MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-07-19 01:55:17+00:00
> I thought Venmo was trying the most with their card offers, as well as PayPal, Cash, Google Pay and several others too

I know at least two of the above used to use a specific US bank for the credit card transactions backing their payment services. For others, if service usage requires a verified credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they too use a processor owned/operated by a bank, bank subsidiary, or an entity sponsored by same.

EDIT:

For payment services which do not require a credit card or debit card backed by a credit card network, they almost certainly use the ACH[0] network. This is a more intimate financial relationship and best used with a dedicated bank account not linked to any others, as fund transfers can be bidirectional.

0 - https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/ach-vs-check/
by bitwize | 2025-07-19 01:55:56+00:00
It could be a holdover from Operation Choke Point, an Obama-administration arm-twisting initiative that would subject banks to more regulatory scrutiny and possible disciplinary action if they did business with certain "high-risk businesses" including firearm and pornography sellers. Ostensibly the initiative was ended in 2017, but banks are probably still afraid to be handed the black spot for doing business with the "wrong" sorts of people.
by dangus | 2025-07-19 01:58:48+00:00
There’s a massive difference between “terminally online” and “goes out of their way to avoid using any of the capabilities of the technology.”

If I’m paying for a 5G connection on a phone that’s more powerful than the computer I owned 5 years ago you’re damn right I want to watch my dumb video in 4K and stream my music lossless.
by consumer451 | 2025-07-19 02:00:19+00:00
One of the most onerous regulation regimes in the USA comes from the FAA.

When people question these regulations, and the cost of certifying aircraft and aircraft parts, someone always rightly responds "these regulations are written in blood."

The same can easily be said about environmental regulations, except in their case, the pool of blood is orders of magnitude deeper.

Do people really think that President Richard Nixon created the EPA to stick it to big business?
by astrange | 2025-07-19 02:00:38+00:00
> 3. H-Nets are significantly more robust to small perturbations in input data like casing, showing an avenue for creating models that are more robust and aligned with human reasoning.

If it forms a hierarchy (a tree), it seems like it wouldn't be robust to rearranging the information in a prompt.

eg if your request has a long list or a table of data, all the different permutations of that will create different trees even though they're actually the same thing.
by m463 | 2025-07-19 02:01:55+00:00
I bought a mini because a phone broke and was not immediately fixable, and I just needed something to get me going.

And... I love it and use it all the time. Into the pocket it goes, great for going out.

I would buy an iphone mini 16/17/18 no questions asked.

When it comes to the marketing side of things, I think back to a story where one of the soft drink companies tried to find the best soft drink taste. They found out that they couldn't optimize for the one true taste because... different people had different favorites.
by bdangubic | 2025-07-19 02:03:20+00:00
if you have a car that is a money pit you and your family keep bleeding money on to make repairs, would you keep making repairs or get another car? all of TV is a simple money game, shows get canceled, new ones spruce up, they get canceled, some are super successful but run their course, others stink from the get-go. what is going to replace the late show? not sure but whatever it does it better make money for cbs or the same faith awaits it
by lurking_swe | 2025-07-19 02:03:38+00:00
Well, you and I could have easily anticipated this outcome. So could regulators. For that reason alone…it’s stupid policy on their part imo.

Writing policy is not supposed to be an exercise where you “will” a utopia into existence. Policy should consider current reality. if your policy just ends up inconveniencing 99% of users, what are we even doing lol?

I don’t have all the answers. Maybe a carrot-and-stick approach could have helped? For example giving a one time tax break to any org that fully complies with the regulation? To limit abuse, you could restrict the tax break to companies with at least X number of EU customers.

I’m sure there are other creative solutions as well. Or just implementing larger fines.
by tzs | 2025-07-19 02:03:41+00:00
I think you are mixing up some things. There are no "likeword95" attributes.

At one point during standardization there was a proposal to add several attributes with names like that although most of them referred to non-Microsoft products like WordPerfect, but it didn't make it into the final standard. That's what you are probably thinking of.

