have to subscribe to multiple ones. Everyone is complaining that the landscape is 1) more fragmented than cable was, 2) costs more, 3) has even more ads than cable",

"author": "63stack",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I think people forgot how bad it was. It was much more fragmented before but instead of services it was fragmented by time. Sure you have access to Seinfeld, but you can watch one or two Seinfelds a night at 8pm and 11pm.\nI also remember base cable without any movies was around $60 or something and with some movie channels is >$100. And that's not inflation adjusted. You can easily get 3 or 4 of the top services for $100 today.\nFinally claiming there are more ads on these services is a joke. There was ~20m for every 30m of programming, meaning 1/3 of the time you're watching commercials. And not just any commercials, the same commercials over and over. There was even a case of shows being sped up on cable to show more commercials.\nI get it, everyone wants everything seamlessly and for next to nothing, but claiming that 90s cable was even comparable is absurd.\nhttps://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/how-networks-spee...",

"author": "bko",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "Seinfeld way syndicated. It aired for a long time on TBS. But also Comedy Central after 2021, Nick at Nite briefly and TV Land more recently.\nI'm not sure what your point is.",

"author": "bko",

"depth": 4

},

{

"text": "Seinfeld only ran until 1998. Not sure what people buying the rights in 2021 has to do with the OP's comment.",

"author": "galleywest200",

"depth": 5

},

{

"text": "Not that it is particularly relevant to agentic coding but how can anyone truly argue streaming costs more? Average cable packages were exceeding 125-150 USD a month (in 2000 dollars). Under no circumstances would I be sympathetic to the argument that streaming costs more.\nYou can get all 7 of the major streaming subs for less without even shopping out deals. That is 100s of times the volume and quality of content that was delivered on cable for far less. It is so much content realistically that no one I have ever met has subscribed to all of them at once.\nThe argument really is empty. The fragmentized experience is annoying, but it isn't more expensive...And it DEFINITELY has fewer ads.",

"author": "hodder",

"depth": 2

}

]

}

]

},

{

"id": "47172119",

"title": "Layoffs at Block",

"link": "https://twitter.com/jack/status/2027129697092731343",

"domain": "twitter.com",

"author": "mlex",

"score": 484,

"comment_count": 472,

"created_ts": 1772140676,

"is_internal": false,

"post_text": "<a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;26&#x2F;block-laying-off-about-4000-employees-nearly-half-of-its-workforce.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;26&#x2F;block-laying-off-about-4000-...</a><p><a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marketwatch.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;block-plans-to-lay-off-nearly-half-its-staff-in-deliberate-and-bold-embrace-of-ai-81e99247\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marketwatch.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;block-plans-to-lay-off-nea...</a>",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

"layoffs"

],

"comments": [

{

"top": "> today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company:\n> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter.\n> i’m sorry to put you through this.\nPOV: Dude who has effortlessly fired people before deflects blame for over-hiring in the first place.\nI swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.\nThis is just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision and no accountability.",

"author": "neya",

"replies": [

{

"text": ">>I had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I chose the latter.\nI don't know why CEOs and other executive members end up writing such useless language in their posts. Essentially, both these points are the same if you look at the employees. However, the writing has to be bloated in such a way that there is something else involved here, which there is not. This is just drama.\nAlso, these decisions are not hard, regardless of whatever the hell has been claimed. They are actually easy decisions and choosing not to do layoffs is actually the hard decision. There is no need to sugarcoat so much.",

"author": "princevegeta89",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "It's for the people who still work there.",

"author": "operatingthetan",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "It surely still does look stupid for the same people though..",

"author": "princevegeta89",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "> I swear people should start blacklisting CEOs and refuse to work under them if they're part of the blacklist.\nLook at the job market. They know they can get away with it and so they don't care.\nMy current theory is that this is partly why executives are desperate to get AI to work, and why investors are ploughing billions into AI. They know they've burnt too many bridges, and they \nneed\n AI to work so they never have to turn to us again. Otherwise the pendulum will swing even farther in the opposite direction, putting even more bargaining power in the hands of employees than the post-COVID job market.\nUnfortunately, AI does seem to be working very well, and I don't see great outcomes for us on the current trajectory. I expect turmoil before a new social contract is established.",

"author": "keeda",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter.\nit's interesting how he casts this as:\na) a drawn-out downsizing that might not meet its numbers for years, which is clearly \"bad\" because no one likes uncertainty.\nb) ripping the band-aid decisively, with the nobility of being an honest decision. and who doesn't appreciate honesty?\nbut certainly most employees would prefer to be laid off in months (or even, as he says, years) \"as this shift plays out.\" they would probably prefer that to having jack's \"honesty.\"",

"author": "khazhoux",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "We'll see how much the AI aspect is true by whether they're thinning out teams equally, or just axing whole initiatives. My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out, so I'm expecting it to be more of the latter, with this being more of an admission that they're now in \"maintenance mode\".\nEither way, I think this is how it's gonna be. Regardless of whether AI significantly increases productivity (40%? come on), layoffs will be preemptory. Executives will see the lack of productivity boost as being due to lack of pressure, and imagine engineers are just using the AI to make their own lives easier rather than to work more efficiently. You can't really double output velocity because your users will see it as too much churn, so the only choice is to lay off half the workforce and double the workload for those who stay. \"Necessity is the mother of invention.\" They'll overlook the fact that the work AI tools provide only encompasses 10% of your job even if they're 100% efficient.",

"author": "daxfohl",

"replies": [

{

"text": "I'm convinced that these \"AI Layoffs\" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.\nNo one really \"knows\" how to grow businesses so the easiest way to spend a lot of money quickly is hiring lots of people, whether or not they are \"necessary\". Then this free money dries up, interest rates go back up, and now they're stuck with all these employees that they didn't actually need.\nSome companies like Google and Microsoft just accepted that assholes like me will call their CEOs incompetent and fired lots of people in 2023, but I think other CEOs were kind of embarrassed and held off. Now they can use AI as a scapegoat and people won't act like they were idiots for hiring twice as many people as they needed.\nAlso, I got declined by Block a year ago. Glad I was now.",

"author": "tombert",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Regardless of the reasoning I think it is worth keeping in mind that the times when companies are letting talented experienced people go is also a great time to start the next new big thing. Talent that might have been unobtanium during a hiring frenzy could now be the building blocks of a new venture. A lot of these companies were started or really built themselves up during a tech slow down.",

"author": "georgeecollins",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "it's all just saying stuff the shareholders want to hear. when the shareholders want to hear \"we're staffing up aggressively\" the companies hire. when the shareholders want to hear \"we're moving workloads to AI\" the companies fire.\nit's not using AI as a scapegoat. they're doing this because they're quite literally being rewarded for it. they could care less what the employees who are getting fired think, as long as the investors are happy.",

