Just frustrated here: I credited my OpenAI API account with credits, and then it turns out I have to go through some verification process to actually use the API, which involves disclosing personal data to some third-party vendor, which I am not prepared to do. So I asked for a refund and am told that that refunds are against their policy.So I&#x27;ll be cancelling my chatgpt plus sub, disputing the card payment, and moving to deepseek.Edit: Deepseek seems to be a lot cheaper than OpenAIEdit 2: seems verification is only needed for gpt-5, gpt-4o seems to work without it

Tell HN: OpenAI now requires ID verification and won't refund API credits

2025-10-24ME: Yesterday I tried to read an article and google blocked me demanding I upload my driver’s
license, passport, or other information to prove my age (I declined). What was that all about?GoogleAI: The prompt for age verification is due to Google&#x27;s new system, which uses AI to
estimate users&#x27; ages to comply with a global push for online age-verification laws. This system
may flag adult users as minors, restricting access to certain content until their age is confirmed
with a government ID, credit card, or a selfie.How Google&#x27;s AI age verification works• AI age estimation: Google&#x27;s system analyzes user activity, such as search history and
YouTube viewing habits, to estimate a user&#x27;s age.• Widespread enforcement: While initially affecting only a &quot;small set&quot; of users, this
system is now rolling out more widely and affecting multiple Google services, including
Search, YouTube, and the Google Play Store.• Restricted content: When the AI flags an account as potentially belonging to someone
underage, it applies the same restrictions as if the user had self-identified as a minor. This
includes turning on SafeSearch and restricting access to mature content.• Incorrect flagging: The system is not foolproof and has been known to incorrectly flag
adult users, causing them to be locked out of content they previously accessed without
issue.Your options for age verification
If your account was incorrectly flagged, you can verify your age using one of Google&#x27;s approved
methods:• Government ID: Upload a photo of a government-issued ID, like a driver&#x27;s license or
passport. Google states it stores these documents securely and deletes them after your age
has been successfully verified.• Credit card: Provide your credit card details to confirm your age. Any authorization is
temporary and will be fully refunded.• Selfie: Use a selfie-based verification service.Privacy concerns and contextFor users who are hesitant to provide private documents to a large tech company, this situation
presents a privacy conflict. While it&#x27;s Google&#x27;s official process, providing personal information is
a risk many users are unwilling to take.This initiative is driven by pressure from lawmakers in various countries, including the U.S. and
U.K., who are pushing for stricter age-verification measures to protect minors online. However,
this is also a highly debated issue, with concerns raised about the impact on adult users&#x27; privacy
and freedom of access to information.

Google Demanded My Drivers Lic Before Letting Me Read an Article

Could there be any link between the two events?Here is what happened:Some 600 instances were spawned within 3 hours before AWS flagged it off and sent us a health event. There were numerous domains verified and we could see SES quota increase request was made.We are still investigating the vulnerability at our end. our initial suspect list has 2 suspects. api key or console access where MFA wasn’t enabled.

Ask HN: Our AWS account got compromised after their outage

Like most devs I have a couple high level languages (Java&#x2F;Python&#x2F;PHP) but my low level language was always C&#x2F;C++. However after 25 years I was still shooting myself in the foot on the regular. I evaluate Go, Rust and fpc. I&#x27;m too dumb for Rust, Go&#x27;s was close but lack of exceptions and classes made it not for me. Fpc hit the sweet spot. The syntax is a little clunky but I have classes when I need them, exception handling, memory management - both auto and manual and cross platform support. Plus I can fit in my head - unlike C++

Ask HN: Anyone else use freepascal as their low level language?

As someone with unique passwords, 2FA, email aliases and a decent password manager and I see no real appeal to passkeys. If anything they seem less secure than what I have now. I understand how it’s leaps and bounds better for people that have reused and simple passwords.However, the &quot;passkeys&quot; branding is pretty much exclusively used for keys that sync, usually with the platform authenticator. Wouldn&#x27;t that be kind of a big deal, if you were a tinfoil hatter? Am I missing anything?

Ask HN: What is a passkey and why is everybody asking for one lately?

