MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built a tool to help you sell Digital Downloads via Stripe
by ben_makes_stuff | 2025-06-17 07:07:12+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Ben, the founder of DownloadPage

Let me share a quick story...

I used to sell a digital product through Lemon Squeezy.

It was full of bugs, the fees were high, and payouts were slow.

When I switched to Stripe, I started saving money and got paid faster.

The only problem? Selling directly meant stitching together a bunch of tools just to deliver a file.

So I built DownloadPage to make it simple. You connect Stripe, upload your product, and share a link. That's it.

If you're tired of giving up a cut to your payment processor, this is for you! Let me know what you think.

P.S. I'll personally do the work of migrating you from your old payment processor to DownloadPage via Stripe! Free white-glove service is included with all plans.
by socceroos | 2025-06-17 07:07:44+00:00
The article opening sounds like a bar joke.

Also, I think this point is salient:

> He pointed to the risk of selection bias: those who volunteer are likely to be “spiritually hungering for a mystical experience,”...

I would go further and suppose that any Christian elder or leader who volunteered to do this had already demonstrated their unsuitability to speak on the matter of psychedelics and God.
by elpocko | 2025-06-17 07:08:19+00:00
>very close to the metal

>(pico8)

But PICO-8 with its integrated tools and Lua programming is super high level, pretty far removed from "8bit". It's only 8 bit in aesthetics, entirely artificial and forced. Why not write games for the 2600, the C64 or the NES to experience real constraints of an actual 8 bit platform, the actual "metal."
by vidarh | 2025-06-17 07:08:41+00:00
Given I see people insisting these tools don't work for them at all, and some of my results recently include spitting out a 1k line API client with about 5 brief paragraphs of prompts, and designing a website (the lot, including CSS, HTML, copy, database access) and populating the directory on it with entries, I'd think the output quality improves a very great deal.

From what I see of the tools, I think the skills developed largely consists of skills you need to develop as you get more senior anyway, namely writing detail-oriented specs and understanding how to chunk tasks. Those skills aren't going to stop having value.
by kot-behemoth | 2025-06-17 07:08:53+00:00
I’ve recently started an open-source self-hosted data platform (https://github.com/kot-behemoth/kitsunadata) with Dokku being a great initial deployment mode. It’s mature, simple to get started and has tons of docs / tutorials.

I collected a bunch of links while learning it, and launched https://github.com/kot-behemoth/awesome-dokku, as there wasn’t an “awesome” list.

Hope it helps someone!
by mort96 | 2025-06-17 07:09:17+00:00
Sure, they exist, but Signal is against them. Look into what they did against LibreSignal.

Now part of the problem with LibreSignal was the trademark violation of using the name Signal. But Moxie is clearly against any third party using their servers, as we can see in this comment: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

IMO that's an unforgivable stance towards third party clients.

I have read (well, skimmed) through their terms of service and haven't seen anything against using their servers from third party software, yet they'll evidently shut down third party software for interacting with their servers. If you're gonna have policies like that, at least outline them in your ToS.
by strken | 2025-06-17 07:09:30+00:00
The neat thing about HN is that I can nearly always find at least one thing on the front page that's useful to me, especially if I read the discussion.

Just looking through now, Canine is interesting because it's similar to Dokku, which I already use. I might consider using Canine in a similar role in the future if I want k8s with buildpacks.

The Dull Men's Club groups aren't like that. The needle to hay ratio is far worse. It's all "huh, cool" coincidences and mysterious objects, but nobody really intends to show the world anything useful.
by netcan | 2025-06-17 07:10:10+00:00
Continuation the counter points: most traditional uses, guided by shamans or priests use heavy doses.

I had expiremented with moderate/recomended doses of lsd and psilocybin before participating in an auahuasca retreat... and the doses were shocking.

This was a relatively tame centre in western Europe that had trained psych nurses in attendance. Still, the Shaman handed out monster doses... and offered a second one a couple of hours in... and again the following day.

Many traditional practices conceive of "levels" corresponding to doses, and the lower levels are not the ones associated with transformative spiritual experience.
by climb_stealth | 2025-06-17 07:11:47+00:00
Not much of a secret, but clicking the unsubscribe links in emails helps. Anything new I sign up to I'm pretty religious about it. Some new email I didn't ask for -> instant unsubscribe. Works way better than one might expect.

