MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: We built a Payment Stack Index for companies scaling past Stripe
by beecee | 2025-06-16 23:18:18+00:00
Hey HN!

Over the past years we’ve met so many teams hitting limitations with Stripe as they built out their payment & billing stack..

We realized there was no good map of what else is out there. So we made one.

The Payment Stack Index is a curated list of tools that help you with payments, quoting, invoicing, usage-based billing, global sales tax/VAT, and more. All things Stripe doesn’t always handle well (or at all).

It’s especially helpful if you’re at the stage where you need more control over monetization, but don’t want to duct tape random services together blindly.

https://headofpayments.dev

Curious to hear your feedback and/or suggestions for tools we missed!
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-06-16 23:18:31+00:00
There's no such thing as a "homogeneous population". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robb...

> From the study, they determined that because the groups were created to be approximately equal, individual differences are not necessary or responsible for intergroup conflict to occur.

> Lutfy Diab repeated the experiment with 18 boys from Beirut. The 'Blue Ghost' and 'Red Genies' groups each contained 5 Christians and 4 Muslims. Fighting soon broke out, not between the Christians and Muslims but between the Red and Blue groups.
by heymijo | 2025-06-16 23:18:34+00:00
Ah, this sheds light on the silence around the Windsurf acquisition:

OpenAI and Microsoft are at a standoff over the terms of the startup’s $3 billion acquisition of the coding startup Windsurf, the people said. Microsoft currently has access to all of OpenAI’s IP, according to their agreement. It offers its own AI coding product, GitHub Copilot, that competes with OpenAI. OpenAI doesn’t want Microsoft to have access to Windsurf’s intellectual property.
by l72 | 2025-06-16 23:18:34+00:00
I think it depends on if you lean more towards fantasy or sci-fi.

Star Wars is space fantasy. Star Trek is science fiction.

I’m not saying one is better than the other, but they appeal to different personalities.

I personally struggle to get in to fantasy, whether that is Star Wars, DnD, or fantasy video games. I’d much prefer to have a court room debate about ethics in the future.

The Star Wars vs Star Trek debate has always confused me as you are comparing two totally different genres.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-06-16 23:20:09+00:00
YouTube's educational value can be unmatched, but it doesn't follow that 99% of time spent on YouTube is educational or even useful.

I'd bet the ratio of time I have spent legit learning something useful vs just using it as distraction/entertainment ("educational" channels are often just entertainment for nerds like us)/background, it has to be something like 1000 to 1. I wouldn't need to replace the 999 at all. I guess I would read books a bit more, probably get a lot more done on personal projects, go out a bit more etc.

Not clear at all my life would be worse off except in that pinch where I need to know how to disassemble & fix the thing, right now.
by tptacek | 2025-06-16 23:20:12+00:00
It took something like a decade to put Capone away. We still locked up murderers during that period.

The whole thread is silly. I don't think a lot of people here are going to stick up for a 15 year stretch for a 24 year old for selling opiates. Probably don't need to pull the Sacklers into it.
by t_mann | 2025-06-16 23:20:43+00:00
> As a German, I'm dying to hear more about these 15-18 year olds illegally employed in finance! Shouldn't they be finishing high school (18) or Abitur (19)? I'm not kidding, please tell me more about these 15 year olds employed in finance, in particular!

It seems that you are oddly unfamiliar with the German apprenticeship system, for a German. Nothing illegal here: https://www.sparkasse.de/karriere/schueler-und-schulabgaenge...
by 7thaccount | 2025-06-16 23:21:01+00:00
This is a little blunt, but I knew a lot of people who went into psychology and got degrees. They were not very gifted academically (C students in highschool) and went into psych as it was an easy major that let them coast and party for four years. I'm sure this isn't the case for all psychology majors of course, but it was very different on average than what I was used to in engineering or the hard sciences where you generally had 4 years of excruciating math classes including calculus and differential equations that weeded out most.

