MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by calmbonsai | 2025-12-23 21:42:07+00:00
The specific "transparency" I was commenting on was mid-drink preparation which can not be handed-off in any sort of scalable automated fashion (and that's OK).

Having worked a warehouse job as a teen and done data science consulting for a global restaurant chain, I'm certain Starbucks has done time*motion studies and concluded that the system is "good enough" given the huge variety of floor-plans and other physical plant limitations they need to operate in.

It's also worth pointing out that they recently greatly simplified their menu to improve service speed variance, throughput, and (in theory) quality.

There are absolutely tons of unavoidable wait-states (espresso group-heads, drip coffee filter changes, etc.) in the system that can't be overcome with automation at any sort of economic scale (and that's also OK).

Starbucks once tried replacing some of that with higher-margin single-serving automation (remember the Clover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_Equipment_Company and it totally failed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfNoNTjcRbE ).
by rconti | 2025-12-23 21:42:45+00:00
I haven't used the McDonalds mobile app in the drive-thru line. Can you clarify the experience? Why would I use the mobile app once I'm already at the drive-thru? For points/payment? Or for ordering as well?

I once ordered ahead using the mobile app at a Starbucks. I got out of my car, only to find the doors locked, as they closed early for some reason. So I had to get BACK in my car, and sit in the drive-thru queue, just to pick up my already-completed drink, which I found infuriating. (actually, what was infuriating was that I really only order at that location to use their restroom, which of course was an option unavailable in the drive-thru for hygenic reasons)
by idle_zealot | 2025-12-23 21:43:13+00:00
Huh. I always thought that JS objects supported string and number keys separately, like lua. Nope!

[Documents]$ cat test.js
let testArray = [];
testArray[0] = "foo";
testArray["0"] = "bar";
console.log(testArray[0]);
console.log(testArray["0"]);
[Documents]$ jsc test.js
bar bar
[Documents]$
by braingravy | 2025-12-23 21:43:32+00:00
“almost nothing” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

Stalking someone from your desk vs. IRL is a whole different ball game. Not sure why this needs explanation… anyways, the main difference is how easy it do things from your desk. For example, no one see you when you’re stalking someone from your desk. Think of the success of 4chan investigations vs. those in authority to actually do so. It’s empowering.

We live in a world of strangers, and unfortunately a % of those are the type to kill/rape other strangers. Why enable them?

Not sure who else would be empowered by making all public camera accessible at the click of a button, but I’m interested in who you think that population is.

Certainly we can agree most normal folks will not spend their time looking camera feeds of strangers?

I’m fascinated by people who stick to their theoretical principles (‘all data should be public’, etc.) no matter the real world implications, but we all have our own interests :).
by legitster | 2025-12-23 21:45:28+00:00
The other day I was using an LLM for worldbuilding. It helped me design a theoretical world that would be orbitally locked to the sun but still have habitable conditions. Then you can work out characteristics like typical windspeed, crop conditions, how shadows behave, etc.

I'm all for banning LLMs from writing prose. But the endless pearl clutching about LLMs is driving me insane. It's a really good research tool! It does things no other resource can. It can aid creativity.

People insisting on these carpet bans on LLMs are being unrealistic. You can not go back to a world before Google or Wikipedia exist either.
by ethanplusai | 2025-12-23 21:45:53+00:00
AI tools bind context directly to a model (GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc) which makes switching tools unproductive and collaboration on ideas non existent. We kept running into this internally, so we built a system where context is stored in a structured, model-agnostic layer and translated into model-specific prompts at runtime.

The core idea is treating modes as execution layers rather than the source of truth. This lets us switch models, share context across a team or project, and preserve context always.

Still early, but curious how others here think about context management across models, especially for collaborative workflows.
by thayne | 2025-12-23 21:46:08+00:00
True. But

1. The luajit documentation basically just had a list of features. AFAIK there isn't any documentation that combines the 5.1 reference with luajit extensions (including things that were backported)

2. In some cases, for example Neovim, luajit extensions aren't guaranteed to be available. It just says there will be a lua runtime compatible with 5.1. Which means a truly portable neovim plugin can't use those extensions

3. There are features from later lua versions I would like to have (in particular <const> and <close>) that will probably never get backported.