Their purpose was to allow someone writing say a WordPerfect to OOXML converter to mark in the OOXML places that were using some specific WordPerfect formatting that couldn't be replicated in OOXML.

OOXML word processors were supposed to preserve those markings if they encountered them but never add them.
by wskinner | 2025-07-19 02:05:29+00:00
People are generally responsive to incentives. In this case, the GDPR required:

1. Consent to be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous and as easy to withdraw as to give 2. High penalties for failure to comply (€20 million or 4 % of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher)

Compliance is tricky and mistakes are costly. A pop-up banner is the easiest off-the-shelf solution, and most site operators care about focusing on their actual business rather than compliance, so it's not surprising that they took this easy path.

If your model of the world or "image of humanity" can't predict an outcome like this, then maybe it's wrong.
by alexjplant | 2025-07-19 02:05:38+00:00
During a work meeting I once suggested using a non-PK column in a Postgres database for a foreign key. A coworker confidently said that we shouldn't because joins would be slow. I pointed out that we could create an index on that column and they rebutted by claiming that PKs created some kind of "special" index. I didn't want to burn goodwill and so didn't push it further but it always struck me as silly.

Depending upon the database storage engine, available memory, and table size I could see there being _some_ performance hit if only PKs are used for statistics but I'd think that modern RDBMSes are smart enough to cache appropriately. Am I missing something?
by sriram_malhar | 2025-07-19 02:05:56+00:00
The phrase "multiple tasks at a time" is ill-defined, according to Lamport, because whose clock are you trusting.

For lamport concurrent does not mean what it means to us colloquially or informally (like, "meanwhile"). Concurrency in Lamport's formal definition is only about order. If one task is dependent or is affected by another, then the first is ordered after the second one. Otherwise, they are deemed to be "concurrent", even if one happens years later or before.
by bmitc | 2025-07-19 02:06:19+00:00
Your comment is ignoring the realities and practicialities in the real world, just like GPL does. GPL is a theoretical idea that doesn't work in the real world, because in the real world, not everyone wants to or even can share their work products with everyone, and especially not just because some person talking about "libre software" says so. No one really cares if they have access to their refrigerator's source code.

There are many, many software libraries and tools that are excellent and yet aren't popular. A very common reason as to why they aren't more popular is because they are often licensed with GPL.
by anonnon | 2025-07-19 02:06:58+00:00
For those unaware, Casey Muratori started a project called Handmade Hero in 2014 to build a complete game from scratch while livestreaming the entire process, with the goal of showing people not just how, but why, rolling your own engine (hence the "handmade" part) is better than relying on Unity, Unreal, or some other leaky abstraction. He even solicited pre-orders for the finished product, IIRC.

Ten years later, he has no game, only a rudimentary, tile-based dungeon-crawler engine, and reams of code he's written and re-written (as API sands shifted beneath his feet), and the project seems to be permanently on hiatus now. Thus, Casey inadvertently proved himself wrong, and the conventional wisdom (use an existing engine) correct.

As far as OOP goes, 45 years has shown that it makes developers highly productive, and ultimately, as the saying goes, "real heroes (handmade or otherwise) ship." Casey's company was founded 20 years ago, and he's never shipped a software product.

He complains often about software getting slower, which I agree with. Yet how many mainstays of Windows 95/98 desktop software were written in a significantly OO style using C++ with MFC?
by wvenable | 2025-07-19 02:07:54+00:00
You can continue to argue the point but that goes against every single definition of compilation that exists. Compilation is a transformation of programming language into another form. For example, taking `3+x*(2+y)` and transforming it into a series of byte codes, machine language instructions, ASTs, or even C code would be compilation.

