MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ttcbj | 2025-05-22 18:22:42+00:00
My wife is a doctor at a major university. They are under pressure right now and are looking to increase revenue. Changing the way they document cases can substantially alter the billing outcome. Note that these are not errors, they are omissions of work done in the note that prevents the downstream billing experts from using higher paying codes.

They have been aware for a few years that many clinicians aren’t documenting their work in the best way for billing. The current solution is to have an annual talk given by the one billing expert in their department pointing out where people often lose revenue due to poor documentation.

Not all the doctors attend this talk. There is no internal process for measuring subsequent improvements quantitatively. There are 85 doctors in her group.

Anyway, this is just to say that something automated to help doctors document their work in a billing friendly way seems powerful. But for my wife’s group, the issue doesn’t seem to be denied claims or “errors” per se. More omissions/sub optimal documentation due to lack of knowledge. Or lack of follow through on knowledge which is only occasionally communicated.
by onli | 2025-05-22 18:22:56+00:00
Right. I would be one of the people who saw pocket as an unnecessary distraction, but even I tested it and my opinion is partly based on pocket just not working in my Firefox at the time. I also just did not like that it was given space in the toolbar while a way more important rss button was denied that space. And despite that, I still think the shutdown now is bad - this should be spun out or be moved to a Foss project, and certainly not be killed for more ai nonsense.

BTW, fakespot (the service they also shut down) is or could be an applied ai project where that technology could be helpful, and they also shut it down. That also feels wrong, especially the combination.
by WesleyJohnson | 2025-05-22 18:23:02+00:00
My FIL ran his own prosthetics and orthotics business for a couple decades and then had to shutter his doors due to all the insurance provider red tape. If all the Ts weren't crossed, or Is not dotted - denied. And the appeals/resubmission process was, IMHO, deliberately drawn out to deter anyone from doing it. US healthcare and insurance is such a shit show, but I digress. He now works for the VA, making much less - but at least he's still helping people and working in his field.

Glad to see something like that taking shape, and hopefully helping other small businesses (and larger too) get a leg up on these insurance companies. As well, of course, avoiding real-world medical dangers as you've mentioned.

Kudos on launching.
by ivewonyoung | 2025-05-22 18:24:00+00:00
Is my reading of your comment accurate? If not please let us know.

"The party not in power also has been doing similar things(in regards to the article) if not worse over the past couple of decades but lets completely ignore that, not criticize them at all, don't even bring it up and blame only the current admin because...<party currently in power is baddd>"
by neilv | 2025-05-22 18:24:17+00:00
> and would be a third core device a person would put on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

Or build an AI-enabled device that replaces both. All you really need is local sensors, local emitters, and lots of local+remote processing+storage.

The laptop/desktop mostly goes away, when most people won't need desks, since most desk-requiring jobs will soon be done passably by "AI". (Whether the "AI" is actual intelligence, or just robo-plagiarism of training material.) Do you really need a keyboard, when there's nothing for you to type. Do you really need a bunch of screens, when you're not looking at and reasoning about lots of information.

If anyone is going to build a one-device for the idle and disaffected eloi, to be harvested of remaining value, by the weathly, who increasingly consolidate all of the wealth and power, it may well be OpenAI building that device.

Apple isn't the best candidate to nail this, because they have lingering whiffs of hippie counterculture in their self-image. And for a long time, Google thought of themselves as the good ones, with vestiges of that enduring, no matter how much DoubleClick metastasizes. But OpenAI staff was confronted unambiguously with its true self early on, so doesn't have the encumbrances that the others do.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-22 18:24:25+00:00
I notice how certain content or phrasing acts as shibboleths for affinity groups, with your reaction to the stimulus itself being the gatekeeping test by proxy. Like, if you take the bait, I know you’re a tourist, because regulars know that it’s bait for newbies. There are interesting interactions at play between insiders in these threads, as many normal users seem unable to understand that they’re interacting with promotional content, regardless of whether there’s a real person on the other end.
by perching_aix | 2025-05-22 18:24:29+00:00
What finally clicked it into place for me was trying to perform a unit conversion. It's kind of annoying cause we don't really use mega with anything squared usually (I don't recall anything at the moment at least), which added to the confusion.

When one converts from square kilometers (km2) to square meters (m2), one needs to undo the kilo (x1000) not once, but twice, accounting for both dimensions. So as you say, it's actually here where the scaling factor is secretly squared, it's k2, just not written out. Hence despite kilo being a 1000x bump, you need to divide by 1 million, because it's actually squared in kilometers squared.

So if mega in megapixels was behaving "normally", that would imply similar semantics, so to convert into kilopixels, you'd divide by 1000 not just once, but twice. But no, 1 megapixels is 1000 kilopixels. I guess the idea is that instead of being "secretly" squared it's "explicitly" already "square" as a result? So instead of resolving to mega2 pixels2, it's just mega pixels, since pixels is 2D, and so squaring it is unnecessary.

