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phodoon North Texas engineer built a map for cheap local restaurants [video]

no affiliation - just thought it was an inspiring story. I modified the YouTube headline to be more neutral.

Original: "After AI cost him his job, this North Texas engineer built a map for cheap local restaurants"

phodoon Chicken products recalled in five states due to “false marks of inspection”

“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”

phodoon How we made hit video game Prince of Persia

In 7th grade social studies, I did a report for a class project, and printed the Karateka opening screen on my apple image writer as the cover page. I got an A+ because of that cover!

phodoon APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

>> "who wants to own cutting vinyl?"

Well, Sega gamers for one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c744iD0_fWU

phodoon Sonny Rollins, jazz saxophonist, has died

RIP - last of the greats - hugely influential to me in his disciplined approach to perfecting his craft and overall grit - https://www.selmer.fr/en-int/blogs/infos/sonny-rollins-bridg...

phodoon Claude.ai and API unavailable [fixed]

what model do you use?

phodoon DOOM running in ChatGPT and Claude

Great work. I wonder what the future "can it run doom ?" Will it be: Can it run AGI on a new quantum processor/ robot / bio-engineered cell. Or will it be Doom all the way down...

phodoon The Visible Zorker: Zork 1

Neat! Any cool stories? What games did you work on?

phodoon Tell HN: Merry Christmas

Prompt: create a christmas tree in ascii but that is a merkle tree

Answer: Here’s an ASCII Christmas tree that is also a Merkle tree (Each parent node is the hash of its two children; leaves are the “data blocks”.)

                   MERKLE TREE  

                       H(ROOT)
                      /       \
                 H(0-1)       H(2-3)
                 /   \         /   \
              H(0)  H(1)    H(2)  H(3)
              / \    / \     / \    / \
            D0  D0 D1 D1   D2 D2  D3 D3

But that's a little too tidy to be a proper Christmas tree — so here’s a more “tree-like” version with ornaments, while still preserving the Merkle structure:

                        H(ROOT) 
                        /       \
                H(0-1)         H(2-3) 
                  /   \           /   \
            H(0)   H(1)     H(2)   H(3) 
              / \     / \        / \     / \
            D0  D0  D1  D1     D2  D2  D3  D3
           (leaf)(leaf)(leaf) (leaf)(leaf)(leaf)

Notes (so it’s actually Merkle-y)

D0–D3 = data blocks (your “presents” )

H(0) = hash(D0 || D0) (duplicated leaf for balance, common in Merkle trees)

H(0-1) = hash(H(0) || H(1))

H(ROOT) = hash(H(0-1) || H(2-3))

If you want, I can:

generate a bigger tree (8, 16, 32 leaves),

make the hashes look like real hash strings,

or format it like a perfect triangular Christmas tree silhouette while keeping the Merkle parent/child layout.

-- Prompt: format it like a perfect triangular Christmas tree silhouette while keeping the Merkle parent/child layout.

Answer: You got it — here’s a perfect triangular Christmas tree silhouette that still preserves the Merkle parent/child layout (parents directly above their two children, leaves at the base).

                                H(ROOT) 
                              /           \
                    ┌────────H(0-3)────────┐
                   /                       \
            ┌────H(0-1)────┐         ┌────H(2-3)────┐
           /               \         /               \
       ┌─H(0)─┐         ┌─H(1)─┐ ┌─H(2)─┐         ┌─H(3)─┐
       /     \         /     \   /     \         /     \
     D0       D1     D2       D3 D4     D5     D6       D7

If you want it even more like a Christmas tree (full silhouette + ornaments)

Here’s a slightly more “filled” version while keeping the structure valid:

                                    H(ROOT) 
                                  /           \
                         ──────H(0-3)──────
                               /               \
                     ─────H(0-1)─────   ─────H(2-3)─────
                           /         \           /         \
                   ───H(0)───   ───H(1)───   ───H(2)───   ───H(3)───
                        / \           / \           / \           / \
                      D0  D1        D2  D3        D4  D5        D6  D7

