MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dormento | 2025-04-08 12:33:35+00:00
Brazilian here.

- no card

- technically not a specific app, its a payment method that any app with a checkout flow (for example) can chose to implement.

- you register some id with your financial institution of choice (any of CPF - equivalent to SSN, CNPJ - for businesses, phone number, email or a randomly generated key).

- keys are fully portable, as in you can revoke em or change the bank institution they're associated with any time.

- you can generate a QR code on the spot so the person paying can just scan it

- transfer is pretty much instant (under 5s seems to be the norm)

- no NFC (so works with any crappy phone)

- since its a bank transfer, and since bank transfers are insured up to 200k (afaik), its pretty safe.
by michaelmior | 2025-04-08 12:33:35+00:00
You're also adding an extra build step that by its nature can't run in CI since it generates the CI pipelines. So now you need some way to keep your Dhall and YAML in sync. I suppose you could write one job in YAML that compiles the Dhall and fails the build if it's out of date, but it seems like a lot of extra work for minimal payoff.

Instead, if you want to stay away from YAML, I'd say just move as much of the build as possible into external scripts so that the YAML stays very simple.
by koyote | 2025-04-08 12:34:00+00:00
We do it similarly and it's pretty easy to tell if someone knows their stuff, especially as the assignment is just a platform to dig deeper in the face to face interview.

However, the coding assignment was a really good filter and allowed us to dismiss the majority of candidates before committing to a labour-intensive face to face.

I haven't interviewed anyone since AI took off, but I am assuming that from now on the majority of candidates that would usually send us crap code will send us AI code instead; thereby wasting our time when they finally appear for the face to face.

Have you encountered that yet?
Show HN: My friend and I built a word game called subletters
by fercircularbuf | 2025-04-08 12:34:20+00:00
My friend and I have been working on this word game as a side project for about six months, and we’re excited to finally share it beyond our family and friends!

The idea came from a simple game my friend used to play with his kids during long car rides — just using their heads and maybe a pencil and paper. He had such fond memories of it that we decided to bring it to life as a proper game.

We’d love for you to try it out and let us know what you think!

PS This is my first real frontend-heavy project, and clean code was not my priority, so I'm sure there is considerable room for improvement on the technical implementation side (don't judge)!
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-08 12:34:23+00:00
Closer to 5 usually. You’re leasing MIPS when you buy these things, so there’s a lot of margin and room for finance games.

It was a crazy business. You’d buy services and other crap in your mainframe deal, but the consultants are really sales guys who have their nose in your tent. Fully captured businesses in insurance and government especially would even use IBMs brand alignment for computers.

I had to close out a deal with them at a past employer when my peer had a medical emergency. It was a very eye opening experience.
by cess11 | 2025-04-08 12:34:44+00:00
OK, but I don't recognise this from my scant experience with Tailwind, which consists of either having a framework do whatever it does with ":tailwind" (maybe it's a compiler, I don't know) which it has done without me noticing anything at all or putting a link in a link-element to pull in a CSS.

So I'm wondering whether this compiler/preprocessor stuff is actually something people run into and my experience is deceptive, or if it's something happening to few people, on the margins, that I'll likely never experience.

Because it matters to me, since I'm not going to spend time digesting the Tailwind docs and whatnot and will forever stay a casual, disinterested user that cribs some stuff I don't understand from search interfaces. If I can't expect this to continue working as it has I'll have to figure out a way to ditch the Tailwind stuff I'm already using.
by DanielHB | 2025-04-08 12:35:24+00:00
- At year end you can download all your invoices, including any taxes already paid, for doing your taxes. (Brazil taxes make American taxation look simple.)

I disagree, although it is VERY complex the US system is much worse. At least the Brazillian one you don't need to pay for an application (TurboTax & similars) to file your taxes.
by xinayder | 2025-04-08 12:35:29+00:00
Yet we, a developing "third-world" country, have a better functioning payment system than the US, where it takes days, or even weeks, for a wire transfer to land, and you pay a huge amount of fees for that.

