MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by m101 | 2025-05-14 07:21:08+00:00
This is also a common experience in retail banking (not only wise) in the UK.

I put the blame on excessive regulation. Businesses are scared of crossing the regulator for fear of revocation of licence or high fines. Also the regulations themselves impose lengthy delay requirements on doing business.

What I've also found is the large incumbents largely skirt the regulations (HSBC for instance let's payments through whilst revolut spent weeks investigating them). Revolut spends the money, which they don't have, whilst HSBC knows they can pay any fine required. Regulation working precisely as designed.
by lylo | 2025-05-14 07:21:17+00:00
This article perfectly highlights the perils of unbounded take home tests.

A timeboxed test for a small group (say, no more than 10) of final candidates can be an excellent differentiator.

The problem here is Kagi have omitted the timebox, so less confident and/or experienced candidates go to the ends of the earth to deliver something that was never going to meet the mark.

Had Kagi said “spend no more than 4 hours on this” - and arguably reduced some of the requirements accordingly - then your man here wouldn’t have wasted a week (!) of his time and Kagi’s.

It’s a real shame that so much time was wasted by the candidate, but the requirements are very clear that “This project tests your ability … to deal with ambiguity and open-endedness”. He’d already dug a hole for himself before he’d started, unfortunately.
by teleforce | 2025-05-14 07:22:35+00:00
Yep, really strange indeed.

I posted the link for the ServeTheHome article last year back in 2024 although it's really year 2023 article [1].

Layer 3 switch for examples from Cisco or Juniper used to cost more than USD100K only ten years ago but now they can be dirt cheap with advent of the networking switch SoC like SparX-5.

High end SparX-5-200 (VSC7558) supports up to 200 Gbps of switch core bandwidth, with flexible interface options including 1/2.5/5/10/25 GbE, and the unit cost is only USD165 [2].

Imagine having this kind of really affordable powerful enterprise layer 3 switch with Linux Foundation SONiC or DENT OS [4], [5].

Someone just need to crowd source this SparX-5 SoC based layer 3 switch and will be selling like hot cakes.

[1] Managed Chinese E-Sports Cafe and Hotel Switch: 48-Port 2.5GbE 2x 25GbE 2x 10GbE:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40883384

[2] SparX-5:

https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/SparX-5_sel...

[3] Sparx5:

https://microchip-ung.github.io/bsp-doc/bsp/2024.03/supporte...

[4] SONiC: Software for open networking in the cloud.

https://sonicfoundation.dev/

[5] DENT: SwitchDev based NOS:

https://dent.dev/
by cameldrv | 2025-05-14 07:22:46+00:00
There are plenty of hotels where you can get multiple rooms and a washing machine. When traveling with kids, one big advantage of hotels is predictability.

The last thing I want to do when I'm pulling in after a long flight an hour past the kids' bedtime is to deal with potentially dealbreaking problems with the place. In a hotel, they generally have maintenance on staff and extra rooms to switch into in case of problems. Generally with Airbnb, the staff is 30 minutes away and is annoyed that you've called them. Most of the time, everything is fine, but there can be snafus with locks, plumbing, cleanliness, etc, and kids make these more complicated. This is all not to mention being asked to strip beds, take out trash, etc, after you've paid thousands of dollars, including cleaning fees for the place.
by user32489318 | 2025-05-14 07:22:59+00:00
I doubt. It seems that payment providers have god-like rights from the government and don’t feel stressed by a few lawsuits here and there. I had a business account at a larger/largest Dutch bank, and have got the middle finger treatment all the way. From impossible to resolve typo in my company name (made by the bank), entirely wrong UBOs name on the payment card to the eventual account freeze for 4years while KYC was looking into this. Fun times
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-14 07:23:01+00:00
>So I would probably lean more toward RPG maker if I wanted to make an RPG

That may be a part of why they chose to take a 3d approach instead. RPG Maker has 20 years of iteration, so it's pretty hard to compete in that space. It's already a bit difficult as is to stand out in a 2D space to begin with.

Meanwhile, 3D is still a hard problem and Voxels give that flexibility to make assets by hand that fit into an overall game.
by lenkite | 2025-05-14 07:23:10+00:00
Yes, I am referring to that Vatican city. Immigration is extraordinarily harsh and strict - your cherished principles of Christianity do not apply. Hence the hypocrisy.

If you believe the city too small, then please consider Italy - which require asylum applications to be submitted while in a third country, the "Cutro Decree", limits on number of non-EU citizens who can enter, non-EU citizens need work permits, nothing given for "family reunification" - laws that are strictly applied or you are kicked out with little fanfare and 1000% less drama than in the USA.

