skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like Starbucks and a lot of other fast food chains are chasing short-term profits at the expense of long-term viability. A quick check shows Starbucks' gross profit has gone up 12% each year in the past 2 years - that's pretty significant for a stable business that isn't really changing much, and it doesn't seem sustainable. The profit of McDonald's is up 10%, 5%, and then 29% year-over-year, respectively, over the past 3 full years.

My question is - why? Isn't raising fast food prices so much to increase short-term profits an incredibly poor business decision? A major part of the appeal of fast food is low cost. If people fall out of the habit of going to McDonald's, Starbucks, etc. - which they will when they realize they can get higher-quality food/coffee/whatever at a local business for a lower cost - then I think it would be extremely difficult for these chains to win back their business.
Yeah but that's why governments hire consultancies... they're not just preventing the government's payroll not explode (usually, government jobs are all but unfireable whereas contracts with consultants aka body shops can be discontinued easily), but they can also act far, far more flexible than any government entity can on their own.
I wonder if there is a database of Starbucks prices over time around the world?
I’ve done something like this before to call Haskell from C++ (in [0]), so that I could build my GUI using Qt. It worked pretty well, except that I ran into various difficult-to-resolve linking problems on both Windows and Linux. After a year or two of trying to maintain it, I gave up and switched to a protocol where both sides pass JSON over stdin/stdout. This particular piece of software doesn’t require a huge amount of communication or shared data, so it works well enough.

The really nice thing about the original interop code, though, is that GHC’s new WASM backend uses essentially the same foreign function interface to export functions to JavaScript. So with only some minor modifications, I was able to get the same program working on a webpage [1], which I think is pretty cool.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica, and see in particular the old version of https://github.com/bradrn/brassica/blob/93d4353c5736018ec094...

[1] At the risk of DDOS’ing my poor little home server: https://bradrn.com/brassica/
I have been eating out and spending a lot of money lately, but then I read somewhere that $28 per day is 10k per year.

So I started a budget and Starbucks was one of the first things I cut
How long ago did you look? The Pi stock issues have been fixed since around the release of Pi5. Looking at rpilocator.com, everything is in stock.

I was looking at Adafruit where I could have bought all of them for the official prices. But can't buy more than 2 though. The same seems to be true of the UK and EU shops I checked.
Your characterization is inaccurate. I don’t think you’ll be able to find a single positive thing I’ve said about Apple, unless you are referring to where I implied that Xcode has improved.

I don’t like dishonest headlines and vague smears, which I see too much of in a site that is meant to be known for curious discussion. Apple isn’t the only victim - I just happen to be noticing it today.
Need your feedback for my side hustle
Hi guys,

I was just looking at astrology website and find most of the website very cluttered. So I created this simple website in last 4 days. I need your review on how it looks and what can I improve on it. I will keep on adding new features but would like to keep it as clean as possible.
https://www.astrologyveda.com

I build many apps in last 1-2 years (more like practice ) and recently started learning webapps.
Thanks for your time.
They didn't even agree with the 700 out of 1000 trips needing review figure

> According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.

Even if the system was fairly accurate, if the vendor is charging Amazon too much for it, it can still be financially worthwhile for Amazon to switch to scanners in their carts.
Anecdotally, ever since I started wearing the whoop, I have been very cognizant of my sleep and recovery. My sleep quality has improved merely by following their recommendations. A great burden lifted tbh.
> I don’t think the political factor is as big as you’d think. Norway is an oil country and has a really high share of climate skeptics. Yet EVs are selling very well. I think most people will drop their political objections to EVs the moment they find them practical and/or economical.

It looks like they would indeed be quite economical there. Norway has high gasoline prices and low electricity prices.

Electricity costs per kilometer for an EV charged at ordinary consumer rates look like they would be about 1/6th the gasoline cost per kilometer for an ICE car that gets about 40 miles per gallon or about 17 kilometer per liter.
I like your thinking. Absolutely. And very true. Even the folk who put the backdoor in will be getting paid. Everybody making bank, except Lasse.
The 3rd bullet point is conspiracy theory. Also, difficult to parse. I'll give it a try: banks are lobbying to prevent something. That something is the broadening of the credit issuance mechanism. The way the broadening is supposed to work is by excluding projects that move costs onto third party balance sheets. How can you broaden something by excluding a category of projects? That's quite a headscratcher.

I think I see another way to parse your statement. Banks lobby to prevent X in order to exclude Y. Where X is the broadening and Y is some projects. But I don't understand your point. If the bank lobbying on this matter is bad, it follows that you are in favor of including Y, vs excluding Y. So you want to include projects that move costs onto third party balance sheets? What does that even mean? What projects do you have in mind, and how would these projects help with climate change?

