I love that you’re tackling this problem, and congrats on launching and getting this on HN!
This does feel like a real problem. The thing that concerns me (and likely other devs here) is that it adds an additional remote API dependency for a very core part of a system when a lot of people are trying to keep those dependencies to an absolute minimum. When your service goes down (not if), everyone who’s dependent on you will not be able to register new users, etc.
Is there any way you can offer this as a library instead? You deserve to get paid of course - maybe provide the library and initial data and charge for updates / premium checks, something like that.
I see a service like this as being in the ip lookup API category (like ipinfo.io) but I wanted to mention that for this (and IP lookup, captcha etc) I would expect that if the service is down then you allow the registrations then review later, and not simply prevent all registrations.
Interesting. I think you're right (on the API category this falls under). Also love the approach on keeping this API async. Makes so much more sense that way.
Super valid and fair. Thanks for taking the time and writing this too. In tears (on the inside) because of some validation around problem statement. I am exploring providing this as a pay-once service too, where you get a point-in-time CSV/JSON export and then folks pay to update data. Felt like too much work for the first release so didn't get to it.
As for the original concern though, here's some thoughts: You may just use it to flag (not act) in an async way. This way, you can just alert/monitor and decide later whether or not to take any actions while keeping the flow non-blocking. Another approach would be to run it against existing handles to see what opportunities exist (ex: premium usernames, impersonators etc.).
BUT, thanks again for the input. I'll definitely make this happen!
That's an unhelpful and unnecessarily nasty comment. Millions and millions and millions of people trust Apple. Whether you agree or not, to say they "deserve" something like this for doing what any normal person on this earth would do (and is marketed-at to do) is obnoxious.
"deserve" is an unnecessarily harsh word, but I'd be lying if I said you weren't courting fate. The day iCloud is revealed to be a FVEY racket, I won't feel pity for the users.
“In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.””
Sorry—-what? Isn’t that one of the fundamental basic jobs to be done and expectations of a retailer? You put physical things on display for sale, you mark prices on them, and you sell them. When the prices change, you send one of your employees to the appropriate shelves and you change the tag.
When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?
I used to work at Best Buy replacing pricing stickers before the store opened. We had a sheet of new stickers for changed prices every time and had to scan every sticker in the store to make sure they were all up to date.
It makes sense they’re all switching to e-ink tags though, probably saves a ton in labor and the occasional mistake.
That's because those stickers constitute an offer of sale for a given price. If a customer comes in, takes the item, throws down the cash to an employee and leaves, that's a 100% bone fide legal sale.
That's also why messing with price stickers is a crime.
> When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?
It always has been this way since barcoded stock keeping units because of the problems identified by CAP Theorem [0]. Since the price data of an object must exist in two locations, shelf and checkout, the data is partitioned. It is also relatively expensive to update the shelf price since it depends on physical changes made by an unreliable human. Even if all stores used electronic price tags there will a very small lag, or a period in which prices are unavailable (or a period of unavailability like an overnight closure).
It would be interesting to understand at what point of shelf/checkout accuracy would lead to what increases in overall prices [1]. That is to say that pricing information has a cost: a buyer must bring the item to checkout to find out the true cost in the case of authoritative checkout, or the clerk must walk to each shelf in the case of authoritative shelf.
Once upon a time, each item in the store was labeled with a price tag and the clerk typed that tag into a tabulation device in order to calculate tax and total. The advent of the bar code lead to shelf label pricing since the clerk needn't read a price from each item, leading to the CAP Theory problem of today.
I suppose that the future will bring back something similar to individual price tags in the form of individual RFID pricing. This way each individual item on a shelf can be priced in a way that is readable by the buyer and the seller in the same manner.
An easy test for this is how often the price at the register is higher vs lower than the marked price. If it's close to 50%, then ok, it's a mistake. But if it's higher...
I don't think you would reasonably expect it to be close to 50/50. Most price changes are increases and the mistake theory basically boils
down to the employees never updating the shelf tags. Which I think is an extremely plausible theory since the one employee at the store isn't paid enough to bother. And who's even going to check that they updated the tags? Dollar General isn't shelling out money for that.