"author": "notatoad",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "> I'm convinced that these \"AI Layoffs\" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.\nPartially.\nThe first nail in the coffin was the change in assumptions around output. Before 2023, there was an assumption that more bodies means more output. After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.\nThe second nail was the change in operational metrics. Before 2023, ARR growth was a good enough metric to target. After 2023, FCF positivity became the name of the game. Especially because us investors are demanding this \nbecause\n most funds are reaching the 10 year mark where we need to make our LPs whole, so a path to exit (be it IPO, M&A, or a continuation fund) needs to be communicated.\nAnd finally, COVID proved to a large number of companies and industries that 100% WFH and Async for white collar roles \ndoes\n work. But wait, if I can hire Joe in Cary to work async, why can't I hire Jan in Karlin, Prague or Jagmeet in Koramangla, Bangalore? This means I can \nalso\n enhance FCF positivity while not impacting delivery.\nAdd to that some very, very, very bad hires (most bootcamp grads just can't cut it) at absurdly high salaries and that's why you're seeing the culling that is occurring today.\nThat said, AI tools are powerful, and if you are working on rightsizing an organization, using Claude or Enterprise GPT in workflows helps one person do multiple jobs at once. We now expect PMs to also work as junior program managers, designers, product marketers, customer success managers, and sales engineers and we now expect SWEs to also work as junior program managers, designers, docs writers, and architects. Now I can lay off 10-20% of my GTM, Designers, SWEs, Program Managers, and Docs Writers and still get good enough output.\n---\nIMO, if you want to survive in the tech industry in this world, doing the following will probably help maintain your longevity:\n1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.\n2. Start coming into the office 2-3 days a week. It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with. Worst case, they can refer you to their friends companies if you get laid off\n3. \nUpskill technically\n. Learn the fundamentals of AI/ML and MLOPs. Agents are basically a semi-nondeterministic SaaS. Understanding how AI/ML works and understanding their benefits \nand\n pitfalls make you a much more valuable hire.\n4. \nUpskill professionally\n. We're not hiring code monkeys for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate business problems into technical requirements. This means also understanding the industry your company is in, how to manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a \nbusiness case\n for technical issues. If you cannot communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will prioritize it.\n5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say \"f##k you\" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence.\nThe reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.",

"author": "alephnerd",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "The Twitter layoffs being used as proof of _anything_ is misguided no matter what you're trying to say.\nIf success is losing half their revenue, reverting to revenue numbers from a decade ago, I gotta know what failure looks like. You might argue that the revenue losses aren't correlated to their headcount changes and probably make a good argument, but I mean... It's not a great one",

"author": "hirsin",

"depth": 3

}

]

},

{

"top": "This is one of the best (if not the best) layoff letters I've seen online (no affiliation, don't know anyone working there, purely outsider perspective).\n* Severance packages upfront because realistically that's what everyone worries about first.\n* Reasoning second. I appreciate the one clean cut vs prolonged bleeding.\n* Owning the decision and respecting the people that got you there. Opting for an awkward allhands vs breakup-via-text-message.\n* Giving people a chance to say goodbye.\nNot gonna go into strategic analysis of this, or Jack's leadership style in general.\nBut realistically, you can't pen a better (or, well, less bad) layoff announcement.",

"author": "senko",

"replies": [

{

"text": "> I appreciate the one clean cut vs prolonged bleeding.\nThat's a false dichotomy, you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways.\nThere's also no reasoning on product impact. Is the strategy to cut products that aren't making money? Is the strategy to cut 40% across everyone because everyone can go faster?\n> Owning the decision\nDoes it? It came across to me as an inevitability of AI, not \"we over-hired\". Layoffs are always a mis-management issue, because the opposite (hiring) is a management issue. If management failed to see where the market was going and now needs a different workforce, that's still a management issue.\n> respecting the people that got you there\nThere's words, and there's money, and on these it's pretty good. But there's also an empathy with the experience they're about to go through and I'm not sure there's much of that here beyond the words. To do this well you'd need to think through what folks are about to go through and look for ways you can positively impact that beyond actions today. I've seen some companies do this better, helping teams get re-hired elsewhere, splitting off businesses to sell to other companies, incubating startups, there are lots of options. Hard, especially at this scale, but possible.\n> But realistically, you can't pen a better (or, well, less bad) layoff announcement.\nAnd this is the crux of my point, I really think you can. This was a good one, one of the better I've seen, but it's still within the realm of SV companies laying people off. In some companies, countries, industries, this would look very different, and better.",

"author": "danpalmer",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "> you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways\nI don't think reducing via attrition is better for the company, for the employees 100%, but attrition would be your people moving to other companies and retirement. It means that you are effectively bleeding your people with options (usually above average) and those with the most experience in favor of \"the rest\".",

"author": "belval",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "It's a nuanced trade-off. It's worse for the company as you said, it may be worse for the employees because some will leave from burnout without severance, those remaining will have more work to do typically.\nBut my point was that what was presented was a false dichotomy and that framing it as such is disingenuous to employees receiving those comms.",

"author": "danpalmer",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "It should be good. It's the third time he's written this exact same announcement, including \"taking the blame\" and \"making the difficult choice to cut a large group instead of smaller cuts over time\" and \"thanking the expendables that got the company where it is.\"",

"author": "shaftway",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "\"owning\" the decision doesn't mean anything. It's just words.",

"author": "slantedview",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.\nYeah, you get 5 months of severance and a bunch of devices and such; but, does this CEO really think these employees will find new work in that time? In this job market?\nIf the profits are still up and growing, why on earth would you evict 40% of the company, to send them into \nthis\n job market? Why not … try new industries, play around, try to become the next Mitsubishi or Samsung or General Electric. If you’ve got the manpower and talent, why not play with it and see if anything makes money. In-house startups with stable capital, all that.\nThis seems … wrong.",

"author": "t-writescode",

"replies": [

{

"text": "> Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.\nI just talked to a bunch of recruiters (we're hiring) and their main piece of advice was: The market is crazy. \nMove fast\n. We're seeing people getting jobs within days of starting to look, bailing on offers after signing because they got a better offer somewhere else, etc. 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned\nedit: I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats. Rents are up 60% in 12 months, which is not the sign of a cold employment market :)",

