MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What payment gateways are you using for a subscription-based service
by shydrablack | 2025-08-16 18:04:58+00:00
I'm building a new platform and need to integrate a professional payment gateway. My primary requirement is seamless access control: the system must automatically grant or revoke user access as their monthly subscription is paid or expires.

I'm curious to know what solutions others have implemented for this. Please drop your recommendations below and share any insights on why your chosen gateway works well for this use case. I'm especially interested in ease of integration and reliability. Thanks, guys!
by mothballed | 2025-08-16 18:05:00+00:00
This is why being a septic guy seems like a good gig. I paid my septic guy $10k for one day's labor, with about $4k in materials to come in with a massive excavator and one helper.

I'm sure the cost of his excavator ran into ~$1k of wear/depreciation over that day but two men basically cleared $5k in a combined 20 man hours.

If you can deal with poop you can make a lot of money. Doesn't seem to be much interest in that trade either, no one thinks to become a septic installer.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-08-16 18:05:25+00:00
> Yet the economic markets are reacting as if they were governed by stochastic parrots.

That's because they are. The stock market is all about narrative.

> Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence.

Yes it is, the mega companies that wil be providing the intelligence are, Nvidia, AMD, TSMC, ASML, add your favourite foundry.
by bostik | 2025-08-16 18:05:26+00:00
The cure for the spam problem is to turn the incentives around in the patent examination process. Make it highly adversarial from the go and reward the patent office staff for rejecting applications, with solid argument trails. A good part of that would be to have the applicants submit their researched potential prior art and PROVE that their patent is actually novel. (If they haven't submitted a clearly discoverable piece of prior art and the examiner finds that out, that's an immediate rejection. With extreme prejudice, and preferably multiplied rejection award.)

It would still be gameable (everything is), but it would certainly curb the flood of copycat "X-but-in-domain-Y" patents once the pool of prior art used to reject crummy patents becomes better known and established. The additional pool of rejected applications then also feeds into the prior art foundations.
by tremon | 2025-08-16 18:05:30+00:00
I understand where you're coming from. But I also think that you're wasting a lot of effort in talking to those useful fools while they're still drinking from the social media and faux news firehose. And that's by design -- you are meant to expend your energy on that asymmetric (and in my view unwinnable) battle, so that you leave the actual policymakers alone.

(sidenote: I said "tools", as in they're disposable means to an end. I'm not sure if you called them fools because you misread my comment or you switched to that term to try and placate me).

edit: actually, I think that my sidenote goes to the core of our disagreement. In your view, there are 77M battles to fight and if you manage to win just a few percent of those to your side, things can be stopped. In my view, 95% of those voters no longer matter. The party is now in power and has full control over all branches of government and media. There is no way they will relinquish power over such a minor technical detail as an election. They only need a few million jackboots to maintain the status quo, the rest is disposable.
by fl7305 | 2025-08-16 18:05:35+00:00
The Swedish airforce doesn't have a "grouping of vehicles".

They are all parked individually at separate locations kilometers away from the road landing strip.

When the plane comes in for landing, they (3-5 pickup trucks and a tiny tanker) all scramble and meet up when the plane touches down. Refuel and rearm in 10 minutes, drive away again.

I've seen this done with my own eyes, it's very impressive.
by thomastjeffery | 2025-08-16 18:06:24+00:00
If it's not a disability, then why can't I work on projects that I am excited to work on?

Sure, my ADHD experience is probably the impetus for most of those projects in the first place, but that doesn't help me get anything done, whether I want to or not.

It sounds like what really happened is that you found an appropriate amount/cadence of medication for your body. That's much more difficult than many realize, which is why each stimulant is sold with 5 different delivery methods: immediate release, capsule with drug dust coated in timed digestion substance, capsule with hole to pump via capillary action, skin patch, and the bonus prodrug lisdexamphetamine that metabolizes into amphetamine at the rate of digestion.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-16 18:06:30+00:00
Framing it as a handicapping disease is not particularly helpful either. ADHD cannot be cured, we have to live with it and cope however we can. Treatment is absolutely an option but we can also change our environment.

