MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-18 17:51:56+00:00
Hello,

I work for a major gift card company. These views are my own and not that of my employer.

The credit card companies take zero risk in this transaction, because we, the company selling the gift card, take the risk.

To this end, my personal job is building systems to prevent and combat credit card fraud. It's not terribly complicated in fact. The team I originally started with a decade ago was like three people.

Every gift card purchased by a stolen credit card is a direct loss to our revenue. We strongly want to keep that amount small. We do a pretty good job of it.

We have a large department of REAL HUMANS you can call to get help with your gift card. In the past, they have had very upset grandmas calling in to ask about why they can't purchase iTunes gift cards because they need them to get their nephew out of prison. Those calls are very sad.

Physical gift cards have no value until you pay the cashier. Despite this, physical gift card security is tough. The plastic card has to be shipped out and sit on a shelf and be directly available to anyone to tamper with. We have made some efforts to reduce that threat, but there isn't much we can do.

If you are in the US you have absolutely used our company's products and if you have bought a gift card online there's a 90% chance your transaction details have run through my code.

Frankly, I do not understand why Apple would have banned an account for trying to redeem a scammed or tampered with card. That doesn't make any sense.
by vernrVingingIt | 2025-12-18 17:52:08+00:00
Well starting over from first principles is exactly what the chip design and manufacture industry is doing. We also cannot afford, in non-finance terms, to burn all the resources on conservation of the existing software mess.

Automation is making it pretty easy to generalize all the abstraction into math automatically to inform how to evolve the manufacturing process.

Using American principles against Americans, it would run afoul of American free speech and agency ideals to dictate chip makers only engage in speech and agency that benefits software engineers.

Was in the room 25 years ago being instructed to help offshore hardware manufacturing as it was realized keeping such knowledge and informed workers domestic posed an existential threat to copyright cartels and media censorship interests.

It's a long term goal that was set aside during the ZIRP era as everyone was happy making money hand over fist.

Guess you all should have paid more attention to politics than believe since it only exists as a socialized theory it isn't real and can safely be ignored.

Americans make up a small portion of the 8 billion humans, and software engineers are an even smaller percent of the population. Other nations have rebuilt since the US bombed them to hell. They're not beholden to kowtow to a minority of the overall population.

Would recommend you set aside thinking in abstract philosophy puzzles and relate to world via its real physical properties.
by bondarchuk | 2025-12-18 17:52:59+00:00
I think the big missing thing in any proposed or actual fully open system is it does away with the difference between "prestigious" and "non-prestigious" journals. "Prestigiousness" is actually a really useful signal and it seems really difficult to recreate from the ground up in an open and fair system. It's almost like "prestige" can only emerge in a system of selfish/profit-motivated actors.
Show HN: Kodefreeze – Automate UI testing with natural language tests
by kodefreeze | 2025-12-18 17:53:02+00:00
Hi HN, sharing a SaaS product that I built to automate web UI testing based on natural language test descriptions. The approach we use is a multi-agent system that uses an augmented vision approach for interacting with the UI, rather than relying on the DOM. The goal is to mimic how your users would naturally use the UI, rather than following a predefined path.

I built this because I got tired of doing manual QA for my last SaaS product. I couldn't trust automated UI tests (Selenium/Playwright) because they were flaky, broke whenever the DOM changed, and missed obvious usability bugs.

We are completely bootstrapped, but we want to gather as much feedback as possible in these early days, so we have made the product available for free (for now).

Happy to answer any questions about it here, and would love your feedback.

Thanks!
by candiddevmike | 2025-12-18 17:53:21+00:00
Because there's a mental overhead when you're not writing the code that is arguably worse than when you are writing the code. No one is talking about this enough IMO but that's why everyone is so exhausted when using LLMs and end up just pulling the slot machine until it works without actually reading it.

Reading code sucks, it always has. The flow state we all crave is when the code is in our working memory as an understood construct and we're just translating our mental model to a programming language. You don't get that with LLMs. It devolves into prorgamming minutae equivalent to "a little to the left" but with the added complexity that "left" is hundreds of lines of code.
by rootusrootus | 2025-12-18 17:53:40+00:00
This does not scale, the amount of abuse is huuuuge. But I think with a prerequisite, it could:

Companies should be required to provide access to a service that verifies identity. I know such companies exist, so it is doable. And then, once it is provable that they are dealing with an actual human who can be identified, your rules can be applied.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-18 17:54:27+00:00
They did not lose. They failed to achieve certain long term strategic objectives. Their military still mopped the floor with all of their enemies, inflicting millions of casualties before finally retreating for whatever reason, and they're only getting better at it by constantly maximizing the casualties per dead US soldier ratio.

