MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by paxys | 2025-11-12 19:10:01+00:00
20 million customers doesn't mean 20 million transactions. Considering we are talking about a convenience store I'm sure a large chunk of their customers visit every day, some probably multiple times a day.

Assuming 3.4 million customers (cash users) and 2.5 cents average loss per transaction, it would only take one visit a month for them to cross a million dollars in losses.

Of course at that scale it's not like that million or two is really making a difference to their bottom line. Doing some quick Googling their annual revenue is estimated to be $6-7 billion.
by smetj | 2025-11-12 19:10:15+00:00
Came here to feel the temperature of the comments, and unsurprisingly, most folks seem to have plenty of gripes with Helm.

A Helm chart is often a poorly documented abstraction layer which often makes it impossible to relate back the managed application's original documentation to the Helm chart's "interface". The number of times I had to grep through the templates to figure out how to access a specific setting ...
by toast0 | 2025-11-12 19:10:28+00:00
> Everyone says the BSD documentation is superb, but the man pages are more of a reference than an onboarding guide.

If you try it again, the FreeBSD Handbook is the onboarding guide. [1] It's been a long while since I've set something up going from the Handbook, so I can't personally attest to its quality, but it's supposed to be good.

> One major challenge is LLMs have a hard time with BSD-related prompts. They’re trained on so much more Linux content, and there’s just enough overlap between both systems that hallucination rates are extremely high in my experience

I can't imagine they work well on Linux either, because different distributions have a different selection of tools, especially when you consider older documentation that's still out there and no longer works on mainstream distributions as tools have been replaced. The same is almost certainly true for MacOS and probably Windows as well. All of the OSes I can think of where most of the online documentation should be consistent probably don't have much online documentation. I'm not a LLM user (which is probably obvious), but I can't imagine how you'd get good information from it... at best, maybe you could get pointers to documentation you should read and understand yourself, or you could find the documentation and paste it to be summarized? People that use LLMs that I've tried to help with problems will tell me that the LLM told them X when it doesn't make sense and it actively contributes to their problem, so that doesn't give me confidence; of course, people who use LLMs and it solves their problem don't need my help, do they? :)

[1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/
by ndriscoll | 2025-11-12 19:10:29+00:00
Except the very idea that they owe you anything is so absurd that even if they had a contract document stating that they'd do work for you, they still wouldn't have an obligation to do so because society has decided that contracts without some consideration from both sides are not valid. Similarly, even if something you buy comes with a piece of paper saying they don't owe you anything if it breaks, the law generally says that's not true. Because you paid for it.

But they don't say they warrant their work. They have a notice reminding you that you are receiving something for free, and that thing comes with no support, and is not meant to be fit for any particular use you might be thinking of, and that if you want support/help fulfilling some purpose, you can pay someone (maybe even them if you'd like) for that service. Because the way the world works is that as a general principle, other people don't owe you something for nothing. This is not just some legal mumbo jumbo. This is how life works for everyone. It's clear that they're not being malicious (they're not distributing a virus or something), and that's the most you can expect from them.

Computer security is always contextual, but as a general rule, if you're going to be accepting random input from unknown parties, you should have an expert that knows how to do that safely. And as mentioned elsewhere in these comments, such an expert would already be compiling out codecs they don't need and running the processing in a sandboxed environment to mitigate any issues. These days even software written in-house is run in sandboxed environments with minimal permissions when competent professionals are making things. That's just standard practice.

So they should be proud that they support obscure codecs, and by default the onus is on no one to ensure it's free from bugs. If an engineer needs to make a processing pipeline, the onus is always on them to do that correctly. If they want to use a free, unsupported hobby tool as part of their serious engineering project, it's on them to know how to manage any risks involved with that decision. Making good decisions here is literally their job.
by starkrights | 2025-11-12 19:10:47+00:00
Per the LTT video [0], the new Steam Frame controllers will have a (separately purchasable) accessory pack which includes a knuckles-like strap. Supposedly the controllers have enough capacitive-sensing ("on every input surface, and on the grips") for knuckles-like five finger tracking.

Linus says "just like" the valve knuckles a couple times, but who knows how they'll feel comparatively. I've personally never used the knuckles, but they seem like they'd have a different enough feel from these to maybe make a difference.

[0]: https://youtu.be/dU3ru09HTng?t=246 - timestampped @ controller section.
by quantified | 2025-11-12 19:10:53+00:00
When the US attempted to transition to the metric system, gas stations raised their prices per unit volume and the American consumer was convinced that the metric system was bad. I have family that think metric is bad because some fringe people thought there should be 10 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour, also something like 10 months a year, and the whole thing is bad because some awkward ideas were floated.

