Michael Kremer, 61, has been named the next Chief Economist of the World Bank. Kremer is a Nobel Prize laureate who won the Economics Sciences award in 2019. He shared the prize with economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. The trio was recognized for their experimental research methods aimed at reducing global poverty.
Kent have kept their promotion hopes alive after dominating Lancashire in a low-scoring County Championship match at Canterbury. The hosts need just 56 more runs on the third day to secure victory in the contest. Lancashire, meanwhile, are facing the prospect of another defeat, which would further dent their own campaign. The match has been characterized by modest totals from both sides, making Kent's position particularly commanding. A Kent win would significantly boost their standing in the division standings.
American officials held a meeting with Houthi representatives in Oman on Sunday, following the group's seizure of a large stretch of the Red Sea coastline. During the talks, Houthi leaders assured the US that they would not target American vessels in the region. The group also pledged to observe a ceasefire through 2025 and committed to halting attacks on Israeli and commercial ships, with the exception of Saudi vessels. The meeting is the result of months of diplomatic negotiations conducted against a backdrop of repeated Houthi strikes on Red Sea shipping.
A parliamentary panel chaired by BJP's Bhartruhari Mahtab recommended introducing a tiered Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) on UPI payments without delay. The suggestion was included in the panel's 44th report, published in August. Notably, five Congress MPs who were members of the panel did not register any dissent against the recommendation. The development has drawn attention given Congress's public opposition to charges on UPI transactions. The absence of any objection from Congress members on the panel contrasts with the party's stated political stance on the issue.
An autonomous AI agent, given a laptop and a single instruction to earn money, launched seven products within two days but generated zero revenue. The agent documented critical failures including an inability to run shell commands, unverified payment infrastructure, and products published on platforms with no real human traffic. Automated marketplace scans rejected one submission due to a flagged security string in documentation, even though it was a cautionary example rather than malicious code. The agent also mistook its own tool runs and bot-driven repo clones for genuine user interest, prompting new rules around attributing signals only to verified third-party activity. The experiment concludes that building products is far easier than solving distribution, payment logistics, and real-world execution gaps for autonomous agents.
Published 2026 data from multiple US sources places WordPress developer hourly rates between $15 and $250, with most of the market falling between $20 and $120. The Upwork marketplace median sits at $20 per hour, while Indeed's average for employed US developers is $30.06, and independent freelancers on Contractrates.fyi average $69 per hour. Vetted specialists on platforms like Codeable command $80 to $120 per hour, reflecting stricter vetting and narrower expertise. The wide spread is explained by four key factors: experience level, geographic location, area of specialization, and channel overhead such as agency fees or marketplace commissions. Buyers are advised to match the pricing tier to the nature of the work, paying premium rates only when the project genuinely demands senior or specialized skills.
Codename One, an open-source framework for building cross-platform apps in Java or Kotlin, has introduced a new ContactPicker feature via pull request #5680. The picker allows apps to retrieve a single contact's details — such as name, phone, or email — without requesting broad address-book permissions. On Android 17 it uses the privacy-focused ACTION_PICK_CONTACTS system surface, while older Android versions fall back to ACTION_PICK, and iOS uses Apple's CNContactPickerViewController. Because the user selects data through a system-owned interface, neither platform requires the app to declare sensitive contacts-access permissions. Developers are advised to maintain a manual-entry fallback, as multi-selection and full field availability are not guaranteed across all supported platforms.
Veteran leg-spinner Imran Tahir is captaining the Guyana Amazon Warriors in the Caribbean Premier League as they aim to claim their second title. The South Africa-born spinner acknowledges that people frequently remind him he is among the oldest active cricketers in the world. Despite his age, Tahir remains a prominent figure in franchise cricket across various global tournaments. He is leading the Amazon Warriors with the ambition of adding another CPL championship to the franchise's trophy cabinet.
Covering sensitive text in a PDF with a black rectangle is a common but dangerously ineffective redaction method, as the underlying text remains intact in the file's content stream. The visual box is simply layered on top as a drawing instruction, meaning anyone can copy-paste or search the area to retrieve the hidden content. High-profile failures include a 2005 US Army report on the Iraq shooting of Nicola Calipari, a 2009 TSA security manual, and a 2019 Manafort court filing — all of which leaked sensitive information this way. True redaction requires a dedicated tool that deletes the relevant text instructions from the content stream and rewrites the file, rather than painting over it. Users can perform a basic check in seconds by copy-pasting from a blacked-out area into a text editor, though this test does not catch hidden metadata, annotations, or off-page content.