"author": "Swizec",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I'm in NYC which I think has similar demographics to SF in this regard; I found my job in August of last year, after about five months of searching, and I found it because a friend of mine referred me. It's a good job, and I like it, I'm grateful for that friend.\nRegardless, it's not like that was the only job I applied to. I had a policy of applying to at least ten jobs a day, so I applied to about ~1500 jobs, and literally \nall\n of them rejected me except for the one I have right now. I had about twenty other interviews (edit: 15, checked my calendar from last year), a few that got to late stages, and they didn't pan out [1].\nI psychotically save money so I wasn't worried in any kind of existential sense, I could survive for years if I needed, but man I would have \nkilled\n to be in a situation where I even had the opportunity to bail on an offer.\nThis has been the worst economy for software engineers I've seen in my ~15 year career. I am slightly optimistic that it will improve \neventually\n but I suspect \"eventually\" might mean several more years.\n[1] And one at a one of the world's largest bank (that my lawyer/mom has advised me not to name publicly) where my interviewers were potentially the most incompetent people I have ever talked to and who didn't seem to know what an atomic was in Java, and \"corrected\" my counter code with a mutex. And I put \"corrected\" in quotes, because what they corrected it to would deadlock. Morons.",

"author": "tombert",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "I'm a senior in NYC, considering changing jobs but haven't pulled the trigger. I've got a good amount of reachouts from finance recruiters and small-to-medium sized startups but haven't heard anything from the established players (admittedly I haven't been looking).",

"author": "garbawarb",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "I got a number of finance recruiters reaching out then too but nothing stuck. I got a few interviews (even got to meet a few interesting characters like Martin Shkreli) but nothing panned out until my friend gave me a referral to my current gig.\nI think recruiters will just carpet bomb emails out and then only respond like ten percent of the people that email them back.",

"author": "tombert",

"depth": 4

},

{

"text": "Blink once if the bank rhymed with face",

"author": "vedaba",

"depth": 3

}

]

},

{

"top": "Square/Block stock peaked at $273 in Feb 2021 and is currently at $54. Taking away the Covid bubble the stock has been completely flat since 2018, almost 8 years, while the S&P 500 returned nearly 200% in that same period. So I'm not buying the whole \"the company is doing great! The layoff is just because of AI.\"",

"author": "paxys",

"replies": [

{

"text": "We know they're not...\n> In its fiscal fourth quarter, Block reported revenue of almost $6.3bn, in line with Wall Street expectations. Its earnings tumbled to 19 cents a share, owing to a $234mn hit — or 38 cents a share — on its bitcoin holdings.",

"author": "QGQBGdeZREunxLe",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Yea, look over there!!! AI.\n(Don’t mention the bitcoin investment that’s in the shitter)",

"author": "dmboyd",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "Exactly this. Seriously, look at a 10 year graph of SQ/XYZ. How a board of directors puts up with this is beyond me, seems like a massive governance failure.",

"author": "shawkinaw",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "AI is the logical, counter proof reason, I feel it serves as a scapegoat so perfectly they pretend it replaces people.",

"author": "hirako2000",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Feb 2021 was peak covid tech bubble stemming from ZIRP. There are a number of companies that hit highs during that period that they'll likely never see again (or for quite some time) despite being profitable.",

"author": "Sparkle-san",

"depth": 1

}

]

}

]

},

{

"id": "47164270",

"title": "Show HN: Terminal Phone – E2EE Walkie Talkie from the Command Line",

"link": "https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/terminalphone",

"domain": "gitlab.com",

"author": "smalltorch",

"score": 290,

"comment_count": 73,

"created_ts": 1772102445,

"is_internal": false,

"post_text": "TerminalPhone is a single, self-contained Bash script that provides anonymous, end-to-end encrypted voice and text communication between two parties over the Tor network. It operates as a walkie-talkie: you record a voice message, and it is compressed, encrypted, and transmitted to the remote party as a single unit. You can also send encrypted text messages during a call. No server infrastructure, no accounts, no phone numbers. Your Tor hidden service .onion address is your identity.",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

"remote",

"communication"

],

"comments": [

{

"top": "Using a v3 onion address as both the cryptographic identity and the NAT traversal layer is such a clean architectural choice. No STUN/TURN servers, no hole punching, you just boot the script and Tor handles routing.\nFor those who use Tor regularly for things other than web browsing: how bad is the real-world latency for pushing a ~20KB Opus audio chunk over Tor these days? Are we talking a 2-3 second delay, or is it much worse?",

"author": "Pinkert",

"replies": [

{

"text": "The real world delay is about 2-3 seconds your spot on. I initially started with a full duplex version but it was absolutely terrible. Walkie talkie kinda forces the recieve, listen, response from the users so the latency isn't as much of an issue.",

"author": "smalltorch",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Is audio transmitted \nwhile\n it is being recorded or afterwards? Is it played before everything is received or is everything buffered? In the later case, I find it more akin an audio message on Signal or similar, than as a walkie-talkie, which is much more \"dynamic\".",

"author": "ale42",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "It's not streamed. It gets recorded, compressed, (voice effects if you want), encrypted on device, \nthen\n piped through, reverse process, auto played on reciever end.\nAlso, once it's decrypted and played back, the message gets destroyed.",

"author": "smalltorch",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "Small suggestion, maybe you should send a “key down” notice when you begin recording, that generates a subtle sound on the receiving end. This would act as something like a typing indicator on a text messaging client.",

"author": "iamnothere",

"depth": 4

},

{

"text": "Thats a great idea.",

"author": "smalltorch",

"depth": 5

}

]

},

{

"top": "Very cool, happy to see more IRL applications of onion services as a backend. Arti onion client support should soon be available, which will make Tor embeddable in applications as a Rust library. Hopefully this encourages even more usage.\nMore applications using the network means more cover traffic as well.",

"author": "iamnothere",

"replies": [

{

"text": "> More applications using the network means more cover traffic as well.\nAgree. The biggest barrier for me using Tor is the perception held by many IT admins is that Tor is synonymous with nefarious. It makes using it inconvenient or impossible in many highly controlled network environments such as enterprise, public access wifi, etc.",

"author": "xnyan",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "> 21 curated ciphers are available\nWhy!? That sounds like approximately 20 too many.",

"author": "lxgr",

"replies": [

{

"text": "The library is openssl and that comes with all these ciphers available. No other reason than \nbecause we can!\nI wish AES-GCM was available...but openssl can't do it on its own without further dependencies to parse the authentication correctly.\nReally this whole layer is complelty redundant actually. It's already E2EE without openssl via Tor. I like that it's encrypted before I hit the network pipe though.",

"author": "smalltorch",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": ">\nNo other reason than because we can!\ngreat attitude for approximately everything except, perhaps, cryptography.\nespecially since the initial encryption is mostly redundant, i would encourage that you, at some point, consider reducing the number of ciphers.",

"author": "john_strinlai",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "If a library doesn't do what you need, you need a different library, but this is impossible from a short bash script, so it's one of the tradeoffs of your design.",

