MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Mercury
by ben_talent | 2025-07-11 00:52:15+00:00
Hi I'm Ben

Today, I want to share something I've been building for the last couple months.

0.finance is an open-source bank account.

You might wonder what I mean with "bank account" or how this would even be possible.

The term here is used loosely. In essence we're just a UI on top of a crypto wallet.

But, we do partner up with some "on-/off-ramp" providers and make it easy for to expose "virtual accounts" these virtual accounts and expose ACH details and make it possible to give a bank-like experience to the end user.

Under the hood, we use some recent advances in crypto UX to make sure you don't need to manage private keys directly. From he point of view of the user it pretty much feels like a classical bank.

The future: And that's just a small taste of what we're working on we're actually in the process of creating an automation layer to help manage your entire financial stack little by little. For example, we created a small gmail connector that allows you to automatically categorize your receipts from your incoming email. Or we also parse emails to auto-populate wire transfers so you can pay your vendors more easily.

PS: It is possible today is to self-host (although painful atm). That means you could effectively get paid on our hosted instance and decide to fork us and continue down your own path.
by ertian | 2025-07-11 00:52:33+00:00
Ehh, I would put it differently: purposefully decentralized societies are ineffective, and create a power vacuum that tends to be quickly filled. Assuming they would have worked requires a view of human nature that I just don't buy. Along comes a Lenin, or a Mao, or a Trump, or a Robespierre, who starts giving rousing speeches about how dangerous forces are rising against the movement, and next thing you know you've got concentration camps, guillotines, mass shootings, and so on. And that environment rewards authority and tyranny.
by andyferris | 2025-07-11 00:53:25+00:00
You can ask it to critique a design or code to get some of that - but generally it takes a “plough on at any cost” approach to reaching a goal.

My best experiences have been to break it into small tasks with planning/critique/discussion between. It’s still your job to find the corner cases but it can help explore design and once it is aware they exist it can probably type faster than you.
by anonnon | 2025-07-11 00:53:44+00:00
I'm too lazy to review the ANSI spec, but the Smalltalk Bluebook VM served as a reference implementation for Smalltalk VMs for years, and it used a method-scoped literal frame for string (and other) literals:

> The selectors in parentheses may be replaced with other selectors by modifying the compiler and recompiling all methods in the system. The other selectors are built into the virtual machine.

> Any objects referred to in a CompiledMethod's bytecodes that do not fall into one of the categories above must appear in its literal frame. The objects ordinarily contained in a literal frame are

> shared variables (global, class, and pool)

> most literal constants (numbers, characters, strings, arrays, and symbols)

> most message selectors (those that are not special)

> Objects of these three types may be intermixed in the literal frame. If an object in the literal frame is referenced twice in the same method, it need only appear in the literal frame once. The two bytecodes that refer to the object will refer to the same location in the literal frame.

> Two types of object that were referred to above, temporary variables and shared variables, have not been used in the example methods. The following example method for Rectangle merge: uses both types. The merge: message is used to find a Rectangle that includes the areas in both the receiver and the argument.

http://www.mirandabanda.org/bluebook/bluebook_chapter26.html
by deadbabe | 2025-07-11 00:55:24+00:00
Why would you be out of a job? Nothing he described is something that someone is being paid to do. Look at everything he needs just to match a fraction of your power.

Consumer apps may see less sales as people opt to just clone an app using AI for their own personal use, customized for their preferences.

But there’s a lot of engineering being done out there that people don’t even know exists, and that has to be done by people who know exactly what they’re doing, not just weekend warriors shouting stuff at an LLM.
by kanoacook | 2025-07-11 00:58:43+00:00
Hey guys!

I just made a gamed called Flickle. For the last couple years, I've been between B2B startups that have flopped for one reason or another. I've been getting a little burnt out on building without really getting user traction, so I figured building a game & self-promoting it via social media would be a great way to get some product experience.

