MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by randycupertino | 2026-01-27 17:09:31+00:00
I feel like they artificially made their prices super low for the last couple years and intentionally operated at a loss as a business tactic to force out competition and kill off local grocery stores. There were instances of their prices being lower than Walmart or other budget stores. The avocados were $0.25 each and carrots were half price of ones in Safeway, even ground beef was weirdly cheap. One time as a comparison I put the same items in my cart for Amazon fresh and Walmart and it was $21 at Amazon fresh and $36 at Walmart. WAY cheaper than Instacart too.
by hackyhacky | 2026-01-27 17:09:33+00:00
> I doubt hobbyists would describe their hobby as purgatory.

Programmers have become accustomed to a lot of cultural and financial respect for their work. That's about to disappear. How do you think radio actors felt when they were displaced by movies? Or silent film actors when they were displaced by talkies?

> I doubt the laborer would describe their toil as "craft".

Intellectual labor is labor. I'm a laborer in programming and I definitely consider it a craft. I think a lot of people here at HN do.
by phendrenad2 | 2026-01-27 17:09:44+00:00
If there's a flash of light and a town in North Korea suddenly vanishes and becomes a giant crater, and the North Korean government claims it was a natural disaster, I'm going to guess they accidentally nuked themselves.

If TikTok suddenly blocks videos on a topic, and they say it was "technical issues", I'm going to guess the new US overlords accidentally pressed the wrong button.

Wonder how long before that button comes for HN. If Dang starts talking like ChatGPT we'll all know.
by freedomben | 2026-01-27 17:10:17+00:00
I mostly agree with you, but I think it's important to consider what you're doing with the data. If we're doing rigorous science, or making life-or-death decisions on it, I would 100% agree. But if we're an AI chatbot trying to offer some insight, with a big disclaimer that "these results might be wrong, talk to your doctor" then I think that's quite overkill. The end result would be no (potential) insight at all and no chance for ever improving since we'll likely never get a to a point where we could fully trust the data. Not even the best medical labs are always perfect.
by xp84 | 2026-01-27 17:10:20+00:00
I agree, it needed a better hook to get people in the 'gates' so to speak. I don't think I've ever waited behind like maybe a single transaction at an airport convenience store, so it's not like having to fiddle with my phone to get in beats tapping a card or phone or watch at checkout. Either way most people are buying 1-3 things so it's not like it saved time scanning.

As for the big Amazon Fresh grocery stores, I only have one out of my way so I only visited once or twice, but the big things I noticed were that it had a small selection and very average prices. Not that surprising because even after buying Whole Foods, Amazon itself has terrible prices on dry goods (meaning supermarket items besides fresh food), and relies heavily on random third-party sellers with big markups for a ton of it.

If they really wanted to get people to buy into Amazon Fresh it would have taken a lot more money (and thus pretty unprofitable for a long while): Probably one way to do that would have been making it as attractive as Costco for Prime members.
by btown | 2026-01-27 17:10:33+00:00
See also re: censorship of messages containing the word Epstein: https://xcancel.com/krassenstein/status/2015911471507530219

Per https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689104/tiktok-epstein-... :

> "We don't have rules against sharing the name 'Epstein' in direct messages and are investigating why some users are experiencing issues," a spokesman for TikTok's U.S. operation told NPR in a statement.

But the evidence in that Twitter thread should be weighed against the spokesperson's statement.
by Projectiboga | 2026-01-27 17:11:09+00:00
I've lived through this whole epidemic, I remember seeing the origional modern Grafitti guy's work all over North Philly on my way to the doctor in the mid 1970s. That guy's name was CornBread. The artful mural like tagging origionating in the Bronx is another story but there have always been a-holes who tag some scribble over other stuff.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-27 17:11:34+00:00
It's hardly unrealistic - most free software has been packaged, by each distro. Very handy for the developer: just email the distro maintainers (or post on your mailing list) that the new version is out, they'll get round to packaging it. Very handy for the user, they just "apt install foo" and ta-da, Foo is installed.

