Normally, I separate the download filename (what the server / person chose to call the file) from my own organization system file name.
So if I download or get sent "Book.pdf", I'll rename it to how I'll remember it -- "Book Title - Author.pdf", etc.
That being said, I don't think there's any right answer here, it's usually just a matter of time and energy. If I had to enrich every single file I download with a great title / detailed metadata / etc that I'd need to find that file later, that's all I'd do all day.
I only bother with files I expect to want to look at again after the next 48 hrs. Which is maybe 5% of what I download. Those usually also get moved from the downloads folder and filed somewhere useful. Or for some stuff like family snapshots they get categorized in a folder and not renamed.
> Stripe (their payment process) will handle adult content payments. It puts the account into the high risk category due to the high rate of fraud in those categories.
Stripe _says_ they will handle these type of payments, but more often than not, within roughly a year of implementation you'll get an email from them kicking you off their platform, no matter how vigilant you were, or even if the things you were selling were more rated R than rated X. Source: my own insider knowledge along with colleagues in the space.
No it isn't. It's struggling on the front page because this is a very old story and it's the same conversation every time: payment processors hate this stuff because digital goods are fraud and chargeback magnets, and that's doubly true of adult content.
Those are valid facts, but this is missing an underlying point: HN’s community is not concerned about this form of discrimination, so each time it crosses the front page, we see lots of threads about deregulation but few about the spectre of ethics raised by these acts. Ethics aren’t typically in-scope for HN unless the party harmed is either a for-profit corporation or a tech worker; since HN doesn’t as a community tend to openly self-identify with the fields of sex work, the ethical issues here are effectively out of scope here. One can imagine a different HN that gave the ethical threats to Others as much airtime as it gives to ethical threats to Self. I remain hopeful.
If only all moral objections had such plausible-deniability ready to promote disregarding them, we’d never have to teach or debate morality and ethical practices in tech at all! Fortunately, the core debate — should payment processors be required to provide service so long as the operator is cooperative with escrow and other such ‘avoid money going out the door fraudulently’ restrictions on high-chargeback enterprises? — remains a ‘brass ring’ desirable outcome of techno-libertarians and so the issue continues be fought about. (Even if it’s only indirectly a morality debate over sex products.)
This isn't responsive to anything I've written. It's not in any sense a moral debate over sex products. It's a practical debate over how expensive it is to underwrite transactions in these markets. The people involved in making those payments work are extending credit.
Payment processors have constructed a “moral ordering of sexuality” [1] that would be entirely unnecessary if, as you claim, their intentions are purely legal and/or related to high chargeback rates.
If it’s not a moral issue, then the rules should be simple and easily communicable. Examples: Comply with the law of your jurisdiction. Keep your chargeback rates below x%. Instead, payment processors intentionally refuse to enforce consistent rules across platforms. Not the behavior of an economically-motivated, entirely rational agent.
First off, great article, everyone involved in this discussion should read it.
Second, agreed, if this was primarily about chargeback rates, there'd be no differentiation between disallowing things like hypnosis, (fictional) non-con, BDSM, etc. over vanilla sexual material. Instead it seems to be a mixture of pressure by (primarily religious, though some feminist) anti-porn activists, negative media portrayals (e.g. Kristof's PornHub article in the NYT), and understandable fear of lawsuits resulting from hosting actual illegal material (Visa/Pornhub case in California).
I’m not calling for “more transparency,” I’m calling into question your assertion that the payment processors are acting out of rational self-interest.
It’s a little strange to complain about no one being responsive to you when you’ve summarily dismissed every comment in this thread.
Once again this is like the 10th time this discussion has played out on HN. If you want to see a less conclusory set of arguments, use the search bar and go back a couple years.
The counterargument here doesn't even make sense. You think payment processors are run by people with weird puritan takes on adult content? No, they're exactly the same nerds that work everywhere else in the industry. I'm sure someone will come up with some just-so story about how payment processors, and only payment processors, are suspectible to influence from religious radicals or whatever, but: special pleading is special pleading.
> Once again this is like the 10th time this discussion has played out on HN.
If the conversation is too boring and repetitive for you personally due to your long, long history as a commenter, you could always choose not to participate in it. That’s more or less what you’ve done here in any case, with the added efficiency of one fewer step.
This is what, past the thirtieth anniversary of Eternal September? I’d think you’ve had plenty of time to cope with the social phenomenon.
> I'm sure someone will come up with some just-so story about how payment processors, and only payment processors, are suspectible to influence from religious radicals or whatever, but: special pleading is special pleading.
If U.S. credit-card issuers were worried about fraud, they would have implemented the other half of "chip-&-PIN," which the rest of the world has been using for decades.
U.S. customers pretty much JUST got chips in our cards... but issuers "forgot" to implement the PIN part.
In my country you usually need to confirm payments with SMS OTP, except for trusted merchants (but they take the risk of fraud by opting out from confirmation). So simply stealing a bank card doesn't get you far. And pretending that you did not pay is also more difficult. Is US different? Do banks and clients trust each other in US and do not require OTP?
