Electricity, water, roads, bridges are all public infrastructure. Why should payments be any different.
Without summoning the decentralized block-based "currency" crowd, I would like to point out that in the entire lifespan of such technologies they never have received widespread institutional or legislative buy-in like this EU initiative to build a digital Euro.
While USDC and BTC have been used as defacto currencies in some countries there is truly no equivalent adoption in any meaningfully mature economic zone such as EU/NA/CN.
Absolutely agree. The idea that private corporation manage our digital payments is crazy if you ever imagine that happening to physical payments. Imagine if bank of america got to decide if the dollar bill your trying to use is too damaged. That should be between me, the recipient, and a public body
> Why should water be public infra but food is not?
The main reason why infrastructure of any kind (water, sewage, etc) is a public infrastructure - even in largely privatized economies - is that infrastructure is essentially a natural monopoly. Food on the other hand isn't and it can largely be traded as a commodity (which is, at least in my opinion, a major reason why our food system is so broken).
If your only expectation is that it provides enough calories for your population, you are absolutely right. If you have a look at the bigger picture, the issues are plentiful. On the producer side, farmers are operating at relatively thin margins which encourages consolidation and unsustainable farming practices. This in turn leads to extensive soil degradation and fertilizer use, which is unsustainable - both financially and ecologically.
On the consumer side, people are becoming more overweight (which cannot be exclusively be attributed to the food system, but diet of course plays a significant role). Food is becoming more expensive and lower quality. Food waste also still is a major problem.
Many issues are shared between the US and the European food system, although they may not be as extreme as in the US. However, it does not feel like there is actual political will to steer the ship in a different direction.
>Why should water be public infra but food is not?
The water pipes are public infra. They pump it into your house.
The more people that use the same system, the cheaper it can get. Drawing competing systems of water pipes to houses to let companies compete would simply drive up the cost for everyone.
Same with electricity, gas lines, sewage...
Water itself is not publicly owned. You can buy water in the store like food.
We have the same with fiber to the home in France. When a company lays the fiber, they have to allow others to use it too (they are paid for that service, but the amont is regulated).
When fiber arrives, there is a 3 months waiting period before any company can provide the service. This is intended to give enough time for everyone to prepare an offer.
When I got mine, I called the regulation authority (Arcep) who gave me the date and hour my line opens. On that day I called my preferred provider who told me "it is coming! we will call you!" and then the one who laid the cable who told me "we can come in 2 days". I chose the latter.
A few years later the preferred one finally made its way to my area...
You should share your answer instead of posing a rhetorical question because the answer isn’t obvious at all and ranges across a large variety of options including food should be infrastructure.
Just to add to the conversation, personally I back and forth a bit on which things should be public or private owned, farms especially.
My general reasoning is that when a "best" solution is known, monopolies tend to form; monopolies tend to extract as much economic rent as possible; I'd rather economic rents be extracted by a government for the purpose of national benefit rather than personal enrichment.
Conversely, when there is no known "best" solution, a free market allows a range of entrepreneurs the opportunity to try their ideas in the hope of cornering the market.
I think water is probably in the first, but with a caveat that this is a high-level thing and it's fine to have hundreds of different companies trying to figure out the best ways to make and install municipal pipes, that work is contracted to by local governments.
Food? I dunno, weather is still a massive dice roll for farming output. Perhaps nationalisation would work, perhaps subsidies, price regulations for inputs and floors for outputs, are the least wrong way to do this. But I'm extremely uncertain.
I think most governments do recognise food as both "strategic infrastructure" and absolutely vital to their re-election chances.
European governments govern food supply with cash subsidies to farmers, land use rules helping farmers, special immigration rules for agricultural labourers, special extra-low inheritance taxes for farmers, special subsidies for things like having hedges between fields, special low-tax fuel for farm equipment, different tax rates for different foodstuffs (bread vs cake vs wine vs beer), provision of super cheap water for irrigation, minimum price guarantees with governments buying up over-produced products, special border controls for fresh goods that can't be held up, special border controls for live animals, entire government departments for things like monitoring and controlling the spread of animal disease, rules on precisely what chemicals can be used, rules about things like chemical run-off into waterways, rules about animal welfare, rules about slaughterhouse conditions, rules about package materials, package sizes, package labels, rules about how much pork must be in a sausage for it to be called a pork sausage, rules about who can call their product 'champagne' or 'parmesan'.
If the payments industry was regulated like the food industry, it would be more regulated, not less.
Food from multiple suppliers is easy to put on trucks going to multiple shops using same roads. Road are workable shared access medium. Water really is not. Unless you deliver it in tanker trucks using roads.