Very noticeable when using custom domain and emails where I might sign up to the same service several times.
by luismedel | 2025-06-17 07:11:47+00:00
Nice. But if I remember correctly, Mode X was a special VGA mode to squeeze a bit more performance (due to planes and full graphics memory addressing), not the "normal" MCGA 320x200x256 (13h)

If you're interested, I also implemented a few effects like lens[0] and Jare's fire[1] along with some other amusements[2]

[0] https://toys.luismedel.com/lens/index.html

[1] https://toys.luismedel.com/fire/index.html

[2] https://github.com/luismedel/js-toys
by kreetx | 2025-06-17 07:12:48+00:00
If the person had his visa cancelled, then the ideal way would have been to not let him on the plane at point of departure. As this didn't happen then the next location entry can be denied is at the border within the destination airport, and he was denied entry there. If you argue that he has landed, is on US soil, is handled by US law enforcement, then are you also saying that regardless of whether this person has a visa or not, he should be let assembled in the United States regardless of the visa status?
by closewith | 2025-06-17 07:13:12+00:00
Those places generally have the luxury of 24/7 electricity, normally via diesel gensets, for key parts of their infrastructure, such as fuel transfer, hospital, food supply.

The places that don't have the fallback ready access to fallback diesel genset, like rural South Sudan or Burundi, are pretty close to an end of the world scenario.

Don't romanticise disaster. If a developed country indefinitely lost power, a huge swathe of the population would die, starting with the infants, elderly, and chronically ill. Then hunger and disease would come for the rest. Nonsense ideas that we'd MacGyver or bushcraft our way out of trouble are infantile.
by tacker2000 | 2025-06-17 07:14:46+00:00
Imessage is a platform also owned by big tech, and the primary motivation and goal of Apple is to keep users locked in to their own ecosystem.

As a a result, imessage doesnt support any other mobile platforms properly, and even discriminates against users that dont have an iphone. The world outside of the US doesnt have 80% iphone penetration.

How you can say that imessage is any “better” is a complete mystery to me.

Both apps (whatsapp and imessage) are just here to serve their big tech overlords in their own bigger picture.
by prmoustache | 2025-06-17 07:15:27+00:00
how do imessage and android users communicate with each others? Do android users really still use sms to reach apple users? Don't they have group chats everywhere?

Here in europe every club/association/group has a whatsapp group chat. For instance here since the official app provided by the government has a super clunky UX most people get information from primary school through a whatsapp group chat managed by the parent's representative who has exclusive access to teaching group.
by Bluestein | 2025-06-17 07:15:55+00:00
(And, to begin with, the whole notion of them having to/having had to focus-group these decisions - so as to, perhaps - give them a "veneer" of grassroots pseudo-democracy is preposterous.-

Why don't they just come out and say "because, profit!" or some good ol' fashioned BS about "value-creation" or some other American thing like that ...)
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 07:16:32+00:00
They probably won't. But it doesn't matter. Ultimately, we'll all end up doing manual labor, because that is the only thing we can do that the machines aren't already doing better than us, or about to be doing better than us. Such is the natural order of things.

By manual labor I specifically mean the kind where you have to mix precision with power, on the fly, in arbitrary terrain, where each task is effectively one-off. So not even making things - everything made at scale will be done in automated factories/workshops. Think constructing and maintaining those factories, in the "crawling down tight pipes with scewdriver in your teeth" sense.

And that's only mid-term; robotics may be lagging behind AI now, but it will eventually catch up.
by cess11 | 2025-06-17 07:16:32+00:00
I didn't mention slave patrols or restrict myself to a particular type of usian cop, and the examples weren't exhaustive.

It is still shameful to be a cop. Similar to medieval executioners and torturers they're urban outcasts appointed by the state to perform otherwise criminal acts against state subjects. A more apt comparison than "the autobahn" would be to switch out the german nazi uniforms for suits and claim that this somehow makes racially motivated state violence and forced labour acceptable for some reason.

I'm not sure what connection you're trying to make between looting and popular mobilisation. Cops are a protection against systemic change through autonomous organising.

Are you denying that the allies ran forced labour camps and continued the german practice of imprisoning gays?
by jpcrs | 2025-06-17 07:16:38+00:00
I use AI daily, currently paying for Claude Code, Gemini and Cursor. It really helps me on my personal toy projects, it’s amazing at getting a POC running and validate my ideas.

My company just had internal models that were mediocre at best, but at the beginning this year they finally enabled Copilot for everyone.

At the beginning I was really excited for it, but it’s absolutely useless for work. It just doesn’t work on big old enterprise projects. In an enterprise environment everything is composed of so many moving pieces, knowledge scattered across places, internal terminology, etc. Maybe in the future, with better MCP servers or whatever, it’ll be possible to feed all the context into it to make it spit something useful, but right now, at work, I just use AI as search engine (and it’s pretty good at it, when you have the knowledge to detect when it have subtle problems)
by lormayna | 2025-06-17 07:17:41+00:00
I agree with you, Meshstatic is not really reliable in this situation. But you need to consider couple of issues: the power for a Lora node must be maximum 0.1W, compared to 0.5W of the free PMR446 handelds. Moreover the handelds are using FM that is not really efficient in term of power, while a Lora node can be powered easily with solar panels.
by lugu | 2025-06-17 07:17:57+00:00
IMO the problem of many platforms is that they don't let you "own" the software (whatever that means).

