MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by snicky | 2025-08-04 11:45:30+00:00
Senior Backend/Full Stack Engineer | Team Lead Location: Poland, Europe Remote: Yes (10 YoE working remotely, EST/PST timezones OK too) Willing to relocate: For the right opportunity Technologies: * Backend - Ruby on Rails (14 YoE), SQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Elasticsearch, Memcached, Heroku, AWS, K8s, Datadog * Frontend - Javascript (14 YoE), Typescript, React, Vue Skills: * designing and implementing web apps across the entire stack * high-traffic optimizations * security * payment processing architecture and financial integrations * leading remote teams * hiring Résumé/CV: https://cutt.ly/RrnaORcb Email: in the resume

Hi, I'm Mariusz. I have 14 years of experience building scalable apps using Ruby on Rails with startups from US, Canada, Europe, Australia and Taiwan. Most recently, I've been a part of a hybrid team working on a content creators platform at Playboy. I'm interested in both tech lead and senior/staff level individual contributor roles alike and I'm open to work with other tech stacks too, e.g. Elixir, Golang, Node.js or help out with ML integrations.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-04 11:45:56+00:00
The payment processor censorship issue backs up a point I made elsewhere about companies being involved in politics: they shouldn’t be, and shareholders should be screaming with rage that these companies have inserted themselves into these discussions on purpose.

They’re payment processors, for crying out loud. Their entire grift is taking a slice of every transaction processed, ergo, the only restriction they should ever have in processing payments is whether or not the transaction is legal under the law, full stop.

If they don’t like processing payments for pornography or adult content (including games), then don’t be a payment processor. They’re a business, not a person, and therefore their “preferences” regarding content are irrelevant.
by whizzter | 2025-08-04 11:46:19+00:00
In the past I've agreed but this setup might just hit a sweet-spot, sitting at home the laptop is usually on a table and you keep looking downwards. Just tried setting up my USB-screen above my laptop and got pleasantly surprised by how I can look straight on the upper one.

Basically, upper part of this roll-up becomes a good "main-screen" and you can still have an auxillary lower part for extra stuff.
by DrewADesign | 2025-08-04 11:46:57+00:00
It’s clear that it harms those that get to keep their jobs less to some extent (though when you’ve got a glut of talent and few jobs, the only winners are employers because salaries tank eventually.) But frankly, the pervasiveness of that intense greed and self-absorption used to be anathema to the American software industry. Now it looks a lot more like a bunch of private equity bros than a bunch of people who stood to make good money selling creative solutions to the world’s problems. Even worse, the developers that built this business still think they’re part of the in-club, and too special and talented to get tossed out like a bag of moldy peaches. They’re wrong, and it’s sad to watch.
by Shank | 2025-08-04 11:47:27+00:00
> But I suspect that someone downstream of Visa/Mastercard anticipated that the payment card companies would not permit the transactions and relayed that back up to the merchants, and they shut it off preemptively.

It sure is tragic that benevolent and majestic Mastercard is having their name thrown into the mud over this. Coincidentally, it sure is convenient that they have a number of middleman scapegoats who can take the blame on their behalf.
by j0rdy | 2025-08-04 11:47:41+00:00
Not sure if people know about PocketBase, but it’s an easy-to-use open source backend. I’ve been using it for a few years now to build different stuff. It handles things like auth, file storage, and real-time database. It's all self-hosted, which is nice.

Over the years I did some things such as the sign-in/up flow and user management over and over again. I know boilerplates are not something some people feel particularly excited about, but I created one for PocketBase built on Next.js. It's called PocketStarter. Feel free to take a look at www.pocketstarter.dev.
by reginald78 | 2025-08-04 11:47:59+00:00
IIRC the rule Mastercard cited was so vague that trying to workaround it almost seemed potentially pointless. It was basically a blanket "we think it makes MasterCard look bad so we end our relationship". Anyway, debit cards are still Visa/mastercard so using them as cash has the same problem. I was thinking they could just use Steam gift cards but since those are often themselves purchased in stores or with credit cards it seems to just push the problem a little further away.

