MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: PayDroid – AI agents can now accept payments
by freebzns | 2025-09-19 20:56:42+00:00
Agents can talk, code, and browse… but until now, they couldn’t accept money.

We built PayDroid, a universal checkout for AI agents. It routes through the merchant’s own processor (starting with PayPal, Stripe coming soon), so there’s no license, no custody, and no messy integration work.

Developers just integrate once, and agents get a frictionless callback flow that works everywhere.

Demo (live with PayPal): https://demo.paydroid.ai

Docs: https://paydroid.ai

Would love feedback — what would you sell through your agent?
by 8organicbits | 2025-09-19 20:56:44+00:00
Feed discovery is a challenge, but there are a number of current efforts to make it easier. Far too many to list here. Briefly:

There are curated lists:

- https://blogroll.org/

- https://minifeed.net/

Community lists (planets)

- https://planet.debian.org/

- https://www.planetpython.org/

Curated themes (like Bluesky starter packs):

- https://minifeed.net/lists

- https://www.youneedfeeds.com/starter-packs

Webrings are cool again:

- https://webring.xxiivv.com/

- https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm

This collection of HN blogs is pretty good too:

- https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs

- https://blogs.hn/about

I've been trying to aggregate many of these into a giant list, https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/, which is especially focused on OPML blogrolls: https://alexsci.com/blog/blogroll-network/
by jpadkins | 2025-09-19 20:56:48+00:00
No, his campaign pledges stated: 6. Ensure Our Legal Immigration System Puts American Workers First Republicans will prioritize Merit-based immigration, ensuring those admitted to our Country contribute positively to our Society and Economy, and never become a drain on Public Resources. We will end Chain Migration, and put American Workers first! https://rncplatform.donaldjtrump.com/?_gl=1*18i1due*_gcl_au*...

He has been pretty good at sticking to his campaign promises.
by anthomtb | 2025-09-19 20:56:54+00:00
> skeptical of slathering something all over my body just to go outside

Missing nuance: Outside for how long? And how strong is the sun?

Even with my pasty Northern European complexion, I'm skipping the sunscreen for a 20 minute walk to lunch in November. But for a 10 hour hike above treeline in July? I'll be re-applying every two hours.
by saaaaaam | 2025-09-19 20:56:55+00:00
Michael Rapino, the CEO of Live Nation regularly boasted about how for sports events people take pride in paying thousands of dollars for tickets near the front, and how he wishes it was the same for music.

Live Nation had been engaging in a venue refit programme to make a higher percentage of venue seating - 40% or so - ‘premium’ seating where they can charge far higher rates.

As someone in this thread pointed out the biggest problem with tickets is that (at the top end) musicians certainly but sports teams also sell tickets far below market rates.

It’s a catch 22: if you are a sports team and only sell $1000 tickets you might sell out the show but you alienate your core base who buy lots of other stuff like shirts and caps and beer. If you’re only selling to VIPs you slowly kill what makes your team valuable.

For music it’s harder: for superstar artists you could almost certainly sell out a stadium at crazy prices. But the fans are going to feel gouged and are going to be very vocal and for a lot of musicians that is a red line. There’s been a lot of controversy recently over airline style ‘dynamic’ demand-driven pricing for concerts, and a lot of big name artists have come out against it.

Again, it kills the golden goose. Better to have fans who will pay $100 a ticket every time you tour for the next 20 years whether you are fashionable or not than sell out three years for $1000 a ticket to people who won’t want to buy if you’re not the hot thing.
by leakycap | 2025-09-19 20:57:07+00:00
Seems like a PR stunt to me after reading this and clicking the link to view the ad:

https://docsend.com/view/q9x3bdin5vy9cst8

Even with the voiceover, it sure "feels" to me as a consumer like Minnie is endorsing calling #LAW ... which goes beyond fair use, in my estimation.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-09-19 20:57:13+00:00
It's hard to miss the similarity between your book's title and Cliff Stoll's 1995 Silicon Snake Oil, an indictment of the general concept of the "information superhighway" that was starting to resonate with the public. Stoll is a really smart guy, but that particular book hasn't held up too well:

Few aspects of daily life require computers...They're irrelevant to cooking, driving, visiting, negotiating, eating, hiking, dancing, speaking, and gossiping. You don't need a computer to...recite a poem or say a prayer." Computers can't, Stoll claims, provide a richer or better life.