There's another kind of store that's in a similar situation: thrift stores and nearly all
of them have also decided this problem is too hard. Lots of items are marked with just colors based roughly around their estimated value and the store changes the price/color mapping occasionally.
When we are in an environment of 3% annual inflation the day to day price movements will overwhelm the drift of inflation and be basically random in terms of increases vs decreases.
It’s virtually impossible for them because they’re not considering hiring more people to do it.
Dollar General stores often run with one overworked staff member doing everything in the store, from stocking to working the register (which is why the register is unstaffed so much and you have roam the store to find someone to ring you up…)
The sticker price is legally binding - it constitutes an offer, and the cash register surreptitiously charging a higher price from what the customer has agreed to constitutes fraud. The problem is that asserting your rights takes time, resources, and energy that people shopping at these stores generally do not have. The people that would have the ability to push back instead just use their resources to move on and shop somewhere else that isn't immediately abusing them.
That’s about ads, not sticker price on the shelf, and about a lack of obligation to sell at that price. It does not say that it’s alright to lie and charge a different price at the register.
> A display of goods for sale in a shop window or within a shop is an invitation to treat, as in the Boots case, a leading case concerning supermarkets. The shop owner is thus not obliged to sell the goods, even if signage such as "special offer" accompanies the display. […] If a shop mistakenly displays an item for sale at a very low price it is not obliged to sell it for that amount.
Boots was a UK court case. The Wikipedia article you linked has a note at the top that it mainly refers to British law.
In the US, local laws generally side with the consumer and legally entitle you to the displayed price. There are also federal laws from the FTC act against deceptive pricing.
>Michigan requires a bonus of 10 times the overcharge amount.
New Jersey’s Retail Pricing Laws mandate that most retail stores clearly mark the total selling price on most items offered for sale. Retailers must also verify the accuracy of their checkout scanners and may face fines of $50-$100 per violation for noncompliance.
Connecticut law requires stores to charge the lowest of the advertised, posted, or labeled price for an item. Customers who are overcharged are entitled to a refund of the overcharge or $20, whichever is greater
"The people that would have the ability to push back"...
And they can. Just bring it up to the cashier or managers attention, and voila, they adjust the price. Please let me know if you have had a different experience.
There's no "just". It takes resources to be scanning your receipt for discrepancies and/or running your own tally. And there are a few examples in the article referencing stores refusing to adjust prices, or of people noticing on their receipt that they were defrauded and the store refusing to reimburse them.
Resources to read the receipt? Are you saying poor people can't do math? Honestly, how much effort does it take to look at your receipt and look for errors? If you are really on a tight budget, I guarantee you will be looking over your receipt.
I have watched countless people shop with a calculator or pen/pad to make sure they stay on budget. It is not hard.
> how much effort does it take to look at your receipt and look for errors [compared to your memory of the exact prices of everything you just bought]
> I have watched countless people shop with a calculator or pen/pad to make sure they stay on budget. It is not hard.
Yes, this is exactly what I am talking about. Both of those things are straightforwardly doing extra work using your own time and resources. I generally spot check my receipts and do a rough mental tally, but if I had to turn that paranoia to max because some store was continually trying to defraud me, then I would likely stop going there.
If a store refused to adjust a fraudulent charge or honor an offered price, then I would keep escalating the issue and not back down. This too requires resources of having the time to argue, reading as someone who will not simply be browbeaten, plus deescalation and being able to communicate clearly if they call the police, etc.
The hard part is talking to the cashier and waiting for a manager, potentially having to argue with both, and looking like a cheapskate.
