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montenegrohugo

2,388 karmajoined 8 lat temu
I occasionally post stuff at www.hugo0.com if you want to check it out.

Email: [email protected] Twitter: @uwwgo - (I'm active here)

Submissions

The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)

sabrinas.space
267 points·by montenegrohugo·5 miesięcy temu·119 comments

A premature software standard has led to billions in losses

hugo0.com
1 points·by montenegrohugo·5 miesięcy temu·1 comments

Ask HN: Is there a way to browse HN weekly?

3 points·by montenegrohugo·6 miesięcy temu·4 comments

Show HN: Peanut – A Modern Money App

peanut.me
15 points·by montenegrohugo·10 miesięcy temu·18 comments

comments

montenegrohugo
·6 dni temu·discuss
Technically Voiceio also does TTS, but it's really crappy and just meant to read stuff loud / select a lot of text and listen to it podcast style whilst I'm e.g. washing the dishes.

However you're totally right that it's focused on STT. I probably use it 95% for STT and only occasionally for TTS (which also reflects itself in the amount of polish I put into each)

and thanks!
montenegrohugo
·6 dni temu·discuss
Super cool!!

I've been using my own solution since January. I'm on Linux, and can't use Aqua, Whipsrflow etc... So i made my own.

Recently cleaned it up and made it install friendly.

If anyone is interested, you can check it out here: https://github.com/Hugo0/voiceio

It's self-improving over time, runs on your local machine, and is generally decent software. 60% of my interaction with my PC nowadays is pure voice input.
montenegrohugo
·3 miesiące temu·discuss
ai garbage
montenegrohugo
·4 miesiące temu·discuss
Really neat. Immediately added to my own small blog: https://hugo0.com/wander
montenegrohugo
·4 miesiące temu·discuss
Shameless self-promo: We've been working for the last two years on making money movement free. We use ethereum (and stablecoins) for that, and integrate with the novel real time payment networks like PIX, Wechat, Yape, Mercadopago and so on.

We're still orders of magnitude smaller than Visa and Mastercard, but I do believe products like ours (and competition is red hot here, theres so much good choice!) will be good for consumers.

Money should be like a message: free and instant

We're open source btw, happy to show off codebase and review PRs

https://github.com/peanutprotocol/peanut-ui

https://peanut.me/
montenegrohugo
·5 miesięcy temu·discuss
I found this gem. Hadn't seen it on HN yet, so I thought I'd post it!

I've always found Japanese design fascinating
montenegrohugo
·5 miesięcy temu·discuss
Hey folks! I wrote this piece. It's about ERC-20, an ethereum payments standard that has bothered me for years. I work in payments, and it's made my life so much harder. I think the lessons are applicable outside of blockchain.

As all my blog posts, no AI, all hand written.
montenegrohugo
·6 miesięcy temu·discuss
perfect, thanks
montenegrohugo
·6 miesięcy temu·discuss
Surely the extrapolation is wrong?

at 4 heads, just randomly select a jury of 3. and you're back on track.

at a million heads, just sum up all their guesses, divide by one million, and then check the over/under of 0.50
montenegrohugo
·9 miesięcy temu·discuss
ah, it seems i completely misunderstood your question.

I think there's two angles here: personal accounting for the user, and compliance for us as a company.

From a user perspective, it's your own responsibility to classify your transactions when you do your accounting, wether you're an individual or a business. So if you get paid via Peanut, you need to say if it was a donation, friend payment, income, etc.

From our own perspective on compliance, risk and fees, it depends a lot on what provider we're working with and in what jurisdiction the operate on. Sorry if that's not a satisfying answer ("it depends"); happy to go into more detail if you have a specific example in mind
montenegrohugo
·10 miesięcy temu·discuss
hmmm that's a very fair point on the FAQ! Will add it
montenegrohugo
·10 miesięcy temu·discuss
Also, to expand on this a bit more:

Currently merchants get kind of shafted by VISA/Mastercard. Not only do they have to wait until they get their funds (sometimes even up to two weeks!), which is horrible for a business where cash flow is important, margins low and float very tight; they also pay huge fees on top!

