MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dilap | 2025-08-22 21:47:36+00:00
US healthcare is such a pain -- very high premiums, high deductibles, tons of paperwork, no price transparency.

My wife is from mexico, so while her visiting familly there I've had some opportunity to interact with and observe their system.

It seems better!

There are public hospitals which are open to all. The quality and wait times are reasonble, not fantastic. There is very little paperwork. (You don't have to jump through hoops like signing up for Medicaid or something.)

Alongside that, you can buy private insurance and go to private hospitals, which, in my (admittedly limited) experience, are very good -- efficient and reasonably priced. I would _guess_ because of less regulation and because they have to provide value above and beyond the free healthcare that's available?

In the US we seem to have created sort of the opposite incentive structure -- public healthcare is only available to a limited set of people, and everyone else is more or less forced into the private healthcare system (or "private", since it seems heavily intertwined w/ govt -- e.g., standard govt websites to pick a povider, tax penalty (tho since lifted) if you aren't signed up).

Somehow there's always a mountain of paperwork and bills that dribble in over months, and you never know how much the final cost is going to be.

Another seemingly-insane feature of the US system is if I pay for a service w/o insurance, I'll be billed some crazy rate. With insurance, I'll copay some reasonable-ish rate, and the insurance company will also pay some reasonable rate, often at like a 90% discount to the "quoted" rate. It feels like I'm coerced into insurance because I can't out-of-pocket pay the actual real reasonable rates.

Another annoyance is it also doesn't seem possible to buy insurance that just covers accidents, which I would personally do if I could...
by roxolotl | 2025-08-22 21:48:00+00:00
Most of the money has already been given:

> The government’s equity stake will be funded by the remaining $5.7 billion in grants previously awarded, but not yet paid, to Intel under the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act and $3.2 billion awarded to the company as part of the Secure Enclave program. Intel will continue to deliver on its Secure Enclave obligations and reaffirmed its commitment to delivering trusted and secure semiconductors to the U.S. Department of Defense. The $8.9 billion investment is in addition to the $2.2 billion in CHIPS grants Intel has received to date, making for a total investment of $11.1 billion.

So it kinda is something weird? It's not really a pure bail out, the Chips act already did that, and it's also not really a tax because they aren't going to get money out unless there's dividends. It's more like a power play which makes sense given that Trump is uncomfortable without anyone getting anything for nothing.
by qualeed | 2025-08-22 21:48:08+00:00
1) "De-googling" doesn't need to be a binary, all-in or all-out situation. Any reduction in reliance of Google (or any single point of failure) is good. Diversifying the big stuff (mail, storage, etc.) is a great start. About last on the list is worrying about the occasional allowance for gstatic.com or whatever.

2) While I occasionally need to allow some scripts from google, it's absolutely nowhere near 1/3rd of sites.
by cj | 2025-08-22 21:48:14+00:00
What would a public insurance option involve? Do you mean insurance that's provided at-cost without a company profiting?

Insurance companies are already required to spend at least 80% (or 85%) of the premiums they collect on paying out claims. If they spend less, they are required to give rebates / premium refunds to policy holders.

It wouldn't be crazy to increase that percentage even more, since it's effectively a cap on the profit margin insurers are allowed to earn on premiums.
by simianparrot | 2025-08-22 21:48:21+00:00
Literally the stuff of nightmares. Why are we doing this?

> As compilers freed programmers from low-level details, we're building the abstraction layer for RNA.

That’s all fun and games when it’s literally fun and games. When it’s mRNA injected into living beings it’s the stuff of nightmares.

Will technologists ever _ever_ stop and think for a second?
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-22 21:48:39+00:00
> Supervisor, runit, systemd, even a tmux session are all popular options for how to run a bunch of stuff in a monolithic "app" container.

Did docker+systemd get fixed at some point? I would be surprised to hear that it was popular given the hoops you had to jump through last time I looked at it
by runako | 2025-08-22 21:48:49+00:00
> Universal healthcare doesn't change the overall cost.

Something like 15% of US healthcare spending goes towards administrative fees just around insurance. That's order of $800 billion annually, roughly $1,500 per American, that does not contribute in any way to improving health. This is roughly the size of the US defense budget that we spend on gating healthcare.

There are knock-on effects of our system that increase some costs, such as people skipping preventative care or medications due to high costs or lack of insurance and then ending up in higher-cost emergency care. Or see the recent trend of physicians documenting how much of their time spent arguing with insurance companies on behalf of patients, time not spent providing medical care (and thereby increasing costs).
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-22 21:49:03+00:00
And the US's economic opponents are taking advantage of the moment. China is spending massively on solar production and deployment, and selling their panels to other countries. The US will be the loser here:

1. More expensive power from non-renewables. Especially as the global consumption of fossil fuels decline (so domestic costs will likely rise). This will become a drag on the US economy.