If anyone has any feedback on the UI/UX or missed opportunities, I'd love to implement some feedback into the game.

Otherwise, I have a new game coming out tomorrow regarding U.S. foreign interventions. Think https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/ or https://oec.world/en/games/tradle, but with more historical facts.
by peter422 | 2025-07-11 00:58:53+00:00
The issue has nothing to do with whether he worked hard, it has to do with the fact that the work the company did ended up being not very valuable, so much so that the company is doing something completely different.

Ultimately he created very little value and therefore is entitled to very little value. The company can just go out of business and start fresh!

Raising money is not value.

2-5% could be appropriate. 10% is completely insane.
by postpawl | 2025-07-11 00:59:07+00:00
It's not about whether they can work 20 hours. Most already do. Arkansas found 95% of people either met the requirements or qualified for exemptions, but 18,000+ still lost coverage due to the paperwork maze.

The requirements are designed to create barriers through bureaucracy. You have to report every month through a specific online portal, track your hours precisely, navigate exemption processes. Miss one monthly filing deadline and you lose healthcare. It's the most socially acceptable way to kick people off coverage without saying "we don't want poor people to have healthcare."

And it's not just work requirements. The bill also adds income verification twice a year instead of once, more asset checks, and cuts the actual funding. Each new hoop is another chance for eligible people to fall through the cracks. The goal is reducing enrollment through administrative friction, not promoting work.
by tomcam | 2025-07-11 00:59:09+00:00
Analysis: true, based on 20+ years of owning successful online businesses and another 15 in the software business before that. I always gave my tech support teams full authority to fire customers like that.

The part that fascinated me most was that just reminding them they had that option seemed to make them much more tolerant than I expected, and out of say 2 million customers I'd guess fewer than a dozen were ejected. I guess it was a mental pressure valve.
by hluska | 2025-07-11 00:59:12+00:00
I’ve been through this type of thing a few times and there aren’t many good solutions. The new business needs cash so taking some is a tough pitch to the new team’s executives. New investors are rarely keen to see funds going to an exit fund. You can make threats and indicate you won’t go quietly into the good night, but that makes things adversarial. At some point in the future, your equity could become a problem that will be worth taking care of. At this point, your best path to dollars is to become the problem, but if you do that, it’s a lot more difficult to see one of those future exits shape up.
by tomcam | 2025-07-11 01:01:32+00:00
It is interesting how receiving the greatest benefit for the lowest cost is considered pathological, yet also the entire basis for our economic system.

What I read from GP's comment was not that this was the tradeoff, it was that people who pay less than market value tend to be the most troublesome customers. I can tell you that holds true in any market I've ever consulted for or have used myself. B2B transactions tend to be much smoother than a visit to Popeye's on the average.
by hilbert42 | 2025-07-11 01:02:01+00:00
When I was a kid thermionic vacuum tubes were still king and the only semiconductors of note were point contact diodes (OA91, etc.) and junction transistors such as the OC71 and OC44 — go look their specs up!

In chemistry, GC–MS was still a dream.

If you'd even hinted to those in the know that something like an Intel i9 or an AMD Ryzen would become the norm within the lifetime of someone living at the time they'd have said you'd lost your marbles and probably suggested you were suffering from delusions.

Fact is you've seen nothing yet, in 50/60 years time the electronics/industrial/biochemical worlds will be unrecognizable.

I wonder how old you are.
by qianli_cs | 2025-07-11 01:03:35+00:00
My colleague did some internal benchmarking and found that LISTEN/NOTIFY performs well under low to moderate load, but doesn't scale well with a large number of listeners. Our findings were pretty consistent with this blog post.

(Shameless plug [1]) I'm working on DBOS, where we implemented durable workflows and queues on top of Postgres. For queues, we use FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED for task dispatch, combined with exponential backoff and jitter to reduce contention under high load when many workers are polling the same table.

Would love to hear feedback from you and others building similar systems.