Depending on geo, these fees can go from 1-3% (total) to >6-8% in geos like Argentina and Brazil (and even worse in some other places). That's insane.

Whilst stablecoin & blockchain adoption is not fundamentally impossible for Visa/MC (see this post for more info https://x.com/uwwgo/status/1973038511897923848), it is still a very long way off, and we expect to be very competitive, especially with sovereign nations pushing their own alternatives that we interoperate with (PIX, Mercadopago, DUITNOW, MB WAY etc)
montenegrohugo
·10 miesięcy temu·discuss
No, the landing page communicates customer fees (which are 0 for peanut to peanut flows and pass through for banking flows). We're very transparent with any FX or fees users experience.

I'm not quite sure I understand the logic of mentioning future merchant monetization plans on the landing page?
montenegrohugo
·10 miesięcy temu·discuss
Unfortunately Firefox rarely has passkey support; so our whole auth system sadly doesn't work on that browser. In the future we'll add multiple auth methods. But for now you can switch to Brave, Chrome or most other Chromium browsers

Apologies!
montenegrohugo
·10 miesięcy temu·discuss
That's an excellent question and has a lot of nuance to it. In principle there's ~200 countries in the world, and most of them have their own currency, which leads do 200^200 = 40_000 exchange rates in the world. More even; most currencies have wildly different exchange depending on what exchange you are actually using and how much liquidity that exchange has.

In practice, most currencies are actually liquid against the American dollar; and maybe a few other major coins. This is mostly a technical issue, since liquidity is fragmented and it is just easier to trade against what you know everyone else has: the all-dominant US Dollar [1].

Now, enough theory, how do we do it at Peanut?

Currently, all user balances at Peanut are dollarized; that means users hold USD stablecoins. This is a deliberate simplification; in the future, we plan to roll out other stablecoin support (especially important for Europeans. The rest of the world is pretty happy with holding USD).

When we have to do an exchange to a local currency, like Argentinian Pesos, we work with a local exchange provider. They are able to give us the best exchange rate, because we go directly from a USD-like stablecoin (USDC or USDT usually), to their currency.

For them, USDC & USDT are functionally equivalent to hard cash, and they price it accordingly. They also get it IMMEDIATELY; they don't have to wait multiple days until settlement and until we wire them the funds from some American or European Bank. This is much better for us than for other fintechs like Revolut or Wise; they have to have their own liquidity (and all the infra, compliance, and legal that that entails!)

In the future, I expect our exchange rates to get even better. As foreign exchange continues to grow ON chain, liquidity on chain will increase; until it is the largest (and thus CHEAPEST) exchange in the world.

[1] Note: with the slow end of Pax Americana under the current US regime, the adoption of US Dollar has actually been falling somewhat; replaced by sovereign nations and funds actually holding more gold instead of usd . That's also why we've seen gold at all time highs
montenegrohugo
·10 miesięcy temu·discuss
Thanks! Do you like the flashy design, or the actual UX of the app?

US and EU banking rails are both fully supported!
montenegrohugo
·10 miesięcy temu·discuss
We're literally adding it this week! Give me your email or some place to reach you, i'll notify you

You can also try the dev build at https://staging.peanut.me but it's quite unstable atm
montenegrohugo
·10 miesięcy temu·discuss
neat technical sidenote: to stay non-custodial, the "key" parameter in these links is after a # hash. This ensures servers don't actually see this link-secret and steal the funds!
montenegrohugo
·10 miesięcy temu·discuss
Just to show how easy it is to send/receive money with Peanut, here's a few links with $2 each.

(they are only claimable once, so please be courteous and don't claim all, leave some for other users!)

1. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5778#p=ms74xIbdGVSK...

2. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5779#p=G7V82WybXthy...

3. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5780#p=Rgpymby5wBbO...

4. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5781#p=6F5nKWjx2Kf6...

5. https://peanut.me/claim?c=42161&v=v4.3&i=5782#p=DtdJ0y2Ufayu...
montenegrohugo
·3 lata temu·discuss
Yup, totally. This is a form of knowledge distillation. Openai, or other foundational model providers, can't really do anything about it.