MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
I changed my address, and TransferWise in two days will empty my account
by casenmgreen | 2025-11-28 22:24:22+00:00
I have a UK one-man company, through which I work as an IT contractor.

Recently, I changed the address.

TransferWise then KYCed, and requires;

1. A bank statement.

2. A utility bill.

There are no other bank accounts, and it's a one-man company; there's no rental, no phone bill, no water bill - there is a server bill, for the server the company web-site is on, and this TransferWise have refused.

To date, TransferWise stated in their communications that if I could not prove the address, the account would become emit-only; I could not pay money in.

I have just received a message from TransferWise that in two days, all funds in the account will be refunded.

This is wholly different to what was said before, and I'm not clear about what it means : refunded? to whom? me? to those who paid in the funds?

This message from TransferWise has come Friday evening. It seems to me if I now move funds out of the account to other bank accounts, this will not occur over the weekend, and so not until Monday morning.

The deadline issued by TransferWise expires Sunday evening and I have no idea what then will happen.

As it is, I have a personal TransferWise account and transfers to there are immediate, so fortunately I have an emergency escape route.

I note that the address I had on file for the last some years also could not be proved, for exactly the same reasons.

I will now write to TransferWise customer support. I know from experience this is futile - there was an earlier occasion, some years ago, when the account was almost closed, because document upload on the TransferWise site was for me at least broken - but I will do so anyway. I will update the thread here with events.
by credit_guy | 2025-11-28 22:24:47+00:00
I used the figure you quoted, which I got from wikipedia [1]. I said "at the time of the accident"; you are pointing out it was 8 months after the accident. I guess I should specify all the details in my comments on HN going forward? I said that now the radiation level must be lower, and I could't find any more recent estimates, but I ballparked it at 100x lower.

In the end, I'm not sure what your point is? Are you disagreeing with my overall estimate that the energy produced by the elephant's foot's radioactivity at 100 meters distance is one billion times lower than the energy we receive from the sun, and therefore fungi can't "feed" on it, because this energy is nowhere near enough to sustain life?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant%27s_Foot_(Chernobyl)#...
by freehorse | 2025-11-28 22:25:11+00:00
I mean if the model is intended to be deployed somewhere for some purpose by some business, as a business you probably would not want to worry whether users may use to produce sth that could be seen as embarrassing or problematic pr-wise. Having a sanitized and more directed training set can help with that. MS does not produce only 7B models, and 7B models can still say "embarrassing" things. I may be wrong of course.
by wtcactus | 2025-11-28 22:25:50+00:00
You've misinterpreted my point. But, I'll start by addressing your statement that fascism is so much worse than communism: It's not, all numbers from the 20th century show us that communism is even worse than fascism... and that's a very though target to beat.

But about my point. My point is not preferring fascism to communism: any kind of collectivism is equally bad and only brings pain and misery to the people.

My point is that presently, communism is a much bigger threat since you have a lot more communists in positions of power than fascists. Sure, it's fancy to now call fascist to anyone that defends basic common sense measures that were accepted by any Democrat as obvious under Clinton (you know, things like meritocracy, praising hard work, incarcerating violent offenders, keeping borders secure and expecting people to work in order to get money... all big red fascist flags nowadays), but you don't have single person in any real position of power of public exposure telling you proudly they are fascists.

But boy, you do have a bunch of them telling you they are "socialists", or "Marxists"... and now, you even have some telling you outright they are communists. Let's get this straight, the amount of propaganda reached such a degree of insanity in the USA, that you now have people, openly admitting they are communists without any repercussions. They are even getting elected for public office.
by mikert89 | 2025-11-28 22:26:16+00:00
what I see alot is that the syntax and overall code architecture is text book, but its the completely wrong approach that creates extremely complicated tech debt. All the code reviews will be on the syntax, and none on the big picture of the business problem, or whether the implementation is overcomplicated.

in the short run (1-2 years) there is no repercussion for this, but eventually making changes will be extremely risky and complicated. The individuals that built the software will lord over everyone else with their arcane knowledge of this big pile of junk
by alephnerd | 2025-11-28 22:27:02+00:00
Ime, a lot of the onus falls on Engineering and Product Management failing to make a case for why certain engineering decisions (eg. Investing in continual tech debt grooming) have business value.

The point of a business is to generate revenue. The point of employees is to do work that helps generate revenue. As such, any decision needs to ensure it has a business case aligned with revenue generation.

Good engineering hygine has significant business value such as in speeding up delivery of new features as well as keeping certain customers happy, but in a lot of cases there is an inability to communicate from either direction (eg. PMs not giving Eng full visibility into business decisions, and Eng not being able to explain why certain engineering choices have business value). If you cannot communicate why this matters, you aren't going to get it prioritized.

