I’m a hobbyist woodworker. I manually design simple things in Shapr3d with a lot of patience when I build things. I wonder in the time of LLMs if there is an effective way to accelerate the 3D model design using AI.. Anybody tried using AI to model wood projects? Any tools to recommend?

Ask HN: CAD for wood working with LLM support?

Maybe that was true with Fable as well.  But one prompt which took 5 minutes of clock time, used 50% of the resources of a Pro account for the 5 hour window.

Tell HN: Google Argon on a Pro subscription is worthless

I sometimes run across comments where someone says they want an open-source router. I wonder if this is a viable idea for someone to start as a small company. What makes me hesitant is that, first, it looks like this already exists in several wireless and non-wireless routers (like the GL.iNet Flint or OpenWrt One), and second, I assume hackers would just make their own.I have been flashing DD-WRT to my routers for many years. My current setup is an Archer C9 that connects via cable to an Archer C8, which then wirelessly bridges to an R7000. All of them run DD-WRT. If I had &quot;fun money,&quot; I would buy a low-power SFF PC with dual NICs, run OPNsense or OpenWrt, and use the wireless routers strictly as access points. Since I don&#x27;t have that much to spend, I look for older DD-WRT friendly routers, usually under $30, on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, and flash them myself.I see that Ubiquiti and MikroTik make quality routers with proprietary OSes for around $65 new. Protectli and Netgate offer pfSense routers starting at $259.00. The GL.iNet Flint 2 is $169.00, and the OpenWrt One is $89.According to ResellBot (because eBay now requires a login to see sold listings with prices), the sold &quot;DD-WRT Routers&quot; generally go for under $160. These include the WRT3200ACM, Netgear AC1750, Linksys EA9300, and Linksys R7350.When I asked an AI how I would go about judging interest, building, raising funds, and manufacturing, it seems doable but expensive (said $125,000 minimum in total made up of $30,000 for regulatory approval, engineering and protoyping $10,000+) and time-consuming just to get to a &quot;golden prototype&quot; for demos.So if I were a &quot;hacker&quot; and wanted an open-source router, depending on my funds, I would either:1. Flash DD-WRT to an existing router (used or new).2. Buy one with it already installed, like the OpenWrt One or a Protectli device.3. Get an SFF PC and build my own.I remember when some comments about DropBox said it was a waste because any hacker could make that. I also know DropBox was marketed to the average person and businesses. I don&#x27;t really see how a hacker friendly router could take off like that unless hackers are choosing the hardware and setting up the networks for average people. And I assume that most people setting up the networks want different qualities like brand name recognition, ease and speed of purchasing equipment (Walmart or BestBuy), and the ability to point a customer or family member to the number of solid reviews and articles saying it a good router to qualify their choices.So, do you actually want a router that you can buy with DD-WRT pre-installed?

Ask HN: Do you want a router that has DD-WRT pre-installed?

I love Apple. I still think its the company that makes the most interesting products in the market. It seems to me that all new Apple Home ecosystem products are well designed and useful. It would be nice to have them. But I do not need any of them, they do not solve any specific pain, any problem I have, and I have many.What problem is Apple Home trying to solve for the customers?

Ask HN: Apple HomeView. What problem is Apple Home solving?

The thing is in the past there can be supply chain attacks but when its an actual programmer creating the software there is at least a chance for them to notice if something is up.But if the app is not even created by a programmer whats stopping prompt injection from including some virus in the app?Aren&#x27;t we completely blind to security issues at that point?

Ask HN: Are you hesitant to install vibe-coded apps?

5 years ago there was a lot of talk, even on here, of getting rich from NFTs and memecoins, discussing airdrops etc. Bored Ape Yacht Club and the like.I was just wondering what happened to those, particularly NFTs of &#x27;digital collectibles&#x27;. As I understand, most of the ones that sold for hundreds thousands or even millions are worth 0 now?Did you get heavily involved in that space? If so, what&#x27;s your story? Interested to hear about experiences with &#x27;yield farming&#x27; as well - another term I have not heard in the last few years.

Ask HN: Did you 'invest' in NFTs or memecoins?

