MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by guax | 2025-04-08 12:43:47+00:00
The pix revolution is for very small business: food stalls, mom and pop shops, seasonal sellers, street vendors, independent and informal professionals (plumbers, electricians, etc).

Brazil adopted banking cards very fast and I remember using them virtually everywhere in debit or credit mode as early as my first card in 2008, I never had to carry money around. But they require two things that are a problem in a Brazil sized country with a Brazil density and infra structure: cell coverage and equipment. So small towns, small shops, independent professionals, etc would not have them or even be able to use them sometimes. Even today there are lots of places with internet but not cell coverage (radio, fiberglass or other infra but no cell tower).

This was changing on its own recently, many companies launched new machines that are cheaper and allow more small vendors to accept cards (+ working over the internet). This is still worse than the free approach of pix (for normal people) and a potentially lower fee for companies. Plus it allows people to buy with something they will have on them way more than their wallet, their phones.

I was in Brazil last week and I had to use pix only a few times to pay: parking (beach lot), tire fix (very small shop on the road) and thats it, everywhere else I used my credit card. Even though they accept pix, its not that huge of a difference for traditional business as far as I can tell, the payment terminal will also facilite pix transactions.

ps. you can tap and pay with pix too! https://support.google.com/googlepay/answer/14615541
by anonzzzies | 2025-04-08 12:44:10+00:00
Because ofcourse they do... But really, what is the way to be biggest AI company ever, eclipsing palantir and openai? Yeah, make sure the US and other govs believing they cannot function without anymore. I see where Musk is going, but like his self driving cars, he is always just not quite there yet. And this is even more dangerous than self driving cars that suck.

I am a bit like him; when I make something, I see the end goal clearly and tell people like it's already there, almost, but it doesn't exist yet and takes years to do. Difference is, I sit in my garden in my underpants, he stands ranting in the white house.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-08 12:44:27+00:00
> payM in the UK (which got shut down a couple of years ago due to lack of use)

I'd never even heard of this! Certainly never seen anyone offering it. Guess it got run over by lack of state capacity during Brexit etc.

> paying businesses vs using a card or your phone to tap and pay

These schemes (izettle etc) have higher costs. The poorer the country the more significant a low-cost business TX option is.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-04-08 12:45:08+00:00
Many government policies around multiculturalism and immigration have gotten to a stage where criticism against it can be seen as incitement to violence / disturbing the peace. Protected class communities have a hecklers veto whereby responding to even mild criticism with violence they’re able to send those who criticize them to jail, often more so than the jail term for violence. States care more about criticism than the violence.

This has an effect of making criticism of government policy a heavily punished crime. A situation the government has fostered.

Multiculturalism is incompatible with free speech and since multiculturalism is government policy free speech has to be sacrificed.

It’s a slippery slope and it’s been going on for some time so very little can be done about it.
by cosmaioan | 2025-04-08 12:45:26+00:00
It is interesting that I did no see in the comments the costs of using Mastercard & Visa as a reason for governments to find alternatives for their economies.

Both Visa and MC are US companies so there is where the profits go ....

From US Senate hearing : "This is classic, classic monopolistic behavior. Yet you're testimony...is you don't want any competition...I'm having a hard time finding that position defensible, let alone sympathetic...it's unbelievable the amount of money you're making."

Margin 50% ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks3wP1nlg6U
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-04-08 12:46:05+00:00
Part of the reason is the decline of the semicolon and em-dash. At least anecdotally, I feel that they were far more common in pre-20th century fiction.

Consider the opening of Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom":

> “Not long ago,” said he at length, “and I could have guided you on this route as well as the youngest of my sons; but, about three years past, there happened to me an event such as never happened before to mortal man — or at least such as no man ever survived to tell of — and the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up body and soul.”

I think that every modern writer would replace the semicolon with a period. Many of them would also get rid of the dashes and the little digression they contain. So, for e.g.:

> “Not long ago,” said he at length, “and I could have guided you on this route as well as the youngest of my sons. Then, about three years past, there happened to me an event such as never happened before to mortal man, and the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up body and soul.”
by Biologist123 | 2025-04-08 12:46:14+00:00
You make the assumption that maintaining the status quo is the norm. In reality, change is the norm - sometimes slow, sometimes fast.

I make this point because I strongly suspect humans become unhappy when their expectations divert from reality in a way that feels costly to them. If our expectation was environmental change, rather than equilibrium, this might change our opportunity set for managing, for example, environmental and climate change. And make us a lot less unhappy.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-04-08 12:46:16+00:00
>I think this might change in the future when men realize the social contract reward for it has been reduced to rubble.

