Hacker News: purplezooey

New comment by purplezooey in "The Hunt for Dark Breakfast"

purplezooey — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 04:56:22 +0000

No mention of Eggs Florentine?

New comment by purplezooey in "Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)"

purplezooey — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:59:45 +0000

Loved this game as a young kid. Great to see it. Somewhere I also found a web implementation of that black and white codewheel that came with it.

New comment by purplezooey in "How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify"

purplezooey — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 20:39:58 +0000

Really like this idea. The archive is automatic! Do you have to organize into folders etc. or just one big list.

New comment by purplezooey in "Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations"

purplezooey — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 21:26:11 +0000

Let's get Rockefeller up in here

New comment by purplezooey in "IBM to acquire Confluent"

purplezooey — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 21:05:52 +0000

Adjacent space, but can't help but wonder why Confluent did so much better than MapR

New comment by purplezooey in "Mapping the US healthcare system’s financial flows"

purplezooey — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 20:17:21 +0000

The author says, "The operational resistance alone would be too much." True. But we need to continue reforms that clearly will improve the system. That effort seems to be stuck as we instead pause to relitigate the advances of the second half of the twentieth century. These would go a long way: mandate price transparancy, decouple insurance from employment, let Medicare negotiate prices broadly, and ban PBMs.

New comment by purplezooey in "Private Equity's New Venture: Youth Sports"

purplezooey — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 21:48:50 +0000

Part of the reason PE succeeds is their choice of things that have a large or lengthy startup cost or other supply restrictions. Most towns will support only 1 hockey arena. Or lately, with veterinarians. New supply is complex and doesn't appear overnight. If PE is to be controlled (so they don't ruin everything), we need to lessen the barriers to create more supply, like in housing. Also, perhaps it would be good to make them actually pay some taxes, if only to mitigate a fraction of the problems they cause. PE is sort of like cigarettes. They exist, and do damage to everyone.

New comment by purplezooey in "McDonald's is losing its low-income customers"

purplezooey — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 21:40:05 +0000

Awkward writing in this article. "McDonald’s executives say the higher costs of restaurant essentials, such as beef and salaries, have pushed food prices up..."

Beef and... salaries? I think I found the name of my new fast food place.

New comment by purplezooey in "Using Generative AI in Content Production"

purplezooey — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 22:22:40 +0000

Netflix joins everyone else jumping on the "rules for thee, but not for me" train.

New comment by purplezooey in "OpenAI is good at deals"

purplezooey — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 23:10:39 +0000

There are some interesting points, but a few cringe things.

1) (referring to the Antifraud Company) "...they call themselves “a private-sector DOGE” -- Not exactly putting your best foot forward.

2) OpenAI paid $6.5B for Jony Ive's year old startup. That's a 'B'. Sure, stock is funny money, but it's difficult to defend the overpaying here. A lot of money seems to have been lit on fire.

New comment by purplezooey in "The Dismantling of the Forest Service"

purplezooey — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:27:30 +0000

Mainly categorical wildfire-related funding. It's a shell of what it was, we've been cutting it for 40 years. Most ranger stations run skeleton crews.

New comment by purplezooey in "Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war"

purplezooey — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:58:46 +0000

I like how the author threw this in as (nearly) the last sentence:

Of course, the AI talent war may end up being an expensive and misguided strategy, stoked by hype and investor over-exuberance.

New comment by purplezooey in "Cognitive load is what matters"

purplezooey — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 16:24:15 +0000

Perhaps best modeled as a waveform that starts before morning coffee. Each engineer has a vector of spectral magnitudes.

New comment by purplezooey in "'Ten Martini' Proof Uses Number Theory to Explain Quantum Fractals"

purplezooey — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 16:29:36 +0000

Appreciated the unexpected Hofstadter sighting!

New comment by purplezooey in "The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon"

purplezooey — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 17:38:20 +0000

That MIT report shall now be known as the Paper that Spawned a Thousand Churnalisms.

New comment by purplezooey in "Building a computer in the 90s (2019)"

purplezooey — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 14:42:09 +0000

The strange thing is, if, in 1995, one were to write an article about building a computer in 1965, it would have involved a room full of gear for e.g. an IBM System/360. The rate of change has slowed.

New comment by purplezooey in "The value of institutional memory"

purplezooey — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 22:22:35 +0000

It seems that a lot of businesses barely function. They're often stuffed with overpaid executives while the actual business wheezes along, barely managing to get its product out the door. More attention is usually paid to reducing competition, increasing one's moat, and restricting supply, so customers have little choice, as in the aerospace industry from this article.

New comment by purplezooey in "Should we design for iffy internet?"

purplezooey — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 16:19:20 +0000

This was table stakes not long ago. There seems to be an increase in apps/UIs blaming the network for what is clearly poor performance on the backend, as well.

New comment by purplezooey in "Will the AI backlash spill into the streets?"

purplezooey — Sat, 24 May 2025 19:35:25 +0000

As others mentioned, self-checkout has been widespread for 30 years. They had it at most stores in the 1990s. The answer is, simply, it's cheaper for companies to hire someone at a non-living wage than it is to install and maintain these systems. Perhaps if we had some policies with teeth -- if you're going to hire a person, they must be able to afford to plausibly live and work in the area. Else, your business isn't actually a functioning business and needs reconsideration.

New comment by purplezooey in "Show HN: Test your license plate identification skills"

purplezooey — Fri, 23 May 2025 12:52:43 +0000

Strangely addicting :)