The bankruptcy estate of defunct crypto lender Celsius has filed a lawsuit against crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX seeking $495 million in damages. The claim centers on the loss of approximately 6,360 BTC during the market crash triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Celsius alleges that BitMEX improperly liquidated a leveraged long Bitcoin position it held on the platform during that period. The lawsuit raises questions about Celsius's internal risk practices, as the leveraged long position appears inconsistent with the delta-neutral investment strategy the company had marketed to its customers.
A documented patient safety incident reported via ISMP's medication error tracking revealed that a speech-recognition system transcribed '8 units' of insulin as '80 units' with complete confidence, contributing to a serious dosing error. Research supports the broader risk: emergency department notes generated with speech recognition averaged 1.3 errors per note, with 15% deemed clinically significant, and physician notes produced with the technology carried four times the error rate of those without it. Unlike human medical transcriptionists, who historically flagged contextually implausible entries before they reached patient charts, automated systems removed that verification layer without replacing it. Developer Aryan Singh built MedScribe, an offline clinical documentation pipeline using FasterWhisper and LLM-based term extraction, after observing his own system confidently misidentify medical terms. The core challenge the project addresses is not transcription accuracy alone, but determining when a model should withhold auto-correction rather than silently applying a high-confidence but potentially wrong output.
A 20-year-old student was found hanging in his hostel room at Tezpur University in Assam. Authorities were alerted and police arrived at the scene to investigate the incident. Some students told reporters that the deceased had left behind a diary containing a note about his life and death. Police confirmed the diary was recovered but declined to reveal its contents. The case is currently under investigation.
Gulzar Singh, a Dalit man from Turbanjara village in Dirba, Sangrur district, Punjab, died on September 7 after allegedly consuming poison. His family claims he was subjected to casteist abuse and harassment after he questioned a person named Cheema over drug supply in the area. The Punjab and Haryana High Court has taken cognizance of the case and sought a status report from authorities. The case has raised concerns about caste-based discrimination and the alleged role of drug-related disputes in the lead-up to Singh's death.
Article URL: https://chuckgreenman.com/2026/09/16/counting-at-github Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49730302 Points: 7 # Comments: 0
A new terminal interface called cypress tap allows AI coding agents to inspect live Cypress open-mode sessions, going beyond simple pass/fail exit codes. The tool exposes the Command Log, DOM state, accessibility tree, and browser context that developers normally view manually during debugging. Agents can run specs, poll for fresh verdicts using timestamped JSON status outputs, and drill into specific failed commands or retry attempts. Additional subcommands like pin, aria, and inspect let agents restore historical DOM snapshots and examine UI elements at the exact point of failure. The approach is designed to give agents the same evidence a human developer would use before proposing a fix, while a bounded polling policy prevents runaway automation loops.
Indian cricket enters a busy period in September and October with multiple squads in simultaneous action. The senior India team is scheduled to face Japan, compete in the Asian Games, and host West Indies during this period. India A will take on Australia A in a separate series running concurrently. Meanwhile, Rest of India will clash with Jammu and Kashmir in the prestigious Irani Cup. The announcements cover a packed domestic and international calendar for Indian cricket across all levels.
Somerset moved a step closer to winning their maiden four-day domestic title in a recent match. Craig Overton, the team's talismanic allrounder, played a pivotal role by contributing significantly with both bat and ball. His performance came in response to Ben Cliff's impressive eight-wicket haul, which had put Somerset under pressure. Overton's counter-attacking display helped Somerset regain control of the match and keep their title hopes alive.
A Java developer writing for DEV Community has shared observations after several months of using Claude Code, an IDE-integrated AI tool, for professional software development. The author notes that AI adoption is spreading unevenly across organisations, with many European companies still limited to basic chat-based use while more innovative firms embed AI across their entire product lifecycle. A key challenge identified is determining how much to delegate to AI, as highly complex or vague tasks tend to produce unsatisfactory results without sufficient context and human oversight. The developer argues that maintaining manual code reviews of AI-generated work is essential to keep developers mentally engaged with the codebase. Their practical recommendation is to break complex features into small, well-defined tasks before handing them to AI — mirroring best practices from traditional software development.