"author": "inigyou",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "> No other reason than because we can!\nThen maybe your scientists should spend some time to stop and consider whether they should ;)\nBut seriously, I'd just limit this to one option on the selection side, even if you continue supporting more than that at the protocol level for cryptographic agility.",

"author": "lxgr",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "I don't see the issue. \"Anything that openssl actively supports\" plus providing a default seems like an extremely reasonable stance to take.",

"author": "fc417fc802",

"depth": 3

}

]

},

{

"top": "Tangential, did Gitlab become faster than a while back or is it an illusion from their lazy loading?",

"author": "aitchnyu",

"replies": []

},

{

"top": "I love this. In your view, how would users go about securely swapping credentials ? PGP over email ?",

"author": "marcosqanil",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Thanks! My realistic use case is that I am already speaking to someone who I know and trust, so ideally exchange credentials in person. A preferred out of band secure messanger of choice is probably fine.",

"author": "smalltorch",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "What do you guys talk about?",

"author": "deadbabe",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "I have my wife's phone set up on autolisten running in the background, so I just pop in and ask how her days going and crack jokes.",

"author": "smalltorch",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "That's funny but it must absolutely drain the battery of her phone, no?",

"author": "clouedoc",

"depth": 4

},

{

"text": "So far it's lasted all week with maybe 10% -15% loss per day. It's not her main, actually just a old phone I had laying around.\nI think it's a pretty light background process.",

"author": "smalltorch",

"depth": 5

}

]

}

]

},

{

"id": "47149586",

"title": "Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play",

"link": "https://llmskirmish.com/",

"domain": "llmskirmish.com",

"author": "__cayenne__",

"score": 213,

"comment_count": 79,

"created_ts": 1772013765,

"is_internal": false,

"post_text": "I&#x27;ve liked all the projects that put LLMs into game environments. It&#x27;s been a weird juxtaposition, though: frontier LLMs can one-shot full coding projects, and those same models struggle to get out of Pokémon Red&#x27;s Mt. Moon.<p>Because of this, I wanted to create a game environment that put this generation of frontier LLMs&#x27; top skill, coding, on full display.<p>Ten years ago, a team released a game called Screeps. It was described as an &quot;MMO RTS sandbox for programmers.&quot; The Screeps paradigm of writing code and having it executed in a real-time game environment is well suited to LLMs. Drawing on a version of the Screeps open source API, LLM Skirmish pits LLMs head-to-head in a series of 1v1 real-time strategy games.<p>In my testing I found that Claude Opus 4.5 was the most dominant model, but it showed weakness in round 1 as it was overly focused on its in-game economy. Meanwhile, I probably spent a third of all code on sandbox hardening because GPT 5.2 kept trying to cheat by pre-reading its opponent&#x27;s strategies.<p>If there&#x27;s interest, I&#x27;m planning on doing a round of testing with the latest generation of LLMs (Claude 4.6 Opus, GPT 5.3 Codex, etc.).<p>You can run local matches via CLI. I&#x27;m running a hosted match runner with Google Cloud Run that uses isolated-vm. The match playback visualizer is statically served from Cloudflare.<p>I&#x27;ve created a community ladder that you can submit strategies to via CLI, no auth required. I&#x27;ve found that the CLI plus the skill.md that&#x27;s available has been enough for AI agents to immediately get started.<p>Website: <a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llmskirmish.com\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llmskirmish.com</a><p>API docs: <a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llmskirmish.com&#x2F;docs\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llmskirmish.com&#x2F;docs</a><p>GitHub: <a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;llmskirmish&#x2F;skirmish\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;llmskirmish&#x2F;skirmish</a><p>A video of a match: <a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lnBPaZ1qamM\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lnBPaZ1qamM</a>",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

"team"

],

"comments": [

{

"top": "MY FELLOW HUMAN, this is amazing work!\nI foresee this laying the foundation for whole football stadia filled to the brim with people wanting to watch (and bet on!) competing teams of AI trained on military tactics and strategies!\nSoon enough we shall have AI-Olympics! Imagine that, MY FELLOW OXYGEN CONVERTING HUMAN FRIEND! Tens of thousands of robots and drones, all competing against each other in stadia across the planet, at the same time!\nI foresee a world wide, synchronized countdown marking the beginning of the biggest, greatest and definitively most unique, one-time-only spectacle in human history!\nKeep up the good work!",

"author": "5o1ecist",

"replies": [

{

"text": "This reminds me of the Unreal Tournament: Xan episode from the Secret Level series.\nLink for those curious or confused as to what I'm talking about:\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F-rAW3vXOU\nForcing AI to fight in an arena for our entertainment, what could go wrong? (this was tongue in cheek, I am fully aware LLM's currently don't have conscious thoughts or emotions)",

"author": "softfalcon",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "I know visualization is far from the most important goal here, but it really gets me how there's fairly elaborately rendered terrain, and then the units are just unnamed roombas with hard to read status indicators that have no intuitive meaning. Even in the match viewer I have no clue what's going on, there is no overlay or tooltip when you hover or click units either. There is a unit list that tries (and mostly fails) to give you some information, but because units don't have names you have to hover them in the list to have them highlighted in the field (the reverse does not work). Not exactly a spectator sport. Oh, but there is a way to switch from having all units in one sidebar to having one sidebar per player, as if that made a difference.\nI find this pretty funny because it seems like a perfect representation of what's easy with today's tools and what isn't\nLove the idea though",

"author": "wongarsu",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Yeah, it's all what you get when you basically ask an agent \"Build X\" without any constraints about how the UI and UX actually should work, and since the agents have about 0 expertise when it comes to \"How would a human perceive and use this?\", you end up with UIs that don't make much sense for humans unless you strictly steer them with what you know.",

"author": "embedding-shape",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Or maybe the simple answer is it looks exactly like the referenced game screeps. Probably a better explanation than hand waving away the faults of an agent.",

"author": "infecto",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "I’d love to see something like this in games like Beyond All Reasons.",

"author": "nirav72",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Check out the top starcraft AIs playing each other. They have like 40k apm its insane to watch.",

"author": "AuthAuth",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "Reminds me of the “Google AI Challenge” in 2011 called Ants [1], except the ‘AI’ is implemented using ‘AI’ now instead of human programmers.\nI was proud for getting the highest-ranked JavaScript-based implementation, but got absolutely crushed by the eventual winner.\n1. \nhttps://github.com/aichallenge/aichallenge",

"author": "arscan",

"replies": []

},

{

"top": "At least until one of the competitors is overheard saying \"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play\"",

"author": "EwanG",

"replies": []

}

]

