Hacker News: barake

New comment by barake in "Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models"

barake — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:29:06 +0000

Anecdotally, it feels like Opus, Fable, and Sol "get distracted" when you use them for writing code. Great at reasoning and coordination but they will go off on a tangent and refactor half the code base. I only use them for reasoning (of course) and coordinating subagents.

New comment by barake in "What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis"

barake — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 23:04:50 +0000

Semaglutide does an incredible job of keeping my autoimmune issues in check. The only side effect I've had is needing to drink more water or else I feel like I've got the flu. Minimal tradeoff IMO

New comment by barake in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

barake — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:08:11 +0000

Apple TV is a little worrisome, surprised the A-series devices jumped so much. They're on older lines and have mostly been a way to recoup R&D for flagships. Theyre either subsidizing other products to soften the increase, or older process nodes are under serious demand suddenly.

Doesn't bode well for the industry. PlayStation and Xbox both switched to mostly-commodity hardware this gen and are years old, yet also facing the same price pressure apparently

New comment by barake in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

barake — Fri, 29 May 2026 01:47:29 +0000

It was sealed sets, still NIB, not individual pieces. No one would bother selling $200k of loose bricks on consignment.

New comment by barake in "PyInfra: Infrastructure Deserves Real Code in Python, Not YAML Soup"

barake — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 11:33:12 +0000

It's due to fragmentation in implementations. The YAML spec is fairly large, and library authors understandably aren't excited at the prospect of dealing with all the minor details of less commonly used bits, like anchors.

You end up with YAML libraries being widely available and they all implement _most_ of the spec, but the portion not implemented varies. Plus there are minor variations in how people have read the spec, and even options _within_ the specification on how to handle parsing:

https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/#chapter-10-recommended-schemas

This isn't really a problem for projects like Kubernetes where most of the ecosystem uses the same library. On the other hand, OpenTelemetry is rolling out "declarative configuration" across all the supported languages. I work on OTel, and have avoided contributing in that area because I lack the patience to deal with the inconsistences - I don't hate YAML, but it can be frustrating.

AFAIK, the only 100% spec compliant implementation is libfyaml.

New comment by barake in "Show HN: Typed-FFmpeg 3.0–Typed Interface to FFmpeg and Visual Filter Editor"

barake — Thu, 29 May 2025 23:44:02 +0000

Prompted the Jules preview to see what would happen. The implementation is pretty naive - there are much easier to read approaches I can think of. So not _awful_ considering the very short prompt I used.

Changes are on this branch for the curious:

https://github.com/matt-hensley/typed-ffmpeg/tree/feature/mu...

New comment by barake in "MacBook Air M4"

barake — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 22:12:53 +0000

If you use the product filter it only shows laptops that come pre-configured with 2TB of storage. If you choose a custom build you can configure the latest X1 Carbon with 32 GB RAM, 2 TB storage, and a 2.8k display.

If you choose the custom build route some even can ship with Fedora or Ubuntu, so presumably Linux support is reasonable.

New comment by barake in "United States Power Outage Map"

barake — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 20:44:33 +0000

Know some folks who used to work at Genscape. The whole business was selling live power generation data. They mostly accomplished it "hands-off" and without the permission of utilities.

If you had property adjacent to a power plant they would happily lease space to setup sensors.

Apparently there are tons of businesses like this gathering data that is mostly live and selling to hedge funds etc.

New comment by barake in "I got OpenTelemetry to work. But why was it so complicated?"

barake — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 19:42:52 +0000

Everything is either in development or stable. There aren't statuses like alpha, beta, release candidate, etc. except for individual library releases. Metric clients will be marked as "development" until it goes "stable" [0]. Consequently it can be hard to determine the actual maturity level of any given implementation.

Tracing is very mature, with metric and logging implementations stable for a number of popular languages [1].

the "experimental" status was renamed "development"

[0] https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/versioning-and-stab...