That was very much the point of using a Linux distro (the clue is in the name!) Trying to work in a Windows/macOS way where the "platform" does fuck-all and the developer has to do it all themselves is the opposite of how distros work.
by jv22222 | 2026-01-27 17:11:45+00:00
We built an internal code review tool at the day job and are getting pretty good results with it (CLI tool).

Here's a summary of the top-level ideas behind it. Hope it's helpful!

Core Philosophy

- "Advisor, not gatekeeper" - Every issue includes a "Could be wrong if..." caveat because context matters and AI can't see everything. Developers make the final call.

(Just this idea makes it less annoying and stops devs going down rabbit holes because it it pretty good at thinking why it might be wrong)

- Prompt it to be critical but not pedantic - Focus on REAL problems that matter (bugs, security, performance), not style nitpicks that linters handle.

- Get the team to run it on the command line just before each commit. Small, focused reviews not after batching 10 commits. Small diffs get better feedback.

Smart Context Gathering

- Full file contents, not just diffs - The tool reads complete changed files plus 1-level-deep imports to understand how changed code interacts with the codebase.

Prompt Engineering

- Diff-first, context-second - The diff is marked as "REVIEW THIS" while context files are explicitly marked "DO NOT REVIEW - FOR UNDERSTANDING ONLY" to prevent false positives on unchanged code. BUT that extra context makes a huge difference in correctness.

- Structured output format - Emoji-prefixed bullets ( Critical, Major, Minor), max 3 issues per section, no fluff or praise.

- Explicit "Do NOT" list - Prevents common AI review mistakes: don't flag formatting (Prettier handles it), don't flag TypeScript errors (IDE shows them), don't repeat issues across files, don't guess line numbers.

Final note

- Also plugged it in to a github action for last pass, but again non blocking.
by spike021 | 2026-01-27 17:11:53+00:00
> You constantly have to work around employees fulfilling online orders

To be fair I've noticed this in multiple supermarket chains the last few years. Although they aren't usually employees, they are instacart runners or whatever.

I go fairly often to a Sprouts grocery store and there are times I need to avoid multiple people clearly doing an Instacart run with 2+ carts full of items.

Shelves are often emptier than they used to be also at these times.
by tamnd | 2026-01-27 17:12:05+00:00
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-kuntz-61551869/

DevSecOps Engineer
United States Army Special Operations Command · Full-time

Jun 2022 - Jul 2025 · 3 yrs 2 mos

Honestly, it is a little scary to see someone with a serious DevSecOps background ship an AI project that looks this sloppy and unreviewed. It makes you question how much rigor and code quality made it into their earlier "mission critical" engineering work.
by gordonhart | 2026-01-27 17:12:40+00:00
1. ~4% of their GDP is from remittances, compared to <1% a few decades ago[0]

2. India has a massive male surplus[1] and they actively look to send them abroad to prevent domestic unrest

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS?lo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India
by lbrito | 2026-01-27 17:13:09+00:00
That's some very obtuse thinking.

The US has been applying soft power and hard power in South America - to put it euphemistically, as the most recent US intervention was just days ago - for close to a century. The Chinese... haven't.

Why should people in South America give a shit about Tiananmen or Tibet and at the same time not give a shit about the escalating authoritarian grip of the US regime, which is infinitely more relevant to their lives?
by y-c-o-m-b | 2026-01-27 17:13:12+00:00
> But this is not an uncommon sentiment among the Iranian diaspora

Iranian-American here, I have never heard a single Iranian badmouth Carter or his family in my entire life. This is the first time I'm hearing of it.

> extremely antagonistic towards the regime

On the other hand, this point is very accurate, I can confirm. There's a reason we left, after all. To my earlier point: this is consistently the direction of our anger - towards the regime - not the Carter administration.
by hackyhacky | 2026-01-27 17:13:21+00:00
> So what if they're niche? Enterprise Software Architect is niche.

It's a question of supply and demand in the labor market. Right now, we are paid well and afforded respect because demand for our service is higher than the supply. When anyone can use AI to do our job, the supply will exceed the demand.