Here, it's a question of resolution, with a proven history that transitions screw the consumer, though maybe it won't be so. We're ok with arbitrary hundredths of a dollar, why were we not at thousandths? The American half cent disappeared a long time ago. You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that runs into the millions of dollars.

It's just an awkward stage in inflation. Eventually a US dollar will be worth what a Zimbabwean dollar was, and we won't have $100 bills anymore.
by nostrademons | 2025-11-12 19:11:03+00:00
I think this is a classic hill-climbing dilemma. If you start in the same place, and one org has worked very hard and spent a lot of money optimizing the system, they will probably come out on top. But if you start in a different place, reimagining the problem from first principles, you may or may not find yourself with a taller hill to climb. Decisions made very early on in your hill-climbing process lock you in to a path, and then the people tasked with optimizing the system later can't fight the organizational inertia to backtrack and pick a different path. But a new startup can.

It's worth noting that Google actually did succeed with a wildly different architecture a couple years later. They figured "Well, if CPU performance is hitting a wall - why use just one CPU? Why not put together thousands of commodity CPUs that individually are not that powerful, and then use software to distribute workloads across those CPUs?" And the obvious objection to that is "If we did that, it won't be compatible with all the products out there that depend upon x86 binary compatibility", and Google's response was the ultimate in hubris: "Well we'll just build new products then, ones that are bigger and better than the whole industry." Miraculously it worked, and made a multi-trillion-dollar company (multiple multi-trillion-dollar companies, if you now consider how AWS, Facebook, TSMC, and NVidia revenue depends upon the cloud).

Transmeta's mistake was that they didn't re-examine enough assumptions. They assumed they were building a CPU rather than an industry. If they'd backed up even farther they would've found that there actually was fertile territory there.
by dfxm12 | 2025-11-12 19:11:08+00:00
What exactly do you mean by "pc-ish"? Setting aside steam deck, are you aware that you can already install steam on linux and play many games [0]? Are you aware of Bazzite [1]?

0 - https://www.protondb.com/

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazzite_(operating_system)
by bogwog | 2025-11-12 19:11:32+00:00
I have a 1st gen Steam Deck (256gb), and it has supported wake from bluetooth peripherals for a while. I've only tested it with a PS5 controller, but it works. [EDIT: btw I use the official dock. Idk if it'll work with others]

I use my SteamDeck as a streaming device too, and since my TV is connected via HDMI, waking the console also wakes the TV. So I can start playing/watching anything by just turning on my PS5 controller (which is not ideal because the PS5 controller has terrible battery life and is often dead when I need it, but that's a different issue)
by thadt | 2025-11-12 19:11:41+00:00
Fortnite & Call of Duty

If I could travel back in time and prevent my kids and nephews from ever learning about Fortnite, I might do it. Instead I'm out here trying to keep from getting sniped by a Simpson character.

Fortunately, it seems like the rest of the family is getting tired of COD's ceaseless churn, and might be willing to pick up something else.
by pier25 | 2025-11-12 19:11:43+00:00
I tried Razor. It's mature, has tons of features, and it's very fast. But it only really solves rendering HTML.

You will still need to integrate Vite somehow to use modern CSS, TS, etc. And if you do that, why even use Razor to begin with?

Also, hot reload is garbage. C# will never get close in speed or features to something like Vite.
by graycat | 2025-11-12 19:11:44+00:00
Glanced at the exercises. It appears that two of them have numbers arranged in a triangle and ask for a longest path.

Hmm. Given such a triangle, let m be the largest number in the triangle. For each x in the triangle, replace it with m - x. For the resulting triangle, solve it to give the shortest path using one of the well known network shortest path algorithms.
by Insanity | 2025-11-12 19:11:53+00:00
This is going to be an instant buy for me, and my first VR device ever. I've used the previous Steam VR headset over at a friends' place many times, but never bit the bullet to get one myself.

The fact that this can run standalone, doesn't have a bunch of wires dangling from it, and is pretty much a fully working Linux box makes this am almost on-brainer for me.

I do _hope_ the price is reasonable though, if it ends up being like Apple VR I might not buy into it immediately, but I'm hoping for a reasonable $1000 max price.
by jacobgkau | 2025-11-12 19:11:56+00:00
> Never mind this: When was the last time you bought something in person, in cash, and bought only one thing? Just think it through for a second.

"In cash" is entirely separate from the rounding debate and is just the "people use cards, anyway" argument. It's not relevant to this discussion. This discussion is about cash. I do buy single items at stores sometimes.

> If you buy two things at $1.03 or $1.04, it's $2.06 or $2.07 and rounds down to $2.05 more often than it's $2.08 and rounds up to $2.10.