2. Not participating in the production and sale of solar panels to other nations.

Trump decries the US trade deficit while simultaneously discouraging one massive upcoming market that the US could become a net exporter in.
by sunshinekitty | 2025-08-22 21:49:46+00:00
Haha almost identical experience but self hosting immich with off site backups. Wild how difficult it is to change your email with certain websites! Several months later still fighting with various sites.

I have an iphone so I use Apple maps and an icloud based obsidian vault, and that is all that is tied to Apple which feels fine for now.
by turbo_wombat | 2025-08-22 21:50:39+00:00
You are asking why save Intel of all chip manufacturers, and the answer is because there aren't any other major chip manufacturers in the US.

AMD no longer has a fab. TSMC dominates the global market and basically has no competition.

In the event that Taiwan is invaded, the US would suddenly have a huge problem getting access to any kind of high end chips, be they CPUs or GPUs. This would be a major problem economically and militarily for the US.

Some caveats: Due to the chip act, TSMC does now have fabs Arizona, though I'm not sure what their capacity is. TI, and some others building lower end components also have fabs I believe. For x86, high end ARM, and GPU's, virtually all of that is manufactured by TSMC right now, mostly in Taiwan.
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-22 21:50:43+00:00
They're setting the ACA up to "naturally" fail anyway, so this doesn't matter to them, or is even a step in the right direction.

They kicked out one of its three "legs" (the "individual mandate") so this right-wing heritage foundation promoted healthcare scheme is now guaranteed to face a price death-spiral anyway, unless that changes.

They gave up on repealing it, because it was so popular, and have settled for breaking it in ways that most folks will have trouble figuring out they should blame Republicans for (those chickens won't come home to roost for years, and I guarantee it's only a tiny minority of voters who understood the necessity of the mandate for the whole thing to work, anyway), so eventually it'll be popular to get rid of it.
by metalman | 2025-08-22 21:51:31+00:00
it's mindless and only going to send all of the interested traffic to european or other(Canadian) sources for basic data, and this will only accelerate the demise of American science by putting more senior scientists out of work.... I have to wonder if, California might decide it needs it's own space program and satelite network to meet the targets it has set, but in some mad twist of reality has to book flights on an asian or european rocket. bonkers
by pxc | 2025-08-22 21:52:13+00:00
tl;dr: no.

This commenter is just wrong. denenv.nix pretty much is flake.nix + services. It has since grown more features, but this kind of use case is exactly its niche.

Devenv isn't a Nix fork and doesn't compete with Nix. Its scope is narrower and it's downstream of Nix. The code you write for configuring Devenv is ordinary Nix code. Its configuration system is a perfectly ordinary Nix module system.

There is a `devenv` CLI tool, and that CLI bundles a downstream soft fork of Nix that carries a few patches. Those patches exist to make it possible to read `devenv.nix` rather than `flake.nix` and use an easily programmatically editable yaml file for defining flake inputs. Other than that, all of the patches are just PRs that are open against mainline Nix that are included to speed up evaluation, notably the patchset for "lazy trees" or "source tree abstraction" (which is also in the Determinate Nix distribution of Nix).

But you can actually use the core features of Devenv (that is, the module system for configuring environments) without using the Devenv CLI or the patched evaluator. This isn't a hidden thing or a hack, either— it's documented on https://devenv.sh . It's always been this way, and isn't a paywall boundary or a trick. The whole of Devenv is open-source, and the vast majority of the code is Nix modules that you can use with any Nix implementation that you like (though flakes support makes it easier; Devenv's modules are exposed as flake-parts modules).

Hell, you can even use large subsets of devenv's functionality without using devenv at all. One of its key features is a Nix wrapper/integration for the pre-commit framework for managing git hooks. That whole subset of functionality is extremely loosely coupled to devenv, and lives in a separate repo. You can just import it as a flake-parts module with vanilla Nix without using devenv at all (i.e., not even the module system).

There's some code duplication with Nix (optional evaluator patches) and Nixpkgs (downstream release channel for guaranteeing integration with devenv's language configuration options, also optional (my team doesn't use it at all)), but it's extremely misleading to characterize Devenv as a fork of any Nix community projects including those two.

Just posting a link to the Devenv website is admittedly not a high-effort reply, but recommending Devenv is absolutely a fair reply to the post you linked. (Given that that post explicitly mentions not wanting to use Devenv, it definitely deserved a real conversation instead of what it got.)

PS: I'm not affiliated with devenv or Cachix. I just use it at work and know the code a little from times that I've filed bugs or submitted patches.
by onesociety2022 | 2025-08-22 21:52:14+00:00
I would support universal healthcare if I think the government is actually capable of reigning in the avg healthcare costs of an American.