Yes, the hypocrisy is mindbogglingly astonishing. I can say even more firmly: What the actual hell ?
by nemothekid | 2025-05-14 07:23:41+00:00
>significantly faster for this kind of code

"Significantly" and "this kind" are load bearing sentences here. In applications where predictable latency is desired, cloning is better than GC.

This is also the baby steps of learning the language. As a programmer gets better they will recognize when they are making superflous clones. Refactoring performance-critical stuff in FFI, however, is painful and wont get easier with time.

Furthermore, in real applications, this only really applies to Strings and vectors. In most of my applications most `clones` are of reference types - which is only marginally more expensive than memory sharing under a GC.
by _QrE | 2025-05-14 07:24:23+00:00
Not sure if I'm allowed to link to stuff, but you can find a bunch of alternatives to offerings like these (the most basic being google alerts), both free and paid, if you look for them - especially on sites that exist to list alternatives.

Some let you link accounts, some give you lists of platforms they scan. I've specifically mentioned Discord because there's no easy way to discover communities without being invited, so if you can actually discover relevant Discord communities and monitor discussions (beyond the few sites that aggregate some popular communities), then you have a USP, since most products don't do that, at least in any capacity that people think is worth paying for.
by Benjamin_Dobell | 2025-05-14 07:25:04+00:00
I haven't been locked out (yet?). However, my account situation with Wise is similar i.e. I'm Australian and have been a customer since they were known as TransferWise. My documentation for UBOs is currently under review right now.

Hopefully I don't get locked out as well!

EDIT: Oh, I actually know who you are, Paris. I don't really have any industry connections these days, but I remember you from various conferences back when I was doing iOS development, maybe 2011-2015. "Hey, Wise! I can vouch for this guy!" Haha, doubt that's gonna hold up.
by k4rli | 2025-05-14 07:25:24+00:00
Keeping funds in Paypal seems nuts. I've also had experience with them just closing the account ~12yrs ago but fortunately only had 10EUR on it.

These days I'd only use Paypal if they didn't offer any better options and then only as a proxy to debit/credit card (which has purchase protection so no need to deal with Paypal itself ever).
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-14 07:25:39+00:00
> Once I had an issue with bus routes for my father's employees (similar problem, high density route with fewer routes). I put a request on their dashboard from abroad and within days, their reply came back with them confirming a trio of new buses to cater to that route.

Well, that's what happens if you can just throw money at problems. In Germany, it would most likely get rejected because there are no spare buses/drivers or budget for the fuel, and even if there was money it would likely be delayed for at least one year because the new route would have to pass through the usual tender/bid system first.
by heavensteeth | 2025-05-14 07:26:00+00:00
I've referenced this a few times working with Win32, it really saved my ass. I don't remember being able to find many other simple matter-of-fact C Win32 documentation.

Win32 is weird and ugly and annoying at times, but I kind of love it. I just wish I actually used Windows so that I could play with it more; unfortunately Linux has no way to create simple lightweight applications like Windows does.
by simianwords | 2025-05-14 07:26:27+00:00
On one hand I agree with you. But upon reading a bit about "Literature as Exploration" you mentioned, I can't help but agree with her point also.

Its cool to expose kids to new and interesting world views that they might not come across. But we really really need to validate whether making a kid read books like Moby Dick is worth it? Do kids really need to read intense books or just have fun? What good is introducing a book that is not relatable in the slightest?
by dns_snek | 2025-05-14 07:26:41+00:00
Wear OS needs core development and an army of QA testers, not another redesign. The design is fine, but overall the functionality of the product feels like a beta test (and I think that's being generous), even on their own hardware.

I answer a call on my phone and the audio is routed to my watch, or vice versa, the official weather app claims it can't get my location even though it has access to the GPS (and it's actively being used by Fitbit to track exercise) and wifi positioning. Google Maps on the watch doesn't load results half the time, the other half the time it'll get stuck on "starting navigation" - sometimes unstuck by launching Maps on the phone (despite having offline maps downloaded to the watch) and other times it's just stuck forever. Fitbit will display some static/mock/fake exercise values until the display is woken up when OS-level always on display is disabled but AOD is enabled in Fitbit during exercise. I could go on.
by vidarh | 2025-05-14 07:26:43+00:00
Even with regular, fixed routes, I've for some time argued the transit operator really need booking apps, on the basis that you really need the data on the full journey, and it'd transform e.g. bus routes if you could offer "there'll be a pickup within X minutes", without necessarily having the buses for it by falling back on renting cars. If you make people give their end destination, you can also do much like what the article suggests, but semi-automatic based on where those on the bus (and waiting at stops) are actually going right now.