[1] https://opentelemetry.io/docs/languages/#status-and-releases

New comment by barake in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

barake — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 16:33:29 +0000

Over 50% of the increased prices are from producers not just recouping their additional expenses, but also increasing profit margins.

Typically you would expect this to be an opportunity for competition, but generally speaking companies are suspiciously raising prices together. They've taken advantage of the COVID shortage and inflation narratives to squeeze consumers.

https://fortune.com/2024/01/20/inflation-greedflation-consum...

https://www.marketplace.org/2024/08/05/ftc-grocery-prices/

New comment by barake in "OpenTelemetry and vendor neutrality: how to build an observability strategy"

barake — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 21:49:26 +0000

Java has really good OTel coverage across tons of libraries. It should mostly Just Work™, though you'll still need to consider sampling strategies, what metrics you actually want to collect, etc.

Would say .NET isn't too far behind. Especially since there are built-in observability primitives and Microsoft is big on OTel. ASP.NET Core and other first party libraries already emit OTel compliant metrics and traces out of the box. Instrumenting an application is pretty straightforward.

I have less experience with the other languages. Can say there is plenty of opportunity to contribute upstream in a meaningful way. The OpenTelemetry SIGs are very welcoming and all the meetings are open.

Full disclosure: work at Grafana Labs on OpenTelemetry instrumentation

New comment by barake in "Final Cut Pro transforms video creation with Live Multicam, new AI features"

barake — Tue, 07 May 2024 15:16:59 +0000

Any iPad with a USB-C port supports video capture via UVC. This allows you use devices like the El Gato Cam Link for as a video source.

Also, I cofounded a startup eons ago that makes an iOS specifically to do multi-camera video production and is still trucking along. There is definitely a market for using iPhones and iPads to produce video.

New comment by barake in "LED Matrix Earrings"

barake — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:31:07 +0000

Could use an optical sensor like the Timex Datalink watches from the 90s[1]

Could set the earrings on a phone screen and transfer the patterns over. Sounds like a fun project.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink

New comment by barake in "The Eagle Never Sleeps: one Kentucky newspaper still screams for press freedom"

barake — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 02:38:05 +0000

Hit me up if you come back, there is a decent tech community in Louisville and Lexington.

New comment by barake in "The Eagle Never Sleeps: one Kentucky newspaper still screams for press freedom"

barake — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 01:59:00 +0000

The Mountain Eagle and Appalshop both have no reason to be as good as they are. Consider supporting both!

New comment by barake in "Amazon Has an Honesty Issue"

barake — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 19:45:01 +0000

We've had the same experience. Prime shipments were 5-7 days regardless of order size, now most items show up in 1-2 days.

Not sure the logic in that.

New comment by barake in "Snapdragon Oryon, faster than Apple's M2 chip at 30% less power"

barake — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 23:51:12 +0000

I daily drive a T14s with a Ryzen 5 CPU. It's easily the best non-ARM laptop I've used.

New comment by barake in "Snapdragon Oryon, faster than Apple's M2 chip at 30% less power"

barake — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 22:17:01 +0000

They already sell the X13s: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx/th...?

I've been sorely tempted to pick up a refurb off eBay, they're only about $500. Supposedly can run Linux OK too.

New comment by barake in "A Call for Developers – Jellyfin"

barake — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 23:15:20 +0000

You're likely in for a treat if you haven't written C# in a while. The language has evolved quite a bit, especially around all kinds of nice ergonomics. Interesting things like pattern matching, using statements, and performance oriented primitives.

I got back to writing C# full time earlier this year and it's a joy.

New comment by barake in "San Francisco Shoplifting: Much More Than You Wanted to Know (2022)"

barake — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 11:13:25 +0000

Blaming shrink may be a way to not spook the market for issues with their business:

> Target’s business has struggled for more than a year with company-specific challenges, including a glut of unsold inventory, backlash to its Pride merchandise collection and a pullback in consumer spending on discretionary items such as apparel and home goods.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/target-says-it-will-close-ni...