People act like ADHD patients are feeble minded and that just isn't the truth. In the right contexts we can also focus quite intensely. Especially with treatment.

It's true that neurotypical people also experience hyperfocus, that's not in dispute. I don't really like these comparisons to be honest. I just think the fact ADHD patients also experience hyperfocus really should make people rethink the pejorative "attention deficit" label.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-16 18:07:01+00:00
I'm familiar with Western Union, as it's how my local neighborhood sends money back home in stacks of twenties and hundreds, one money order at a time. The problem is theirs (and Moneygram's) fees can be insanely steep due to a lack of competition or government equivalents; the author of the original article rightly points out that wire transfers in the US can be INSANELY expensive as a result (my bank charges $20 per transfer; a domestic money order from USPS, by comparison, tops out at $3.60 for $1,000; WU quotes ~$45-$60 depending on country and method, with another $25 for credit cards). Add in growing nationalism about penalizing sending money across borders via these methods (as migrants often do when sending money back home), and the costs add up shockingly quick for what's effectively a digital ledger transaction on the back end.

To WU and Moneygram's credit, however, they do offer more digital wallet integrations and direct bank transfers nowadays. Their product lines are growing, but their fees aren't decreasing as they effectively have a captured (impoverished) market. Still, since money orders can be as safe as cash, having them as a viable alternative to the private payment card industry is necessary for business to function and smaller vendors to thrive, particularly in niche industries.
by stahtops | 2025-08-16 18:07:22+00:00
I tried to buy a Prusa. Even after I paid them they couldn’t tell me when the order would ship or be delivered.

Instead they pointed me at some webpage with a lead time table? Pretty sure the table also changed/slipped over the eight days I waited for them to get their act together.

If someone from Prusa is reading this: I don’t want to hear about your internal manufacturing lead times. Especially if they’re going to slip. Commit to a ship date you know you can meet and deliver.

When I found out that Prusa had absolutely no clue what the ship date would be, I cancelled my order and went with Bambu.
by judofyr | 2025-08-16 18:09:50+00:00
A mutex would be the most trivial example. I don't believe that is possible to implement, in the general case, with only acquire-release.

Sequential consistency mostly become relevant when you have more than two threads interacting with both reads and writes. However, if you only have single-consumer (i.e. only one thread reading) or single-producer (i.e. only one thread writing) then the acquire-release semantics ends up becoming sequential since the single-consumer/producer implicitly enforces a sequential ordering. I can potentially see some multi-producer multi-consumer queues lock-free queues needing sequential atomics.

I think it's rare to see atomics with sequential consistency in practice since you typically either choose (1) a mutex to simplify the code at the expense of locking or (2) acquire-release (or weaker) to minimize the synchronization.
by kptbarbarossa | 2025-08-16 18:09:54+00:00
Hi HN,

Just added an X content creator inside the app so users don’t have to switch between tools.

It’s still very early, but already working for basic use cases. I’d love to hear whether this feels genuinely useful, or if it’s unnecessary bloat.

Feedback would mean a lot: https://validationly.com/blog/x-content-generator-guide
by mhandley | 2025-08-16 18:10:25+00:00
If you have two pipes of the same height, one filled with fresh water and one with salt water, the pressure will be greater at the bottom of the salt-water pipe because salt-water is denser. Connect them at the bottom with a pipe and water will flow from salt to fresh until the pressures equalize. But connect them with a membrane, and this is countered by the osmotic pressure of fresh water trying to get to salt water, so you don't get any magic flow for free. You have however got a pressure gradient for free - just not enough to desalinate.

If you put this in the ocean, you can remove the salt pipe and get the same effect. But if you want continuous fresh water, you need to further increase the pressure difference across the membrane by continuously lowering the height of the fresh-water column by pumping water up and out of the top. That takes energy, but not as much as it would take if we had to raise the pressure on the salt-water side.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-16 18:11:47+00:00
If you have been ghosted by your employer for a few weeks, and he then brings personal struggles into the conversation of firing you, it is understandable that the author would have some gripes.

