MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
AI Paying with Bitcoin and Lightning – A Working Demo
by Prashanthc | 2025-04-23 11:42:30+00:00
A demo where an AI agent buys an eSIM and pays using Bitcoin. The payment is made from a Euro balance using Lightning. No credit card,—just AI transacting in Bitcoin. Here’s what happens in the demo:

-> The AI picks the best eSIM plan (Rigged for the Demo) -> It makes a Bitcoin payment over Lightning -> It uses a Euro balance to send sats

This works using:

-> Lightning for instant and cheap transactions -> Bringin APIS exposed via MCP Model context protocol

Bitcoin is internet-native money. AI agents will need a way to transact, and Bitcoin is the best fit. But there are scaling issues with Bitcoin and being able to provide secure controlled access.

That's where Lightning and Nostr Wallet Connect come into the picture. They enable instant, cheap payments with controlled secure access to AI to make payments. Bitcoin adoption is not keeping up with AI development.

Most AI services are still stuck with fiat payment rails—slow, expensive, and restrictive. That’s where on/offramp providers should step in. Like how Bringin is doing.

I also wrote a blog post breaking down how Bitcoin can power AI payments. Check it out here: https://medium.com/bringin/bringin-bitcoin-to-ai-684e744b6795
by codeflo | 2025-04-23 11:42:42+00:00
> I don't think it has anything to do with display technologies though.

I think your two examples nicely illustrate that it's all about the display technology.

> The computer is running a service that is resizing images from 100x100 pixels to 200x200 pixels. Would the programmer of this server be better off thinking in terms of samples or rectangular subdivisions of a display?

That entirely depends on how the resizing is done. Usually people choose nearest neighbor in scenarios like that to be faithful to the original 100x100 display, and to keep the images sharp. This treats the pixels as squares, which means the programmer should do so as well.

> Alvy Ray Smith, the author of this paper, was coming from the background of developing Renderman for Pixar.

That's meaningful context. I'm sure that in 1995, Pixar movies were exposed onto analog film before being shown in theatres. I'm almost certain this process didn't preserve sharp pixels, so "pixels aren't squares" was perhaps literally true for this technology.
by madeofpalk | 2025-04-23 11:43:06+00:00
Both WebUSB and WebBluetooth is still a draft spec, and is doubtful to progress any further with both Mozilla and Webkit objecting to it

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth

https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#anti-fingerprinting

Essentially, these are proprietary that are a part of an embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy by Google Chrome.
by wannabebarista | 2025-04-23 11:44:26+00:00
I mainly discover new blogs from links from other blogs I read or from HN.

I share my blog on HN and Bluesky and a few niche communities like Mander (when it makes sense).

Most of my traffic right now comes from chatbots citing my posts, StackExchange, or links in documentation.

My website is https://bcmullins.github.io
by steinuil | 2025-04-23 11:44:30+00:00
Turns out I managed to use almost all of these during a refactor of a project at work, even metaclasses... (Metaclass usage is justified in my case: we have a sort of language evaluator and using a metaclass lets us define function arguments with their types and validators in a very coincise and obvious way similar to Pydantic.)

I think this list should also include descriptors[0]: it's another metaprogramming feature that allows running code when accessing or setting class attributes similar to @property but more powerful. (edit: nvm, I saw that they are covered in the proxy properties section!)

I think the type system is quite good actually, even if you end up having to sidestep it when doing this kind of meta-programming. The errors I do get are generally the library's fault (old versions of SQLAlchemy make it impossible to assign types anywhere...) and there's a few gotchas (like mutable collections being invariant, so if you take a list as an argument you may have to type it as `Sequence[]` or you'll get type errors) but it's functional and makes the language usable for me.

I stopped using Ruby because upstream would not commit on type checking (yes I know you have a few choices if you want typing, but they're a bit too much overhead for what I usually use Ruby for, which is writing scripts), and I'm glad Python is committing here.

