MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwpoaster | 2025-08-21 15:54:09+00:00
In Canada any transactions over a certain limit require the regulated counterparty to file a Suspicious Transaction Report with FINTRAC.

FINTRAC is unable to establish a pattern in those reports and prosecute. Instead, when someone is charged with an indictable offence, their name and related entities are searched for STRs. Any financial crimes are then used to create additional charges.

The net result of this, because of lack of digitization and various privacy guarantees, is that it is almost impossible to be charged with financial crimes as a primary offence in Canada.

Source: former RCMP financial crimes consultant.
by mullingitover | 2025-08-21 15:54:27+00:00
> You're assuming there is another side, which there seems to be no reason whatsoever to assume

There are at least two sides to every contract, that's how contracts work. There are a lot of people lining up to defend the business owner, and I'm not finding a single word from any of the H-2A workers, who are uniquely powerless and in a class who has a well-documented history of being exploited.

Those workers 'quitting' was found to be constructive dismissal. They were coerced into quitting, that's the 'other side.' That meant they surrendered their transportation costs back home (which they would've been entitled to if they were fired), and arguably lost out on other work they could've done.
by nutjob2 | 2025-08-21 15:54:44+00:00
> This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will break”, then in the same paragraph “but don’t do this specific thing”.

I think you're being a bit pedantic. There is no contradiction.

You can indeed delete System Preferences and nothing will break, ditto for utilities, it just makes life difficult if you do. For a locked down system for say a child though it might make sense. Also reversing the problem isn't hard, you can just copy in the apps from elsewhere.

macOS isn't perfect, but it does have a nice, clean, logical implementation in many ways.

One huge demonstration of that is the way it runs on commodity hardware so well (ie Hackintoshes). Apple could have easily baked in very hardware specific support in the OS, but instead they mostly implemented a general system that follows PC standards. Security lock downs are orthogonal to that.
by rnhmjoj | 2025-08-21 15:55:27+00:00
I'm far from being an AI enthusiast as anyone can be, but this issue has nothing to do with AI specifically. It's just that some greedy companies are writing incredibly shitty crawlers that don't follow any of the enstablished conventions (respecting robots.txt, using a proper UA string, rate limiting, whatever). This situation could have easily happened earlier than the AI boom, for different reasons.
by basketbla | 2025-08-21 15:56:50+00:00
After seeing "Do things that don't scale" trending the other day, I thought it would be fun to have a hackernews archive of all the Paul Graham essays.

This was vibe coded pretty quickly so can't vouch for its integrity, if anyone has modifications they want to make here's the repo: https://github.com/basketbla/pg-scraper

Also please let me know if something like this already exists! There was a reddit thread where somebody posted this:

https://www.reddit.com/domain/paulgraham.com/top/?sort=top&t...

But I don't know if there's an equivalent thing for hackernews.
by uncertainrhymes | 2025-08-21 15:57:17+00:00
I was taken aback recently when a Gen-ish Z person told me AI was 'destroying all the water'. I've done data center work, and while I know it is used for cooling, I don't think I've ever personally destroyed any large bodies of water.

There is a perception out there about GenAI and water that goes surprisingly deep. I was told we are will be living in a drought-stricken hellscape, and AI is to blame.

I'd like to know the equivalent energy consumption of a single TikTok video, but that is probably arguing the wrong thing. My bigger question is ... where do they think that water goes? Steam? The assumption is that it is gone forever, and I can't get over how people could just take that at face value.
by Hilift | 2025-08-21 15:57:19+00:00
> have a lot of shoplifting here in recent years.

Grocery stores have a low profit margin. In 2020 it was 3%. In 2024 it was 1.6%. That is not a good number. Assume this number is two times worse in California or other areas with spontaneous looting. Lots of empty shelves with pictures of products you can pick up at the counter.

https://www.fmi.org/our-research/food-industry-facts/grocery...
by benjiro | 2025-08-21 15:57:26+00:00
Also need to add, that a large part of the 80% that got kicked, was moderator staff. So it makes sense that after they removed too many developers, they ended up rehiring them.

