I asked o3-mini-high this question after outlining some criteria that I deemed necessary in a city:

I want to live in a city that: - Is highly walkable with excellent public transportation infrastructure - Prioritizes safety for women - Has clean air and good environmental standards - Functions as a major hub for either tech or finance industries - Ideally offers: * Good work-life balance * English-speaking environment * Strong expat community * Easy travel connections

> Based on your criteria, Amsterdam stands out as a top contender. Here’s why:

Walkability & Transportation

Amsterdam’s compact, historic center makes it extremely walkable, and its extensive cycling culture—as well as an efficient network of trams, buses, and trains—ensures that you can get around easily without a car.

Safety for Women & Clean Environment

The city is known for its progressive, inclusive atmosphere and strong safety standards, which contribute to a secure environment for women. Additionally, Amsterdam places a high priority on sustainability and environmental standards, so you’ll enjoy relatively clean air and plenty of green spaces.

Hub for Tech & Finance

Amsterdam is a major European hub where both the tech startup scene and finance sectors thrive. Many global companies and innovative startups are based here, creating ample professional opportunities in both industries.

Work–Life Balance, English-Friendly, & Expat Community

With its relaxed yet dynamic work culture, Amsterdam offers an excellent work–life balance. Even though Dutch is the native language, English is widely spoken—making it very accessible for expats. The city also boasts a robust expat community, providing a welcoming network and plenty of social opportunities. Moreover, Amsterdam Schiphol Airport offers excellent travel connections to destinations around the globe.

Overall, Amsterdam ticks all the boxes for a walkable, safe, environmentally conscious, professionally vibrant, and expat-friendly city.

The Neurodesk Project[1] uses CVMFS to fetch Singularity container images dynamically on-the-fly from a central repository.

[1] https://neurodesk.org

Yeah I saw a (mind-blowing) talk on Neurodesk (and Brainhack Cloud) last night (NeuroTechX Hacknight at Noisebridge in SF https://www.meetup.com/neurotechx-sf/events/288358663/ ) and that's what led me to CVMFS. Neurodesk is nuts (in a good way!) It successfully abstracts away so much of the gnarly details. You need different versions of that obscure program? No problem, have them all, run them concurrently, whatever.

Even if you're not a researcher it's worth checking out for the technical accomplishments.

Reading Flash Boys by Michael Lewis since last night.

Palantir/Foundry

Care to explain?

Palantir was built on the tax payers back for surveilling themselves. Seems pretty straight forward to me?

Recall all the Palantir wearing blokes riding around Pre-Snowden?

Yeah, all those palantir shirts and bags disappeared immediately after Snowden.

this has got to be the dumbest response i've ever seen on HN. congratulations.

This is very cool! I just setup an instance for myself!

Yup, articulated excellently.

Any card details that are being stored in the merchant's database need to be tokenised. It applies to all entities who are retrieving card details from customers, irrespective of PCI/DSS compliance.

I use the Flame Dashboard [1].

It runs in a docker container, has support out of the box for custom bookmarks and links and also detects other docker containers running on your machine and automatically lists them on the dashboard. It is even opensource, so you can customise it to your liking [2].

[1] https://hub.docker.com/r/pawelmalak/flame

[2] https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame

UPI can potentially be scaled to all countries. I think the biggest USP of UPI is the interoperability between payment apps(Google Pay, Paytm, PhonePe, etc), VPAs(alice@icici, bob@axis, dan@upi, 9848123456@paytm) and banks. One could have an account with bank A, create a VPA with bank B and use that VPA to pay a business through virtually any of the payment apps(GPay, Paytm, PhonePe, BHIM, etc). The main pain point UPI addresses is instant transfer, zero cost transfer irrespective of transaction size and removal of friction due to credential exchange. NPCI (the creators of UPI) are already in talks with the UAE and other neighbouring countries to build a cross nation interoperable payment stack. Since no player in the entire stack can charge a service fee, the way that payment apps have monetized UPI is by acquiring customers through payments and selling value added services like insurance, prepaid mobile recharges and mutual funds/ETFs. Interoperability allows for balancing and decentralisation of network load across multiple providers, making transactions less likely to fail. Also cross border exchange is another problem that is still unsolved. Maybe a UPI backed approach to real-time currency transfers is a pipe dream but in a ideal world every transaction, irrespective of point of origin, size or currency would be as seamless as an UPI transaction.

On a side note, I wonder if something like this could be built in the web3 space. A totally decentralised public blockchain implementation of the payment network using UPI-esque interoperability between payment providers and banks.

I took a trip last month(within India) with about ₹600 cash and returned with ₹560, with UPI for everything from chai to flight tickets. It's just so frictionless.

UPI was built around mobile phones, and a significant part of the trust comes from the KYC that was enforced from the beginning for mobile connections. I'm not sure how well that process will scale across countries and across currencies. Still, with the international partnerships coming up, I'm excited for the possibilities that are presenting in the payments space.

You can use UPI as a foreigner without an Indian bank account?

Actually the India-Singapore link will start in 2022 [1]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/13/india-and-singapore-to-lin...

But it's going to be an overlapping mesh of 1-to-1 agreements. Singapore is also negotiating with Malaysia to allow cross-border payments, but it's unlikely a Malaysian user would be able to chain these together to pay someone in India.

I suppose that various KYC / AML checks are a significant obstacle to frictionless international payments; another is fraud protection.

I bet it's seriously harder to get two countries agree on the lists of undesirables, and streamline e.g. court protection across jurisdictions.

Will this suffer from the usual payment restrictions imposed by PayPal/Stripe?

VISA/MasterCard-based services suffer from US regulatory pressure, applying US norms across the planet. Non-US-based payments systems will instead have pressure from their respective countries. For instance they may care less about WikiLeaks pulling the pants down on US intelligence, but may be even more strict on porn.

Bitwarden, Adguard-Home/NextDNS, UBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Disable Flash, LocalCDN(Replacing Decentraleyes), Selfthosted Paperless-ng and Nextcloud instances for storage and documents with seperate accounts for each family member secured behind authelia with 2FA. Docker-Mail-Server instance with catchall emails for each family member. Enabled 2FA for every sensitive account. Private Selfthosted Wireguard tunnel to access local network services publically (behind a CGNAT network). Non technical family members have been instructed to never use real names while signing up for trivial services online. Guacamole to provide remote assistance when required.

>LocalCDN(Replacing Decentraleyes),

I am sure this isn't the first time the idea has popped up.

Should LocalCDN be a built-in feature in Browser?

Ideally, going by the cancerous nature of the internet in 2021, web browsers should ship with ublock origin, automatic https upgrades, an usable js-blocking toggle and LocalCDN-esque features out of the box. Chrome would never do something like that but maybe firefox could. Improves privacy and usability overall.