Yep. If I take someone's credit card, I can use it all I want, until either 1) they notice and cancel the card, or 2) I trip the fraud protection with unusual spending patterns.
Are you viewing by the default page or active? Several of these articles were discussed last year when the processors were pressuring Valve. Maybe a little topic fatigue?
US civics 101. The first amendment mostly restricts government action. This is not a free speech issue unless you want to legislate that adult content is a protected class or want to make a special clause for payment processing.
This is a perfect use case for crypto imo.
If you are making an argument that new legislation needs to made, great but unfortunately people jump to the idea that this is immediately a free speech issue.
Freedom of speech is not defined by the US constitution. Free speech is an ideological stance, not a legal definition. US laws protects some forms of free speech and not others.
Good luck with that. We can all day long discuss what is free speech and not free speech but unless it’s a protected class or a carveout for payment processors it does not matter. Propose solutions instead. You could argue that payment processors control so much of the market that it’s like the government limiting speech but I would counter argue that they could use crypto easily.
Not to mention usually businesses use payment processors as the scape goat. Very few business, other than purpose built, want to deal with adult content.
There is no "religious oligarchy" dictating anything.
Feminist groups are responsible for the last few waves of censorship. Collective Shout was specifically named in the itch.io/Steam campaigns and the previous PornHub campaigns were waged by a litany of left-wing media sources hyperfocused on particular types of content (mostly rape, hypnosis and incest). Jewish groups applied similar pressure when people were uploading antisemitic porn.
"Religious" groups haven't been relevant to censorship discussions since the early 90s.
> Fewer and fewer people are hiding porn payments from their wives.
Normalizing leaving a paper trail of extramarital misdeeds is the sort of opsec disinformation you're supposed to use on enemies. Don't lie to your allies.
Anyone that wants out of their marriage that badly can just as easily come out as bisexual or propose redefinition of their marriage to embrace interracial cuckolding. Women love having such salacious leverage in divorce court.
> There is no such thing as vice content being higher risk. That's a diversion topic.
Such a diversion that there is an entire cottage industry of guides for prospective e-thots to mitigate chargeback risks?
Every commercial site I've ever seen engages in fraudulent billing or dark patterns. "$1 for a week, then only $24.99...billed weekly."
The chargeback rates are real when an industry exists to part horny fools from their money.
Collective Shout is a Christian anti-rights organization wrapped in feminist cloth.
The founder of Collective Shout previously successfully lobbied against mifepristone and opposed changes to legislation requiring pro-life pregnancy-counseling services to disclose their affiliations in their advertising.
In 2004, she founded the anti-abortion lobby Women's Forum Australia.
> Published by Bible Society Australia, Eternity is a national media platform for Christians, designed to encourage, equip and inspire them by revealing what God is doing in our nation and beyond.
That’s not a jump, it’s a straight line. These fundies like to dress it up but it’s transparently obvious to anyone who has dealt with religious fundamentalists that is their core driver.
Lately I've been building Aho (https://aho.com) -- an API for verifying age, credentials, and identity using cryptographic proof from digital wallets instead of document inspection.
For context, I built out Playboy's age verification system, and watched as it hurt conversion (nobody wants to upload an ID to an adult website, who would have thought!). Cryptographic signatures from issuing authorities (DMVs, universities, employers, etc) with selective disclosure (e.g. you don't need to upload your full ID, just the fields that matter) is how verification _has_ to work going forward -- AI can fake documents, but not private keys.
I've been working on this 6 months full time, and implemented all the W3C VC, OpenID4VCI/VP, SD-JWT specifications myself.
I find people over-rotate on whether we should be reviewing AI-produced code. "What if bad code gets into production!" some programmers gasp, as if they themselves have never pushed bad code, or had coworkers do the same.
I've worked at places where I've trusted everyone on my team to the extent that most PRs got only a quick glance before getting a "LGTM". On the flipside, I've also worked on teams where every person was a different kind of liability with the code that they pushed, and for those teams I implemented every linting / pre-commit / testing tool possible that all needed to pass inspection (including human review) before any code arrived on production.
A year ago, AI was like that latter team I mentioned -- something I had to check, double check, and correct until I was happy with what it produced. Over the past 6 months, it's gotten closer (but still fairly far away) from the former team I mentioned -- I have to correct it about 10% of the time, whereas for most things it gets it right.
The fact that AI produces a much _larger_ volume of code than the average engineer is perhaps slightly concerning, but I don't see it much differently than code at large companies. Does every Facebook engineer review every junior engineer's pull request to make sure bad code doesn't slip in?
That isn't to say I'm for letting AI go wild with code -- but I think if at worse we consider AI to be a junior engineer we need to reign in with static analysis tools / linters / testers etc, we will probably be able to mitigate a lot of the downside.
There are two opposite answers here, and I feel like I could argue either one:
1) Humans were never held accountable, really
Outside of a few regulated industries, the worst that happens to an engineer who pushes negligent code is that they get fired. But after that happens, what actually changes? The organizational structure of the company that allowed the employee to push bad code still exists.