There are blacksmiths still working today. Their work is niche. And although blacksmithing today requires no less skill than it did 200 years ago, there is significantly less demand, and very few can make a living at it.
by midlander | 2026-01-27 17:13:39+00:00
> The oppressors and the victim are clear in the Israel - Palestine conflict

Only if you zoom in and focus on one tiny sliver. If you look at the bigger picture, Israel is surrounded by dozens of countries 100s of times its size, that have all been ethnically cleansed of Jews, many of them in different stages of open or proxy war with Israel, militarily or politically.
by orwin | 2026-01-27 17:14:11+00:00
> Neoliberalism is basically just markets-by-default and evidence-based alternatives when they fail.

That's not though. I think the name is from the 'New classical school', oppose Keynesian economics. I think the meaning drifted to mean supply-side economics (direct inheritor from the Chicago school and the new classical school).

Neoliberalism can't be 'evidence-based' when it rejects basic observation (like those from MMT. You can reject MMT 'solutions', that's fine, I do too. Don't reject evidence though).
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-27 17:14:19+00:00
In general, Assembly for a simple well documented CPU is fairly close to most familiar calculator operations, and is demonstrated as a 1 to 1 relationship in the binary firmware. If folks drop on abstractions like Scratch/Basic/Python/Java the students will develop a random notion of what Register/Stack/Heap even means.

I would recommend looking at a few random samples of Ben's build series, as he covers most first year subjects in subtle efficient ways.

Soldering kit PCB or Emulators are insufficient to demonstrate a physical bus wire harness, clock timing, and memory layout. Best of luck =3
by reify | 2026-01-27 17:14:46+00:00
who needs AI when we have a wonderful package like ffmpeg.

use "convert" part of ffmpeg package

convert -resize 25% in-file.jpg out-file.jpg

convert -resize 25% 1.jpeg 1.png

This will reduce the size to 25%, not by 25%.

in-file.jpg 235.5 Kib 1200x1600 -->> out-file.jpg 35.8 Kib 300x400

-------------------------------
use mogrify

batch:

mogrify -resize 25% *.jpg # keep image aspect ratio
mogrify -resize 60% *.png # keep image aspect ratio
mogrify -resize 320x240 *.png # keep image aspect ratio

see the !

mogrify -resize 320x240! *.png # don't keep image aspect ratio
mogrify -resize x240 *.png # don't keep image aspect ratio
mogrify -resize 320x *.png # don't keep image aspect ratio
by ottah | 2026-01-27 17:15:26+00:00
TikTok scared the elite class in ways we're not understanding. This isn't about protecting children, it's about indoctrination. You learn a santized version of the world in school and they keep you from an uncensored view of the world by controlling your access to information online. They're terrified of an informed younger generation not buying into the current political narrative. They know it's happening, because they told us that the war in Palestine was a fight against Palestinian aggressors, but young people with access to information online know it's a genocide. They want to kill that contra narrative.
by Rendello | 2026-01-27 17:15:56+00:00
I used to spend hours in The Powder Toy as a teen (it's also how I learned about Conway's GoL):

https://powdertoy.co.uk/

Now I also play Noita, which also has the same powder-based physics:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/881100/Noita/
by antonvs | 2026-01-27 17:16:09+00:00
Thanks for the heads up, that does look much more interesting.

I don't think it really affects the point discussed above for now, because we were discussing average users, and by definition, the first person to code a plausible web browser with an agent isn't an average user - unless of course that can be reliably replicated with any average user.

But on that note, the takeaways on the post you linked are relevant, because the author bucked a few trends to do this, and concluded among other things that "The human who drives the agent might matter more than how the agents work and are set up, the judge is still out on this one."

This will obviously change, but the areas that LLMs need to improve on here are ones they're notoriously weak on, so it could take a while.
by tehjoker | 2026-01-27 17:16:16+00:00
It's designed to protect consumer confidence so the economy hums along. A single plane is a few hundred people, but the effects ripple out. This is a big country, you need air travel to make it reasonable to connect the coasts, and the more people traveling the more cohesive and economically balanced the country is. They were fine with letting 1M+ Americans die from COVID to protect the economy. That's really all there is to it.
by mitaphane | 2026-01-27 17:17:31+00:00
I use the one situated in Seattle, Amazon HQ. It's just like self-checkout at a grocery store with fewer steps. The entrance/payment mechanism is Amazon One (a palm scan associated with a payment wallet). At Whole Foods, it's used as an optional payment option at checkout.

