notpushkin

> Imagine that your ISP (connectivity), browser (interface), OS (orchestration), app store (functionality), search engine (directory), social network (chat), and media houses (news & data) were all run and owned by a single company.

Oh, cool! An antitrust violation epitome!

This could work for that purpose in a pinch. You do actually get other matches afterwards, you just don’t get an infinite feed of other candidates and can focus on having great time with the one you’ve got.

> so that support can be added into generic point of sale terminals or web shopping carts etc

We don’t have a single protocol for acquiring (online) card payments either, and this hasn’t been an issue. Everything just uses plugins or custom integrations.

Not sure about in-person payments. From my experience, banks program their own firmware into the terminal, but it may support some standardized API over USB / Serial. Even then, any given bank can implement some subset of features, and supports only a bunch of models (so if you decide to switch banks and your terminal isn’t “blessed”, you’ll have to buy a new one; thankfully, they’re fairly cheap used).

It’d be nice to have a unified protocol for all payment types IMO, but I’m not sure that’s realistic. Some Chinese payment processors have something like that, with a couple Alipay gateways emulating one protocol established by another gateway, so you can just swap out the API endpoint in case you want to switch. But even that’s just for the simplest case (you have to redirect the user to the processor’s page).

This.

The only thing hashing classes achieves is making it difficult for users to use ad blockers and/or custom CSS. I understand why e.g. Meta does it on their sites, but for GitHub it makes no sense.

> at gas pumps and ATMs: Inserting the card for contact EMV typically means inserting the whole card.

Fairly standard for ATMs, yeah. I’ve always wondered why they do it like that.

And I think I’ve seen ticket machines like this in Finland – not a typical ATM-like receptacle, but you do insert the card all the way in and it locks it down. (I guess Ohio gas pumps also have something like that?)

So yeah, those things exist, but the “typical” terminal style where you only insert the card halfway is fairly safe at least. :-)

I’ve searched for ‘zelle spec’ and came across this line:

> Zelle® is available in over 2,400 banking and credit union apps.

so I’m pretty sure there is a spec because there is no way in hell this many banks are using ad-hoc protocols to talk to each other and/or a centralized system. But yeah, I don’t see anything published.

Chances are it’s something ISO 20022-ish. (Either that or an Excel spreadsheet.) Speaking of which...

> and has a bank account can then talk to their bank using the standardized protocol

...if you’re a big enough business, you probably can also speak ISO 20022 to your bank. If you want it on your personal account however, well, that makes two of us, but from practical standpoint what I care more about is that I can punch in an account number and send money near instantly, which Zelle seems to provide in the US (but I have to make do with whatever Wise provides, probably regular ACH judging by speeds).

Zelle, from my understanding, is a “protocol” – many banks support it in their own apps. (Scare quotes because I’m not entirely sure it’s a proper well-defined protocol.)

And there’s nothing preventing PoS from supporting individual wallet apps – see e.g. WeChat Pay / Alipay in China. (Alipay+ is also a “protocol”, i.e. other banks and wallets support it.)

Inserting and tapping is mostly the same process, apart from the physical layer of the protocol (NFC vs interfacing the chip directly).

Unless there’s a hidden magnetic reader in the chip-reading portion of the terminal, in which case the scammers could read like 1/3 of the magstripe data? Which doesn’t seem that useful tbh.

Asahi is in a fairly good shape nowadays: https://asahilinux.org/

“Maybe later” doesn’t explicitly say that you’ll never get the prompts again, so even if it did work that way, PMs would be able to weasel out and change it back to nagging you with the next update. (In reality, the wording like that is used precisely for this reason already, and that’s why we hate it.)

And it doesn’t really help the user. If I click “Not now” and later decide that I do want the feature, how do I find it? If you want to reassure the user, just say that:

  Enable cool new feature X?

  (You can always change this in System Settings → Y.)

  [ Sure ] [ No, thanks ]

HN doesn’t support Markdown tables. You can prepend two spaces to show it in monospace though.

I don’t see zstd in your comparison?

Honestly, I was going by my most recent experience, which was F1 in Singapore last year. (I’ve been in Singapore at the time, but haven’t managed to get to a good spot, so I was watching it online a couple blocks away.) That thing had ads every minute, but the race obviously doesn’t stop during the breaks.

> What's happening in that time is just random bullshit.

Are most sports events like this? It sucks then, but the playing games with people in the stands thing sounds better than just plain ads. Mix that with sidelines shots, some alternative commentary maybe (with some instant replays?), and sure, information from other games, and you get a nice, coherent broadcast with some ads from the stadium but none that are as out of place as the usual commercial breaks.

> Try LWN for free for 0 month: no payment or credit card required.

Quite a generous offer!

</aside>

Even that is a bit too much to my taste. For self-promotion pre-roll kind of ads, if I can skip it the first time I see it, and I don’t see it ever again, and I don’t see more than one ad like this per day per series, then I’m reluctantly okay with that.

But ideally, just stick to some non-video recommendation UI during the credits, and let me discover things on your platform by myself otherwise, and don’t get in my way when I’m trying to enjoy the show.

I suppose it’s a response to this part:

> But even for broadcasts wholly owned and controlled by a streaming platform, like Thursday Night Football on Prime, there are just times when it would be dead air. I don't entirely mind commercials in that instance. Nothing else is going on.

I.e. instead of dead air, they could show some live feed in the spot that other broadcasters use for commercials.

Noted, thanks!

The older ones usually make you wait for a minute or two before the door is unlocked. I have one in my current apartment that doesn’t do that, but I’ve tried it a couple times and it does spill some water when you open it.

With top-loaders, you don’t even have to pause, the lid is always open; and the water stays inside, obviously.

> Are you suggesting that the burden should be on channel owners to upload variations of their videos that don't include sponsor blocks?

No, just mark the sponsored segments, so YouTube can skip over (like SponsorBlock does). And they already pay more per view from Premium users vs ad-supported ones, so it just makes sense to skip ads in the video as well.

That being said, I think paying creators directly is more sustainable in the long term.

That is quite deliberately YouTube’s fault. It only occurs with an ad blocker (VPN is irrelevant here, though it might be rolled out only in some countries), and the “experiencing interruptions?” thingy links to an article basically telling you to disable your ad blocker.

One thing I love about top-loaders is that if you’ve found a piece of laundry you forgot, you can just throw it in mid-cycle. Not necessarily ideal but hey.

An apartment I’ve rented in Vietnam had a top-loader with a drying program. I think it put a stream of (cold) air through the clothes while spinning somehow, and IIRC the clothes were not completely dry at the end, but definitely closer than just after a spin. (I think if they’ve added a dehumidifier to the process it would work just as well as a standalone dryer!)

Uoɰel?

Wikipedia lists ‘C’ as “cee”, but that’s cheating IMO. It’s clearly “see”!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet#Letter_names

Sure, but they could still check the age while also linking the ID.

> Sounds like AOO is effectively dead, so this example is a fail to my challenge.

You didn’t ask for examples where both projects are alive!

History repeats itself: https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent

I’m wondering how this is possible. Usually when you submit something that has been already posted recently, HN will upvote the existing post instead.

> every hard fork in history the chain with the most hashpower has retained the ticker

The opposite is also true – most miners have stayed on the “official” chain :-) I do agree that having more hashpower helps, but ultimately all users (including miners) determine the price on the market.

Fair point. Maybe you could hardcode a lower difficulty in the fork for the next couple dozen blocks, and schedule an adjustment after that?

How does that work?

Suppose I make a paper wallet on an offline PC, write down the address and discard both keys. If I now send some BTC to this address, how does the client figure out the public key?