Hacker News: shushpanchik

New comment by shushpanchik in "Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees"

shushpanchik — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 20:59:38 +0000

> It's a smart thing, because it causes the processing costs of expensive payment types to be borne by the customer who is using the expensive payment method

Why the same logic does not apply to cash payments? They have costs too.

> Unfortunately it has become a popular idea to ban the surcharging of these costs by retailers, so it's likely to be outlawed by next year, which is completely asinine.

It's completely sane. Surcharges are now outlawed in Australia (from 1 Oct) and I finally paid for my coffee exactly the same amount that was written in the blackboard. Businesses that do not want to absorb the 0.5% fees are free to stop accepting credit cards or can raise prices (none near me did that so far). That's fine, the most important thing is if coffee is 5.50, you pay 5.50, not some random amount.

New comment by shushpanchik in "Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe"

shushpanchik — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 02:49:54 +0000

PISA is not the only OECD study/assessment that evaluates students abilities. There are others - PIRLS, and, more importantly, ICILS (The International Computer and Information Literacy Study). It's unfair to look at PISA results alone.

New comment by shushpanchik in "OpenAI agent hacked Australian government website, PM says"

shushpanchik — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:50:27 +0000

I'm pretty sure the whole "hack" was AI agent asked some question about health statistics in Australia, tried to google info, found some clues that statistics it is looking for was on old Medicare portal, went to that portal, and, ignoring robots.txt, crawled site to get all publicly accessible documents.

Really, a "hack", and a "cybercrime", when you really need those words to push regulatory agenda you need. Just do not go into details what really happened, vaguely mumbling "webcrawler... Not taking no as an answer...."

New comment by shushpanchik in "We Think the SpaceX IPO Is Overvalued"

shushpanchik — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:51:42 +0000

> Tesla is only one administration change away from going bankrupt. Ask yourself what would happen to Tesla if BYD could freely import cars.

Well, here in Australia, BYD (and lots of other CN EV brands) can freeely import cars, and Model Y still outsells every other EV. [1]

[1]: https://thedriven.io/2026/06/03/australian-electric-vehicle-...

New comment by shushpanchik in "The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100"

shushpanchik — Mon, 25 May 2026 08:00:32 +0000

Mate, 3 months ago you admitted on HN that you never get Singapore PR, just admit you want to moan how west is bad. I pay more taxes than you, and that's ok, Australia worth it.

> shell0x 3 months ago | As a white person, I’d probably never get PR too but I think it’s good that they maintain the current percentages, otherwise the country would turn unrecognizable like Germany or France

New comment by shushpanchik in "Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator"

shushpanchik — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 23:34:37 +0000

It's not clear from README, does it have persistence? I.e. if I create an s3 bucket and upload files in it, would the bucket/files be there after I restart the emulator?

New comment by shushpanchik in "Universal vaccine against respiratory infections and allergens"

shushpanchik — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 03:42:38 +0000

But evolution is not optimizing for best outcome in terms of health. As Dr Karl said, "Evolution does not have to be perfect, just good enough for you to have babies & get them to maturity".

New comment by shushpanchik in "Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers"

shushpanchik — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 21:30:06 +0000

To add to that, most of the events described in the article - hitting cyclist, hit when reversing, hit stationary item on parking etc - happen during low speed city driving, but most miles for average driver are driven on highways. So, taxis, that are driven most of the time in city, would definitely get more crashes per mile than average driver. So 500,000/200,000 miles number could not be really applied to a taxi. I exect that number for taxis could be much lower.

Also, even for a non-taxi, 200,000 miles between minor hits on average seems incredibly high - that would mean that an average car in US does not hit anything in a car's lifetime. I'm not sure where that number is coming from, if that's non-reportable events.

New comment by shushpanchik in "A lot of population numbers are fake"

shushpanchik — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 02:55:45 +0000

Have you read the article? It's casualties, which includes wounded. Article mentions that about 100-140k are killed, not >1m

New comment by shushpanchik in "A lot of population numbers are fake"

shushpanchik — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 02:40:17 +0000

It actually does - migration from central asian ex-USSR republics was and is massive.

New comment by shushpanchik in "Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections"

shushpanchik — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:40:09 +0000

There are lots of reported cases in Russia, when your manager requires you to take photo of your paper ballot and show it to them, otherwise you have problems.