Today, ridership gives hard data on where people will go and when given the current availability. Offer a guaranteed pickup, and you get much closer to having data on where people actually would want to go, and even more reliably than people voting on a "wouldn't it be nice if" basis.
by pbmonster | 2025-05-14 07:28:27+00:00
Are those fintech companies under any financial regulatory authority?

If my bank pulls any kind of stuff like that, dropping the magic "I will have to report this to the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority" gets any and all gears unstuck right quick. Because this is absolutely unacceptable, and my local financial regulator agrees (and levies substantial fines accordingly).

Might be an EU thing, though.
by grumpy-de-sre | 2025-05-14 07:29:24+00:00
So the public transport authority stops running their own vehicles, and instead places tenders for individual routes? And anyone can bid on operating the route? I mean they already do that with subcontractors for contingencies etc.

Overwhelmingly however it's cheaper to vertically integrate, and private operators have no interest in taking low profitability routes (which can often be very important due to second order effects).

I will contend that automated busses might change things here a bit though.
by BlackFly | 2025-05-14 07:30:48+00:00
The truth is that by the time you are a senior developer, you will have encountered the lessons that make rust worth learning but may not have truly understood all the implications.

Many people will think, I have a garbage collected language, rust has nothing to teach me. Even in garbage collected languages, people create immutable types because the possibility of shared references with mutability makes things incredibly chaotic that they look for immutability as a sort panacea. However, once you have immutable types you quickly realize that you also need ergonomic ways of modifying those objects, the methods you create to do so are often more cumbersome than what would be permitted for a mutable object. You wish there was some way to express, "There is a time where this object is mutable and then it becomes immutable." Enter the borrow checker.

Once you are borrow checking... why are you garbage collecting? Well, expressing those timelines of mutability and existence is a cost because you need to understand the timeline and most people would rather not spend that energy--maybe mutability or the poor ergonomics of immutable objects wasn't so bad. So, I garbage collect because I do not want to understand the lifetimes of my objects. Not understanding the lifetimes of objects is what makes shared mutability hard. Immutability eliminates that problem without requiring me to understand. Rust can teach this lesson to you so that you make an informed choice.

Of course, you can also just listen to me and learn the same lesson but there is value for many people to experience it.
by boomskats | 2025-05-14 07:30:57+00:00
Ahh, I have fond memories of this. Their random KYC 're-verification' process (the lack of humans/computer says no) was _dystopian_ levels of frustrating. In the end I made a gif[0] and called them out publicly in the hope that they'd do something about it.

The service they offer is amazing when it works, but it'll be a long time before I use them for anything my business depends on.

[0]: https://x.com/boomskats/status/1407019117555683332
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-14 07:31:15+00:00
> You have to basically be a big player that can put up the money and because by any number of the various methods of corruption, you already know that you will have government contracts waiting for you on the far side.

You seem to working from the faulty premise that FedRAMP only isna concern for durect federal contracting. Because FedRAMP applies to systems with federal data, and because entities other than the federal government often have a mix of federal and non-federal data, it is quite common for a vendor who does not have FedRAMP certification (either at all or for some services) to know by non-corrupt means that some of their customers have workloads that are in-house or with a different vendor due to FedRAMP that they would bring to the first vendor if that vendor was FedRAMP compliant for the services involved.
by yieldcrv | 2025-05-14 07:31:25+00:00
the permissionless aspect of using crypto allows consumers and businesses to transact without worrying about a payment processor shutting them down. some crypto is permissioned though

many people say crypto is a solution looking for a problem, as they are comfortable with an alternative to every crypto use case someone might have. such as instant and fast cross border payments. and then the problem surfaces.
by rob74 | 2025-05-14 07:31:38+00:00
Maybe the FCOM was actually the design specification, i.e. how they wanted it to work, which however had significant differences from the final product?

The article later points out that the many Direct Mode reversions probably have something to do with the Electronic Interface Units (EIUs) which are responsible for making sure the various off-the-shelf Western components (which were apparently not customized due to cost reasons) could talk to each other. So the only Russian-made (and thus technologically not so advanced) component in your design is also a single point of failure. What could go wrong?
by mantas | 2025-05-14 07:31:44+00:00
> Your thinking is scattered, disorganized, surface level and not well thought-through. You are missing crucial information and you are looking for a simple argument to a complex problem you erroneously believe to be simple and common sense.