That's a great point but I don't think it ever will. Said social contracts are dictated by our underlying biology and whilst we may adjust or tweak them over time the fundamentals of them will stay the same. But who knows, maybe I'll be surprised and the higher order social rules will completely overcome the lower order animal rules.
by keyringlight | 2025-04-08 12:46:32+00:00
The 'cheap' angle is something I wonder about, especially for the coming year with tariffs, and especially when Microsoft is trying to tell a lot of people that they need to buy new PCs to get off win10 and I doubt a huge proportion will be able/willing to do the remaining bypasses or learn another OS. It seems like a perfect storm if you're trying to be frugal, so I assume 'frugal' is going to translate into a lot of people on unsupported systems.
by afarah1 | 2025-04-08 12:46:35+00:00
So do most Brazilians, as today that choice is available. It's interesting how being the first to launch contributed to that preference, regardless of the widespread usage of WhatsApp. There are other interesting factors to consider. For example, a lot of people had WhatsApp but no bank account. As mentioned in The Economist's article there have been changes to the banking sector brought by Pix as well. Anyway, an interesting case study, and that's why I mentioned it.
by goda90 | 2025-04-08 12:47:01+00:00
While it's sad the devastation we've had on native species, this also feels like a testament to the ideas of permaculture. The article says the new ecosystem is full of cinnamon and guava. With just enough management to allow sustainable harvesting, such an ecosystem can be beneficial to the environment and people. It'd be better if our farms were freakosystems instead of ecological dead zones.
by rpgbr | 2025-04-08 12:47:17+00:00
It's a framework laid out by Central Bank and mandatory for medium and large-sized banks and payment companies. (For small ones, it's optional.)

Pix has several rules that makes up for a nice UX, such as being free for personal use and a 10-second limit to get a response after a transaction.

Pix is an open source specification, btw: https://github.com/bacen/pix-api
by amazingamazing | 2025-04-08 12:47:20+00:00
chuckles while seeing this posted on Hacker News, meanwhile a "Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!" message appears at the bottom

in any case, ads are speech, and speech is protected. funny seeing this litigated over and over again here. it's actually concerning how many people on here want to ban speech because it's paid for.
by swores | 2025-04-08 12:47:22+00:00
> "[...] the redirected url will still be in the history unless you manually redirect with a bare component. Hence whenever someone used back, the redirect pushed them back to the route they just left."

I know this isn't technically a browser bug, but ever since this first became a problem that's somewhat common to find on various websites, a decade or so ago, I've wondered if browsers couldn't provide the solution nonetheless..

At the very least, detect the user behaviour that screams this problem is happening (multiple clicks of the back button, which each time lead to the user being redirected to the URL they were on when they clicked it - but maybe it would be OK to detect that on the first attempt too?), and then either automatically solve it by taking them back by two URLs rather than just to the previous one (while looking out for possibility of stacked redirects that might need to skip more than one redirecting URL), or provide an alert that this potential problem has been detected and giving the user a single click solution to use or ignore.

I feel like the automatic solution should work well, but I've not put much thought into this beyond what I've just written, so maybe somebody will point out why doing it automatically would be a problem - either because of difficulty in the browser being accurate in recognising when this problem needs a bypass solution, or because even when it has correctly spotted it there are scenarios I haven't thought of where the user wouldn't want the back button's default behaviour to change?

I know very little about web browser (or even general software) development, any chance somebody reading this could chime in on whether this feature would be hard to code, whether it might have any / too much of an impact on performance, and generally whether or not you think it's a good idea?

(And happy of course to hear answers to the "good idea?" question from anyone who's had this problem in a web browser, not just developers.)
by acdha | 2025-04-08 12:47:28+00:00
If you’re going to play the “actually” game, at least check Wikipedia first. That quote is about Oahu and it’s correct:

> Like all other Hawaiian Islands, Oʻahu was formed from the volcanism associated with the Hawaii hotspot; it started to grow from the sea floor 4 million years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oahu

Your broader use of “few” is also dubious since 28 is not normally considered small enough to include in that number:

> From this study and others,[14][15] it is estimated that the northwesternmost island, Kure Atoll, is the oldest at approximately 28 million years (Ma); while the southeasternmost island, Hawaiʻi, is approximately 0.4 Ma (400,000 years).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Islands
by yetihehe | 2025-04-08 12:47:28+00:00
More likely it was written by some cheap interns and requires getting unique ticket id from server for "controlling" purposes. Then there is one part time employee (met him, small talked a little) who goes from car to car with terminal and checks if those tickets are valid. I have some experience with gprs systems here, so probable flow:

- press button

- gprs roundtrip about button press with "no payment, free ticket" (2s)

- machine shows "printing ticket", asks server what to print (aka the idiotic unnecessary step)

- gprs roundtrip (2s)

- printer warmup? (?s)

- prints ticket

> to save power (and possibly SIM cost)

Nope, costs per sim are monthly per card, until you hit the data limit, then per MB. Those machines typically have enough power to keep connection alive.
by jrvarela56 | 2025-04-08 12:47:58+00:00
I’d say come back in a few years for a bad take. But this is already a bad take.

