MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-07 17:57:05+00:00
I literally said that.

The part you missed is that supermarkets sell a significant amount of stock.

If shop lifting is a serious enough problem in a particular store to make it financially unprofitable then there’s more at play than just the theft:

1. The store isn’t following best practices of having electronics tagged, and high value items at the back of the store.

2. The store isn’t making enough legal sales. This could be for a multitude of reasons from the stores location to its cleanliness. Or maybe they’re just stocking stuff people don’t want to buy or at the prices they’re advertised for

3. The overheads are unsustainable regardless of the sales. For example the land rental might be so high that the store wouldn’t turn a profit with the types of products they’re trying to sell.

Shops also factor in loss of stock in their margins. Eg spoiled food, damaged products and theft. This actually comes to less than the cost of personal nor rental costs.

There is still value in anti-theft measures. But that doesn’t mean that the GPs comments were correct when they said:

> it doesn’t take much theft to put the business in the red.

…because if you run a supermarket correctly then it does. Despite what the knee jerk reactions to my initial comment suggest.
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-07 17:57:14+00:00
LA's food scene is unbelievably good. There are individual categories of food that other places have it beat on (for example, if I want a deep dish pizza, I'm probably better off going to Zachary's, or being in Chicago), but on a scale of "I can walk into a random restaurant with no research and expect a good to extremely good meal, with plenty of variety in such restaurants to choose from" to "Evansville, IN", I haven't been anywhere in the world that has LA beat.
by LunaSea | 2026-01-07 17:57:23+00:00
> Note that they were running psql on ec2 instances, which implies bare metal with SSDs.

No, this doesn't imply SSDs.

EC2 instances do not have access to SSDs but to EBS volumes which is a much slower distributed network block storage medium.

Not sure about their PostgreSQL replication issues but lots of companies manage to make it work without a hitch.
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-07 17:57:32+00:00
I consider the traditional food pyramid, with grain at the base, to make a lot of economic sense.

The question is not "what's best for you", but "how to keep as many people as possible well fed and reasonably healthy". And an important part of it is that everyone gets enough calories, even the poor, and even during hard times.

Grain is an efficient source of calories, and grain products tend to have a good shelf life and don't need refrigeration. And ideal baseline for keeping people from starving.

But grain is good for calories, but not enough to keep people healthy, you also need vitamins, fiber, etc... So you introduce the second food group: fruits and vegetables. A bit more expensive and more involved than grain, but it provides most of the things grain don't.

Now, we are at a vegan diet, and experience has shown that it can be perfectly healthy, but in order for it to be, you need to do a significant amount of bookkeeping, and you may need some slightly exotic food to avoid deficiencies. So, not enough for the general population, so you introduce animal products. Even more expensive, but now you have everything you need, with good margins.

The top of the pyramid is for the products for which the needs are covered more efficiently by the lower layers.
by Espressosaurus | 2026-01-07 17:57:34+00:00
Yeah, my basket of goods hasn't changed and is closer to doubling in price comparing 2018 to today. Some items I've been tracking have quadrupled since 2010 or thereabouts. Your basic cup-of-noodles used to be $.20 to $.25 and is now at over $1. Beef prices are much like egg prices, quadrupling at best. Chicken is high but sales prices keep it at a modest doubling relative to previous sales for the most part. More like triple for whole chickens.

Expect the computer prices to rise since OpenAI bought out the next year's supply from two of the biggest RAM/NAND manufacturers in the world.
by Lucasoato | 2026-01-07 17:57:39+00:00
Last year I attended the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. This is a global event, in which people coming from different countries gather together to showcase their projects, chasing the dream. Many are independent developers, looking for the opportunity or investment that could change their life.