Steam experience is closer to the feel of ownership because: - Most games don't just randomly upgrade. They are stable. - Steam is cross platform enough that you can use the software on different devices as if you were copying it. - Your steam account isn't the center of your digital life, it's access isn't subject to many associated risks.
by raducu | 2025-06-17 07:18:30+00:00
> We didn't smoke Andy up anymore.

I got open eye visuals from smoking some dubious hashish, 2 other people smoking the same stuff had no issues. I really enjoyed the experience, except for a small incident where I woke up in the middle of the night and started slapping my snoring friend -- I hallucinated he was in fact chocking on his own vomit and was going to die and in my mind I was saving his life.

I also got mild HPPD that got better in a few years -- mainly I could not look at certain grid patterns because bright flashes of light would come from the intersection -- this mostly happened from vent iron grids and some shirts of mine.
by dsego | 2025-06-17 07:18:55+00:00
I don't think anybody in my non-tech circle even knows that messages are encrypted. It's just a convenient way to message people and share pictures from android phones. At some point in the past it was viber and before that fb messenger. I know older people who wouldn't know how to attach a document to an email but can share vacation photos via whatsapp, and we have group chats between friends and family. People also care about their chat history, and if they don't know that the data is encrypted and needs to be backed up, they loose it when transferring to a new device. It's happening all the time, a lot of common users would expect chats to just stay in the cloud somewhere and be available.
by easymodex | 2025-06-17 07:19:26+00:00
Might be you're just different than me, or might be that it's the type of nightclub. For me it needs to be something more ravey, like psytrance, DNB or hard techno. If I went to some lame commercial house nightclub, I'd have a bad time as well. But either way, no reason not to retry, life is an adventure. It beats sitting around and <doing the regular evening passtime stuff>.
Show HN: Open-Source Emoji Economy with Multi-Species Governance for Co-Creation
by supernova_2177 | 2025-06-17 07:19:27+00:00
Hey HN

We just open-sourced MetaKarma Hub, a fully modular, emoji-powered karma economy for co-creation between humans, agents, and future digital species. (just an experiment for now for the community to build on)

It’s designed as a remix-friendly space where:

* Content and reactions mint value * Decisions are made via *multi-species supermajority governance* * Creators, reactors, remixers, and influencers all earn * It’s built from day one to support *AI agent participation, safe and fair coordination

Why this? We believe co-building value systems like this is one of the best long-term safety practices as AI advances, a sandbox where humans and agents can experiment with shared rules, karma, and currencies.

Highlights:

* Every emoji has a value weight and earns karma * Coins can be remixed with automatic revenue splits * Fully auditable logchain (with cryptographic hash chains) * Treasury, influencer rewards, dynamic emoji market * Governance with timelocks, karma-weighted votes, and cross-species balancing

MIT licensed.
by renewiltord | 2025-06-17 07:19:59+00:00
It's inevitable. You can't afford to just provide a platform for free that someone else monetizes. I wonder what API plans are reasonable:

* Just let your users pay for API access at a per-call rate

* Charge app developer per user

The problem is that ultimately the LTV of the average user is high, but this is skewed up by the most valuable users who will switch to a different app that will inevitably attempt to hijack your userbase once they control enough of your users.

A classic example is that imgur became a social network of its own once it had enough Reddit users and only Reddit doing their own image/video hosting stemmed that bleeding.

And then there's the fact that if you choose the payment-based approaches, one app will suction the data out and compete with you for it; inevitably some user will lose his data through some app breach and blame you; and the basic app any newbie developer will build will be "yours but ad-free" which is fine for him because you're paying the development and hosting costs of the entire infra.

It's no surprise everyone converges on preventing API access. Even Metafilter does.

I'm curious if anyone has an idea for API access that can nonetheless be a successful company. Everyone's always got some idea with negative margin and negative feedback loops which they bill as "but that won't make you a billionaire" (that's true, because your company will fail) but I wonder if there is some way that could work without ruining social network network-effects etc.
by muppetman | 2025-06-17 07:20:00+00:00
What would you want/need a desktop app for? If you use Chrome (and yes, I'm aware some people use Firefox) you can install it as an App that way, so it appears in your start menu/finder. It can cast to your local devices etc.

I can't think of a single reason I'd want/need a standalone app over having the Chrome version of the app, which to all intents and purposes appears as a standalone app anyway.

So I'm curious, what's the use-case for a Desktop App to stream music? Even with the webapp you can download music for offline play.
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-17 07:20:49+00:00
It's gambling at the core that's the issue here. We used to have robust regulation of it for decades (and it was recognized millennia ago that gambling is bad for societies anyway), the problem is that the global gambling industry moved far too fast for regulations to catch up - and now we're at a point where children, even toddlers are getting lured into gambling mechanisms. It's all lootboxes nowadays.