It's not going to go well for Venezuela if the US attacks it, no matter the result of the war.
by xpe | 2025-12-18 17:54:48+00:00
I offer some metaphors bundled into a claim:

Silver bullets almost never beat fraud. Better to steel yourself for a never-ending grind against a horde of nameless adversaries.

I asked Gemini for some follow-ups, and lo! they are interesting to consider:

- "fraud is an evolutionary arms race fought in the trenches."

- "fraud is a siege where the attacker has infinite attempts, and the defender must succeed every time."

- "fighting fraud is not a battle, it is industrial waste management."
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-18 17:55:12+00:00
Apple became infected with the same thirst for "engagement" as any advertising-driven company. That's why even first-party apps like Maps or Music now waste your time with bullshit notifications. Same for every OS update trying to con you into enabling Apple "Intelligence".

Whether the advertising is ultimately successful does not matter to those people, what matters is if they can convince the person paying them (the manager paying their salary, the ad agency, etc) that they are effective.
by lbhdc | 2025-12-18 17:55:19+00:00
That is interesting. I have worked in the space too, and have seen similar attitudes.

I think it often comes down to who is responsible for making decisions with that data. If a product or business person is the one driving a feature, and looking for adoption, the engineers likely aren't going to be invested in building out sophisticated metrics. They get the metrics they are responsible for from their cloud provider (resource use/latency/scale).

I think that problem is compounded by the perception that these integrations are going to tank your products perf (may hurt the metrics engineers care about).

I think all of those dynamics change in really big companies with thousands of engineers. Then you can often end up in a situation where engineers are now required to maximize product metrics, and need visibility into their small slice of the pie.

So, I think its largely incentive, which is why I see all of the metrics vendors targeting product and sales people in small/mid sized companies.
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-12-18 17:55:23+00:00
>PLoS [...]

At low costs of $2k~$3k per publication[0]. Elsevier closed-access journals will charge you $0 to publish your paper.

>Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication model.

Elsevier is also[1] moving to APC for their journals because is better business.

>The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money

Journals (usually) forbid you of sharing the published (supposedly edited) version of a paper. You're allowed to share the pre-published draft (see arXiv). Institutions could (and some indeed do) supply those drafts on their own.

>Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.

At the expense of making research more expensive and hence more exclusive. It's money rather quality that matters now. Thus it isn't unsurprising that Frontiers & MDPI, two very known open-access proponent publishers, are also very known to publishing garbage. It's ironic that once was said that any journal asking you for money to publish your paper is predatory, yet nowadays somehow this is considered best practice.

[0]: https://plos.org/fees/ [1]: https://www.elsevier.com/open-access
by fennecfoxy | 2025-12-18 17:55:43+00:00
I didn't really have a problem with the spoken sounds when learning in school - we were also required to take Maori lessons as well and a lot of the sounds are shared. Quite interesting really.

Edit: actually the only one I ever had an issue with was one of my homestay's names "Ryouhei"...that Ryou sound...it's like the Y stops me from rolling the R properly, so odd.
by noelsusman | 2025-12-18 17:55:52+00:00
It's not an error, Gemini 3 Pro is just somehow able to complete the benchmark while using way fewer tokens than any other model. Gemini 3 Flash is way cheaper per token, but it also tends to generate a ton of reasoning tokens to get to its answer.

They have a similar chart that compares results across all their benchmarks vs. cost and 3 Flash is about half as expensive as 3 Pro there despite being four times cheaper per token.
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-18 17:56:28+00:00
> I honestly don’t know if you cannot see the difference between issuing a warrant to be enforced by sovereign nations (or not), and actively interfering on foreign soil, or you simply don’t want to, and to avoid having to agree with that distinction you’re making up random arguments.

I'm not saying there are no differences, but your apparent claim that "issuing a warrant to be enforced by sovereign nations (or not)" in the manner the ICC does is not itself a form of "actively interfering on foreign soil" just doesn't seem to be aligning with the reality of the situation.

> If you have the opinion that a country has the right to act in that way, simply say so.

I would agree these sort of sanctions are somewhat problematic in general, however given that the ICC has decided to issue actual arrest warrants backed by the power of a legally binding international treaty I think it's also hard to argue that the sanctions are much of an overreaction given the real threat to the interests of the US and allies they pose. IMO arrest warrants are a step above sanctions in terms of their potential threat to those being targeted.

> The ICC has zero executive power and as such by definition cannot act violently. There is a clear difference between ICCs publications and a country‘s decision or refusal to enforce it, and the consequences if Visa were to refuse implementing the sanctions. You are not honestly proposing that they have a choice.