To me, the fact that crêpes were sold at 20$ and cans of coke at 10$ at the event was a shame. The organizers turned what was once a great event to bring everyone together into a way to scalp even more indie game developers. The price to partecipate as a company was so high that even big names boycott it.
by yalogin | 2026-01-07 17:57:58+00:00
They nailed it. Consumers don't care about AI, they care about functionality they can use, and care less if it uses AI or not. It's on the OS and apps to figure out the AI part. This is why even though people think Apple is far behind in AI, they are doing it at their own pace. The immediate hardware sales for them did not get impacted by lack of flashy AI announcements. They will slowly get there but they have time. The current froth is all about AI infrastructure not consumer devices.
by bmc7505 | 2026-01-07 17:57:59+00:00
There are a few approaches if you want to write a new language. One, as the author argues, is to write a library in an existing language, which may require sacrificing ergonomics to fit inside the syntax of the host language, but is safe, modular and reusable.

Many DSLs can be bolted onto an existing language with support for compiler extensions. This approach offers more flexibility, but often leads to fragmentation and poor interoperability in the language ecosystem.

There is third approach, established by a group in Minnesota [1], which is to design languages and tools which are modular and extensible from the get-go, so that extensions are more interoperable. They do research on how to make this work using attribute grammars.

If the host language has a sufficiently expressive type system, you can often get away with writing a fluent API [2] or type safe embedded DSL. But designing languages and type systems with good support for meta-programming is also an active area of research. [3, 4]

If none of these options work, the last resort is to start from tabula rasa and write your own parser, compiler, and developer tools. This offers the most flexibility, but requires an enormous amount of engineering, and generally is not recommended in 2026.

[1]: https://melt.cs.umn.edu

[2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.01473

[3]: https://www.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/~kam/papers/aplas2016.pdf

[4]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.17065
by antiframe | 2026-01-07 17:58:00+00:00
Today, I am one of the Ten Thousand [1] that learned you can make croissants with olive oil. Thank you for that! I've always assumed the laminated dough required solid fats, but apparently any layering of fat and flour can make flaky goodness. I am guessing that liquid fats are probably harder to work with, and croissants are already tricky enough to get right: but I must try.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1053/
by dormento | 2026-01-07 17:58:04+00:00
Disclaimer: not an """AI""" enthusiast. I think it takes away the joy of coding, which makes me sad.

With that out of the way, I don't think there will be "people inheriting codebases" for much longer, at least not in the vast majority of business-related software needs. People will still be useful insofar as you need someone responsible and able to be sued for contract breach, failures and whatnot, but we'll see more and more agents inheriting previous agents codebases. And in the other hand, "small software" that caters to particular customized workflows can be produced entirely by LLMs.

I can totally relate how some of us would want to be off raising goats, planting watermelons or whatever.
by superkuh | 2026-01-07 17:58:05+00:00
I did. Did you notice that in the article they're talking about how the price (89%) spanned a decade at least? This seems to align with what I've said in my above coment.

>That's an 89% increase over a decade, and a 32% jump in just two years. San Francisco has the highest indexed concert ticket prices in the nation, roughly 29% above the norm, according to analysis from Tickethold.

Of course prices are increasing everywhere across the USA. I am just pointing out that San Francisco has always been significantly more expensive than everywhere else even before the last handful of years. And the reason for this is very clear: SF people have been paid more on average. Probably because a demand for the small area (so nice climate wise, job availability wise, etc) exceeds availability for those things and drives up other prices. And then the ratcheting like I said.
by bpt3 | 2026-01-07 17:58:10+00:00
You can argue it was primarily due to inflation (changes in the economy can never be attributed solely to any one thing).

The upper 0.1% largely owns things that are relatively safe from inflation (like expensive real estate in areas where increases in value have exceeded the rate of inflation for decades) while the lower 50 - 80% does not.