Complex problem? Most of the world, even very backwards places, figured out voter IDs ages ago. It is pretty simple.

My thinking is biased, due to my experiences and context. Just like yours. But if you guys are stuck in your kindergarten battles, maybe it's worth to consider hearing outsiders' perspective?

> And yet you don't understand why democrats oppose voter ID laws and neither do you understand why republicans support it.

TBH I bumped into more republicans against voter ID than for it.

I know why democrats are against. But their arguments didn't convince me. All of the problems listed are easy to solve. And if there's a will to not solve them... You have bigger problems and will to do election fraud elsewhere.

> Because you first have to understand what the argument is about.

I know both sides whys both pro- and against- voter ids.
by simianwords | 2025-05-14 07:31:51+00:00
I have a radical insight on this topic: contemporary books and media are good and worth analysing and teaching to students. We are really biased towards old books for some reason and old books have this quality of being completely un relatable.

I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale.

I don't want to read a Dickens book or Gatsby, I want to read a book that is relatable, that I can understand, that I can have fun reading. Of course, it should not be too easy in which case there is nothing to gain from it academically. For example, a relatable contemporary book might cover contemporary problems like social media, teen angst, technology - this would sit better with high school students.

We need to think: why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter? What makes them an inherently worse choice than Charles Dickens? Game of Thrones certainly has intricate characters and a nice story line.
by noduerme | 2025-05-14 07:32:20+00:00
Wherever the vest disconnected from having a viable or profitable or useful product to invest in is where this whole shitshow of nontechnical people ruling over engineering serfs started. Roughly it went from search to ad networks to social graphs to crypto to NFTs to AI to vibe coding (with a physical side in jacking blue collar jobs in delivery, taxis and hotels), all driven by each 4-year crop of unimaginative business school frat boys piling on the last, as if they had been hazed into the delusion that they were smarter than the engineers they would hire and dispose of to get around the pesky laws. Now we're in the third generation of investors infused with the idea that one can grift indefinitely that way, the way that say, anyone who bought a house in California between 1946 and 2007 was guaranteed to make a fortune sitting on it. What we have run out of is people with non-derivative ideas and the actual skills to implement the same. To the extent that AI is just massive IP theft that might let the boys club continue to build the garbage they're currently choosing to build, by recirculating what has been done before, it's clearly a dead end. But they won't go down without a fight. What's so strange to me is, as a nerd boy born in 1980 in California, I definitely did not expect in the late 90s that the yuppies of 2025 would be even less original and more rapacious than their parents. That's what's been most disappointing about the first quarter of this century.
by missedthecue | 2025-05-14 07:32:23+00:00
I'm building a business and if it were, say, 2018 I would have already made several dev hires already this year. But using LLMs I simply do not have the demand for labor that I would have had.

This is a $900k ARR business already. Android and iOS apps published, as well as a webapp. We do not have a dev team.
by arnsholt | 2025-05-14 07:32:54+00:00
The way I think about it is more or less in terms of how a C program would work: if you assume a heap allocated data structure, the owner is the piece of code that is responsible for freeing the allocation at the appropriate time. And a reference is just a pointer with some extra compile time metadata that lets the borrow checker prove that the reference doesn’t outlive the referent and that there’s no mutable aliasing.
by alterom | 2025-05-14 07:33:20+00:00
>It's easier to get justice from a local bank in your country, or to at least talk to a real person face to face than from PayPal Luxemburg or wherever they're located.

Is it, really?

It would not matter to the local court where PayPal's HQ is.

PayPal needs to be licensed in your country to handle money transfers. They can lose the right to operate in your state if they aren't compliant with the laws.

In the US, the licenses are required even on the state level: e.g., here are the requirements for California Money Transmitter License:

https://www.jwsuretybonds.com/states/california/money-transm...

Fraud and theft are one fun way to lose such a license.
by reedf1 | 2025-05-14 07:33:27+00:00
Globally last year there were an estimated 1.4 Billion tourist arrivals. Besides the rare baggage issue (which has always been resolved for me within 24 hours), the systems are astoundingly robust. This is likely because these system have been battle tested for decades - and there is a manual resolution for all problem paths and individual staff have significant autonomy.

Passport, credit card, cash - that's all you truly need. No need to stress.
by octo888 | 2025-05-14 07:34:44+00:00
> They wanted photo ID, a deposit, and sign a second contract in a _separate website_

Yup my average airbnb experience in eg Spain is: dealing with an agent, asked to submit all my personal data to some random third party, all other communication done via WhatsApp, and often my number is given to third parties without my consent who spam me with things like offers of experiences/day trips etc