The BASIC interpreter doesn't recognize `3+x*(2+y)` nor does it compile it instead it evaluates that expression using a pair of stacks. You've expanded the definition of compilation to cover almost all computation. It's compilers all the way down to the electrons.
by bwfan123 | 2025-07-19 02:09:37+00:00
> I'm always surprised by the number of people posting here that are dismissive of AI and the obvious unstoppable progress

Many of us have been through previous hype-cycles like the dot-com boom, and have learned to be skeptical. Some of that learning has been "reinforced" by layoffs in the ensuing bust (reinforcement learning). A few claims in your note like "it's only a matter of time before we have domain-specific ASI" are jarring - as you are "assuming the sale". LLMs are great as a tool for some usecases - nobody denies that.

The investment dollars are creating a class of people who are fed by those dollars, and have the incentive to push the agenda. The skeptics in contrast have no ax to grind.
by Shekelphile | 2025-07-19 02:10:25+00:00
It is a shame that it takes payment processors to get Valve to do even the bare minimum curation of their store. IMO the thousands of outright bad games and ai slop asset flips and weirdo porn that verges on outright illegal content in many countries should have never been allowed in the first place. All of this leads back to various executives at Valve essentially doing no actual work and refusing to hire anybody because a huge part of their corporate culture is to keep headcount low while chasing constant growth.
by fsckboy | 2025-07-19 02:10:43+00:00
there are several buildings like this in Manhattan. https://www.cromwell-intl.com/travel/usa/new-york-internet/p...

yeah, it looks less basic than a concrete block, but it is just a big box. this small skyscraper could offer a nice view, but it has no windows.

they used to be filled with telephone switching equipment for all the phone lines, but electronic switching has shrunk those space needs a lot. I think they've turned them into hosting providers for financial companies but I'm not positive.
by noduerme | 2025-07-19 02:10:52+00:00
I wouldn't scoff at the leftovers. You're talking about maybe a trillion dollar industry that struggles to find payment solutions. This is why I gave up on credit card processing for my startup casino in 2010 and just went to taking Bitcoin and other crypto. I originally planned to just take Visa. I wasn't looking to skirt the law. Card companies are looking out for themselves, and they don't really even need regulatory capture to shaft anyone running a business that the public could consider shady or immoral. There's plenty of demand out there, and in my opinion they're leaving money on the table. But their business model makes it difficult to take on the risk, especially in the case of something like Valve where they can't pick each transaction apart and evaluate the risk separately. So yeah... a globally accepted porn and gambling card? That would be a home run if the bills showed up never to someone's spouse, and it won't happen. Using a combination of crypto and higher CC fees to sell the content, though, there's a lot of pent-up demand.
by billy99k | 2025-07-19 02:10:54+00:00
"excelled in these classes and have had impressive career trajectories after school."

This also has to do with networking. I was a CS major and a friend of mine, who couldn't code and wasn't interested in coding, was also a CS major.

He joined a fraternity and after graduation, could have had a high-paying coding job with basically no interview, because of his network.

I learned too late that going to college is 10% learning and 90% getting into the right social/friend groups to help you with your career.

This is what self-taught coders (with no degree) usually miss completely and have to spend years working up the ladder of shitty companies.
by lisbbb | 2025-07-19 02:11:20+00:00
I agree with the above comment. During that time period was the height of my tech career. The remarkable number of open positions didn't lead to the kinds of wage increases one might expect, perhaps some, but what I mostly encountered was a lot of highly specialized roles that I wasn't qualified for because everything has to be "just so" in order to be hired on because companies refuse to train or allot time for training, just brief "ramp up" periods that are do or die.

Nowadays, since I'm in my 50s, I'm disqualified from being able to work in tech completely. Mind you, the age discrimination is hidden behind me not being perfectly qualified for whatever role due to not checking some technical skillset. Never mind that I am still sharp, have a great deal of experience, and can do whatever is asked given a decent target to aim for. None of it seems to matter, it's purely ageism eliminating me from getting interviews now.

I do think we here in the US passed some kind of inflection point where the damage done by H1B labor finally killed the tech career path in the sense that all of a sudden, entry level jobs simply vanished, never to return. I'm sure that H1Bs reached some critical mass that triggered that extinction event.

