Using Typescript to Obtain One of the Rarest License Plates
Key topics
The quest for a rare license plate using TypeScript has sparked a heated debate about the darker side of vanity plates: the fact that many are manufactured by prisoners who are paid minimal wages, raising concerns about forced labor. Commenters were quick to point out that this practice is not only morally dubious but also has broader economic implications, as companies using prison labor can undercut competitors. The discussion took a historical turn with references to the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, highlighting the loophole that allows this practice to continue. As commenters weighed in, it became clear that there's no easy consensus on the issue, with some arguing that prisoners should be expected to work, while others saw it as a form of modern-day slavery.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
17m
Peak period
120
0-12h
Avg / period
20
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Dec 18, 2025 at 10:00 AM EST
22 days ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Dec 18, 2025 at 10:17 AM EST
17m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
120 comments in 0-12h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Dec 23, 2025 at 1:47 PM EST
17 days ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
I'm sorry, how is it "borderline" slave labour and not straight up forced labour? These people are imprisoned, and I'm assuming forced to do this work, or what happens if they say no? It's quite literally known as "penal labour" and I thought most of the world figured out that we're not supposed to treat people like that anymore.
But it doesn't matter, really. Either we have rights as humans or we don't. Qualifying them erodes protections for us all.
Well you’re making the assumption that prisoners are forced to do this work rather than opting to in order to make a little money for snacks and/or make a case for good behavior when they come before the parole board.
It can be a bit more explicit than that: in Colorado, inmates can earn 10–12 days per month of "earned time." Earned time shortens the time until eligibility for parole. Section D in the linked document (from the linked department policies page section 625-02) gives examples of behavior that can add up to earned time. For instance, a day of work at a disaster site is worth a day of earned time (D.4.a.1)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q6IXf-yWnbA3Ujjejola7fiwijv...
https://cdoc.colorado.gov/about/department-policies
Plus you don't really have choice in the labor you perform, no choice in where you perform it, no choice in when, you aren't really paid, you can only spend money in the commissary (at insanely inflated prices).
Sure it's not a slave on a cotton field getting whipped for not meeting quota, but it really isn't far from that.
It’s not quite slave labor but it probably should be compensated better at the minimum.
> Prison labor in the US is mostly optional. Although inmates are paid for their labor in most states, they usually receive less than $1 per hour. As of 2017, Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas did not pay inmates for any work whether inside the prison (such as custodial work and food services) or in state-owned businesses. Additionally, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and South Carolina allowed unpaid labor for at least some jobs. Incarcerated individuals who are required to work typically receive minimal to no job training resulting in situations where their health and safety could potentially be compromised. Prison workers in the US are generally exempt from workers' rights and occupational safety protections, including when seriously injured or killed. Often times, inmates that are often overworked through penal labor do not receive any proper education or opportunities of "rehabilitation" to maximize profits off the cheap labor produced. Many incarcerated workers also struggle to purchase basic necessities as prices of goods continue to soar, meanwhile prison wages continue to stay the same. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
It sounds like it isn't optional everywhere, the pay is beyond inhuman, they don't always get any benefits at all, no training, don't safety and are overworked.
Overall, sounds like a nice idea on paper, but combine it with private companies actually running these prisons and probably making profits on having more f̵o̵r̵c̵e̵d̵ labour available to them and you basically re-invented slavery again, just with a nicer name.
Most of these are true, but I would push back on the pay angle. If a person is in jail, they are a ward of the state and have no expenses at all. There is no sense in paying them a "living wage" because they don't have to live off it. In any case, most stereotypical prison jobs would not cover the cost of incarcerating the employee.
A common way this works these days in more progressive states is that prisoners who can hold down a remote job are allowed to keep their income, minus paying a tithe for their incarceration:
https://www.mainepublic.org/2025-08-29/in-maine-prisoners-ar...
> Overall, sounds like a nice idea on paper, but combine it with private companies actually running these prisons and probably making profits on having more f̵o̵r̵c̵e̵d̵ labour available to them and you basically re-invented slavery again, just with a nicer name.
Only about 10% of prisoners are in private prisons. The vast majority of them are in some kind of government prison. The US definitely puts too many people in prison, but that's for cultural reasons and not because of some nefarious plan to get cheap labor.
only the last sentence here is true.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
many prisoners receive a bill for their incarceration and will come out of prison with debt, even if they're working while in prison.
it varies prison to prison, but even basic toiletries may not be provided. the most commonly purchased items at commissary are food.
