Hacker News Reader

matdehaaston Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

Agreed, all these people who make it seem that companies need to be some duty to employee everyone clearly hasn't seen how this has failed in many social leaning states.

Don't like how they do it? Create your own company and run it how you want.... We live in a world where you can do that.

matdehaaston TigerBeetle raises $6.4M to power the future of financial accounting infra

Tigerbeetle does support these use cases quite well. It has linked transfers that allows multiple chains of transfers to be linked and all atomically commit or not. Coupled with two-phase commits it provides for some powerful primitives.

I'm sure the team would be keen to talk to you!

matdehaaston Ask HN: What happened to flatbuffers? Are they being used?

AFAIK the whole cloudflare workers ecosystem is built using it. The capnproto creator is lead on the workers project

matdehaaston Ask HN: What is your preferred light weight stack for personal projects?

Laravel with tailwind. Great DX and quick to setup

matdehaaston While crypto bro scammed clients, reporters scammed readers

You need to read The Gray Lady Winked. This isn’t something new for the NYT. This is par the course for the last hundred years

matdehaaston Digital Wallets and Payment Pointers

As a follow on the Online card payments still suck[1], Adrian discusses how Fynbos plans to address the future of online payments.

[1] https://fynbos.app/blog/card-payments-still-suck

matdehaaston Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform

Oleg is creating https://webstudio.is/ which I think is that.

matdehaaston Accounting For Developers, Part I

For those interested, Tigerbeetle[0] is a high-peformance purpose built accounting database. It supports - double entry transfer - two-phase transfers (ie reserve an amount and post it later) - linked transfers (move money across multiple accounts atomically)

Worth looking at.

[0] - https://www.tigerbeetle.com/ & https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle

matdehaaston Jeff from Software Daily passed away

Really sad he passed. Jeff was troubled but gave so much to our community :(

matdehaaston Programming languages endorsed for server-side use at Meta

Could be mistaken by I think slack uses it

matdehaaston 2022 Cloud Report

Last I checked cockroach don’t support ARM binaries. Probably means they thought not worth the effort to do the analysis on those instances as it doesn’t help for their offering

matdehaaston Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%

Fair enough, I've never heard rate increases discussed in relative terms. The context matters in the case.

matdehaaston Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%

Isn't that the same thing?

matdehaaston GraphCDN is now Stellate and raised $30M

@Max I loved watching your livestream of building Feedback Fish! Congrats on this product, I basically handrolled something like this using Cloudflare Workers. Would have been amazing to have this out the box. Good luck for the future

matdehaaston U.S. court rejects Tether’s bid to conceal reserve records from the public

Tethers collapse or fall from the peg would be such a contagion within the entire crypto ecosystem. I would think all crypto holdings are at risk if there are large adverse findings in the disclosure.

matdehaaston Nearly 20% of active Twitter accounts likely to be fake or spam

AFAIK he doesn't even have a way out of paying the full buying price. The breakup fee does not allow him to abritarly invoke it. It is only conditional on finance, of which the banks have already given binding commitments. Matt Levine has a great article on it [1].

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m...

matdehaaston Meta Is Transferring Jest to the OpenJS Foundation

I just want to call out my great appreciation for Simen. He has been trying to maintain the fort of Jest for years. He is not even a Meta employee. Releases would always be complicated and blocked as Meta needed to sign off. I'm glad this is moving and hopefully more velocity can happen within Jest now.

matdehaaston Stripe Financial Connections

@zach this is what I find very frustrating about the current players. We recently got pricing from you and obviously being under NDA won’t share the figures but I’m not seeing the discount you quote above compared to stripe.

Further there are significant platform minimums and platform fees that add large costs initially.

How do you reconcile the above comments from our interaction?

matdehaaston Ask HN: What side projects are you working on over Easter?

Painting my spare bedroom with my girlfriend.

It’s not as easy as YouTube makes it look and paint gets everywhere! But still happy to learn and try

matdehaaston Stripe 2021 Business Update [pdf]

Well spotted. My quick math was very incorrect. Thanks for the correction

matdehaaston Stripe 2021 Business Update [pdf]

Not forgetting it but it doesn’t move the needle much. If you assume an average card transaction size of $10, which is likely higher. That is only 0.3% of processing which may increase revenue by 30% at best.

matdehaaston Stripe 2021 Business Update [pdf]

Thanks that’s handy to know! At their volume they can obviously get better rates from the bank. I do wonder knowing that what the actual revenue is and perceived IPO valuation. I can’t see it being $100B unless they doing crazy numbers on their other products

matdehaaston Stripe 2021 Business Update [pdf]

Stripe don’t get even close to the full fee of card transactions. Most goes to the issuing bank. They would be lucky to clear 0.8% of a card transaction and it’s likely much lower

matdehaaston NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard

We in South Africa have a single state owned energy producer, Eskom. We consistently have power cuts (load shedding) to prevent grid collapse, it has the highest head count per MWH produced and is in total disarray.