4. Some features require luajit to be built with special flags
by Findecanor | 2025-12-23 21:46:31+00:00
Back when LoongArch was announced, RISC-V did not yet have enough (ratified) extensions to achieve feature-parity.

Even if it had, LoongArch is much more similar to MIPS. LoongSon would have had to make more microarchitectural changes before being able to tape out their first non-MIPS CPU.
by AceyMan | 2025-12-23 21:46:37+00:00
> That seems to be a more recent thing. There is now a concrete barrier in front of the rock face.

Nodding thx for the correction. Understandably, I am not scanning the outside shoulder in this or any other technical section in the Angeles National Forest roadways. "Eyes on the road" is not just something your Dad would say when driving at speed on these (or any other) fast, twisty roads.
by 15155 | 2025-12-23 21:46:45+00:00
> It irritates me to no end that Gowin won't open their bitstream format because they'd displace a bunch of the low end almost immediately.

All of their IDE/programmer/etc binaries are basically entirely unprotected, almost all of their chips are entirely implemented in https://github.com/YosysHQ/apicula - if other manufacturers cared to implement it, it wouldn't be hard.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-23 21:46:52+00:00
> While it is a change when compared to recent years, we’ve seen this in one version or another in the past

I noted many 4+ adult families before WWII (from doing genealogy). It was a time when affordable housing for large families was generally obtainable and work/shopping/etc was in walking distance or reachable via public transit.

FF to today and affordable housing isn't available for families of any size. Most folks must shoulder a number of new major, ongoing expenses like individual transportation. Living is massively more complex due to reams of requirements attached to anything you can think of. Parenting time has increased from a few hours/week to 24/7 adulting and modern children fully their lives in a series of adult-curated, adult-populated boxes.

So we're back to needing 4+ typical income earners to meet minimal bills but nearly everything that enabled the 4+ adult household has been eradicated.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-23 21:47:16+00:00
> For example, this article never mentions DASH, which is made for these exact purposes.

DASH isn't supported on Apple AFAIK. HLS would be an idea, yes...

But in either case: you need ffmpeg somewhere in your pipeline for that experience to be even remotely enjoyable. No ffmpeg? No luck, good luck implementing all of that shit yourself.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-23 21:47:26+00:00
I think this is such an important point. I know all about Bellard's main works. I actually have no idea what he looks like, I've also never seen an interview with him, and I've never read about his specific philosophies when it comes to different software engineering topics. In a world of never-ending bloviations from "influencers" and "thought leaders" it's so awesome to see a real example of true excellence.
by scottyah | 2025-12-23 21:47:50+00:00
Yes, they've always had a model of "people in the know" being subsidized by others.

Didn't pre-print out your ticket? 100 euro fine. Your bag is too large at the gate? Same thing.

It's the airline of Compound Interest- "He who understands it, earns it... he who doesn't... pays it"

An airline that isn't purely catered to the rich, but to those who are intelligent, knowledgeable, and don't mind the lack of frills. It's like an airline crafted for grad students.
by baq | 2025-12-23 21:48:39+00:00
I’ve been doing Python and Typescript professionally, Python for almost two decades, Typescript for last 5 years and I can very confidently say that it doesn’t matter.

Besides, you see to be confusing Python run-time with Python typecheck-time, theoretically unfortunate, but again practically irrelevant distinction. (Unfortunate since Python typecheck is basically a different language than Python execution; irrelevant, because the right subsets of both align well.)
by bad_haircut72 | 2025-12-23 21:49:01+00:00
My recent shower thought was the idea that Moores law hasnt slowed at all, we just went multi-core. Its crazy that the intel folks were so interested in optimizing for single thread CPU design they completely misunderstood where the best effort would be spent - if I had been around back then (speaking as an Elixir dev) I would have been way more interested in having 500 theead CPUs than getting down to nanometer scale dies. Thats what you get when everyone on the team is a bunch of C programmers
by gnabgib | 2025-12-23 21:50:49+00:00
Related - it's a lot of the brands: Hisense, LG, Samsung, Sony, TCL

Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch (1258 points, 7 days ago, 641 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46294456
Show HN: Greed.js – Run PyTorch code in browser using WebGPU
by adityakhalkar_ | 2025-12-23 21:51:54+00:00
Greed.js is a javascript library that allows executing PyTorch code right in the browser. It uses the WebGPU of the browser to execute PyTorch operations.

