alister

> Some languages even discriminate different types of hole, distinguishing e.g. between superficial hollows, inner cavities, and see-through perforations.

This blew me away when learning Portuguese. You have to use different words depending on the kind of hole: for a hole in the ground or in your tooth, it's buraco, and for hole to pass a shoelace, it's furo. A hole that is closed at one end is different than one that's pass-through. I never thought about the distinction before learning another language. "Hole" is more general a word than exists in Portuguese.

Similarly, the word "bump" in English is far more general than any equivalent word in Portuguese. There is no single word in Portuguese that covers all the cases of "bump":

- For bumpy road, you would use esburacada (eg., estrada esburacada)

- For a bump on a table (a surface), you would say solavanco (eg., solavancos na mesa)

- For a bump under a carpet, the best word is caroço (eg., caroço embaixo do tapete)

Using any of the above Portuguese words for a different kind of "bump" would be confusing and may or may not be understood.

I wanted to copy and paste the name of the park from the Times of India article so I could see the location in Google Maps, but the Times of India injects their URL into anything you try to copy. Such antisocial behavior. And I can't believe that browsers (Firefox in my case) even permit this. Is there ever a legitimate web-design reason to override copy or Ctrl^C?

> Disabling alerts is the second thing I do to a new handset

Except you can't in Canada. The Canadian government has made the alerts mandatory. The option to disable alerts in not present in settings menu (at least on iPhones).

You can disable alerts in Brazil. So in one sense, Brazil is more free than Canada.

What was the large-scale commercial procedure for making electrodes that pass through the glass without letting air in? I assume that electronics manufacturers must have been making millions of such vacuum tubes in the past. Is the knowledge lost (or not practical for hobby use)?

> "Get in line" vs "you are already rebooked". (my Air Canada experince.)

Which of the two was the Air Canada experience?

In Brazil, people get so much SMS spam and phone call spam that many people turn off notifications for all text messages and phone calls and use only Whatsapp (even for voice calls).

But once in a while my iPhone in Brazil will get spam as a unblockable "system message". I'm not sure if I'm using the correct term. I'm mean that it looks just like an Apple system notification and it disappears without a trace afterward, but the content is obviously spam.

I wonder how they are able to do this.

At least in Brazil, it was very rare. In the last 3-4 years, it's almost every time you pay. And you have to grab and hold the payment terminal (especially if you're using tap / contactless payment) so the cashier or waiter, trying to be helpful, doesn't click the wrong button and cost you 15%.

Thank you for telling me what it's called!

On the positive side, it seems that Wise must block it because I never see the DCC "choice" when using a Wise card.

As a negative point, I've noticed that AirBnB, which used to use reasonable conversion rates, has just recently started to use exorbitant currency conversion and not allow you to pay in the local currency of the country you're traveling to (so you can let your own credit card do the conversion at a lower rate). I.e., if you try to book a property in Brazil in BRL (literally clicking on the price to pay in BRL), the charge will nevertheless go through in USD (or whatever currency is your own) with AirBnb doing the conversion at the rate they choose.

I want to mention another infection happening at payment terminals and ATMs if you're using your credit card in a foreign country: You get a message saying "Would you like to pay in your own currency? Click [Accept] or [Decline]", and there's fine print that says there's a 12-15% currency conversion markup.

To give a concrete example, if you're an American traveling in Brazil withdrawing cash from an ATM or buying something for BRL 500, you'll be presented with an option to pay BRL 500 or pay just US$110.58 in your own currency (with text saying conversion includes 15%).

But the typical American (and Canadian) credit card adds at most 2.5% to the Visa or Mastercard exchange rate, which is at most 0.5% higher than the interbank rate. So basically by clicking the wrong button, you're paying an extra 12% to the payment processor. In the example above, your credit card would have charged you about US$99.04 had you declined the conversion, and saved you $10.

I can't imagine a situation where it's to your benefit to accept the "conversion service" they're offering. I wonder if the payment processor is kicking back some of the profit back to the merchant because this swindle is spreading everywhere.

The worst part is that a couple of people that I've tried to warn don't get it. They still think that they should pick US$ (or whatever their own currency is) because that's what their credit card uses.

> Nowhere appropriate to rest without noise, terrible lighting and hard surfaces.

Compared to every railway station I've seen, airports are 5-star resorts. Bus terminals are even worse than railway stations.

> https://karpathy.ai/hncapsule/2015-12-24/index.html#article-...

I wonder why ChatGPT refused to analyze it?

The HN article was "Brazil declares emergency after 2,400 babies are born with brain damage" but the page says "No analysis available".

Remember blogs on the old web when the author would plaster his name in a huge font on every page along with his photo, and have an extensive bio about himself and perhaps even his resume?

Well this author has gone to the opposite extreme: There isn't one shred of info that I can find about him. I liked his writings and was curious who he was in real life, but there's nothing. Stands on its own merits like Death Note, Bitcoin, or Truecrypt.

But you had the option of having an unlisted or unpublished phone number. To give one datapoint, in Los Angeles in the 1980s about half of all numbers were unlisted. I would expect that the unlisted rate was much higher in big cities like L.A. compared to the rest of the country.

What I find fascinating is that people paid for privacy. Yes, indeed, people paid several dollars extra per month to maintain an unlisted/unpublished phone number. Today very few people are willing to pay actual money for privacy.