(excerpted from the Amazon summary at https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snake-Oil-Thoughts-Informatio... ).

So, was this something that you guys were conscious of when you chose your own book's title? How well have you future-proofed your central thesis?
by suriya-ganesh | 2025-09-19 20:57:22+00:00
Interesting decision. I'm on the F1 -> H1B pipeline myself as a software engineer. And my wife is a researcher working on Genetic Engineering.

Of the both of us, I've been the strong proponent for moving the US. and with each passing day, its getting harder to make a strong case for the pain, and uncertainty of moving here.

Lately everything has been counter to what one would expect from a pro-growth, accelerationist country. But I understand where the reasoning is coming from, though.
by fred_is_fred | 2025-09-19 20:58:00+00:00
It's not in this article but in others that this will be addressed.

"The proposal would increase the wage floor for H-1B visa recipients from $60,000 to $150,000, eliminate the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, and replace the current lottery-based selection process with a highest-bidder system."

EDIT: This is a proposal by 1 senator - not Trump. https://www.newsweek.com/h-1b-visa-change-proposal-2132484
by NoahZuniga | 2025-09-19 20:58:08+00:00
Does it matter? When I say deno, you think of the software product deno, produced by deno. Just like when I say coca cola, you think of the specific drink produced by the coca cola company. What I say escalator, you don't think of that specific company's products, but of the staircase conveyor. When I say javascript, do you think of any oracle product? No! So why should users of javascript live in fear of a lawsuite from oracle?
by melenaboija | 2025-09-19 20:58:19+00:00
Absolutely.

I think some people underestimate the power of those willing to migrate to the US.

I’m in my early 40s and moved from Western Europe to the US 11 years ago, and I feel I was the last generation eager to come, the perception of US is changing fast. This is not an H-1B problem but still a parallel one on how to attract people.
by c2h5oh | 2025-09-19 20:58:23+00:00
The time spend on hardening software is always zero or very close to that unless the company makes that hardening a selling point of the product they make.

In the world of VC powered growth race to bigger and bigger chunk of market seems to be the only thing that matters. You don't optimize your software, you throw money at the problem and get more VMs from your cloud provider. You don't work on fault tolerance, you add a retry on FE. You don't carefully plan and implement security, you create a bug bounty.

It sucks and I hate it.
by Sevii | 2025-09-19 20:58:46+00:00
It's not a bad thing if FAANG gets every single H1B visa. There has long been a complaint that FAANG is willing to pay 300k+/head in salaries but instead Cognizant gets the visa and pays 60k/head. If we have a limited visa pool it makes no sense to give visas to low paying employers until FAANG is completely saturated.
by fair_enough | 2025-09-19 20:59:05+00:00
One man's rising gas prices are another man's oil industry boom.

The H1B process is unfair to engineers because it drives down their compensation in a way that doesn't affect nurses or welders. If immigration were completely irrespective of profession and based solely around whether the imported laborers get paid enough to contribute more than they receive in taxes/public services, nobody would have any standing to complain about their wages being driven down because every single person benefits in the long run from the economic growth.

As things stand, tech workers and unskilled laborers get screwed by the current status quo because they don't reap the benefit of cheaper goods and services in all the other industries, but everyone else benefits from cheaper electronics/software and landscaping/housekeeping/food service while their wages grow.

You're not wrong on paper, the current immigration practices are just screwy.