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/descriptor.html
by ivape | 2025-04-23 11:46:15+00:00
It kind of shows the state of Indie development over the last 2 decades that it's only the big players that can move mountains. Linux on the phone never happened, and it seems like we are all resigned to the fact that the future AI phone OS/AI browser will be made by the titans and not anyone else. Even if it came out of the open-source scene the titans just buy the damn thing.
by troupo | 2025-04-23 11:46:20+00:00
> That's kind of the point, Chrome shipped it across multiple platforms two years ago

Chrome ships a lot of things. Even now WebGPU is marked as experimental technology on MDN.

WebGPU didn't even become a Candidate Recommendation until December 2024 (half a year ago)

> Apple are just dragging their feet.

Or they are not in any rush to implement APIs that haven't reached consensus, haven't passed reviews, are subject to change etc. Chrome has very very cavalier attitude towards shipping APIs.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-23 11:47:15+00:00
This might be just a semantic argument, but if you mean "programming" as in "configuring a machine to implement one or more algorithms" (which I would assert most people do when they use the term), computer science is emphatically not about programming, although programming is taught for much the same reason that artists learn how to use a pencil. Computing, as a discipline, predates the machine (although the machine justified the existence of a whole discipline for studying it because the force multiplier it represented made it worthwhile to dive deeply on the subject of algorithm development and execution, the nature of algorithms, the nature of computability, formal logics, etc... Before the machine, it was just a subset of mathematics).

This was a point repeatedly driven home in my undergraduate curriculum, and in fact, they made a point of having multiple classes where a computer was completely uninvolved.
by diggan | 2025-04-23 11:47:20+00:00
> The only gripe I see is funding for Wiktionary

Seems like a well-specified and specific reason for the funding though, not just "do whatever you want":

> This project will develop QA modules for Wiktionary, leading to easy parsing and processing of cross-linguistic data. This helps to unify data formats across Wiktionary, and improve the overall reliability of this invaluable resource.

Given that the EU has 24 official languages, I think it makes a lot of sense to try to contribute resources for improving cross-linguistic data, bonus points for funneling those resources to a relatively open platform.
by lukeqsee | 2025-04-23 11:47:23+00:00
Since this article was written, we've (Stadia Maps) also launched and made significant progress with our own Geocoding API: https://stadiamaps.com/products/geocoding-search/

It was originally based on Pelias, but we've since augmented with additional data sources (such as Foursquare OS Places) and significantly improved the baseline for performance and accuracy.

Happy to answer questions on the topic!
by irusensei | 2025-04-23 11:47:32+00:00
Personally I wouldn’t install software unless it were from a really trusted person doing something extremely unique and useful that doesn’t have an alternative on the Apple Store (think UTM with JIT for iPad).

Please don’t take that as a negative comment but I suspect most people source their software from conveniently centralized repos whether it be App Store, Steam or even the main package manager on a Linux distribution.
by klabb3 | 2025-04-23 11:47:34+00:00
In a way yes. If you compare ads to purchasing products or even subscriptions, ads translate into attention and optimizing for addictive engagement. The same as microtransactions in games.

If you instead pay money, there’s even an incentive to reduce time spent, which translates into a focus on efficiency and customer focus.

The hard part is competing with free as in beer. It would be great if users learned more about the data that’s collected on them, in order to power the ad machine. If it was more concrete, I think more people would be deterred. Especially influential people.
by alxlaz | 2025-04-23 11:47:48+00:00
Except this has nothing to do with some monopoly on the smartphone market, but with Apple not allowing application developers to enable their users to vote with their wallets on payment methods. From the press release:

> Under the DMA, app developers distributing their apps via Apple's App Store should be able to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside the App Store, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases. > > The Commission found that Apple fails to comply with this obligation. Due to a number of restrictions imposed by Apple, app developers cannot fully benefit from the advantages of alternative distribution channels outside the App Store. Similarly, consumers cannot fully benefit from alternative and cheaper offers as Apple prevents app developers from directly informing consumers of such offers. The company has failed to demonstrate that these restrictions are objectively necessary and proportionate.