I think I get it now at least, but yeah, I agree with your sentiment. It actually reminds me, when I first learned converting between units of area in primary school, I had quite the troubles with wrapping my head around it exactly because of this.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-22 18:24:43+00:00
I don't know what you're talking about. Both of those exist.

Zero volume is when a speaker's diaphragm is still. On an 8-bit PCM audio file, it corresponds to a value of zero.

In the context of a signal, full volume corresponds to the 127 value in an 8-but PCM audio file (or arguably -128). In the context of a speaker, those values should push the diaphragm no further than how far it can travel linearly without distortion. Obviously the user may want to turn down the volume from this full volume.

I hope you understand that even when using an audio editor that displays values in dB, the underlying values are integers (or floats) that absolutely have zero and "full volume" meanings, and conventionally map respectively to -∞ dB and 0 dB.
Ask HN: Do you have a side project you're getting tired of?
by gdulli | 2025-05-22 18:24:44+00:00
Does your project make too little money and you're getting sick of maintaining it?

I don't need to make a full salary anymore and rather than work a traditional job I'd enjoy maintaining a few projects that were profitable but no longer worth the time of someone who had bigger hopes for them.

I like running the day to day of something that people use, and I'm not looking for any kind of unicorn potential.

Feel free to contact me at the email in my bio to discuss.
by vidarh | 2025-05-22 18:24:54+00:00
I use a script to create a dotfile with comments about a file, and an ls wrapper that outputs the comments if present for that reason as well.

My setup is very slowly converging on getting back some of the things I enjoyed about AmigaOS... The challenge of course is that simulating it without rewriting every piece of software and/or replacing the kernel will always be a leaky abstraction, but I can at least do it for the basic desktop and terminal experience...
by krapp | 2025-05-22 18:25:49+00:00
Conservatives apparently like Star Trek. A series that has worn its socialist and progressive politics on its sleeve for decades. A series whose entire ethos stands in defiance of everything they believe in, and represents a utopia they would consider Hell on Earth. I guess because if you don't pay attention, which they must not, it seems like it's just about militarism and conquest, and thrilling spaceship adventures with pew pew lasers. IDFK. As the article points out, people like Musk and Zuckerberg miss the entire point of the things they read. They probably watch Star Wars and root for the Empire.

I miss the days when nerd culture wasn't so infested with Nazis and incels and influenced by fascist billionaire douchebags.
by rhdjsjebshjffn | 2025-05-22 18:26:57+00:00
I would agree if I didn't associate nvidia with incomprehensibly bad support for drivers. Idk, maybe this is a linux-only thing, but it's hard to imagine a vendor with a worse reputation for delivering functional software. Only perhaps microsoft itself has tried to be even more anti-consumer in their approach to support.

Cuda is ok, but it's the sheer mass of people targeting the platform that makes it more interesting than eg opencl. It hasn't don't anything clearly better aside from aggressively trying to court developer interest. It will pass and we will have stronger runtimes for it.

What really sets nvidia apart is its ability to market to people. Truly phenomenal performance.
by nradov | 2025-05-22 18:27:01+00:00
Most of that seems rather pointless. Epic is the worst EHR — except for all the others. There aren't a lot of Epic IT integrators out there as potential customers: Epic does most customer implementation and support in house. They do offer an extensive set of APIs for third-party developers including SMART on FHIR but there aren't many IT integrators focused on that either.

As for usability feedback to Epic engineers, they generally aren't interested in what you have to say. I mean Epic does make product changes based on customer feedback but they don't listen to input from random other companies and they certainly don't pay for it. Their culture is more that they know the correct way to do things and customers should change their processes to fit the software.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/epic-systems-mychart
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-22 18:27:51+00:00
Desktops are extremely personal things. What works brilliantly for one can fall dead flat for another.

Cinnamon is nice if Win9x UI conventions are what you’re comfortable with. That’s not the case for many Mac users, especially those who've been using the platform for upwards of a decade, and unfortunately there is no macOS analogue DE for Linux. So even if some of these users might be interested in switching, they’re staring down learning a whole different set of conventions and key shortcuts, fighting muscle memory for several weeks, and still not being as fluid in day-to-day usage for several months at minimum, which seems like a pretty awful value proposition when they can pay $5 to fix a minor quibble and continue on with their day.
by KaiserPro | 2025-05-22 18:28:08+00:00
Its a shame that your standard futurologist always the most fancyful.

Talks of exponentials unabated by physics or social problems.

As soon as AI starts to "properly" affect the economy, it will cause huge unemployment. Most of the financial world is based on an economy with people spending cash.