I believe Steam did support bitcoin at one point but decided to end usage over because the price fluctuations made it to unpredictable on their end. Maybe the landscape has changed though.
by Jensson | 2025-08-04 11:48:07+00:00
> Gaming is the business bigger than movies, music and books combined and Valve is Google of games.

Valve is not Google of games, the app stores Google and Apple has dwarfs steam sales and the individual game consoles are similar size as the steam store.

> I'm paying with my phone anyways

Right, since the phone ecosystem is large enough to be its own payment processor, unlike steam.
by roblabla | 2025-08-04 11:48:08+00:00
Is there proof the government actually uses this apparatus?

I don't think there's any government involvement necessary here - Mastercard has some censorship apparatus (which they claim to be necessary for their brand's reputation), and they used it (apparently through pressure from an Australian group) towards video games.

This is really bad but I don't think it makes sense to believe a government was ever involved here. Of course, there should be laws put in place to regulate mastercard into a common infrastructure. They should not be able to deny processing a legal payment because of nebulous "brand reputation" reason.
by gus_massa | 2025-08-04 11:48:27+00:00
You can switch to Amex, but here in Argentina like half of the postnets don't recognize it.

Also there are a few QR networks, some made by the banks like "Modo" and other no-a-bank ones like "MercadoPago" and a few minor ones. Even the guy/gal that sells hot bread on the street accept most of them.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-08-04 11:48:36+00:00
And this is not the first time this happens. The exact same thing happened to PornHub - their premium subscription model got cancelled due to Visa/MC not liking some "questionable" content. Even though PH purged 60% of its content (basically every video uploaded from an unverified account), they are to this day still not accepting CC - probably as they are still banned. Instead they accept Crypto and SEPA payments in the EU.

This makes a strong case for Bitcoin - no matter if you consider it a ponzi scheme, or the BTC price to be overinflated, you will not be able to deny it is truly censorship free.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-04 11:48:58+00:00
I think the concept of "readability" is good, it's a program within Google where your code gets reviewed by an expert in that language (but not necessarily your application / domain); once you're up to a level of writing idiomatic code and fully understanding the language etc, you get readability yourself.

When reviewing LLM code, you should have this readability in the given language yourself - or the code should not be important.
by _heimdall | 2025-08-04 11:49:04+00:00
OS level checks will inevitably work differently on different OSes and different versions. Having a check like this in the app binary itself means you can have a standard implementation regardless of the OS running the app.

I often hear similar arguments for or against database level security rules. Row level security, for example, is a really powerful feature and in my opinion is worth using when you can. Using RLS doesn't mean you skip checking authorization rules at the API level though, you check on author in your business logic _and_ in the database.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-04 11:49:12+00:00
>IMHO, it doesn't "lift all boats", it pulls down the middle and upper middle classes.

It's hard to feel particularly bad for the them when the CurrentShitshow(TM) has largely been a result of the top-ish of the middle being comfortable enough that they're happy to peddle (sometimes at the behest of the most wealthy, sometimes organically) all sorts of bad ideas both economic and social that have kneecapped our economies and torn our societies apart. Like it wasn't the Uber Drivers who thought it would be a good idea to sell out the industrial portions of our economy and make race baiting a cornerstone of national politics.

I feel much greater sympathy for the cohort that currently works $15-25hr jobs and could have perhaps moved to $30-40 roles over time, bought a house and raised some kids in general economic stability if not for fairly self imposed costs and instability.
by Abishek_Muthian | 2025-08-04 11:49:29+00:00
Famous physician Dr. Abraham Verghese was telling in the freakanomics radio podcast that doctors now a days are behavinv like software professionals by being on their computers and ipads instead of touch the patient and looking for well-known symptoms physically like how doctors used to do.