Take in account, Twitter their front end, the stuff that people interact with was only like 15% of the actual code base. The rest was analytics for the data (selling data, marketing analytic for advertisers etc).

But as they are not reintroducing moderators, the company is "still down by 63.6% from the numbers before the mass layoffs".

So technically, Twitter is probably back or even bigger on the IT staff then before Musk came.
by addaon | 2025-08-21 15:58:32+00:00
Not affiliated with EPC, although I've been super impressed by their GaNs since first using them in lidars nearly a decade ago now. I've been keeping an eye on their integrated circuits (GaN + drivers), and just noticed today that this has moved from ENG to PROD. A super interesting part to me; a real compromise on FET resistance since clearly a lot of die area is going towards the driver, but the ability to directly drive a 5 mΩ half-bridge from a µC PWM pin without worrying about protecting the gate, gate drive current, etc, seems like a big deal...
by oulipo2 | 2025-08-21 15:58:40+00:00
The issue is that now we're over-utilizing prompts everywhere. Every search engine query. Every keypress in an AI editor. Every new website makes queries in the back. Analyze emails. etc

So it's not just about "the one query you ask ChatGPT about what you should write your mum to say you're not coming for Thanksgiving"

It's rather that an AI query is 0.24Wh, but that we are now using thousands of those per users per days, and that we globalize it at the scale of the planet, so 7 billion users... and this becomes huge
by alphazard | 2025-08-21 15:59:01+00:00
We are having an emperor's clothes moment with regards to the value of the dollar. Not that fiat money is arbitrary and therefore without value (I think this is a bad argument), but because the US government is not paying its debts in real terms. It always pays in nominal terms (and probably always will), but it doesn't pay in real terms. Dollar holders cover the gap.

If the dollar inflates away, then you need to grow just to break even. And it's advantageous to have debt denominated in a devaluing thing (in this case dollars).

Now every retail investor, and really everyone with an internet connection knows what's going on and are trying to take action accordingly.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-21 15:59:10+00:00
I used to consider myself a "tech guy" but the world seems to have moved on without me. I look at announcements of new phones and computers and I'm not even remotely excited about any of it. They're not solving any problem that I have anymore. I have a 9 year phone, and nothing released since then has really been compelling enough for me to upgrade. The only reason I will probably get a new one at some point is because the OS manufacturer and 3rd party app developers have (at best) stopped supporting my device and (at worst) are actively blocking my using their software/websites purely because of the age of the otherwise perfectly working device.

I used to have this "I'm missing something" thought but I don't think that anymore. This isn't me failing to get on board with what they think I should care about--It's the device manufacturers who are missing/ignoring my needs in the market.
by SkyBelow | 2025-08-21 15:59:16+00:00
It depends what level the education is happening at. Think of it like students being taught how to do for loops but are just copying and pasting AI output. That isn't learning. They aren't building the skills needed to debug when the AI gets something wrong with a more complicated loop, or understand the trade offs of loops vs recursion.

Finding the correct balance for a given class it hard. Generally, the lower level the education, the more it should be closed books because the more it is about being able to manually solve the smaller challenges that are already well solved so you build up the skills needed to even tackle the larger challenges. The higher the education level, the more it is about being able to apply those skills to then tackle a problem, and one of those skills is being able to pull relevant formulas and such from the larger body of known formulas.
by nerevarthelame | 2025-08-21 15:59:20+00:00
What's the dog whistle? People are concerned about the impact industry has on the environment, and they are stating those concerns plainly. I don't think the non-profit WaterWatch's true goal is to destroy big tech.

I think you're oversimplifying the "just use rivers" idea. Most data centers (80% for Google) require potable water for cooling, and it can't come straight from a river. Plus, using potable water in cooling adds mineral deposits to the water and will require treatment to be consumable again.
by kraussvonespy | 2025-08-21 15:59:39+00:00
Mid 1980s, I worked at an record store that was also heavy into stereos and other audio / visual equipment. We were fortunate enough to have not only a huge 40" Sony set (which weighed about 300lbs) but also a 36" Fisher console set that I think weighed close to 400lbs. So, so much heavy glass.