This is true. I 100% agree with you that this is awful and should not be allowed.
> the largest maximum security prison in the united states is a slave plantation, operated continuously since the 1830s. they still farm cotton.
Fair, but only 12% of prisoners are even maximum security to begin with, and you don't end up there for slinging a little bit of pot.
On that note, I also think we send far too many people to jail and should rewrite the laws to fix that.
Point blank, the system is not meant to prevent or discourage crime, it's meant to enact torture for people we feel deserve it. Whether that helps our society does not matter at all - nobody cares if a rapist leaves prison just to rape again, so long as they are sufficiently punished for it. The punishment is more important than real, tangible outcomes, because ultimately we've built it so the punishment is what makes us feel good and safe.
Joking aside, read the 13th amendment https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/ and pay close attention to the bit that reads, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. In the United States, involuntary labor, slavery, and locking someone in a cell are all equally not allowed. And all equally allowed - as punishment for crimes of which you have been convicted.
If you think that this is ripe for abuse, you'd be exactly right. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing. We got rid of chattel slavery - and immediately accomplished the same effect with the black codes and convict leasing. As the name suggests, this was overwhelmingly directed at the same black people who had just theoretically been emancipated.
This happened in Oregon to my kind of brother in law. (Married to half sister of my half siblings - what do you call that?)
He's Native American, so the local police thought that they could target him with a BS charge. They lost. The private jail that he'd been kept in, now that they weren't getting paid by the state, sued him for the cost of keeping him. Incidentally the counter sheriff is on the board of directors for the private prison in question.
Can you spell conflict of interest? Of course you can! Can you spell corruption? That too, wow!
Can anyone do a danged thing about it? Of course not! As long as they are only targeting people that nobody likes, like Native Americans, their victims won't get the time of day in our wonderful United States of America.
(I really wish I was making this up.)
But if your case has not been officially lost, you can't be set to forced labor either.
(Of course our BS system in many places still charges exonerees after the fact despite the fact that it was a wrongful conviction.)
I knew one guy who was doing a 30 day jail sentence for some misdemeanor and was told they would reduce it to 14 days if he worked in the kitchen. He took the job and lost most of his thumb in a very unsafe meat slicer. This put his 17 year career with UPS in jeopardy since the nerve damage made it hard for him to handle things.
I'm far older than 9 now, and the tip of my left thumb still gets very cold in the winter and if I directly bump it into something, it hurts a whole heck of a lot.
Rant is because while that moment sucked pretty hard (I immediately put my thumb in my mouth, eating the bit of thumb apparently..) it didn't take very long for me to realize that any lower and it would have certainly been a life changing event.
Bad aim, but in the best way possible.
I can only imagine the difference. Has to be harsh.
This is an incorrect assumption, at least in my state. It’s a job that they can apply for and opt in to do.
The debate is about their hourly wage.
There is a possibility of forced penal labor, as I understand it, but it’s mostly things like being forced to do cleaning duties, road cleanup, etc.
It's slavery. The South fought hard to include the "except as punishment for crime" clause in the 13th amendment. The US has never fully abolished slavery.
> Fees for room and board—yes, literally for a thin mattress or even a plastic “boat” bed in a hallway, a toilet that may not flush, and scant, awful tasting food—are typically charged at a “per diem rate for the length of incarceration.” It is not uncommon for these fees to reach $20 to $80 a day for the entire period of incarceration.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
I don't think that's historically accurate. The 13th amendment was passed in the Senate on April 8, 1864 and HoR on January 31, 1865.
At the time, the senate and congressional seats from the 10 southern states were vacant.
So the only fighting the south was doing was in the civil war, which didn't end until May 26, 1865.
The text itself is identical to the text in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery (but allowed for the return of fugitive slaves) in what would later be Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota.
Having a prison job often comes with deals of better behavior and a shorter sentence (!!!). When you're being told that just working for 2 dollars an hour might lower your sentence from 20 years to 15, do you really have a choice?
For example, in Georgia, prisoners often work outside of the prison for well below minimum wage in order to earn "good time". This means they might get more visits to their family. It also increases their chances of parole. However, the labor is coerced as well. Showing up late or not coming in results in in-prison punishments. So, many prisoners work in cotton fields or McDonald's on the promise of an easier life, while most of their wages are siphoned away and businesses get to pay very little.
"Behave a certain way and you will be imprisoned for less/no amount of time" is not slavery unless the law is slavery. The full term imprisonment is just, and being able to shorten it is a privilege.
