Hacker News: janpeuker

New comment by janpeuker in "Retro-Tech Parenting"

janpeuker — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:06:21 +0000

I bought a Super Nintendo Mini and it's the best thing ever - children love it and don't feel left out of digital entertainment

New comment by janpeuker in "Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)"

janpeuker — Sat, 30 May 2026 19:54:56 +0000

> ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

Ah yes, EU Sovereignty when a post makes it to the HN front page.

New comment by janpeuker in "Use boring languages with LLMs"

janpeuker — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:19:40 +0000

Great post showing the ironic revenge of opinionated architecture in times of cheap code. Exactly what LLMs can’t deliver, they always seem to be bias towards added complexity, not simplification.

New comment by janpeuker in "Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs"

janpeuker — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:13:21 +0000

Outsourcing usually gives you exactly what you pay for, arguably more transparently than other ways. It’s just that transparency (i.e. the price for quality) is sometimes not passed on from management / procurement taking that decision down to the team eventually having to work in a distributed fashion.

I think that’s also where the assumptions of the original post are off - the difference between DeepSeek and a frontier model is not usually what low quality outsourcing can cover. So you probably end up paying a highly qualified outsourced engineer who may not be significantly cheaper (most outsourcing is not just due to cost but capacity and capability).

New comment by janpeuker in "SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud"

janpeuker — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:45:07 +0000

Thanks for clarifying the rule - I wasn't aware of that and follow it next time. But I also don't think it's a marketing link. The post explains why specifically in the cases of transaction fraud other signals are important, with specific SQL examples, and that should translate to any other payment provider.

New comment by janpeuker in "SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud"

janpeuker — Sat, 16 May 2026 13:10:43 +0000

I agree the post looks a little AI written but generally this kind of analysis is quite common. Leaving aside human heuristics that are generally too well known to catch real scammers (like time travel or "7 days", which is bad because often weekly patterns are important so at the very least look at 10 days) and actually have low precision, what I find odd it that all results just return a user ID.

So this is really just surfacing cases, but with not enough context to be useful to prioritise. I would expect a score to be included.

Apart from that it misses a lot of signals like refunds, declines, disputes etc [1].

1) https://stripe.com/gb/guides/improve-fraud-management-with-r...

New comment by janpeuker in "Academic Research Skills for Claude Code"

janpeuker — Sun, 10 May 2026 17:04:42 +0000

While I agree most of this seems to go too far I do like the idea of the Socratic mode with State-Challenge-Reflect reflection. I often use LLMs in the same way with a skeleton "brief" document and separate chapters that I ask it to fill based on my input, basically augmented note taking (such as references, coherence, in-scope vs out of scope, arguments considered, pressure points, vulnerabilities etc)

New comment by janpeuker in "The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism"

janpeuker — Sat, 09 May 2026 17:23:44 +0000

Excellent text and Winner's "Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community" is a milestone.

New comment by janpeuker in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

janpeuker — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:40:40 +0000

The European Payments Initiative (Wero) made the mistake of only aiming for Peer-to-Peer QR code payments, carefully avoiding competing with cards so each country could keep their card schemes (Cartes Bancaires, Girocard etc). I don't think it will ever even _compete_ with cards in the near future.

New comment by janpeuker in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

janpeuker — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:36:05 +0000

Europe already has plenty of alternative card systems e.g. France's Cartes Bancaires (CB) and ironically Germany just last year turned it's Girocard/Maestro system off in favour of Visa/Mastercard; the problem is the banks in individual countries in Europe are not willing to give up their control in favour of a compatible standard.

New comment by janpeuker in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

janpeuker — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:32:50 +0000

Lots of other Asian countries already did something similar, e.g. Singapore had PayNow QR Codes (probably the closest to Pix) since 2017, Thai PromptPay was even earlier and India UPI (slightly different wallet system) since 2016. China was even earlier but different though private superapps.

What has changed, and I find interesting, is that Card rails are more and more used for political pressure [1], and I feel the "American hemisphere" is probably the reason Pix gets more of this pressure than Asian countries.