Edit: Note the emoji ornaments did not come through.

phodoon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

My sister and I are glued to it, and she continues to destroy me, with consistent zero reveals and half the time to complete, as yours truly. We love this game. thanks.

phodoon Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now

Will this be the new "pelican on a bicycle" test for frontier models?

phodoon Meta’s live demo fails; “AI” recording plays before the actor takes the steps

a few moments earlier... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

phodoon OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

Good point. It’s 2 conditions and both have to be true : - Arrive first - Use that first arrival to innovate with your new AGI pet / overlord to stay exponentially ahead

phodoon OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

One view is that it’s not first mover, but first arriver advantage. Whoever gets to AgI (the fabled city of gold or silver?, Ag pun intended) will achieve exponential gains from that point forward, and that serves as the moat in the limit. So you can think of it as buying a delayed moat, with an option price equivalent to the investment required until you get to that point in time. Either you believe in that view or you don’t. It’s more of an emotional / philosophical investment thesis, with a low probability of occurrence, but with a massive expected value.Meanwhile, consumers and the world benefit.

phodoon Traveling with Apple Vision Pro

you can use the iPad kindle app and it works great.

phodoon Ask HN: What macOS apps/programs do you use daily and recommend?

Obsidian +1

phodoon Ask HN: I have many PDFs – what is the best local way to leverage AI for search?

Thank you all for the comments. Got a lot of good input and ways to think thru the tried and true tools (enjoying ripgrep-all + fzf) plus the standard ai/rag-style tools. I do think there is room for a bridge or an integrated way to pipe in similarity / embedding into the ripgreps of the world. Maybe something close to fzf’s piping model. Will explore if I have some time.

phodoon Embracer Group Cancels 'Deus Ex' Video Game, Lays Off Workers

What are some top indie games you would recommend?

phodoon Paperless-ngx – Open source document management system

Does auto OCR work on iCloud files ? For example: I scansnap a huge collection of documents to a folder that is on iCloud (synced w desktop). It works great because it is so simple. However if I have, say, PDF document, will the Mac ocr functionality perform the OCR if the doc is on iCloud and will I then be able to search for the text in that doc via spotlight / finder ? I tested this a few years ago and the search on content inside scanned PDFs did not work. I had looked at Paperless but decided to stay on Mac os file system.

phodoon Nvidia on the Mountaintop

What is a good book on how nvidia is run ?

phodoon The odd appeal of absurdly long YouTube videos

If on a mac you can always type ‘caffeinate’ in Terminal and it will keep your laptop on when you close the lid.

phodoon YouTube, the jewel of the internet

My biggest gripe is that I cannot search playlists by name - especially when I want to add a new piece of content to a previously created playlist. I end up having to scroll through many playlists or end up creating duplicate playlists.

phodoon Using LLaMA with M1 Mac and Python 3.11

What are some prompts that seem to be working on non-finetuned models? (beyond what is listed in example.py)

phodoon Llama.cpp: Port of Facebook's LLaMA model in C/C++, with Apple Silicon support

For whistper.cpp live transcription, there seems to be duplicates in the output filename. Is there a mix of parameters that eliminate this?

phodoon The Most Cited AI Papers in 2022

What are some of the best tools people are using these days to consumer research papers? (outside of clicking on the PDF)

phodoon A decentralized social network with a chance of working

But they have dark mode, so it will work. /s

phodoon Self hosting in 2023

What is the worst case scenario for security on your network, in the above self hosted setup ?

phodoon Show HN: Self-host Whisper As a Service with GUI and queueing

Is it running on a max or are you accessing iCloud from a non-Mac?

phodoon I had ChatGPT write a Decemberists song and recorded it

Related: Here is an interesting deconstruction on chords (jazz) and chatgpt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmvzMeJdRTI

phodoon John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

Would be interesting to get a list of those 40 papers mentioned