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superzampon Double-entry bookkeeping as a directed graph

Jumping-in as I happen to know formance very well; I'm 100% agreeing with the need to know what posting originates from what account, which is why formance transaction format is essentially a container for postings, which themselves are a quantified, directed relation between exactly 2 accounts. So a transaction can indeed impact N >= 2 accounts, but a posting within a transaction will always relate exactly 2 accounts.

superzampon Misunderstanding about the details of how Apply Pay works

> That 'though' does not compute.

s/", though"/"though, "

superzampon How the Most Expensive Swords in the World Are Made

One could also care and value autonomous manufacturing processes that don't need to start with:

import * from "world@latest"

superzampon Surgeons transplant pig kidney into a patient

Alternatively, let's wish the best to both of them.

superzampon Figure 01 robot demos its OpenAI integration

Interesting stutter at 0:53

superzampon Ledger: Stripe's system for tracking and validating money movement

Mentioned company founder here, we did not yet! I'm glad to see the ILP project is continuing to progress well though, we should definitely consider it again.

superzampon EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone

Tbh, the hit to omniscient funds traceability is not that different from what some financial institutions started to accept with Stablecoins already, i.e. a model where KYC/AML happens at the edges but not within the transaction graph itself. It's pleasantly surprising to see this model getting acceptance in the regulatory spheres.

superzampon EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone

Great news from a project that deserves a close look for those not familiar with it already. Taler is very close in term of mindset to what Ripple was, as originally developped by Ryan Fugger, before helm changed hands and it became the commercial farce known as today's incarnation of Ripple / XRP.

superzampon Tell HN: Wise froze $40k+ in funds for 10 days and counting

The current AML/CTF regulations frameworks can only lead to extremely opaque implementations and end-user experiences. For that reason alone, it makes sense to keep the bulk of your money in a place (meaning, a mainstreet financial institution) where you'll be able to get in touch with a real human and have proper ways of recourse should your account be the unfortunate target of overzealous fraud-screening algorithms. You don't want a FAANG-like random termination account procedures with anything related to your money, which is unfortunately the experience that many new-gen finance apps are delivering right now.

superzampon Show HN: Webhooks for platforms that do not natively support them

> feels more like a proof of concept than an actual product

I don't think OP ever touted it as an actual product:

> We’d like to show you our project [...]

This may be personal but I'd love HN and especially Show HN to be one of the last places compatible with bleeding edge demos, where creators can feel confortable to share their pet projects no matter how naive or not-(-so-)prod-ready.

Otherwise I'm afraid we'll only get to deserve ProductHunt-style Show HNs, with tightly knit PR replacing substance and foolishness.

superzampon AI Canon

Now that we have good language models, it would be great to see what would a quantitative analysis of this perceived increase in ressentiment actually lands as results. I lean on agreeing with your comment, but also curious to see if we're both hallucinating.

superzampon Tell HN: Cancelling HP Instant Ink prevents cartridges from being used

I figured that shipping labels or tickets were almost the only thing I printed these days, and hence bought a thermal label printer. Couldn't be happier with it. Reasonable price, never asks for ink, prints are instant, never stops working over random nonsense, small form factor.

superzampon Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

Just the other day, my friend asked me if I knew what this bug she took a picture of was. I replied it looked like a house centipede, and it was indeed one. Two things:

1) My confidence was around 80%, without any sense of absolute certainty. 2) I had no idea why I knew that, and where did I originally learned about what a house centipede looks like.

superzampon Starbucks claims $181M in revenue from unused gift cards (2022)

Yikes that seems insane, do you remember which vendor it was?

superzampon Google Cloud Europe service disruption

I'm curious about how is the support these days. My last interaction with it was along the lines of "Uh, why are you contacting us for advice and not like, use the docs". This was for a new project and asking the same set of questions to AWS led them to send three guys to our office the next week for a round of demos and best-practices discussions.

superzampon Indigo: A game engine for functional programmers, in Scala

I guess I'm adding my own to the pile with this, but your last paragraph resonates. I feel like it's getting to a point where one can predict with reasonable accuracy the first top comments just by the title of the post, and been thinking more and more about what a proper quantitative analysis of this feeling would yield.

superzampon WebGPU Fundamentals

Total graphics / shaders / GPU noob here. Does that mean you'll essentially get free visualisations (albeit non-sensical ones) as a byproduct of your computations?

superzampon PayPal has restricted our account after we invoiced a key containing “ALEP”

Well put. As great is the current financial system, seeing legitimate people and companies left on the sidelines for basically no reason aside factored in cost of applying the current regulation efficiently is quite maddening.

Also well summarized by patio11 with [1]:

> The actual probative value of SARs varies wildly; at the top of the spectrum, they can include sufficient investigatory work and documentation, produced by the analyst at the financial institution, to lead to convictions for e.g. human trafficking.

> Across the financial industry, that SAR is wildly outnumbered by “Mohammed tried to do something, we didn’t let him, and when we told him that he became agitated.”

> An example from here in Japan: an immigrant attempted to wire the equivalent of $600 to his cousin in Africa. He was asked the purpose of the wire and said it was for a tuition payment. Bank staff asked for supporting documentation like e.g. a tuition statement or student ID card for the cousin. The customer refused to provide that documentation. The bank refused the wire. The customer accused the bank staff of racially profiling him and raised his voice.