It's effectively impossible to prove definitively, but I find it hard to believe it's a coincidence that the share of wealth held by asset-heavy individuals shot up at the exact same time the money supply increased significantly, especially given that lower class wages were actually increasing faster than inflation and upper class wages at the same time.
by overgard | 2026-01-07 17:58:29+00:00
Yeah, I agree, I'm not really a calorie counter. (I tend to get irritated by the "a calorie is a calorie" folk because nutrient quality is the most important thing). It's occasionally worth paying attention to calories with some foods though, like bacon or whatnot because it's very easy to eat a small volume but a lot of calories.
by ewoodrich | 2026-01-07 17:58:35+00:00
I’m well aware, as I said I am regularly using CC/Codex/OC in a variety of projects, and I certainly didn’t claim that can’t be used productively in a large code base.

But that different challenges become apparent that aren’t addressed by examples like this article which tend to focus on narrow, greenfield applications that can be readily rebuilt in one shot.

I already get plenty of value in small side projects that Claude can create in minutes. And while extremely cool, these examples aren’t the kind of “step change” improvement I’d like to see in the area where agentic tools are currently weakest in my daily usage.
by victor_y | 2026-01-07 17:58:36+00:00
I think the effort is valuable, however hard for individuals to act upon to effectively improve their diet.

A simple do / don't list serves this better:

Do:
- Do consume more legumes or beans, lentils and peas.
- Do consume more fish (low lead options)
- Do consume more vegetables and fruit

Don't
- Don't consume alcohol or other harmful drugs
- Don't consume sweetened items (either added sugars or artificial sweeteners)
- Avoid processed food (try to cook as much as possible)

Feel like this is more helpful for 99% of people.
by tylerchilds | 2026-01-07 17:58:47+00:00
I’ll be honest.

I’m a contributor to this.

I’ve been CSS since the mid 2000s and I have a lot of it memorized by heart.

My team uses tailwind, therefore I use tailwind

But I don’t want to reconfigure my mental model to think in esoteric shorthand, when I already have vanilla web tech memorized.

So I just write some code to match the design and then I let an llm transform it into what my team expects.

I’m sharing in the hopes that the tailwind team can figure out a middle ground because I think a service that can take any valid styled content and output the same result in tailwind would be a niche small language model that solves the use case for why I don’t go to the docs.
by bluGill | 2026-01-07 17:58:52+00:00
Nobody cares about fat, except as it influences how well they look. They care about good health. There are many people who would be happy to sit in a wheelchair all day (they probably don't know how uncomfortable that is and would demand extra comfort, but the idea). People don't want to exercise (in general). They want to eat good tasting food. They want to drink, smoke, and do other drugs. They want whatever their religion says is good.

Because these are often in conflict they must compromise something. If you find a way to be fat while: looking good, living a long life, and being able to do the other things in life you want through life people would be happy.

Of course being fat correlates strongly with things people don't like about living a long healthy life and so we try to lose weight, but that is only a proxy.
by aldarion | 2026-01-07 17:58:54+00:00
Large percentage, yes. The issue is the "not large percentage" part. Sugar, additives, preservatives, colors... all of these are toxic. And when you mix up beef steak with sausage... you won't get realistic results.

That's like asking "what's the issue if somebody salts the soup with cyanide, most of the meal will still be soup". Yeah, but the cyanide will still kill you, even if it is the small percentage.
by enaaem | 2026-01-07 17:59:04+00:00
In the past reputation matters. Accounts like "Endwokeness" would never work, because people would just make fun of him. "Why is he so obsessed with trans people?" "Does he have a job?". His whole persona would become an inside joke. You also can't just spam low effort opening post, because it will just be removed, so if he for example wants to hate on gay people he needs to write whole essays about it.
by skippyboxedhero | 2026-01-07 17:59:05+00:00
If you think about what they are actually trying to measure, it should also be clear that the primary goal of these statistics is to employ economists.

There is the raw price data, which is mostly bunk because it uses unrepresentative products. And there is obviously huge political pressure not to make basket adjustments that result in prices going up.

And then there are quality adjustments that are completely nonsensical. Worst example is obviously with something like medicine where it just isn't possible to compare the price of drugs that save lives that didn't exist fifty years ago.

