Hacker News Reader

aiisjustanifon RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

Not at the entry price point of a hackathon, which is the point. Using AI in software hackathons are magnitudes cheaper than AI doing manual labor in hardware hackathons.

aiisjustanifon Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

People really should stop conflating the technical requirements for an optional back service, with they are always collecting our data and anything is a lie.

aiisjustanifon Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

Never seen it pop up for me

aiisjustanifon CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

> Just yesterday I used AI to generate 235 new system docs based on our codebase

For who? Will it ever be read? I’m bias on good documentation and I think AI is better at publishing documents for machines, for now.

aiisjustanifon Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

Most government processing is prohibited at Stripe that is why it always tends to be small. Too much risk being exposed to more regulatory scrutiny that is not worth it as payments processor. > “Prohibited Businesses… Government services… Disbursement of government economic support, such as grant” [1] [1]: https://stripe.com/en-br/legal/restricted-businesses

aiisjustanifon Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

Stripe is an EU and US company dual headquartered in Ireland and subject to the same EU regulations as Ayden. They spend a lot developing and maintaining talent in Ireland.

aiisjustanifon Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

I used to work at Stripe and they subject to the same penalties as Ayden. There is a misconception that Stripe is an American only company, they have dual HQ model in Ireland and San Francisco. Since they are an Irish founded company and they have an EU entity “Stripe Technology Europe”. They can be kicked out of entire countries and regions if they didn’t have an extensive KYC systems and be fined just the same.

Since Stripe operates by working with a BIN (banks that sponsor them within each country) generally like all payment providers. While the decline rates for new customers are not public, they are very high, especially for industries that aren’t allowed like Adult Content, Weapons, and Gambling [1]. Also revocation of existing accounts can happen often if KYC systems flag anything, like Stripe Identity, Connect, and Radar.

[1]: https://stripe.com/en-br/legal/restricted-businesses

aiisjustanifon Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

Yes, the 3rd competitor to Stripe and Ayden being Checkout.com

Also running payment processor per country would not be an easy feat or probably feasible.

aiisjustanifon When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

Reminds me of Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, there is also a cancelled series on Netflix that had an awesome first season.

aiisjustanifon Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

I mean we saw this with cloud spending and especially with logging and database read write cost across numerous companies.

It’s a clear pattern in service delivery for software for a while now. Hell for many goods and services in general, like Uber rides themselves.

Start cheap, get some vendor lock in, service provider reduces discounts, consumer notices and then reacts to the price by reducing consumption.

aiisjustanifon First public macOS kernel memory corruption exploit on Apple M5

Yes they do

aiisjustanifon Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

Depends on what I get for it and it is close to NYC and San Francisco it the 100 to 200k range. I do agree though that it is too high.

aiisjustanifon College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

> Right but what about actual usage? Young believe social media is bad for them, but nonetheless use it.

The topic was about sentiment, not usage. And the Pew Article has broad sample sizes ranging from 5,000 to 28,000.

aiisjustanifon College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

aiisjustanifon First public macOS kernel memory corruption exploit on Apple M5

While maybe true, it is better to back that up with data and the data I know of and read yearly is mostly not great. Between Splunk and SANS surveys of 2025 maybe ~2000 companies have a SOC. [1] [2]

Then you have the many companies in the UK, US, Canada, EU that have compliance and regulatory laws that require them to exist in some capacity in house. Though that is changing with MDR services, but someone still has to interface with the MDR.

[1]: https://www.elastic.co/pdf/sans-soc-survey-2025.pdf [2]: https://github.com/jacobdjwilson/awesome-annual-security-rep...

aiisjustanifon You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts

I don’t like when people use this without all the important context. Showing other quotes from the same person that is giving subjective advice on topics, lends to curiosity around how to filter their advice.

> It's is a complex and hard question, but the principles we apply to it have been around for a long time and are consistent with the site guidelines. If they weren't, we'd change the latter. > > I've explained all of this many times. If you, or anyone, would like to know how we approach the question, you could start here: > > https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47373246

aiisjustanifon Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

Yes: A prominent examples is for those that don’t know how make servers and do a lot of video editing that want high disk speeds and processing power.

aiisjustanifon Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

Blanket statements like this is the point of many of the above replies, it’s not a true statement with evidence. All rent control does not reduce the number of rentals, “more restrictive rent control”[1] [2] does. These nuances are important in the conversation.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105113772...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4904928

aiisjustanifon Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

While I appreciate sarcasm in a time of privacy crisis, I agree. We come to hackernews for discourse and try to follow the rules to have better discourse and comments that only provide sarcasm work against that.

aiisjustanifon If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

Optimizing and over-engineering to soon has gone out the window

aiisjustanifon Layoffs at Block

Network higher up the stack and be extremely likable

aiisjustanifon Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

> This takes time and effort, thus, lost opportunity cost.

Why should we assume this for every type of business.

> The thing that makes these providers worth it, is that it lets the business focus on their core competencies and just add-on as they scale without worrying about complexity.

Since when? Mastering the complexity and implementation of infrastructure from US cloud providers is a skill that takes time in itself. Personally I don’t see how Scaleway does not provide the same for example.

At some point we have to question are we choosing AWS, GCP, or Azure out of brand name, convenience, and marketability. Our if they actually enable faster business execution, higher availability, security, and regional compliance that alternatives don’t…

aiisjustanifon Amazon cuts 16k jobs

I’m more surprised that it’s not believable for some of management depending on how process driven there job is.

I’ve definitely had roles where I sadly realized I’m automating the QA person next to me well before LLMs were mainstream.

In my experience I think, you would automate enough of a mid manager role that upper management doesn’t care for, and whatever left over responsibilities that couldn’t be automated is split between a high level IC and the next above. Then the bureaucracy sells is as a success.

aiisjustanifon Heathrow scraps liquid container limit

While still theatre to a degree, that was 11 years ago.

aiisjustanifon Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM

Many one-time eSIMs aren’t transferable, Nomad for example.

aiisjustanifon I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

I think this is a very privileged statement when looking at affordability of many countries. For example 40 euros a month is out of reach for much of Albania.

aiisjustanifon Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

What did you not like about stripe?

aiisjustanifon Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

> knowledge of what should and shouldn't be, while important, bears no predictive power whatsoever as to what actually ends up happening.

I don’t know if you are intentionally being vague and existential here. However, context matters, and the predictive power is zero sounds unreasonable in the face of history.

I think humans learning that diseases were affecting us and thus leading to solutions like antibiotics and vaccines. It was not guaranteed, but I’m skeptical of the predictive power being zero.

aiisjustanifon Green card interviews end in handcuffs for spouses of U.S. citizens

Just for the record I went through this process this year with my spouse and a lawyer. My spouse did continue studying and had their i-130, i-485, and i-131, however the immigration office told our lawyer and said their F1 was no longer valid and that my spouse was under “authorized stay” not a visa any longer, especially for i-131.