This has nothing to do with smartphones specifically, it applies equally well to anything in the AppStore ecosystem.
by blueflow | 2025-04-23 11:47:56+00:00
The operating system interface that Unix, BSD and Linux share is called POSIX. The term POSIX is not widely known, so people sometimes make up for it by using "Linux" in-place because it is the most popular implementation.

This explains people who argue that Android is not Linux, despite it featuring a Linux kernel and self-identifying as so: They are intending to say that Android is not POSIX.

We need to make POSIX (as concept/word) more popular.
by tomn | 2025-04-23 11:48:13+00:00
You're comparing a hub dynamo with cheap low-capacity rechargeable lights.

Rechargeable lights from the usual suspects are generally not good, they are expensive for what they are, have low capacity, and don't have swappable standard-size batteries.

They make dynamo systems look like a good deal, but if typical battery-powered lights were even close to their theoretical optimum I think people would be much less enthusiastic about dynamos.
by snozolli | 2025-04-23 11:48:22+00:00
the PE wants to do a leveraged buyout where the acquired company itself has borrowed most of the funds to buy itself.

Planet Money did an excellent podcast back in 2012 about Bain Capital buying and effectively destroying an iconic American manufacturer of legal pads. It's a great example of exactly this behavior:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/147590440
by cookiengineer | 2025-04-23 11:48:55+00:00
Well, you could also decide to pay a linux distribution of your choice.

KDE is a German project, GNOME a French/German project, most of Debian's maintainers come from the EU, Manjaro is a German project, probably most Arch, NixOS and Alpine maintainers come from the EU as well...

The problem with open source projects is always "unopinionatism". The only project that comes to mind where the design language feels actually integrated are KDE Plasma (not before) and maybe elementaryOS.

But those projects need a lot of funding to come to feature parity with Microsoft's and Apple's alternatives. Especially in the enterprise/corporate product portfolio, and system landscape administration.
by stavros | 2025-04-23 11:49:06+00:00
I'll be generous and assume you're being disingenuous by accident: This isn't about the ads, it's about the tracking. Meta is free to put ads wherever it wants, but it's not free to track people who don't want to be tracked.

In the end, a population has the right to govern itself how it wants. There's absolutely NOTHING wrong with that - Meta is free to simply not operate in the EU.
by lukeqsee | 2025-04-23 11:49:39+00:00
That's just not the case.

For a good geocoder, you need many other data sources (which can be open). OpenAddresses (https://openaddresses.io/) is an example of a vital dataset to delivering anything of any quality.

Returning real results requires extensive parsing and awareness of addresses and place data (including localization of them), and this is not something you get for free based on OSM data.
by ryao | 2025-04-23 11:49:43+00:00
I would think that phrase is related to the phrase, “he who does not work, does not eat”, which is in the Bible:

https://biblehub.com/2_thessalonians/3-10.htm

The phrase “he who does not work, does not eat” was never intended by its author to be applied to those who were physically incapable of working. You might say otherwise, but Saint Paul had been a very traditional adherent of the Jewish faith, which had required farmers to leave portions of their harvest for the poor and destitute. The idea that he thought those who were physically incapable of working should not eat is absurd. It is unlikely he had a change of heart on this matter after his conversion to Christianity given that he had viewed Christianity as the continuation of Judaism.

Anyway, I always thought the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” meant you had to do a bare minimum within your capability to take care of yourself if you want help. I think it is a corruption to claim the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” in any way implies that God does not help those who are incapable of helping themselves.
by fidotron | 2025-04-23 11:49:43+00:00
No, Sony Ericsson was way more successful than the attempts to revise history like to portray.

The vision of what to do with the more powerful technology was also better than Nokia, though still not as good as Apple. The whole direction Nokia kept dragging Series 60 in was a dead end, almost from the very start.