Psychology is very dependent on statistics and experiments. That can be complicated and after going through those classes I simply don't trust the majority of students (or their professors) to get any of that right. It's why I roll my eyes every time the radio guy talks about the results of another pop psych study. I knew some psych majors big into new age crystal stuff and legitimately believed it all as well as a bunch of additional pseudoscience garbage. That kind of thing is a lot more rare in say physics where it's really hard to get through the program without a rational brain.

Again, there are probably some brilliant folks drawn to that field who knows how to do solid research, but my experiences suggest that the signal to noise ratio may be suspect.
by GianFabien | 2025-06-16 23:21:24+00:00
> make it easy for anyone to contribute

Perhaps you are underestimating the level of expertise required to write an operating system for modern hardware.

The core challenge with Linux is that it is a massive code base. It supports multiple CPU families and within each of them dozens of architectural variations and then there are the thousands of device drivers.

It might be more realistic to go back to fundamentals, build a secure kernel, e.g. based on seL4 and then build only for modern hardware. Let Linux handle the accreted bulk of being over 30 years old.
by ekr____ | 2025-06-16 23:21:34+00:00
Basically none.

First the success rate of any new IP-based protocol through most devices is incredibly low, especially now that NAT is so common.

Second, part of why QUIC runs over UDP is because the operating system generally won't let applications send raw IP datagrams.

Even running over UDP, QUIC has nontrivial failure rates and the browsers have to fall back to TLS over TCP.
by shinycode | 2025-06-16 23:21:43+00:00
I can’t stop thinking that this way of thinking is either plain wrong and misses completely what software development is really about. Or very true and in X years people will just ask the trending AI « I need a billing/CRM/X system with those constraints ». Then the AI will ask questions and refine the need. Work for 30mn the time to use libs and code the whole thing, pass into systems to test and deploy and voila. Custom feature on demand. No CEO, no sales, nobody. You just deploy your own SaaS feature. Then good luck to scale properly and migrate data and add features and complexity. If agents hold onto their promise, then the future is custom based, you deploy what you need, SaaS platform is dead with everyone in between useless.
by briHass | 2025-06-16 23:22:25+00:00
Toluene or xylene are very similar non-polar solvents, but don't have the same level of carcinogenicity as benzene. You still don't want to be inhaling them regularly or in large quantities.

The sad chemical being phased out is tetrachloroethylene (a.k.a. brake cleaner), which is nicer than its replacement (acetone), because it's non-flammable. It's also a better solvent for oil/grease than acetone.
by ges | 2025-06-16 23:23:44+00:00
I like the fact it allows you to write clean declarative code. Imperative becomes quickly messy imo.

I’d need to find a good api to make it open source. It’s a mini ecs system handling the object states atm.

I think the main advantage over vanilla threejs would be built-in user-friendly controls and opinionated common object types (think remote glb models, plane images, etc)
by perching_aix | 2025-06-16 23:23:53+00:00
> Nice, now with extra patronizing, just the flavor we inferior cultures apparently crave.

Oh no! Sounds like somebody just figured out that insults work both ways!

> Let me guess, you can count them on one hand, right?

If I needed two, would that help? Three? Four? [0] Would it? Really?

> Let’s be clear: I've been working in Spain for nearly 25 years. Cursing is common here.

Let's be extra clear then! That's not what's being discussed!!!

Are you deliberately missing the point somehow? Do you see parentheses and skip right on?

> waiting to be corrected by the wisdom of outside standards

And this is especially not what's being discussed. What's being discussed is if it's waiting to be corrected by the wisdom of inside standards. If people there think they're being unprofessional when using foul language in codebases or formal corporate communications, and if that even happens. An event of mere (albeit severe) disbelief. Although if I were to believe you, an event of "cultural colonialism". Because apparently having an assumption or a negative impression is somehow inherently oppressive (???), and like how do I even dare to think that way? Sensitivities, huh?

Except you keep not talking about that for whatever reason. You keep going off about how people curse all the time. Of course they do. That was never the question! Do you include foul language when sending out advisories or quotes or other formal documents, to clients or internally? Do you include foul language and rants in the work you deliver, be it in commit messages, tickets, ticket comments, release notes, checklists, or code comments? That's what I want you to tell me, with every single one of those amazing, one of a kind, definitely maximally representative of everyone and everywhere else in the country 25 years of experience.

