MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AlienRobot | 2025-08-16 15:44:16+00:00
I think this is the biggest problem with crypto that it will never be able to solve. Every year there are millions of dollars lost in crypto due to scams (the "send me crypto and I'll give you money" kind). The instant you have a digital good people can actually buy with crypto and sell for real money, it becomes a money laundering machine.

Like you could get money from ransomware, buy a ton of games on steam, then sell the account to a third party.
by fariszr | 2025-08-16 15:44:56+00:00
The problem for me with dokploy is how do you manage in-config secrets for deployed apps. There are many apps which have secrets in their configs that can't be imported from env variables.

The only solution is to have these files locally on the server and then use an external bind mount.

I solved this in my docker-compose-gitops-action by just inserting secrets before copying the files to the server.

https://fariszr.com/docker-compose-gitops-github/

you can't do that with dokploy even with this dokploy action so it's triggers a pull from the source repo only.

Also the preview feature on dokploy is almost useless because there is no variable to get the preview URL dynamically.
by stavros | 2025-08-16 15:45:16+00:00
I feel like the phrase "all you need is Postgres" has the (often unspoken) continuation of "until you actually get to a trillion messages".

In other words, the developers you're envious of didn't start with Cassandra and ScyllaDB, they started with the problem of too many messages. That's not an architectural choice, that's product success.
by altairprime | 2025-08-16 15:45:26+00:00
“The root of the problem” is a more usual usage, but is just as readily applied (ha get it) as “the root of the solution”, especially when a dental pun can be bonded (puns are swell) to the headline (I can’t think of a way to pun on gumline here).

I found the phrasing really difficult to read and understand, even though I got the pun, so you’re not alone in that.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-08-16 15:45:34+00:00
> Your logic is fill in the blank

True, in short consider Tesla, jack up the prices as much as the market can bear, as usual. A bunch of people, who don't need subsidies, get them to buy at luxury prices. Little to no investment in low cost, mass production, chase capitalization instead. Environment... who cares, large trucks still pollute the most. LNG bad, etc.

> If you put crooks in charge, of course, everything becomes a con.

That's true too, but some schemes are easier to con than others. I don't see why we should act in ways that help the cons.

> so we should just not have government.

That's not my opinion. Utilities are government controlled or used to be anyways, I consider that necessary.
by guiambros | 2025-08-16 15:45:58+00:00
+1; Mac key bindings is a s**show.

BetterTouchTool is my solution. Incredibly hacky and time consuming, but I'm happy with my setup. Now my key bindings are 95% equal across Linux and Mac, so I don't have to spend too much cognitive energy having to remember which system I am using.

I wish we had some sort of key maps that you could copy between machines & OSes, and all the key bindings would work the same way.
by bediger4000 | 2025-08-16 15:46:29+00:00
How about things like NoScript JavaScript blockers? They don't futz with the DOM, at least directly.

What about DNS blocks?

If I am a German citizen, am I required to run other people's code now?

How does this play with DNS blocking of "pirate web sites"? How can a judge or jury tell one use from the other?
by landl0rd | 2025-08-16 15:47:00+00:00
There are two main reasons companies will block types of payments: material downside, like high chargeback risk, and reputational damage. It completely makes sense that certain things should be relegated to working with pmt processors who have structures designed to manage and be compensated for that risk. We shouldn’t socialize those costs onto the processors or, via higher fees, everyone who accepts credit cards. Instead, we should expect the companies who engage in those activities to shoulder their own burdens rather than pushing that risk off to others.
by nipevast | 2025-08-16 15:47:01+00:00
In many places, wireless networking has gone from being a “nice-to-have” to a critical factor in property value. People looking to buy or rent often ask about internet reliability the same way they ask about water, electricity, or location.

In Tanzania, for example, agencies like Danvast Land and Property https://danvastproperty.com/ and the wider Danvast Group are noticing this shift. Strong connectivity is becoming part of what defines a “modern property.” Even in land management and property consultancy, firms such as Danvast mention wireless infrastructure as part of investment considerations.