Electricity itself is fungible in moment, so electricity can used shared access medium of grid. But similarly it makes little sense to have multiple roads in densely build areas. So both roads and water pipes end up as natural monopolies in build up areas.
Food should be public infrastructure, and the subsidies every country gives to farmers are a good indication of that.
Not all food but produce, bread, milk, infant foods, flour, rice and other cereals being sorta price controlled the way water/electricity is on most places would benefit mostly everyone
Medicine should count too. And a lot of other things that we often realize to be essential only in a crisis situation. But I'm sure GP didn't intend their list to be exclusive.
Electricity, water, roads and bridges are natural monopolies.
Payments aren't and there is no reason for the State to monopolize it. Especially given the EU poor track record on fostering innovation. The EU bureaucrats will "regulate" it to the bone, increasing compliance costs for processors and mass surveillance. We'll be back to the start.
In an age where card payments are ubiquitous, being suddenly cut off from VISA/MasterCard networks can severely disrupt a country's economy. Especially if it heavily relies on tourism.
The EU prevents sellers to surcharge depending on the type of card used (PSD2 Directive (EU) 2015/2366), Art. 62(4)). It in effect opened the door to a Visa/Mastercard duopoly, as no local competitor could emerge and compete on price.
When it comes to tourism, this problem will always happen if the tourists are coming from the side that's cutting off the other. Without an interface between European and American payment systems, Americans won't be able to pay in Europe.
It's way more severe than that since Americans are not the only ones relying on VISA/MasterCard for payments abroad. The presence of other payment systems would make it easier for any non-USA country to still do payments.
- The EU is not a state, it's a governance body composed of representatives from individual member states. Every state is responsible for implementing their take on the directive.
- "EU poor track record on fostering innovation" - many things you use online have been researched and conceptualised in the EU. Even if they go elsewhere for funding, don't mistake where "innovation" happens and where it gets packaged by VC money for sale and enschitification.
- compliance costs: I think that's only expensive for companies who intend to to sell or otherwise do something shady with user data. Remember, not collecting data makes you instantly compliant with zero cost.
It's a supranational institution that dictates laws to States, with a budget and coercive powers against States. It just lacks an army of its own. Whether it's a proper state or not doesn't matter.
> conceptualised in the EU
No, in Europe. No EU bureaucrat conceptualizes things. EU =\= Europe.
> I think that's only expensive for companies who intend to to sell or otherwise do something shady with user data. Remember, not collecting data makes you instantly compliant with zero cost.
A lot of businesses need consumer data to improve their offerings and be competitive against the big boys. And RGPD lawyers ain't cheap, so even if you keep the minimal amount of data, you have to fork €10k+ to review everything, etc. The requirements for AI are even worse. All of those compliance jobs are unproductive and a burden on EU companies.
Same for the tax compliance obligations, which are ever increasing and now require you to record and document everything, especially if you do cross-border operations, as you are considered guilty by default if you don't.
We could also talk about the requirements to audit your sourcing chain for "human rights abuses", which ends in compliance hell for industrial companies with 2k+ suppliers, while of course Chinese companies don't have this problem.
The EU doesn't do any cost/benefit analysis on this, and just suppose that companies will magically find ressources to deal with their new regulatory "innovations".
Ok, I think you're reading a lot of tabloids as none of the above are actually true.
Regarding
> Institution that dictates laws to States
again no, because the laws are created and voted by elected representatives of said states, so the EU is not some 3rd party that exists on the side, the EU is the countries within it. Member states create their own laws.
Please point what is false. Does the EU, as an institution, produces technology? No Europeans do, did it before the EU, and don't need the EU to do it. WWW was created in Switzerland by an English scientist. Not in a ugly "bureaucrat-grey" building in Brussels.
What you are saying here is false: EU regulations are directly applicable, and don't need to be transposed into local laws.
It's the case for directives, which are required to be incorporated within 2 years. If the State doesn't comply, it faces an infringement procedure (Article 258 TFEU:), sanctions and fines (Article 260 TFEU).
The EU itself is not a real democracy, given that at every step obscurity and backroom-dealing is preferred to transparency. Chat Control is an excellent example of it: it was recommended by officials whose names were redacted. Even when the European Parliament said no in the past, they try to push it again - those fools can't anyway vote a law preventing the EC to do it!
More formally, the only directly elected institution (the parliament) doesn't have initiative power, doesn't hold the pen during trilogue negociations, is highly corruptible[0] given the proportional election, and can just "accept" the head of the European Commission. The EC is the only permanent body and can arbitrage rotating presidencies, pressure parties, and do screening on MPs to get what they want.