Cases in point:

- To transfer money to a broker, I need to pay around $5 in transfer fees via ACH or wire

- I want to change the custody of my stock market assets from one broker to another, and it will cost me $75 to move $60 worth of shares. Meanwhile, in Brazil, this process is free in every broker.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-08 12:35:48+00:00
More likely it's warming up the mobile comms state machine, without checking if it's actually needed. Unlike mobile phones which try to keep their data connection somewhat live, IoT things often drop back to the lowest state to save power (and possibly SIM cost)

https://www.sharetechnote.com/html/Handbook_UMTS_RrcStateCha...
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-08 12:35:53+00:00
>LLMs are reasonably competent at surfacing the behaviour of simple programs when the behaviour of those programs is a relatively straightforward structural extension of enough of its training set that it's managed to correlate together. It's very clear that LLMs lack understanding when you use them for anything remotely sophisticated.

No, because even those 'sophisticated' examples still get very non trivial attempts. If I were to use the same standard of understanding we ascribe to humans, I would rarely class LLMs as having no understanding of some topic. Understanding does not mean perfection or the absence of mistakes, except in fiction and our collective imaginations.

>Try to get one to act as a storyteller and the limitations in understanding glare out. You try to goad some creativity and character out of it and it spits out generally insipid recombinations of obvious tropes.

I do and creativity is not really the issue with some of the new SOTA. I mean i understand what you are saying - default prose often isn't great and every single model besides 2.5-pro cannot handle details/story instructions for longform writing without essentially collapsing but it's not really creativity that's the problem.

>The ones that stand out are the circumstances where the local change to make is very obvious and simple

Obvious and simple to you maybe but with auto-complete, the context the model actually has is dubious at best. It's not like copilot is pasting all the code in 10 files if you have 10 files open. What actually gets in in the context of auto-complete is fairly beyond your control with no way to see what is getting the cut and what isn't.

I don't use auto-complete very often. For me, it doesn't compare to pasting in relevant code myself and asking for what I want. We have very different experiences.
by cannonpr | 2025-04-08 12:36:13+00:00
I agree that some of his main elements were relatively set by then but others continue to evolve. Personally I feel that his work is entirely fair game after his death, by which I mean to say after the end of his journey that he has poured his entirety into, in terms of value to humanity and respect to him for that value I think it’s reasonable to respect his wishes during his lifespan.
by felipc | 2025-04-08 12:36:46+00:00
Pix has really spurred up small local businesses. It's so much easier to buy digitally from local stores now, or even just a person starting up a business because it required no setup, no fees or anything.

If I need to buy a gift for someone from a store at the mall, for example, I just text them, they send me pictures with the options, I pay instantly via pix and they send the product through local delivery. The whole thing takes 5 minutes of my time and the purchase shows up on my door in 30 minutes. I saved on time, gas and parking, and meanwhile the store made a sale through a local employee instead of me buying online from their national franchise for example (if it's a franchise of course). Win win for everyone.
by michaelmior | 2025-04-08 12:36:52+00:00
I understand the arguments for putting more things in scripts instead of GHA YAML. However, I also like that breaking things up into multiple YAML steps means I get better reporting via GitHub. Of course I could have multiple scripts that I run to get the same effect. But I wish there was a standard protocol for tools to report progress information to a CI environment. Something like the Test Anything Protocol[0], but targeted at CI/CD.

GitHub Actions workflow commands[1] are similar to what I'm thinking of, but not standardized.

[0] https://testanything.org/ [1] https://docs.github.com/en/actions/writing-workflows/choosin...
Show HN: Connecting an IBM 3151 terminal to a mainframe [video]
by norbert_kehrer | 2025-04-08 12:36:53+00:00
The IBM 3151 from 1987 is an interesting ASCII terminal. Unlike "normal" serial terminals, it not only supports the so-called "character mode", where after each keypress there is an interaction with the host computer (like with a Unix terminal), but it also has a "block mode". This means, you can send it commands to define fields for input and output on the screen (like a form to fill out). The terminal then handles autonomously all the the user input, and when the user is done and presses a special key (Enter or a function key), all the entries in the form are transferred to the host in one go.

