Hacker News: Carioca

New comment by Carioca in "U.S. science is in chaos"

Carioca — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:54:05 +0000

While this is a good long-term heuristic, I'd describe the upper rungs of government as more cynical on matters of science and theology than a typical fundie.

The only relevant difference is that you might be able to push it back a bit on "strategic interest" types of arguments

New comment by Carioca in "U.S. science is in chaos"

Carioca — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:44:11 +0000

For a country that has been a "brain magnet" for a good century, a "brain drain" might just be "talented people from wherever choosing to go somewhere else".

Case in point: an EE I know who is finishing his master's[1] is considering interesting proposals from solid (but not top tier, think Texas not Massachusetts) universities from the US, Germany and China. While he's afraid of the culture gap with China, it's clearly the one that has the more interesting things going on technically and the one he feels more excited about

[1]Engineering by itself is a bachelor's level degree here

New comment by Carioca in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

Carioca — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:03:52 +0000

A friend in a prestigious European university said that applications were up in basically all fields

New comment by Carioca in "NPR finds "no sign" of Polymarket at its Panama HQ address"

Carioca — Tue, 05 May 2026 22:45:10 +0000

> Why would this be news?

Mostly because international litigation is, let's say, fraught issues (as in "good luck!")

New comment by Carioca in "It's time to reclaim the word "Palantir" for JRR Tolkien"

Carioca — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 04:40:09 +0000

I mean, could be accurate if they deliver the drones broken

New comment by Carioca in "Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen"

Carioca — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:06:55 +0000

One weird analgesic/antipyretic is metamizole/dipyrone[1]. It's banned in the US and some of Western Europe (and prescription-only in other countries). Yet it's by far the most used medication here in Brazil and I have actually never heard of adverse effects, except some allergies

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamizole

New comment by Carioca in "FFmpeg 8.1"

Carioca — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 22:50:30 +0000

Big difference for ffmpeg especially (but I imagine for curl too): it's not just one guy in Nebraska. Seems to have a very healthy community of devs involved in it.

New comment by Carioca in "What's Hiding Inside Haribo's Power Bank and Headphones?"

Carioca — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 13:52:43 +0000

Yup! And their whole social media “thing” is doing these kinds of on-topic analysis of (mostly consumer) devices

New comment by Carioca in "Why Does the U.S. Always Run a Trade Deficit?"

Carioca — Tue, 20 May 2025 14:12:02 +0000

> USG has not deleted and re-issued their USD even once so far afaik. Other countries do it more often.

Interesting side note: they did it once, just after the ratification of the US Constitution. The Revolutionary War was funded in some sense by devaluing the Continental Currency of the time, denominated in "Dollars". You could argue that the "US Dollar" only came to being with the coinage act of 1792, but as a Brazilian I'd say "Potay-to, Potah-to"

New comment by Carioca in "Students invent quieter leaf blower"

Carioca — Thu, 16 May 2024 14:30:52 +0000

Also never seen one here in Brazil FWIW

New comment by Carioca in "Why don't grocery stores stock pawpaw fruit?"

Carioca — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 14:26:06 +0000

And beyond pricing strategy, there are people who feel that a fair price is intrinsic to the product (e.g. the amount of work that goes into it). For example, it's pretty common in the classical guitar luthier world for there to be a decade-plus waiting list for some masters. They refuse to scale up their prices to “market-level” (i.e. a couple years max, takes months to build a guitar), because they don't want the guitars going to someone for purely economic reasons. Mind you, these are still very expensive, five figure instruments.

(edit: you could obviously think of it as a strategy that maximizes some other utility function in which profit is just one parameter)

New comment by Carioca in "UK 2022 rail station flow images"

Carioca — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 14:02:44 +0000

As agoose77 said on another comment, Github probably disabled the whole LFS (Large File Storage) for that repo

New comment by Carioca in "UK 2022 rail station flow images"

Carioca — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 13:46:45 +0000

I'm pretty sure Github disabled image downloads for that repo in the last few minutes.

New comment by Carioca in "Hyphens, minus, and dashes in Debian man pages"

Carioca — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 03:11:22 +0000

While I agree with most of what you've said, I'm not sure I see a use-case for the distinction between Hyphen, Minus and Hyphen-Minus. Specifically, with having all three. If I were designing Unicode, I'd remove the Minus sign specifically. That way, if you absolutely need to e.g. use an old font that used long minuses (in old texts they could be even an em-dash), it would still be _encoded_ as the parseable expected by every software to date

New comment by Carioca in "Apple CPU Architecture Through the Ages"

Carioca — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:27:53 +0000

There are a few answers to my question now, if you're still curious

New comment by Carioca in "Apple CPU Architecture Through the Ages"

Carioca — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:41:06 +0000

> such as the (in)famous evaluate polynomial instruction, POLY.

What CPU has this instruction and where can I learn more about it?

New comment by Carioca in "Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security"

Carioca — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 18:14:22 +0000

As a Brazilian, I'm here to tell you: that's how it starts. If this isn't curbed, you'll have a presidential candidate thoroughly linked with them in ~20 years

New comment by Carioca in "Raku: A language for gremlins"

Carioca — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 03:01:20 +0000

I kept reading the post and had a growing feeling of “oh my god, it's like Perl but MORE.” Only when I got to the end I saw the footnote that it's indeed Perl 6

New comment by Carioca in "Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)"

Carioca — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 17:23:15 +0000

Having lived in São Paulo most of my life, I'd like to corroborate this. The groups tagging buildings generally have nothing to do with (other) crimes. The only unsettling part was the time I saw that that the wall below my 6th floor bedroom window had been tagged overnight

New comment by Carioca in "Color Photos of Stalin-Era Soviet Union Taken by a US diplomat"

Carioca — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 15:36:47 +0000

The choice of bananas as a benchmark seems really bad given that the US invaded and supported coups throughout Latin America specifically to keep the price of bananas low.

> The idea that US and USSR were equals or even anything near it is totally absurd

That's not what I said. I said the material conditions of the population improved markedly more in the USSR than here in Latin America following WW2