It's convenient; I only ever remember one problem where it thought I had purchased an item that I picked up and decided on something else. I disputed it online and it was resolved in a day.
by FrustratedMonky | 2026-01-27 17:17:33+00:00
Really like what you are going for.

I'd like more hover help to explain features, so i can read them while it runs. Next to 'Cognition' there is some help. I'd like that on all parameters.

And, would like to see results from multiple long term runs. Does it settle out in particular configurations over time?

And, need little more short description of what is going on, since it seems to cycle around different stability points and not really one life form take off.
by specialist | 2026-01-27 17:17:38+00:00
Agree with all.

> Graffiti is a population's expression of ownership of their city.

My understanding has been (some fraction of) taggers are disaffected. So I could buy that some are reasserting ownership.

Some are just dumb teenagers acting out (shitposting), like my son did.

A handful are pretty good artists. Like some of the kids in my kid's extended social group. Worthy of resources and media. eg Commissions for murals.
by seanhunter | 2026-01-27 17:17:41+00:00
I'm going to go out on a limb and say you posted this accidentally on the wrong thread somehow, but this isn't (at all) a theory of everything, nor is it some crank producing anything.

Eg https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.0510

See the authors- in terms of contemporary mathematics they are pretty much as far from a crank as it's possible to be. Universality seems to be some sort of intrinsic characteristic of the distribution of eigenvalues of certain types of random matrices which crop up all over the place. That seems interesting and the work is serious academic work (as you can see from the paper I linked) and absolutely doesn't deserve the sort of shallow dismissal you have applied.
by gus_massa | 2026-01-27 17:17:42+00:00
Clicky: https://github.com/numaes/protoCore https://github.com/gamarino/protoJS

> ProtoJS: Phase 1 complete, demonstrating real parallel execution and sub-1ms GC pauses.

Is it a moving GC or a non-moving GC? IIRC Golang use a non-moving GC to make pauses very short.

Is it possible to create cycles? I think I didn't use cycles since a long time ago, but it's useful for big systems with a lot of interacting objects.
by derbOac | 2026-01-27 17:17:53+00:00
I'm surprised in the sense that it seems a few times we've been exposed to various problems arising from social media manipulation or censorship — of the right and left variety actually — so I'd think people might be more sensitive to it at this point.

Part of it too I guess is my personal experience with people I know who will complain about a platform repeatedly (in terms of algorithmic political manipulation) and then turn around and continue to use it voluminously, sending links to stuff on the platform over and over again, etc. (not speaking just about TikTok in particular, with a few sites). It has this feeling similar to if they complained about how awful a food item tastes, and expressed concerns about it being poison, but then continued to binge eat it daily.

Maybe they figure it's just inevitable or something, or maybe you're right about reinforcement contingencies. Maybe it's as simple as that.
by Nihilartikel | 2026-01-27 17:18:44+00:00
Interestingly, I had the exact same experience leaving Shanghai - I had picked up some nifty lighters at the wholesale markets. They took me to the room, had me take them out, and I was lucky enough to be able to hand them off to a friend who was staying. No fuss, waiting, or intimidation. They just took care of my honest mistake.
by sebastos | 2026-01-27 17:18:56+00:00
>(which it rarely is)

You're saying it's _rare_ for developers to want to advance a dependency past the ancient version contained in <whatever the oldest release they want to support> is?

Speaking for the robotics and ML space, that is simply the opposite of a true statement where I work.

