> Development with HTML/CSS/JavaScript and WebGL is my favorite stack to work with.
I love this myself, but..
> have great debug information
How do you debug WebGL stuff? I find that to be one of the least debuggable things I've ever done with computers. If there's multiple shaders feeding into one another, the best I can usually come up with is drawing the intermediate results to screen and debugging visually. Haven't been paying too much attention to the space the past 2-3 years though, so I'm wondering if some new tools emerged that make this easier.
The JavaScript debugging is great right out of The Browser these days.
WebGL debugging... it's a combination of how you're doing it, visually, especially for shader-related issues. For API calls, logging gets most things figured out, there is also this: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGLDeveloperTools
Think it's context dependent whether it's a good or bad thing.
The owners of German supermarket and car companies are really the richest of the rich in Germany (okay and maybe the SAP guy on top). It would definitely be a net positive if someone manages to scrape and compare their prices.
In the restaurant market it's one player abusing many small players.
And honestly, I think the reason everyone cries when "Amazon launches an API" is because Amazon would not dare to piss off the German supermarket oligopoly.
Can you share them? I recently looked for such projects and didn't really find anything that works well.
The issue is that each market sets their own prices and I believe REWE is the only large one where you can fairly easily scrape the product catalogue. I thought about it in a shopping list context, so you'd need to make it location dependent to be useful. But you could do a lot of cool things with it. Like choose a basket of goods and it creates a route for you: "Go to supermarket A and buy goods XYZ, then to supermarket B and buy ABC"
There's this one which got some publicity, doesn't seem to be updated any more but it worked for all these retailers listed and is open source: https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise
> B2C: Is it really surprising that a busines has no interest in providing more price transparency to their customers?
Might I suggest you remove your tin-foil hat and consider that:
- 99% of REWE customers almost certainly have no clue what an API is
- 99% of the remaining 1% know what an API is, but their day-job involves messing with APIs, so they don't want to spend their weekend-time messing with the REWE API, they just want to do their shopping at REWE.
- The final 0.1% are those who come on HN and pretend its all some sort of big conspiracy to minimise transparency by $evil_corp. :)
If you think about it, imagine if REWE officially exposed an API B2C. This would mean they are obligated to provide support.
Do you really want the price of your shopping to increase because REWE now needs to find money to pay for a helpdesk for the millions of B2C API users ?
Businesses and services differentiating between B2C and B2B is nothing new, that is why the two different terminologies exist !
What next, you don't want to fill up your car at the petrol station (B2C) but you want to be permitted to buy a barrel crude oil direct from the drill and refine it yourself (B2B) ?
> Might I suggest you remove your tin-foil hat and consider that:
First up: Read and follow the rules. No need to insult me. Especially considering what you said shows that you both misunderstood AND misrepresented what I've said.
And frankly, my reasoning was simply saying "Company won't publicize internal info if they don't get an advantage from doing so". It's literally the same reason Google doesn't publish all of their source code. I'm struggling to see what part you are misunderstanding but it has to be something extremely basic to conclude I'm a conspiracy nut for basically stating "Company acts in their interest".
Opening an API to the public allows third parties to develop apps that can then be consumed by end-consumers. Not trying to be offensive here, but do you know what an API is? To conclude I meant every single end-consumers building their own app is at best disingenuously twisting my words.
Opening the API would allow new players like you and me to enter the market and take a piece of the pie. Why would a market, dominated and controlled by a few big players, opt for that? You don't even need to know that the German grocery market is incredibly price competitive, to understand that.
> If you think about it, imagine if REWE officially exposed an API B2C. This would mean they are obligated to provide support.
Can you provide a source for that requirement? I'm pretty sure you just made that up.
> Businesses and services differentiating between B2C and B2B is nothing new, that is why the two different terminologies exist !
At this point I'm entirely lost what you read in my comment. Yes I know. I specifically made that distinction.
> What next, you don't want to fill up your car at the petrol station (B2C) but you want to be permitted to buy a barrel crude oil direct from the drill and refine it yourself (B2B) ?
Yeah you definitely misunderstood something... What I said/meant:
The question: Why isn't the API open?
My answer:
For B2B I gave an example where the API is used by another German firm, providing an example that the API is indeed consumed B2B.
For B2C: They have no reason to do so. They have a well functioning app where you can order stuff. They have one of the bigger recipe pages (at least it does very well SEO-wise) in Germany where you can immediately order ingredients from a recipe. The biggest recipe page in Germany (chefkoch) offers a direct link from recipes to their order page. Maybe you're missing this info? Thinking it's an internal API to data that isn't exposed anywhere at all would somehow explain whatever you tried to say here. But again, if you're that uninformed, don't insult people.