Where's the law preventing stores from imposing an accounting fee for multi-item purchases, conveniently totaling a few cents?
by rtkwe | 2025-11-12 19:12:08+00:00
It's because the two-thumbstick, 8 face buttons, 2 shoulder and 2 trigger form factor covers so many games there's not been a real reason for super wacky controllers. They kind of hit it out of the park on the 360 design and the only real sticking point left is the exact ergonomics which mostly fall into the PS thumbstick position (both lower) vs XBox position (left high and right low).
by zahlman | 2025-11-12 19:12:18+00:00
From all the surveys I've seen, the demographics of Python users haven't meaningfully changed over time. (And the core dev team is still over 90% male as best I can determine, although there doesn't seem to be an authoritative list.) It's far more plausible that the popularity owes to its viral success as a "glue" language in data analysis and "scientific" applications, which lead to familiarity and adoption for ML applications that are connected to today's AI hype. It also saw a boom during the COVID lockdown; and the choice of Python here can largely be attributed to network effects.

In short, languages like Perl and Ruby didn't have a NumPy equivalent (PDL doesn't appear to be on anything like the same level, and Numo is a newcomer), while languages like R and Julia don't have the same perception as general-purpose (i.e. suitable for integrating numerical computing applications into a wider context).

Python isn't in these niches because of demographic-specific outreach programs, as demonstrated by the demographics of the niches.

Also, the updates were not "poorly conceived", although they were initially released half-baked. If anything, they didn't go nearly far enough.
by jabbany | 2025-11-12 19:13:17+00:00
I know this is supposed to be a joke but... businesses have pushed for this the other way around in the past, asking for a new coin to raise prices.

> The Coca-Cola Company sought ways to increase the five cent price, even approaching the U.S. Treasury Department in 1953 to ask that they mint a 7.5 cent coin. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_price_of_Coca-Cola_from_...]
by scottlamb | 2025-11-12 19:13:28+00:00
> The issues is that they are not "fair" in that they don't poll the future holding the lock.

How would you change that? A section of code doesn't have access to its own future to call into.

Best I can think is that you can't just call `let guard = mut.lock().await` but instead have to do `mut.do_locked(fut).await`, so that other `do_locked` calls can poll `fut`. I think that would work, but it seems quite awkward. Then again, imho async mutexes are something that should be used quite sparingly, so maybe that's okay.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-11-12 19:14:03+00:00
> We’re bringing both GPT‑5.1 Instant and GPT‑5.1 Thinking to the API later this week. GPT‑5.1 Instant will be added as gpt-5.1-chat-latest, and GPT‑5.1 Thinking will be released as GPT‑5.1 in the API, both with adaptive reasoning.
by hinkley | 2025-11-12 19:14:18+00:00
We use async code in two modes which have different very different consequences for concurrency issues.

We have an imperative code flow where we perform a series of tasks that involve IO, and apply the effects sequentially. Here the biggest problem is holding a lock for a long transaction and starving the rest of the system. So we break it up into a finite state machine where the lock is held mostly during the synchronous parts.

The other is asking a lot of questions and then making a decision based on the sum of the answers. These actually happen in parallel, and we often have to relax the effective isolation levels to make this work. But it always seems to work better if the parallel task can be treated as a pure function. Purity removes side effects, which removes the need for write locks, which if applied consistently removes the Dining Philosopher’s problem. “Applied consistently” is the hard part. Because it requires not just personal discipline but team and organizational discipline.

> There is usually not much of a point in writing a finalizer that touches only the object being finalized, since such object updates wouldn’t normally be observable. Thus useful finalizers must touch global shared state.

That seems like an “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-12 19:14:49+00:00
Technology know-how spreads rapidly, so no need to be first. Look how fast Google caught up with Gemini when they chose to, or how fast X.ai developed Grok.

Maybe it's cheap insurance to invest in, say, LeCun just in case JEPA or the animal intelligence approach takes off, but if it does show significant signs of progress there'd also be opportunity to invest later, or in one of the dozen copycats that will emerge. In the end it'll be the giants like Google and Microsoft that will win.
by scotty79 | 2025-11-12 19:15:03+00:00
Facebook messenger tries to marry end to end encryption with multi-device access and it's a horrible mess with some messages not being delivered to some devices for hours , days or ever.

I absolutely want OpenAI to keep all of my chats and I absolutely don't want them to share them ( voluntarily or by force) with any private agent.

I have exactly the same expectation of any document or communication platform. It's been long established as accepted compomise between security and convenience.
by immibis | 2025-11-12 19:15:39+00:00
There's a part in the GPL that says you're free to discard any terms other than the GPL and specific ones (like attribution). So if they really did apply the GPL, you can use it commercially, but only under GPL terms.

I don't think it's that bad. Most commercial enterprises don't want their commercial products to be under GPL terms, so they'll pay for the license regardless. You should really fix the SaaS loophole by using AGPL instead though.
by cube2222 | 2025-11-12 19:15:42+00:00
This is fantastic!