It’s 4 AM in my time zone, and after a lot of thinking, I finally sat down to write this post.A few months ago, MassTransit announced that they are going commercial. That was a big shock for many of us in the .NET ecosystem.Some of us thought someone would eventually fork the project and keep it open, but that hasn’t really happened yet, probably because it’s not a small project. Understanding it deeply and maintaining it properly would easily be a full-time job.My idea: an open-source fork called OpenTransit
I’m thinking seriously about maintaining a fully open-source fork of MassTransit, called OpenTransit, that stays community-driven and free forever.My initial plan:I’ll take over as the primary maintainer at the beginning.Over time, we’ll bring in 3&#x2F;4 core maintainers so the project never depends on a single person.The goal is long-term stability, improved documentation, and transparent governance.A bit about me
I’m not anyone special in the .NET world, just a developer with about 4.5 years of experience who loves working deep in the infrastructure layer.
I enjoy understanding what happens inside the .NET runtime and working on complex system design problems. Occasionally, I write NET-related blogs on Medium if I find some concepts that aren&#x27;t well organized on the internet.So a project like MassTransit is honestly a dream to work on.But here are the two big questions that have been keeping me up tonight:This would basically be a full-time job. How would I manage that?Does the community even want this? Would you actually use and support a well-maintained open-source fork?I can’t answer that second question alone; that’s why I’m here, asking the community.If you’re a current or past MassTransit user, I’d love to hear your honest thoughts.
Would a stable, open-source alternative matter to you?
Would you consider using it or even contributing if it existed?Please comment below or DM me. I’d really appreciate it.My plan, if there’s interest
MassTransit v8 will remain open-source and supported until December 2026, which gives me some breathing room.
In that time, I plan to:Deeply understand the code and learn the transports I’m less familiar with.Restructure and improve the documentation — I think it could be more organized and easier to approach.Add API references for all types (classes, interfaces, etc.) that are currently missing.If there’s genuine community interest, I’m prepared to commit fully — even if it means leaving my current job.
I’ve saved enough to live for 2–3 years, and I’d rather spend that time building something meaningful and open than doing something I’m not excited about.I know it might sound a bit crazy, but I’m okay with that. I’d rather take a shot at something that matters.Even if you’re not a MassTransit user, I’d still love to hear your opinion. Do you think the .NET ecosystem needs a strong, community-backed service bus library again?Thanks for reading.
(And for tolerating a slightly sleep-deprived 4 AM post.)

Would the .NET community benefit from an open-source MassTransit fork?

I&#x27;ve been struggling with coffee-induced anxiety and afternoon crashes. Tried matcha (too much prep) and mushroom coffee (digestive issues). Recently discovered puer tea has a better L-theanine:caffeine ratio for calm focus.I&#x27;m exploring whether there&#x27;s demand for a convenient puer concentrate and put together a quick survey (2-3 min): https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aicofounder.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;ElEORiNCurious what&#x27;s working for the HN crowd—especially folks doing deep work who&#x27;ve moved away from traditional coffee?

Ask HN: What do you use for focus without coffee jitters?

In certain large industries it feels like there&#x27;s more urgency to migrate off of VMware than there is to do genAI stuff.Do others sense this? If so, what options do you see for folks to keep their servers but move off of VMware? Is it all RedHat?

Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

For an experienced software developer looking to get started in AI development. What online courses would you recommend for someone entering this area of development today?Any guidance on where to begin or which areas to focus on would be greatly appreciated. While I prefer online courses, I’m also open to other learning formats like books, YouTube channels, or tutorials.Thanks in advance for your advice!

Ask HN: Where should an experienced developer start learning AI development?

Hi HN,Cuttly is a modern link management platform that goes beyond shortening URLs.It lets you create branded short links, generate customizable QR codes with logos and colors, build link-in-bio pages, run short surveys, and track engagement in real time. It also includes campaign grouping, aggregated analytics, team collaboration, and a developer-friendly REST API.It started as a simple URL shortener and grew into a flexible tool used by marketers, creators, and businesses who need more control over their links and data.I’d love to get feedback on how you handle links, QR codes, and analytics in your own workflows — and what features you’d expect from a modern shortener.Main site: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cutt.ly 
Blog: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cutt.ly&#x2F;resources&#x2F;blog&#x2F;
API docs: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cutt.ly&#x2F;cuttly-api
integrations: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cutt.ly&#x2F;resources&#x2F;integrations

URL Shortener as a HUB for marketing tools?

Hi all, I am looking at this product: [Sipeed NanoKVM-USB](https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.sipeed.com&#x2F;hardware&#x2F;en&#x2F;kvm&#x2F;NanoKVM_USB&#x2F;development.html).It would work very well for my need, but the company has a [terrible track-record for security](https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=plJGZQ35Q6I).So I am trying to approach it from a fully paranoid perspective. Can I use this device and protect myself fully from it?They provide the source code for the client side. SO that&#x27;s fine, I can read that code, recompile it, and convince myself it is fully safe (I am only human, but let&#x27;s assume it&#x27;s good enough).I have strong doubts about the firmware side though. I am not familiar with the hardware side, but could there be any security issue there?The guys making the device are claiming [&quot;there is no firmware code&quot;](https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sipeed&#x2F;NanoKVM-USB&#x2F;issues&#x2F;5#issuecomment-2785035753). I do not understand that statement. Can anyone more knowledgeable shed some light as to what that means, and how I could verify it?They point to a link to corroborate that claim, but the link is broken.Thanks in advance for any insights!