EDIT - The hard statistical proof that most of the H-1Bs are tech workers:

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/o...
by eastbound | 2025-09-19 20:59:06+00:00
I thought there was no-one else on the market? If you think it will kill the visa program, that means you thought hiring underpaid developers was the goal of the visa program. No-one would change companies if if get paid decently: You leave a bad boss, but you can stay with a with a 10-15% lower-than-market salary just because of the friction of changing (Cue the downvotes: “I’m changing for a cent more” - yes you do when you have energy but most employees absolutely don’t). And employees will stay because they need time to settle in the new country and the welcoming company is generally equipped to make integration easier for newcomers.
by taurath | 2025-09-19 20:59:24+00:00
> unless I believe in a conspiracy by the state of Utah itself

What about political incentives? The conservative media sphere was falling over themselves to rush to label the shooter before any evidence or even a statement of "ideology" was given by the Utah gov, such that the WSJ posted and retracted an article about how the shooter was trans. An observation of that was what got Kimmel turned off the air. It wasn't what the Utah gov eventually said, it was all that had taken place before then.

> And, if you notice that it's not even clear the FCC took any action, that it was actually ABC's distributors who caused the ruckus

What if the chair caused the ruckus with the distributors by making public comment and explicitly threatening to pull ABC's status, on a timeline before the distributor made the call? Why is this explicit threat of removal, not just taken against the show, but against the entire network, not considered an action?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-19 20:59:26+00:00
The point isn't to help your competitors, it's to help your customers. Qualcomm or Apple doesn't have the incentive to help their competitors design chips, but TSMC or Samsung does have the incentive to help Qualcomm's competitors design chips, because then there are more companies making chips and the fab gets more business and prevents any one of their customers from getting too much leverage over them.
by adolph | 2025-09-19 20:59:27+00:00
Iirc, the primary problem with gas stoves is nitrogen oxides which are created by just about any burning process that uses atmosphere as the oxygen source since air is about 78% nitrogen. In other words, the problem doesn't have to do with the methane being a fossil fuel.

If we had stoves with a source of gaseous or liquid oxygen, then the NOx emissions would be greatly reduced.
by p12tic | 2025-09-19 20:59:28+00:00
Better build a single workstation - less noise, less power usage and the form factor is way more convenient. A budget of $3000 can buy 128 cores with 512GB of RAM on a single regular EATX motherboard, a case, a power supply and other accessories. Power usage is ~550W at maximum utilization which not much more than a gaming rig with a powerful GPU.
by pizlonator | 2025-09-19 20:59:31+00:00
> Remember that the child side of `vfork(2)` can only do async-signal-safe things as `vfork(2)` is documented

And if it does anything that isn't async-signal-safe, then all bets are off.

So, the Fil-C implementation of vfork(2) would have to have some way of checking (either statically or dynamically) that nothing async-signal-unsafe happens. That's the hard bit. That's why I think that implementing it is crazy.

I'd have to have so many checks in so many weird places!

> The point of `vfork(2)` is that it's _fast_

Yup. That's the reason to have it. But I haven't yet found a situation where a program I want to run is slow because I don't have vfork(2). The closest thing is that bash is visibly slower in Fil-C due to forking, but bash always uses fork(2) anyway - so in that case what I need to do is make my fork(2) impl faster, not implement vfork(2).
by DrewADesign | 2025-09-19 20:59:51+00:00
I totally support bringing in actual specialists, or fantastically talented people from abroad… but it’s painfully obvious how infrequently that happens. I worked with an H1B doing L2 support in the mid aughts. The position required significant knowledge of networking, but nothing close to even a mid-career enterprise network administrator, and it wasn’t a rare skillset for the area. We had plenty of very local candidates when we hired people before, but suddenly, new management decided it was an incredibly specialized, difficult-to-fill, rare job that paid locals an eye-watering 70k/year to start but paid an H1Bs far less than that I assume.
by mooreds | 2025-09-19 21:00:08+00:00
Sorry, is this legal? Like is the fee something that can be changed with an EO, or is it set by congress?

The original Bloomberg article doesn't state: https://archive.is/tpuut

Some research (okay, okay, I used Claude) indicates that "In summary, while Congress provides the statutory authority and mandates certain specific fees, the specific amounts for most H1B fees are set through the regulatory process by DHS/USCIS based on cost recovery principles and activity-based costing analysis."