There were lots of reasons why you wouldn't want to buy one of these behemoths at the time (cost, weight, heat) but maybe the most significant was how bad NTSC video looked when you spread it across a 40" screen. I recently pulled out an old laserdisc player and connected it to a 65" OLED set and it looks absolutely terrible.
by jayd16 | 2025-08-21 16:00:24+00:00
You mean like it turned on Hibernate or it wrote some custom rolled in app cache layer?

I usually find these kinds of caching solutions to be extremely complicated (well the cache invalidating part) and I'm a bit curious what approach it took.

You mention it only updated a single file so I guess it's not using any updates to the session handling so either sticky sessions are not assumed or something else is going on. So then how do you invalidate the app level cache for a user across all machine instances? I have a lot of trauma from the old web days of people figuring this out so I'm really curious to hear about how this AI one shot it in a single file.
by ncr100 | 2025-08-21 16:00:39+00:00
/s: B-b-b-but if you buy the Pixel 10 Pro Fold you can pay $1799 and, assuming your bank account can only hold amounts $1699 and lower, the amount needed to purchase will overflow at some point in the purchasing process, making it SEEM like you only pay $100 for that new phone!?
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-21 16:01:00+00:00
> Which underlying proxy is Aqua Proxy built on?

Aqua Proxy's source code is here: https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/AquaProxy/tree/master. It mostly leverages the Go standard library.

One thing I really like is that it won't MITM any requests that use TLS 1.3 or HTTP2. Since Mavericks doesn't support these protocols natively, the proxy knows this traffic must be coming from a relatively-modern app that ships its own TLS implementation and doesn't need any help.

> Can you touch on how some of these patches were made/backported from and to closed-source binaries?

The Mail plugin just disables a feature via Objective-C swizzling. Swizzling is fun, you can replace any method in any app with your own version. I usually use class-dump to get a list of methods in the original app, read the method names to guess at what each one does, and try the ones that look promising. More recently I've begun using Hopper (a proper decompiler/disassembler) more heavily, particularly because Claude is very good at reading both assembly and decompiler babble and can direct me.

The font patch is just a hex edit. To quote the readme:

>> The patch removes the `fnt_adjust` TrueType instruction from Apple's font rendering code. This instruction has not been used by legitimate fonts since the 90s. After CVE-2023-41990 was published, Apple responded by removing this instruction from modern macOS. This patch merely does the same on Mavericks.

The patched library replaces the vulnerable instruction with a no-op.
by pjc50 | 2025-08-21 16:01:18+00:00
Everyone else telling you about civil forfeiture; I'm going to mention the original James Bond novel Goldfinger, in which part of the early plot is exactly Auric Goldfinger hiding gold in the panels of his Rolls-Royce in order to smuggle it out of the UK, which was illegal at the time. Even for gold legitimately owned.

(historical background: https://www.chards.co.uk/guides/exchange-control-act/785 )
by foldr | 2025-08-21 16:01:36+00:00
Lots of people told Liz Truss that the budget would lead to a crisis in confidence in the markets. Even more people would have told her if she hasn’t decided to go ahead without an OBR assessment.

Whether or not someone was able to foresee the exact specifics is irrelevant. Everyone who knew anything knew that the budget would have catastrophic consequences.

You don’t have to like Labour’s economic policy, but it’s rather a weak argument to insist that it will eventually lead to an even bigger crisis that the Truss-induced crisis that has actually happened. So far it hasn’t. Isn’t economic policy essentially the art of delaying crises, in any case?
by wredcoll | 2025-08-21 16:01:39+00:00
It was the dev environment for a bunch of wannabe microservices running across node/java/python

