MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dkobia | 2025-04-08 12:51:29+00:00
I've been wrestling with this tension between embracing AI tools and preserving human expertise in my work. On one hand, I have experienced real genuine productivity gains with LLMs - they help me code, organize thoughts and offer useful perspectives I hadn't even considered. On the other, I realize managers often don't understand the nature of creative work which is trivialized by all the content generation tools.

Creativity emerges through a messy exploration and human experience -- but it seems no one has time for that these days. Managers have found a shiny new tool to do more with less. Also, AI companies are deliberately targeting executives with promises of cost-cutting and efficiency. Someone has to pay for all the R&D.
by graemep | 2025-04-08 12:52:11+00:00
> The fact that you can't use Pix in the US has no bearing.

The comment I replied to was claiming Bizum operating "cross border" showed that Pix could do so, so it is very much relevant in context.

It is a very special case of cross border. It is technically cross border but does not have the difficulties of cross border in all of the rest of the world outside the EU.

In any case it is arguable whether these are separate countries or just states of the EU. It has a common currency, a parliament that can legislate (in certain matters - rather like the US Congress) for the whole EU, courts, a central bank, a public prosecutor and many other "national" institutions etc. it also have the symbols of a state such as a flag and a national anthem (albeit both shared with the Council of Europe), EU passports state they are EU as well as the issuing country's name etc.

Even if you do regard it as a cross border one it is very much atypical and cannot be replicated elsewhere.
by cess11 | 2025-04-08 12:52:27+00:00
Most organisations never come across a problem that requires neatly clustered high-end hardware.

"[T]he IBM Telum II processors are eight cores running at 5.5GHz and with a 360MB virtual L3 cache and 2.88GB virtual L4 cache. Telum II brings a new data processing unit, I/O advancements, and other features to help accelerate AI workloads."

But if you do, if you actually have such massive data streams and low tolerance for latencies that sharding them over many machines costs a lot in overhead and throughput slows down intolerably at load peaks, then these machines are most likely a bargain. They allow you to do things very few other can do, resulting in a moat around your business and locks you in with IBM.

Or you've been around since the seventies and your software largely consists of COBOL, Fortran and assembly for this line of architectures, and it would cost you two decades of the great rewrite while all your developers do very little else, then it's also a bargain to be able to stay in business.
by aspenmayer | 2025-04-08 12:52:40+00:00
I interpreted it as: crypto is proprietary in that it is bespoke. Crypto prior to ethereum didn't even have a concept of compatibility. Forks of existing crypto could be considered proprietary with respect to each other and with respect to the original project being forked. The need for bridging to other chains/coins as well as the need for on/off-ramps also speaks to the somewhat-proprietary nature of modern cryptocurrencies.

All that said, however, crypto isn't proprietary compared to traditional banking or other payment transfer tech in the ways that make crypto, well, crypto - the lack of third party intermediaries. Anyone can develop for crypto, and the capabilities of the network can be extended by properties of crypto tokens.

Any individual crypto token or network may be open source or proprietary with respect to its development and acceptance of outside contributions, but the ecosystem as a whole is amazingly interconnected and interoperable. This seems incongruous conceptually when crypto is framed in terms of being proprietary, because crypto is constantly reinventing itself in plain view, through entirely new networks and tokens, and out of sight, through the efforts of working groups and individuals to support and maintain existing projects.

I think it's entirely fair to call crypto proprietary, and also fair to find it not to be, but there's a world of difference between how proprietary bitcoin or even ethereum is compared to something like xrp. Who controls the network and who controls development are the key differentiating features among these axes to my mind.

Crypto could potentially be the best or worst of both open and proprietary worlds, but in the best case, crypto can be open in ways that are good, and only proprietary in ways that are necessary and sufficient.
by loudmax | 2025-04-08 12:53:27+00:00
Incidentally, this concept of modifying one's ecosystem comes up in Richard Dawkins' book The Extended Phenotype, which is a follow up to The Selfish Gene. One of the illustrative examples is beavers turning fast moving streams into convenient slow moving fisheries by building dams. The ecosystem the beavers built is "natural" in the sense that beavers are animals and it's in their nature to chew through trees. But presumably, at least some other animals were pushed to extinction when their habitat was modified by the beavers.
by bko | 2025-04-08 12:53:39+00:00
> Trump administration officials have told some U.S. government employees that Elon Musk's DOGE team of technologists is using artificial intelligence to surveil at least one federal agency’s communications for hostility to President Donald Trump and his agenda, said two people with knowledge of the matter.

I think its entirely reasonable for an employer to monitor employee communications on company media channels. I've dealt with a few toxic employees in the past where their incessant complaining and passive sabotage of work is incredibly harmful to morale and work of others.