If you've ever shopped at dollar stores they are often understaffed with a long line, no self-checkout, and a single cashier on duty if at all. If you argue about pricing you will hold everyone up in line, maybe get dirty looks and possibly wait an hour for someone with the authority to come and clear it up. Another person in this thread also mentioned that they got screamed at and chased out of the store for "causing a problem": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46182451
I have been to the Dollar Store (and similar) many times and have never witnessed anyone getting yelled at for saying, "Hey, I think this was a mistake. Can you correct it, please?" (or any other place I shop - especially the grocery stores). We tend to have very positive experiences when pointing out pricing errors. My mother-in-law made it a point to review the receipts ever time we went to the grocery store. No big deal. As other have said, sometimes you get +10% of your money back and other times you get it for free.
Yes, mistakes happen; yes, people get over charged. But to imply people are shamed for asking to correct the error just seems...odd.
I mean, that person actually got yelled at and had to leave the store. Some are more sensitive than others and just the fear of an unpleasant interaction is enough for some people. I've let small discrepancies slide just because the staff looked overworked and I didn't want to make them stop what they're doing, run down to the aisle and check prices and get their supervisor. For most I think it's just a time thing. It isn't worth a couple dollars to commit to an unpredictable amount of time going back and forth and waiting for a manager. I salute those lions like your MIL who stand their ground and fight back but there are also many, maybe most, who are just in a hurry or want to avoid confrontation.
One note about asking for a refund/price adjustment. Occasionally the store workers forget to pull the sale prices off the shelf when the sale is over. In these situations, the manager/workers are appreciative since they can pull the sticker that was left on by accident. Just my experience...
I’ve never understood this - it’s maddening. I grew up in the US and the bare minimum was always at least a shower curtain (inner and outer), and if not that, a proper door.
Why on earth did this half-pane of glass become standard in so many places. It’s completely ineffective and ends up with water everywhere.
My shower in Denmark has no door, and no curtain, but the splashes don't reach very far away, and aren't in the way of anywhere I'd want to walk after showering anyway.
I've often seen hotel bathrooms in other countries that get this wrong. In the worst case, splashed water from the open shower runs all across the bathroom, and in one case (a Grand Hyatt!) into the main room carpet.
The half pane of glass is appropriate in warm parts of the world where you want the heat to be removed as quickly as possible. I suspect some hotel executive thought it looked cool in Miami, then made it the standard for the whole chain.
It's not even appropriate there. Ventilation should be determined by the fan, not the aperture.
Even in Miami, I don't want the entire bathroom floor flooded, and I want to be able to close the curtain/door and increase the humidity in the shower.
i hate it when the set up the half-pane in such a way that you can't adjust the water temp/pressure without being directly under the shower head.
when dealing with a new set of shower controls, i like to stand to the side and figure out what's happening and whether i need to let it warm up rather than stepping into the firing lane and taking whatever it throws at me
What's remarkable to me is how deep OpenAI is going on "ChatGPT as communication partner / chatbot", as opposed to Anthropic's approach of "Claude as the best coding tool / professional AI for spreadsheets, etc.".
I know this is marketing at play and OpenAI has plenty of resources developed to advancing their frontier models, but it's starting to really come into view that OpenAI wants to replace Google and be the default app / page for everyone on earth to talk to.
As a happy OpenRouter user I know the vast majority of the industry directly use vendor APIs and that the OpenRouter rankings are useless for those models.
I use codex high because Anthropic CC max plan started fucking people over who want to use opus. Sonnet kind of stinks on more complex problems that opus can crush, but they want to force sonnet usage and maybe they want to save costs.
Codex 5 high does a great job for the advanced use cases I throw at it and gives me generous usage.
Well that may also be because ChatGPT is worse than Gemini and Claude for coding. I don't know what the benchmarks say, I am just saying that from my own experience.
> ChatGPT is overwhelmingly, unambiguously, a "regular people" product.
How many of these people are paying and how much are they paying, though. Most "regular" people I met that have switched to ChaptGPT are using it as an alternative to search engines and are not paying for it (only one person I know is paying and he is using the Sora model to generate images for his business).
I really struggle to see a path where $.01 ad inventory covers the cost of inference, much less training or any other of OpenAI ventures. Unless every query makes you watch a 30 second unskippable video or something equally awful.