I’m curious how this plays out globally:

Should wireless networking be treated as a basic utility in property markets?

In your region, is connectivity already factored into property pricing or valuations?

Could this become a bigger driver of urban vs. rural migration?
by griffzhowl | 2025-08-16 15:47:17+00:00
> I also don't see any other system working without much more massive societal changes than anyone is talking about.

The other system is that the mass of people are coerced to work for tokens that buy them the right to food and to live in a house. i.e. the present system but potentially with more menial and arduous labour.

Hopefully we can think of something else
by misswaterfairy | 2025-08-16 15:47:26+00:00
Cloudflare are working on this at the moment.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/

There's also an open specification called x402:

https://www.x402.org/x402-whitepaper.pdf

I would definitely use this to charge US$100,000 per request from any AI company to crawl my site. I would exempt 'public good' crawlers like The Internet Archive though.

If AI companies valued at billions of dollars want to slurp up my contribution to the human condition, that's my price - subject to price rises only.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-16 15:47:28+00:00
I'm pretty ignorant of how all this works, never having had to take medication, so I apologize in advance if this comes off the wrong way. But isn't the reticence of doctors a result of the over-prescription of opioids leading to the very serious opioid crisis?

Not sure what the correct solution is, but on the one hand we don't want doctors to overprescribe, but on the other hand we want doctors to liberally prescribe without re-checks to make it easier for those who need it to get their meds. That would seem to put providers in a bind.
by klabb3 | 2025-08-16 15:47:40+00:00
> we don't know where the ceiling is.

The ceiling for current AI, while not provably known, can reasonably be upper bounded to human aggregate ability since these methods are limited to patterns in the training data. The big surprise was how many and sophisticated patterns were hiding in the training data (human written text). This current wave of AI progress is fueled by training data and compute in ”equal parts”. Since compute is cheaper, they’ve invested in more compute but failed scaling expectations since training data remained similarly sized.

Reaching super-intelligence through training data is paradoxical, because if it were known it wouldn’t be super-human. The other option is breaking out of the training data enclosure by relying on other methods. That may sound exciting but there’s no major progress I’m aware of that points that direction. It’s a little like being back to square one, before this hype cycle started. The smartest people seem to be focused on transformers, due to getting boatloads of money from companies or academia pushing them because of fomo.
by ada1981 | 2025-08-16 15:48:11+00:00
I was testing custom GPTs with a security prompt I developed. Typically it only causes the GPTs to reveal the configuration info and files; but this came out along with the configuration prompt. I cut off the part with the gpt specific tools it has access too, but could share if interested.

It’s possible it hallucinated a system prompt, but I’d give this a 95%+ chance to be accurate.
by masfuerte | 2025-08-16 15:48:13+00:00
I think I'm missing something.

Presumably, you use a function like this to represent your sum type containing the value "avalue":

(readA, readB) => readA(avalue)

The problem I have is that when you create this function you have to reify the return type Z. You can't use this value in arbitrary contexts where the accessors need to return different types.

How do you get this to work?
by teamonkey | 2025-08-16 15:49:08+00:00
Having read your post again, it’s my misunderstanding.

But I disagree that it’s unsustainable or unhealthy for the ecosystem. It’s clearly a loss-leader designed to keep you engaging with the platform, yes, but it’s not necessarily worse for the developers or the platform than, say, a hugely-discounted Steam sale (or a subscription service like Gamepass).

Also if Steam started giving away games like Epic do I’m pretty sure they’d be adored for it.
by criley2 | 2025-08-16 15:50:04+00:00
A few quick pulses doesn't make mush and is fine for a lot of applications. Otherwise, food processors have dicing kits https://i.imgur.com/cXbZ9aC.png

I enjoy the art of prep with my beautiful wa gyuto, I truly do. But if you put a 5 pound bag of large onion on front of me to dice, I will prefer the machine...
by alfiedotwtf | 2025-08-16 15:50:06+00:00
Yikes! Yeah no way could I do that without meds. It's amazing hearing of truck drivers driving 13 hours straight... but I guess that's why fighter pilots are on modafinil!