Anyway, back to your central point, which I believe is this:

> no credit = no project

And this:

> projects are evaluated on narrow financial criteria

You would like banks to evaluate ESG loans in such a way as to account for the net benefit to society. That sounds like a sensible idea. It results in yes credit = yes project.

The problem is that the loan continues to exist after its origination too. And at that point the financial criteria revert to being narrow. Let's say JP Morgan announces during the quarterly earnings call that they increased the loan loss reserve by $20 billion because of non-performing ESG loans. And Jamie Dimon hops on the call and explains to the analysts that those loans were made with the full consideration of the societal benefit they entail. Do you think people will say, "Ah, ok, then we're all set. Good job Jamie, keep it up". Well, there's actually quite a good chance that this is exactly what they'll say, but millions people will vote with their wallet, and the share price of JPM will tank.

I see how you can perceive this as being short-sighted, or unfair, or [insert some bad sentiment]. But this is how the world works.

And guess what. At least the US Government is aware of how the world works, and the Inflation Reduction Act decided to work within the system rather than fight it. So banks are very happy to extend credit, and green projects are booming. See for example [1]. All in all, a lot of people see the glass half full.

[1] https://www.gsam.com/content/gsam/uk/en/institutions/market-...
Tough, but fair
- Has forum channels now

- The chat literally isn’t ephemeral. It is saved forever and you can search it.

- Bots and webhooks. Communities can have very advanced functionality there. Applications can interact with the Discord API and do a huge variety of things. For example, I have a bot installed that sends alerts for free game sales on PC game platforms.

- Multiple Voice/video/streaming channels in the same server. You can manage huge real time social events.

- Cross-server socialization. You can make friends in one community and interact with the same people in other communities with no friction.

- No registration friction. You can join other servers (forums) without making another account.

I’d make the argument that you’re backwards on this. Forums are a poor substitute for Discord or any similar product. If you started with Discord and decided to migrate your community to a forum solution you’d be looking at lost functionality.

People seem to cite lack of Google-searchability as the main downside with Discord but the people who use it don’t actually need that. In fact you could easily get around it: for example, you could make a Discord channel for support that automatically creates GitHub issues out of Discord messages.
I usually visit when I'm at an airport, so like twice a year. Every time I go, the experience gets worse. Last month I realized I paid like 12 dollars for two flat whites with a really painful to opt out tip system.

On top of that I realized they got rid of the milk and sugar and I now have to beg the barista. That was the last straw.
Because they keep raising prices and people keep paying and their YoYs keep going up. So they'll keep doing it. It, unfortunately, works.
On King of the Hill, Dale used a frozen fish he brought with him: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz4SgWPAJQE
Yeah, the not being able to remove items grinds my gears.

It's especially annoying when I am waving an item furiously, trying to get the poorly printed barcode to scan, and when it finally accepts it, it double scans the item.

Then when I have to stand there waiting for someone to remove the item is usually where I get disgusted with the process and give up on shopping, especially when it happens multiple times.
>Dominos had this down pat twenty years ago, how come everything with an app is so much more expensive?

The people making the app need a much bigger cut than Domino's. Domino's cut only needs to be big enough to pay their delivery drivers, they make their money selling pizza and the delivery is just an additional service that drives business.

The app maker needs a cut big enough to pay their delivery driver and also be the main revenue stream for their entire business since they're not making money off the pizza.
Jon Stewart roasts SF tech CEOs, says Apple stopped him from interviewing critic
I summarized my understanding of fatigue
They really are great. I have one snes-themed and one GameCube-themed modern dual stick controller from them. I think they got hit by Nintendo lawyers because they don’t sell them anymore and these became pricy on the second hand market.

Their arcade/fighting game stick has a similar retro style to the nes keyboard, and like the keyboard supports usb, wireless using a usb dongle that stows in the bottom, and Bluetooth. You can get it to work with anything. It even has Xbox and Nintendo modes that physically show the correct button names using backlit leds.
> I boil it in a simple pot

Maybe the difference is this.

Boiled rice gives you one type of rice. It is relatively easy, but I know a lot of people tend to want the softer fluffier rice cooked using the absorption-method.

Rice cookers are doing absorption-method cooking. This is slightly more technically complex - the exact ratio of water to rice is important, as is controlling temperature.

I consider myself a reasonably competent home cook. I cook rice fairly regularly on a stove top, but getting the exact ratio of water to rice correct is something I find is very easy to mess up.

Additionally, my current stove is fiddly, and hard to control the exact temperature. Sometimes I will end up with a situation where the rice has fully used all of the water, but is not cooked through, other times I will end up with rice that is fully cooked, but is still quite wet.

When trying to time this with other dishes, it's painful.