I’d bet the $800/mo eyedrops this poor lady is relying on don’t cost that much in any other country (and I don’t mean poor countries - I mean in other rich countries like Japan, Singapore or Australia). So when she switches to Medicare as soon as she turns 65, how much are the US taxpayers paying for these eyedrops? It’s just wealth transfer from US taxpayers to the US medical industry complex.

So I fear “Medicare for All” would simply mean we pay even more taxes than we already do now and the US government will keep spending insane amounts of money on healthcare as compared to every other developed nation in the world with no better outcomes.
by tyg13 | 2025-08-22 21:52:34+00:00
Depends on who you ask. Trump himself seems to think the US is getting 10% for free. I think that's a fair assessment given that these grants were already supposed to be paid out to Intel, without any kind of equity stake promised.

Worth noting that Intel is the only company that had these kinds of shenanigans pulled with their grant. Samsung, TSMC, Micron and others were granted similar funds without any kind of withholding or demands for equity from the federal government.
by cvoss | 2025-08-22 21:52:54+00:00
The answer is in the paragraph in between the two you quoted from. The money for the purchase has already been appropriated by Congress and awarded to Intel. The awards didn't previously have this giant string attached where Intel gives stock in return. But now they do.

And it makes sense that Intel is spinning it as a generous investment from the gov't, but the gov't is spinning it as a free gift from Intel. Neither account really paints the full picture, but each one paints themselves as coming out ahead.
by mjr00 | 2025-08-22 21:53:06+00:00
> However, I wonder if you could have that while still removing features that make cheating seem appealing. For example, as you said, you can have games with randoms without an automatic ranking of all players.

This does not stop cheaters whatsoever. Anyone who played during the private server era of FPS in the late 90s/early 00s knows this; wallhacking, modified character models with big pointy spikes indicating player locations, aimbots, etc. ran rampant, even when nothing was on the line.
by runako | 2025-08-22 21:53:18+00:00
TL;DR it's not doctor salaries. Fortunately, there has been much expert research on this, for example:

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...

That "administrative costs" line item is closing in on $1 trillion annually, and its main purpose is to prevent people from getting healthcare.
by threemux | 2025-08-22 21:53:27+00:00
The Republican party of 2008 bears little resemblance to the one of 2025, especially on economic issues. Many in the party have changed their views over the last decade+ on industrial policy and the libertarian wing of the party has very little influence now. It's really a striking shift.

What remains of the "old guard" is, in fact, loudly complaining about this move:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/08/the-government-should...
by thehoagie | 2025-08-22 21:53:56+00:00
> Of the total, $5.7 billion of the government funds will come from grants under the CHIPS Act that had been awarded

Also > "Your CHIPs Act is a horrible, horrible thing...You should get rid of the CHIP act and whatever's left over Mr. Speaker" - Donald Trump

Fast forward to today: > "This is a great Deal for America and, also, a great Deal for INTEL." - Donald Trump
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-22 21:54:18+00:00
It’s not been a problem for me. The registrars I use are pretty vocal about expiring payment credentials, and if I were really worried they allow stacking multiple methods to fall back on, some of which have their own fallbacks (like PayPal). In theory paying for longer periods in one go could help, but ironically that might make it worse since you’re more likely to forget about a renewal happening 5 or 10 years from now than you are one that recurs every year.
by kstrauser | 2025-08-22 21:54:32+00:00
Seconded. I spend a whole lot of effort making my early 2000s websites emit compliant XHTML because it seemed like the right thing to do, and the way we were inevitably heading. And then I — and apparently almost everyone else, too, at the same time — realized it was a whole lot of busywork with almost nothing to show for it. The only thing XHTML ever added to the mix was a giant error message if you forget to write "<br/>" instead of "<br>".

Know what? Life's too short to lose time to remembering to close a self-closing tag.

About the time XHTML 1.1 came along, we collectively bailed and went to HTML5, and it was a breath of fresh air.
by everforward | 2025-08-22 21:54:36+00:00
Consoles are also vulnerable via peripherals. There are controllers that will run recoil countering scripts and things like that.

XIM fakes being a controller but is KBM. I sort of wonder whether it’s possible to use a camera to get a stream of the game and make an aimbot either by making a fake controller or a robot that manipulates a real controller.
by viccis | 2025-08-22 21:54:51+00:00
Yeah I think, given its gradual typing approach, that any discussion about the quality and utility of Python's type system assumes that one is using one of the best in class type checkers right now.

I didn't really use it much until the last few years. It was limited and annoyiongly verbose. Now it's great, you don't even have to do things like explicitly notate covariant/contravariant types, and a lot of what used to be clumsy annotation with imports from typing is now just specified with normal Python.

And best of all, more and more libraries are viewing type support as a huge priority, so there's usually no more having to download type mocks and annotation packages and worry about keeping them in sync. There are some libraries that do annoying things like adding " | None" after all their return types to allow themselves to be sloppy, but at least they are sort of calling out to you that they could be sloppy instead of letting it surprise you.