Because supposedly, according to you, all of these will be chock full of cursing!

> the kind where people don't filter themselves for fear of offending delicate American sensibilities

The delicate American sensibilities of a Central-Eastern European. Of not including foul language in code comments and such. Are you actually taking a piss? This is a fever dream, it has to be. You're acting as if I could drive for a few days and enter a foreign planet. You guys are not nearly that special and different, I'm sorry. Maybe except for turrón, no idea how to enjoy that with or without having my dentist on speed dial, I'll admit to that much.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oh-you-love-x-name-every-y
by pixelpoet | 2025-06-16 23:25:25+00:00
I'm familiar with the apprenticeship system of course, but AFAIK 15-18 year olds must still attend normal school 5 days a week- that doesn't equate to normal employment, right? At the very least it seems to not have anything to do with the degree vs no-degree argument.

Actually I just looked it up and found that you can legally start working from age 13 in some circumstances! :O
by stego-tech | 2025-06-16 23:26:00+00:00
That’s fair! Nutanix impressed me as well when I was doing a hypervisor deep dive in 2022/2023, but I had concerns about their (lack of) profitability in the long run. VMware Tanzu wasn’t bad either, but was more of an arm-pull than AWS was for K8s. Talos is on my “to review” list, especially with their community license that let’s you manage small deployments like a proper Enterprise might (great evangelism idea, there), but moving everything to kube-virt was a nonstarter in the org at the time.

K8s’ ecosystem is improving by the day, but I’m still leaning towards a managed K8s cluster from a cloud provider for most production workloads, as it really is just a few lines of YAML to bootstrap new clusters with automated backups and secrets management nowadays - if you don’t mind the eye-watering bill that comes every month for said convenience.
by andy99 | 2025-06-16 23:26:56+00:00
Even though I think most people know this deep down, I still don't think we actively realize how optimized LLMs are towards sounding good. It's the ultra processed food version of information consumption. People are super lazy (economical if you like) and rlhf et al have optimized LLM output to being easy to digest.

Consequence is you get a bunch of output that looks really good as long as you don't think about it (and they actively promotes not thinking about it) that you don't really understand, and that if you did dig into you'd realize is empty fluff or actively wrong.

It's worse than not learning, it's actively generating unthinking but palatable garbage that's the opposite of learning.
by terravion | 2025-06-16 23:26:57+00:00
Congrats to Saildrone! I am surprised that the article did not discuss the dramatic force structure re-evaluation that needs to be going in light of the Ukrainian non-navy dominating the Black Sea, instead of the framing of Russian incursions in the Baltic Saildrone type assets seem well poised to be a part of that small, distributed, networked type of sea control.
by jameshart | 2025-06-16 23:27:06+00:00
This isn't how math works.

When you get to the point in a proof of the irrationality of root two where you've demonstrated that if it is expressible as a fraction p/q, then both p and q have to be even, you don't then need to proceed to prove that if they're both even, then they both have to be divisible by four, and then if they're both divisible by four, that means they're both divisible by eight...

I mean, you can, but you don't have to.

You can just say 'if it's a rational number then it has a reduced form where p and q have gcf of 1, so if p and q would both have to be even, that is a contradiction'.

Same with the 'set of uninteresting numbers'. If 'being uninteresting' is a property numbers can have, then the 'set of uninteresting numbers' exists, and it has a least member. Being the least member of the set of uninteresting numbers is interesting.

You don't have to infinitely regress from here and get tied up in knots saying that surely there is some 'first truly uninteresting number' to prove that the set is actually empty - you can just see that you must have gone wrong somewhere. Either:

1) Being the least member of the set of uninteresting numbers isn't as interesting as we assume.

or

2) 'Being uninteresting' is not a property numbers can have

I think actually of the two, 1) is more likely the case.

But that doesn't defy mathematical logic. It is a consequence of mathematical logic.
by npunt | 2025-06-16 23:28:22+00:00
Not quite apples to apples tho because you have to take into consideration what was known at the time each theory was developed (the input), not just the output.

