Hacker News

Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039362

also: Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063199

To see what the agent sees, you can load https://getadb.com/new

There's two fun things about how it's implemented:

1. If you curl the home page, it the agent content rather than human content. We do this by detecting the 'Sec-Fetch-Mode' header. It's not perfect, but gets the job done for Claude Code et al.

2. For an agent to spin up an app, they make _two_ fethes. (1) getadb.com/guide tells them to generate a uuid, and fetch (2) getadb.com/provision/<uuid>. We did this, because just about half of the popular web-based app builders cache URLs globally, even if you return no-store headers. To get around this we just instruct the agent to generate unique URLs

You may wonder: Why GET requests, rather than POST requests? It's because then you can build in surprising places. For example, we get meta.ai to build an app inside the artifact preview: https://artifacts.meta.ai/share/a/b80c7412-c3af-4088-b430-78efdfe8ea2d

Under the hood, this is possible because the whole infra is mult-tenant from ground up. We already announced how that works on HN, but if you're curious here's the essay for it: https://www.instantdb.com/essays/architecture

https://apnews.com/article/trump-ufos-uap-aliens-pentagon-re...

https://www.war.gov/UFO/#release

This morning, our database flagged a duplicate UUID (v4). I checked, thinking it may have been a double-insert bug or something, but no.

The original UUID was from a record added in 2025 (about a year ago), and today the system inserted a new document with a fresh UUIDv4 and it came up with the exact same one:

b6133fd6-70fe-4fe3-bed6-8ca8fc9386cd

We're using this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/uuid

I thought this is technically impossible, and it will never happen, and since we're not modifying the UUIDs in any way, I really wonder how that.... is possible!? We're literally only calling:

import { v4 as uuidv4 } from "uuid";

const document_id = uuidv4();

... and then insert into the database, that's it.

Additionally, the database only has about 15.000 records, and now one collision. Statistically... impossible.

Has that ever happened to anyone?! What in the...

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status?t=2026-05-07

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/08/aws-outage-data-center-fandu...

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/05/08/aws-warns-of...

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazon-clou...

A couple people recently emailed, asking whether the Klein bottle business was still operating after my death.

“Huh?” I thought. “I ain’t dead yet.”

After some digging, I discovered the source: an AI-generated review of The Cuckoo’s Egg circulating on Facebook. Alongside the usual synthetic praise and fabricated details, it confidently announced that I had died in May 2024.

Apparently AI has now advanced to the point where it can kill people off before they notice.

Mark Twain once wrote, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” I never expected to field-test the quote personally.

source: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=989939243570691&id=100076638743004

Cheers, -Cliff