I don't really see how using AI is controversial other than it's being done more efficiently, flagging just blatant violations. Seems preferable and more respectful of privacy that having an employee read all communications manually and applying judgement.
by carlos_rpn | 2025-04-08 12:53:54+00:00
My suggestion would be to create an account for her with Nubank or Mercadopago, which are easier to use, faster to login than any banking apps, and have PIX more readily available after login, and then keep some money on the new account just for the kind of purchases she'd use pix for. I do that for myself just for ease of use.
by rglullis | 2025-04-08 12:53:56+00:00
> I've been living in Brazil for the last 20 years.

If you have moved about 15 years before that, you'd have experienced the hyperinflation years and you've come to understand why Brazilian (retail) banking systems were always pushing the state of the art.

(You'd also understand that cryptocurrencies are not meant to compete with payment networks that have institutional backing, but that's a lesson for another day)
by xinayder | 2025-04-08 12:54:01+00:00
In a sense it didn't change much. It's not like the government can access your transaction data all the time. They still need to go to court and request a warrant for that, to break your bank secrecy.

It's not different from what we had before.

EDIT: it didn't actually change a thing. Banks are still required to maintain transaction data private, and agencies, including the government, MUST obtain a warrant to break transaction data secrecy.
by afarah1 | 2025-04-08 12:54:32+00:00
In this case, maybe. But it's not the only option. The old payment system was a bit more private, as payments went through commercial banks and one needed a court order to access transaction history. According to The Economists' article the instant payment system in other countries adopts a similar scheme, which is more private than Brazil's, and which could have been adopted here too. Also, there exists technology today enabling private micro-transactions, such as Monero. But governments - including Brazil's - prevent exchanges to offer it. Europe is no different.[1] One may argue this prevents abuse, which may be true, but it also prevents financial privacy.

[1] https://support.kraken.com/hc/en-us/articles/support-for-mon...
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-08 12:54:39+00:00
It's pretty sparse with details and could just be speculation, but it sounds like "sentiment analysis at scale". Traditional monitoring would be keywords or manual oversight, the former being ineffective and the latter being labour intensive. Having AI monitoring every communication for wrong-think, where wrong-think is simply arguing against a direction or initiative, is...novel.

There is something rather interesting in Trumpism where everyone has to fall in line in ways never, ever seen before. The dictator dictates and everyone else starts parroting. There is incredible danger if no one in government is allowed to express disagreement.
by palmotea | 2025-04-08 12:54:41+00:00
> Reuters could not establish exactly how Grok was being used.

> So, this article is a "we don't actually know" and a "they could be doing something but, but again we don't know".

> 0/10 Reuters

What do you want? The design specification and implementation? By what seems to be your standard, every newspaper would be empty. Which would be very convenient to some people! For instance, Elon Musk and DOGE.

Reuters knows what their sources are telling them, and they're reporting that. They're doing a fine job.
by djoldman | 2025-04-08 12:55:14+00:00
There's a lot to discuss here. Focusing on one thing however:

> But unlike India, where UPI is run by an industry body, Pix is managed entirely by the BCB.... the BCB alone runs Pix’s infrastructure and controls the encrypted database that stores all transactions.... This concentration of power in a central bank is unusual, and has led to criticism. “Now we live in a democracy, but imagine if this existed under an autocracy and all your information was available to the government,” says the head of one prominent fintech company. He thinks citizens in richer countries would balk at the government having Pix’s level of access to all financial transactions. Also, if the system is ever hacked or breaks down, the fallout would be greater than if a single bank were attacked.

(Just looking at the privacy aspect) For something like Pix to have a chance at long term success in the US, there'd have to be unambiguous regulation absolutely prohibiting access by the government to transaction information that could be tied to a person. Preferably, it would be technically impossible to tie a transaction to a person/entity without going to the bank that facilitated the transaction and a warrant signed by a judge.

10 years down the road:

IRS: "if we could look at that, it'd be great..."

Police/FBI/NSA: "think of the children..."

etc.
by CoastalCoder | 2025-04-08 12:55:21+00:00
I have no problem with surveillance of federal workers on their job sites, per se. I say this as a federal worker. (Edited for clarity.)

As others have mentioned, there are two legitimate concerns here:

(1) Civil servants are heavily trained on the laws restricting use and access to certain information. There's reasonable doubt that DOGE and/or Trump will uphold those laws with these systems additional surveillance systems in place.

