Hacker News: WinstonSmith84

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

WinstonSmith84 — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:57:45 +0000

Well .. How did you register to MercadoPago? I never was able when I was in Argentina (end of last year). It also asked me for some official IDs in Argentina which is even harder to get than a CPF (or probably impossible as a non-resident, I didn't bother at that point)

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

WinstonSmith84 — Fri, 08 May 2026 08:21:42 +0000

I can see that Visa and Mastercard are freaking out, not because Pix can take over their business model, but because it can give ideas to other countries doing the same.

I've spent three months earlier this year in Brazil and never used Pix once. Not because I didn't want, but because I couldn't, or let's be honest: my time was not worth the hassle. To be able to pay with Pix, one needs to get a CPF (Brazilian Tax ID). Then to open a bank account, mostly local banks only accept Pix, with which you can tie your CPF. It's possible but it's definitely not straightforward the slightest. All the while Visa and Mastercard work everywhere in the country, I almost never had to pay in cash, even some sellers in the streets accepted regular credit cards.

Pix is certainly great, but locally only, and if every country comes with its own system and Visa or Mastercard disappear, we are going to go back to how people used to travel 50 years ago: with a lot of USD bank notes hidden in your hotel room or elsewhere ...

Pix is a good local idea, but the world needs something better.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"

WinstonSmith84 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:09:16 +0000

fun fact for Paraguay: the Itaipu Dam is one of the largest in the world located between Brazil and Paraguay, where each country gets 50% of the production. But 50% of that production for Paraguay, a country of 7 millions inhabitants, means that it cannot consume that much, so it's essentially reselling that energy to Brazil, a country with 30x more inhabitants. Paraguay only uses about 1/3 of its share (and thus resells 2/3 to Brazil).

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

WinstonSmith84 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:10:30 +0000

It's just another military adventure ending in a disaster - probably the most humiliating in a long long time. But to your point, it's better for the US to admit defeat now, than in 2 or 3 weeks, let alone in 2 or 3 years. If a parallel can be made, Russia would have been best advised to have done the same 3 years ago.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]"

WinstonSmith84 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:39:18 +0000

Not discussing Mythos here, but Opus. Opus to me has been significantly better at SWE than GPT or Gemini - that gets me confused why Opus is ranking clearly lower than GPT, and even lower than Gemini.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "OpenAI demand sinks on secondary market as Anthropic runs hot"

WinstonSmith84 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:56:10 +0000

Indeed .. my company got on Cursor when Cursor's fame started to fade. We've just got out of Cursor now to go on Claude, and I feel like we are again "buying the top"

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland"

WinstonSmith84 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:09:06 +0000

Argentina didn't lose the war because they came with fighter jets, but because their fighter jets were throwing scrap metal at British boats. Had these detonated, the outcome would have been different, and expensive for UK. I don't doubt that F35 are working very well in comparison to the junk Argentina was using.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling"

WinstonSmith84 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:04:37 +0000

I'm not following the relationship - because you'd have to pay, thus it's not "free" speech? It's hard to argue that having to pay a minimal fee (of let's say $1 per month) would be something against free speech. But the payment shall remain anonymous obviously.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "An Update on Heroku"

WinstonSmith84 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 23:53:26 +0000

I used Heroku extensively before AWS reached its current level of maturity. Heroku made it incredibly easy to create cool apps. When Salesforce acquired it, and knowing a lot about Salesforce, I expected tight integration to address use cases where Apex is too limited (Apex being Salesforce's native language). There were (and still are) numerous such use cases. Unfortunately, this never materialized, and Salesforce gradually shifted away from a dev-first platform toward click-based config and heavy reliance on middleware for all kind of integrations.

It's been a butchered acquisition and missed opportunities along the way. And now it ends up just like Microsoft's Skype.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Termux"

WinstonSmith84 — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 13:25:37 +0000

Right, I enabled it, and got that exact error when starting the Terminal app on my Xiaomi 15: "Non-protected VMs are not supported on this device."

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Flameshot"

WinstonSmith84 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:09:55 +0000

Maybe try Spectacle. I use the OOTB Spectacle app on Fedora KDE. It has the same features as Flameshot and is .. well, native.

But on my Mac, I use indeed Flameshot, it's not ideal (the window is "shrinking" when a screenshot is captured), but it's better than any alternative I tried.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Drug trio found to block tumour resistance in pancreatic cancer in mouse models"

WinstonSmith84 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 21:34:14 +0000

I had a relative who died from this around 20 years ago. 50yo slim, sportive and healthy and after going to a diagnostic as she didn't feel good, she was gone within a few months .. So yeah, if there is even a slight chance it works, this should be tried and that'd save people :(

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office"

WinstonSmith84 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:38:42 +0000

I certainly believe you, but you're missing the point of the current administration goals. Trump wont be around in 10 years when the consequences of their actions become clear. In fact, he is gone in 3 years, and the admin is only concerned within that timeframe. Their strategy is quite clear: please their base while simultaneously positioning the family for influence on a global scale.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "The U.S. Government Just Followed Through on Its Ban of DJI Drones"

WinstonSmith84 — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:48:35 +0000

Probably so. Having the software and hardware built in the US facilitate installation of backdoors. This comes handy to control the population just at the moment when the population feels they had an hedge over ICE, the regime, etc.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "I wasted years of my life in crypto"

WinstonSmith84 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 11:01:28 +0000

only for privacy coins tho

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance"

WinstonSmith84 — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 13:37:59 +0000

> this legislation is proposed by a bunch of european members of parliament who in no way represent any governments and much less the commission

Well, here is the guy from where that comes from, the minister of justice of Denmark. He certainly represents a good part of Denmark, even though he may be irrelevant to any other EU country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hummelgaard

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing"

WinstonSmith84 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 15:39:10 +0000

She is the European Commission president, that's unrelated.

But that made me curious, and answering my own question, it's this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hummelgaard who is indeed a Social Democrat .. So much about workers rights, funny ...

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing"

WinstonSmith84 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 14:49:25 +0000

Good insight. Let's see whether Denmark remains competitive.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing"

WinstonSmith84 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 14:47:52 +0000

Did they vote left? And that's the same left pushing over and over the Chat Control? That's an interesting twist if it turns out it's not always the right wing trying to undermine privacy rights.

New comment by WinstonSmith84 in "Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing"

WinstonSmith84 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:32:01 +0000

> In MANY other countries...

When your scope is Europe ... The US is not the exception in the world, it's Europe which is.

The US has a dynamic job market where it's easy to lose your job, but easy to find another one. In Europe, and that's true for most EU countries, it's really hard to lose your job, but it's also really hard to get one for the very reason it's hard to get fired - and when you get a job, you will have to compromise on compensation and other benefits. It's not black and white here. While the European market is appealing to some people, the US market is preferable to others.