1) https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/icc-strongly-rejects-new-us-san...

New comment by janpeuker in "Uncle Bob: It's Over"

janpeuker — Sun, 03 May 2026 18:20:43 +0000

Yes I get the irony but also let's not forget that it's over for the Code that Uncle Bob likes. Which is bad, verbose, dogmatic, unreadable, elitist code [1] with "discipline" [2] and a dash of sexism. And that has luckily been over for a _long_ time before LLMs.

1) https://qntm.org/clean

2) https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/10/04/CodeIsNotTh...

New comment by janpeuker in "AI uses less water than the public thinks"

janpeuker — Sat, 02 May 2026 03:16:10 +0000

> AI concerns are speculative

There is ample evidence around the world of data centers causing extreme water crises [1].

Not a water expert but I find the focus on evaporation very confusing. Draining ground water and aquifers causes environmental degradation in itself and waste water from data centers can’t just be fed back into the water cycle?

1) https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-08-17/ais-backyar...

New comment by janpeuker in "Credit cards are vulnerable to brute force kind attacks"

janpeuker — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:12:45 +0000

Payment processors don't allow just brute forcing all card numbers a.k.a. card enumeration or card testing [1][2] and card schemes penalise merchants and payment processors heavily if they don't take measures against it [3].

1) https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/card-testing-surge

2) https://stripe.com/blog/the-ml-flywheel-how-we-continually-i...

3) https://docs.stripe.com/disputes/monitoring-programs#enumera...

New comment by janpeuker in "Do you want the US to "win" AI?"

janpeuker — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 06:03:38 +0000

The chart is also misleading because it paints investment as morally good but ignores most of this investment goes into closed source APIs while the rest of the world does open weights, and does so way more efficiently (spending less money) due to export controls

New comment by janpeuker in "What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)"

janpeuker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 01:46:02 +0000

That’s an extremely western and recency biased list, what about

* The Decimal System

* Concept of Zero (Brahmagupta)

* Invention of Algebra (Al-Khwarizmi)

* Invention of Optics (Ibn al-Haytham)

* Meritocracy (Confucius)

New comment by janpeuker in "Why AI Sucks at Front End"

janpeuker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:50:51 +0000

I don’t 100% agree with the “AI can’t see” because in a Ralph-loop against screenshots, it basically can (inefficiently). But more importantly I do find it generally curious how bad even frontier models are in spatial thinking. Say “Align these right to left unless it crosses the center” or “Keep this box always visible and collapse X to make space” and all hell break loose - maybe it might work but in an extremely slow, costly and tedious process.

New comment by janpeuker in "I've been waiting over a month for Anthropic to respond to my billing issue"

janpeuker — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:19:09 +0000

Had the same experience after switching from regular credits to a subscription realizing credits not only cannot be refunded but also cannot be used to buy a subscription and even wilder not to buy extra usage for a subscription. In other words credits are just stolen. Took ~10 support tickets and ~4 weeks to get a reply by a human that actually articulates this fact.

New comment by janpeuker in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

janpeuker — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 03:40:59 +0000

I guess someone already said it but just to be sure Singapore also had Fiber to Home since 2010, roughly around the same time as Switzerland. But it’s less needed because Singapore also has 99% 5G coverage with 300-400Mbps

New comment by janpeuker in "Unsubscribe from the Church of Graphs"

janpeuker — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 04:43:16 +0000

> I want to forcibly confine the small number of criminals, street addicts, and lunatics responsible for a wildly disproportionate amount of crime and disorder

I think for that alone the post should be flagged and removed. "Political" posts are commonly flagged for mentioning basic human and civil rights. Here is someone suggesting locking up everyone they call "lunatic" like in Victorian times because they don't want to see supermarket isles with locks and don't understand cafes may not take cash because it's simpler to install a payment terminal. They should read some texts on the prison complex first [1].

[1]: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/golden-gulag/paper

EDIT: Added reference