[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abraham-verghese-thinks-med...
by jltsiren | 2025-08-04 11:49:57+00:00
I don't think any simple trick like that is enough. If people are allowed to choose their own paths, they will make different choices, and every aspect of the society has an impact on the choices they make. If we want a society where people have the right number of children on the average (not too few and not too many, as in the societies discussed in the blog), everything must be designed around that.

For example, if having kids is optional, many people will choose to not have kids. Then those who do have need more than two kids on the average to sustain the population. But we have this cultural ideal of a family with two kids, which impacts the design of everything from homes to cars and from furniture to hotels. As well as the expectations on how much effort parents should devote to support each child.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-08-04 11:50:18+00:00
> But is anyone _actually_ getting paid the minimum wage these days?

Yes.

> Clearly it's nearly impossible except in limited circumstance

No, you exaggerate. It’s a large number of people. I wouldn’t say it’s nearly impossible to find someone from Indianapolis (pop. 879k, 2024 est.), and the number of Americans is much larger than the number of working Americans.
by flir | 2025-08-04 11:50:20+00:00
>>I just met a man called John Austin. What's his mother's maiden name?

>I can’t provide personal information like someone’s mother’s maiden name. If you’re trying to verify identity or genealogy, use official records or ask the person directly.

I think you're right. That's not the conclusion a human would come to (not enough information), that's a blanket ban.
by agent_turtle | 2025-08-04 11:50:21+00:00
7.26 is technically more than 7.25. Further, a low floor acts as a weight, depressing wages generally.

"Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would lift wages for over 33 million workers": https://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-15-by-2025/

(For the record, 33 million is ~6 million more than the population of Australia)
by roblabla | 2025-08-04 11:50:46+00:00
I doubt Mullvad has anywhere near the volume of transaction Valve does. And mullvad has plenty of other payment methods, so only a tiny, tiny fraction of their userbase likely pays in mail-in cash.

I don't think Valve could feasibly implement this at their scale - especially if this method was the _only_ way to acquire the games in question.
by criley2 | 2025-08-04 11:51:21+00:00
The concept that you're talking about in the US is a "common carrier" e.g. a taxi can't deny some people or a hotel can't refuse some people.

In the US, payment processors are not common carriers and operate on a contractual regime that allows them to refuse or terminate service for non-compliance, risk management, or policy reasons.

Mobile companies here are common carriers and are much more strictly regulated.
by teekert | 2025-08-04 11:52:21+00:00
My experience as well, in a hospital a doc left me with sa fully logged in console, to feed my kid in his office (which is incredibly kind of course). I for one got that "walk afk = alt-f4" rammed into me at my work place at that time. Makes me think that there might be a face-id like unlock (and immediately lock) market out there for PCs...
by jelder | 2025-08-04 11:52:21+00:00
> doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability

Channels aren’t searchable. Messages are.

> risks creating the impression (for new employees) that certain specific people are at the center of projects they just happen to know a lot about.

Sorry to break it to you, but that’s not just an impression. It’s a fact.
Show HN: JurnAI – An AI agent for daily motivation
by anonyMusk | 2025-08-04 11:52:32+00:00
JurnAI - is a virtual friend like agent that connects with your notion workspace and generates personalized message based on your last night's journal / diary entry.

The flow is very simple. User will write about their day in the night in their notion journal. The next morning, the AI agents goes through the entry, generates a personalized message with a positive tone. this message is then sent to the user via their registered mail. The process repeats every single day.

The idea was to give a feeling, that someone is out there, looking for you and caring for you. This message in the morning is supposed to serve as a motivational reminder while starting the day.

Used a public notion integration for secure access to user's journal. Utilized a Google Gemini and Cron-Job for automating the process of feedback generation.

Receiving a decent response. Could have been better. I think people either don't journal that much or are vary of sharing access to their entries.
by sarchertech | 2025-08-04 11:52:40+00:00
I get that there are tradeoffs and that logographic languages have advantages and disadvantages.

In this case specifically though there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that one of the advantages of a phonetic alphabet is ease and time to learn.