Ask HN: Security of Hardware Nano KVM

Join Little ML book club. We are reading &quot;Ultra-scale playbook&quot;. Together!Hello fellow ML geeks, my name is Andrey. Each day, I understand more about how little I know. Time to cover another gap - scaling LLM training. Most of the time I just plug in a library or ask an expert colleague. And... I still want to do the same thing, but finally have a much better grasp on what is going on under the hood. Join in!How it works:- Read a chapter from the list.- Jump on a call once a week on Thursdays at 14:00 (London time)- Take part in the discussion and learn something.- Message here if you want to present one of the chapters (pretty pretty pretty please!)- All slides will be uploaded to GithubFirst call: October 30 (Thursday), 14:00 (London time)Important links:- Schedule https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;spreadsheets&#x2F;d&#x2F;157L7VW-2M1KcwJoRtzadagpJ7LOpos338oEwj8kp2XQ&#x2F;edit?usp=sharing- Calendar https:&#x2F;&#x2F;calendar.google.com&#x2F;calendar&#x2F;u&#x2F;2?cid=ZTM4ZmMwYTM5MDhmZjkwNjcwY2EyZDRlNmQzYThjODZmM2I2NzZkMzZiNWExNzc4NWY3MTE4NTk3MDJkNWJlYkBncm91cC5jYWxlbmRhci5nb29nbGUuY29t- Repo with slides https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fxlrnrpt&#x2F;little_ml_book_club- Chat invite https:&#x2F;&#x2F;t.me&#x2F;+bleQ2wfB4DBjMGZk

Little ML book club – reading Ultra-scale playbook

I recently read Genius Makers and very much enjoyed it, and was wondering if there were any similar books to help me better understand where we currently are regarding QC and how we got here

Ask HN: Any good books for a layman on history of quantum computing?

Hello, I&#x27;ve decided to learn the abacus (bi-quinary coded decimal).I&#x27;m doing it because it&#x27;s fun to learn new things and because I like the tactile, soundscape and afk aspects of the abacus.At the moment I&#x27;m practising counting up and down with the &quot;correct&quot; fingers but it feels like I want to start doing simple arithmetic calculations (+, -, × &amp; ÷) soon.However, the resources I&#x27;m finding don&#x27;t really talk about, or even show, the order in which to push the beads.It might be the case that I&#x27;m just overthinking this but somehow I think it matters.For example: 63 - 27What is the order to push the beads, and why?My guess is:- 1 bead from the earth 10 rod down (-10)- 1 heaven 1 down (+5)- 2 earth 1 down (-2)- 1 heaven 10 up (-50)- 3 earth 10 up (+30)So first I do the -7 and then I do the -20, I also move the bead(s) with the highest value first.Does this seem correct?I suspect I&#x27;m not thinking about the numbers and values correctly as I&#x27;m used to think about numbers in 1-10-100s and not in 1-5-10-50-100s.If you have any resource or your own experience to share I would very much appreciate it.

Ask HN: Abacus, learning; Can someone explain the order of pushing the beads

what do you think about the strategy of publishing apps via html5. I mean desktop apps trough html5 rendering.
Let me know.

Publishing desktop apps via HTML5 canvas

Writing research code (in my case ML&#x2F;AI) is very different to writing production code. The goals are different, and thus so are the best practices, patterns, and values.What&#x27;s your favorite resource on how to write code in research? What are the research-code-specific equivalents of Rich Hickey&#x27;s talks or SPJ&#x27;s posts or the many many SWE blogposts posted to HN?

Ask HN: Best practices for research code?

I&#x27;ve tried using various AI tools and models over the past couple of years, but honestly it feels like it gives me a false sense of confidence. Plus, the time I supposedly save building things gets eaten up debugging, correcting, improving the AI-generated slop.Am I using the tools wrong or are others finding the same thing?

Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI?