> model drift driven by just small, seemingly unimportant changes to the prompt

What changes to the prompt are you referring to?

According the comment on the site, the prompt is the following:

Create HTML/CSS of an analog clock showing ${time}. Include numbers (or numerals) if you wish, and have a CSS animated second hand. Make it responsive and use a white background. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no markdown formatting.

The prompt doesn't seem to change.

> Interviewer at Endpoints: You plan to potentially launch a generic GLP-1 in Canada and Brazil in 2026.

Looking at the original interview on Endpoints, Sandoz CEO Richard Saynor says this about Brazil:

In Brazil, the biggest prescribers are dentists. Everyone says, “Why dentists?” They do aesthetic work, and then you have your Botox, and then you want a bikini body. It’s behaving like an OTC consumer brand. Imagine selling this, rather than $300, at $50. Anybody over the age of 40 in Brazil will probably want to be on that.

But he doesn't explain how they got around the patents. Another comment on HN says they expire in July 2026, but can anyone explain why the patents expire so soon in Brazil?

Patrick Winston also wrote a book about presentation and communication: Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform. It was published a year after he passed away.

https://www.amazon.com/Make-Clear-Speak-Persuade-Inform/dp/0...

> Pix is available even without a bank account.

Can you explain this a bit further? You need a bank account from which to send money or to receive money as far as I’m aware.

Several comments here mentioned shift work as a possible explanation.

The paper concedes that shift work is unhealthy[1] but claims that shift work doesn't explain their finding[2]. And their conclusion is "avoiding night light may be a promising approach for preventing cardiovascular diseases," but without telling us why. It's going to be fascinating if there's a mechanism by which sleeping with light can cause heart disease.

[1] "Evidence demonstrates higher risks of adverse cardiovascular events, coronary heart disease, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and mortality due to cardiovascular disease in rotating shift workers."

[2] "Following separate adjustments for pre-existing diabetes, hypertension, high BMI, high cholesterol ratio, short, long, or inefficient sleep, and exclusion of shift workers, the relationships of night light with cardiovascular risks were attenuated but remained statistically significant for all outcomes except stroke."

There's a discoverability problem with this tool because I've never heard of Fakespot or Mozilla Review Checker until today.

> Mozilla integrated Fakespot's technology directly into Firefox as the "Mozilla Review Checker" feature, making it easier than ever for users to verify product reviews without installing separate extensions.

If it was integrated directly into Firefox, it's funny that I don't recall ever seeing it. I wonder if it gets disabled if you set your security and privacy settings too high, or if you use the Firefox ESR versions (Extended Support Release).

I’m so sorry to hear about your loss. We’ve never met but I feel like I know you because of your book and many other works, and I feel your loss.

In case there are readers who don't know who Clifford Stoll is, he's the author of The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, that was practically required reading if you were a programmer or hacker in the early 1990s.

I didn't understand how hijacking worked on Amazon until I read this lucid explanation. Clearly he's still a great writer.

He's on Hacker News as CliffStoll. This makes me wonder how Hacker News deals with someone registering a famous person's name if they are not that person? I'm guessing that it's not a big problem here on HN because there's nothing being sold.

Brazilians don't need a visa for Portugal, France, or any Schengen country. But everybody has to pass through immigration control (at least a passport check even if you don't need a visa) when entering the Schengen zone. My question was which country would that happen in.

As a quick test of logical reasoning and basic Wikipedia-level knowledge, I asked Mistral AI the following question:

A Brazilian citizen is flying from Sao Paulo to Paris, with a connection in Lisbon. Does he need to clear immigration in Lisbon or in Paris or in both cities or in neither city?

Mistral AI said that "immigration control will only be cleared in Paris," which I think is wrong.

After I pointed it to the Wikipedia article on this topic[1], it corrected itself to say that "immigration control will be cleared in Lisbon, the first point of entry into the Schengen Area."

I tried the same question with Meta AI (Llama 4) and it did much worse: It said that the traveler "wouldn't need to clear immigration in either Lisbon or Paris, given the flight connections are within the Schengen Area", which is completely incorrect.

I'd be interested to hear if other LLMs give a correct answer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area#Air_travel

In the face of this AI-powered sales onslaught, customers will use AI-powered tools to analyze and evaluate all corporate products and services to make their purchasing decisions, without talking to anyone. Personal connections won’t be the solution to sales when customers trust their personal AI agents even more than real-life contacts.

> I feel like this with my (current) bank of choice here in Brazil. Now they've decided to be what they call a "SuperApp".

I'm curious to know the name of that digital bank.

> we were looking for a robot vacuum cleaner

For this kind of product search, may I suggest Consumer Reports. It's one of the very few sites I'd consider unbiased since they (a) do testing with actual technicians and extensive laboratories, (b) anonymously buy all the products they test and they don't take gifts or manufacturers' sponsorships, (c) don't take advertising. They are funded by subscriptions, donations, and grants, and have been in existence for 89 years.

Specifically for robot vacuums, I looked just now and Consumer Reports has reviewed 46 different models from 14 manufacturers. (I knew about Roomba but had no idea that robot vacuums had become such a big category.) I'm putting the robot vacuum link below to give an overview. It's worth subscribing to evaluate options for a big purchase.

https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/vacuum-cleaners/r...