The job market in tech in the US has been absolutely brutal since at least 2023.
by m463 | 2025-07-19 02:13:01+00:00
People are routinely notified they are pre-diabetes.

It gives people the agency to alter their lifestyle trajectory.

I personally suspect that people get and cure cancer all the time.

I wonder if cancer is just damage to your body - either a lot of direct damage or interfering with the body's ability to manage/heal itself.

if someone was pre-cancer, would it help to exercise, cut out sugar, use the sauna, stop overeating? I'll bet it might make a difference
by pkdpic | 2025-07-19 02:13:13+00:00
Perfect length post, perfect CSS, perfect font family.

For whatever it's worth after years of being in a space that felt very similar to this my solution was... Having a kid and / or going to Recurse Center and / or moving to a non-LA/NY city.

I don't know if any of it's causal but I have finally crossed over some kind of line. I read books again (like I ever really did), I don't think about social media, I don't have that toxic icky parasocial relationship feeling, I don't even know how to use social media UIs when I see them anymore.

Its fantastic, I'm sure writing / reading this kind of post is a good first step so bravo and welcome (back) to the resistance.

Wait does HN count as social media? Does linkedin? Does Slack ir Teams at work? Does SMS??
by hardwaresofton | 2025-07-19 02:13:15+00:00
It's not that simple actually -- this kind of thinking might leave you working on mainframes in 2000 (or even now) which is obviously a mistake.

It requires a certain taste. There's a skill involved.

> Just be smart and selective about your choices, and avoid compromising.

This is a very "draw the rest of the owl" kind of statement
by rapatel0 | 2025-07-19 02:14:37+00:00
I literally lived this with GDPR. In the beginning every one ran around pretending to understand what it meant. There were a ton of consultants and lawyers that basically made up stuff that barely made sense. They grifted money out of startups by taking the most aggressive interpretation and selling policy templates.

In the end the regulation was diluted to something that made sense(ish) but that process took about 4 years. It also slowed down all enterprise deals because no one knew if a deal was going to be against GDPR and the lawyers defaulted to “no” in those orgs.

Asking regulators to understand and shape market evolution in AI is basically asking them to trade stocks by reading company reports written in mandarin.
by lisbbb | 2025-07-19 02:16:10+00:00
So you're saying all a CS grad has to do is go back in time and get a degree from MIT and they're golden, right?

Let me explain something: When I graduated from High School in Upstate NY in 1991, 3 of my fellow grads got accepted into MIT that year. From that one school! The odds of such an event taking place in the 2020s has to be vanishingly small to impossible. The high-end schools like MIT have not scaled up to match the enormously scaled up demand for education, not to mention how expensive the tuition has become. So it is simply impossible for everyone who wants to be engineers or computer scientists to attend some elite school nowadays. The competition for seats must have increased 100 fold since the early 1990s!
by drooby | 2025-07-19 02:16:27+00:00
Id think yes.

Intelligence is a model of reality and the future. They'll converge into the same system as a reflection of the laws of physics and human psychology.

And then when they are used as weapons they'll perhaps try to diverge and it will become an arms race to create models of the adversaries models.

_

Another way to look at it is our own history. Intelligent apes all "converged" into our one homo sapien.
by kragen | 2025-07-19 02:17:21+00:00
I think a more important consideration for currently produced microcontroller hardware is the ability to run from ROM, because then you can load your program into relatively abundant Flash instead of the much scarcer RAM. Some way of using virtual memory (take a look at Forth's approach, which doesn't require hardware support but doesn't work for code, only data) would also make a big difference. All of this doesn't necessarily depend on native-code compilation; microcontroller memory is a much more tightly pinching shoe than microcontroller speed.
by TkTech | 2025-07-19 02:17:22+00:00
Any coalition of banks can. Replacing Visa is a daunting task, but rolling out PoS support and the technical challenges are peanuts compared to actually getting banks onboard. Visa itself was started by a single bank, and Mastercard was started by a coalition of banks. They can do it again.