Unsurprisingly, at big organizations, communication can take the backseat because communication is hard and at a large company, there is some amount of complacency because the product is good enough.

Edit: Unsurprisingly got downvoted.

The only reason you are employed is to make value (which generally is measured in revenue generated). You are not paid $200k-$400k TCs to write pretty or a e s t h e t i c code. You can make a case for why that matters, but if you choose to bury your head in the sand and not make that case, I have no sympathy for you.
by nickff | 2025-11-28 22:28:27+00:00
Airbus is not immune to design & manufacturing issues with fatal consequences, they’re just not too-of-mind these days. A similar issue seems to have ‘cropped up’ on this flight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72

There was a television show (episode) about another design issue (which was fatal) some time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
by Razengan | 2025-11-28 22:29:14+00:00
> how easy it is to get trapped in a bubble thanks to algorithmic social media.

This. For example there are so many awesome videos on YouTube that would actually make the world and cross-culture relations better if more people got to see them, but few people will unless they specifically search for them.

Like just yesterday I stumbled upon this amazing nature documentary [0] from Poland (in English) of a quality rivaling or exceeding that of the major channels, with no ads, no "like and subscribe!!" begging, and it's just as amazing that I didn't hear of this since the 3 years it's been up.

There's many more videos on all topics that you don't need to be a purveyor of the subject to enjoy and appreciate, sitting at criminally low views and likes.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NBTZJi_grk
by bigyabai | 2025-11-28 22:29:53+00:00
> Even if Rosetta wasn't being removed, everyone should still want native ARM software

I think this is seriously flawed logic, and part of why I don't daily a Mac anymore. As a user, I have zero leverage in porting 90% of the stuff I own to the New Hotness. Yes, that includes video games. But it also includes BBEdit and Sublime and Git Tower and dozens of other Mac apps I paid for and can't easily use anymore. That is insulting - I should be allowed to use these apps if the hardware supports it. No software nanny should have the right to tell me playtime is over.

There's no point paying for premium software that my laptop OEM uses as leverage against their own developers. I'm not going to be complicit in it even if emulation "harms" the performance. It's not unviable for Apple to implement UEFI, take Rosetta seriously or hell, even support Windows. They are a trillion dollar company, Apple could launch a satellite into fucking orbit if you gave them enough time. They simply don't want to.
by degamad | 2025-11-28 22:30:07+00:00
Not wearing out increases the time frame across which you can amortise the costs.

If option A costs $100,000/unit and needs to be replaced every 10 years, while option B costs $300,000/unit but lasts 50 years before replacement, option B is still cheaper in the long run, even factoring in interest rates.

(You can substitute "time until replacement" in the above with "time until maintenance costs exceed the original capex", and the logic remains the same.)
by godelski | 2025-11-28 22:32:13+00:00
> A good senior engineer is for the most part able to not write bad code from day one

This seems unlikely. Self contained, I'd go further and say you're not a senior if your code isn't good you shouldn't be a senior.

But what is good code is in context of the codebase. It takes time to get the context of a reasonably sized codebase and no one is doing that in a single day or single week, even the wizards.

I don't agree with everything the OP writes but I think they're correct in that many companies don't value institutional knowledge. To me that is lunacy. I'm not sure how any programmer could think a reasonably complex codebase could be learned quickly. The larger and more complex your codebase the more valuable institutional knowledge is. Adding new actors just accelerates complexity and redundancy. Pushing people to be quick only worsens this. The best thing to do with new employees is get them deep into the code. Have them write/update docs, do cleanup, or other tasks that force them to understand the code and how everything interacts
by crazygringo | 2025-11-28 22:32:15+00:00
There's a huge difference between running an email server and some additional servers for thin clients -- all traditional stuff -- versus running an entire private cloud that redundantly stores the many many petabytes for your 40,000-person university, and all the web servers for the office software. Keeping it secure, keeping it updated, and having a live failover site if there's a fire or flood in your main data center that takes it out for weeks or months.

If it were that easy and cost-effective to do, large corporations would be doing it too. But there's a reason they're not.
by mlsu | 2025-11-28 22:32:33+00:00
I think this is true to an extent, but it's actually far deeper and more basic than that we fear being watched by others.

"the self" is formed in relation to others, it is not formed by itself. The way that people think of their own self, is the way they imagine themselves to act in relation to others _only_. There is no "me" alone, it's all entirely relational.

The problem I think we have now is that a huge proportion of how we relate to others has been moved online. When I was growing up, being in a picture was something that happened rarely -- on "picture day" for the yearbook, at a family gathering when someone happened to have a disposable camera. But now, kids are in photos and videos all the time, 24/7. The way we relate, from very early on, is influenced by the deeply unnatural online parasocial relationships of Instagram etc.

