The sudden loss of working capital while awaiting a refund would be extremely disruptive for even large businesses.

Areas like PCB design, embedded systems, SDR and biohacking all seem interesting, but I'm not sure where to begin.

I'm hoping to find a hobby with a low barrier to entry, supportive community, and exciting future.

Do you have any hobbies involving hardware that you would recommend? What do you like about it, and what advice would you give to new comers?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48901519

Points: 8

# Comments: 7

Cloudwatch -> Logs -> Log Management

It shows "There are no log groups."

when there should be many log groups. Occurring in at least us-east-1 and us-west-2.

Status page has no mention of it: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

I've verified I'm in the correct region and account. Dashboards, alarms and other Cloudwatch resources seem normal.

Anyone else seeing the same thing?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48776521

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I think that's if you're lucky enough to receive an early fraud warning, in which case, you have maybe ~12 hours to refund the money, but who knows, it's completely opaque to the merchant. As a merchant, I've even had previously refunded payments become disputes hours after issuing the refund.

Most of the time, the charge back is sprung on the merchant without warning. It can be worth fighting some. I've successfully countered several, it feels like I win maybe around 50% of those that I counter. I usually counter when the reasons are nonsensical, such as "Subscription renewed after cancelling", yet there was only one payment for the subscriptions creation.

To add insult to injury, Stripe charges an additional fee to counter the dispute (which you might get back if you win).

The whole process is infuriating. Charge backs are a tiny % of transactions, but cause a large amount of distress. I can't see why Stripe / banks don't offer an early dispute window, in which the merchant has say 7 days to refund without penalty. If they ignore or decide not to, it becomes a standard dispute.

I have systems running in us-east-1, and over the course of the incident, I noticed unexplainable intermittent connectivity issues that I've never seen before, even outside of az4.

AWS EC2 outage in use1-az4 (us-east-1)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057294

Ordinarily this would result in failed health checks and auto service restart, but in this case, the service simply died without logs or alerts.

I want to feel the enthusiasm I felt when I first started programming, and I've starting looking into a hardware oriented tech hobby. Something involving a smallish group of dedicated people, minimal hype, working with cool tech, and maybe feeling like we're building the future.

Some areas I'm considering include robotics, sensors/IoT and embedded systems.

These are my constraints:

- Can be done at home

- Reasonable budget

- Surmountable learning curve to a newcomer

- Strong community, minimal hype

Can you recommend an area of tech that fits the above? Doesn't have to involve hardware, I just figure there's a higher barrier to entry and therefore less noise.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48024078

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

The list is missing Lakeman's recent travels in Afghanistan: https://mattlakeman.org/2026/01/05/notes-on-afghanistan/

They can, they will be available on the black market along with every other widely used illicit recreational drug.

Banning tobacco won't make the problem disappear, people want their poison, including sensible rational people who accept the risks and use in moderation.

Banning tobacco will push it underground, giving criminals a new revenue stream which can fund more harmful activities.

Not only will the govt lose out on tobacco tax, they may have to ramp up law enforcement expense to crack down on the now illicit tobacco trade and ever more empowered criminals.

Users of the black market products will have no guarantee of quality assurance, products may contain additional harmful additives.

There's an optimal level of tax and regulation to keep distribution out of criminal control, educate the general public, and offer support to the serious victims, all the while collecting tax to fund these activities.

This is precisely what many countries are already doing to varying degrees.

And the same argument can be made for many vices, including gambling and alcohol.

Do you have a source for this?

> All HTTPS traffic was decrypted and logged. No modifications were made to the traffic. The app was used as any normal user would use it.

Is it really that simple to inspect network traffic on an iPhone, namely to get it to trust the user-installed cert? I do quite a bit of network inspection on Android and I find it to be painful, even if the apps don't use certificate pinning.

Regardless, it highlights the importance of having control of our own devices, including the ability to easily inspect network traffic. We have the right to know where our data is being sent, and what data is being sent.

I recall during COVID it was discovered that Zoom was sending traffic to China. There was also the recent case of Facebook tracking private mobile browsing activity and sending it to their servers via the FB app. Imagine how much questionable traffic goes unnoticed due to the difficulty in configuring network inspection for apps.

Maybe describe why you're interested in Netherlands & Estonia.

.store .online .tech .site .fun .pw .host .press .space .uno .website

https://radix.website/

The query also filters to PostTypeId = 1, what does this refer to?

1. manifest.json: a JSON file that defines the app's name, icons, theme colors, and how it should launch when installed.

2. Service worker: a JS file that controls things like resource caching for offline usage

Unfortunately PWAs don't receive first class support compared to native apps. Still, I still hope to see wider adoption. I think for many not-too-complex apps, they can significantly lower the cost of development, and the development experience could be as simple as

- Building with HTML + JS + CSS. No clunky SDKs, reduced need to test on painfully slow emulators or expensive physical devices

- Installable from a browser. No need to maintain a listing in the Playstore/App Store, avoiding policy headaches, rent, etc.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...