[HN Gopher] purl: a curl-esque CLI for making HTTP requests that...
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purl: a curl-esque CLI for making HTTP requests that require
payment
Author : bpierre
Score : 37 points
Date : 2026-03-21 02:09 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.purl.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.purl.dev)
| throwaway-538 wrote:
| Oh no, this is already the second "purl" Name collision...
|
| https://github.com/package-url/purl-spec
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_uniform_resource_lo...
|
| These things are _always_ a massive source of confusion...
| acheong08 wrote:
| A couple questions:
|
| - The default seems to make the payment without confirmation.
| What stops an endpoint from changing payment amount between an
| inspect request and the actual request?
|
| - Will adoption of this payment protocol ever grow large enough
| for anyone to implement this on either the client or server?
|
| - Bots have more of a financial incentive to crawl sites than a
| human. I doubt this will actually stop anything
|
| - I see a AGENTS.md. How much of this is vibe coded? It's near
| impossible to get a sense of the care taken to review LLM output.
| Hard to trust with money.
| gforce_de wrote:
| user@NAS:~$ curl -fsSl https://www.purl.dev/install.sh | bash
| ... purl: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version
| `GLIBC_2.38' not found (required by purl)
| user@NAS:~$ uname -a Linux NAS 6.1.0-43-amd64 #1 SMP
| PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.162-1 (2026-02-08) x86_64 GNU/Linux
| connorgurney wrote:
| It only took us 29 years but HTTP 402 Payment Required might
| finally mean something on a wider scale...
| rtpg wrote:
| Uncharacteristically unclear marketing from Stripe!
|
| You're gonna have to give me more to go off of than this.
| kiallmacinnes wrote:
| An annoying trend I've been seeing recently, which the GitHub
| repo behind this does, is having better documentation for the
| robots than there is for the users.
|
| Compare the README.md to the skills/pay-for-http-request/SKILL.md
| tejtm wrote:
| purl: persistent uniform resource locator (at least since 1995)
|
| []
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_uniform_resource_lo...
| captn3m0 wrote:
| There is also package url (`pkg:/`), now an ECMA standard:
| https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| It's also the name of my business, chosen for the definition
| "(of a stream or river) flow with a swirling motion and
| babbling sound". I have to say, it's really unsettling when a
| behemoth like Stripe shows interest in a word you use for
| branding/identity, even in a totally unrelated industry. I
| doubt it matters, but I'd feel better if they just didn't
| rbtms wrote:
| While I can understand the rationale behind it, I can't imagine
| this being used for anything that requires low latency requests.
|
| I imagine the flow would be something like (correct me if I'm
| wrong) [client request] -> [backend returns an error]/[accepts
| the request and waits for payment] -> [client sends the money] ->
| [backend accepts the transaction] -> [backend returns the
| requested data]. All of this sounds like a huge bloat over the
| current API key/token system.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| what are the use cases here?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| My first thought was that it would make payments easy for bots.
| It would be trivial to turn this into tool calls, so you'd just
| set up the wallet and let your bot go shopping.
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(page generated 2026-03-24 23:00 UTC)