The manager/owner failed to manage in any number of ways (graceful exits, cash flow, task assignment), and then brought his personal problems to a firing (you should not - ever - mention your own financial issues while firing an employee from your Hawaiian vacation).

You are right that business is transactional, but there is the underlying notion of goodwill (which accountants can and do put on the balance sheet). It is the reason why we tell our old employer that we are leaving in two weeks instead of ghosting them the day our new job starts. It is the reason that you don’t fire people over text from a Hawaiian vacation. You don’t want to be the employee with the reputation for giving no notice, and you don’t want to be the employer with a reputation for firing people heartlessly. The employer in this case significantly reduced the goodwill part of their balance sheet to save a few weeks of salary for this guy. Do you think the other employees won’t read this? What will the morale hit among other employees cost the business? Would you stay at a business where the owner is firing people like this while admitting to personal financial problems?
by ksymph | 2025-08-16 18:12:01+00:00
After years of jumping between different platforms and systems I've landed on linkhut [0]. I like that it's social by default and chronological-oriented, with flexible but really basic options for organization (tags and 'read later' flag). It makes it so that bookmarking neat things actually feels like it has a point, even if I don't always organize them in a way I can easily find later.

[0] https://linkhut.org/
by no_wizard | 2025-08-16 18:12:10+00:00
Something about my old CTO and VP of Eng I respected is they were still technical enough to call out this kind of thing. For as big as that company was they really held down complexity and overengineering to a real minimum.

Unfortunately the rest of the executive has leaned on them so hard about AI boosting productivity they aren’t able to avoid thst becoming a mess
by nlawalker | 2025-08-16 18:12:28+00:00
I agree, but I think my point is that the interview context and expectations can differ radically different from the role context, depending on the interviewer. If the expectation of the interviewer is that the interviewee should be asking questions to determine scale needs, then they should be explicit about that. For all the interviewee knows, you're going to ding them and ultimately fail them for asking too many questions and not exhibiting knowledge and experience.
by zamalek | 2025-08-16 18:12:35+00:00
I'm guessing this is fiction, but it's not unreasonable. Employers love to harp on about "loyalty," "being family," and "caring for you." Try to remember the last time any employer of yours has demonstrated these traits for either you or a, functionally ex-, colleague.

We need to stop participating in this brouhaha as an industry. If your employer wanted to demonstrate loyalty you would see it in your contract.

Operating a business is hard? Well, yes, so is surviving.
by bambax | 2025-08-16 18:13:22+00:00
One way to think about 1-to-many relationships is to think in the other way, "many-to-one". You don't join the orders to the customers, you join the customers to the orders (enrich the orders with customer information).

It's very natural to want customer information when querying an order, and if you have a view like orders_with_customer_info, you get that with zero effort when querying that view by order id.

You also get consolidated data (orders by customer) by doing

select count(*), sum(amount) from orders_with_customer_info group by customer_id

which I think is pretty straightforward.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-08-16 18:13:40+00:00
Sorry it may be from the paper linked on that page.

A strong preference against engaging with harmful tasks; A pattern of apparent distress when engaging with real-world users seeking harmful content; and A tendency to end harmful conversations when given the ability to do so in simulated user interactions.

I'm sure they'll have the definition in a paper somewhere, perhaps the same paper.
by dingnuts | 2025-08-16 18:14:16+00:00
it's just poorly named; it's an executive function disorder. The hyper focus you described is just as uncontrolled and pathological as lack of attention. I used to hyper focus on StumbleUpon. You think that's evidence I _don't_ have an attention disorder?

Stop spreading medical misinformation. You're extremely uninformed.