And like, I'm getting to the point of being old enough that I've "seen this before"; I feel like I've seen other projects that went "this really hard problem will be solved once we just re-implement everything inside our new system" and it rarely works; you really need a degree of pragmatism to interact with the real world. Systemd and Kubernetes are examples of things that do a lot of re-implementation but are mostly better than the previous.
by bikenaga | 2025-08-21 16:02:35+00:00
"We find a warp relative to the invariable plane at semimajor axes of 80 - 400 AU (98% confidence) and 80 - 200 AU (96% confidence), but not at 50 - 80 AU or 200 - 400 AU. If it is not spurious, a possible explanation for this warp is an unseen planet in the outer solar system. With n-body simulations, we find that a planet with mass between that of Mercury and the Earth, semimajor axis in the range 100 - 200 AU, and inclination ≳10∘ to be the most likely cause of the warp; however, parameters outside of these ranges are still possible."
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-08-21 16:02:49+00:00
Not necessarily. In my case I will often buy a few bunches of bananas, which don't all fit on the scanner’s scale at once. If I try to weigh them once bunch at a time, I will get a “too many scans of this item” alert and a staff member will have to come unlock the machine for me (and they'll usually scold me for not weighing all of my bananas, which can't all fit on the scale, at once).
by abxyz | 2025-08-21 16:02:59+00:00
Outcome-based billing is interesting. I think some people may balk at the idea of trusting customers to self-report their outcomes but self-reporting already happens often in enterprise billing. A customer can defraud their service providers by underreporting but the risk to their relationship with the service provider is rarely worth it (if the service isn't delivering value, drop it, if the service is delivering value, the fees are worth it). SaaS companies are already regularly writing off unpaid bills. That said...

https://www.useskope.com/resources/why-now

"Salesforce, Sierra, Zendesk, and Intercom are a few of the early movers in adopting an outcome based model. Their definitions of a 'successful outcome' vary from simply facilitating a conversation (Salesforce) to completing a customer support query with no human elevation needed (Sierra)."

"Chargeflow is another company that automates the process of collecting revenue and preventing chargebacks for ecommerce, which has adopted this model. They take 25% of each recovery and charge $39 for each chargeback prevention. Their pricing page explains the idea perfectly: success first, pay second."

Are these examples of "outcome-based billing" or just the redefinition of usage and/or fees as an "outcome"? "Facilitating a conversation" and "completing a support query" are not trust-based outcomes, that's just usage. A thing happened within the service's boundary. Stripe's usage based billing (and Orb etc.) can be used for this already.

I guess you are in a tough position because you are trying to provide real world examples of a category you are hoping to define, but in this case, perhaps it's best to wait for some clear real world examples instead of muddying the waters like this. I fear that reading this, most people would conclude that outcome-based billing is just a way to define your usage-based pricing, rather than something that needs a platform like Skope.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-21 16:03:03+00:00
It’s a lot cheaper to replace an employee by one who leaves at market rate than to pay all of your developers at market rate. Many are going to stick around because of inertia, their lack of ability to interview well, golden handcuffs of RSUs, they don’t feel like rebuilding the social capital at another company or the naive belief in the “mission”, “passion” etc
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-21 16:03:12+00:00
Meta's business model is to capture attention - largely with "content" - so they can charge lots of money to sprinkle ads amongst that content.

I can see a lot of utility for Meta to get deeply involved in the unlimited custom content generating machine. They have a lot of data about what sort of content gets people to spend more time with them. They now have the ability to endlessly create exactly what it is that keeps you most engaged and looking at ads.

Frankly, content businesses that get their revenue from ads are one of the most easily monetizable ways to use the outputs of AI.

Yes, it will pollute the internet to the point of making almost all information untrustable, but think of how much money can be extracted along the way!
by ghurtado | 2025-08-21 16:04:32+00:00
why is there so much of this on HN? I'm on a few social networks, but this is the only one where I find this kind of quasi-spiritual, stream of consciousness, word length steadily increasing, pseudo-technical, word salad diatribes?

It's very unique to this site and these type of comments all have an eerily similar vibe.
by hearsathought | 2025-08-21 16:04:34+00:00
> When I get to the checkout, this middle-aged guy acting a bit like a drunk comes behind me and boxes me in

Is this a new jobs program? I've been seeing a lot of these middle aged/elderly guys with "Loss Prevention" on their shirts walking the aisles aimlessly in supermarkets and department stores. What's the point really when there are cameras everywhere?
by sxp | 2025-08-21 16:05:36+00:00
You're right. It's clear I should have had an LLM write my comment rather than do it myself before a cup of coffee. I've already spent an order of magnitude more energy thinking about this article compared to an LLM.