The lack of judicial consequences regarding Van Der Leyen after the sms affair is quite appalling for a commission that yells about "compliance" every day of the year.
Payments aren't but issuing currency is. State doesn't monopolize the payments. State creates a regulation and common standard across the EU. It's the banks who would do the payments, not the state, and for that banks would receive a standard fee so you as a consumer always know how much you pay for the service.
The alternative could be to foster competition to allow private local actors to emerge. Why do we need the State for this? The EU prevents sellers from surcharging depending on the type of credit card used, which led to the Visa/Mc duopoly and prevented local alternatives to compete on costs.
There is already. Almost every country on earth has single state controlled currency.
Fiat currency is already a natural monopoly on payments.
Imagine if every time you wanted to pay for a train ride you had to put your money into an envelope, mail it to the United States, and wait for it to come back. That's VISA.
How many non-government physical currencies are there in your country? I'm guessing if there is a legitimate government electronic currency most alternatives will fade away which will be the best rebuttal to your argument.
The public can hold government rules for surveillance in check, whereas they don't have that option for private payment systems.
I also do technical diligence, often times the blocker to sharding is the target company's tenancy model and schema. PK data type is certainly a blocker.
Definitely an issue, rarely the main one. You can work around integer PKs with composite keys or offset-based sharding schemes. What you can't easily fix is a schema with cross-tenant foreign keys, shared lookup tables, or a tenancy model that wasn't designed for data isolation from day one. Those are architectural decisions that require months of migration work.
UUIDs buy you flexibility, sure. But if your data model assumes everything lives in one database, the PK type is a sub-probem of your problems.
Hmm, yea that's a great callout. Something we definitely have in our sights longer term (focus for now is to make sure that the desktop chat experience is truly amazing).
But why one or the other? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a curated list of suggestions, but it would really be useful to have some tips or comments on the experience of each one, their shortcomings or advantages. Otherwise, it's not much better than just checking out a list of names from Google :)
I will use hledger if I'm handling someone else's money, like as a trustee. Double entry accounting is nice for being precise about things. But for my own accounts it's too much overhead to deal with reconciliation. Don't have time for that.
A lot of it is going to be needs & vibes based. Some of them have more in-depth and niche features in certain areas, like transaction splitting or categorization and others are just simple and clean UI to go for ease of use.
I use monarch, I don't think it is very good as an 'investment tracker' (what wealthfolio claims to be). It's fantastic as a more general personal finance/budget tracker.
For example - I have to reclassify loads of transactions for it to track close to correctly. Say treasuries - purchase at a discount, then at maturity redeem for full amount. You can enter them as buy/sell, but then it wont properly report to cashflow, or give you a good classification as to what type of income that was.
Similar with stocks and short term/long term. It means that even though all the info is there it's not as useful as I'd like for showing total income broken out as types of income to help with tax planning etc.
I still use it so the annoyances are not too extreme, but if there were a tool that did a better job of the investment side I'd switch.
Looking at the wealthfolio features I'm not sure it handles any of that any better though, but it does seem to break out dividend/interest income.
I use monarch and I've been happy enough with it. Would probably consider self-hosting with actual in the future, but I wanted an easy on-ramp for myself to actually get in the habit of budgeting.
We're entering the same market but with a tilt towards investment & actionable guidance. Same read-only capabilities on the account sync side (although our budgeting + spending side is still heavily in development) except we're an RIA that can provide professional advise (for free).
I still use GNUcash [1]. Only drawback is comparatively poor handling of equities, with no good way to view historic portfolio value / net worth. Great for general purpose accounting though.
As I recall, it doesn't incorporate the historic price of stocks. So if I bought 1 share of Nvidia for $10 10 years ago, it'd say I had a net worth of $180 then, not $10 (as it uses today's stock price).
It's not perfect, for example its monthly/yearly subscription detection didn't work great for me, but compared to all those apps that involve trusting a third party with your banking data it's worth a look.
beancount + the web ui for it, fava, is what I end up going back to whenever I look for the sort of tools. Downside is I'm way behind on my ledger and don't _really_ want to spend the effort inputting everything to catch up.
Which you appear to be the developer of from other comments in this thread. Not saying it's bad, but it's self-promotion rather than organic preference.
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
You missed https://tiller.com which uses the same financial connectors as others but dumps the data into a Google/Office365 spreadsheet that you control.