To be honest, now that I'm medicated I think I could at least do 5 hours without stopping. I might need some snacks though - the amount of sugar I've been consuming lately is unnatural
by Der_Einzige | 2025-08-16 15:50:38+00:00
Business class is 20x the price of economy (it should be no more than 4X and that should be taxpayer funded), isn't enough of the plane and is constantly sold out months before the flight on long flights.

"Premium economy" and similar doesn't give meaningful legroom improvements and is generally a scam.

The only option for tall people (not overweight) is exit rows which are also the first seats taken or the few "extra legroom" seats usually in the front of economy by the bathrooms. These seats are also taken months in advance.

Americans are tall because we are fed well. Our tallness is partly why we are so dominant during wartime. The world bends to our will, not the other way around.

We need widespread and popular "passenger revolts" to force the FAA to change policy. Make the lives of the airline executives hell and use political power to nationalize them yesterday. Privitization of the air was a massive mistake.
by TheDong | 2025-08-16 15:50:56+00:00
I once had a headache and thought about taking an aspirin, but you know if I take an aspirin and feel 10% better, I'll want to feel even better so I'll then just have to take meth, there's no other possibility.

I would hope it's the knowledge of testosterone having significant side effects that would stop you from wanting to take it, not the fact that you haven't taken creatine yet.
by mwenge | 2025-08-16 15:51:08+00:00
Well no, as a consumer you need to feel comfortable that you know how to get your money back if there's a problem with your purchase, as a merchant you need similar protections and a stable cost model, and as a bank you need an income model to cover all the costs and risks associated with processing the transaction. Moving the money is the easy part and is not the main set of problems that the card payment schemes have solved.
by meagher | 2025-08-16 15:51:22+00:00
In 2018, Patreon almost got kicked off of Stripe because Mastercard objected to NSFW content (probably because of PACs and/or “moralizing busybodies”). Patreon booted most of the NSFW creators and OnlyFans scooped them up. OnlyFans is now significantly bigger than Patreon.
by ryandv | 2025-08-16 15:51:46+00:00
> We girls really need to be getting out there and keeping down men, it's for their own good,

I wholeheartedly agree. What western society needs is a matriarchy that will take care of its own and suppress any subversive elements.

I can't wait for scientists to demonstrate that testosterone is actually a poison and the main cause of toxic masculinity. In a more civilized era, children assigned to any sex at birth will be dosed with exogenous estrogen starting from age 5 in order to optimize and civilize their development.
by NoahZuniga | 2025-08-16 15:51:50+00:00
> If you're making your own PayFac, you're suddenly responsible for getting and securely storing that information and handing it up to your sponsoring Acquirer. You're also responsible for verifying it, ...

My understanding is that steam already has to do this? Like when I buy a game on steam it goes to steam, who then redistributes the funds to themselves, developer and tax man. Since they are holding the money, are they not defacto already a Payment Facilitator?
by westurner | 2025-08-16 15:52:11+00:00
Aren't there radioisotopes in sea water? If you're filtering microplastics out of deep sea water you might as well collect those too?

"Fungus breaks down ocean plastic" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40676239

> Of course they are going to want to dump the salt in the bottom to complete the mass transfer loop of the upwelling water.

This method of desalination is designed to limit hyperaccumulation of salt in the ocean and the apparatus:

"Extreme salt-resisting multistage solar distillation with thermohaline convection" (2023) https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(23)00360-4 .. "Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39507702 :

> Here, inspired by a natural phenomenon, thermohaline convection, we demonstrate a solar-powered multistage membrane distillation with extreme salt-resisting performance. Using a confined saline layer as an evaporator, we initiate strong thermohaline convection to mitigate salt accumulation and enhance heat transfer.

The thermal difference between the deep sea water and surface water (or waste heat heated water, or solar heated water) can be used to generate electricity.

"140-year-old ocean heat tech could supply islands with limitless energy" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38222695 :

OTEC: Ocean thermal energy conversion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...