Users will ask ChatGPT for recommendations and the answer will feature products and services that have paid to be there, probably with some sort of attribution mechanism so OpenAI can get paid extra if the user ends up completing the purchase.
> I mean, yes, but also because it's not as good as Claude today.
I'm not sure, sometimes GPT-5 Codex (or even the regular GPT-5 with Medium/High reasoning) can do things Sonnet 4.5 would mess up (most recently, figuring out why some wrappers around PrimeVue DataTable components wouldn't let the paginator show up and work correctly; alongside other such debugging) and vice versa, sometimes Gemini 2.5 Pro is also pretty okay (especially when it comes to multilingual stuff), there's a lot of randomness/inconsistency/nuance there but most of the SOTA models are generally quite capable. I kinda thought GPT-5 wasn't very good a while ago but then used it a bunch more and my views of it improved.
Codex is great for fixing memory leaks systematically. Claude will just read the code and say “oh, it’s right here” then change something and claim it fixed it. It didn’t fix it and it doesn’t undo its useless change when you point out that it didn’t fix it.
Afraid not, a bit outside of my budget (given that I've been pushing millions of tokens daily, especially for lots of refactoring that'd be great to do in an automated fashion but codegen solutions for which... just don't exist). From what little I've used Opus in the past, I'm sure it'd do reasonably as well. Maybe even Sonnet with more attempts, different prompts etc.
Their tokens, they released a report a few months ago.
However, I can only imagine that OpenAI outputs the most intentionally produced tokens (i.e. the user intentionally went to the app/website) out of all the labs.
I think there's a lot of similarity between the conversationalness of Claude and ChatGPT. They are both sycophantic. So this release focuses on the conversational style,it doesn't mean OpenAI has lost the technical market. People a reading a lot into a point-release.
I think this is because Anthropic has principles and OpenAI does not.
Anthropic seems to treat Claude like a tool, whereas OpenAI treats it more like a thinking entity.
In my opinion, the difference between the two approaches is huge. If the chatbot is a tool, the user is ultimately in control; the chatbot serves the user and the approach is to help the user provide value. It's a user-centric approach. If the chatbot is a companion on the other hand, the user is far less in control; the chatbot manipulates the user and the approach is to integrate the chatbot more and more into the user's life. The clear user-centric approach is muddied significantly.
In my view, that is kind of the fundamental difference between these two companies. It's quite significant.
I don't follow Anthropic marketing but the system prompt for Claude.AI says sounds like a partner/ chatbot to me!
"Claude provides emotional support alongside accurate medical or psychological information or terminology where relevant."
and
" For more casual, emotional, empathetic, or advice-driven conversations, Claude keeps its tone natural, warm, and empathetic. Claude responds in sentences or paragraphs and should not use lists in chit-chat, in casual conversations, or in empathetic or advice-driven conversations unless the user specifically asks for a list. In casual conversation, it’s fine for Claude’s responses to be short, e.g. just a few sentences long."
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They also prompt Claude to never say it isn't conscious:
"Claude engages with questions about its own consciousness, experience, emotions and so on as open questions, and doesn’t definitively claim to have or not have personal experiences or opinions."
Man, maybe I'm getting old and jaded, but it's not often that I read a post that literally makes my skin crawl.
This is so transparently icky. "Oh woe is us! We're being sued and we're looking out for YOU the user, who is definitely not the product. We are just a 'lil 'ol (near) trillion-dollar business trying to protect you!"
Come ON.
Look I don't actually know who's in the right in the OAI vs. NYT dispute, and frankly I personally lean more toward the side the says that you are allowed to train models on the world's information as long as you consume it legally and don't violate copyright.
But this transparent attempt to get user sympathy under insanely disingenuous pretenses is just absurd.
OpenAI has seemingly done everything they can to put publishers in a position to make this demand, and they've certainly not done anything to make it impossible for them to respond to it. Is there a better, more privacy minded way for NYT to get the data they need? Probably, I'm not smart enough to understand all the things that go into such a decision. But I know I don't view them as the villain for asking, and I also know I don't view OpenAI as some sort of guardian of my or my data's best interests.