It goes further than you, a stable self who is worried about cancel culture. It's built into your sense of self, it affects how your self is constructed. It's deeply embedded into who you are, your way of being. To be is to be perceived and we are being perceived in these really weird/unnatural/algorithmic ways, and it is reflecting on us.
by array_key_first | 2025-11-28 22:32:41+00:00
I'm not understanding how limiting data collection is draconian regulation.

Recording in public is a huge problem overall and is slowly decaying our society. People don't do anything anymore because nothing is sacred. Have you been to a club lately? It's just a room of 500 people standing there.

It gets worse the younger and younger the people are. Kids these days are too petrified to leave their homes. Every aspect of their person is under constant scrutiny.
by auggierose | 2025-11-28 22:32:52+00:00
> I don't understand the relevance. I'm not asking for exact computation of steps. Big O is fine. And provisional on the current implementation would be the whole point.

What do you mean by "the current implementation"? Isabelle defines mathematical functions, not running code.

> No. That would be a clear hack. And it would break a lot of stuff in Isabelle.

You are thinking a little bit too simplistic here. Of course you have to do some work to integrate it properly. In particular, you would need to have to generate inequalities (upper bounds) as runtime theorems. Just as code generation (for example to Ocaml) is integrated with Isabelle, this approach could be integrated similarly, and I don't think there would be any danger to the logic. Note that for code generation, you also have to provide special theorems for higher-order functions. But it would definitely be interesting to work this out in detail.

> wouldn't be able to state or prove very natural theorems such as "the asymptotic runtime of a sort function based on pairwise comparison can't be less than O(n log(n))"

No, you wouldn't, because the approach only proves upper bounds. As stated before. So lower bounds on runtime complexity would not be natural at all in this framework.

> The problem isn't axiomatic vs definitional, the problem is denotational vs operational.

You have to explain what you mean by that. Of course you can write these morphisms, you need to define your machines and machine functions first though, which is a lot of work. Maybe start with just a Turing machine first. The upside of all this work: you could also prove theorems about lower bounds now.
by wafflesfreak | 2025-11-28 22:33:16+00:00
Hi! Datasheets can definitely be inconsistent, and that’s one of the tougher parts of doing this well. LLMs are very much “garbage in, garbage out,” which is exactly why the tool doesn’t search the web or pull from any sort of automatic datasheet library. It only reasons from the netlist and the PDFs you upload, so you stay in full control of the context and the primary sources it can pull from. If the datasheet is clear, the results are usually very solid; if the datasheet is vague, the model reflects that instead of pretending otherwise.

I’d really recommend trying it with one of your designs: upload the netlist + a component’s datasheet and ask a specific question about the part in the design. It’s the easiest way to see how well the ingestion works in practice. Would love to hear your feedback after you try it!
by nosianu | 2025-11-28 22:33:25+00:00
Then how do you work with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

I did that job, just after university, but that is not my comment. I bookmarked it though because that person said it so well.

You will write bad code, because what you already find there - and that one company is not alone! - is already so bad, there is no way to do a good job on top of literally millions of escalating hacks.

And don't think that you could clean this up - not even with ten years of time is that possible. You can only rewrite from scratch. Trying to rewrite even a tiny part is like picking up one spaghetti and always ending up with the whole bowl on your fork.
by evanelias | 2025-11-28 22:33:41+00:00
> I've seen significant uptake of AI tooling where possible.

Uptake is orthogonal to productivity gain. Especially when LLM uptake is literally being forced upon employees in many companies.

> I do absolutely see them reducing a lot of ancillary work that is associated with the developer lifecycle.

That may be true! But my point is they also create new overhead in the process, and the net outcome to overall productivity isn't clear.

Unpacking some of your examples a bit --

Better code and documentation search: this is indeed beneficial to productivity, but how is it an agentic workflow that requires individual developers to adopt and become productive with, relative to the previous status quo?

Documentation generation: between the awful writing style and the lack of trustworthiness, personally I think these easily reduce overall productivity, when accounting for humans consuming the docs. Or in the case of AI consuming docs written by other AI, you end up with an ever-worsening cycle of slop.

Automating low sev ticket triage: Potentially beneficial, but we're not talking about a revolutionary leap in overall team/org/company productivity here.

Low sev customer support: Sounds like a good way to infuriate customers and harm the business.
by aabhay | 2025-11-28 22:33:51+00:00
If they didn’t have the nodejs dependency then the Tauri bundle could be as small as 20mb.

Another pro not mentioned is that native integrations (i.e. obj-c on macos) are much easier to do since rust has great ffi integration with other native libraries.

The biggest pro to electron is that it has extensive plugins that are often widely used in production by large companies. But Tauri is definitely winning and any new project should use Tauri no matter what essentially.
by lenerdenator | 2025-11-28 22:34:08+00:00
> Wasn't that the root of the 2008 crash? The debt spiral was acceptable because people were making enough money in the present that regulators were powerless to advise against it. In a sane world people often go to jail for decades when doing this at pennies on the dollar.