[1] https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-py
by azinman2 | 2025-07-11 01:03:41+00:00
The demo buying toothpaste shows the difficulty of these tasks. Toothpaste itself was very underspecified, and it essentially randomly chose from a huge list. Some tasks may have past actions that could help guide, others won't have any to inform. Failure cases abound -- maybe the toothpaste you previously bought is no longer available. Then what? Ultimately how much time did this particular example save since you need to double check the result anyway? This is what doomed Alexa for the purchasing experience that Amazon assumed it would enable in the first place.

I think it'd be better to show more non-trivial examples where the time savings is clear, and the failure cases are minimized... or even better how it's going to recover from those failure cases. Do I get a bespoke UI for the specific problem? Talk to it via chat?

This whole world is non-trivial. Good luck!
by moron4hire | 2025-07-11 01:04:06+00:00
Bullshit. He helped build a company that could even continue past a year. That's better than literally 80% of the startup market. Look up BLS statistics. Not only that, he helped build a company that could even bother to attract the attention of investors. Prima facia, someone thinks there's value there.

The world is full of jokers talking about starting a business and jokers who have "started" a business but are faking-it-to-make-it off of credit cards. You can't do that for a 18 months. OP has built something. It may not be the software he started out to make, but it's certainly a business that some investor thinks has a chance of being a going concern.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-07-11 01:05:18+00:00
> Musk has a good understanding of what people expect from AI from a science, tech and engineering perspective, but it seems to me he has little understanding of what people expect from AI from a social, cultural, political or personal perspective. He seems to have trouble with empathy, which is necessary to understand the feelings of other people.

Absolutely. That said, I'm not sure Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and others are notably empathetic either.
by cguess | 2025-07-11 01:05:25+00:00
This is exactly my experience as well. I've had agents write a bit of backend code, always small parts. I'm lucky enough to be experienced enough with code I didn't write to be able to quickly debug it when it fails (and it always fails from the first run). Like using AI to write a report, it's good for outlines, but the details are always seemingly random as far as quality.

For frontend though? The stuff I really don't specialize in (despite some of my first html beginning on FrontPage 1997 back in 1997), it's a lifesaver. Just gotta be careful with prompts since so many front end frameworks are basically backend code at this point.
by peter422 | 2025-07-11 01:08:01+00:00
The investors invested on a previous idea.

The fact that the other founders are deciding to pivot is just a luxury of the fact that the company has inertia, not value, which is why they are switching ideas.

Our OP doesn’t want to work on the new idea, the one that might have value, therefore he is entitled to very, very little.

You do not understand the economics of VC backed startups.
by singingfish | 2025-07-11 01:08:27+00:00
Matt taught me everything I know about how to make commercial programming creative, engaging, artistic/craftsman type activity, aligned with my desire to keep everything open source to the maximum extent practical.

Another former colleague who is way more talented than I am emailed me privately to express a similar sentiment.

You'll find Matt's indirect influence in things like SQLAlchemy, and chunks of the enduring parts of the javascript ecosystem as well. He was known in the perl community, but his unparalleled thinking skills have a much wider indirect influence
by giantg2 | 2025-07-11 01:09:46+00:00
I'd feel more comfortable if we'd raise the standards for the driving test so that only responsible people can drive. For example, the proper way to park is to back into the driveway. You should never be backing from a smaller road or driveway into the larger one. The perk of this is that you do not have to watch for cross traffic while backing up and also looking at a camera, no gear change delay when pulling out, and better visibility into the area you are backing up to due to your approach. This makes it significantly safer for all parties when exiting the driveway.
by lgessler | 2025-07-11 01:10:18+00:00
In my (poor) understanding, this can depend on hardware details. What are you running your models on? I haven't paid close attention to this with LLMs, but I've tried very hard to get non-deterministic behavior out of my training runs for other kinds of transformer models and was never able to on my 2080, 4090, or an A100. PyTorch docs have a note saying that in general it's impossible: https://docs.pytorch.org/docs/stable/notes/randomness.html

Inference on a generic LLM may not be subject to these non-determinisms even on a GPU though, idk
by dylan604 | 2025-07-11 01:10:27+00:00
When you're the head of state getting insulted, you can do whatever you want. It's good to be the king, er, dictator, er, whatever.