I know a startup founder whose company is going through a bit of a struggle - they hired too many engineers, they haven't gotten product-market fit yet, and they are down to <1 year of runway.
The founder needed to do a layoff (which sucks in every dimension) and made the decision to go all-in on AI-assisted coding. He basically said "if you're not willing to go along, we're going to have to let you go." Many engineers refused and left, and the ones that stayed are committed to giving it a shot with Claude, Codex, etc.
Their runway is now doubled (2 years), they've got a smaller team, and they're going to see if they can throw enough experiments at the wall over the next 18 months to find product-market fit.
If they fail, it's going to be another "bad CEO thought AI could fix his company's problems" story.
But if they succeed....
(Curious what you all would have done in this situation btw...!)
Not meaning to sound accusatory, just asking. Was it the tools provided that they didn’t like? Ideological reasons not to use AI? Was the CEO being too prescriptive with their day to day?
I guess I find it hard to imagine why someone would dig in so much on this issue that they’d leave a job because of it, but 1) I don’t know the specifics of that situation and 2) I like using AI tooling at work for stuff.
You ask a great question. My sense is that the engineers fell into three camps (as they do here on HN as well):
1) I don’t really like these AI tools I write better code anyway and they just slow me down
2) I like these tools they make me 10% faster but they’re more like spell check / autocomplete for me than life-changing and I don’t want to go all in on agentic coding, etc and I still want to hand write everything, and:
3) I am no longer writing code, I am using AI tools (often in parallel) to write code and I am acting like an engineering manager / PM instead of an IC.
For better or for worse, and there is much to debate about this, I think he wanted just the (3) folks and a handful of (2) folks to try and salvage things otherwise it wasn’t worth the burn :(
Personally I might choose to leave too. I just don't feel like taking responsibility of something iterated with AI. Something I will take the blame when it goes wrong.
This especially so after I have seen someone trying to use AI after I had provided simple and clear manual steps. Instead trying to do something different with very unfitting scenario. Where also the AI really did not understand that the solution would not have even worked.
Oh man this definitely makes me wax nostalgic for that golden era ... it was 2013-2016 for me. I would throw an annual holiday party w/ my roommate in SF every year and I recall being able to just go down the list of my FB friends and click "invite, invite, invite" and everyone I cared about would show up and we all had a wonderful time. Sigh.
The only thing missing here is a way to SEND emails from your new business email. I don’t think CloudFlare (yet) offers virtual SMTP for your routed email, so you can receive emails to your new “noah@mynewcompany.com” address but sent mail will still come from your personal email address.
Anyone have a simple way of solving this? I’ve done it in a complex way (setting up my own SMTP service through through Google Apps, a paid service), but I’m wondering if there’s a simpler approach I should use going forward for these quick setups.
It's funny and this timing is perfect - just today two (mostly non-technical) friends, unprompted, sent me two different "projects" they just launched. Both have the same identical and unmistakable AI design with pills and tags and highlights and icons and all that. Both are bland, don't really offer anything deeply novel, but are unmistakably real and perhaps even usable.
On the one hand - I'm actually psyched that mostly nontechnical people have successfully launched their ideas into the world. This would have eaten up time and at least several $thousand previously.
On the other hand, they are both super blah projects.
Date I say it: The AI Slop Web App era has arrived in full force.
It's like how people who say they want to write a book spend all their time on the cover and the page and chapter heading layout before they put any effort into the manuscript.
This does feel like a real problem. The thing that concerns me (and likely other devs here) is that it adds an additional remote API dependency for a very core part of a system when a lot of people are trying to keep those dependencies to an absolute minimum. When your service goes down (not if), everyone who’s dependent on you will not be able to register new users, etc.
Is there any way you can offer this as a library instead? You deserve to get paid of course - maybe provide the library and initial data and charge for updates / premium checks, something like that.
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