Further, "The core authority comes from the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) section 286(m), 8 U.S.C. 1356(m), which authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to set fees for adjudication services "at a level that will ensure recovery of the full costs of providing all such services".

From the legislation ( https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2024-title8/pdf/U... ):

That fees for providing adjudication and naturalization services may be set at a level that will ensure recovery of the full costs of providing all such services, includ- ing the costs of similar services provided with- out charge to asylum applicants or other immi- grants. Such fees may also be set at a level that will recover any additional costs associated with the administration of the fees collected.
by vntok | 2025-09-19 21:00:08+00:00
> But you have your story you believe, I'm resigned that the die are already cast.

But that is your story you believe, consider that the parent commenter has the exact same (mirrored) mindset.

A useful segue to avoid you or them "being resigned": given that you say you're "skeptical", what would be the minimal proof you'd consider valid for you to change your mind?
by alephnerd | 2025-09-19 21:00:11+00:00
Here that sound? It's the GCCs being opened up as a result of this shift.

There's a reason Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others have been expanding offices and raising TC in Eastern Europe and India for years.

The main industries that will be severely hit are chip design, biotech, pharma, and STEM academia.

Good for India though, who needs a "Thousand Talents" program when the targets of a brain drain are to cost prohibitive to hire in the US.
by topkai22 | 2025-09-19 21:00:52+00:00
If they are using the program as intended they would. They are supposed to be looking for skills that are impossible to find in the US. If they are offering a good deal to the employee then the employee should stay, just like someone with full work authorization would.

If they are just using the program to pay less than they otherwise would for labor that does exist in the us, well, then we have another issue.

I would modify the proposal to include a larger annual fee rather than an application fee, so that the initially sponsoring company isn’t solely bearing the cost. There should also be a floor pay rate for the visa holder, something the 75th or 80th percentile of both the company and of income in the MSA the visa holder is located in.
by davidw | 2025-09-19 21:01:04+00:00
As always, so much zero-sum thinking in all these discussions.

Often, the person may not have been as productive, happy, or well compensated in their own country.

Also, over time, some of those people make money in the US and take that, their knowledge and skills and go back home to share there. Everyone is better off.

I was discussing this elsewhere, and dug up something I wrote 11 years ago, and I think I'm still pretty happy with it:

https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-job...
by creesch | 2025-09-19 21:01:51+00:00
> I don't think they're teaching Java much in university or boot camps anymore so it doesn't matter much anyway

That might just be the bubble you are in. Java is still one of the biggest languages used in corporations across the globes for anything backend related. If it is because it is a modern COBOL or because it actually is a stable language with a solid ecosystem might be a matter of some debate.

In the circles I navigate it is still heavily featured in various bootcamps.
by jrflowers | 2025-09-19 21:01:55+00:00
I love this:

>Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech"

Under a tag that says “pro-censorship”.

I think I could maybe (?) imagine what they’re trying to say there, but “a lack of censorship is political and the presence of censorship is apolitical” sounds like something a person would say after a humongous bong rip of salvia or sustaining a life-threatening amount of blood loss
by 0manrho | 2025-09-19 21:03:23+00:00
> they're pretty much just testing from the perspective of the consumer

Yes. that's their schtick. Do just enough so that the average non-tech literate user doesn't know any better. And if you're just a casual consumer/reader, It's fine. Not great, not even necessarily accurate, but most of their readership don't know enough to know any better (and that's on purpose). I don't believe their intentionally misleading people. Rather - simply put - It's evident the amount of fucks they give regarding accuracy, veracity, depth, and journalism in general is decidedly less than their competition.

If you're trying to gain an actual technical insight with any real depth or technical merit, toms is absolutely not the place to go. Compare to ServeTheHome (servers, networking, storage, and other homelab and enterprise space related stuff), GN (gaming focused), RTings.com (Displays and peripherals), to name a few to see the night and difference between people that know what they're talking about and strive to be accurate and frame things in the right context, and compare that with what Toms does.