We have written the core PyTorch operations in WGSL, which speedup the calculations.

Also for devices/browsers which don't have GPU support. We have implemented fallback to CPU with NumPy polyfills implementing the PyTorch functions.
by bikenaga | 2025-12-23 21:51:58+00:00
Abstract: "The third macroscopic interstellar object detected in the solar system recently passed through perihelion, with the best-fitting models of its trajectory now featuring non-gravitational accelerations. We assess how much mass loss is required to produce plausible non-gravitational acceleration solutions and compare with estimates of the mass loss. We find that they are consistent when the nucleus of 3I/ATLAS is around 1 km in diameter. For a recent solution with a time lag in the acceleration from Eubanks et al, we find diameters between 820 meters and 1050 meters, assuming an outgassing asymmetry factor ζ=0.5 and a density of the comet nucleus ρ=0.5 g cm−3. The limits on the diameter scale as (ζ/ρ)1/3. Substantial extrapolation is required in general to compare non-gravitational accelerations to mass loss rates, so reliable estimates of the mass loss rate at other stages of the comet's trajectory will substantially reduce the systematic uncertainty in this estimate."
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-23 21:52:08+00:00
I broadly concur. These days, gaming is usually very easy on Linux.

Except: If I want to kill some time being chaotic in GTA:V Online, and do that in Linux, then that is forbidden. Single player mode works beautifully, but multiplayer is verboten.

(And I'm sure that there are other games that similarly feature very deliberate brokenness, but that's my example.)
by upboats | 2025-12-23 21:52:21+00:00
Yeah they want a return to TV era where censors curtail content

Everyone will own a presentation layer device. Anyone who can only afford the 1GB model can only get SNES quality visuals.

Snow Crash and Neuromancer have displaced the Bible as cognitive framework for tech rich.

Am working on an app that generates and syncs keys 1:1 over local BT and then syncs them again to home PC (if desired). The idea being cut out internet middle men and go back to something like IRC direct connect, that also requires real world "touch grass" effort to complicate greedy data collectors.

Testing now by sharing IP over Signal and then 1:1'ing over whatever app. Can just scaffold all new protocols on top of TCP/IP again.
by jcgl | 2025-12-23 21:52:40+00:00
> love your blog, thanks for the link.

Thank you!

Configuring configuration via env var is a good historical example. I think that especially works nicely when you Buy An Operating System. You know, one that is created and provided by A Vendor. In principle, the vendor can architect a unified metaconfiguration system, e.g. one or several env vars that align behavior to a standard.

But I dunno if it would work so well to to hypothetically apply that tactic to a modern bazaar-based OS like Linux. Distros do amazing, valuable work to unify things, but modern Linux is basically a zillion software packages in a trench coat. So either the distro carries a zillion patches to have a few env vars, or the distro carries no patches and there are a zillion env vars. Either way, total cost of maintenance explodes.

Maybe when people say "text is the universal interface," they really mean that once you've released a textual interface, the interface becomes universal, unchanging for all time.
by saaaaaam | 2025-12-23 21:53:04+00:00
That’s very interesting, thank you! Do you have any info on how it compares to Suno/Udio etc? I don’t know if you saw the news about Anna’s Archive having effectively scraped the majority of the Spotify library. It will be very interesting to see how this impacts on the next generation of generative models for music. Any thoughts there?
by dijit | 2025-12-23 21:53:19+00:00
You cant optimise the general case

Optimisation is almost universally about tradeoffs.

If you are a general engine, you can’t easily make those tradeoffs, and worse you have to build guardrails and tooling for many cases, slowing things down further.