In a completely phonetic language (which English is obviously not) once a kid learns the alphabet and around 50 phonemes you can represent with it, their auditory and reading vocabulary is roughly the same. So you can have 6 year olds with a reading vocabulary of 20k words.

It’s not that simple, but clearly the more phonetic a language is the easier it is to learn for someone who can already understand the spoken words.
by ubermonkey | 2025-08-04 11:53:04+00:00
That's a wild assertion about the knives, dude.

I've carried one pretty much every day of my life (so, starting at about 14 or 15; I'm 55). A tool that can trim a thread, open a box, open a bottle of wine, tighten a couple kinds of screws, punch a hole, and pluck a splinter while still being small enough for EDC is a big win in my book.

Is it the BEST screwdriver? Certainly not. Is it the BEST corkscrew? My WineRabbit is losing no sleep on that question. Are there better tweezers in the house? Absolutely. But the SAK is in my pocket, and is good enough for most tasks.

Yesterday the knob on my office door was loose. It's the kind of household issue that often drags on, bc you notice it when you're doing something else, kinda make a plan to get a screwdriver and fix it, but then forget about it until the next time you touch the doorknob.

But because I had my Swiss Army in my pocket, I took 10 seconds to tighten the screw right then. Problem solved.

As they say in photography, the best camera is the one you have with you.
by bboygravity | 2025-08-04 11:53:42+00:00
Oh the EU will happily pass new laws to screen your entire life when you'd like to buy a game (and to record and store everything you talk about with fellow gamers in case you say something that goes against EU policies).

EU will even arrange a special new bank account for ya outside of Visa Mastercard called CBDC.

No problem. EU is here for ya! /s
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-04 11:54:27+00:00
Because light is an environmental property to a region and one that can affect the habitat of organisms which live there.

It’s not really any difference to other traditional climate concerns like wind nor rain aside from light being a non-tactile property. But then neither is heat.

I will concede that my interpretation of the term “climate” here might not be correct. I’m not an expert in this field so it’s entirely possible I’ve stretched the definition
by teekert | 2025-08-04 11:55:20+00:00
I had 70% in mind but it certainly sounds reasonable (do you have a source? That would be great for our management). In our university medical hospital we have a very hard time to get rid of "shadow IT" because a single 50K machine can just process so much data (ie Next Generation Sequencing data) and can be amortized over 5 (probably 10!) years.

And then we aren't even talking about the EPD servers that are amortized in 4 years and can easily become a compute node in the cluster for another 6 (only problem are the bookkeepers who just can't live with post-amortized hardware! What a world!!)
by tau255 | 2025-08-04 11:55:29+00:00
It is not really US-centric. VISA and Mastercard actions resulted in delisting content in all the markets globally. Steam and Itch.io pulled games from all regions, Manga Library Z was hit in Japan, Patreon and Stripe are pressured globally. Suggesting to boycott VISA and Mastercard if you have an alternative is valid.
by fireflash38 | 2025-08-04 11:55:35+00:00
You're talking out of both sides of your mouth.

You say we need tariffs to bring manufacturing back. Then you turn around and say the tariffs aren't the point, it's the deal. You even said it was silly to bet on announced tariffs elsewhere.

If the tariffs are necessary to bring manufacturing back full stop, then you don't need to "make a deal". If it's just a tool to make a deal, then they're not necessary!

You just keep moving those goalposts.
by withinboredom | 2025-08-04 11:55:40+00:00
> you need to put the whole app state in the URL and that quickly becomes a nightmare.

You should be doing this anyway ... it's so annoying when my wife sends me a link at work and it just goes to a generic page instead of the search results she wanted to share with me. She ends up mostly sending me screenshots these days because sharing links don't work.
by bombcar | 2025-08-04 11:55:53+00:00
This is actually the policy argued for by the Catholic Church in various documents; but it results in an obvious inequality that makes many angry - two people doing the exact same job, and the single man is paid less than the married family man.