> I was not a party to that transaction and, for clarity, it did not involve any employer or business partner of mine. I winced when reading a news report about it, because this is practically ripped from Compliance training. The customer is absolutely right and they are very likely getting a SAR filed on them.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/money-laundering-and-...

superzampon Sex worker-led payment platform shuts down after being cut off by processor

I think these kind of shenanigans are byproducts of how regulation in financial services is delivered from the regulating bodies to builders in the space. As opposed to e.g. health where clear guidelines are often the norm, fintech is basically a shit show where regulators expect you to have internal processes to combat fraud, know your customers, do not finance terrorism, money laundering et al. — all without laying out actual precise guidelines of what they really expect want to see from an implementation standpoint, keeping you on your toes all the time. This leads to self-inflicted wounds from financial services providers, anticipating that regulators might not like e.g. stoner stocks and preemptive actions to minimize risk of being shut down.

superzampon Stripe faces $3.5B tax bill as employees' shares expire

My understanding is that the delta between their strike price and the current valuation would be seen as capital gain and taxed accordingly.

superzampon Ask HN: What are these strange random strings spamming my blog?

A long time ago, I discovered a bunch of websites that had their search bar feeding back your previous searches as suggestions. You would for example search for "abc 1234 xyz 2345" once, and upon next search, typing "abc 1234" would then suggest "abc 1234 xyz 2345".

You can probably guess where I'm headed now and in a true "if it can be done it has to be done" mindset, subsequently had the most fun implementing a parasitic KV-storage engine on top of those search bars. I was probably prouder of it at the time than I am now, and would today strongly recommend against storing your PDFs in other people's search bars.

Obviously can't know for sure if this is what's happening here, but seeing this definitely rings a bell.

superzampon Launch HN: Lago (YC S21) – Open-source usage-based billing

Side story, and that might not be true as of today, but Datadog was a nightmare billing-wise for me. Probably precisely because they didn't use a tool like the one launched in this post. Anything ranging from seeing your live usage to getting a rough idea of what your bill at the end of the month would be was impossible, not to mention the absence of any kind of alert even after reaching $30x our previous month usage. Usage based is fantastic when done properly, but can quickly turn to a nightmare for the user on half-assed systems.

superzampon U-Bahn station in Berlin is decorated with radioactive uranium glazed tiles

chuckles

glancing at my living room and seeing second-hand 70s orange antiques, glasses and dinnerware everywhere

superzampon Tether ownership and company weaknesses revealed in documents

You can open a short position on e.g. Kraken, for as long as you can keep paying the yield to the stakers.

superzampon Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April

The problem with SEPA payment, is that it's great for the merchant and a net loss for the user, especially individual consumers.

From a UX perspective today, it will always be more cumbersome to initiate a SEPA transfer to the merchant. Some integrations offer a semblance of interactivity with your banking app in an attempt to streamline it, but nothing beats the simplicity entering your cards details or just showing your face to Apple pay. Then from a consumer protection perspective, if something wrong happen with your order or the merchant goes bust, you have no recourse if you initiated a SEPA CT. Card payments on the other hand give you a nice chain of large entities exposing themselves to the merchant's credit risk in front of you.

It can probably work in specific situations (e.g. if you have a niche website with a sophisticated audience ready to overcome the hurdles to acquire your widgets), but for these reasons alone I just can't see SEPA payments going anywhere near even a ridicule fraction of the market share held by legacy card networks yet.

superzampon Is a venture studio right for you?

This. I've seen multiple sad stories around of me of studio-incepted ventures, whose founders were replaced once the company started to be successful and the higher hand decided that they were no longer needed; obviously this part of the journey is not advertised on the brochure.

superzampon Curvature consistency in Apple hardware and software products (2017)

I can finally put some words on this. Tangentially (no pun intended) in CSS, the poor rendering you get out of an ambitiously border-radius'ed button has been driving me mad for years; time to get down the rabbit hole to see how to replicate that look on the web.

superzampon I am done. I give up

Props for getting that laid out here and you are in the right now by focusing on what matters, i.e. your health. FWIW, granted it's worth anything, I feel like everything you describe here (a.k.a. ProductHunt, Substack, etc) are byproducts of success but not a good ramp to success itself. Granted that you genuinely enjoy building stuff from scratch (which, without saying, is totally fine if not), those are the least of your concern when roaming the road to PMF. And you'll have better luck at finding it by becoming an authentic expert in a specific niche and building a shitty MVP along the way, which is a much more enjoyable journey.

So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, all these parts of entrepreneurship that you didn't like, they were actually just distractions posturing themselves as Entrepreneurship™ and their shilling was probably the product of other entrepreneurs. Take care and remember that failure is a byproduct of trying and there's absolutely no shame in that.

superzampon Capsule: the nano (WASM) functions runner

Side answer to your side question: not sure for NATS, but Redpanda is trying to be a lightweight drop-in alternative

superzampon Rammstein Get Restraining Order Blocking Viagogo from Reselling Concert Tickets

You piqued my interest and now would love to know more, are you selling ticket yourself for your own events and acting as a ticket selling platform for others?

It's sad to see you have such a big amount of automated traffic, no wonder why it's so hard to get tickets for high demand events as a human when you're competing with this.