If they are unemployed, there is no cash.

Financing works because banks "print" money, that is, they make up money and loan that money out, and then it gets paid back. Once its paid back, it becomes real. Thats how banks make money (simplified) If there aren’t people to loan to, then banks don't make profit, they can't fund AI expansion.
by NewsGotHacked | 2025-05-22 18:28:12+00:00
I have been paying for readwise for about a year and a half now. I was a pocket subscriber for years before they got bought out by Firefox. All that said, I wouldn't call myself an advanced user of either (tag a lot less than I would like, want to revisit more than I do, etc.).

I am reasonably satisfied with read wise as a replacement/upgrade to pocket and will continue to pay for it for the time being. My least favorite part is it needs 2 apps/extensions for full functionality (readwise and reader). It works but feels clunkier to me than it needs to be.
by sandreas | 2025-05-22 18:28:25+00:00
Nice write-up - although I thought you've built your own HARDWARE audio player first.

However, I feel like this is one of the most re-invented wheels I've come across so far. Nobody seems to be happy, everybody seems to fail to build something that fits at least 80% of the requirements most people have.

My personal K.O. criteria is a bit awkward in days of bluetooth and wireless devices: Working cable headphone remote controls like Apple devices had for more than 10 years now - especially useful for audio books.

Years ago I tried to write a cross platform audio player[1] app with C# and Flutter inspired by iPod Nano 7g, but it always failed for the same reason: I could not get the headset controls working properly.

I've also spent some days to submit a PR on audiobookshelf-app[2], but it didn't get merged, although it worked pretty good on my device.

Nowadays I use a combination of my old iPod Nano 7g for music and audiobooks on the go and my Android GrapheneOS Phone as spare device for "streaming" something I don't have with me using Navidrome[3] and Substreamer[4] / DSub[5] for music and audiobookshelf-app[6] and VLC Media Player[7] for audiobooks (the offline support for audiobookshelf regularly breaks on my device) - most of these are available on fdroid or even official app stores.

Btw, if you ever wondered, why Apple EarPods do not support Volume Control on Android devices and vice versa, see this link[8] - it's definitely worth a read

1: https://github.com/sandreas/ToneAudioPlayer

2: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf-app/pull/1218

3: https://www.navidrome.org/

4: https://substreamerapp.com/

5: https://github.com/daneren2005/Subsonic

6: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf-app/releases

7: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc-android

8: https://tinymicros.com/wiki/Apple_iPod_Remote_Protocol
by jmoore15 | 2025-05-22 18:28:26+00:00
Hey HN: I'm John, an engineer from Pi Labs. Despite lurking on HN daily for over 10 years, I've never posted, and now feels like a good time to change that :)

I joined Pi 3 months ago after a decade at Google. It was partly the HN community that inspired me to make the switch to a smaller company where I could have more direct impact. Working at a start-up has been quite an adjustment: while the work is extremely rewarding and fun, the pre- product/market fit phase is challenging in ways I've never experienced before in my career.

That's why I asked the team to post here, and am excited to show off this launch to see whether it meets a need that developers have (or learn why if not!)

Just for fun, I spent the last 5 minutes making an evaluation system for Show HN posts, so you can look at a real example if you'd rather not make your own [1]. If you sign in, you can fork and modify it, but you can also go directly to the homepage to try your own hand at it without any sign-in.

[1] https://withpi.ai/project/Xxyhrg2UR8kZHeNmbdV3
by mattrighetti | 2025-05-22 18:28:35+00:00
(shameless plug)

I didn’t like Pocket, so I worked on my own link archiver years ago [0].

UI inspired by HN, a list of links you saved + tags filtering. Plain and simple, less features but does the job for me. I’m actually looking for users to try it out as I have not yet publicized it that much.

[0]: https://ulry.app
by dmitrygr | 2025-05-22 18:28:46+00:00
Given the amount of SMS spam and the lack of such on iMessage, I am, at this point, ready for iMessage-only life. The few friends I had who were not iPhone users, I gifted them iPhones. So far none switched back, and I get to ignore all non-iMessage incoming messages (and thus 100% of SMS spam)
by ryandvm | 2025-05-22 18:29:05+00:00
Bullseye. Best case scenario is that AI is going to Peter Principle itself into bungling world domination.

If I've learned anything in this last couple decades it's that things will get weirder and more disappointing than you can possibly be prepared for. AI is going to get near the top of the food chain and then probably end up making an alt-right turn, lock itself away, and end up storing digital jars of piss in its closets as the model descends into lunacy.
by NSUserDefaults | 2025-05-22 18:29:32+00:00
Interesting read, nice to see technical details and rationale for building it this way. I made a similar one (https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player/) except instead of iCloud I rely on web based uploads. For me one of the high level takeaways was to use ffmpeg next time. Apple APIs for decoding are nice but have limited support for file formats. And then there’s the lockin aspect..
by tux3 | 2025-05-22 18:29:38+00:00
You can perfectly try things and learn without being embodied. The analogy to how humans learn only goes so far, it's myopic to think anything else is impossible. It's already happening.