Now, if Musk can tinker with it to the point it no longer says woke propaganda and lets the pendulum swing back to nazi stuff, just wait until he has it dump on Trump. I have popcorn at the ready.
by cyberax | 2025-07-11 01:10:38+00:00
Sure, but the replication protocol requires a separate connection. And the annoying part is that it requires a separate `pg_hba.conf` entry to be allowed. So it's not enabled for IAM-based connections on AWS, for example.

pg_logical_slot_get_binary_changes returns the same entries as the replication connection. It just has no support for long-polling.
by meragrin_ | 2025-07-11 01:10:48+00:00
> It only takes a friend to send a photo or meme through WhatsApp to get you in trouble.

Does it? The particular meme which was claimed to be the issue is something the administration and people on the right enjoy. I can't see anyone on the side of the administration being vindictive for having that meme.

https://x.com/JDVance/status/1898372454235451694

https://youtu.be/ejIPG8-rm7k?si=0nsvoalAz6XvLFE3&t=240

https://youtu.be/pmM6N1XxHjc?si=JO5teQIikHXfXnEW&t=80
by Brajeshwar | 2025-07-11 01:11:03+00:00
I’m also a happy Migadu customer, and I have never had to interact with their support. I use it for most of my domains, except for a few that are work-related.

For Webmail, I have been meaning to try https://roundcube.net

You can try it out at https://www.pikapods.com/apps#email to see if this works for you.
by viraptor | 2025-07-11 01:11:38+00:00
You're thinking about it like a human programmer. It may or may not find that part tricky. There will be subtleties it will solve without even mentioning and there will be other stuff it fails on miserably. You improve the chances by asking to ask questions. But again - just try it. Try it on exactly the thing you've already described and see how it goes.
by rukuu001 | 2025-07-11 01:11:38+00:00
I'm sympathetic to the argument re experience with the tools paying off, because my personal anecdata matches that. It hasn't been until the last 6 weeks, after watching a friend demo their workflow, that my personal efficiency has improved dramatically.

The most useful thing of all would have been to have screen recordings of those 16 developers working on their assigned issues, so they could be reviewed for varying approaches to AI-assisted dev, and we could be done with this absurd debate once and for all.
by mac-attack | 2025-07-11 01:12:15+00:00
Curious if there is a threshold/sign that would convince you that the last week of Grok snafus are features instead of a bugs, or warrant Elon no longer getting the benefit of the doubt.

Ignoring the context of the past month where he has repeatedly said he plans on 'fixing' the bot to align with his perspective feels like the LLM world's equivalent of "to me it looked he was waving awkwardly", no?
by jofla_net | 2025-07-11 01:12:16+00:00
totally. Especially when i'm debugging something for colleagues or friends, given a domain and a handful of ways of doing it, if i'm familiar with it I generally already get a sense of the reasons why its failing or falling short. This has nothing to do with the code base, any given language not withstanding. It comes from years and decades of systems and idiosyncratic behaviors of systems and examples which strangely rear their heads in notable ways.

Theese notable ways may also not be commonly known or put into words, but they persist nevertheless.
by goku12 | 2025-07-11 01:12:42+00:00
> The pandemic oversaw the introduction of the Coronavirus Act 2020, which was described by former Justice of the Supreme Court Lord Sumption as "the greatest invasion of personal liberty in [the UK's] history."