I used to (and sometimes still do) love really thinking about a problem - pen and paper, whiteboards, thinking on the tornado throne, you name it.And before AI, the projects I came up with might not have been the BEST or life-changing but they were the result of me hyper-focusing on something niche for an inordinate amount of time. Which inevitably meant I learned a lot AND anyone who saw that had a predictable reaction &quot;that&#x27;s so cool, you need a life, but still cool&quot;. And I&#x27;ve interpreted that as a recognition of skill and care. On occasion that has even landed me opportunities that I didn&#x27;t even know existed.These days I find myself wondering if there&#x27;s anything that isn&#x27;t a prompt (or a few hundred) away. And if it is, what would make my skills valuable or even visible. Specifically in the context of soon becoming an ex-student, current struggling new-grad, I keep wondering what signals indicate skills to an outsider (and not a SKILLS.MD). A resume by itself is quickly becoming deceptive with most projects just being the product of barking at a model with half-baked ideas until something resembling a working prototype comes out.To be clear, I&#x27;m not a pessimist. I don&#x27;t think its time to till the fields for our overlords. I&#x27;m trying to understand what advice people think is still applicable and what is a relic that needs a patch or two.TL;DR: AI projects are impressive but don&#x27;t always indicate skills. How do i signal skills and not just ideas and prototypes?

Ask HN: Demonstrating Skills When Everything Is a Prompt

https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitterwebviewer.net&#x2F;Previously, twitterviewer.net, which had some annoying ads, was seemingly the only website of this type left.But now twitterwebviewer is back. It doesn&#x27;t have anywhere close to as many ads as twitterviewer does.I don&#x27;t know exactly when twitterwebviewer came back online. The owner of the website didn&#x27;t announce on here or Reddit or seemingly anywhere else that he had restored the website, and I discovered the website was back a few hours ago by accident when I was doing a google search to get to the similarly named twitterviewer.So now, even if you don&#x27;t like all of twitterviewer&#x27;s ads, there is an option to read Twitter without an account.

Twitterwebviewer.net Is Back Online

Ask HN: Can I tell my managers to skip the corporate bs and get to the point?

Ask HN: What is the black swan event that could bring down GPU costs?

If you have a third.level.name domain, it&#x27;ll get permanently expunged next year. Have you successfully taken steps to migrate away? Did you move to a standard .com domain, or are you taking your chances with another .tld?Personally, I&#x27;m stuck in Microsoft hell because Azure admin emails cannot be changed and support is both uncaring and powerless.

Tell HN: Remember to migrate away from .name domain

I sometimes read Show HN, and there is literally no creativity at all: note-taker app after note-taker clone. Everyone is essentially looking at what’s already there, and they say, “Why can’t I create the exact same product, but worse, and add an AI suffix?”There is nothing creative about AI. Show HN might as well be renamed “Prompt HN.” These promoters always say, “Prompting makes me efficient; I don’t have to write code by hand anymore.”Great. What has your “efficiency” gotten you? Yet another note-taker with an “AI” suffix? I could take notes in 1990.Where did the actual engineers go? Surely they aren’t all selling ads at Facebook’s spyware empire? Where are the transistor, the C programming language, Emacs, and SQLite developers of our time?

Ask HN: Where has creativity in software gone?

We have WorkOS and are sending out activation emails for our beta product. They activation email (with the link) ends up in spam. We&#x27;ve tried so many different combos (plain text vs. html, vs. no hyperlink), and it seems like anything with a link is getting bounced. I&#x27;m worried about our domain health and curious if there&#x27;s a better way to diagnose the problem

Domain Health

Recently I created a Facebook scraper that can scrape profiles, posts, comments, reactions, groups, Marketplace and search engine.It&#x27;s free and open source. It&#x27;s lightweight, doesn&#x27;t use a headless browser and doesn&#x27;t rely on fragile HTML parsing.If anyone is interested, feel free to try it out and contribute if possible. And don&#x27;t forget to star the repo if you find it useful! :)https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;XD-MHLOO&#x2F;facebook-gql-scraper

Free and Open-Source Facebook Scraper – Lightweight, No Headless Browser

If you&#x27;re looking for a job, do -not- have Claude bulk email every company on &quot;Who&#x27;s Hiring&quot;.These things all look the same and your message is just going to get marked spam.For example, it&#x27;s painfully obvious that our staff eng role&#x27;s &quot;combination of distributed execution, workload optimization, and cost-aware infrastructure&quot; is not, in fact, &quot;unusually close&quot; to whatever line on your resume Claude decided is tangentially relevant.Just write a normal email by hand and send it. If you it looks like you spent 5 minutes looking up what we do and are actually excited I&#x27;ll at least look at your resume; if you spent 0 minutes thinking about the job posting I&#x27;m going to spend 0 minutes on this too.