Edit to add: example of what I'm referring to with S60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3650 . Just complete madness. Who would waste time on this?
by dgellow | 2025-04-23 11:51:31+00:00
1. Because of hardware limitations. Writing text using arrow keys and 4 buttons is a real pain, error prone, requires formatting, uses way too much horizontal space. C would also be a horrible choice for creative programming, you cannot quickly tweak things around, iteratively and interactively develop your program. That doesn't match the tracker workflow I'm interested in.

2. In my concept columns and rows do have specific meaning too. Each row is a function (known as words in Forth, the language that is the closest to what I'm doing and a main source of inspiration). Columns have clear meaning, as mentioned in the article:

- function name

- input

- expressions 1-5

- output

That does match quite closely what my m8 tracker does in phrase view, where columns are:

- note

- volume

- instrument

- effects 1-3

I'm not sure what made you think that columns and rows are arbitrary.

For context, the main use case is to generate demo-scene like animations for my music. I would hate to write C on such a limited device for that purpose — in fact that's exactly what I do not want and the reason for this project to exist.
by pansa2 | 2025-04-23 11:52:12+00:00
> still a relatively simple language

If only. I suspect very few Python programmers can even fully explain what `a + b` does.

If `a` and `b` are instances of classes, many would say it's equivalent to `a.__add__(b)` or `type(a).__add__(a, b)`, but in fact it's much more complex.
by xvector | 2025-04-23 11:52:13+00:00
I've worked at most FAANG companies, including Google, Apple, and Meta in the past (not currently).

In my experience working at these companies and diving into the reported incidents/issues (e.g. Batterygate, Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica), I have found that comments like yours present an overly reductive worldview. You are likely entirely informed by ragebait news articles that grossly misrepresent the issues as opposed to a nuanced understanding of (1) the widely reported incidents, and (2) the services these companies provide and those that rely on them to make a living.

No, it would not be replaced "in an instant" with other options, and any other options would quickly evolve into the same state as FB/IG today unless you make targeted ads illegal (which - again - would collapse millions of small businesses and centralize power for wealthy large businesses).
by berkes | 2025-04-23 11:52:37+00:00
The main thing that keeps me from using Jupyter notebooks for anything that's not entirely Python, is Python.

For me, pipenv/pyenv/conda/poetry/uv/dependencies.txt and the invitable "I need to upgrade Python to run this notebook, ugh, well, ok -- two weeks later - g####m that upgrade broke that unrelated and old ansible and now I cannot fix these fifteen barely held up servers" is pure hell.

I try to stay away from Python for foundational stuff, as any Python project that I work on¹ will break at least yearly on some dependency or other runtime woe. That goes for Ansible, Build Pipelines, deploy.py or any such thing. I would certainly not use Jupyter notebooks for such crucial and foundational automation, as the giant tree of dependencies and requirements it comes with, makes this far worse.

¹ Granted, my job makes me work on an excessive amount of codebases, At least six different Python projects last two months, some requiring python 2.7, some requiring deprecated versions of lib-something.h some cutting edge, some very strict in practice but not documented (It works on the machine of the one dev that works on it as long as he never updates anything?). And Puppet or Chef - being Ruby, are just as bad, suffering from the exact same issues, only that Ruby has had one (and only one!) package management system for decades now.
by monade | 2025-04-23 11:53:50+00:00
There are actually quite some projects named in the article that are moving in on Adobe turf:

- Typst (a new typesetting tool, previously covered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941) - PagedJS, a browser polyfill for CSS paged media - and something called "Pushing forward for CSS Print" which is also about creating professional print media with HTML + CSS

And to top it off, there is a project for digital signatures (Signature PDF) to compete with Adobe Sign...

So I would say the score isn't too bad on that dimension.
by matthewsinclair | 2025-04-23 11:54:53+00:00
I think you might be misunderstanding what I’m saying, or I’m not being clear enough (apologies). The simple fact is that yes, I’m watching it, but it’s way faster at typing than me. So it’s often easier for me to tell it to just throw away a whole chunk of code and rewrite it than it would be for me to rewrite it on my own.
by macleginn | 2025-04-23 11:54:57+00:00
Ireland is awkward: there are state policies and all, but the language as taught in schools and universities is quite different from the varieties spoken inside Gaelic-speaking communities (gaeltachta) by a very small number of people. Scottish Gaelic is much better preserved in the communities, and Welsh is basically doing fine (hundreds of thousands of speakers), so it can be argued that the situation on the ground in the three communities is very different to touch upon in a smallish article.
by JNRowe | 2025-04-23 11:55:30+00:00
Some of the background was explained before¹, along with a heap of comments when it was posted here².