This is very similar but unfortunately not identical to the so-called 3270 terminals used by IBM mainframe computers. Therefore, I wrote a little C program to translate between the differing protocols of 3270 and 3151 terminals enabling a 3151 to be connected to a mainframe.

I made a video describing a little bit the 3151 terminal and the interface program and showing how it looks like to work with the (emulated) mainframe on an 3151. The source code and Windows binary are on github for you to try out, if you happen to have a 3151 terminal. The link is in the description of the video.
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-08 12:37:11+00:00
For those who wonder where this fits relative to platforms we are usually more accustomed to, they sell these to banks and financial services that have a long history of mainframes and are basically just upgrading in place within minimal change. With recent iterations they've added some AI processing on the silicon, offering baby steps to imbuing solutions like fraud detection with neural nets on chip.

But to put it in context, the 24 TOPS that they advertise -- the inference performance of their AI module on their Telum II -- doesn't even match an M4's neural engine (40 TOPS). And of course compared to a dedicated device like an H100 SXM that can hit 4000 TOPS (yes, 166x more). Of course for both the M4 and H100 chip I'm giving quantized numbers, but presumably the Telum II is as it boasts about its quantized support.

Massive caches. Tonnes of memory support. Neat device. A "you won't get fired for leasing this" solution for a few of the Fortune 500.

But you can almost certainly build a magnitudes faster device in just about every dimension using more traditional hardware stacks and for a fraction of the price.
by sbarre | 2025-04-08 12:38:30+00:00
LLMs are powered by web scraping.

The same way Google and others have been crawling and capturing all your public posts for decades to power their search engines. Now the data is being used to power LLMs.

Were you able to opt out of being part of the search index (and I don't mean at the site level with a robots.txt file)?

I think your choice here is "don't post on a publicly accessible website", unfortunately.
by InfinityByTen | 2025-04-08 12:38:42+00:00
Food for thought: if a failure (of sorts) can make the successful rethink their ways of being, is that success missing the point, maybe?

A lot of ways of life in India are sustainable. In fact going the consumerist ways of West is a step in the opposite direction, given what all problems that has created for the planet. I think the motive of the piece is not the nostalgia of repairing, but how living with constraints births sustainability and how we all can learn from it (including India) and in fact foster it in a positive way :)
by lores | 2025-04-08 12:38:56+00:00
If they're young it can also be because that's what they've been told to do, if they're from a different culture (even an American one) it may be shockingly weird not to wear a suit to an interview, and there are even people who wear suits all the time because a well-made suit is very comfortable, with no more showing off involved than dressing up any other way. An interview is not a regular work day, best not to summarily judge people like that.
by soared | 2025-04-08 12:39:03+00:00
If you’re interested in this, the garden below is very worth visiting.

https://ntbg.org/gardens/limahuli

It’s built into sections - plants from before any humans landed in Hawaii, plants from early settlers, plants from the plantation period, etc.

My favorite learning was canoe plants (maybe a different name) - plants that early settlers would bring with them when exploring new islands in their canoe that were critical to their survival. They provided food, medicine, etc.
by xinayder | 2025-04-08 12:39:04+00:00
This is the difference in Brazil. Because it's ran by the Central Bank, there are some fraud protections. For example, if you receive money by mistake, you have the option to return a transfer to the original sender. And if you don't do that almost immediately, the sender can actually sue you and get the bank to revert the transaction (once proven you've deliberately chosen to not return the money).