The best we can hope for is even better profiling tools from Epic, but they’ve been doing that for the last couple of years since borderlands.
by xandrius | 2025-12-23 21:53:57+00:00
Either you got used to their evolved dark patterns or you haven't booked with them recently.

I was also Pro-Ryanair: they allowed to see friends and family across Europe with a student budget.

Now, it's an 8-step booking process where you try to figure out what is actually optional and avoidable and what's included in the advertised fare. Depending on the airport, they threaten to charge you if you don't print your boarding pass beforehand. Depending on the flight, they become pretty aggressive in weighing your carry on, mainly to try to catch you out and make an extra 50 euro.

The company went from no frills budget airline to antagonistic and aggro where literally anything is cranked up to 11 to extract value from you.
by necovek | 2025-12-23 21:54:04+00:00
There is no denying practice is needed, but... I've been doing this (getting to reduce ambiguity and simplify complex problems) since before my first job in free software communities, yet really, I wasn't anywhere close to "senior" when I joined my first job at a demanding SW organization at 22 years old.

There was simply a lot I did not know, but I had the talent to do this part well (sure, one can argue that I had "practice" doing this with any problem since I was ~10 years old, but calling that "senior" would be... over the top: I think it rather qualifies as "talent").

It took me a couple of years of learning good software engineering from my wonderful and smart senior colleagues and through my own failures and successes for me to become a Tech Lead too.
by onion2k | 2025-12-23 21:54:07+00:00
You still need ridiculously high spec hardware, and at Apple’s prices, that isn’t cheap.

You can easily run models like Mistral and Stable Diffusion in Ollama and Draw Things, and you can run newer models like Devstral (the MLX version) and Z Image Turbo with a little effort using LM Studio and Comfyui. It isn't as fast as using a good nVidia GPU or a cloud GPU but it's certainly good enough to play around with and learn more about it. I've written a bunch of apps that give me a browser UI talking to an API that's provided by an app running a model locally and it works perfectly well. I did that on an 8GB M1 for 18 months and then upgraded to a 24GB M4 Pro recently. I still have the M1 on my network for doing AI things in the background.
by kristianp | 2025-12-23 21:54:31+00:00
"Local AI" could be many different things. NPUs are too puny to run many recent models, such as image generation and llms. The article seems to gloss over many important details like this, for example the creative agency, what AI work are they doing?

> marketing firm Aigency Amsterdam, told me earlier this year that although she prefers macOS, her agency doesn’t use Mac computers for AI work.
by echelon | 2025-12-23 21:54:46+00:00
A graphics programmer does not need that.

To help understand, you need to see this code as math. Graphics programming algorithms are literally math.

You're asking for training wheels comments, which just get in the way for those who are familiar with the domain.

I'm sure a few graphics programming engineers might want calls to react useState(), useEffect(), etc. to be documented in a codebase, yet a react programmer would scoff at the idea.
by throwaway173738 | 2025-12-23 21:55:13+00:00
This article reminds me so much of so many hardware providers I deal with at work who want to put equipment on-site and then spend the next year not understanding that our customers manage their own firewall. No, you can’t just add a new protocol or completely change where your stuff is deployed because then our support team has to contact hundreds of customers about thousands of sites.
by kvthweatt | 2025-12-23 21:55:55+00:00
The point is you can perform a box dimension attack.

If you have a known input, you can match all outputs.

Example: Document that DOJ took down and reuploaded that redacted Trump's name when it was previously available. They used the same size boxes in each location.

You cannot do this with handwriting, but fonts have known widths.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-23 21:55:59+00:00
I've used spotify for a decade. But the other day I opened one of my playlists and noticed that almost all the songs were greyed out as "unavailable" despite a quick search showing those songs still existed.

Spotify rotted my playlists because it didn't feel like updating a database row somewhere when some licensing agreement got updated. Apple will do the opposite: Rot your music collection by replacing songs with "identical" songs that aren't at all.