> Opening an API to the public allows third parties to develop apps that can then be consumed by end-consumers. Not trying to be offensive here, but do you know what an API is? To conclude I meant every single end-consumers building their own app is at best disingenuously twisting my words.
Here you are wrong too.
If you want to develop an app via an API that is only offered B2B, what do you do ?
Yes, that's right ...
You phone up REWE and negotiate a license to access to the B2B API to develop your application. B2B2C if you want to put it in simpler terms.
My original point stands. REWE clearly do not want to officially expose the API B2C, almost certainly for the exact reasons I already spelled out in my original post.
But no, its easier for you just to spread FUD, claiming "busines has no interest in providing more price transparency to their customers" just because they will not let you have access to the API as direct B2C.
They will lose. The only areas Germany can compete, are that with broad APIs. Take HBCI/FinTS for banking. Go API or go out of business. I‘m pretty sure Piknik and Flaschenpost will offer agentic agent compatible APIs at some point.
Haha man, I think this is a cool project, the REWE API is cool, the REWE delivery App and Website are cool. Certainly not spreading fear, uncertainty or doubt.
What you describe as B2B2C is exactly what chefkoch does. And it's exactly what I initially said, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. But anyway. Doesn't feel like we're getting anywhere. Have a great day ;)
I do have a suggestion for your app though:
Have it compare your basket of goods across different markets in your region to show you the cheapest option.
I'm pretty sure this possibility is actually one of the reasons they locked down the API.
I've used Data from REWE in the past and made a comparison between a couple of cities in Germany (I believe it was Frankfurt, cologne, Berlin, Munich and Hamburg). Hamburg was by far the most expensive, often as much as 10-20% more expensive.
> I do have a suggestion for your app though: Have it compare your basket of goods across different markets in your region to show you the cheapest option.
This is a great idea. I just think the use case is not that big since REWE is the worst in the price/quality ration and just going to another shop would save you more.
>I do have a suggestion for your app though: Have it compare your basket of goods across different markets in your region to show you the cheapest option.
I'd settle for just being able to sort items by unit price... I'm sure this is a [regulation-]solved problem in Germany though
Sorry, yes, I'm not German and haven't used it. It was an idle complaint about how trying to use grocery store (or other similar) sites is difficult because they prevent you from being able to sort properly, for example by unit price. Sometimes they change the displayed unit per product so you also have to convert them to compare manually (less of a problem for metric, but like, drink brand 1 €2/100ml, drink brand 2 €13/1L etc).
As I was writing it, I realized that this kind of tactic just feels like it would be banned in Germany
Stores are required by law to provide the price per unit/weight/volume alongside the price, so you can directly compare the price of a pint of beer to the 0.33 liter bottle without calculating anything.
I just checked and REWE only lets you sort by absolute price. But honestly, you can compare prices so much better on their website than in a physical supermarket already [0].
What I suspect though:
They mainly show current discounts. The REWE API exposes those as a separate list for each market.
There's around 3.5k markets and each can set their own discounts and has their own product catalogue with their own pricing.
So it would be 3.5k API calls to fetch all offers for all markets. Which is doable.
But fetching all products takes like 100 calls per market. It's quite a bit of data. And I think most supermarket don't publish their catalogue at all since they don't have delivery options.
Oooh Can you elaborate a bit how the gazette is publishing them? Like what format did you have to parse. And how many documents were there in total? I tried doing the same for German laws 1-2 years ago but LLMs weren't smart enough yet. And the costs would've been at least a couple of thousand €.
Ed: Nevermind, I missed the "BOE (Spain's official gazette) consolidated legislation API" part. Sending jealous greetings from Germany. We just have a bunch of PDFs in Germany. And the private entity that has been publishing them for decades even claims copyright on them!
On a purely philosophical level, what does it even mean for a law to be “public” or “on the book” if access to it is restricted by something like copyright? This seems very backward to me.
Boiling down the different approaches to freedom of speech to "The baseline level is higher/lower", has always been a pretty simplistic (and if you would actually delve into the topic a little, flat out wrong) view .
Freedom of speech is not absolute. Neither in Europe nor in the US. Both effectively have rules restricting certain speech. For example, speech that may harm others, such as inciting violence or maybe the most famous example: "Shouting FIRE in a full venue".
European countries tend to spell out these restrictions more explicitly. It's completely reasonable to disagree with these restrictions. But the simple existence of them shouldn't lead you to the conclusion that one is "more freedom of speech" than the other.
And at last I want to add, that that is how it's been historically. Sadly, the recent developments in US show pretty well how freedom of speech cannot be measured by "How many specific laws are there about things I cannot say?".