Theory A: fits 7 known predictions but also makes a not-yet-verified prediction

Theory B: fits 8 known predictions and offers no new ones

In this example wouldn't Theory A be better, because all else equal it is less likely the product of overfitting and required more insight and effort to discover? In other words, Theory A used a different process that we know has a higher likelihood of novel discovery.

(Maybe this is a restatement of the simplicity argument, in that Theory A requires fewer predictions to discover it, ergo it is simpler)
by camtarn | 2025-06-16 23:30:08+00:00
Quite a remarkable history for a company I had never heard of! The aerated bread process, invented by its founder John Dauglish, involved forcing pressurised carbon dioxide into dough, and was the primary way of making industrially produces bread for nearly a century until the Chorleywood process replaced it in the 60s. Later, the firm had a chain of tearooms that were so omnipresent that George Orwell, Bram Stoker and Agatha Christie referenced them in their writing.
by shinycode | 2025-06-16 23:30:54+00:00
To follow up my previous comment, I worked on a project where someone fixed an old bug. This bug became a feature for clients who build their systems around this api endpoint. The consequence is hundreds of thousands of user duplicates with automations attaching new ressources and actions randomly on the duplicates. Massive consequences for the customers. If it were an AI doing the fixing with no human intervention, good luck understanding, cleaning the mess and holding accountable. People seem lightly think that if the agent is doing something bad it’s just a risk to take. But when a codebase with massive amounts of loc and logic is build and no human knows it, how to deal with the consequences on people’s business ? Can’t help but think it’s crappy software with a « Google closed your Gmail account, no one knows why and we can’t do anything about it, sorry ». But instead of a mail account it’s part of your business
by esseph | 2025-06-16 23:31:57+00:00
If you work for any of the CISA-Identified 16 critical infrastructure sectors, one of their recommendations is for organizations to be able to expect to operate for more than 24h without an Internet connection.

Kinda hard to control real-world things with no Internet connection that rely on an internet connection

Note: Nutanix made some interesting k8s-related acquisitions in the last few years. If interested, you should take a look at some of the things they are working on.
by seabird | 2025-06-16 23:32:25+00:00
Yeah man, I know that it's traditionally called gender, and I know that German has a gender and case system. I don't understand what the link you've posted has to do with my point, I'm really not sure what there is to misunderstand about what I'm saying.

To come all the way back to what my original comment was about -- a German speaker is not ascribing any sort of sociological femininity to words like Freiheit or Bundesanstalt, nor any sort of sociological masculinity to Anschluss or Wein, nor any lack thereof to Sicherheitsrelais or Volk. The objects in the language have a grammatical gender, not a sociological one. It would be interesting seeing research on what sociological gender speakers of a language with a gender system choose for an object they're personifying (especially inanimate ones), but I don't think a German necessarily thinks "I'm personifying this key, and it's a man because the noun is masculine". Does anybody here have any anecdotes?
by rorosen | 2025-06-16 23:32:27+00:00
From what I can see zstd-seekable is more closely aligned to the C functions in the zstd repo.

The decompress function in zstd-seekable starts decompression at the beginning of the frame to which the offset belongs and discards data until the offset is reached. It also just stops decompression at the specified offset. Zeekstd uses complete frames as the smallest possible decompression unit, as only the checksum data of a complete frame can be verified.
by normalaccess | 2025-06-16 23:33:26+00:00
Let's not forget people in very powerful places want to use AI to create a new "correct" religion. So this sort of thing does not surprise me in the least. I'll give it 2-3 years before we start seeing the public side of this work being done on the back end.

https://youtu.be/IwTq7LbUO6U
by voidhorse | 2025-06-16 23:33:38+00:00
Yeah. The software industry very quickly forgot what made it hyper successful in the first place: developing solutions that people actually wanted and that made their lives more convenient. You didn't have to advertise too much since these products naturally go viral because, surprise surprise, when you make something good people let other people know how good it is.