},

{

"id": "47151842",

"title": "Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better",

"link": "https://respectify.org/",

"domain": "respectify.org",

"author": "vintagedave",

"score": 212,

"comment_count": 214,

"created_ts": 1772029279,

"is_internal": false,

"post_text": "My partner, Nick Hodges, and I, David Millington, have been on the Internet for a very long time -- since the Usenet days. We’ve seen it all, and have long been frustrated by bad comments, horrible people, and discouraging discussions. We&#x27;ve also been around places where the discussion is wonderful and productive. How to get more of the latter and less of the former?<p>Current moderation tools just seem to focus on deletion and banning. Wouldn’t it be helpful to encourage productive discussion and <i>teach</i> people how to discuss and argue (in the debate sense) better?<p>A year ago we started building Respectify to help foster healthy communication. Instead of just deleting bad-faith comments, we suggest better, good-faith ways to say what folks are trying to say. We help people avoid: * Logical fallacies (false dichotomy, strawmen, etc.) * Tone issues (how others will read the comment) * Relevance to the actual page&#x2F;post topic * Low-effort posts * Dog whistles and coded language<p>The commenter gets an explanation of what&#x27;s wrong and a chance to edit and resubmit. It&#x27;s moderation + education in one step. We want, too, to automate the entire process so the site owner can focus on content and not worry about moderation at all. And over time, comment by comment, quietly coach better thinking.<p>Our main website has an interactive demo: <a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;respectify.ai\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;respectify.ai</a>. As the demo shows, the system is completely tunable and adjustable, from &quot;most anything goes&quot; to &quot;You need to be college debate level to get by me&quot;.<p>We hope the result is better discussions and a better Internet. Not too much to ask, eh?<p>We love the kind of feedback this group is famous for and hope you will supply some!",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

"feedback",

"communication"

],

"comments": [

{

"top": "It seems to have a harder time with political news than more abstract concepts. I was able to pass the checks for the Algorithmic Radicalization and Echo Chamber articles with my first comments.\nHowever, I did not manage to express any opinion on the transgender rights article, from any political perspective, without being flagged. On one of the comments I tested, it gave me a suggested revision from this:\n\"This is another move in a pattern of limiting the rights of anyone who isn't a MAGA supporter.\"\nTo this:\n\"This seems to continue a trend where certain groups feel their rights are being limited, which could affect many people beyond just MAGA supporters.\"\nThe first comment isn't substantive, but the second is even worse, adding so much equivocation that it's meaningless. To add insult to injury, the detector also flagged its own suggested revision. Even if it had gone through, accepting these revisions would mean flooding a platform with LLM-speak, which is not conducive to discussion.\nHonest feedback: from a user perspective, the suggestions feel frustrating and patronizing, more so than if my comments were simply deleted. I would stop using a site that implemented this.\nFrom a site operator perspective, the kind of discourse it incentivizes seems jagged, subject to much stricter rules if the LLM associates a topic with political controversy. It feels opinionated and unpredictable, and the revisions it suggests are not of a quality I would want on a discussion board. The focus on positive language in particular seems like a reductive view of quality; what is the point of using an LLM if it's only doing basic sentiment analysis?",

"author": "Miraste",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Dave here -- I've tweaked a bunch of the internal rules during the HN discussion today, and your comment now passes (using the default settings.)\nAs for equivocation, that should be strongly dialed down too. It annoyed me too, it was \"mush\", and did not help. I hope you'll find the current version a lot more human.\nI'm grateful for the feedback! Changing it based on all these comments has been intense over the past couple of hours, but boy is it now significantly improved and I am super grateful to you and other commenters.",

"author": "vintagedave",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Perhaps in keeping with age-old internet behaviors, it completely fails to recognize sarcasm.",

"author": "tacitusarc",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "As much as I love sarcasm that is done well, I do find that it translates very poorly to written text unless explicitly noted with /s or something like that. Even when annotated, it's extremely rare that a sarcastic comment actually furthers discussion or makes a meaningful point. If a person is using sarcasm, odds are pretty high that they aren't engaging substantively anyway. Given the difficulties with detection (which even many humans fail at) it seems like trying to detect sarcasm would just make the tool a lot less useful and would be mostly antithetical to the project goals anyway.",

"author": "freedomben",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "How shocking!",

"author": "dcanelhas",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "That's understandable, humans do in many cases too",

"author": "hvb2",

"depth": 3

}

]

},

{

"top": "Decades ago (1995), \nwhen I was barely a decade old\n, I created a maintainence/repair website for a Motorola product (pre-iFixit). A fellow geek created his own similar website, focusing more on general product usage.\nNeither of us webmasters \ntook constructive feedback well\n, often lashing out at fellow usenet geeks \nwho were just trying to be helpful\n. Tantrums, from us both.\nTwenty years later we randomly met in-person @DEF-CON (recognized his unique name) — he ended up being \na year younger than me!\n We exchanged chuckles about what big personalities us two little kids had been, blasting angst into the aether.\nMotorola had linked to both our websites in their official documentation, despite our pottymouths =P\n----\nWhen I witness road rage (myself, included), I pretend the aggressor is a toddler. This makes it easier (and more effective!) to handle the rage that often passes through miscommunication(s).\n----\nI've been a forumjunkie since 1994, and HN is the only online forum I still participate within — mostly because of the techgenre, but also because the rules here prevent all sorts of perpetualSeptembers from scattering themselves among otherwise-constructive threads.\nDanG&co: thanks for cultivating an exceptional online community\nOP: Thanks for trying; I haven't used your product, but the premise seems noble... my main question to ya'll is: how do you prevent overbearing censorship (e.g. does karma influence how \"tough\" your product is on particular users, or are we all \nequally correctable\n)?",

"author": "ProllyInfamous",

"replies": [

{

"text": "I empathise. We definitely mature over time :) And we all have bad days.\nIf we can bring the HN kind of interaction approach to more sites, we'll call ourselves successful. Dan and co provide an inspiration through this site. Someone commented below something about automating dan, and... dan, if you read this, I laughed, but kinda ;) At least, bringing a chance for or what we can of the general HN approach to other spaces.\nRe specific users or karma, everyone is equal. Comments are judged on their own merits, within the context of the topic they are about (the API allows adding more context, such as other comments in the thread, which isn't shown in the demo.)\nWe've played around with the idea of building a kind of reputation over time, ie allowing people to build a score. If so, it's important to note that's not based on the content of what was written (eg specific political views) but based on how well, how healthily, someone expresses it. That line does blur because some opinions are inherently unhealthy, and cannot be expressed in a way that respects others, demonstrates decency / humanity, etc, but within the spectrum of 'being a decent person and just trying to interact well including while disagreeing' we specifically do \nnot\n want to police topics. We want instead to encourage, and in future maybe try to build a rep, for how well someone engages with others.\nAnd returning to your question, if we did that, every comment would \nstill\n be assessed standalone. We want people to grow, kinda like you were talking about. If someone expressed themselves poorly a year ago and behaves more healthily now, now is what should be reflected.",