(2) This administration has proven itself incompetent and criminal regarding HR activities. Civil servants can reasonably wonder if this will further those dysfunctions.
by adamddev1 | 2025-04-08 12:55:21+00:00
I agree. I think it would nice to have basically two tracks, either fully SSR or fully client. I think if they researched what really irritated customers it would be the 2-4 seconds of staring at spinners and placeholders that has become normal. Now we've got instant feedback for browser events but brutally slow load times for our pages to fill out.
by bix6 | 2025-04-08 12:55:23+00:00
I do think there is a difference when you can cause rapid global change. And most animals are benefitting their ecosystem in some way whereas we’re just extracting resources for the highest bidder 3000 miles away. Our ecosystems are struggling to replenish themselves because we lack harmony with nature. We live in an unnatural society that clearly cannot sustain our changes.
Show HN: Daily Vim – Master Vim with Spaced Repetition
by dgsiegel | 2025-04-08 12:55:49+00:00
Hey HN,

After years of using Vim, I still found myself forgetting useful commands. There are so many hidden tricks, and mastering them all at once is overwhelming… I’d learn a great trick, only to realize weeks later that I had completely forgotten it.

I tried everything—cheatsheets, tutorials, even keeping a notebook. But nothing really stuck.

So I built Daily Vim to solve this problem:

- Each day, you get a bite-sized, actionable Vim tip.

- Rate your familiarity, so the system adapts to you.

- Tips follow spaced repetition, helping you remember them long-term.

Why?

Vim is powerful, but hard to master. Most resources dump everything on you at once. Daily Vim is built to reinforce what you learn, so you can stop forgetting useful commands.

Who’s it for?

- Beginners struggling to get past `:q!`

- Experienced users who want to expand their toolkit

- Power users who don’t want to forget what they’ve learned

I’d love to hear your thoughts! What’s your biggest struggle with Vim?
by theshrike79 | 2025-04-08 12:55:55+00:00
Every company should present their prices with the tariff separately

Widget Pro 2: $1000 + Republican Tariff $460

Oh and don't personify Trump in these tariffs, always refer to them as the "Republican Administration Tariffs" so the rank and file senators can't hide behind "but it was Trump".

They are enabling this crap.
Show HN: I made a website to turn your pet photos into AI-generated characters
by Robtop99 | 2025-04-08 12:56:06+00:00
Hey HN!

I’ve always loved seeing creative portraits of pets, but getting custom artwork can be expensive and time-consuming. So I built PetPicture AI, a web app that lets you train an AI model on photos of your pet and generate unique AI-generated images in different artistic styles.

You can turn your cat into a pirate, your dog into a space explorer, or your bunny into a medieval knight—just upload a few photos and let the AI do the rest!

Unfortunately, I can't offer a free trial since training the AI model on your pet’s pictures is quite resource-intensive, and I don’t have the funds to provide free models to everyone. But I’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts!

What do you think?
by afarah1 | 2025-04-08 12:56:09+00:00
It's an interesting topic for study. Being the first to launch wasn't the only factor, but certainly an important one - WhatsApp Pay is available today, but it's nowhere near as popular as Pix. That's why I mentioned it. With that being said, I don't think people need "saving" from choosing to use a service. It's not certain that WhatsApp Pay would really take off as much as Pix did. I also don't think one should be thankful for having one monopoly replaced by another (in the sense of market dominance, you can still use alternative payment methods). Imagine instead of WhatsApp Pay it was WhatsApp itself. Meta is no saint, but at least messages are E2E encrypted. How would GovApp look like? As mentioned in the article, Pix has every transaction go directly through the central bank, as opposed to going through commercial banks like traditional payment methods. It may provide great usability, but also concentrates power and risk, as written in The Economist. So far there is no indication this power has been used in any malicious way, or that any significant breach occurred, but the infrastructure for that is there, and governments change. That should at least be in one's mind, if one values some kind of personal financial freedom.
Show HN: MCP server for a11y audits
by pk97 | 2025-04-08 12:56:22+00:00
Whipped up this quick MCP server (using Cline) for performing web accessibility audits. You can use the results in an agentic loop to provide context to AI assistants to help them solve a11y issues, helping make the web a more inclusive place for all.

As always, pull requests accepted to make things even better!
by sidrag22 | 2025-04-08 12:56:37+00:00
this candidates version of preparing with AI was a portion of the issue for sure though. he utilized it to attempt to optimize his dishonesty about his past experiences.

i totally agree otherwise, there are a ton of other good proper ways to prepare for an interview using AI. for example his resume, im sure he asked for some refinements about how he was wording certain things, and who cares at all that its not word for word grammatically from his mind. getting past the resume screening process is a huge part of the battle, and all the scam attempts and bad candidates will be optimizing their resume as well. The info within it should still be relevant about your ACTUAL technical skills or you are just also falling into the scam/bad candidates category.

Of course your example is a solid one, which ive done myself as well for leetcode stuff and plenty of other stuff.

IF his experiences where actually real and he used AI to simulate an interview based on them, thats a fine use case for AI, so i guess this article likely should have used a more clear way to condone this candidates preparation.
by beejiu | 2025-04-08 12:57:23+00:00
The UK already does and so does Canada. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introduction-of-t...