The Rome Statute is a binding treaty for State Parties, many of these states appear to take a fairly strict interpretation in regards to their obligations to enforce an arrest warrant issued by the ICC in their own national laws/policies, this is in effect those states delegating the power of state violence to the ICC. Just because some states decide to violate a binding international treaty doesn't mean the ICC is entirely unable to exercise the delegated power of state violence. Likewise just because the ICC can only indirectly exercise the power of state violence doesn't mean it doesn't have that power at all.

> Just because you have the means of violence doesn’t mean it is right (beneficial) to apply them.

My argument is more that the ICC and the US are both in effect using the threat of state violence(arrest warrants/sanctions) as a way to advance their goals internationally.
by lesuorac | 2025-12-18 17:56:42+00:00
It's not about returning power to the states.

It's the same dog whistle as States Rights vs Slavery. When push comes to shove the confederacy banned states from determing their own slavery policy.

We see this extremely obviously with the AI policy of the white house which is _do not_ let the states decide.

Elected Republican dogma is "State's Rights" when the states would decide the "correct" right and it's Federal supremacy when they wouldn't.
by Juliate | 2025-12-18 17:57:16+00:00
Saying #1 and #2 are not possible or not likely is not a good take, in a world where our digital accounts take more and more a central place in our daily lives. It may work for autocratic societies, it won't cut it for democratic ones: imagine if our legal systems were that irresponsible to us collectively and individually?

Why not introduce friction on both sides, like: 1/ just face to face, physical meeting? 2/ or a basic (paid, yet reasonable) insurance that account management doesn't happen over the shoulder?
by bee_rider | 2025-12-18 17:57:19+00:00
Can we make an LLM do it?

“You are a cranky senior software engineer who loves to nitpick change requests. Here are your coding standards. You only sign off of a change after you are sure it works; if you run out of compute credits before you can prove it to yourself, reject the change as too complex.”

Balance things, pit the LLMs against each other.
by jayd16 | 2025-12-18 17:57:35+00:00
Looking at this, there's some nice features in there, I guess. Likely the major features are about what it doesn't have. https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md

A syntax to mark structs to be stored as SOA in arrays is the only one I see that doesn't have a modern C++ analogue (besides things like no header files).

Const expressions, defer (but not sure its significantly different than using destructors), some smart pointer stuff...

I assume you need to compare it to C++ from more than a decade ago.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-18 17:57:43+00:00
> By this logic, because helen keller cant see or hear, we should eliminate all educational materials using written text and spoken word.

I'll reiterate my comment earlier: Most people in this thread don't seem to have any idea how any of this works.

No - if someone cannot see, the law doesn't say eliminate visual material. It's more like "Provide alternative means for them to understand the same concepts (while keeping the same material)."

There are standards on what accommodations to provide for which disabilities. This isn't something everyone has to figure out on their own. If the standards dictate something for people who are both blind and deaf, it's because it is not technically onerous to provide for them.

I don't know if the standards do for this case, though.

> This is simply an insane, bad-faith take.

What I find to be bad faith is people skirting around the issue that the problem (if any), is not those who complained, but the law. This isn't an isolated case. Both Harvard and MIT were also sued. And just like Berkeley, both ultimately settled. If 3 of the top universities can't fight this, it means that if you want change, lobby to change the law. Start looking into how these universities are pushing to change the law. If they aren't, you'll get a good sense of why these laws exist.
by zeroasterisk | 2025-12-18 17:57:56+00:00
And thank you CopilotKit team!

I think AG UI is great if you are building the UI and the Agent at the same time and want a high bandwidth sync between them and the UI supports AG UI as an adaptor layer (they have done a lot of work making this easier for folks).

A2UI is most interesting for it's LLM generation options (not tools but structured output), it's remote message passing options (if you don't own the UI), and it's general-purpose-ness (same fairly simple standard which can work for many models, transports, and renderers).

They do fit nicely together. Sorry the naming conventions are complicated. There are 2 hard things in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation, off by one errors.
by furyofantares | 2025-12-18 17:58:16+00:00
There's a person behind all of these bad posts that are making it here. What I've said is that their perspective has been erased by the garbage the LLM put together from whatever inputs they gave it. OK - OK - I did say "you're not a real person" which is maybe what you're responding to here; I did not mean algal is not a real person, I meant algal didn't write the line I was quoting.

But yes, it's "vibes" - although extremely obvious IMO. Extreme usage of headings for paragraphs, which are often just a bullet list or a string of short marketing-speak fluff statements.

That's all aesthetic though and not the offensive part, it's just what makes it obvious. The offensive part is you can read the whole thing and come away with little more than the title. The author's perspective and voice is lost, beyond "they want you to try htmx" I can't tell what they care about or why, I can't tell what it is they were excited to try to convey.

Btw they did just add this to the footer.

