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alexmorley

713 karma · joined March 20, 2018

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alexmorley··on Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
> "anyone can build a payment processor, nobody can get regulatory approval."

If you want to become a bank regulatory approval is hard. If you don't then its necessary but not the biggest barrier by far. Building trust with card networks, merchants & banks, interfacing with card networks, optimizing acceptance rates to a high level against the black box of card networks etc.

And then you still wouldn't make any money because the margins are extremely low on processing payments themselves - so either you have to have massive scale or have a bunch of value added services that you charge more for. For which you also need a serious commercial engine to be able to sell to either loads of enterprises or some very large ones (who will rarely sign exclusive deals - they will just give you a share of wallet so they can transfer traffic over at will).

Card networks are another story...

alexmorley··on UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
Not made clear in this article - this bill will be passed back to the House of Commons to debate/amend before going back to the House of Lords. This was not the final say.
alexmorley··on Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI
Does anyone know where their SWE-bench Verified results are from? I can't find matching results on the leaderboards for their models or the Claude models and they don't provide any links.
alexmorley··on Show HN: Walrus – a Kafka alternative written in Rust
IMO for those requirements Redpanda has been the go-to for the last 5 years or so but I agree this is still a nice take and potentially even lighter.
alexmorley··on AI World Clocks
It's just html/css so no js at all let alone d3.
alexmorley··on Garmin beats Apple to market with satellite-connected smartwatch
They are built to last. I've had my Fenix 5 for at least 7 years and it shows no signs of slowing or dying. Battery still lasts 5 days or so with normal use. Think it's just stopped getting software updates.

Admittedly they were a bit cheaper back then (but this will one will be too next year)...

alexmorley··on GPT-5
> For Free and Plus users, these changes take effect immediately. Pro, Team, and Enterprise users will also see the changes at launch but will have access to older models through legacy model settings.

So only for free/plus users (for now). I do wonder how long they will take to deprecate these models via API though...

alexmorley··on Death by AI
Even those versions could well have been interleaved with other AI summaries about Dave Barry that referred to OP without disambiguating which was about who.

Be ideal if it did disambiguate a la Wikipedia.

alexmorley··on UK's Vertical VX4 eVTOL flies outside Kemble circuit for first time
The front propellers do pivot to rotors for vertical take off (in the schematics on their website at least).
alexmorley··on CVE Foundation
Edit suggests the contract has been renewed last minute.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2025/04/16/cve-...

alexmorley··on Apache iceberg the Hadoop of the modern-data-stack?
Most of these issues will be ring true to lots of folk using Iceberg at the moment. But this does not:

> Yet, competing table formats like Delta Lake and Hudi mirror this fragmentation. [ ... ] > Just as Spark emerged as the dominant engine in the Hadoop ecosystem, a dominant table format and catalog may appear in the Iceberg era.

I think extremely few people are making bets on any other open source table format now - that consolidation has already happened in 2023-2024 (see e.g. Databricks who have their own competing format leaning heavily into iceberg; or adoption from all of the major data warehouse providers).

alexmorley··on UK Banking Apps Partial Outage
Anyone have any info on root cause?
alexmorley··on Meta fined $102M for storing passwords in plain text
It’s part of GDPR. I’ve been given training on it at all (3) companies I’ve worked for and training has always included what constitutes a breach and what to do.

I would hope any company would treat it as an incident rather than just a bug where senior enough folks would be involved to know what their responsibilities are.

alexmorley··on Show HN: SwimOS Rust – A framework for real-time streaming data applications
Maybe stating the obvious but took me an embarrassingly long time to clock this:

SwimOS is an existing streaming framework (Java-based) targeted at full stack / app development.