"Crowded theater"? In any case, yes, that's a popular understanding of limits on free speech in the US, but it's actually been superseded twice - first by "clear and present danger," then by "inciting or producing imminent lawless action." These days, it's probably (I am not a lawyer) legal to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater under many circumstances.
> Sadly, the recent developments in US show pretty well how freedom of speech cannot be measured by "How many specific laws are there about things I cannot say?".
There are no laws preventing you from saying anything in the US, unless you are specifically, directly inciting people, at that moment, to do things that break other laws. That's the point. You can't measure it in terms of degrees of restrictions; the US has none, and all European countries have at least some. The latter approach opens the floodgates to restrictions on any kind of speech that the government doesn't like. The US Constitution prevents that from ever happening.
This is a common refrain from people in countries without freedom of speech, used to argue that the US doesn't AcKtUalLy have freedom of speech.
The idea that "freedom of speech" in the US is not philosophically and fundamentally different than "freedom of speech" in, for example, the UK or Germany, is not an opinion grounded in reality regardless of what legal minutiae you can point to.
So far all we have is the statement that Germany has some speech laws, but the US has no speech laws except for the speech laws that it has, which is a grammatical trick, not an actual difference, because it's saying both countries have some speech laws.
>For example, speech that may harm others, such as inciting violence or maybe the most famous example: "Shouting FIRE in a full venue".
Perhaps a misquote from 1919 wartime supreme court decision involving an anti-draft activist isn't a great example? Even when correctly quoted, this quote is utterly meaningless in 2026.
>Freedom of speech is not absolute
Nobody ever claims it is? That's literally never in dispute, fraud (for example) is illegal everywhere.
> Perhaps a misquote from 1919 wartime supreme court decision involving an anti-draft activist isn't a great example? Even when correctly quoted, this quote is utterly meaningless in 2026.
I was not actually quoting any specific American case law but referring to the general legal concept. But even if I had referred to it specifically, it would not be meaningless. If I understand correctly, the US has overturned that specific case, but to my understanding the legal concept behind it remains in effect. But I see how my use of quotes and the choice of words "most famous example" was confusing here. I was not aware that there is this specific US case where the "Fire in a theater" phrase originates from and was talking about the general concept of purposefully causing a panic in a crowded space.
>Freedom of speech is not absolute
> Nobody ever claims it is? That's literally never in dispute, fraud (for example) is illegal everywhere.
I never claimed that anyone claimed that.
I thought that the preceding statement was too simplistic for a complex topic and tried to offer a more differentiated explanation. Why are you upset that I started that explanation with a statement that you agree is true?
Maybe they meant "Not hard != quickly done". I don't think many people think bureaucracy is especially difficult. It's just time consuming.
But frankly if they meant that, the statement doesn't really say anything at all. Because what in this world is hard if you stop taking shortcuts and spend time doing it correctly?
I think that's incorrect. Exclusivity would be something you grant to YC. These terms need to make sense to be valid. Claiming exclusive rights would mean they are forbidding YOU from licensing YOUR rights to anyone else.
Imagine Facebook claiming that by uploading images you are granting them exclusive usage rights to that image. It would mean you couldn't upload it to any other site with similar terms anymore.
Yes, this is what I mean in the above - the rights are non-exclusive so YC is also granted rights but not in a way that any of those other things listed after are true.
Would you also say that you cannot "train" intelligence?
I would agree that generally, purely acquiring knowledge does not increase intelligence. But I would also argue that intelligence (ie your raw "processing power") can be trained, a bit like a muscle. And acquiring and processing new knowledge is one of the main ways we train that "muscle".
There's lots of examples where your definition of intelligence (intelligence == raw processing power) either doesn't make sense, or is so narrow that it becomes a meaningless concept. Let's consider feral children (ie humans growing up among animals with no human contact). Apparently they are unable or have trouble learning a human language. There's a theory that there's a critical period after which we are unable to learn certain things. Wouldn't the "ability to learn a language" be considered intelligence? Would you therefore consider a young child more intelligent than any adult?
And to answer your question, whether learning about atoms makes you more intelligent: Yes, probably. It will create some kind of connections in your brain that didn't exist before. It's a piece of knowledge that can be drawn upon for all of your thinking and it's a piece of knowledge that most humans would not figure out on their own. By basically any sensible definition of intelligence, yes it does improve your intelligence.
IMO it was mostly that people didn't want to rewrite (and maintain) their code for a new proprietary programming model they were unfamiliar with. People also didn't want to invest in hardware that could only run code written in CUDA.