> Does this all sound a bit like shallow slop? Yup, please help make it better.
by rootusrootus | 2025-12-18 17:58:28+00:00
I won't be redeeming any, that's for sure. I've been lucky so far, but I got a brush with this experience a couple years ago. I logged into my apple account from a web browser on my work computer. Turns out my company has pretty shitty security and our NATs were on the naughty list (I should have known better, I had been getting CAPTCHA'd every day if I browsed outside our network). Because I logged into the apple account from a naughty network, they instantly locked the account until I could prove it was really me and that everything was okay.

I did get it resolved relatively quickly, but for the next couple weeks I was randomly running into the fallout from that. It became really clear just how far reaching the impact would be if I lost the account and could not recover it. Ever since then I've tried hard to disentangle myself completely so that the blast radius will be much smaller.

At this point the biggest worry I have is what would happen to my MBP and iPhone. All of my cloud services are non-Apple, but they might be able to keep me out of my own machine and that would be devastating.
by snowwrestler | 2025-12-18 17:59:27+00:00
> Dealing with fraudsters should be baked into the cost of doing business for these megacorps. A smaller business couldn't get away with this kind of "support". The largest companies should be held to the same standard.

It is already baked into the costs in business models of big companies. And they are pretty good at it, actually; we’re talking about one high-profile case, and it’s not the only one, but it is rare enough that such stories are still newsworthy.

The standard that people want, though, is absolute certainty: zero errors that affect real customers, a 0% false positive rate.

The scale is in fact a challenge. If a small business has a 0.00001% false positive rate, they will affect approximately zero of their customers. For Apple, managing billions of accounts, that same false positive rate would affect hundreds of real customers every day.
by dang | 2025-12-18 17:59:52+00:00
> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies

I should probably clarify this a bit.

It's true that HN sponsors Launch HNs (and Show HNs) by YC startups. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. However, YC would not be funding HN if that were the only reason for it. It's a secondary factor.

Far more important than promoting existing startups is attracting founders who might start new startups. This requires an entirely different strategy than promotion: it requires being interesting enough to attract the right kind of users. That's why the site is organized around curiosity, as I explained elsewhere in the current thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46309399).

For more on this, here are past explanations:

optimizing for curiosity - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

relationship between HN and YC's business interests - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
by HDThoreaun | 2025-12-18 17:59:54+00:00
There are many vacant minimum wage jobs. I think the issue here is just that you overestimate the number of people who cant get a job because minimum wage exists. If you are a decent worker you are able to get a minimum wage job in this country, so if you cant you are by definition not a decent worker. Looking at the micro scale (employee only worth $14.90 to a single company) is largely irrelevant because there are plenty of other companies that find decent employees to be worth $15/hr. The level of incompetence you need to have to not be worth a minimum wage job to any company is so high that you are actively hindering business from being done.
by vkou | 2025-12-18 17:59:54+00:00
The Saudis are doing all of those things, but we turn a blind eye to that. The Cubans are doing none of those things, but they are still at the top of America's shit list.

Something makes me think that those aren't the reason for why Iran is everyone's favorite whipping boy in the region.

Nationalizing western assets half a century ago probably has something more to do with why they are treated the way they are.
by stuffn | 2025-12-18 18:00:25+00:00
I have plenty of anecdata that counters your anecdata.

LLMs can generate code that works. That much is true. You can generate sufficiently complex projects that simply run on the first (or second try). You can even get the LLM to write tests for the code. You can prompt it for 100% test coverage and it will provide you exactly what you want.

But that doesn't mean OP isn't correct. First, you shouldnt be remembering everything. If you are finding yourself remembering everything your project is either small (I'd guess less than 1000 lines) or you are overburdened and need help. Reasoning, logically, through code you write can be done JIT as you're writing the code. LLMs even suffer from the same problem. Instead of calling it "having to remember to much" we refer to it as a quantity called "context window". The only problem is the LLM won't prompt you telling you that it's context window is so full it can't do it's job properly. A human will.

I think an engineer should always be reasoning about their code. They should be especially suspicious of LLM generated code. Maybe I'm alone but if I use an LLM to generate code I will review it and typically end up modifying it. I find even prompting with something like "the code you write should be maintainable by other engineers" doesn't produce good value.
by autoexec | 2025-12-18 18:00:35+00:00
Steam is its own DRM on top of whatever else a developer chooses to do. I found this out one year when I spent months without internet access. At a certain point steam would refuse to run any of the locally installed single player games I had paid for through their platform until my computer phoned home to their servers. I'd already configured everything for working offline and they did successfully for a long time until one day they just wouldn't anymore.

If you don't want lose access to every game you fully paid for on Steam you'd better pirate a copy of everything you bought because on a whim they can take it all from you at any time.