I don't have anywhere convenient to store a rice cooker, so I don't have one - but when I renovate my kitchen in the future it will be one appliance I end up getting.
I mean, sure, this would annoy me to, but I don't understand the "Shame on you Starbucks" ending. Starbucks is the epitome of an optional luxury with a million possible replacements. As the commenter said, "I am slowly turning to my Nespresso machine to make my drink now", which is exactly what should happen. Starbucks will raise their price until the point that people no longer think it's worth it.

I wrote about this in a related comment recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39889890. There are many "nice, but not extravagantly fancy" restaurants that I would go to when it was about ~$60 per person. Some of these same places are now $100 and above per person, and at that price I won't go.
I’ll bite. What are you referring to?
Hurting anyone, no, but the whole jukebox probably cost the provider at least a penny all told, and that's a good enough reason for someone to close the oversight.

EDIT: thinking about it again, there is such a thing as surplus capacity. Like how before we all transitioned to pay-as-you-go elastic cloud services you would just have an idling CPU you could point at SETI and folding@home.

The jukebox probably didn't strain the host enough that they had to expend any actual expense, so I changed my mind, somebody might have thought they were shutting down some freeloaders but they weren't costing any money really.

OTOH there are cases where viral phone forwarding blew past the system's capacity and did cause downtime, see "You and the little mermaid can both go fuck yourselves, I can't find The Books, they must be in La Jolla" [0] (Act One)

[0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/203/transcript

[0.1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROLM
Convenience. Rice cookers are very much fire-and-forget systems.
This is interesting to me, do you know any articles about this? I feel when I put off exercise until later in the evening(after 7pm) that I often get poorer quality sleep, but I'd be surprised if working out at 6am vs. lunchtime would make that much a difference.
First off, you should know 2% cash back no questions asked is already pretty much available on a no-fee card (Citi Double Cash).

This is effectively a $50 annual fee card.

Next, the redemptions have limitations:

> The cash back has limitations as to how it can be redeemed — (1) purchases at select merchants directly through Robinhood’s shopping portal; (2) booking travel through the travel portal; or (3) redeeming as cash to be deposited in the Robinhood brokerage account, which is set up automatically

So that means that you can put cash in an account that’s going to tempt you to invest with Robinhood, which makes them money. There is at least some friction to withdrawing it and that withdrawal doesn’t happen automatically.

Plus, that account pays no interest like an online checking or savings account does.
I guess it's because an inflationary environment is the best time to increase profit margins, because the average customer won't be able to tell the real increase when everything else gets more expensive as well. It is relatively harder to justify price changes when inflation is near zero.
It's kind of tragically amusing how heinously complex and unnecessarily inscrutable modern technology is, and it's only getting worse. I think developers sadistically enjoy it.
Concise, accurate, and to the point.
Raising prices while everyone is might avoid any negative press. Plus you get to test how inelastic your demand / how price sensitive your consumers really are. Since most people buy coffee out of a habit to get their daily caffeine (and sugar) dosage I would reckon demand is pretty inelastic and management wanted to test that. You can always suddenly lower prices again for consumables like coffee - doesn't hurt your image long term. It's not like a luxury brand starting to lower their prices - which would be detrimental for their brand.
Here's an example of a single player game, we wanted to play this just today:

https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/off-the-grid-tron-evolutio...
People are in fact not free to wonder "why it is I only seem to pop up when"; we have a guideline about that.

If you're wondering, though: it's because Hamas is intrinsically loathsome, and I find people mitigating or even defending it to be motivating.
The Fed said they were only looking at core inflation, which excludes housing, energy, and food. Companies immediately started soaking consumers for those.
I’m actually going to McD more than I have in the past. With mcd app, it’s really cheap when I’m on the move. Like $5 for a meal cheap.
/pedantic

ROM - Read Only Memory - programmed at the time of manufacture.

EPROM - Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (AKA UVEPROM because they could be erased using UV light over a period of time, and they had a quartz window to admit the UV.)

EEPROM - Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory. IIRC it required a special device to erase.

It's been a while since I worked with this stuff but I don't ever recall hearing it called flash.
And Bob becomes a high value target from a single comment in an open forum. Woops
I see this so much these days. I totally get being upset about rents, utilities, and supermarket food. But Starbucks and such are entirely unnecessary, there are no ethics or shame involved here. If it’s not worth the price, don’t buy it. You don’t have to buy it.
Is it interest rates or is it rumors that the Silk Road wallet is on the move
I wouldn’t count the Amazon card because unless you subscribe to Amazon Prime at $140 a year you can’t get that rate.

I canceled my Prime membership and instantly the reward rate dropped to 3%, which is a pretty crummy store card. Compare to Target as an example - 5% without the pricey subscription.

You have to buy an insane amount of stuff from Amazon/Whole Foods/Fresh to make that product make sense above and beyond other rewards offerings.
Aristotle, perhaps?
> That was the last straw.

