New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Apple terminated our dev account over a rogue employee

Ask HN: Apple terminated our dev account over a rogue employee
13 by 0x1f | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I know that HN isn't a customer support forum and it might not be right to post this here, but we are absolutely desperate and hoping someone in this community can point us in the right direction. We are a small software company in Africa. For over two years, we've built and maintained an app. It has become a vital economic engine for our local community, employing a whole fleet of delivery agents and serving as a lifeline for local stores and restaurants. Recently, we discovered that a single employee used a shared company machine to engage in unauthorized activities that violated Apple's Developer Terms of Service. We took immediate action: we fired the employee on the spot and completely overhauled our security. We revoked all individual access and implemented mandatory, peer-reviewed, supervised sessions for any Apple Developer portal access. The problem is the collateral damage. Apple terminated our entire organization's account. We submitted an appeal through App Store Connect, but we feel completely stuck behind automated walls. We have also emailed Apple executives, but are waiting in the dark. Because of this one employee's actions, our app is facing total removal, and families in our community are quite literally losing their daily income. We aren't asking for special treatment, just a chance for a real human at App Review to look at the security steps we've taken and consider a second chance. If anyone here has been through this, has advice, or knows how to get a human at Apple to actually read our appeal, our entire community would be forever grateful. Thank you so much for your time. (For reference if any Apple folks are reading: our Apple Team ID is T35TM9SW45)

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Dumped Wix for an AI Edge agent so I never have to hire junior staff

Show HN: Dumped Wix for an AI Edge agent so I never have to hire junior staff
6 by axotopia | 5 comments on Hacker News.
I run a building design consultancy. I got tired of paying Wix $40/month for a brochure that couldn’t answer simple service questions, and me wasting hours on the same FAQs. So I killed it all and spent 4 months building a 'talker': https://axoworks.com The stack is completely duct-taped: Netlify’s 10s serverless timeout forced me to split the agent into three pieces: Brain (Edge), Hands (Browser), and Voice (Edge). I haven’t coded in 30 years. This was 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, heavily guided by AI. The fight that proved it worked: 2 weeks ago, a licensed architect attacked the bot, trying to prove my business model harms the profession. The AI (DeepSeek-R3) completely dismantled his arguments. It was hilariously caustic. Log: https://ift.tt/CsRtjFM... A few battle scars: * Web Speech API works fine, right up until someone speaks Chinese without toggling the language mode. Then it forcefully spits out English phonetic gibberish. Still a headache. * Liability is the killer. Hallucinate a building code clause? We’re dead. Insurance won’t touch us. * We publish the audit logs to keep ourselves honest and make sure the system stays hardened. Audit: https://ift.tt/u4b1sXG The hardest part was getting the intent right: making one LLM pivot seamlessly from a warm principal’s tone with a homeowner, to a defensive bulldog when attacked by a peer. That took 2.5 months of tuning. We burn through tokens with an 'Eager RAG' hack (pre-fetching guesses) just to improve responsiveness. I also ripped out the “essential” persistent DBs—less than 5% of visitors ever return, so why bother? If a client drops mid-query, their session vanishes. No server-side queues. The point: To let me operate with a network of seasoned pros, and trim the fat. Try to break it. I’ll be in the comments. Kee