Even if you believe this, which I would describe as naive at best and willfully ignorant at worst, you have to understand that the parole is a carrot. It's not real.
Georgia has some of the lowest, if not the lowest, parole stats in the country. They almost never hand it out, even if you are a good little prisoner and work on the field picking cotton for a buck or so an hour. They don't actually want to help society, or prisoners. They just want to siphon money and labor from a population that they know has no options. It's opportunistic. These people are a plague on humanity, a virus of such low lows they must only prey on the most vulnerable. They are the pneumonia of American society.
Words mean things. Slavery is something that is not occurring here. Argue amongst yourselves about the ethics of underpaying for the work, but don't invoke the word slavery.
This is a contested assumption. Prisons and penal systems in US as I understand it are for profit.
It’s slave labour, whether you like it or not.
And if it never sells, the profit margins for the slave drivers decreases.
I mean, I really, this post is trying to justify slave labor. Is that not... A little bizarre to find yourself doing that?
Prisons should not be allowed to be a profit center. The ramifications of doing so create gross incentives.
Lol, wasn't slavery outlawed in the US, or were some states still allowed to keep it? That's absolutely bananas if true.
[1] the only excluded bit is the followup "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Without this, the power to enforce the 13th Amendment would be left up to the states due to the 10th Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."), which would have slightly useless given the whole war that had just been fought over some states wanting to keep slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison
The contention is about how much they’re paid per hour.
Not 100% true it seems, but happy for someone else to correct me.
> Prison labor in the US is mostly optional - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
Sorry, do you have a source for that? The requirement to work is a major point of contention, and a very quick check with this[1] directly contradicts your claim in the federal system: "Sentenced inmates are required to work if they are medically able. Institution work assignments include employment in areas like food service or the warehouse, or work as an inmate orderly, plumber, painter, or groundskeeper. Inmates earn 12¢ to 40¢ per hour for these work assignments."
[1] https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/work_programs.j...
> Institution work assignments include employment in areas like food service or the warehouse, or work as an inmate orderly, plumber, painter, or groundskeeper.
Meaning some prisoners work in the kitchen preparing food for other inmates, others are on clean up duty, and so on. You could argue that nobody in prison should have to participate in anything inside their community and that’s a valid debate to be had.
In my state, the jobs that provide things outside of prison are applied for.
> They work as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. They washed hospital laundry and worked in mortuary services at the height of the pandemic. They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, athletic equipment, and uniforms. They cultivate and harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and work in meat and poultry processing plants.
> From the moment they enter the prison gates, they lose the right to refuse to work. [...] More than 76 percent of incarcerated workers report that they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation, or the inability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap. They have no right to choose what type of work they do and are subject to arbitrary, discriminatory, and punitive decisions by the prison administrators who select their work assignments.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/publications/2022-06...
This a good reminder to all Americans to read the Constitution. The amount of bizarre understandings (not necessarily this one) that I see is very high.
Practically everyone in human history since the dawn of time has had to go out and produce something of value. Why, all of a sudden, should a murderer or rapist get to sit on their ass and consume what we all produce? I find nothing questionable about a humble job for them at all.
I do find that questionable.
Prisoners already lack freedom in many aspects. "Sitting on their asses" like if they were sipping cocktails on a beach is a bit a misrepresentation don't you think? I wouldn't exchange the possibility to move and do what I want for possibly any amount of money, nor for being able to "sit on my ass" in that sense. Would you?
Besides the moral arguments - which I will say, they are so obvious that it feels incredible even having to discuss why enslaving prisoners is wrong - you can make economic arguments. For example, that having cheap or borderline unpaid labor compresses the salary in that market, or that this system creates a dysfunctional incentive to increase prison population for private profits.
Maybe that's why the US is one of the countries with the highest incarcerated population in the world. The highest among western and larger countries.
I understand though there is a cultural barrier. I am from Europe and in most countries here prison has a rehabilitation purpose, which is what most benefits society, and prisons are not private entities.
1. Why should they be restricted to ludicrously low wages? If they're producing something of value, they should be compensated. Not only is it morally wrong to, you know, enslave people, on a more practical level it would be very helpful for people who are leaving prison after serving their sentence to actually have some money saved up, so they have better opportunities, to avoid recidivism.
2. The reason they can sit on their ass and consume what they produce is that they effectively become wards of the state. They're still human beings, and if we have decided to incarcerate them, we become responsible for them, and they still have rights as human beings.