A query in a regular search engine can at best perform like an LLM-based provider like Perplexity for simple queries.

If you have to click or browse several results forget it, makes no sense not to use an LLM that provides sources.
by terminalbraid | 2025-04-08 12:48:20+00:00
This story just makes me sad for the developers. I think especially for games you need a level of creativity that AI won't give you, especially once you get past the "basic engine boilerplate". That's not to say it can't help you, but this "all in" method just looks forced and painful. Some of the best games I've played were far more "this is the game I wanted to play" with a lot of vision, execution, polish, and careful craftspersonship.

I can only hope endeavors (experiments?) like this extreme fail fast and we learn from it.
by bayindirh | 2025-04-08 12:48:20+00:00
I don't think you're dumb or trying to change anyone's mind or you have an agenda in general, and just trying to understand. Also, the "fashionability" of your PoV doesn't matter for me, because we're discussing here, and trying to learn from each other.

There are two problems with this PoV.

First argument is, we really don't understand how much private information we have, and how making it public is creepy. Your finances, what you own, how much you earn, your sincere chats with people you love or care are your private information. These things maybe known by limited parties, but when all of it is public to anyone, even to an algorithm reading it, and making it searchable is creepy and unsettling. I don't want a copy of asking my friend about their personal well being indexed anywhere.

This brings the second argument, and the above paragraph becomes a dangerous precedent. Consider you were chatting with your friend, spouse or child. One party says something and it can be very dangerous if it's taken out of context. One person shared an anecdote about their Alexa device. They found a recording in their account, their child saying "Why daddy always beats me?". Think about it for a second, and how dangerous this can be... The context was they were playing Uno, and dad beat their children in the game.

Again, take this recording or a couple more. Fine tune an AI sound engine with it. Extrapolate from there.

You see where this is going...

We want privacy not because we do nefarious things, but because we don't want our private matters to be publicized and not abused to harm us. This is why you put a password to your phone. Not because you hide something, but not to leave everything lying there.

Lastly, in the words of Edwards Snowden: "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."

More reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
by cies | 2025-04-08 12:48:28+00:00
> htmx is much easier for the developer, but worse for the user because of higher latency for all actions

Latency is something to consider yes. Besides that we should not forget it is easy to make an HTMX-mess: HTMX's not a good fit not fit for all use-cases and some approaches are dead end (the article even talks about this, but you find more testimonies of this online). With HTMX you also create a lot of end-points, usually without a spec: this can also become an issue (might not work for some teams).

> if you mix client- and server-side computation, then you're adding back in complexity that you explicitly wanted to get away from by using htmx.

Exactly! A good reason not use HTMX, if you need a lot of browser-side computation.

> I didn't mean (just) that. I included vanilla webtech in my definition of "normal"

If you mean "just scripting with JS (w/o any framework)" then I still do not think this is an acceptable alternative to compare HTMX to. IMHO you have to compare with something that that provides a solid basis to develop a larger application on. Otherwise you may say HTMX is great because the status quo (vanillaJS/React/Vue/Ang) is such a mess.
by charlie-83 | 2025-04-08 12:48:35+00:00
Whether I reach for AI or Search depends on two questions. Am I looking for a site or information? If I'm looking for information, how easily can I verify it?

Websites have all kinds of extra context and links to other stuff on them. If I want to learn/discover stuff then they are still the best place to go.

For simple informational questions, all of that extra context is noise; asking gpt "what's the name of that cpp function that does xyz" is much faster than having to skim over several search results, click one, wait for 100 JavaScript libraries to load, click no on a cookies popup and then actually read the page to find the information only to realise the post is 15 years old and no longer relevant.

There are times where I know exactly what website to go to and where information is on that site and so I prefer that over AI. DDGs bangs are excellent for this: "!cpp std::string" and you are there.

Then there's the verifiability thing. Most information I am searching for is code which is trivial to verify: sometimes AI hallucinates a function but the compiler immediately tells me this and the end result is I've wasted 30 seconds which is more than offset by the time saved not scrolling through search.

Examples of things that aren't easy to verify: when's this deprecated function going to be removed, how mature is tool xyz.

Of course, there's also questions about things that happened after the AI's knowledge cutoff date. I know there are some that can access the internet now but I don't think any are free
by justonceokay | 2025-04-08 12:49:19+00:00
Interested in what your benchmark for accuracy is. I feel like for my searches that I am normally looking at a few different sources and cross referencing them to come to a conclusion about what is best for me. Do you find that AI is good at automatically figuring out what is best for you?