I mean, yeah, but at the same time, and?

The lesson learned from 2008 was that no one was going to do anything of consequence to degenerate gamblers who kneecapped a generation's economic prospects. Then, in 2024, we doubled down on that position.

The behavior will continue until an effective consequence is introduced.
by Retric | 2025-11-28 22:34:26+00:00
> Are you disagreeing with my overall estimate that the energy produced by the elephant's foot's radioactivity at 100 meters distance is one billion times lower than the energy we receive from the sun

Yes, the elephants foot is not the only radiation source at Chernobyl making your calculation meaningless in practice.

You’re making such a huge range of incorrect assumptions here and I was trying to correct some of them. I’m honestly done with this conversation but it’s worth remembering that order of magnitude calculates can be off by 100,000 fold when you make the wrong assumptions.

Also, Wikipedia itself says the reading was from 8 months after the accident. “At the time of its discovery, about eight months after formation, radioactivity near the Elephant's Foot was” The falloff from 8 months post accident to now isn’t actually that large because even iodine 131 had already seen 30 half lives at that point the really nasty stuff was already gone and the reasonably long lived stuff is what was left.

Finally, fungi get by on way less energy than plants do from photosynthesis it’s really not a particularly meaningful benchmark.
by XorNot | 2025-11-28 22:35:11+00:00
It's not advice. It reads to me that the friend is lacking the framework to express that the conversation the author just involved them in made them uncomfortable.

Like there is so much detail missing here: was this within the bounds of established conversation the author has with this person, was it contextually appropriate? Does the friend ever relate similar experiences back and this reaction was surprise?

> Back and forth, back and forth, we fought like this for a while. In fact, it ended the friendship.

Seriously there's a ton of missing context here.
by chomp | 2025-11-28 22:35:15+00:00
They’re not bad, it just depends on how much you process them. Oven baked fries for instance, are not far removed from normal oven roasted potatoes. Par boiling and then deep frying them in fats will release more nutrients than you would get from a normal baker. Slicing paper thin and perfectly frying is an industrial process that most people can’t replicate at home.

I honestly think home cooked potatoes are going to be perfectly fine in most ways.
by wubrr | 2025-11-28 22:35:21+00:00
The disconnect is more between long term business value, and short term benefit for the most parasitic and manipulative actors within the business.

Engineering and business value go hand-in-hand in a healthy tech/engineering business.

A business that was built on great/innovative engineering, became successful, and then got taken over by various impostors and social manipulators, who's primary goal is gaming various internal metrics for their own gain, is not a healthy business.
by alephnerd | 2025-11-28 22:35:47+00:00
If you understand what are the metrics being tracked, and what are the primary goals that an initiative or product has, you can make a case.

We are an engineering discipline and engineering decisions can have revenue making implications. But it is hubris to assume why you should care about the nitty gritties of a codebase. It's the same way no one in leadership cares about the nitty-gritties of HR policies or accounting practices - people are hired to deal with the intricacies.

When I was a PM, I didn't have a difficult time making a business case for "keep the lights on" or tech debt work so long as I was able to attach tangible revenue implications (eg. X customer might churn because of subpar experience and we have both customer testimony and user stats showing that) or roadmap implications (eg. If we spend 6 months refactoring our monorepo, we can add new revenue generating modules every quarter instead of annually).
by cyberax | 2025-11-28 22:35:55+00:00
I reverse-engineered the notification infrastructure in Android, but for me it was the desire to be able to use customer-provided Google API keys ("google-services.json").

The protocol itself was easy, but my problem was that Google Play Services have a special permission to exempt itself from power management. And more importantly, grant that permission temporarily to the individual apps when they have a notification. I don't think I ever found out how to work around this.
by GaryBluto | 2025-11-28 22:36:06+00:00
> They’ve never been running it as a public service or a free speech platform.

I largely agree with this but it doesn't shield them from criticism.

> vibe checked

> fun fact

> And that’s okay.

If you want people to agree with or understand your viewpoint I'd suggest conveying them in a way that doesn't immediately harken back to BuzzFeed and pop journalism.
by mrdevlar | 2025-11-28 22:37:23+00:00
This is silly.

Regulation exists to help balance out the power disparity between consumers and corporations that sell AI. The EU wrote a good AI law, it's mainly focused on access to goods and services and the impact that AI can have in those domains. Among other things, it almost entirely bans surveillance pricing. Makes companies liable if an AIs discriminate on their behalf. Also restricts the use of facial recognition.

This is it's role, to equalize the power disparity by prohibiting companies that do business within the EU from engaging in these predatory practices.