You can try to google-translate [this, for example](https://holod.media/2024/03/08/soprotivlenie-putinu/#h-3-%D0...)

New comment by shushpanchik in "Show HN: Terminal UI for AWS"

shushpanchik — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 06:55:10 +0000

> // TODO: Handle credential_source, role_arn, source_profile, sso_*, etc.

So it does not support any meaningful multi-account login (SSO, org role assumption, etc), and requires AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID/AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY. That's a no-no from security POV for anything in production, so not sure what's the meaningful way to use that.

New comment by shushpanchik in "Show HN: Terminal UI for AWS"

shushpanchik — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 06:43:31 +0000

so stealing temporary credentials are fine, right?

New comment by shushpanchik in "My dad could still be alive, but he's not"

shushpanchik — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 04:16:36 +0000

I don't think anyone pays 5%, practical limit would be ~3% (2% levy, and ~1% for cheapest private insurance to be exempted from levy surcharge)

New comment by shushpanchik in "My dad could still be alive, but he's not"

shushpanchik — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 04:10:50 +0000

That's not nearly true, at least for Melbourne as a metro area. I never heard of weeks waiting for GP appointment, and I never waited for more that 2-3 days for GP both in east and west suburbs. Usually you have at least 3-5 GP medical centres in 5 km radius, and in half of them appointments are avaliable same day or next day. That's the case now, and was the case 5 and 10 years ago, with only obvious exception during COVID. 6+ years wait could occur, but it would be ~1% of elective surgeries. Basically, elective surgeries are covered by private healthcare, that's the unofficial limitation of Medicare. I got an elective surgery twice, wait was 4-6 months. Just to stress, that's an elective surgery fo non-life threating condition that just affect your quality of life, so it's reasonable to expect people paying up private insurance/hospitals for getting this done quickly.

Emergency 12+ hours wait is not an ordinary situation - could be when there is a combination of very busy night (like Friday during long holidays) and lowest triage category. Every time I attended emergency I was almost immediately triaged and when things were serious, was admitted in minutes. When it was just a cut with bleeding stopped, I was advised after triage that I can wait for 4+ hours or just come back in the morning. All my friends had the similar experience with Melbourne's public hospital ERs.

2% medicare levy is cheap compared to taxes in other countries with free healthcare.

I'm actually very surprised that someone has such negative impression about Melbourne's medical system. There was a short period several years ago, related to COVID, when ambos ramping time could be hours, but that's not not typical for Melbourne, and was resolved pretty quickly.

New comment by shushpanchik in "Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity"

shushpanchik — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 05:08:00 +0000

6 free hours during weekend with 7kW home charger give you 42kWh, that's ~200km per week free. That's not nothing.

New comment by shushpanchik in "Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity"

shushpanchik — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 04:51:09 +0000

Not sure what renting has to do with this? Renters in Australia do not install batteries/panels, it's landlord's business.

If landlord has batteries/panels installed, chances are rent would be a bit higher. Renter is free to choose a place with lower energy bills by paying that premium, so these subsidies definitely could benefit the renters.

New comment by shushpanchik in "Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity"

shushpanchik — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 04:44:54 +0000

I'm from Australia and my electricity provider has 12pm-2pm free electricity. As other's said, dishwasher and washing machine has delayed/smart start options, so that is free for me. That saves at least 3kWh per day for me, so ~$30 per month. So it really helps with CoL crisis.

And yes, those appliances are (almost) 10 years old.

New comment by shushpanchik in "Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity"

shushpanchik — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 04:33:14 +0000

That's a weird uninformed take. Both solar and battery are heavily subsidised in Australia if your household income is less than $180k AUD. Average solar 6kW installation with subsidies is ~3k AUD, 30-40kWh chineses batteries are 4-6k AUD after subsidy.

Median full-time salary in AU is ~90k AUD, and we have pretty good minimal wages, so solar panels are affordable to almost every working homeowner.

New comment by shushpanchik in "23andMe says user data stolen in credential stuffing attack"

shushpanchik — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 09:08:07 +0000

Emailing backup codes doesn't sound like a good idea. You give the keys to the kingdom to email provider or anyone who would be able to access your mailbox.