Oh now you want a straw?
Anecdotally, my family has significantly cut back on going out. We used to have a weekly habit of going out to eat with a family of four. We rarely go out now, and usually just as a couple. It's just too expensive.

In the long term, it might be a good thing. Part of the obesity epidemic in the US could be attributed to the fact of how cheap it was to get a meal at a fast food joint compared to just eating in. That differential has significantly increased, probably by at least a factor of 2x in the past few years.

Of course they always say places like McDonald's are really a real estate business disguised as a fast food joint. We'll see how well that holds up in this age of crumbling CRE values.
Cold foam inflation rate is out of control!
Both _can_ be true. They may be price gouging.
The problem is there is no punishment for the people who do it. The board and higher ups get their short term profits that wall street love and when they eventually see that people stop coming the CEO will get a multi-million exit package and go and destroy his/her next business. In fact, they get rewarded for it.
It works until it doesn’t.

I’m sure there are also more complexities, e.g. not sure how much control local franchise owners have over price.
BLS puts it at 10, not 50.

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=100&year1=1963...
Something something sensory deprivation chamber something something art!
The state control which Hamas imposes upon journalism in Gaza is minute next to the state control which Israel imposes upon the same population

This is a rhetorical sleight of hand. I agree: Israel is far more repressive of Gazan journalism than is Hamas. The comparison is between Israel's own journalistic institutions in Israel and Hamas' in Gaza.
You can also ask for a remake with no questions asked.
Two of the main grocery stores in my area, one of which has sufficient cashiers, are trying to merge in order to make a worse shopping experience for everyone -- at least I assume that's the goal. The third, the only real alternative, is Walmart. Sucks.
Gross Profit doesn't matter - it's Net that matters. There's more to a business like Starbucks than just COGS.

Their Net[1] doesn't paint as rosy of a picture as you described. While still a growing organization, the annual YoY growth isn't outrageous.

A smart business will also plan for upcoming expenses - like wage growth, downturn in markets (to sustain hard times), volatile goods cost, ever increasing rent/CRE, upcoming legislation, and more. That's along with all your normal business planning, such as expansion, new marketing endeavors, etc.

This theme... of trying to angle increased prices as pure corporate greed is very misguided.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SBUX/starbucks/net...
There most certainly is getwchar() and fgetwc()/getwc() on anything that's POSIX C95, so that's more or less everything that's not a vintage antique.

Reading individual UTF-8 codepoints is a trivial exercise if byte width getchar() were available, and portable C code to do so would be able to run on anything made after 1982. IIRC, they don't teach how to write portable C code in Comp Sci programs anymore and it's a shame.

Never read a file completely into memory at once unless there is zero chance of it being a huge file because this is an obvious DoS vector and waste of resources.
> The buying power of the US Dollar has declined to about a fiftieth since then

This shows the buying power decline since 1963 as about 1/10, not 1/50.

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=196301...
"inaccurate" can mean lots of things here, from "actually it was 690 out of 1000" to some other minor technicality. Note that Amazon did not provide a figure of its own.

Large corporations tend to tell the truth, but push it as far as they can.
My main test for a UI framework is if I could solve the hardest 'widget/interaction/perf' problem and if I need to make that myself or need to just tweak it.

For example, because I work on business apps, I need a solid "DataTable". Na dit needs a lot of features to be useful. And need to be fast, so my 1sec queries run in 1sec, not 10secs.

So, look for what is the hardest problems then which UI toolkit solve them.
Strangely that issue has almost vasnished for me in the last couple of years, here in New Zealand at least across the several supermarket chains I frequent (although they all seem to use the same self service POS supplier). Sure it was a big issue when these first came into stores but I think they've realised they need to increase the tolerances a bit (e.g. accept even if the weight is <1% off) and it all just works close to 100% of the time for me. I do however generally avoid adding bags to the weight area (as I've found these to trigger false warnings) and just load my shopping directly onto the weighted area and then once I've paid I'll just bag my shopping then. Works like a charm.
Sleep and subjective age: protect your sleep if you want to feel young
Why a UC Berkeley professor's dating toxic advice is a national story
Hasn't been my experience, also the damn cups are almost guaranteed to get coffee on someone.. the place is over priced garbo
Thing is, sec should be taken seriously across the board.
I love what OpenBSD devs did - they seen an entire community of naive coders who didn’t give much of a crap about security and started something.
I have used OpenBSD for 10 years and thoroughly recommend it to anyone to give you a good slap around the face for how shit is done right.
I work for a government contractor with military sponsors. I agree with this 100%; the government should pay people to work on FLOSS code. Not only because I might get paid more, but because I strongly believe that classification and bureaucracy are tools to hide incompetence, and also that as (much as possible) public money taken from everyone should produce public code that benefits everyone. It’s really a win for everyone doing the right thing.