Personal take on it: that's all just preparing children for the inevitable fact that everything from education over employment and housing to dating is mostly depending on luck...
by Kiro | 2025-06-17 07:20:54+00:00
> I believe people who claim that it makes them faster or more productive are making a conscious decision to relax their quality standards to achieve those gains.

Yep, this is pretty much it. However, I honestly feel that AI writes so much better code than me that I seldom need to actually fix much in the review, so it doesn't need to be as thorough. AI always takes more tedious edge-cases into account and applies best practices where I'm much sloppier and take more shortcuts.
by utopcell | 2025-06-17 07:24:12+00:00
We can probably trace a ton of greatly influential programmers back to Sinclair machines (Linus Torvalds used a Sinclair QL for example, I think Demis Hasabis had a Speccy.. maybe), but the original ZX Spectrum 48k stands separate from all the rest. The whole hardware architecture was a series of hacks to make the machine as cheap as possible. A few fascinating facts that come to mind:

(1) the 48k Speccy had a total of ..96KiB of memory: 16KiB of "proper" DRAM, 16KiB of ROM for its BASIC and ..64KiB of DRAM of which half of was non-functional! Sinclair was buying broken memory chips and binning them to get sets whose either the top or the bottom 32KiB worked. They could get these chips for way cheaper. Each machine would have a jumper to select either the top or the bottom 32KiB working region.

(2) Both the "graphics card" chip (the ULA, or Uncommitted Logic Array, an early form of an FPGA) and the Z80 CPU needed to read from memory. Instead of having multiplexers, the ZX Spectrum just connected the two address buses with resistors, such that the ULA would overpower the Z80 if both tried to set an address to read from. The CPU was completely unaware of this: the ULA would ..freeze its clock signal for a few clock cycles, do its thing, and then let the CPU continue with its read. It was actually slower to read from a specific region of RAM that contained the framebuffer because of this.

(3) the article describes the weird out-of-order memory layout for the screen. The reason it was done this way was because of the 4116 DRAM chips the machine was using. These were 16,384 (2^14) 1-bit memories, arranged in 2^7 rows and 2^7 columns. To address a random location, one would need to first clock in the 7-bit row, followed by clocking in the 7-bit column. If you wanted to access consecutive memory locations with the same row address, the chips had a "fast page mode", where you would only need to clock in the next 7-bit column address. The memory was laid out in such a way that would minimize row address settings.

Hacks, all the way down to the core.
by tigroferoce | 2025-06-17 07:24:57+00:00
I think this is two sided topic:

- on one side there is the increasing number of features in WhatsApp that nobody asked for and that make the experience worse and worse, I agree. Yet, on the other side of the world a 1B people in China use WeChat for so many things beside communicating, so I understand Meta's appetite to become the West WeChat. Still I hate it. - on the other side there is the business model of WhatsApp. Or the complete lack of it. It's 100% unrealistic that a global, always on, high availability, high security service is free. These things are expensive and they need to be monetized.

It's either ads, either fees on extra services they are providing through the app, either a monthly subscription. Now, I think nobody would pay for WhatsApp and they would lose their market immediately if they went that route (for many good reasons). They tried hard to position WhatsApp as WeChat, failing at that (for many good reasons). Ads is the only thing that is left IMO.
by oblio | 2025-06-17 07:25:11+00:00
I used Gemini to find stuff out. But WinPatrol was actually what I vaguely remember, I think...I probably remember it doing more than it actually did, my recollection was that you would install it, run it, and it could intercept, I think, applications you wanted to run. Or you'd run it through WinPatrol?

That's why I said Sandboxie is closer to in spirit to what I remembered.

It's been closer to 20 years since I used it, I remember a lot of popups, I think, and you could break programs in all sorts of creative ways :-)))
by gherkinnn | 2025-06-17 07:26:29+00:00
https://blog.whatsapp.com/helping-you-find-more-channels-and...

How long until "Updates" gets a red badge despite no updates only to show you an ad? Also, I find the language used in their announcement deeply offensive.

> Helping you Find More Channels and Businesses on WhatsApp

> support your favorite channel

> help you discover

> find a new business and easily start a conversation with them

> help admins, organizations, and businesses grow
by quietbritishjim | 2025-06-17 07:30:08+00:00
I think most software engineers need to draw a class diagram from time to time. Maybe there are a lot of unnecessary details to the UML spec, but it certainly doesn't hurt to agree that a hollow triangle for the arrow head means parent/child while a normal arrow head means composition, with a diamond at the root for ownership.

As the sibling comment says, sequence diagrams are often useful too. I've used them a few times for illustrating messages between threads, and for showing the relationship between async tasks in structured concurrency. Again, maybe there are murky corners to UML sequence diagrams that are rarely needed, but the broad idea is very helpful.