Probably still not enough information for an outside observer(like me), but they probably assume more familiarity with the project for posts on their discourse.

¹ https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-ox...

² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43353240
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-04-23 11:55:33+00:00
I'm curious, what is your preferred financial regime? EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices. Do you find that wrong in general?

Perhaps you prefer an industro-fascist regime where businesses are not bound by any tailored laws? Pretty sure there would already be alternative iOS app stores under such a regime - government controls (IPR system, computer security laws) seem necessary to enable these sorts of tech monopolies.
by ajdude | 2025-04-23 11:56:50+00:00
The title is clickbait. Most of openai's comments were about their desire to have access to google's index. They also discussed how open AI is thinking about creating a chrome Fork to compete with Google Chrome. The specific part where they mentioned wanting to buy chrome was a hypothetical muse:

> According to Turley, OpenAI would throw its proverbial hat in the ring if Google had to sell. When asked if OpenAI would want Chrome, he was unequivocal. "Yes, we would, as would many other parties," Turley said.
by Yaelita | 2025-04-23 11:57:00+00:00
Prompt Security, a leader in generative AI (GenAI) security, today announced the beta launch of Vulnerable Code Scanner, an advanced security feature that catches potential risks in AI-generated source code before they can pose a threat to enterprises. By automatically scanning AI-generated code, Vulnerable Code Scanner helps ensure that developers don’t use hazardous code suggestions coming from GenAI applications.
by bobmcnamara | 2025-04-23 11:57:10+00:00
HP was the only CPU vendor I recall that went for massive L1 with their PA-RISC chips, some with 1-2MB of L1. I'm going to say a large L1 is ~1MB for this comment.

There are power, speed, and complexity trade-offs in cache design. Here were a few of them:

Direct-mapping is the simplest approach, and means a given address can only exist in one location, but a problem occurs when two addresses map to the same cache line - one is evicted even if there's plenty of space in the cache elsewhere.

What if we built an associative cache, where every line had an address indicator? Then we can fully use the cache space. But it's far more complicated to search: a miss requires checking every cacheline. If it's fast, so does a hit.

Many systems today use a mix. Smaller caches are often direct mapped. Larger caches tend to use a combination of 2-8 direct-mapped caches where an address can be searched in at the same time, or within a few cycles of each other.

Another problem is evictions becoming a future cache miss. With only a large L1, a cacheline was either in fast L1 or in DRAM. There's often a write buffer or victim cache between them to try to hide dirty eviction latency, but a subsequent fetch will pay the DRAM access cost. As we scale the cache size up, L1 access speed becomes challenging and eventually it's more effective to limit the L1, and build a even larger, slower L2, and then we get the advantage that L2 is still faster than DRAM and we can prefetch into it.

This cache hierarchy tends to fit typical access patterns better as well - for many workloads most accesses will tend to be clumped together. For streaming workloads like video processing that won't fit in a L1 cache anyway, the algorithms are usually aware of row/column/striding impacts on cache utilization already.

There's probably more to consider, like SMP.
by klabb3 | 2025-04-23 11:57:10+00:00
New to me as well. It’s not surprising me at all though. It’s ironic that peak capitalists seemingly spend all their efforts trying to circumventing the only things that make free markets actually efficient: eliminating competition and consumer choice, confusing and exhausting participants (this psychological warfare), reducing the ability to compare prices (anti-scraping, dynamic pricing, soft-paywalls).

I’m convinced that if you pitch building better products than the competition as a sustainable business plan to VCs today, they would laugh you out of the room.