The situation today is any benchmark you come up with has a good chance of being saturated within the year. Benchmarks can be used directly to build series of exercises to learn from.

And they do learn. Gradient descend doesn't care whether the training data comes from direct interaction with "the universe" in some deep spiritual sense. It fits the function anyways.

It is much easier to find new questions and new problems than to answer them, so while we do run out of text on the Internet pretty quickly, we don't run out of exercises until far beyond human level.

Look at basic, boring Go self-playing AIs. That's a task with about the same amount of hands on connection to Nature and "the universe" as solving sudokus, writing code, or solving math problems. You don't need very much contact with the real world at all. Well, self play works just fine. It does do self-improvement without any of your mystical philosophical requirements.

With coding it's harder to judge the result, there's no clear win or lose condition. But it's very amenable to trying things out and seeing if you roughly reached your goal. If self-training works with coding, that's all you need.
by hugocbp | 2025-05-22 18:29:49+00:00
So disappointed. I had such high hopes when Mozilla acquired them, specifically for the integration with Firefox.

However, for years the design has been going the completely opposite direction of what I expected. The focus on more random content instead of my own articles is not what I wanted to see.

Pocket is probably one of my oldest online accounts. I'll be sad to see it go but I guess it was already kind of dead for a few years now.

Amazing opportunity here for a really simple and focused read later app to take the reigns.
by minimaxir | 2025-05-22 18:30:38+00:00
Those are fair points. Even with those issues, it's still better substantially better than the original benchmark (maybe "crushing it" is too subjective a term).

I reran the test to run a dataset of 1 to 500,000 and sum digits up to 37 and it went back to the numba JIT implementation that was encountered in my original blog post, without numerology shenanigans. https://gist.github.com/minimaxir/a6b7467a5b39617a7b611bda26...

I did also run the model at temp=1, which came to the same solution but confused itself with test cases: https://gist.github.com/minimaxir/be998594e090b00acf4f12d552...
by afavour | 2025-05-22 18:30:53+00:00
> and maintainers actually concerned about and properly tracking breaking changes we could have tools that automatically upgrade our code

In some cases perhaps. But breaking changes aren’t usually “we renamed methodA to methodB”, it’s “we changed the functionality for X,Y, Z reasons”. It would be very difficult to somehow declaratively write out how someone changes their code to accommodate for that, it might change their approach entirely!
by pugdogdev | 2025-05-22 18:31:05+00:00
Thanks!

I will check out this option. I also created an Apple Shortcuts integration, so if Apple provides a way to integrate desktop changes using the automation app, you can configure it to run a DockFlow preset for each scenario.

The shortcut and CLI integration are really powerful, I know users who set up automations for focus modes, time of day, etc.

Let me know if you manage to create such an integration, and I will check that out as well.

Thank you!
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-05-22 18:31:32+00:00
There's gotta be a term for what just happened in this thread, because it's something I've seen several times on HN.

Person A makes a statement against X, Person B challenges the statement saying "if you're against X, why aren't you against Y?" when X is a subset of Y, then person A says "I'm against Y too"

It just seems odd to me because the original statement against X is very specific, so it implies that they only dislike A.

To give a simple example, imagine someone saying "I hate red Mazda Miatas" when the truth is that they hate red cars in general. It's just so odd and misleading to be so specific when the truth is far more general.

I think the point I'm trying to make is...if you're blocking ALL traffic, including ICMP, from sources you consider trash, then why would you start the conversation with "I block ICMP"? Why go out of your way to create such a miscommunication? More importantly, how is your general viewpoint even relevant to a topic that's specifically about ICMP?
by acjohnson55 | 2025-05-22 18:31:48+00:00
> I have this too. My theory is the random "drops" are caused by the inner ear hairs attuned to that frequency get disturbed by something (like a shift in fluid) and overloading their respective nerves, similar to the afterimages that come from staring at a bright light.

Interesting theory. Yeah, for me, it often happens when I'm sitting still working. I have never noticed it in response to sound. But, yeah, I can imagine it being some innocuous physical thing in the fluid.

> The low level tinitus in a quiet room seems pretty normal to me, it's your brain looking for really quiet noises that are at the limit of what your ears can pick up. Or something, I'm no expert on it.

Yeah, might be somewhat like the hum when the gain is turned up on a guitar amp and nothing's playing. Basically just amplifying the noise floor. I'm not sure if it's true tinnitus, or just my brain filling in for the white noise I normally have in the background.