Interac[1] is Canada's debit system, originally created as a non-profit by our largest banks way back in '84, and these days is supported everywhere. The large banks are already used to bullying their way through political or bureaucratic challenges, and a single Canadian bank typically has trillion(s) in managed assets - they _can_ bully Visa.

Zelle[2] (2016) is a limited (etransfer only) clone for the American market, UPI (2016) in India, UnionPay (2002) in China, carte Bleue (1967) in France, etc etc. What's missing is cooperation between national systems like these, as well as lending as they typically only do debit instead of credit.

Any cooperation between these systems would likely get spun out as a separate entity, which would eventually just turn into a new Visa or Mastercard - but 3 choices is better than 2.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
by imachine1980_ | 2025-07-19 02:18:46+00:00
Not really china make big policy bet a decade early and win the battle the put the whole government to buy this new tech before everyone else, forcing buses to be electric if you want the federal level thumbs up, or the lottery system for example.

So I disagree, probably Europe will be even more behind in ev if they doesn't push eu manufacturers to invest so heavily in the industry.

You can se for example than for legacy manufacturers the only ones in the top ten are Europeans being 3 out of 10 companies, not Japanese or Korean for example, and in Europe Volkswagen already overtake Tesla in sales Q1 for example and Audi isn't that much away also.
by lisbbb | 2025-07-19 02:18:56+00:00
This is a touchy subject for sure, but yes, I have witnessed this firsthand at two different Fortune 10 companies. Reverse racism against caucasians was on full display and you damn well best not mention it at all. The managers saw it as building their power base using fungible assets--they kn3w, from a purely cultural standpoint, who is going to kill themselves to meet deadlines and not argue.
by mafuy | 2025-07-19 02:19:15+00:00
Might be a good idea. This is so curious.

The US has a weird fetish with privatizing things that the government should handle, like consumer protection. If there were a reasonably robust infrastructure for this outside of payment processors in the US, there would be far less pressure on porn providers to comply with fucked up morals about porn. What we have here is an instance of late stage capitalism, and half the people are too narrowminded to see how it hurts their freedom.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-19 02:21:05+00:00
Corporations, more often than not, are parasitic, good weather friends, and a let-down to FLOSS. They don't pay their fair share to support critical bits and they don't sustain projects with stability or usability when release things or take them on themselves. Their employee get performance points for adding new features, not making things usable, simple, or polished.
by nullc | 2025-07-19 02:21:52+00:00
It was my investment thesis that HN comments reflected the trading activities of a meaningfully large cohort of non-toxic trades-- people with disposable income and opinions that exceeded their actual knowledge. Bored know it all googlers day trading from their desks, and as a result there might be profit to be had trading against it because not only were they frequently just wrong when they were right the market prices exaggerated things.

I consistently made good profits from it, but I had no real basis for setting trade sizes which I was never happy with-- if I could actually see commenters orderflow I could clone their sizes with scaling, but obviously I can't. I didn't resume the activity after the 2020 market turmoil particularly as I had a lot less time available and didn't have a good way to fully automate the practice.
by gond | 2025-07-19 02:22:07+00:00
> and most site operators care about focusing on their actual business rather than compliance,

And that is exactly the point. Thank you. What is encoded as compliance in your example is actually the user experience. They off-loaded responsibility completely to the users. Compliance is identical to UX at this point, and they all know it. To modify your sentence: “and most site operators care about focusing on their actual business rather than user experience.”

The other thing is a lack of differentiation. The high penalities you are talking about are for all but of the top traffic website. I agree, it would be insane to play the gamble of removing the banners in that league. But tell me: why has ever single-site- website of a restaurant, fishing club and retro gamer blog a cookie banner? For what reason? They won’t making a turnover you dream about in your example even if they would win the lottery, twice.