Also doesn't your philosophy require me to figure out the packaging story for every separate distro, too? Do you just maintain multiple entirely separate dependency graphs, one for each distro? And then say to hell with Windows and Mac? I've never practiced this "just use the system package manager" mindset so I don't understand how this actually works in practice for cross-platform development.
by logicprog | 2026-01-27 17:19:01+00:00
Replying to sibling comment:

the problem is that you actually have to implement that high level DSL to get Lisp to look like that, and most DSLs are not going to be able to be as concise and abstract as a natural language description of what you want, and then just making sure it resulted in the right thing — which then I'd want to use AI for, to write that initial boilerplate, from a high level description of what the DSL should do.

And a Lisp macro DSL is not going to help with automating refactors, automatically iterating to take care of small compiler issues or minor bugs without your involvement so you can focus on the overall goal, remembering or discovering specific library APIs or syntax, etc.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-27 17:19:08+00:00
I agree with @epsters perspective - while it may not have been done at the behest of Israel, it is increasingly becoming clear that most of these so-called "revolutions" exploited the naivety of the youth and incited them through planned (CIA? MI6? Mossad?) social media campaigns on platform all controlled by the west. Throw in a violent, committed group into the mix of these naive young idiots when they are protesting, to deliberately target and provoke the police or the army, and you have the recipe to start a civil war in any country and potentially destabilise it. The aim (from what is apparent in Ukraine, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal etc.) seems to be to replace experienced politicians with inexperienced politicians who can then be easily influenced and manipulated (over a period of time) to completely flip government policies to match the interest of the foreign powers behind the incitement.
by joelwallis | 2026-01-27 17:19:13+00:00
IIRC, multiple writers in SQLite is supported, their writes will just be serialized. What you don't have is concurrent writes. But, given SQLite writes are so fast, in practices it's not really a big deal.

If you haven't used SQLite in a real project with heavy writes, I'd say you do it. SQLite is WAY more powerful than people tend to think of it.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-27 17:19:22+00:00
Thanks, means a lot. As the author of one such article (that might have been the catalyst even), I'm guilty of this myself, and as I dove deeper into understanding what Cursor actually built, and what they think was the "success", the less sense everything made to me.

That's why taking a step back and seeing what's actually hard in the process and bad with the output, felt like it made more sense to chase after, rather than anything else.
by LeFantome | 2026-01-27 17:19:25+00:00
It is refreshing to see somebody else notice that the complaints about systemd and Wayland are philosophically incompatible.

Systemd is creating the same kind of monolith monoculture that Xorg represented. Wayland is far more modular.

Regardless of your engineering preferences, rejecting change is the main reason to object to both.
by MisterTea | 2026-01-27 17:19:57+00:00
> I used to encounter them a lot in Sheepshead Bay.

My friend is one but wasn't always like that. He was never critical of Russia or the USA and was pretty quiet until befriending some Russian dude in his apt building during the blackout of hurricane Sandy. Now he frequently criticizes and rants about capitalist USA then sings praise of Russia. We keep telling him to go back but he doesn't. He's unfortunately "that guy" in our group of friends now -_-
by happymellon | 2026-01-27 17:20:20+00:00
> wayland has been consistently slower than X11

Wayland is a specification, it has an inability to be "faster" than other options. That's like saying JSON is 5% slower than Word.

And as for the implementations being slower than X, that also doesn't reflect reality.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2504-x11-gaming
by btown | 2026-01-27 17:20:47+00:00
Taking a best-faith approach here, I think it's indicative of a broader issue, which is that code reviewers can easily get "tunnel vision" where the focus shifts to reviewing each line of code, rather than necessarily cross-referencing against both small details and highly-salient "gotchas" of the specification/story/RFC, and ensuring that those details are not missing from the code.

This applies whether the code is written is by a human or AI, and also whether the code is reviewed by a human or AI.

Is a Github Copilot auto-reviewer going to click two levels deep into the Slack links that are provided as a motivating reference in the user story that led to the PR that's being reviewed? Or read relevant RFCs? (And does it even have permission to do all this?)

And would you even do this, as the code reviewer? Or will you just make sure the code makes sense, is maintainable, and doesn't break the architecture?

This all leads to a conclusion that software engineering isn't getting replaced by AI any time soon. Someone needs to be there to figure out what context is relevant when things go wrong, because they inevitably will.