It's now good and easy enough that it saves me time to use type annotations even for small scripts, as the time it saves from quickly catching typos or messing up a return type.

Like you said, Pydantic is often the magic that makes it really useful. It is just easy enough and adds enough value that it's worth not lugging around data in dicts or tuples.

My main gripe with Go's typing has always been that I think the structural typing of its interfaces is convenient but really it's convenient in the same way that duck typing is. In the same way that a hunter with a duck call is the same as a duck with duck typing, a F16 and a VCR are both things that have an ejection feature.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-08-22 21:55:15+00:00
> by the time people notice it will be too late / we will try to blame it on the other party?

This is it.

A lot of the things that the Republicans are doing that will completely fuck the lower/middle class don't actually take effect until after the mid-terms. This is an insurance policy so that if they get absolutely wrecked in the mid-terms, they can point to Democrats having the majority push blame onto them. On the flip side, if Republicans maintain control after mid-terms, by the time the next election takes place, people will have forgotten who it was that screwed them over.

Alternatively, they can just keep saying it's all Obama/Biden's fault. That still works.
by Reason077 | 2025-08-22 21:55:33+00:00
Comrades,

Starting today, under the government’s guidance, Intel shall serve the needs of the needs of the nation - not the whims of oligarchs.

Liberated from wasteful and destructive capitalistic competition, Intel’s revolutionary “people’s processors” (soon to be developed) will ensure that the world’s most advanced AI chips are made in America. And priced within the reach of every US worker.

Viva la revolution! Viva Intel!
by spasemanYC | 2025-08-22 21:55:39+00:00
This is wild. Always felt stuck between two bad options for running legacy MATLAB code: MATLAB itself, which is expensive and clunky, or Octave, which is slow and incomplete. Tackling both grammar and performance head-on is impressive. Curious how it handles edge-case compatibility like object handles, metaclasses, or weird indexing behavior.
by ImageXav | 2025-08-22 21:55:43+00:00
This is an interesting point. I've been trying to think about something similar recently but don't have much of an idea how to proceed. I'm gathering periodic time series data and am wondering how to factor in the frequency of my sampling for the statistical tests. I'm not sure how to assess the difference between 50Hz and 100Hz on the outcome, given that my periods are significantly longer. Would you have an idea of how to proceed? The person I'm working with currently just bins everything in hour long buckets and uses the mean for comparison between time series but this seems flawed to me.
by butterisgood | 2025-08-22 21:55:58+00:00
https://github.com/rminnich/9front/tree/ron_nix

Has Ron Minnich's port of "Nix" (not NixOS as you may know it), to 9front.

The entire point of this is to disallow the kernel pre-empting and switching out CPU cores that should be dedicated to an "application". (Application Cores).

One could imagine this arrangement plus io_uring would be awfully nice.
by adastra22 | 2025-08-22 21:56:05+00:00
Doesn't matter. All of the US's advanced weaponry systems now use "state of the art" electronic systems, which in the context of defense only means "not decades out of date." Two or three generations old is perfectly fine. The military does not need the latest and greatest CPUs and GPUs going into the iPhone 17 or whatever, but it does need the equivalent of the chip in the iPhone 12 or iPhone 8 or whatever for integration into next generation weapons systems.

But if all of our advanced weaponry used chips from Taiwan or Korea, for example, then the strategic implications for war in East Asia would be radically different. People are right to say that China could engage in war over Taiwan for chips, but for the wrong reasons. It's not that they want access to the fabs (they'd love it, but they're not stupid and they know the fabs and know-how would be destroyed in the war), but it would deny the US defense industry access to those fabs.

If US missiles or drones use chips from TSMC, and TSMC is in occupied territory or a war zone... the US can't make more missiles or drones. And no matter how powerful your starting position is, you can't wage war without the ability to replenish your stockpiles. It's the bitter lesson Germany learned in both world wars.

China wants hegemony in Asia, and to remove the influence of the US, Japan, and their allies within what they perceive as their exclusive sphere of influence. How to achieve that? Invade Taiwan, which eliminates western access to TSMC one way or another, effectively blockading western defense industry from the core things they need to resupply their militaries in a war. Like WW1 all over again, a "preemptive war" becomes the game-theoretic optimal outcome, and the world suffers.

How to counter that? The US and its allies need to make sure they have access to chip fabrication facilities that can produce near-state-of-the-art chips, even at inflated prices that are not commercially viable in peacetime, as well as the necessary strategic minerals like germanium and lithium. Only then does calculus swing the other way in favor of peace. Hence Biden's effort to get TSMC to build SOTA fabs in Arizona, and when that failed/stumbled, this investment in Intel.