2) Humans will still be held accountable
If a human (managing a fleet of AI agents, let's say) ends up deploying bad code to production, they won't be able to point to the AI agent and say "it was them that did it!" -- it will still be the human at the end of the line that is held responsible.
Your comment seems to imply AI is currently at a junior developer's level -- 12 months ago I would have agreed (like I mentioned in my parent comment, both near the end and about the "latter" team I was a part of), but it's gotten quite good over the past few months.
That's not to say it won't ship bugs, but so does any engineer (junior or senior). It's up to you as to what level of tooling you surround the AI with (automated testing / linting / etc), but at the very least it doesn't also hurt to have that set up anyways (automated tests have helped prevent senior devs from shipping bad code too).
Many of today's news websites (tech or otherwise) cashed in their goodwill / reputation / page rank to sell ads.
The first shoe dropped when news websites realized they weren't generating content fast enough. Hard, in depth journalism takes time, but when people want to know something that happened _today_, they don't want to wait a week for all the facts to come out, and so the major websites started losing traffic to websites that churned out articles fast.
The additional benefit of churning out articles was that you could match against more and more long tail keywords, which lead to more traffic and more ability to sell ads. To keep up, many websites dropped quality for speed, and consumers noticed.
The second shoe then to drop was with affiliate marketing -- articles on CNET / Wirecutter etc were already ranking and rating products, so they figured "[...] why shouldn't we get a cut if someone ends up buying a product we recommend"? The challenge then became that consumers couldn't tell the difference between a product that was recommended because it was good, or because the product gave the biggest "kickback" to the website for using the affiliate link. Thus, people that gave "honest" opinions on products (e.g. people asking on Reddit, at least for a while, as the article suggests) became the new source of truth.
The result of this means that these days, if you read a lot of articles on the major tech websites, they feel more like they've been optimized for speed (e.g. churning out an article fast), SEO, and not much else. Many people have talked about how recipie websites are now short story generators more than food instructions, but it's been common for a while where I go to a tech website to read about something I specifically Googled, only for it to feel more like it was written _specifically_ to capture traffic for a keyword, rather than actually solve the issue or question I came into the website with.
The cherry on top is that AI has none of these problems (so far) -- yes, there's some movement on trying to do SEO for AI, and of course ads will eventually come to AI like it has everything else, but currently, you can get the answers you want, described to you exactly how you'd like to hear it -- who wouldn't want that?
Why do you think that they are pushing so many ads? It is because they have too much money? Most sites are struggling to pay the few employees they have. Fewer ads aren't going to lead to better reporting. Would you be willing to pay a subscription to the website? Probably not.
I'm curious -- are there any stories of projects that launched on Hacker News, Hacker News loved it, and it ended up _also_ being a big success?
E.g. we have stories like Dropbox where HN seemed to be dismissive only to be proven wrong, and there are numerous launches where HN was dismissive and they were proven right, but I'd be more curious when the HN crowd got it right in a positive way.
If we assume token providers are becoming more and more of a commodity service these days, it seems telling that OpenAI specifically decided to claw out consumer hardware.
Perhaps their big bet is that their partnership with Jony Ive will create the first post-phone hardware device that consumers attach themselves with, and then build an ecosystem around that?
this would be an incredibly tough play. We've seen few success stories, and even when the product is good building the business around them has often failed. Most of the consumer plays are terrible products with weak execution and no real market. I have no doubt they could supplement lots of consumer experiences but I'm not sure how they are more than a commodity component in that model. I'm a die-hard engineer, but equating the success of the iphone to Ive's design is like saying the reason there were so many Apple II's in 80's homes and classrooms was because of Woz's amazing design.
I’m glad someone called this out. “Let’s just use vanilla rails” — sure, except basically every version of rails for the past 5 years has decided to completely change how they do JS.
So many gems are also still built on sprockets — even when you want to use the “rails” way, you are stuck now with a hodgepodge of JS anyways.
It’s a mess — maybe one day we’ll get it fixed, but don’t pretend it’s not partially rails fault as well.
Another potential self-selection bias -- if people know they are signing up to have a conversation with a stranger, perhaps they are already predisposed to be more "pleasant" in conversations, vs a potential curmudgeon who doesn't ever want to speak to anyone, even for money.
There's also the magnitude of a negative interaction as well to consider.
If I have 99 great interactions with someone, but one REALLY bad interaction (they insult me deeply, or say something irredeemable), that can also sour the whole relationship.
It would be interesting to research commonalities amongst bad interactions -- are there patterns that emerge from certain personality types, politics, etc? What about a few "sour" people that will take any interaction and make it bad regardless of matchup -- if we removed them from the interaction pool, do the stats suddenly adjust quickly?
In my mind this would have big implications for social media sites -- not that all bad interactions need to be quelled, but if you are trying to keep conversations civil, attempt to implement X strategy or Y strategy.
So if I download or get sent "Book.pdf", I'll rename it to how I'll remember it -- "Book Title - Author.pdf", etc.
That being said, I don't think there's any right answer here, it's usually just a matter of time and energy. If I had to enrich every single file I download with a great title / detailed metadata / etc that I'd need to find that file later, that's all I'd do all day.
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