I definitely believe having multiple independent producers makes a huge difference for competition and ensuring energy stability

matdehaaston The Interledger Protocol

Good question. Firstly it’s a matter of reach. How can I as a South African use RTP to pay for a digital good online? I can’t because all RTP systems are designed and used in national systems. That being RTP in the US, SEPA in Europe or EFT in South Africa. The only current global payments mechanism is the card networks really. We aim to be a global payments network like to RTP with account to account payments.

Secondly it’s a matter of access. Most domestic RTP systems are closed to banks. We want to open up to all account holding institutions, whether it’s banks, digital wallets, mobile money or potentially non custodial wallets.

Lastly we want to standardise the APIs so that applications can start building on top of your account. We see a world where you don’t need embedded finance. I should be able to use my current financial account everywhere. Whether that’s in Twitter to send a tip or on shoplift to receive payments directly to my account.

matdehaaston The Interledger Protocol

Could you please explain why Interledger uses XRP in its marketing,

Its no secret that Interledger came out as a research project at Ripple, so examples like this our bound to still be in documentation/marketing. But just as XRP is listed, so is ETH, Dollars and Euros. Interledger is a payment clearing protocol where counter parties can settle there positions however they see fit.

DISCLAIMER: I am speaking in my own capacity and must note, I don't know Chris personally and have never spoken to him. These are my own opinions.

* why Interledger has a co-founder of Ripple (Chris/Christian Larsen, who was sued by the SEC in December 2020)[2] on its board of directors*

As stated, Interledger came out of research at Ripple. I believe he serves on the board because he deeply believes in Interledger mission and vision. Which is to create a more fair and open payments system for the world. Yes there is an ongoing case, but our justice system is based on the presumption of innocence. And baring any finality in the case that is how it should be treated.

Commoner thanks for engaging and please do keep engaging, but I want you to know that there is no ulterior motive here. We are honestly just a community of people who are trying to solve a problem. Which is digital payments are still difficult and not affordable for a large number of people.

matdehaaston The Interledger Protocol

Just another shitty 'crypto' technology fulfilling a hypothetical usecase that doesn't exist in the real world.

I'm sorry you read the site and came away with that impression but that is not that case. Interledger is completely agnostic to underlying ledger technologies. It is a payments clearing protocol between participants. Can you please tell me why you believe that to be your impression?

Show me meaningful usage of blockchain/public ledgers, then show me a scenario where you need to bind something between two ledgers.

Again Interledger does not just connect public ledgers. Interledger is a clearing protocol between any system. Do you send payments via ACH, SEPA? Pay with goods with a credit card, Visa or Mastercard? All these use payments clearing protocols. Interledger competes with these technologies in an open and federated manner.

All this software built is like a Minecraft theme park trying to sell tickets to real people to go on virtual rollercoasters. Sell them what exactly? Interledger doesn't have a token or anything to sell people. It is just a technology, much as HTTP and IP.

I would love to engage more, so please feel free to answer and ask questions. Our goal as a community is to foster a more fair and open payments ecosystem for the world.

matdehaaston The Interledger Protocol

We believe so yes, Interledger is a payments clearing protocol. More akin to to card networks or SWIFT.

The ultimate goal is to allow disparate account holding institutions ( banks, digital wallets, crypto wallets etc) to have an interoperable mechanism for clearing payments between each other. Settlement between these parties is for them to decide.

The next goal for us to to enable a layer on top of Interledger to create an effective global open banking spec, which is called Open Payments[0]. Just a side note, with a backbone of ILP there is many applications that could potentially be built on top. As ILP has decided to take a layered approach to the stack, similar to the internet.

Replying on my phone but happy to answer any questions

[0] openpayments.dev

matdehaaston The Interledger Protocol

Interledger is a clearing protocol and thus has more stringent requirements from a regulatory point of view.

Our goal as a community is still to get there but this is going to take longer. Happy to answer any questions you have

matdehaaston The Interledger Protocol

Whilst Interledger came out of research of Ripple, it has zero connection with XRP or relies on it or any blockchain for that matter. This comment is disingenuous at best.