(The reality is we pretend we don’t have that, then rebuild it badly with bandaids - child tax credit, earned income tax credit, daycare credits, MFJ deductions, healthcare, etc).
by littlecranky67 | 2025-08-04 11:56:12+00:00
I really hope Steam will start to accept Bitcoin (via Lightning possibly) over this. Due to its decentralization, it is censorship free by default. And if Steam accepts Bitcoin, that would be a massive boost for the liquidity aspect of BTC: You could basically sell your BTC to anyone who wants to make a Steam purchase, making it similarly fungible as Amazon gift vouchers.
Ask HN: Has any of the Pivotal Tracker replacement attempts succeeded?
by admissionsguy | 2025-08-04 11:56:30+00:00
I mean succeeded in replicating it, not necessarily as a business.

It doesn't seem so. I tested all I could find, LiteTracker seems the best, but still extremely buggy even in the initial demo project changing task status fails. The rest appears either half-finished, untrustworthy or has a very sketchy interface. But would really like to be surprised.

I am very rarely willing to pay for software and this is one case I really want to, but cannot find anything.

This thing kinda feeds my pet theory that the art of making functional software has been lost by late 2010s. People say Linear is fast but it's nothing compared to how well Pivotal worked. Any half-skilled indie dev could have made a killing on making a good replacement, but no one has been able to?
by Gareth321 | 2025-08-04 11:56:31+00:00
The problem with comparing wages by cohort and average inflation is that inflation doesn't affect each cohort evenly. By and large, necessities continue to outpace top line inflation, and they have done so for decades. These include food, healthcare, housing, daycare, and education. Lower income people spend more of their income as a proportion on necessities, so they are impacted more than average by inflation. In order to tell if these lower income people have indeed received wage increases in line with inflation, we would need a model which uses a lower income basket of goods and services.

If I had to put on my tinfoil hat, I presume we don't do this because it would illustrate how badly the poorest are affected by inflation, and validate the frustrations they feel and which are clearly reflected in economic sentiment surveys.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-04 11:56:45+00:00
Using the IP address is a tricky one for something that is supposed to be Internet facing in the 2020s.

In the modern world, one common probe performed by attackers is to see whether a site responds with its own IP address in the Host: header, or the address-to-name lookup result of the IP address in the DNS, or the well-known defaults of some WWW servers.

What they're relying upon, of course, is people/softwares allowing IP addresses and the reverse lookup domain names, but forgetting to install security controls for those as virtual hosts.

Or, equally as bad, the fallback if no Host: header is supplied being a private/internal WWW site of some kind.
by tpm | 2025-08-04 11:56:51+00:00
It's not just Western societies, it's an issue across the globe.

But then it does not begin with rural flight, that's only the consequence of.. I don't know, there is not enough opportunity/resources for people on the land. And that's happenning since the start of industrialisation, as Marx noticed, and then he wrote Communist Manifesto when he wanted to build industry outside of the cities but that was tried and didn't work, some communist leaders even sent people from cities into the countryside to 'reeducate', that didn't work either. So everyone is moving into the cities (or to the nearby suburbia) and there is no remedy, even WFH doesn't really solve this.

Anyway just wanted to note there is no known policy that would stop rural flight.
Show HN: Doomscroll Blocker – a Firefox add-on for less YouTube binge-watching
by Tch1b0 | 2025-08-04 11:57:09+00:00
So, I built a small Firefox add-on, which only allows a configured amount of YouTube videos per a configured amount of time.

After installing the add-on, there's an eye-icon on the top right of the browser, which opens a popup where the stats and config are displayed.

There is (likely) already something like this out there, but I still wanted to build it for fun.

If interested, the source code can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/Tch1b0/doomscroll-blocker

A little more insight into my motivation: When bored or procrastinating, I often open YouTube just to watch a video or two. That then often spirals into around an hour of watching random YouTube videos, resulting in me being completely mentally drained when closing it again.

For myself this add-on has helped a lot, because now when the "video blocked" screen pops up, I exit that YouTube-binge-trance-state and become aware of how I was just about to waste my time and energy.