This announcement is a new Rust SDK for the above - not a new framework.

alexmorley··on CVE-2024-41110 Critical Docker Vulnerability
Also see post on docker.com: https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-security-advisory-docker-...
alexmorley··on Tektite – New Kafka-compatible stream-processing database
Streaming database that exposes a Kafka-compatible API but also offers Flink-like stream-processing out-of-the-box.
alexmorley··on Why your team doesn't need to use pull requests
Couple of other good articles about async code review linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36029328
alexmorley··on Node-Red
Should probably change the submission title to "Awesome Node-RED".
alexmorley··on The Future of E-Bikes
The marathon plus's are quite a bit more durable IME. And my sister and brother in law literally cycled fron UK -> singapore without a single puncture between them.
alexmorley··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2021)
Babylon https://www.babylonhealth.com/ | Healthcare Technology | Engineers (all levels: product, data and cloud) | US (Austin, SF, Remote) & UK (London, Remote)

Tagline: "We want to put an accessible and affordable health service in the hands of every person on earth".

Over the last 7 years have built a platform that combines telemedicine, patient facing AI services (a symptom-checker and an automated health check) and clinician facing AI services.

We are now consolidating this offering into a set of "Cloud Services" as well as moving towards a value-based care model in the US and the UK.

I work as an Engineering Manager in the data team where we are especially excited about hiring talented junior engineers.

If any of that sounds exciting feel free to reach out to alex.morley@babylonhealth.com

https://jobs.lever.co/babylonhealth?lever-via=TOLO6jaZxS

alexmorley··on Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing
> For decades, neuroscientists have treated the brain somewhat like a Geiger counter: The rate at which neurons fire is taken as a measure of activity, just as a Geiger counter’s click rate indicates the strength of radiation.

This hasn't been true for at least 20 years. There's a classic paper showing evidence of this in 1993 (O'Keefe and Reece) in rats. And has been an active area of discussion both before and since. (Note that it's not to say that rate isn't important, but as a community no one has beleived that all the information would be encoded in rate for many years)

There's lots of good explainers here that link to relevant research: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Encyclopedia:Computation...

alexmorley··on Auth0 Is Down in US and Canada
Haven't linked to https://status.auth0.com/ because that is currently down too (even though it seems to be hosted on Heroku, which is presumeably separate from the rest of thier infrastructure).
alexmorley··on Show HN: CourseMaker – Interactive Course Builder for Developers
Adding interactive coding tasks weaved within lectures is pretty cool. Not sure there is much out there at the moment that provides that kind of configuration.

Not sure what the "free migrations" feature is though?

alexmorley··on Real-time tracking of serotonin, dopamine opens new window to the brain
The technique they are referring to is FSCV (fast scan cyclic voltamatry). Im not sure about its use in humans but it's been around in rodent research for like thirty years. This paper was the one to introduce it I think (Millar J. and Barnett T. G., J. Neurosci. Methods. 1988).

Its also possible to measure other things using the same technique such as pH and adenosine but as I heard from colleagues that getting good signal to noise ratio in these preps is really difficult.

alexmorley··on Show HN: Write generative fine art in Rust
I've been using nannou [1] for these types of projects in rust and really loved it. Could they be interoperable?

1. https://github.com/nannou-org/nannou

alexmorley··on Samsung accidentally sends 'Find My Mobile' notifications to Galaxy phones
From a Samsung Care Abassador on page 22 of comments:

> Hey everyone,

> From what I can tell, this is a some test on Samsung's end to assure services are working. U expect Samsung will make an official statement explaining but I want to mention it now to hopefully put some of you at ease.

> I hope this helps.

alexmorley··on Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
AFAIK integrating an android fork with the hardware on modern devices is a LOT of work and usually done by the hardware manufacturers themselves (and this layer is not shared openly). These folk https://itsfoss.com/open-source-alternatives-android/ have tried or are trying to do related things.
alexmorley··on Buttons on the Web: Placement and Order
For me personally left buttons are often annoying on mobile as I have a wide phone (like lots of people) which I hold with my right hand (like lots of people) meaning I'd need to stretch or use my other hand to press the button.
alexmorley··on DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
You can do pip install git+https://github_repo_url if you want
alexmorley··on Pyodide: Bringing the scientific Python stack to the browser
This project was designed to meet the internal needs of data science at Mozilla. Them releasing and developing it openly likely has no/little impact on the amount of energy going into their core products.
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