Lots of people wanted (and Intel tried to sell, somewhat succesfully) something they could just plug-and-play and just run the parallel implementations they'd already written for supercomputes using x86. It seemed easier. Why invest all of this effort into CUDA when Intel are going to come and make your current code work just as fast as this strange CUDA stuff in a year or two.
Deep learning is quite different from the earlier uses of CUDA. Those use cases were often massive, often old, FORTRAN programs where to get things running well you had to write many separate kernels targeting each bit. And it all had to be on there to avoid expensive copies between GPU and CPU, and early CUDA was a lot less programmable than it is now, with huge performance penalties for relatively small "mistakes". Also many of your key contributers are scientists rather than profressional programmers who see programming as getting in the way of doing what they acutally want to do. They don't want to spend time completely rewriting their applications and optimizing CUDA kernels, they want to keep on with their incremental modifications to existing codebases.
Then deep learning came along and researchers were already using frameworks (Lua Torch, Caffe, Theano). The framework authors only had to support the few operations required to get Convnets working very fast on GPUs, and it was minimal effort for researchers to run. It grew a lot from there, but going from "nothing" to "most people can run their Convnet research" on GPUs was much eaiser for these frameworks than it was for any large traditional HPC scientific application.
It seems funny though: The advantages of GPGPU are so obvious and unambiguous compared to AI. But then again, with every new technology you probably also had management pushing to use technology_a for <enter something inappropriate for technology_a>.
Like in a few decades when the way we work with AI has matured and become completely normal it might be hard to imagine why people nowadays questioned its use. But they won't know about the million stupid uses of AI we're confronted with every day :)
> The advantages of GPGPU are so obvious and unambiguous
I remember being a bit surprised when I started reading about GPUs being tasked with processes that weren't what we'd previously understood to be their role (way before I heard of CUDA). For some reason that I don't recall, I was thinking about that moment in tech just the other day.
It wasn't always obvious that the earth rotated around the sun. Or that using a mouse would be a standard for computing. Knowledge is built. We're pretty lucky to stand atop the giants who came before us.
I didn't know about CUDA until however many years ago. Definitely didn't know how early it began. Definitely didn't know there was pushback when it was introduced. Interesting stuff.
I'm dealing with someone in 2026 insisting that everything has to be written in Python and rely on entirely torch.compile for acceleration rather than any bespoke GPU kernels. Times change, people don't.
The completely low information and amateur hour aspect of what our HPC Welfare Queens were pushing above was that a couple hours invested into coding Intel's Xeon Phi alternative to GPUs demonstrated the folly of their BS "recompile and run" strategy and any attempt to code the thing exposed how much better a design CUDA was than their series of APIs of The Month that followed*. And I was all but blacklisted by the HPC community over standing up to this and insisting on CUDA or I walk, my favorite quote was "You lack vision and you probably wouldn't have backed the Apollo program or Lewis and Clark." Good times, good times...
*But TBF Xeon Phi was not a complete disaster for if you coded it in assembler you could squeeze out Fermi class GPU performance. Good luck getting the "recompile and run" crowd to do that though as they segued from that to relying on compiler directives going forward and that's how NVDA got a decade+ headstart that should never have happened, but did. Today a lot of these sorts are insisting that because of autograd, everything should be written in Python and compiled with an autograd DSL like torch. I am so glad I am close to retirement on that front. I already trust coding agents more than I trust this mindset.
Phi was cool, I think it could have been leveraged into something great. Imagine all consumer CPUs coming with 512 little pentiums in them or something like that.
And ahead of GPUs in some ways at the time. But that was entirely squandered by their idiotic recompile and run marketing. There was some serious denial that thread blocks that could synchronize without thunking back to the CPU along with the intuitive nature of warp programming were pretty much a hardware mode against anything that couldn't do the equivalent.
But good luck explaining that to technical leaders who hadn't written a line of code in over a decade and yet somehow were in charge of things. People really need to consider the backstory here if they want to do better going forward, but I don't think they will. I think history is going to rhyme again.
In the beginning, valid claims of 100x to 1,000x for genuine workloads due to HW level advances enabled by CUDA were denied stating that this ignored CPU and memory copy overhead, or it was only being measure relative to single core code etc. No amount of evidence to the contrary was sufficient for a lot of people who should have known better. And even if they believed the speedups, they were the same ones saying Intel would destroy them with their roadmap. I was there. I rolled my eyes every single time but then AI happened and most of them (but not all of them) denied ever spouting such gibberish.
Won't name names anymore, it really doesn't matter. But I feel the same way about people still characterizing LLMs as stochastic parrots and glorified autocomplete as I feel about certain CPU luminaries (won't name names) continuing to state that GPUs are bad because they were designed for gaming. Neither sorts are keeping up with how fast things change.
https://bewelge.github.io/escherTower/
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