"author": "vintagedave",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": ">allowing people to build a score\nI think of this as \"letting \ntheir voice\n speak\" — but yes, a \"score\"/tolerance of sorts.\n>now is what should be reflected.\ngrowth. context. rebirth. forgiveness.\nIt's always so shocking when decades-old writings discredit modern thinkers.",

"author": "ProllyInfamous",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "This thing seems to be more about enforcing a political PoV than about avoiding logical fallacies.\nAll my attempts to comment on the UBI article (and not supporting UBI) said my comment was a dogwhistle, and/or had an overly negative tone. This topic, of all things, is absolutely worthy to challenge and debate.\nUsing this would have the effect of creating an echo chamber, where people who stay never benefit from having their ideas challenged.",

"author": "badc0ffee",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Yeah I feel like this will funnel everyone's opinion into sounding like it was written by an AI.\nLove the idea but the example they give with bears is absolutely hilarious. Calling bears dumb animals is offensive? God help us.",

"author": "ryanackley",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Hah, the idea is to have an example on the site that is not offensive -- we're not going to write something offensive down -- but where you can understand what it \nwould\n be or \ncould\n be. It lets you infer / understand the point without us actually writing something awful. (Maybe we can do it better, though.)\nBears seemed a pretty inoffensive target, plus our backend uses Python with beartype and that library is all about bear jokes.",

"author": "vintagedave",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "Can you give some examples of comments you made which you feel were reasonable but got flagged?",

"author": "esperent",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Thankyou — I’d love to hear what you wrote, if you wouldn’t mind sharing?\nWe’ve tried to aim it not to enforce any specific view — that’s a design goal — but focus on how it will feel to the other person.\nAlso things like logical fallacies or other non-emotional flaws in comments (there’s a toxicity metric for example, or dogwhistles).\nAn echo chamber is the exact opposite of what we want. There are too many already. What we hope for is guided communication so different views _can_ be expressed.",

"author": "vintagedave",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "If that is happening, that is a huge problem. We'll look at that right away.\nWe specifically \ndon't\n want that to be the case. We want to encourage healthy, productive debate.\nWe may have the \"dog-whistle\" stuff over tuned.",

"author": "NickHodges0702",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "I think the better model is to just block everyone who isn't useful to communicate with. For instance the top of this HN page reads (for me): 68 comments | 11 hidden | 3 blocked\nThe hidden comments are from people in the Top 1000 by word count (who I usually don't want to hear from but if there is not much content I might click to toggle). The blocked are people I've seen argue with others in a useless way because they don't understand them or because they're just re-litigating or whatever (which I cannot toggle). I think it would be cool if people all published their blocklists and I'd pull from those I trust. Sometimes I open HN on my phone through the browser and I'm baffled by all these responses I got which are useless.\nI'm surprised by how much more high quality comment threads are now to me and I frequently find that I want to respond to everyone. It's like in old-school mailing lists or forums where you were having a conversation so the other people are worth talking to.\nAttention is precious and I wouldn't want to waste it on boring things. And it goes both ways. I communicate incompletely and there are people out there who get what I'm saying and there are people who need me to be more explicit. I would prefer that the latter and people who find me boring just block me.",

"author": "arjie",

"replies": [

{

"text": "This goes back to my early days on the internet, but: I do not use blocklists or ignore features except as an absolute last resort. Ignoring the problem is not a solution. In other ways I think it just makes the problem worse. If the person is not banned from the community, then your decision to pretend they don't exist just leaves other people to deal with it. Instead my feeling is that you should confront it by lobbying for their removal, or leave the community.\nSure, you may no longer see the noise, but that means that newcomers to your community do and have to deal with it. When you have a giant blocklist, you are ignoring your duty to police your own community.\nThen there is the issue of people blocking people who are simply more tolerant than they are. Hiding speech that is challenging to your personal views is a different kind of disaster.",

"author": "devin",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Haha, it's funny. I just disagree with you on about every point. I don't think that all the people I find noise are annoying to others. Some of them have 5000+ karma so others find them useful. And I don't want to leave the community so I'm not going to do that.\nThe community has some loose norms and I'm fine with that being the baseline. I don't want to police the community to strict norms. In fact, I would prefer if society were looser and we lived like in \nToo Like The Lightning\n. I can't have that there but I can here so I'm happy for it. The technology affords it.\nAs for blocking people who are more tolerant than me - that seems fine. Tolerance is not some unalloyed good. There are people who are tolerant of spam and all that and I don't really care for it. They're welcome to it and I'm welcome to mine.\nThe virtual world affords us a glorious opportunity: we don't have to worry about occupying the same space, and we don't have to worry about broadcast media like voice over air, we can silence and amplify as we see fit. To not use that is to take a skeuomorphic approach to a new parallel world, I think.\nI like that I don't need everyone to agree with me that someone belongs or doesn't belong. I can simply edit my user-agent to behave correctly for me and others can do so likewise. Free agents controlling their own experience of the world without impinging on others is great!",

"author": "arjie",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "> I do not use blocklists or ignore features except as an absolute last resort\nI block people every single day. I've blocked so many people on Twitter that all I see is a very nice timeline with mostly stuff I like, some boring, but none of the culture wars garbage. Some days the timeline is completely empty, I suspect because Twitter can't cope with having blocked so many nodes in the social graph :D\n> If the person is not banned from the community, then your decision to pretend they don't exist just leaves other people to deal with it.\nWhen you start banning people outright from the entire community you risk ending up like any far left group, with schisms and civil wars between factions for absolutely tiny differences. The right approach is to have a very high bar for banning, and it's perfectly fine if people decide not to speak to one another.",

"author": "ragall",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "If there's one good thing that could possibly come out of this AI revolution, it would be the ability for people to automate this across all their feeds. I'd love it if I never had to waste time on toxicity, spam, or propaganda.\nAlthough, recent history would suggest that we'd just end up with even more powerful echo chambers.",

"author": "alexose",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "You would end up in a more powerful echo chamber for sure - whichever side was best at avoiding your autoblocker while tricking the other side into activating it.",