Here are some lectures, go educate yourself: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKF2Eq0eYbbrNLoJjFpWG_U...
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-16 18:14:45+00:00
The author did not claim that the entire or the main reason for longer flight times was ATC delays. He wouldn’t be dead wrong if he had made that claim since as you note, ATC delays are higher than they were in the 90s. But he didn’t make the claim that ATC was the full and only cause of delays.

His conclusion is that there are a multitude of causes, among them, ATC staffing delays.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-16 18:15:33+00:00
SSDs and USB flash drives in particular are full of sketchy NAND flash chips.

Some of those chips are straight up salvaged from other electronics. Some are "known bad" chips, hanging in by a thread while the flash controller is fighting to sweep all the bad blocks under the rug. Some are dead MicroSD cards - with the dead MicroSD controllers bypassed to access the NAND die directly.

NAND flash chips are "everything but the squeal" of electronics. There is a lot of chips that "somewhat work", and a lot of people trying to "upcycle" them into something that works long enough to be sold.
by notherhack | 2025-08-16 18:16:10+00:00
"The Debian development team put it like this: So, given the wafer thin vectors of attack here, the extreme age of the images in question, and the fact that even at the time that they were fresh, they were images that shouldn't be used in production anyhow (Debian's "development" repositories), we've opted to leave them in place.

Binarly kind of agrees ... "
by pessimizer | 2025-08-16 18:17:26+00:00
First thing I (and a lot of people) do with a drive is encrypt the volume and write zeros to the entire thing. Otherwise, you're leaking information about how much is on them after you encrypt them for your own needs. Once they've been "erased" they're ready to use (or give away to friends.)

edit: of course who knows what's on the hardware, but I haven't heard of the exploit that would doom me.
by adastra22 | 2025-08-16 18:18:35+00:00
There’s a lot of myth in this myth-correcting post. I’ve doubled dosed by accident and although I felt like my heart was going to explode (and was very anxious over that), I still felt absolutely nothing resembling a euphoric high.

If you have good vision you do not benefit from glasses. In fact it makes things worse, as those with good vision are able to use their eye muscles to adjust focus but the glasses make that harder.
by xpe | 2025-08-16 18:20:04+00:00
I welcome counterarguments, rebuttals, criticisms. I learn very little from downvotes other than guesses like: people don’t like the tone, my comment hit too close to home, people are uninterested in deeper issues of morality or philosophy, people lack enough a grounding to appreciate my words, or impatience, or people don’t like being disagreed with, even if the comment is detailed and thoughtful.

Seeing the downvotes actually tells me we have more work to do. HN ain’t no hotbed for thoughtful analysis, that’s for sure. But it would be better if it was.
by furyofantares | 2025-08-16 18:21:41+00:00
I'm not looking for any kind of game changing class breaking work. I don't think I'm being understood here at all.

I must have put too much emphasis on PRNG or on maybe there's a more intelligent way to sample - you can ignore those comments. I just think it's framed poorly to make it sound more counterintuitive than it is.
by ramesh31 | 2025-08-16 18:21:42+00:00
>They routinely produce contradictions, fail simple tasks like counting the letters in a word etc. etc

It's all about tools. Given sufficient tooling, the model's inherent abilities become irrelevant. Give a model a tool that counts characters and it will get this question right 100% of the time. Copy and paste to your domain. And what are tools but a means of providing context from the real world? People seem blinded by focusing on the raw abilities of models, missing the fact that these things should be seen simply as reasoning engines for tool usage.
by zarzavat | 2025-08-16 18:22:02+00:00
You're absolutely right, but AIs still have their little quirks that set them apart.

Every model has a faint personality, but since the personality gets "mass produced" any personality or writing style makes it easier to detect it as AI rather than harder. e.g. em dashes, etc.

But reducing personality doesn't help either because then the writing becomes insipid — slop.

Human writing has more variance, but it's not "temperature" (i.e. token level variance), it's per-human variance. Every writer has their own individual style. While it's certainly possible to achieve a unique writing style with LLMs through fine-tuning it's not cost effective for something like ChatGPT, so the only control is through the system prompt, which is a blunt instrument.
by reactordev | 2025-08-16 18:22:22+00:00
Louder for the back.