Also, since I live a first-world life style which consumes multiple KW of power, I've probably consumed multiple orders of magnitude energy more than an LLM on this topic.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-21 16:06:32+00:00
It's probably best, for your mental health, to ask these questions in earnest, and stop dismissing people as illogical. The communities living near data centers have real water problems, making it believable. If you're wondering why NIMBY happens, just watch the first 30 seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGjj7wDYaiI
by OJFord | 2025-08-21 16:06:53+00:00
But that's fine, that's why I say for big companies - the pipeline is the entire industry, everyone potentially in the job market, not just those currently at AWS. Companies like Amazon have a large enough work force to care that there's people coming up even if they don't work there yet (or never do, but by working elsewhere free someone else to work at AWS).

They have an interest in getting those grads turned into would-be-L5s even if they leave for a different company. If they 'boomerang back' at L7 that's great. They can't if they never got a grad job.
by benjsm | 2025-08-21 16:07:03+00:00
Thank you! To define the outcomes, it will be up to our customer and their users to state precisely what an outcome is and how it will appear. Once we have that information, we sync into their systems of record and act as that verification layer. It’s not an automated self-report-system, because they don’t have to report anything. As the work gets completed successfully (ie, a meeting booked or a customer support ticket closed) we will see it, verify it and bill it in realtime.

Would love to chat as well (ben@useskope.com) if you have any questions specific to your use case. May be able to give a better answer, as the nuance really varies by use case.
by ajb | 2025-08-21 16:07:25+00:00
A friend of my uncle used to sign his cheques "Mickey mouse"

My understanding is that under English law (probably inherited by the US) anything you intend to act as you signature is legally your signature. So the joke was on him, because his signature was Mickey Mouse.

This goes back to the days where people were illiterate and would sign by writing an X. But that was fine, because they only had to sign a handful of legal documents in their entire life and could remember each one.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-21 16:08:06+00:00
No, mostly misunderstanding. ~95% of all cars sold in Norway are EV, yet only ~25% of the cars on the road are EV's. Most cars predate the EV transition. It'll take another ~20 years until the 95% of the cars on the road are EV's.

We'll have the battery capacity and charge capacity to allow 100% of cars sold in 2030 to be EV's. We only need 2 capacity doublings for batteries, and currently doublings happen every ~18 months. Charge capacity is even easier, we just need to increase electricity production by 1-2% per year for a couple decades to support the transition to EV's.
by randallsquared | 2025-08-21 16:08:08+00:00
A society where trust is regularly abused isn’t—or will not long remain—a “high-trust” society.

Also, it’s not clear me if you really meant that enforcing property laws inevitably worsens outcomes for those who would otherwise have been victims, or if you mean that the now-much-smaller pool of victims have a worse time with effective enforcement. I’d argue that both are false, but the latter at least seems arguable.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-08-21 16:08:38+00:00
> It's like we live in different worlds.

There is the huge variance in prompt specificity as well as the subtle differences inherent to the models. People often don't give examples when they talk about their experiences with AI so it's hard to get a read on what a good prompt looks like for a given model or even what a good workflow is for getting useful code out of it.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-21 16:08:43+00:00
> If tomorrow ExxonMobil disappears from existence, you'd get half of the world paralysed. If Nvidia tomorrow gets replaced by a massive hole in the ground, you'd just shrug, go down the road a bit and buy AMD.

That's the wrong way to think about it, because the stock price is about all future profit over time, not the current moment. Over the next 50 years, which one do you think will have made more profit?

Imagine you're in the year 1900, and you're comparing a light bulb company with a steam engine company. Industry needs steam engines, you say! Half the world would paralyze if they stopped working! Meanwhile, who cares about a light bulb company?

But you can understand why light bulbs actually turned out to make much more money moving forwards.