I&#x27;m not going to speak about specific languages because they will distract readers.What I discovered over years is that I should just use the right tools for each job. Trying to use a specific language outside its well-established niches resulted in a lot of wasted time.You can spend years on silencing every little inconvenience and every little noise by trying to use a specific language everywhere. That doesn&#x27;t work. Resisting every little inconvenience will only result in more friction in life. Ignore little inconveniences and little noises. Just swim with the flow by using the right tools for each job. Don&#x27;t swim against it by obsessing with specific tools.If you want to move forward in life, you have to just suck it up and use the right languages for each task.You may not like the fact that a specific language doesn&#x27;t have specific constructs, but it can get this current job done quickly without fuss.Developing attachment to a specific language that&#x27;s not going to maintain its sharp edge for very long anyway will only lead to time waste and disappointments.Screw programming languages. Just focus on accomplishing the task at hand quickly.If your life satisfaction depends on using specific programming languages, you won&#x27;t have a good life. Just get things done, and move on, and enjoy free time and wealth.To have the best life possible or even just a good life, most of the time, you will just have to use tools you don&#x27;t particularly like and have to do things you don&#x27;t feel like doing.Are you trying to have fun with programming languages? Or, are you trying to get things done quickly in programming languages? Speed is infinitely more important than fun.

Programming language agnosticism is the only way to move forward in life

detailed reasoning welcome!trying to decide between React Router 7 (Remix), TanStack Router, Next.js, or something else.

Ask HN: Preferred Next.js Alternatives?

Here&#x27;s a quote:&gt; &quot;That’s not neuroscience — that’s cargo-cult reasoning wrapped in academic buzzwords.&quot;I think most of us who use ChatGPT would immediately recognize this as being AI-generated. It&#x27;s perfectly valid English and we could all imagine a real human saying it, but ChatGPT (or maybe LLMs more broadly) seem to have landed on certain patterns like this one that they use constantly. Is it some kind of overfitting? Post training where a biased toward this pattern was introduced? Something else?

Why do LMMs overuse these patterns of speech that aren't overused in the wild?

“Efficiency” might be the wrong word. I can’t wrap my head around how “efficient” companies are&#x2F;will be as a result of AI. In the 90s when the internet became broadly available, people became “concerned” but things were still on the horizon, like the concept of AI. Now? I don’t know what is beyond AI in terms of human productivity.So I’m confused about what the future will look like. If this level of efficiency compounds, even for a few years, we would be required to spend a compounding amount of money to match it, right? The alternative is that we move to a 4 (or 3?) day work week, or UBI, or what? If we don’t match the spending, companies will consolidate - both in terms of personnel and competition.What is going to happen? What is next? Was there any concept similar to this 30 years ago and I’m just worried for no reason?

Did people in the 90s worry about the efficiency of the internet

AWS recently published a postmortem on the October 2025 us-east-1 outage [1]. A DNS race condition in DynamoDB cascaded across EC2, Lambda, Redshift, and NLB, leading to ~14 hours of degraded operations for new instance launches and knock-on effects on multiple services.Has anyone quantitatively modelled AWS’s effective availability once you account for inter-service dependencies inside their control plane and data plane?In other words: if EC2 depends on DynamoDB, and Lambda depends on EC2 + NLB, what’s the composite availability in practice?[1] - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;message&#x2F;101925&#x2F;

Ask HN: How many 9s did AWS lose due to the last outage (us-east-1 incident)?

The second EA of Project Valhala has been made available at https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jdk.java.net&#x2F;valhalla.

Java Valhalla Early-Access build 2 (JEP 401) available

I&#x27;m retired and I would like to resume collaborating with smart people. Any project will do. Journey &gt; destination. My best times programming had more to do with people than purpose.If you&#x27;ve got a nice community brewing, or if you&#x27;re just a solo dev who&#x27;s friendly, please share.

Ask HN: Would you like some help with your OSS project?

Hostingmoz aims to become the world’s first truly objective, data-driven hosting comparison platform. It’s being built to solve the long-standing problems found in traditional review sites — affiliate bias, outdated data, manipulated rankings, and a lack of transparency.The platform analyzes hosting plans as users actually see them on official provider websites, collecting data continuously and scoring providers with fair, algorithm-based real-time evaluations. Each company is rated using two distinct metrics: GPS (Global Performance Score) and CPS (Category Performance Score).All scoring criteria are fully transparent, allowing users to see exactly how each factor influences the final score. Prices are standardized to USD using daily European Central Bank exchange rates, ensuring fair global comparisons.Providers can manage their own listings through the system, while an inconsistency-detection mechanism maintains quality. User reviews aren’t active yet — the team is working on a verification process to eliminate fake feedback before launching it publicly.Currently, the Web Hosting category is in Beta, with VPS, Cloud, and WordPress categories coming soon. Hostingmoz’s mission is to create an algorithmic, objective, and transparent evaluation model — finally freeing hosting comparisons from marketing manipulation.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hostingmoz.com“Is a truly fair hosting comparison possible?” – We believe it is now.