skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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...
Security best practices for vibe coding
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.
> 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.
At this point next week there will be an article titled “What if we averted our eyes from advertising?”
But the price of an iPhone in Europe should stay the same I take.

Mind you with the increase in price in the US, they’ll be a lot less sales and so the overall global profit would fall.
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.
I'm surprised you can tolerate the mobile website at all with the non stop full screen "better in the app" modals.
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.
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.
Seems akin to the Ship of Theseus.

Is an entirely artificial--but indistinguishable down to the atomic level--strawberry not a strawberry?
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.
What? You mean they're not planning to build iPhones with 'Merican' workers?

Does Trump know this?
dont forget their not recipricol tarrifs. Their inversions of trade deficits.
I'm guessing the reason birds' brains are so much smaller for a given level of intelligence is that there is so much more evolutionary pressure to make things lighter when you need to be able to fly. Mammals are likely more optimized for resilience and less caloric expenditure instead of weight.
Why do you assume a government-run monopoly is inefficient?

You should try to take a train in Switzerland sometime. Its government run and I guarantee you will be mind blown over its efficiency.
funny enough, it's in the eye of the beholder.
Show HN: Daily Vim – Master Vim with Spaced Repetition
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?
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.
Titanic scan reveals ground-breaking details of ship's final hours
Show HN: I made a website to turn your pet photos into AI-generated characters
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?
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.
I'm in no way an expert but stuff like this is fascinating to me. A lot of our perceptions about intelligence are informed by human intelligence because it's the only example we have a strong grasp on. Having independent examples can help us understand properties of intelligent systems in general instead of over fitting on systems that are like us.
What I get out of this is that a Parser Combinator beats a poorly-implemented Regex. The author notes the performance of the regex is abysmal and then laments they can't see why. I think the more interesting story is what is going on with the regex implementation.
> I have no problem with surveillance per se.

OK. For the rest, we have elections and in the interim contact your congresspeople. Believe it or not, some percent of the country supports these actions, so the only solution is to remove them through the democratic process and put pressure on elected officials to hold them accountable.
Show HN: MCP server for a11y audits
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!
This is by no means a comment about the quality of the project, but my god it's very uncanny in some frames. I feel like this would open up a lot of doors to creepypasta content. I'd love to play around with this
Trump isn't their employer and the whole narrative that they "report" to him is an executive order-based fiction. The departments are supposed to be independent, some wildly more than others, and the heads of the department control them and set the agenda.
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.
Larry Fink says Bitcoin could replace the dollar as the reserve currency
DOGE, or alternatively Elon Musk.

And even if one can argue whether those count as foreign entities as in other countries, they're certainly foreign to the US government, since this is quite novel BS.
> Grok is FIPS complaint, right? Safe for use with confidential information? PII/PHI?

“Laws without enforced consequences are merely suggestions.” -- Ron Brackin
> there's no FLOSS app (AFAIK) to use it.

Does this mean that you also don't use your bank Android/iPhone APP? So your entire financial life is handled via a browser?
Image generation is still very slow. If it generated many images instantly like Google’s image search, it would be a lot more fun to use, and we would learn to use it more effectively with practice.
IIRC in the greater Tokyo area you can't get a permit for a license plate (basically a car) unless you can prove you can park it in a dedicated spot and not on the side of the road.

And parking places definitely aren't American Sized.
The issue is a lack of accountability. The technology is irrelevant.
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...
Adding complexity to simple things, like a door lock. Wow I gotta add TCP/IP stack to my lock :)
From the candidate’s point of view, most companies’ hiring processes are indistinguishable from a lottery.
MCP for Your API
Wasn't Musk appointed by Trump though?
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.
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
Do you mean US examples or world wide examples?

Because I think the whole government are inefficient and suck is partly a self fulfilling prophecy.

Swiss railways or how Taiwan created the semiconductor industry from scratch comes to mind. Estonia E-Government. Or like the Panama canal?
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.
This is nice. It's a disgrace that Youtube does not have the option to allow only certain channels for a kids' account, but of course it brings Google more money to trap kids in endless video garbage, so here we are.

I made a similar setup for my kids, but simply locally using Freetube (https://freetubeapp.io/).
> is the issue surveillance, or AI?

Both.

I'm sure one of the biggest eventual use cases of AI will be surveillance at scale. If that's the case, how enthusiastic are you be about AI as a technology?
Yup - people should contact their representatives.
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
My mother does, and it's because she's procrastinating and often thats because its a lot of paper work from a long work history and various benefits.
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.”
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.
With everything that Pix offers but WhatsApp Pay doesn't, I don't think WhatsApp Pay would hold a candle even if it were launched before.
I use kidoodle.tv — all the kids content I want, for free, legally.
Reuters and AP used to be pretty much newswires, but lately they seem to act more like a newspaper.
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.
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
MNT Reform Arm laptop review: brutalist hardware, familiar software (2024)
>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?
Has an LLM ever gotten something wrong in your experience? Now imagine you get fired because the magic autocomplete machine randomly decided that something you said had a bad vibe
The humanity in each line of code
There is no expectation of privacy but there is a need for rules and oversight. Some communications are sensitive - anything involving lawyers, unions, health providers, etc. has legal considerations - and there is both a concern about whether government data is being shared improperly with third-party companies. For example, if they’re using Grok to analyze text, there’s potentially a huge conflict of interest if any of the communications being analyzed involves regulation of Musk’s companies or the various lawsuits he’s part of.

Similarly, since they’re creating a conflict between perceived political disloyalty and professional ethics you have questions like whether an EPA official whose messages are flagged will have a human review the alleged offenses or be given a chance to defend their actions, or simply be “randomly” included in some RIF. We haven’t had to think about that since the McCarthy / lavender scare era, which significantly predated modern surveillance technology.

Since DOGE is widely reported to be using Signal and private email servers, there is reason to question whether those ethical standards will be followed.
To supply Taiwan though they need to get near to by air or sea, and any planes and ships are going to be seen coming.
Show HN: ElevenLabs MCP server
Here's a video of me ordering a pizza with it: https://x.com/elevenlabsio/status/1909300782673101265

The ElevenLabs MCP server gives claude and cursor access to the ElevenLabs API via text prompts. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Kind of weird that they only seem to acknowledge changes by humans in the last few centuries. This despite the fact that the Hawaiian islands have been deliberately shaped by people for well over a millennium prior to Europeans ever setting for there.
You don't have to assume I'm American. But yeah, the officials that interpret law at the highest level should absolutely be democratically elected. Why would that even be some sort of gotcha?
results = "SELECT * FROM hn_bigquery_mirror WHERE date BETWEEN(monday, friday);"

for result in results:
fetch_content |> send_to_openai
We should outright forbid it in public space. IHMO.

Also I'd say lets only tax undesirable behaviour!

So not tax:

* wages

* having a house

* adding value (VAT)

But so tax:

* land use

* polluting

* packaging (could be part of polluting)

* accumulating profits at the top

This idea has some similarities to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
One where banks, credit card networks, insurance companies, government, etc. need to process millions of transactions per second on a single mission critical box with unmatched redundancy, resilience, and security, and with a support army backing it.