Tell HN: Don't mass spam employers with LLM generated emails

Question is what it says on the tin. I&#x27;ve been mulling over the state of the industry and where I believe it to be going, and while I believe there will still be a role for us SWEng&#x27;s in the future, I believe there will be a need for far fewer of us.So much so that, a la industrial revolution, there will be lots of layoffs and SWEngs without a cause. This is obviously quite a pessimistic view of where the industry is going, and maybe I&#x27;m just looking for some reassurance or discussion - my question is at what point do a large amount of SWEngs have to find something else to do and re-train?

Ask HN: Many SWEngs out there are considering re-training

I recently started a conversation on ChatGPT for macOS in &quot;Work&quot; mode with the &quot;In the Cloud&quot; execution option enabled. I was expecting this to run on a cloud VM, just like &quot;Work&quot; conversations started on chatgpt.comWhen I continued it in the browser (e.g. via right clicking it on macOS and then selecting &quot;Open on chatgpt.com&quot;), I was pretty shocked to learn that it actually had (and still has) access to my local file system. I could just prompt it to list files in my home directory, in &#x2F;Applications etc.I never have opted into this behavior in the macOS app, nor does there seem to be any way to deactivate it. It&#x27;s somewhat documented for enterprise accounts [1], and it can be deactivated for those in the admin panel, but this seems like the wrong place: Why should this be possible to activate remotely?Can anybody confirm this behavior? Maybe I&#x27;m missing something, but this seems pretty concerning.[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.chatgpt.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;enterprise&#x2F;cloud-local-access

Tell HN: ChatGPT on macOS grants local computer access to cloud account

Not having social media is good for avoiding ragebait, but it leaves me feeling helpless when I&#x27;m running out of customer support options.For the past 2 weeks, I have been failing to reach a human with competency and agency at HPE.I have a tape drive, and HPE published a recommended firmware update, but firmware downloads are gated behind an active warranty, and my warranty expired a few months ago. Trying to buy a new warranty has been a nightmare.For the past 3 weeks, I&#x27;ve been stuck in the tar pit of bouncing between departments, contact pages with no contact info, being ghosted on chats, being ghosted in email, managers saying they&#x27;ll call and then not calling, getting referred to third-party companies that seemingly have no clue about tape drives, waiting on hold for 4 hours just to have my call disconnected, twice (see for yourself: if you call the sales number and press 1, you&#x27;ll never get a human: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hpe.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;en&#x2F;contact-hpe.html)I am at the point where I&#x27;m considering a 4 hour road trip to an office just to see if showing up in person will get attention on my issue.Is there an approach I&#x27;m missing or unaware of?

Ask HN: Any secrets for reaching a human at large companies?

I&#x27;m a technologist with 25+ years of hands-on experience across all IT roles and hundreds of technologies. I&#x27;ve done it all: from startups to Fortune 500s, from desktop applications to global distributed systems to AI dark factory harnesses.But I&#x27;m bored.I want to work with a startup who&#x27;s taking on real challenges, challenges that require the kind of engineering expertise that gave us the microprocessor revolution and the real birth of Silicon Valley.Yes, everyone is talking about AI. Sure, in the right hands, with the right ring-fencing, AI is great, and there are plenty of great startup ideas around AI. At the same time, there is a lot of disinformation. The risk is that many of these startups will fail because they lack the serious engineering needed to use AI to its maximum potential.But I&#x27;m looking for something else.Do you have something that shifts the paradigm? Do you have a startup with a real challenge?I&#x27;d like to hear from you.I&#x27;d love to see what people are doing out there ... things that my AI agents haven&#x27;t found yet.

Are there any more startups with real technical challenges?

Apple has added notification red icons to the Apple Settings app to try to sell extended AppleCare. I find this annoying because there are their alerts in the Settings app that I immediately respond to. Any tricks to turn these off (without buying the service)?