There are also other security features tailored for the crime aspect of Brazil (since some people argue Pix increased the number of flash robberies); you can limit how much money you can transfer via Pix during day and night time, and even request a second confirmation before the transfer actually goes through. And if you prove you've been robbed, the bank can easily revert the transaction and you can get your money back.
by svantana | 2025-04-08 12:39:10+00:00
> the main problem really is [...] no fraud protection

It's a problem for the victims, but I don't think it's why there's a scam epidemic in Sweden - scammers don't care if you get reimbursed or not. I believe the root issue is the ease and speed of transactions - it's easy to get fooled in a moment of confusion, and before you realize what happened, the money is out of reach of the authorities - as cash, crypto or in foreign accounts.
by loudmax | 2025-04-08 12:39:55+00:00
That is a very interesting point about how little use of AI most of us making day to day, despite the potential utility that seems to be lurking. I think it just takes time for people and economies to adapt to new technology.

Even if technological progress on AI were to stop today, and the best models that exist in 2030 are the same models we have now, there would still be years of social and economic change as people and companies figure out how to make use of novel technology.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-04-08 12:40:09+00:00
If the White House Tesla sales event converted any of them, it will be very short-term blip.

Mainline ICE companies take their branding dead seriously, unlike apparently Tesla and its CEO. Their very existence is based on the macho masculinity paranoid male pickup truck driver.

There's no way they cede that in any way to Elon and Tesla. Tesla's pass for the next 10 years was still going to be through progressive buyers.

It really shocks me that people are so ignorant about branding and advertising to not recognize what Elon did to his own brand. I thought everybody in the country had seen Mad Men at a minimum.

Ever since the release of the model y, Tesla has been run utterly incompetently. After the model Y release, Tesla showed embarked upon a model, expansion and platform expansion in order to expand into global markets which probably would require six platforms and well over 20 different variations and trims.

They should have started in a low end and high-end brand vastly increased their fit and finish options

They probably should have merged with another struggling ICE company like Nissan or something to gain a lot of engineers and manufacturing capacity and OEM relationships.

They should have started pushing their advanced drive train to phevs using this other car company.

They should have pushed their brand into things like e-bikes scooters, side by sides and a lot of other electrification opportunities where they could both make Superior products and push their brand to further places. Build more competence with more users to gateway them into EV ownership.

Obviously all this is too little too late
by Galatians4_16 | 2025-04-08 12:40:13+00:00
Despite a global move towards a cashless society, 54% of Brazilians now opt for cash withdrawals.¹

2024 has seen a surprising reversal, as cash usage makes an unexpected comeback, defying predictions that the world was moving toward a cashless society. With rising cybersecurity threats, concerns over financial privacy, and economic instability, consumers and businesses are increasingly turning back to physical currency as a preferred transaction method.²

¹) https://www.riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/brazils-shift-bac...

²) https://www.adeptswipe.com/cash-makes-a-shocking-comeback-as...
by havblue | 2025-04-08 12:40:33+00:00
Let's say we aren't talking about "hate" as much as "disagree". Some countries have vastly different labor standards so globalization means subsidizing immoral practices. As we all know it means that local industrial base is vulnerable to a supply shock.

You can always wonder what there is left for people to do for a living if there's always someone willing to do it for less and have fewer kids, working longer hours. (with economics they simply say that there should always be something to do in a service based economy, but obviously service based jobs can be hit as well) So if you take it to the conclusion it looks fairly bleak. It raises a lot of existential questions of what group you belong to and how you can meaningfully contribute.
by panick21_ | 2025-04-08 12:40:48+00:00
I work in Swiss banking. We also have such a system for payments. Its very popular and used by most people. I keep saying they should use it as SSO, if you can authenticate payments you damn well can authenticate login requests. It makes no sense to go to an online shop, log-in with your shop account or google, and then when you pay, authenticate the payment with TWINT. And banks could even use it to login to their e-banking. Currently literally every bank has its own 'Access' App, that is almost the same but slightly different. And to my irritatingly they don't consistently encode TWINT information the same way into the normal banking transactions.

Our developer phones have like 40 apps on them to log into different test system, its madding.