A humble job is fine; I'm not saying they should be sitting in an aeron chair bullshitting on Slack for 8 hours a day. But slavery for pennies on the hour is wrong.
Often that reason is "too poor to afford proper representation" or "looked vaguely like the actual criminal" or "took a plea bargain because the justice system was threatening them with an immorally-long wait for a trial and a likely worse outcome".
The numbers I saw said 47% of inmates had a violent crime under federal or state classifications.
Often it is not.
Often, they too are a victim of our judicial system, and we can't just ignore them due to the peers we locked them in with.
You didn't, but I'm taking your stance to its logical conclusion.
GP: > they shouldnt be paid at all. they're in prison for a reason. they have a debt to society.
Your response: > Often that reason is "too poor to afford proper representation" or "looked vaguely like the actual criminal" or "took a plea bargain because the justice system was threatening them with an immorally-long wait for a trial and a likely worse outcome".
Be that as it may, this is our system. Through a series of laws we have defined due process for our people, and people who end up in prison are a result of this due process. Like it or not this is the best we were able to do.
If we are going to say prisoners should be given more privileges because some prisoners do not deserve to be in there, then why are we holding them in a prison to begin with? Being confined to prison is a thousand times more punitive than not receiving pay for making a license plate.
A better reason for arguing that prisoners should be paid for their work is because it is more humane. That's a better argument than some people are in prison unjustly.
I'm actually in favor of prison reforms. Prisons' number one goal should be to reduce recidivism. I see that as the entire point of the prison system: reducing crime. If a person leaves prison and re-offends, we have failed to do our job.
That's the fact. You can't argue jail time is automatically fair only because it has been added in the sentencing.
Its legal, and that's it. Civil forfeiture is also legal. Slavery was legal (and is still legal in us prisons).
Doesn't make it justified.
Then we have people who demand to double down on the punishment and wonder why these people never stop breaking the law.
Americans are a marvelous bunch. Thanks Dog I live in a first world country.
I'm sure it differs between countries but in the UK vanity plates have become reasonably contentious.
As a gross generalisation they're fine if the car is worth hundreds of thousands or the plate itself is worth hundreds of thousands.
The UK plate "F1" last sold for just under £1m (about US$1.3m) over 10 years ago and it's rumoured that there are offers for ten times that from someone who wants to buy it now.
It comes down to a classic British issue of "class", which is inherently difficult to explain.
If you have the money to have, say, a Ferrari 250 GTO then you can do what the hell you like with it, including getting a vanity plate for it. You are rich enough that you don't care what anyone else thinks about you. Anyone seeing you and that car will know you are rich.
If you have the money to spend close to £1m on a plate like "X1" and decide to put it on beat up 15 year old 1.2 litre Ford Focus then, again, it shows you have stupid amounts of money and some delicious irony in putting it on an old beater of a car.
But if don't have a supercar and you get a relatively cheap vanity plate like "RMZ 1327" and stick it on a Range Rover Evoque that's only a couple of years old then it just shows that you're trying too hard and just aspire to be seen as rich. You don't have enough money for a really nice car, or a really exclusive vanity plate.
I guess the other way of looking at it is that people who don't have the money to get a vanity plate aspire to being able to do so as it would mean they have more money than they have now. Once they get to having that amount of money most realise that the money is best spent elsewhere (or not spent at all). Once they have so much money that having a vanity plate is inconsequential to their finances they may as well do it. So it's natural that some people want to pretend they've reached the "rich" state by buying a vanity plate preemptively - the problem is that this is so easy to spot it just looks gauche.
All of this obviously doesn't apply to countries where vanity plates aren't traded for stupid amounts like famous pieces of art.
It's interesting to see how luxury brands have different segments of clothes that range from no logos at all to a huge alligator the size of your chest, depending on whether you need to announce to the world that you made it or if you just want to have access to good quality clothes.
(One classification of "upper class" is someone who has never had to buy their own furniture because they inherit it and pretty much everything else they need.)
Also, my vanity plate is $0 more than a normal plate. Why wouldn't I?
In the most ironic twist of all - Ontario did away with license plate renewals a few years ago, and now, I would actually consider a vanity plate..
I've always wondered if a regular plate was better for avoiding speeding tickets - a vanity plate is much easier to validate, IMHO.
The issue turned out to be drain covers in the field of the view of the cameras, which the system was detecting belonged to car 11111.
