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If you want me to read your comment, please pay me $1 first... if I find your comment interesting I might refund.

I had this idea / pet project once where I did exactly this for email. Emails would immediately bounce with payment link and explanation. If you paid you get credit on a ledger per email address. Only then the mail goes through.

You can also integrate it in clients by adding payment/reward claim headers.


Bill Gates already had this idea. All efforts to change email were already documented 25 years ago. The biggest changes are it is more centralized these days, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, JMAP innovation, oh... and one more thing! It is HUGE!! HTML email is the default...

Yeah I remember this from "The Road Ahead" which I chanced upon one time in the 90s. I thought it was a silly idea.

Scammers (and spammers) always got $1! That's why there's a lot of the scam ads on google, fb, apple.

So the paywall email firewall will not work as desired.


Not many email attacks are worth an entire dollar. It would be very very effective at reducing spam. And too effective at reducing everything else.

Emails to CEOs they do worth.

So only CEOs will get spam, and it's effective for 99.9% of people? I would not describe that as "will not work as desired".

And it would even still work for the CEO, they would just have to charge more than $1.

The real problem is we don't have a low-friction digital payment system that allows individuals to automate sending payment requests for small amounts of money to each other without requiring everyone to sign up for a merchant account with a financial bureaucracy.


> The real problem is we don't have a low-friction digital payment system that allows individuals to automate sending payment requests for small amounts of money to each other without requiring everyone to sign up for a merchant account with a financial bureaucracy.

Its called cryptocurrency


First you have to make it low-friction. If I want Joe Average to send me $1 in cryptocurrency, how is he getting $1 in cryptocurrency to send me?

There is no shortage of apps to do that these days. Venmo and CashApp are pretty mainstream for people in the US.

I'll better keep the $1 to myself than go through the crazy 35 steps KYC onboarding form just to send that $1.

>First you have to make it low-friction. If I want Joe Average to send me $1 in cryptocurrency, how is he getting $1 in cryptocurrency to send me?

Absolutely. You're 1000% correct. Cryptocurrency is way too high friction for stuff like that. When I wish to spend crypto, I need to:

[If you don't have an exchange account already, you'll need the 0.x steps too!]

0.0 Create an account on an exchange which is legally allowed to operate in your state/country;

0.1 Provide all sorts of KYC/AML info including photos of yourself and your government ID;

0.2 Wait hours/days/weeks for the exchange to "validate" your KYC/AML info and allow you to purchase crypto;

1. Log in to an exchange which is actually allowed to operate in the place where one resides;

2. Purchase Bitcoin or other coin the exchange deems appropriate (leaving aside the hefty fee charged for using fiat currency/traditional credit card);

3. Wait days/weeks until the exchange allows you to transfer the purchased cryptocurrency out of your exchange-hosted wallet;

4. Transfer crypto to a wallet you actually control;

5. Convert the crypto purchased on the exchange to the crypto coin required for whatever your purpose may be;

6. Transmit the crypto to the destination wallet.

Total time (not including setting up the exchange account, which can take anywhere from 1-10 days): 3-10 days.

Much too high friction for small payments, IMHO.


All the setup is no worse than setting up a bank account

And technically it can be avoided through back channels if you know someone who already has it - can just pay them cash or whatever and they can send crypto to you

Crypto is very easy to transfer once you have a wallet

Its the exchange to/from real world currency where the friction is.


> All the setup is no worse than setting up a bank account

Which is a huge pain in the butt. If someone invented a new lower-spam email ecosystem that required everyone to make a new bank account, very few people would join.

I would say something about a combined account but many countries have already figured out free bank transfers without needing crypto so maybe do that?


The market currently values your reading of HN comments at $0.

I'm sure astroturfers value it more highly than that.

The only way for you to be sure of that is if you're one.

I'm sure there's literature out there on how much astroturfers are paid.

Who's hit with the transaction fees though?