So I'm thinking it's time to buy music again.
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-23 21:56:09+00:00
Your whole post is an ignorant, ugly and hate filled rant of little value, but I will pick out this one trope:

> Not the EU and its blob of unelected bureaucratic despots and unelected Commission of dictators

EU haters have two complaints, that it is unelected and that it takes away sovereignty, yet it consists of the members of national governments that not only elect the various officers of the EU (including the Commission) but also vote on all major decisions of the EU, as well as the directly elected EU parliament. So in fact the EU preserves both sovereignty and the votes of EU citizens, both member governments and citizen representatives must approve all EU actions.

It's a little complicated sure, apparently too complicated for some to understand.
by chris_st | 2025-12-23 21:56:37+00:00
Nice! I've done similar things with iPad AUv3 plugins (of which there are way too many!).

Notable ones are:

* Patterning 3 - which, while "just" a drum sequencer, has the ability to automate rotations, etc. in really interesting ways, as well as separate sequences for each part of the kit.

* 4Pockets Euclidean - gives you four different sequences, with adjustable steps, events, rotations, notes to play, velocity, ... for building interesting rhythms.

* Riffer - MIDI random sequence generator

* OODA and ZOA - sequencers with clever morphing and looping abilities

* Battlestation - drum sequencer with random generation, lots of manual adjustments, and then three different synth blocks with random generation.

If you have an iPad already, most AUv3s are generally from free to $30, so somewhat cheaper than going Eurorack :-)

Also, there are things like Drambo that pretty much are Euroracks, and things like Loopy Pro that are not really like anything else (well, LP is kind of like a Boss 505, if the Boss had an arbitrary number of loops, incredible automation, several built-in plugins plus the ability to use pretty much any AUv3 plugin, and the ability to control those plugins...).

It's all kind of an incredible rabbit hole to go down. TONS of fun.
by nh23423fefe | 2025-12-23 21:56:44+00:00
i xored 2 images on the front page

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/images/wintersrose.jpg

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/images/wintersrose-glazed-trim...

https://pasteboard.co/7IJPWBDuroMe.png

it splashes rgb noise near edges in the original
by burningChrome | 2025-12-23 21:57:34+00:00
Same here. Been with them since the beginning (or what felt like the beginning) and have always been impressed with their constant drive to get out new features and make sure their core stuff is still rock solid.

Feels good knowing they are continuing to do well, gives me hope that there's more on the horizon for them. So many companies with great ideas never seem to make it far, or burn out fast, so seeing them navigate the space there in is really inspiring.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-23 21:57:41+00:00
Eh. Whenever someone posts something like this, you get a bunch of folks, stating how they meet that description, etc. Sometimes, they do it humbly, sometimes, not.

In my case, I met that description on my first job, and I guarantee, I was not senior.

You see, my initial training was as an electronic technician (RF/microwave stuff).

That thought process described, was exactly what they trained us to do. Debugging a wonky RF board is about as ambiguous as you can get.

So maybe there's a different definition of "senior."
by samkim | 2025-12-23 21:59:03+00:00
One of the discussions we had in our slack was that the introduction of the New Enemy Problem on page 21 may be oversimplified. It currently relies on an unwritten assumption that the contents of the room change between days or that the previously granted permission was revoked. However, we figured setting the scenario and leaving a note that grownups could easily google for more info would be an ok tradeoff.
Show HN: DR Web Engine – JSON-based web scraping that doesn't break on change
by starlitlog | 2025-12-23 21:59:14+00:00
Built this during my PhD research after getting frustrated with traditional web scrapers breaking every time sites updated their HTML. DR Web Engine uses declarative JSON5 queries instead of imperative scraping code.

Key features:
- JSON5 query language (can still use XPath for field selectors)
- AI-powered element selection (describe what you want in natural language)
- Plugin architecture for extensibility
- Modern browser automation (Playwright-based)
- Handles dynamic content and JavaScript

The core insight: define WHAT data to extract in a structured format, not HOW to extract it step-by-step. Makes scraping more maintainable and less brittle.

Started as academic research but rebuilt it for real-world use. Published the methodology in arXiv and now actively developing the open source version.

Looking for feedback on the query language design and real-world use cases!