"Ask HN: Does OTEC work with datacenter heat, or thermoelectrics?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40821522 .. "Ask HN: How to reuse waste heat and water from AI datacenters?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40820952

At 40-44% efficient given at least 1,435°C, Solid state thermoelectrics are more efficient than steam turbines at converting a thermal gradient to electricity.

"Renewables Game-Changer? 44% Efficient TPV Cell" (2024) https://eepower.com/tech-insights/renewables-game-changer-44...

Thermophotovoltaic energy conversion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophotovoltaic_energy_conv...

"Using solar energy to generate heat at 1050°C high temperatures" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40419617
by anonandwhistle | 2025-08-16 15:52:18+00:00
That is a lot assumption right there. Starving masses can't logically and physically fight with AI or government for long. They become weak after weeks or months? At that point government would be smaller and controlled probably be part of AI owners.

IF they dont have 1-2 months of living expenses saved, they die. They can'be a big threat even in millions??? they dont have organization capacity or anything that matches
by greentea23 | 2025-08-16 15:52:42+00:00
But then aren't you messing with the IRS? If you pay in crypto, you have to report every conversion from fiat to monero, and every payment out of the monero wallet: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/taxpayers-need-to-report-crypto...

Until crypto is legally treated like cash (e.g. I don't have to report that I bought a beer with a $20 bill from an ATM), I don't think it's a very satisfying solution to have to either 1. Report to the IRS that I bought a VPN with monero or 2. Commit a tax crime and be paranoid about the IRS using automated tools to find you out for years after each transaction.

Even ignoring that elephant inthe room, how do you regularly (to pay subscription) get the crypto without leaving a paper trail or dealing with sketchy people?

I like virtual cards like privacy.com. If a state actor is after you, they will find you. So the typical threat model to me is companies trying to track you, like your ISP/Google/Facebook.

It would be nice if there was some way to be tax compliant and get the privacy benefits of monero though. Am I missing some crypto tax compliance tooling here or are all of these crypto payment users just poking the IRS bear?
by pphysch | 2025-08-16 15:52:47+00:00
> My former Ph.D. supervisor who moonlights as a consultant on this topic uses a nice acronym to capture this: BAPO. Business, Architecture, Process, and Organization.

It's funny and not surprising that this came from an academic/consultant combo.

Business/mission/product should come first, absolutely.

But prematurely designing your system architecture and automations before your processes emerge is a sure-fire way to overengineer and waste everyone's time, except the consultant you are paying by the hour.
by nneonneo | 2025-08-16 15:52:51+00:00
I’ll note that you didn’t reply to any of the technical points made in my post, nor have you substantively engaged with those points made elsewhere by other posters.

Notably: the only part of your system which can be verified is the SGX box, which can only handle encryption. How can we be certain that you are not able to correlate traffic? It is not enough to simply say that you implemented traffic mixing, as that can be defeated by placing each user on their own SGX instance.
by sschueller | 2025-08-16 15:53:39+00:00
The only correct solution is something like the Brasilian pix. No fee paid for by taxes and the central bank just like the management of cash.

A digital alternative to cash offered by the central banks which are the ones responsible to enable financial transactions. Since so many are moving to cashless it is important for the central bank to retain control of the currency alternative to cash.

We can not allow this explosion of middle men all taking a cut of something they should not be part off especially since they now have such power that they decide what you can and cannot buy instead of the laws of the land.
by samuell | 2025-08-16 15:53:57+00:00
Wine can be a bit of a headache if you are on a couple year older distro as it can make it harder to install newer Wine versions.

But I found that the Bottles project pretty much solves this, by installing everything in some kind of sandboxed environment:

https://usebottles.com/

https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles

Has worked wonderfully for the few cases where plain Wine failed.
by valzevul | 2025-08-16 15:54:44+00:00
OP here. Yeah, "copyright law" was a lazy shorthand, but it reads better than "tortious interference."

PureGym's T&Cs [1] have a ridiculously long "PIN abuse policy" (probably meant to stop people sharing with mates). They can cancel memberships or even retroactively charge for gym use if you "knowingly provided your PIN to another individual."