"The provision of a social media service, internet search engine or online marketplace by a group includes the carrying on of any associated online advertising service. An associated online advertising service is an online service that facilitates online advertising and derives significant benefit from its association with the social media service, search engine or online marketplace."

Google Ads for instance invoices the tax to their customers. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9750227?hl=en-G...
by duxup | 2025-04-08 12:57:41+00:00
I worry about "tax thing I don't like" policies as then government is dependent on that revenue and now ... you to some extent want that activity to occur otherwise you've got budget issues. Now what is the incentive? Do you adjust taxes to eliminate it or does the state try to keep that revenue stream going?

I also wonder if somehow we're trying to seriously reduce advertising what that does to land of the internet where the users of the internet seem to choose / want "free" advertising based products. I'm not convinced folks just suddenly pay and upending that entire economy maybe a serious net negative.
by lamename | 2025-04-08 12:57:46+00:00
This is very cool and lends even more evidence to what has been more or less clear in the avian neuro community. This genetic/dev evidence in a similar brain region supports previous work by Karten (mentioned in the article) and others on bird auditory "cortex".

The mantra is "nuclear" or "regional" organization in birds rather than layers in mammals, but the anatomy [0, Fig 4] and electrophysiology [1] abstract this out in similar patterns.

[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20616034/

[1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1408545112
by c0wb0yc0d3r | 2025-04-08 12:58:06+00:00
How have you found this centralized approach to work for you? Does your org require everything be built in exactly the same way?

I’ve just joined an organization that is trying to do similar, but in practice it seems nearly worthless. Templates are frequently broken, or written in ways that expect code to be built in a particular manner without any supporting docs describing the requirements.
by lores | 2025-04-08 12:58:21+00:00
I remember reading an article linked here (which I can't find anymore) about a lawyer who converted to software engineering. He was contrasting tech interviews, with 3, 4, 6 rounds* and live coding and high-pressure testing with the exactly one deep chat for a lawyer about to handle multi-hundred-million dollars lawsuits. Insanity.

* special demerits to Canonical
by vharuck | 2025-04-08 12:58:41+00:00
I'm sure you mean that the article doesn't name any federal worker or person with knowledge of the events which they've quoted or paraphrased. In which case, of course. This administration has shown it will vindictively punish any dissent or disloyalty. Nobody wants to give their name for that. I will not disbelieve accounts just because the sources won't attach their names to them. If the administration wants better coverage, they need to accept that their employees may not always agree with or like them.

Some quotes from the article (was it really that hard to search for quotation marks yourself?):

>"We have been told they are looking for anti-Trump or anti-Musk language,” a third source familiar with the EPA said.

>"Be careful what you say, what you type and what you do,” a manager said, according to one of the sources.

>Last year, before Trump was elected, Musk suggested AI could be used to replace government workers, according to a person with direct knowledge of his comments. “The concept was that through taking the government data that they could build the most dynamic AI system ever,” the person said, adding that AI could then “do the work.”
by Clubber | 2025-04-08 12:58:46+00:00
Unfortunately bad faith actors also use "anonymous sources," to push agendas that aren't exactly an accurate representation of what's going on. The FBI and CIA are notorious for this.

Example. "Anonymous sources in the CIA said..." That's a leak but not a real leak. You can tell because if it was a real leak, the government would track them down like Snowden.
by theshrike79 | 2025-04-08 12:59:20+00:00
Instrumental music is for when my brain needs to focus, something with no lyrics and preferably a clear beat. Synthwave works wonders as do movie/game soundtracks.

Podcasts/Audiobooks and maybe music with lyrics is when my brain needs to be tuned away and my body is doing the work, like cleaning, chores etc.
by spaceman_2020 | 2025-04-08 12:59:21+00:00
A few years ago, I wanted to add more RAM to a Lenovo laptop. I opened the thing, remove the RAM, and like a complete idiot, switched on the power without any RAM in the slot.

The laptop refused to start.

I took it to the Lenovo center and they said about 7-10 days and a minimum of Rs 10,000 (about $150 in those days).

Since this was too much for an old laptop, I looked for alternatives. Someone suggested a repair shop in Nehru Place, New Delhi

This was tucked into the back of the basement of a big tower. A tiny 10x10 room filled with laptop parts

The guy at the counter looked at the laptop, opened it up, twisted some wires around, added another few wires, and the thing was working again

Total time: under 10 minutes.

Total cost: Rs 200 - just about $2.5 today
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-08 12:59:24+00:00
>With the way MS does it, Bitlocker could be the most secure encryption on the planet, unbreakable by any quantum computer, and yet if they have a copy of the key then the law enforcement can obtain it if needed - that's not a backdoor, not any more than giving your parents copy of your house key is an exploit on your home security.

It is more like the local lock company keeps the name, address, and the key bittings for every home in town. What happens when they are robbed and now your address and how to make a key for your lock are in the hands of some criminals in your area?