For instance I wanted help cooking Coq au vin yesterday. I’ve cooked it before but I couldn’t remember what temperature to set the oven to. I read about five recipes (which were all wildly different) and choose the one that best suited the ingredients and quantities I was already using.

I asked chat gpt for a coq au vin recipe, and I’ll just say I won’t be opening a restaurant using ChatGPT as my sous chef anytime soon.
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-08 12:49:36+00:00
>my front door still keeps my home secure even though my sister has a copy of the key.

Someone has to physically come to your house to access your front door. Computers and other computer equipment is accessible by anyone anywhere. A Russian hacker outfit can attempt to access your phone from Vladivostok in a way they can't with your front door.

Sticking with front door analogy, what if there were a master key that could open up all door locks that the police held. What if that key was leaked and now you knew that multiple gangs and criminals had the key and were breaking into houses. Would you feel secure with your front door then? Data breaches happen and a company with the keys to everyone's computer front door is a huge target. I don't trust my bitlocker key to Microsoft. There is no such thing as a magical backdoor that only good guys can use but is secure against everyone else. A backdoor is a vulnerability that puts everyone using it at risk.
by bko | 2025-04-08 12:49:54+00:00
There are a lot of programmers on this platform (myself included), and I love that my work has an impact on others.

I have a number of public repos and I have benefitted greatly from other public repos. I hope LLMs made some use of my code.

I wrote blogs for years without any monetization. I hope my ideas influenced someone and would be happy if they made some impact on the reasoning of LLMs.

I'm aware of patent trolls and know people with personal experience with them.

So I generate a lot more content that the typical person and I am still in favor of much looser IP rights as I think they have gone overboard and the net benefit for me, a content creator, is much greater having access to the work of others and being able to use tools like LLMs trained on their work.
by candiddevmike | 2025-04-08 12:50:00+00:00
> And they have “heavily” deployed Musk’s Grok AI chatbot – an aspiring ChatGPT rival – as part of their work slashing the federal government, said that person. Reuters could not establish exactly how Grok was being used.

Grok is FIPS complaint, right? Safe for use with confidential information? PII/PHI?
by xinayder | 2025-04-08 12:50:04+00:00
And the Receita (IRS) app has an option to pre-fill the tax declaration form, which works wonders most of the times. It requires a manual review to certify that everything is correct, but from the times I had to declare my taxes (I'm living abroad so I don't have to do it anymore), it was as easy as loading the pre-filled details and just verifying if everything was correct.
by kasey_junk | 2025-04-08 12:50:11+00:00
My info is several years out of date so take with a grain of salt. Pix is a phenomenal in country payment system. One of a couple of the best next gen payment rails.

But its design is very much hard to work with for international transactions. It has some risk rules and design choices that make this true. I believe this is intentional as Brazil wants to maintain pretty conservative currency controls.

But! Similar things could have been said about pix and online shopping rails. It wasn’t great for that as it wasn’t the primary use case. And that is changing fast so maybe the international use case will improve.

UPI in India for instance does international work well in a similar conservative currency environment.
by Svetlitski | 2025-04-08 12:50:31+00:00
At the risk of sounding overly harsh, I just don’t think this crate is a particularly good idea. I really do mean this as constructive criticism, so let me explain my reasoning.

A function being marked unsafe in Rust indicates that there are required preconditions for safely invoking the function that the compiler cannot check. Your “safe” function provided by this crate sadly meets that definition. Unless you take great care to uphold the requirements of async-signal-safety, calling your function can result in some nasty bugs. You haven’t made a “safe” wrapper for unsafe code like the crate claims, so much as you’ve really just traded one form of unsafety for another (and one that’s arguably harder to get right at that).
by cjbgkagh | 2025-04-08 12:50:56+00:00
Many of your remaining freedoms are provided by dissidents who fight for them, not you. Their fight against the state requires secrecy and plausible denial. If the state is able to peer into all aspects of your life and others they can route out dissidents by process of elimination. States naturally evolve to be fascistic and the culture required to prevent that generally decays as the memory of what exactly ‘Chesterton fences’ were preventing is lost to time.
by stevoski | 2025-04-08 12:51:15+00:00
> "If you're making a dynamic page, then you want to push as much logic to the client as possible because far more users are latency-limited than compute-limited"

That's an assertion I don't agree with.

Data still needs to come from or go to the server, whether you do it in a snippet of HTML or with an API call.

In either case, latency is there.
by accurrent | 2025-04-08 12:51:27+00:00
While I agree cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance, my experience with qr systems has been a mixed bag. The country I live in has a fairly good qr code payment system. But there was one day when the largest bank went down and that was chaos (cash very much has a role to play). We also supposedly have linkage with India's UPI. Unfortunately, it was impossible for me to actually use that linkage thanks to the way upi works (I think only some subset of banks are supported).