I'm not a lawyer and don't fancy being the test case for whether entering your PIN on a third-party website/app counts as "knowingly providing" it. Given how their app works, I suspect they might just ban a bunch of accounts instead.

Though now that I think about it, the squat racks are always packed, so maybe I should just distribute the app to people who go at the same time as me.

[1] https://www.puregym.com/membership-terms-conditions/
by criley2 | 2025-08-16 15:54:48+00:00
Enjoyed reading this. I've followed J Kenji Lopez-alt for a while and I've practiced the "aim below" method for a few years now.

I also like that the article ends with the perfect Kenji-ism. "Yes, technically my method is statistically ideal, but like, it's home cooking and it doesn't matter, heterogenity isn't the enemy". Reminds me of Adam Ragusea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cWRCldqrxM), we're not making fancy french cuisine, we don't need a perfect brunoise!
by leephillips | 2025-08-16 15:54:50+00:00
I guess I’m one of your pirates. Especially when I notice that most of the bins are closed near the back, where my seat usually is, I’ll use the first open space that I see. Bonus is that I don’t have to maneuver my suitcase as far. Drawback is that I have to keep an eye on things during deboarding: once I had to chase down some idiot who exited the plane with my bag. Why do you believe that people are supposed to use the bins next to their seats?
by Shank | 2025-08-16 15:55:22+00:00
I think you really need to make a card that isn’t a Visa or MasterCard or a QR payments system that’s wired to common banks. I don’t think anyone has suggested creating a payment processor without this, because the issue is with Visa/MasterCard, not with the middleman.

I think Valve could actually find a bank to work with to run a QR payments scheme for the gaming industry (SteamPay perhaps?) that’s “topped up” via ACH. Just ignore the whole card part, since it’s online you don’t even need it. Require biometrics and you can make the fraud burden easier.

Of course this would cost a lot of money, but it’s at least in the realm of possible versus a PayFac etc.
by m4nu3l | 2025-08-16 15:55:30+00:00
In economics, you aren't necessarily creating wealth just because your final output has value. The value of the final good or service has to be higher than the inputs for you to be creating wealth. I could take a functioning boat and scrap it, sell the scrap metal that has value. However, I destroyed wealth because the boat was worth more. Even if you are creating wealth, but the inputs have better uses and can create more wealth for the same cost, you're still paying in opportunity cost. So things are more complicated than that.
by troupo | 2025-08-16 15:55:58+00:00
> The permissions are required because you will put the files in places that can be seen by all users of the system.

Why does software installed by a user puts stuff where it will be seen by all users?

> It's not different from UAC on Windows getting in the way of installing "for all users".

When I'm not installing "for all users" UAC isn't there, right?

Edit

For the purposes of installing software Linux is a single-user OS masquerading as multi-user.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-16 15:56:19+00:00
or we could describe it by its actual term, extortion. step 1) tell businesses they can no longer export X product because of "national security concerns"; 2) tell businesses the "national security concerns" can be dropped if they pay 15% of sales.

in other words, threaten to put up barriers than agree to take them down for a "fee"; it's exactly what the mafia does
by elric | 2025-08-16 15:56:37+00:00
American hate for wire transfers will never sound anything other than irrational to me. Why don't you have an equivalent of Europe's Instant Payments?

The author mentions the storefront pocketing the money, that seems implausible? If an unscrupulous storefront can pocket money that would be wired, it could also pocket money that would be paid by CC.

And then there's the weird thing about payment volumes...that's been a solved problem for half a century?
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-16 15:56:44+00:00
Well, yeah. It’s a more nuanced way of saying that because “it didn’t work” isn’t very useful nor descriptive.

What if it wrote all of the boilerplate and just let you focus on the important bit that deserves your scrutiny?

You could say I failed every single project I ever built because it took many iterations to get to the final deliverable stage with lots of errors along the way. So more nuance would be needed.

But when it comes to LLMs suddenly we get all gleeful about how negatively we can frame the experience. Even among HN tech scholars.