Unfortunately, economists will forever be in the camp of not understanding the difference between what is measured and what can be useful (and this has serious consequences for policy, for example the understanding within modern economics of long-term economic growth is close to zero which has led to policies focusing heavily on resource usage/intensity, essentially no different to North Korean economic policy in the 50s, due to significantly understated long-term estimates of growth). Hong Kong's government didn't produce economic statistics during its period of rapid growth for this reason.
by beloch | 2026-01-07 17:59:06+00:00
"We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."

--------------

What we're seeing here is that "AI" lacks appeal as a marketing buzzword. This probably shouldn't be surprising. It's a term that's been in the public consciousness for a very long time thanks to fiction, but more frequently with negative connotations. To most, AI is Skynet, not the thing that helps you write a cover letter.

If a buzzword carries no weight, then drop it. People don't care if a computer has a NPU for AI any more than they care if a microwave has a low-loss waveguide. They just care that it will do the things they want it to do. For typical users, AI is just another algorithm under the hood and out of mind.

What Dell is doing is focusing on what their computers can do for people rather than the latest "under the hood" thing that lets them do it. This is probably going to work out well for them.
by kaydub | 2026-01-07 17:59:46+00:00
> 1) There exists a threshold, only identifiable in retrospect, past which it would have been faster to locate or write the code yourself than to navigate the LLM's correction loop or otherwise ensure one-shot success.

I can run multiple agents at once, across multiple code bases (or the same codebase but multiple different branches), doing the same or different things. You absolutely can't keep up with that. Maybe the one singular task you were working on, sure, but the fact that I can work on multiple different things without the same cognitive load will blow you out of the water.

> 2) The intuition and motivations of LLMs derive from a latent space that the LLM cannot actually access. I cannot get a reliable answer on why the LLM chose the approaches it did; it can only retroactively confabulate. Unlike human developers who can recall off-hand, or at least review associated tickets and meeting notes to jog their memory. The LLM prompter always documenting sufficiently to bridge this LLM provenance gap hits rub #1.

Tell the LLM to document in comments why it did things. Human developers often leave and then people with no knowledge of their codebase or their "whys" are even around to give details. Devs are notoriously terrible about documentation.

> 3) Gradually building prompt dependency where one's ability to take over from the LLM declines and one can no longer answer questions or develop at the same velocity themselves.

You can't develop at the same velocity, so drop that assumption now. There's all kinds of lower abstractions that you build on top of that you probably can't explain currently.

> 4) My development costs increasingly being determined by the AI labs and hardware vendors they partner with. Particularly when the former will need to increase prices dramatically over the coming years to break even with even 2025 economics.

You aren't keeping up with the actual economics. This shit is technically profitable, the unprofitable part is the ongoing battle between LLM providers to have the best model. They know software in the past has often been winner takes all so they're all trying to win.
by hiQloIQ | 2026-01-07 17:59:57+00:00
I like how we recognize this necessity to our biology but commit everyone to Hunger Games-lite performative, fiat (by decree alone), economics due to lack of political action in the face of some walking dead politicians who can't get through a day or week without handfuls of pills, they're that pathetic.

We are a deeply unserious society.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-07 18:00:03+00:00
I think a lot of it comes down to corporate interests combined with religious interests (veganism and the Seventh Day Adventist church), they push a philosophy and treat statements as facts without evidence to a point that they become "common knowledge," suppress contravening evidence and inject themselves into standards bodies and product educational programs around they philosophy.