No price difference for the yellow on black plate when you want personalized.
The Frost Report sketch explains it quite well:
https://youtu.be/9XmB59Ax4cE
Is it that the latter can be called "slavery" that makes people upset?
So it's not about which one is worse, it's about not supporting something that could lead to corruption or an unfair system.
Don't forget that the cost is not only the bureaucratic fee; you also have to buy a vintage Aston Martin or Lotus, to display the plate.
I wonder if the Danish system would prevent ÆØÅ and AEOA from both being registered. Would the Danish system Match "ÆØÅ" if someone input "AEOA"? There are unicode normalization rules, but I wonder if systems would be built to handle that. If you're Danish, you'd just use those letters so it wouldn't be a useful feature. If you're English, you wouldn't often encounter those letters so it wouldn't be a useful feature.
I would assume the UK has worked out a way of dealing with this having had plenty of years of foreign plates being driven around the country.
Any Danish license plate driven in the UK will almost certainly have to a be an EU style plate with the blue band on the left with the "DK" country code. If someone needs to send a fine to the registered owner of this plate I'd guess they'd be handing over the camera footage/images to a contact in the relevant country and letting them confirm what the exact plate is.
(There may be some weird exemptions for old classic/vintage cars that can continue to be driven on their original number plates, in which case you really don't know who to contact.)
The UK is very strict on license plates. I don't think there's any valid reason for driving a car without some form of a license plate on display (cars being driven on trade plates placed in the front/rear windscreens are the closest thing I can think of). I'd expect the UK Police to pull over any car that didn't have plates on it if they spotted it. It's certainly considered very suspicious in the UK if a car is missing either of its plates.
There are plenty of examples of normal ANPR cameras failing to capture plates properly. Or even sillier examples like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-58959930
This story got referenced by the associated Government body here: https://videosurveillance.blog.gov.uk/2021/10/27/the-camera-...
Similarly, I've been flashed for speeding in France, which does have cameras adjusted to my plates' size, but they also didn't bother sending a ticket. Germany - on the other hand - will send you a ticket, but since they allow Ö, Ü, etc. on their plates, their system can probably handle Æ, Ø and Å as well.
Based on my experience, the UK approach is to not even bother and try and collect fines from owners of foreign registered vehicles. They do sell them to some private company that has been sending me scary letters for 10 years soon.
I've never actually used that account, because there are too many anonymous Bart Simpsons (and old people who don't understand email addresses) who use that one.
The shitty thing is that I use Google Apps for Your Domain (a.k.a. Dasher/GSuite) to get around this. For years, things like Photos and Music were stuck to my useless Gmail account, because the PMs involved never bothered going through the approvals to get those things to work on custom domain accounts (which Google ret-conned to be for businesses only).
A lot of these are resolved now, but there are still frustrating places where it comes up:
- I pay twice for YouTube Music - once for myself, and once for my family. I can't share my account with them, because it's attached to my domain name.
- I similarly can't join their Google Home accounts to do things like have my voice recognized when I visit them.
- Gemini CLI thinks I'm a business and quotas me like one.
But don't despair! Depending on how crappy the cam's firmware is, NULL might just do the trick.
⸻
1. Although some specialty plates end up having suffixed letters, usually shown on the plate stacked.
They're not. Both are bad, but at least there's some utility to LLMs.
I started thinking about it when someone parked next to me in a nearly-identical model - same brand, year, etc, the only difference was some roof accessory - and a nearly identical license plate. (Think ABC D12 and ABC E12). I started trying to open their car door, and was confused until I noticed some things in their front seat that were clearly not ours.
Later that week, I was shopping around for car tires, and saw that some shop - PepBoys or something - let you punch in your license plate and let you know what kind of tires you need, and that their API response included the car make and model. I thought about poking around it, and seeing if there was a pattern to the way my state assigned license plates, but never got around to it.
(They live in town, too, and I've seen where they park. I should go introduce myself to our car twin.)
They have a license plate checker on their site. I don't live in the states, therefore I don't have a plate to check. Or do I..... HY in Florida....
@lafond - do you own a 2010 Subaru Legacy with the 2.5L SOHC engine?
Eventually a screwdriver works for both.
(It could say "React," but still, the interesting part is that you built a scraper/visualizer, not that it used React.)
That means there are probably a lot of great plate names up for the taking that people are just assuming are taken. You'd need to call the DMV to verify.
Hopefully Florida's web page does not have that limitation.
42 more comments available on Hacker News