A while ago I bought the Quest 3 and set it up with WiFi 6 for streaming games. It's a decent setup, but I only bought it cause I was tired of waiting for the "rumored new headset by Valve".

And it seems everything on my wishlist is here:

- foveated rendering based on eye tracking - this is excellent, and was I think only available in the Quest Pro until now

- a dedicated wireless streaming dongle, with multiple radios on the headset - awesome, tuning WiFi 6 got me to a good-enough state, but I'm looking forward to a dedicated out-of-the-box solution

- pancake lenses

- inside-out tracking

In general, having had the Valve Index previously, and then using the Quest 3, it's a night-and-day difference to play something like Alyx wireless. Much better clarity with pancake lenses, too.

Main surprise here is their usage of a Snapdragon chip and not AMD, didn't expect this. I thought it would effectively be a steam deck hardware wise. Curious to see how well that works, esp. for standalone gaming. In practice though you'll likely want to be streaming any "pc-first" titles anyway.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-12 19:15:47+00:00
> Your stance seems to be is that it is unreasonable to be annoyed by someone who is being unreasonable.

No, that's not their stance.

You talked about whether ffmpeg was reasonable. They talked about whether ffmpeg was unreasonable.

You never accused google of being unreasonable, and they never mentioned it either.

So this idea of "responding to google being unreasonable" is a brand new premise. And I'm pretty sure they would disagree with that premise.
by Yokolos | 2025-11-12 19:16:04+00:00
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1493

This is fun, just found this issue from 2018 which was closed with this comment:

> Hello @setsunati, this is not a realistic objective for Proton. As @rkfg, mentions wine for ARM does not magically make x86 based games work on ARM cpus.

> Even if Steam were brought to ARM, and an x86 emulation layer was run underneath wine, the amount of games that could run fast and without hitting video driver quirks is small enough not to entertain this idea any time in the near future.

It's mentioned in this issue https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/8136 which was closed Oct 2024 with this comment by kisak-valve:

> Hello @Theleafir1, similar to #1493, this is not a realistic objective for Proton any time in the near future.
by vunderba | 2025-11-12 19:16:14+00:00
From the spec sheet:

> Large FOV (up to 110 degrees)

Sigh. More than a decade later and we're still stuck at "submarine periscope" Field of view level. As somebody who's used the Pimax (~180-200 FOV), your definition of "large" may vary.

> Headstrap includes integrated dual audio drivers and and rechargeable battery on rear.

Freaking thank you. Apple failed hard to learn the lesson of - it's not necessarily the weight that matters, it's the distribution of the weight.
by panarky | 2025-11-12 19:16:34+00:00
93% of American drivers think they're better drivers than the median driver [0].

This overconfidence causes humans to take unnecessary risks that not only endanger themselves, but everyone else on the road.

After taking several dozen Waymo rides and watching them negotiate complex and ambiguous driving scenarios, including many situations where overconfident drivers are driving dangerously, I realize that Waymo is a far better driver than I am.

Waymos don't just prevent a large percentage of accidents by making fewer mistakes than a human driver, but Waymos also avoid a lot of accidents caused by other distracted and careless human drivers.

Now when I have to drive a car myself, my goal is to try to drive as much like a Waymo as I can.

[0] https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/1981-svenson.pdf
by estimator7292 | 2025-11-12 19:17:03+00:00
DO NOT assume SMART is reliable. You can wipe SMART stats or write any values you want.

You have to actually examine the real bits on the drive. Resellers don't want to take the time to actually zero a drive, they usually just nuke the partition table.

You also need to physically examine the drive. Corroded fingerprints on the PCB, wear on the port contacts, scratches from mounting rails, etc.

That's how it found out that the last "new" drive I bought on Amazon was actually a used Backblaze drive. It contained terabytes of customer data, and a shit ton of cleartext files. SMART, of course, reported it was a brand new drive with zero hours. Cleartext logs on the drive showed many thousands of hours of runtime.

Physical examination is the only reliable method.
by aerhardt | 2025-11-12 19:17:40+00:00
I would use it exclusively if Google released a native Mac app.

I spend 75% of my time in Codex CLI and 25% in the Mac ChatGPT app. The latter is important enough for me to not ditch GPT and I'm honestly very pleased with Codex.

My API usage for software I build is about 90% Gemini though. Again their API is lacking compared to OpenAI's (productization, etc.) but the model wins hands down.
by bre1010 | 2025-11-12 19:17:43+00:00
I discovered project euler as a novice programmer in high school around 15 years ago. I loved how solving a problem unlocks a secret forum only available to other solvers. I would spend hours reading through everyone's prior solutions and trying to understand them. One guy had tagged his profile as "haskell" but would always provide his solutions in ruby which threw child-me for quite a loop (I actually thought ruby and haskell were the same language for some time)!