First of all, if you have a mesh you don't have to connect to home server to talk to other devices in the same network. They connect to each other.

Second it's super easy to add a new device. Managing wireguard keys is annoying.

Third I don't have to open the port, worry about ddns etc.

Finally, for me it allows me to manage my DNS easily and I can leave tailscale running at all times. Also good luck implementing ACL on your own.

I don't see an issue with them logging when I connect to my stuff. The convenience for me is worth it more than the risk.


If your devices are in one network like at home, you have all those things with Wireguard too.

Devices in home LAN all talk to each other, so you have a mesh network.

You need keys for your laptop, phone and remote devices only. Most nodes are in LAN and don’t need to even run VPN.

With plain Wireguard, you open a single port in a single device. With mesh VPNs you open tons of ports: several ports in coordination, STUN and relay servers, also every device runs a vpn server listening to a port.

You VPN to home and use your home DNS. Your enter ACL rules and DNS server in your router.

I use a mesh VPN but I’m thinking of switching back to Wireguard, my older setup.


The title is missing an important part "... for Essay Writing Task"


Or "...For the Tasks That Were Measured". You can always complain that it's not universal enough.


Why is the how dropped? Is it automatic?


Yes. There are a few other title-mangle rules that HN has.

It's an attempted technical solution to try to remove / limit the amount of "clickbait" in titles.

It does not work very well.


I tried searching for similar incidents in the past[1], and I think the problem is that the title munging actually doesn't happen often enough for Hacker News to want to do anything about it. It's unusual that two front page articles were affected on the same day, but that's a small fraction compared to titles that passed through[2].

I don't know if Hacker News will pop up any extra confirmation to the submitter to warn that their submitted title were automatically edited, but I think that would be a better interface than relying on submitters and readers to fix the mistake after the article is already visible and ranked.

Whether any automated editing of titles actually helps with reducing clickbait is a different question.

[1]

How wolves became dogs (2026-01-09) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553433

How Samba Was Written (2026-01-04) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46551531

Why I have to give Fortnite my passport to use Bluesky (2025-12-19) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46327832

How they clean the balls in a ball pit (2025-10-15) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45592984

Why we didn't rewrite our feed handler in Rust (2025-10-08) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517240

How Spain put up wealth taxes (2025-08-16) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44927460

[2]

Majority of the submitted titles never had "how" or "why" to begin with, and sometimes the submitter catches the change in time, for example:

How to Code Claude Code in 200 Lines of Code (2026-01-08) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545620

I didn't see any mentions of the title being edited here.


It is automatic on submission, but the submitter can go back and edit the title. I just forgot to do so.


>b/c they didn’t know how to play politics

Or they refuse to play that bs game


True. I used to count myself in that category. Do the work and stay away from games. I was also thinking of myself as clever, self-respecting by doing hard work and leaving daily politicking for others. And now sometime back I got like 2-3 dressing downs from managers, reason being I am not taking leadership feedback seriously enough and mending my ways. This despite I am only one with left with knowledge of legacy system. Clearly I am pretty dispensable while thinking otherwise all along.

No outside prospects considering market situation, miserable current workplace ultimately due to my choices. So in end just no winning for me by not playing game.


Politics and leadership is a responsibility. By avoiding it, you're setting a bad example. Once you know how an organization works, you should help lead it.

If we consider a family, you're essentially saying you'll only "do the work": brush teeth, feed kids, clean up, but not take on any responsibilities for the actual goals of the family. Not pushing to have your kids learn things, just executing somebody else's ideas, driving them to sports; not improving the living situation by perhaps investigating if you should get a bigger car. Nothing leading, only executing the ideas of your spouse.

I exaggerate of course, but there is something there.


> And now sometime back I got like 2-3 dressing downs from managers, reason being I am not taking leadership feedback seriously enough and mending my ways.