It's these sort of transgressions that make people hesitant or opposed to lifesaving interventions like mass vaccination campaigns and pandemic-time mask mandates. If you give an inch in the name of safety, you'll end up giving a mile permanently in terms of freedom.
by dzaima | 2025-07-11 01:14:23+00:00
L1 latency is 4 cycles typically (1 nanosecond would be closer). And of course it gets longer if you're chasing through multiple pointers.

It of course depends on the specific program, but, looking at any optimization at the level of separate impacted assembly intructions, everything other than mispredictions, division, and vectorization is "just a couple cycles" so that's not really a meaningful way to look at them.
by dmix | 2025-07-11 01:14:43+00:00
A completely non-technical saleslady on our team prototyped a whole JS web app that generated some data based on some user inputs (and even generated PDFs), which solved a problem our customers were having and our devs didnt have the time to develop yet.

This obviously was a temporary tool we'd never let touch our github repo but it still very much worked and solved a niche problem. It even looked like our app because the LLM could consume screenshots to copy our designs.

I'm on board with vibe coding = non-maintainable, non-tested, mostly useless code by non-devs. But the plus side it will expose many many people to learn basic programming and fill many tiny gaps not solved by bigger more serious pieces of code. Especially once people start building infrastructure and tooling around these non-devs, like hosting, deployment, webhook integrations, etc.
by IX-103 | 2025-07-11 01:15:07+00:00
Well, that's what you'd expect from an LLM. They're not designed to give you the best solution. They're designed to give you the most likely solution. Which means that the results would be expected to be average, as "above average" solutions are unlikely by definition.

You can tweak the prompt a bit to skew the probability distribution with careful prompting (LLMs that are told to claim to be math PHDs are better at math problems, for instance), but in the end all of those weights in the model are spent to encode the most probable outputs.

So, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. If the average person using AI is able to produce above average code, then we could end up in a virtuous cycle where AI continuously improves with human help. On the other hand, if this just allows more low quality code to be written then the opposite happens and AI becomes more and more useless.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-11 01:15:25+00:00
As others probably have experienced, I can only add that I am doing coding now I would have kicked down the road if I did not have LLM assistance.

Example: using LeafletJS — not hard, but I didn't want to have to search all over to figure out how to use it.

Example: other web page development requiring dropping image files, complicated scrolling, split-views, etc.

In short, there are projects I have put off in the past but eagerly begin now that LLMs are there to guide me. It's difficult to compare times and productivity in cases like that.
by folkhack | 2025-07-11 01:15:48+00:00
> were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards

Anymore this feels impossible due to neighbors, landlords, and police. I have so many anecdotes... I don't think it's "getting ready" as much as it's an intolerant society of chronically entitled people. Also, it's increasingly expensive to go out + I truly believe we're experiencing the destruction of "3rd places"

My 20's had a good amount of that too... but it was increasingly at odds with real consequence and risk. I'm just safer at home with my SO, in my space. It's getting much worse for younger generations :(
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-11 01:16:14+00:00
I've never understood are obsession with mRNA. I swear its success isn't from being better, but from being enough of a buzzword to getting extra funding and exceptions. There's no reason Corbevax wouldn't have had the same speedy development as Comirnaty and Spikevax, if it were treated the same, and logistically it's a much better product.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-11 01:17:15+00:00
Right, so better get rid of the department charged with helping have an informed electorate. The slope is much steeper than I ever imagined a US President ever being able to get away with. This guy has shown us exactly how precarious the balance of power actually was. Just get enough people in all of the branches to have control, and boom! (figuratively, hopefully not literally too)
by tomcam | 2025-07-11 01:17:16+00:00
Interestingly, it's actually being done properly:

* The US constitution has an executive branch consisting of a single person, the President. (The other two branches are judicial and legislative)

* That person is given broad authority that includes the treasury, commanding the military, pardoning power, appointing a cabinet, etc.

* Delegating this is well within the power of the executive

That said we're allowed to complain about these things and a big enough protest could have the desired effect. I love pennies myself, but I'm not interested enough to leave my Go compiler long enough to do so.