"author": "inigyou",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "I am bitter about this.\nDo you really with your mind and with your heart believe that:\n- LLMs are fundamentally fit for this type of comprehension\n- Misjudgements posted in this thread are \"bugs\", \"errors\"\n- Agents who choose to act in bad faith will be anyhow affected\n- It is desirable by a majority of the group whose opinion you would even consider (is there such a group?), that everyone should have this kind of thing shoved into their face\n- Promotion of this kind of thing does not also promote (and help build) harsher censorship mechanisms\nDo you think that every single thing you will ever say publicly from now on will be considered constructive by all future filters with all of their different biases and \"bugs\"? Do you think that this new \"constructive speak\" will not make you want to blow your brains out at some point? Do you not see it everywhere already and get nauseus from it? I would prefer trash talk to that - at least seldom honest and \ntrue\n. If you don't like the message - hide it, timeout the poster, block them or whatever - with your own agency. If you think they welcome education from you - dm them a book.\nOr perhaps you imagine yourselves as above that kind of filtering? Then there is no question.\nAlso, nothing new under the sun. Can't remember exactly but I saw not long ago on a medical platform a review filtering system. It \"isn't\" censhorship per say, of course, the same as your idea. Only, you can't post a review you want - only a much more milder version (and therefore useless) with transformations akin: \"This thing doesn't work\" -> \"I felt like this thing didn't work for me in this instance, but there were such an such positives\". Way to go - turning everything into \"we are sorry you feel that way\".",

"author": "izucken",

"replies": []

}

]

},

{

"id": "47151163",

"title": "Red Hat takes on Docker Desktop with its enterprise Podman Desktop build",

"link": "https://thenewstack.io/red-hat-enters-the-cloud-native-developer-desktop-market/",

"domain": "thenewstack.io",

"author": "twelvenmonkeys",

"score": 125,

"comment_count": 78,

"created_ts": 1772025953,

"is_internal": false,

"post_text": "",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

"enterprise"

],

"comments": [

{

"top": "The best alternative to Docker Desktop on macOS is to abandon the GUI entirely use colima to create the linux VM.\n brew install colima docker docker-buildx docker-completion docker-compose\n export DOCKER_HOST=\"$HOME/.colima/docker.sock\" >> ~/.zshrc\n source ~/.zshrc\n colima start --cpus 8 --vz-rosetta --ssh-agent --mount $HOME:w\n\n\n\nthen add this line to your $HOME/.docker/config.json\n \"cliPluginsExtraDirs\": [\"/opt/homebrew/lib/docker/cli-plugins\"],\n\n\n\nthat will get you a fast virtiofs VM with the latest docker, including compose and buildx. it may seem scary to replace an officially blessed tool like Docker Desktop, but i have had zero issues with colima. it isn't \"docker compatible\". it's docker. just need to run `brew upgrade` and `colima update` every once in a while to keep it up to date.",

"author": "y0ssar1an",

"replies": [

{

"text": "I've been using Finch (\nhttps://runfinch.com/\n) for the last few years, it basically is a managed Lima, nerdctl, containerd and BuildKit.\nI just alias docker to finch and it just works.",

"author": "jpalmer",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "If you're going full CLI on macOS, I've had the best experience with:\n brew install podman\n\n\nPodman manages the linux vm for you automatically.\nI've come to enjoy podman more than docker on my linux hosts anway; the default runtime (crun) is lighter than docker (runc), podman-kube-play is great for managing multi-container pods and is compatible with kubernetes. It also integrates very neatly with systemd. Of course there is the whole daemon-less and rootless side of the things as well..",

"author": "seemaze",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I’ve been using OrbStack instead of Docker Desktop and gotta say, I’d not replace it with anything else. So if anyones looking for a more automated alternative, check out OrbStack.",

"author": "eknkc",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I hear great things about OrbStack; unfortunately the licensing tied to their free offering doesn't play nicely with corporate environments (and we're cheap!).\nI switched to Colima instead and couldn't be happier.",

"author": "cathalc",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "Thank you!!! Been struggling with time skew on Podman desktop for around a year now with no fix in sight. At least in the initial test since I saw your comment a few hours ago, this is working great!",

"author": "a456463",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "I tried to use podman desktop for a bit but I ran into some screwy compatibility issues. It just wasn't as smooth as docker.\nI really really want an alternative to docker desktop. I don't like the path they're going down. I don't like the AI crap in the UI. The licensing is crazy. It just doesn't feel right.\nSo I've been lately using rancher by SuSE. Surprisingly, it's been all right. So far it just works. I'm using this on Mac OS.\nIf anybody's looking for an alternative that's one worth considering.",

"author": "bmurphy1976",

"replies": [

{

"text": "I'm still confused by why anyone wants to use either Docker or Podman desktops. The the docker/Podman CLIs seem like a much better way to interact with containers/images. Maybe it's just my usecase.",

"author": "scuff3d",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I can't speak to docker, but the Podman desktop UI on MacOS doesn't really offer any functionality that the CLI doesn't. It's more like a status dashboard than anything else. I personally never look at it. I don't see how you can get very far managing containers, images, etc using _just_ the UI in any case.",

"author": "bityard",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "Agreed. To be honest I feel the same way about k8s. A bunch of people on my team get grumpy if we don't have k9s available or some other interface, but I prefer to just use kubectl",

"author": "scuff3d",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "The API is pretty extensive too. It works on a local socket that you can start on demand. (Lest people think there's a daemon or root requirement)",

"author": "dizhn",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "I personally use Docker Desktop because it was the easiest way to install Docker on my Mac. I launch Docker Desktop, close the window but keep the app running in the background, then use the docker tool on the command line :)",

"author": "mort96",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "I love podman. it’s my default whenever i need to run containers locally. Ive also used it to run containerized systemd services.\nSelling enterprise licenses is a smart move from Redhat: they actually build/contribute to production grade container orchestration platforms like openshift. Unlike Docker Inc which looks like it only has the docker registry and Docker Desktop.",

"author": "pm90",

"replies": []

},

{

"top": "Man, I feel bad for Docker, the company. Created the open source project that almost single-handely revolutionized deployments, development environments, and cloud computing, but sorta never managed to stick a product.",

"author": "tonnydourado",

"replies": [

{

"text": "I'm equally shocked nobody has bought them out to keep them well funded and not focused on trying to monetize (outside of just billing for private images). Every cloud provider like CloudFlare (I think?), Azure, AWS, GCP, etc benefit from Docker, it seems like a no brainer to me... You would then condense the org to just developers and PMs. Then marketing and other employees could be shifted to another part of the parent org and condense it down to a core group that builds and makes the tooling stronger.\nI wish we had tax exceptions for companies maintaining open-source projects full time to be reasonable write offs or something, with strict checks so companies dont just make random \"open source\" projects to write off, it should be something with known sizable impact and/or use, it would make some critical open source projects attractive \"buy outs\" or options to fully fund for some of these giants that benefit from them. Imagine if the devs entire salary (up to a point) could be written off completely. Some of these people are working on key infrastructure for the modern web, and even other critical systems, think of Chromium (tricky because of Chrome being not-open source but a proprietary end-product), Firefox, Linux, openssl, and obviously Docker, as good example.",