Now the industry has been reduced to desperately trying to brute force crap that nobody wants.
by czhu12 | 2025-06-16 23:34:51+00:00
Yeah I agree with you, but I think thats why maybe Kubernetes is a good place to work from. It already has a massive API with a pretty large ecosystem, so at the base level, the `kubectl` developer experience is about as good as any could be. K8 also makes it reasonably easy to scale to massive clusters, with good resilience, without too much of a hiccup
by Balooga | 2025-06-16 23:35:09+00:00
Africa runs on WhatsApp.

Went to South Africa on vacation last year. United lost our luggage on the first leg of the trip, which then became South African Airways responsibility to sort out because they handled our final leg.

I communicated directly with the SAA baggage agent over WhatsApp. Then communicated over WhatsApp with the courier delivering our bags . Best customer service ever.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-16 23:35:26+00:00
WhatsApp’s desktop app is also a good deal better. Signal is very mobile-centric which I’m sure makes sense for a lot of people, but I’m sitting in front of a real keyboard for most of my days and so it’s a nice when desktop clients are first-class citizens and not afterthoughts.

It’s frustrating that it’s basically only Telegram and WhatsApp that take desktop platforms seriously.
by w10-1 | 2025-06-16 23:35:39+00:00
Yes, Cozodb has mostly worked as documented for me and been a pleasure to work with (also for program static analysis, also using sorted trees and type-fu internally). The docs have enough for an initial comparison with the blog walk-through, esp. interesting work on optimizing queries. But if you're not working in-memory in rust, data serialization is costly, and the project is quiet at best.
by cubano | 2025-06-16 23:36:01+00:00
I'm not at all sure you can make a blanket statement like this and expect it to be always true. This is classic Disruptive Technology stuff, and I'll spare everyone the tedious explanation of how the typical trajectory will go.

Yes there will tons of garbage, but of course there will be the 1% of the 1% who spend the time and efforts to, perhaps, create something of equal and perhaps better quality than what has come before.
by JeffMcCune | 2025-06-16 23:36:48+00:00
Is Google sheets backend (from the screenshot in the readme) what I think it is? Sheets API as a database?

If so props to you.

My original idea behind https://holos.run was to create a Heorku like experience for k8s so I’m super happy to see this existing in the world. I’d love to explore an integration, potentially spinning up the single or multi node clusters with cluster api.
by czhu12 | 2025-06-16 23:37:28+00:00
Weird, I'll take a look, guessing theres a permission issue with reaching the docker hub. Is it a private repository? I think last time I tried deploying an image with Dockerhub, the token that was provisioned didn't have read access.

At the very least, theres. bug with showing a better error message so I'll do that now!
by lelanthran | 2025-06-16 23:38:11+00:00
> I think it would be great to be a junior dev now and be able to learn quickly with llms.

I'm not so sure; I get great results (learning) with them because I can nitpick what they give me, attempt to explain how I understand it and I pretty much always preface my prompts with "be critical and show me where I am wrong".

I've seen a junior use it to "learn", which was basically "How do I do $FOO in $LANGUAGE".

For that junior to turn into a senior who prompts the way I do, they need a critical view of their questions, not just answers.
by isaacvando | 2025-06-16 23:39:28+00:00
This is super cool! Bravo. Awesome to see it written in Nim too.

When I do `cha example.com` I can't figure out how to use any of the commands (hjkl, etc). The only keys I've found that have any effect are typing numbers which show up in the bottom left. Haven't figured out how to do anything with those. Am I missing something obvious about how to use this or could this be a bug?

I built from source on MacOS Sequoia 15.5 Apple Silicon using Nim 2.24. Pages load correctly, I just can't get the commands to work. Thanks!
by simonw | 2025-06-16 23:40:10+00:00
If I use parameterized SQL queries my systems are 100% protected against SQL injection attacks.

If I make a mistake with those and someone reports it to me I can fix that mistake and now I'm back up to 100%.

If our measures against SQL injection were only 99% effective none of our digital activities involving relational databases would be safe.

I don't think it is unreasonable to want a security fix that, when applied correctly, works 100% of the time.