In our system the pay system is also 'half' branded so you have to download 'TWINT-<bank>' not just 'TWINT'. Making it unnecessarily confusing and its literally the same app (from a user perspective).

It seems this Bank Id is an even earlier system adopted for modern SSO use-case.
by xinayder | 2025-04-08 12:42:10+00:00
Fun fact, before Pix, every bank was trying out different digital wallet solutions. It was a pain to go to a store and realize they support Bank A's digital wallet, which, not surprisingly, doesn't interoperate with Bank's B.

I went to buy açai at a shop one day and didn't have cash. Only way I could pay was with Itau's iti, but I only had money in my PicPay account.

Pix was a godsend that saved us from the thousands of different, non-interoperable digital wallets the fintechs were creating.
by lukev | 2025-04-08 12:42:35+00:00
Pix is super interesting. I have two questions to which Google wasn't able to provide quick answers:

1. Is there an easy way for a US resident to sign up for a Pix-enabled account (e.g. at a Brazilian bank?)

2. Can Pix be used easily for online payments?

If both are true, it seems like it could be used as a drop-in replacement to crypto for small-value transactions which are currently infeasible in the US due to transaction overhead and fees.
Show HN: dialectical.dev: Compare and contrast programming languages
by dimarco | 2025-04-08 12:43:20+00:00
Nim is an interesting language. Elixir looks amazing. Zig has some fantastic syntax patterns. Rust has blown up recently. Every few months a new language pops up, and with the adoption of LLM-assisted programming, I'm hoping we start seeing more usage of languages like these in professional settings.

I put together this project that lets you compare the same concept across multiple languages - like how do type annotations work in Typescript versus Zig, or how do lambdas or anonymous functions work in Nim versus Python, and so on. I've included Kotlin, Typescript, Zig, Nim, Elixir, Gleam, Python, Go, and Rust, but on the lookout for more languages.

I always learn better when I can compare something I want to know against something I already know.
by cgadski | 2025-04-08 12:43:26+00:00
Where x is the final hidden layer of the base model, the idea here is to steer outputs in some direction by adding a vector y. More specifically, y is an exponential moving average over a sequence of vectors W(z_t), where z_t are some sort of context vectors and W is a linear map.

Except, the linear map W is just set to a random initialization, so it won't work for obvious reasons in its current form. (I guess this is why there is no example of its output. I'm guessing it was vibe-coded?) Also, since the intervention is only happening at the last hidden layer, I can't imagine this would really change how the model "thinks" in an interesting way. Like, yeah, you can absolutely make a model talk about dogs by adding in control vector for "dogness" somewhere.

Basically, this method is "inspired by graffiti art of tagging and the neuroplastic nature of living brains" in the same way that taking an exponential moving average of a time series would be "informed by state-space dynamics techniques utilized in deep learning, reservoir computing, and quantum mechanics." Really tired of the amount of insincere/pointless language in deep learning nowadays.
by jdietrich | 2025-04-08 12:43:41+00:00
As someone who is adept at electronic repair, I am absolutely certain that it's overwhelmingly because of high labour costs. I fix my own stuff for the fun of it, but there's no way I'd do it for a living because there are just much better uses of those skills in the modern economy. Just look at the prices for old electronics on eBay or Facebook Marketplace - unless the item is very recent, repair doesn't offer good value to the owner or a viable margin for a recycler.

People used to darn holes in their socks, but that's an eccentric hobby in a world where you can buy perfectly good socks for less than $1 a pair.

It's still a factor in the developing world. Those awful scenes of e-waste being melted down for scrap in open pits are symptomatic of the fact that a lot of devices just aren't worth fixing or dismantling for spare parts, even at third-world labour rates.

Manufacturing is heavily automated, which is the reason why you can buy a toaster or a clock radio for less than $10; without massive advances in robotics and AI, the only similarly automated end-of-life solution for those items involves a shredder and a furnace. Here in the EU, the manufacturer is responsible for bearing the end-of-life costs for electronic devices, but it doesn't really change the economics.