Again, depends on what the user is looking for, but Toms is catering to the casual crowd, aka people who don't know any better and aren't gonna look any deeper. Which is totally fine, but it's absolutely not a source for nuance, insight, depth, rigor, or anything like that.

The article in question[0] is actually a great example of this. They found a youtube video of someone buying white-label drives, with no control to compare it to, nor further analysis to confirm that the 4 drives in question actually all had the same design, firmware, controller, and/or NAND flash underneath (absolutely not a given with bargain bin white label flash, which these were, and it can make a big difference). I'm not trying to hate on the youtuber, there's nothing wrong with their content, but rather with how Toms presents it as an investigation into unpowered SSD endurance while in the same article they themselves admit: "We also want to say this is a very small test sample, highlighted out of our interest in the topic rather than for its hard empirical data." This is also why I say I don't believe their trying to be disingenuous. Hell, I give them credit for admitting that. But it is not a quality or reliable source that informs us of anything at all about the nature of flash at large, or even the specific flash in question, because we don't know what the specific flash in question is Again, just because they're the same brand, model and capacity does not mean they're all the same, even for name brand devices. Crucial's MX500 SSD's for example have been around for nearly a decade now, and the drives you buy today are VERY MUCH different from the ones you could buy of the same capacities in 2017 for example.

Don't even get me started on their comments/forums.

0: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered...
by derefr | 2025-09-19 21:03:26+00:00
> If you keep the brains where they were raised, there is no mechanism for them to actually turn their ideas into fruition because there is little funding to support this either in private or public sector.

In such a world, why wouldn't you see 1. foreign R&D companies, 2. indexed into a thriving foreign equities market, 3. gathering the interest of domestic investors who want to diversify beyond domestic investments, by 4. moving their money and/or investing in domestic proxy investments?

I say this as a Canadian whose managed mutual-fund holdings are apparently largely composed of foreign (mostly American) proxy equities — and who has met many Canadian-based VCs who don't do much investment into Canadian companies. If not for talent immigration, the American investment landscape would probably look similar!
by t_mahmood | 2025-09-19 21:03:39+00:00
Yes, so much for portability, the portability ship now is in the hand of two corporates, that do not care about what a user wants. The convenience, it offers, depends on the profitability of these corporates.

Well, I do not want to just in to one walled garden to another, so, I think, this is the end of portable devices for me. That is the stick, that Google and Apple both using to keep us in their hands, so, I'm going to do my best to say: No thank you, and F*ck off.

I might not ever buy a flagship or high-end smartphone anymore, but get a smaller laptop, and keep an old or cheap Android handy, which will have very little personal data in it. I can easily tether the Laptop with my mobile and do most of the things that are needed.

Yes, for bank applications, and some other applications, that requires app, I will keep the cheap Android handy. But, it not a personal device anymore, the thing that I loved about Android, it's just there, because it has to.

And I am done with a mobile device till a true Linux based mobile become available.
by smelendez | 2025-09-19 21:03:46+00:00
The problem for seated events is variations on, four people buy tickets together, seats ABCD, and the people in seats B and D drop out. They have friends who would buy the empty seats, but instead end up with a stranger in between them.

Or two people buy seats together, one can’t make it, and now the other person is stuck sitting with a stranger. And they have a friend who also wants to go who is also sitting alone.

The venue might still sell out but it’s a worse experience for everyone. Even groups who all get in together get annoyed by people trying to swap seats or cram in the aisles to be with their friends. Venue staff are stuck dealing with crowd control issues.
by cyberax | 2025-09-19 21:03:47+00:00
Because there aren't enough "equally qualified nurses".

> There is a lot of under-employment for highly qualified US citizens.

No, there isn't. Even with the current AI mess, the unemployment for highly-qualified software engineers is 2.8%: https://www.ciodive.com/news/june-jobs-report-comptia-data-I...

The AI is now decimating the jobs for the recent CS graduates.