I'm a huge fan of You Need A Budget, it was instrumental in giving me control over my finances. It feels like a superpower to see all my money in one place and not care which bank account the dollars actually reside. Also makes it easier to take advantage of various offers (Credit card or things like HYSA) since I know all the records will live in YNAB and I have full control there, even if the individual banks I use have terrible UIs.
Someone else mentioned this up the thread. I am a huge fan of YNAB too, but I just gave Actual Budget a try and I'm hooked. Some things are better and some things worse than YNAB, but it's open source and self-hosted. I'd recommend either.
So if CUDA could be ported to Mojo w/ AI then it would be basically available for any GPU/accelerator vendor. Seems like the right kind of approach towards making CUDA a non-issue.
Chris Latner of Apple's Swift and Tesla fame is running a company entirely predicated on this, but at the deterministic language design level rather than the inference level.
If a beam search, initiative plan and execute phase is more effective than having better tooling in a deterministic programming language then this will clearly take the lead.
Thanks for the link! I am not familiar with the company but reminds me of the whole formal methods debate in distributed systems. Sure, writing TLA+ specs is the 'correct' deterministic way to build a Raft implementation, but in reality everyone just writes messy Go/Java and patches bugs as they pop up because its faster.
That's correct - however as other commenters have noted. Doing this by hand is extremely challenging for human engineers working on tensor kernels.
The expense calculation might be
expense of improvement = (time taken per optimization step * cost of unit time ) / ( speedup - 1)
The expensive heuristic function is saving wall time well also being cheaper in cost of unit time. And as the paper shows the speed up provided for each unit time multiplied by unit cost of time is large.
Usually the rate of overall improvement for this type of optimization is less than Moore law rate of improvement, thus not worth the company investment. 17x micro-benchmarks don't count. Real improvements come from architectural changes, for example: MoE, speculative multi-token prediction, etc.
I think there's a very important nugget here unrelated to agents: Kagi as a search engine is a higher signal source
of information than Google page rank and ad sense funded model. Primarily because google as it is today includes a massive amount of noise and suffered from blowback/cross-contamination as more LLM generated content pollute information truth.
> We found many, many examples of benchmark tasks where the same model using Kagi Search as a backend outperformed other search engines, simply because Kagi Search either returned the relevant Wikipedia page higher, or because the other results were not polluting the model’s context window with more irrelevant data.
> This benchmark unwittingly showed us that Kagi Search is a better backend for LLM-based search than Google/Bing because we filter out the noise that confuses other models.
> Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results.
It's likely they can filter the results for their own agents, but will leave other results as they are. Half the issue with normal results are their ads - that's not going away.
>Maybe if Google hears this they will finally lift a finger towards removing garbage from search results.
Unlikely. There are very few people willing to pay for Kagi. The HN audience is not at all representative of the overall population.
Google can have really miserable search results and people will still use it. It's not enough to be as good as google, you have to be 30% better than google and still free in order to convert users.
I use Kagi and it's one of the few services I am OK with a reoccurring charge from because I trust the brand for whatever reason. Until they find a way to make it free, though, it can't replace google.
They are transparent about their growth of paying customers, do you feel as if this fairly consistent and linear rate of growth will never be enough to be meaningful?
> Primarily because google as it is today includes a massive amount of noise and suffered from blowback/cross-contamination as more LLM generated content pollute information truth.
I'm not convinced about this. If the strategy is "lets return wikipedia.org as the most relevant result", that's not sophisticated at all. Infact, it only worked for a very narrow subset of queries. If I search for 'top luggages for solo travel', I dont want to see wikipedia and I dont know how kagi will be any better.
The wrote "returned the relevant Wikipedia page higher" and not "wikipedia.org as the most relevant result" - that's an important distinction. There are many irrelevant Wikipedia pages.
Generally we do particularly better on product research queries [1] than other categories, because most poor review sites are full of trackers and other stuff we downrank.
However there aren't public benchmarks for us to brag about on product search, and frankly the simpleQA digression in this post made it long enough it was almost cut.
1. (Except hyper local search like local restaurants)
I've tried to use it early on, but it hasn't moved much over time. It was opinionated and neglected. Meanwhile, pre-commit is supported by everyone. There are other alternatives, such as Husky, hk, and git-hooks, but they don't offer the out-of-the-box support that pre-commit does.
Without summoning the decentralized block-based "currency" crowd, I would like to point out that in the entire lifespan of such technologies they never have received widespread institutional or legislative buy-in like this EU initiative to build a digital Euro.
While USDC and BTC have been used as defacto currencies in some countries there is truly no equivalent adoption in any meaningfully mature economic zone such as EU/NA/CN.
I welcome sovereign digital payments initiatives.
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