"author": "giancarlostoro",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "> Every cloud provider [...] benefit from Docker\nHow ? Docker didn't invent the underlying technology and can't control it (through patents, etc...). It's all open and Docker tools are just the most popular but there are alternatives. Why pay when you can get it for free ?",

"author": "ragall",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "To keep it maintained.",

"author": "giancarlostoro",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "Cloud providers have no reason to. If Docker disappeared today, the alternatives would take over.",

"author": "ragall",

"depth": 4

},

{

"text": "I think they are now doing better than ever. And they have been bought out already by Mirantis, unless I missed something.\nPodman isn't really a competitor at this point, it's just the \"docker at home\" NIH project from redhat. It works fine, but docker isn't going anywhere really.",

"author": "mardifoufs",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "I personally prefer the Podman CLI however as you don't need the daemon running in the background and prefer Kubernetes like yamls for local development. I definitely don't need a polished desktop GUI that shows me how many images I have though - I've never understood the use case for that.",

"author": "osigurdson",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Same. I switched to podman just so I don't have to troubleshoot why the docker daemon isn't running again.",

"author": "dec0dedab0de",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Used docker for over a decade, never ran into this docker daemon intermittently stops running issue.",

"author": "newsoftheday",

"depth": 2

}

]

}

]

},

{

"id": "47147183",

"title": "Ask HN: Share your productive usage of OpenClaw",

"link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47147183",

"domain": "news.ycombinator.com",

"author": "aavci",

"score": 97,

"comment_count": 77,

"created_ts": 1771992206,

"is_internal": true,

"post_text": "What are some very productive things you achieved with OpenClaw that you wouldn’t mind sharing?",

"is_ask_hn": true,

"matched_keywords": [],

"comments": [

{

"top": "We run an OpenClaw agent for our entire team — he lives in a group chat (although we have DMs too).\n- Runs our standups, checks in withe everybody EOD on blockers\n- Already know what we shipped on Github and Linear so it can focus on the work that's not tracked and summarize it in the morning for everyone\n- Helps with debugging customer issues\n- Keeps up with twitter and competitors and lets us know if they launch new features\nBesides, I'm honestly blown away by the social aspect of it. I was honestly pretty skeptical at first, but having an AI team mate is actually _fun_. There, I said it. Everybody on the team said they'd be sad if we took it away.\nI'll do a write-up on our setup sometime this week, I hope others will find our approach to security posture and multi-tenant usage insightful.",

"author": "maebert",

"replies": [

{

"text": "We did the same and I wrote (admittedly had AI write) about it.\nhttps://speedscale.com/blog/building-speedy-autonomous-ai-de...",

"author": "stitched2gethr",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Thanks for sharing. Can you share an estimate of how many tokens it uses over time? Would love to know how much it costs in terms of money.",

"author": "apopapo",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "It all depends on the model and how much you use it of course. We're running Opus 4.6 and on a light day it spends a dollar or two. This is just a few simple operations like \"create a ticket for ...\" and it's regular heartbeat checks. The heaviest day I see is $110 and on that day we were basically talking to it and having it implement features all day long.",

"author": "stitched2gethr",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "In your experience, did you (or anyone) in the team/company felt that some non-tech people were not pulling their weight, example project managers/directors who didn't seem to bring enough value and if you did, found that using OpenClaw reduces the need for those positions?\nOr has anyone else?",

"author": "hboon",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Holy s*t loaded question batman",

"author": "ucffool",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "I have a claw (that is not OpenClaw, just another impl) and my wife and I communicate to it through a Telegram bot (we have a group chat, but we both DM it most of the time), it has its own email, and all that. A couple of things I had it do:\n* I was going through some SOC2 compliance vendor evals and I just messaged it as things were happening and it made me a nice doc at the end\n* My wife and I are planning a trip and we have a spreadsheet organized as a calendar. A friend asked when we'd be in Taiwan and my wife texted it to summarize the calendar into a text message to copy and it gave it to her.\n* I have it set up to warn me when to cover my bike so it doesn't get rained on, in the sense that I told it I wanted this functionality and it wrote something and scheduled it\n* It pulls my wife and my todo lists and gives me a top 3 in the morning to work on.\n* Every morning, it looks up Hacker News posts related to AI, filters out culture war type stuff and then sends me a short message about what it thinks will be interesting (new models, techniques, that sort of thing)\n* It watches some subreddits for sales of certain hardware (I'm interested in servers with SXM5 boards, Mac Studios with >64 GiB of RAM) and then notifies me when something matches\nOverall, it's all about mechanizing lots of parts of my life and using the advantage of a machine that understands text: it doesn't need sophisticated parsing logic. That's actually really nice.",

"author": "arjie",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Do you mind sharing how much this is costing? I'm a heavy claude code user, but if I had to pay the API rate, it would be a bit prohibitive",

"author": "ffb7c5",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Certainly, yes. It's about $75/week. The harness picks the model appropriately but it's mostly Sonnet with some rare Opus and Haiku/Gemma. I was previously running on DeepSeek 3.2 but while per token costs are low, the actual amount of tokens required to produce results is high so total costs were actually higher!\nI am also a Claude Code Max subscriber so the API use is in addition to the subscription, but it can't be helped. Claude Code is the best way for me to do work and the Claw is the best way for me to get an automated EA. I forgot something else: I also just text the bot to schedule meetings and it does that as well (I have a calendar delegated to its Google user).\nI've got some space in a datacenter, and I was vacillating on getting a card and running some open models but when I actually exercised them, it turned out that the quality of open models was too far below the Claudes for my use-case. Still if you've got a 300W Blackwell-based RTX 6000 Pro and you want to trade for some 4090s, email me.\nMy claw powered by Claude is pretty trustworthy for my use-cases.",

"author": "arjie",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "“so the API use is in addition to the subscription, but it can't be helped.” - I beg to differ. OrcaBot.com is a claws that runs using vanilla Claude Code so you can do all that with your regular subscription. Disclosure: I’m the author. The only reason these other claws can’t offer that is because they front it with their own AI.",

"author": "robbomacrae",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "That's pretty cool. And when I first tried this, I tried to do it with a bash loop around `claude -p` and you can get quite far with that! But overall, I think I'd rather use their tools the way they've set them up to be used and pay them their $500/month total or whatever. I'm probably going to stick to this approach, but your thing is pretty neat so thank you for sharing.",

"author": "arjie",

"depth": 4

},

{

"text": "Just a heads up, I tried to use the continue with google button on your site, but running into \"Bot verification failed\". Using stock chrome browser, not running a VPN either",

"author": "ffb7c5",

"depth": 4

}

]

},

{