It's important that you have relationships with your boss's boss. Some organizations call these skip-level 1-1s, other times it's just riding with your boss's boss in the car. This also is not politicking or CYA.

The reason is that managers are fallible, and when you have a relationship with your boss's boss, it helps get things back on track when someone (you, your boss, or your boss's boss) makes a mistake.

Getting back to the point: If you get a dressing down from your manager, your relationship with your boss's boss helps you know if you deserve it, or your manager made a mistake and your boss's boss has to intervene.

---

Quite tangible: A few weeks ago my manager gave me a dressing down. Earlier in the day I had a conversation with the CEO where he told me I was 100% in the right, so my manager was basically putting his foot in his mouth the entire time they gave me the dressing down. It's interesting to see where the situation is going to go, because everyone (me, the CEO, and everyone else in the company) really respects my manager and wants to continue working with them in a non-managerial role.


In your situation, it's end of year review time. He might be softening you up.

Why not mention to your manager that CEO supported you? Are they working with different data? I get these may not be fun to press on right before the holidays.


Don't make assumptions. My employer does not do end-of-year reviews.

To make a long story short, my manager got angry because I wrote a quick and dirty tool that bypassed a lot of confusing abstraction layers, and is significantly easier to use than the tool the company currently uses.

When my manager got angry, I first told my manager that we shouldn't argue in front of the entire office. Then I went to the CEO for advice. The CEO gave me advice that I used on my 1-1 with my manager later that day. (The CEO was also quite happy that I made a quick-and-dirty tool that made peoples' lives easier.)

> Why not mention to your manager that CEO supported you?

I suggested that my manager discuss the issue with the CEO when they told me that he didn't think he could "sell my tool" to the CEO.

To make a long story short, this is a case where my manager started the company, and people / project management is not their strong part. The limiting factor is funding, otherwise we'd have hired a proper project manager and promoted my manager (the founder) to a thought leadership role.


>I suggested that my manager discuss the issue with the CEO

Point blank:

Why not tell your manager you already spoke with the CEO instead of

1. Not mentioning you already overstepped your manager

2. And the skip-level boss/CEO liked the idea.

This seems like potentially good intentions being easily perceived by your manager as passive-aggressive. Maybe your skip level told you to use that phrasing.

Regardless, good luck.


I think you're misinterpreting the situation, because I didn't "overstep" my manager, and in a small company everyone has a relationship with everyone. (IE, what I did was taking initiative and making good use of dead time.)

I'm not comfortable discussing this further in a public forum at this point, but you're welcome to look at my profile to contact me directly if you want to.


I understand and don't have your context.


If you're still looking at this thread, this article explains what's going on: https://www.startups.com/articles/how-founders-get-fired-by-...

The article takes a harsh tone on the situation, which really isn't true. (I wish the author avoided the word "failed" because the situation is really about recognizing success and playing to strengths.)


Sure, you have a lot more tactical context.

I agree that diagnosing and treating Founder's Syndrome is a natural, healthy outcome.


But... GitHub stars!


Podman has plenty of problems. Rootless for example has super slow networking. Last time I checked it was not a solved problem.


For production workloads, you can use systemd socket activation to avoid most of the network issues. The caddy demo I've linked below explains more about the issues it would solve.

[0] https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorial...

[1] https://github.com/eriksjolund/podman-caddy-socket-activatio...


I remember the preview price for 2.5 flash was much cheaper. And then it got quite expensive when it went out of preview. I hope the same won't happen.


For 2.5 Flash Preview the price was specifically much cheaper for the no-reasoning mode, in this case the model reasons by default so I don't think they'll increase the price even further.


It's a bit slower performance wise


Will you get upset if Microsoft will charge 500000000 USD (because more copilot value added every month) per year? That is way more upsetting imho. And if all fails there is still some SAP solution to everything in life :P


This one gets me now than most of the rest... The increase in licensing for copilot features a lot of orgs would prefer to disable is distasteful to say the least.


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