They don't want you eating meat. So anything that pushes a meat centric diet is the enemy.
by weitendorf | 2026-01-07 18:00:11+00:00
I'm a big agent proponent myself but I don't think these kinds of companies actually exist yet. It's gotta either be some CTO who learned the word "orchestration" or "agent harness" and decided to play around with that stuff, or pure fantasy from the usual suspects of VC-twitter trying to build FOMO/signal themselves as part of the "in crowd"/drive engagement with hyperbole.
by hackingonempty | 2026-01-07 18:00:21+00:00
The article claims "a burrito that cost $5.50 in 2014 is now $13.95" but I just checked one of the better SF Mission taquerias that has a web site with prices (Papalote) and used the Way-Back Machine and a carne asada burrito was $9.10 in Jan 2014 and is now $13.75. That's only 1.5X not 2.5X increase.

According to the BLS CPI calculator, that $9.10 in 2014 has $12.61 of buying power as of a couple months ago, or $13.75 in late 2025 dollars is $9.92 in 2014. The price has only exceeded inflation by 9%.
by nis0s | 2026-01-07 18:00:22+00:00
US companies have long been reliant on free flowing investment monies subsidized by the USG. Tightening those purse strings has reduced the level of jobs openings, including tightening of SBIRs and other non-research grant programs that small to medium sized companies use. Small business loans are also tight or non-existent. So, of course jobs will be limited.

The macro-level economic policies really only affect large corporations, unless a business is impacted by the tariffs. In general, hiring is fucked by immigration visas in large companies, which are still going strong and sneaking around the anti-immigration barriers. In some way, hiring non-U.S. workers for work funded by the USG is unacceptable, and economic theft.

If USG opens up funding more, then things will normalize, including for immigrant or non-U.S. contract workers in other places. As always, it’s the economy that’s the problem, but which part of it is always hard to pin down when other parts of it make up for it.
by jnk0le | 2026-01-07 18:00:40+00:00
(timming leak of condition flags, POC for cortex-m85)

As they confirmed by mail: "You're correct, IT predicates are considered control flow (and absented from the guarantees provided by DIT)"

Affected should be mostly assembly implementations, as this is the area where one expects it to be constant time, unlike branch-more code, beloved by compilers.

Happy auditing.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-01-07 18:00:43+00:00
> "Built out products" like you're earning money on this?

No, I'm not interested in monetizing stuff, I make enough money from $dayjob.

> Having actual users, working through edge cases, browser quirks, race conditions, marketing, communication - the real battle testing 5% that's actually 95% of the work that in my view is impossible for the LLM?

Yes, all of those. Obviously an LLM won't make a tiktok ad for me, but it can help with all the other stuff. For example, you mentioned browser quirks. I ran into a bug in safari's OPFS implementation that an LLM was able to help me track down and work around. I also ran into the chrome issue where backdrop effects don't work if any of the element's parents have nonzero transparency, and claude helped me find all the cases where that happened and fix them. Both of these are from working on the app in my bio. It's a language app too, so however many edge cases you think there are, there's more :D

I don't want to give the impression that it was not a lot of work. It was an enormous amount of work. It's just that each step is significantly faster now.

> and now you haven't even learned anything because you didn't code so the sideproject isn't even education anymore.

I read every line. You could pull up the github right now and point to any line of code and I could tell you what it does and why it's there and what will break if you remove or change it.

> What's the point of such a project?

I originally made it because I wanted a tool to help me learn French. It has succeeded in helping my enormously, to the point where I can have short conversations with my french family members now. Others seem to find it useful too.
by mewpmewp2 | 2026-01-07 18:00:51+00:00
I've got the per PR env with CI/CD setup working now! I still have to wait until tomorrow before I can use Claude Code (or I could use the API token, but I've already spent so much on everything).

I do have ArgoCD too now, right now Github self hosted permanent runners work, so I'll look to switch I think after some time.

I have to understand your browser usecase better. I'm using playwright for automated browser/e2e right now?

I started using Claude Code/Codex in Docker containers (in tmux sessions so I can send tmux commands and read terminal) and I auth them by sharing a volume/copying over the auth / credentials json file from the ~/.claude/ ~/.codex dir. Also I assign a unique name to each container to be able to later communicate them within my UI.

Does this solve the subscription problem for you if I understand the problem correctly?