It’s like people crave complexity because it makes them, indispensable? Like if you’re the only one who knows how the billing reconciliation service works, they couldn’t possibly fire you?

They will.

Being pragmatic is something I look for in engineers. So long as they understand where to draw the line (and use a queue instead of cron). However that’s usually several years away at this point and them being able to say “You don’t need that, all you need is…” is welcome. Then again, that’s probably why I got fired. :shrug:
by LoganDark | 2025-08-16 18:23:27+00:00
I don't think they're completely not looking for that entire type of answer, but those examples are pretty dry and don't really go into the reasoning for your opinion, which is probably what they're worried about. Whenever you say something isn't worth considering or doesn't seem necessary, you should be explaining exactly why you think that, and exactly where it would be worth considering or seem necessary, because otherwise you just look like someone who simply doesn't care about whatever kind of scalability they're asking about.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-16 18:23:56+00:00
This is the problem with increased wealth disparity. We're all subject to the whims and fleeting thoughts of the top 20 billionaires. If Mark Z has an idea about social media, well, he controls 80% or something of social media. Even if his idea is terrible, we have no alternatives to switch to, we just have to wait out the irrationality.
by rwyinuse | 2025-08-16 18:24:42+00:00
For vast majority of human history most people spent their days doing fairly simple physical work, which didn't require that much sustained focus compared to what an average knowledge worker needs today. Obviously they didn't have smartphones, computers and other forms of distraction either. So really it's quite obvious that most people with ADHD would have done much better in such environment, compared to the unnatural mess we live in today.

So, people with ADHD have always existed, but it's our modern world full of distractions and unnatural work which makes it a much bigger deal than it would otherwise be.
by achenet | 2025-08-16 18:25:27+00:00
Not GP, but I suspect it's the part where you call them "sexist" -

It seems like in your head "professional arm candy" must be female.

"Boy-toys" are a thing, and people from the Kardashian mother to the local gay nightlife empresario have them :)

By assuming that "professional arm candy" must be of one gender... You've kinda accidentally made a sexist remark, ironically enough ^^"
by charleslmunger | 2025-08-16 18:25:35+00:00
I too interpretat those docs as contradictory, and I wonder if, like how Java 5 strengthened volatile semantics, this happened at some point in C# too and the docs weren't updated? Either way the specification, which the docs say is definitive, says it's acquire/release.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...

"When a field_declaration includes a volatile modifier, the fields introduced by that declaration are volatile fields. [...] For volatile fields, such reordering optimizations are restricted:

A read of a volatile field is called a volatile read. A volatile read has “acquire semantics”; that is, it is guaranteed to occur prior to any references to memory that occur after it in the instruction sequence. A write of a volatile field is called a volatile write. A volatile write has “release semantics”; that is, it is guaranteed to happen after any memory references prior to the write instruction in the instruction sequence."
by jonahbenton | 2025-08-16 18:25:38+00:00
True but not the point and also false.

There is a ton of impact measurement- Gates Foundation, for instance, does a tremendous amount of that, as did MacAskill's Effective Altruism infrastructure. The landscape is littered with NGOs doing work and measuring and modeling. CZI and Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective are orgs that have strong opinions about what and how while still generally being "philanthropists." And there are plenty of folks on the other end of the spectrum, more Chicago School people, who have completely different opinions of what charity is and is not and what our goals for humanity are and so forth.

BOK is saying- none of that is his job, that is not the hat he wants to wear. He is not wrong about that. Having enormous private capital pools is its own dysfunction. The strongest way to say it is that those capital pools are a sociopathic fundamentally unequal indulgence, and there is nothing wrong with relatively indiscriminately giving money away. So much of the metering and the "capital efficiency" of a "charity" that goes on is itself complete bullshit. "Throwing money away" is not a problem. Holding and thinking you think you know better- that's actually a problem.

Cheers.