MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-08 15:16:09+00:00
I agree PBMs are also a problem, as my comment mentioned. Several states are working to aggressively regulate them, but until there is more progress in that regard, people who need medication through these systems will experience maximum extraction.

Inside the Mafia of Pharma Pricing - https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/inside-the-mafia-of-pharm... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971553 - July 2024

> Today, as a result of these changes, PBMs are big. Really big. The parent insurance companies of the biggest PBMs top nearly $1 trillion in revenue annually, roughly 4% of the GDP of America. Just the top four equal 22% of national healthcare expenditures, up from 14% in 2016. And no other country has anything like the PBM industry. The revenue of American PBMs is larger than what France spends on its entire healthcare system [My note: !!!].

> In 2021, for instance, Kentucky got rid of its use of big PBMs in Medicaid, and saved $285 million out of $1.2 billion its program spent on prescription drugs. It even led to an attempt by the Trump administration to get rid of the ability of PBMs to engage in certain forms of secret rebating. Academics are now focused on the problem of vertical integration, and so is Congress. And there have been dozens of PBM-related hearings - the next one is on July 23 with the CEOs of the ExpressScript, OptumRX, and Caremark - and Congress is closer to passing PBM legislation than it has ever been.

https://www.axios.com/2025/06/03/pbms-fight-state-regulation...

https://www.axios.com/2025/01/14/pbms-marked-up-specialty-ge...

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/...

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/PBM-6b-Second-I...

https://nashp.org/state-tracker/state-pharmacy-benefit-manag...

https://www.46brooklyn.com/
by jamesponddotco | 2025-08-08 15:16:19+00:00
I have multiple system prompts that I use before getting to the actual specification.

1. I use the Socratic Coder[1] system prompt to have a back and forth conversation about the idea, which helps me hone the idea and improve it. This conversation forces me to think about several aspects of the idea and how to implement it.

2. I use the Brainstorm Specification[2] user prompt to turn that conversation into a specification.

3. I use the Brainstorm Critique[3] user prompt to critique that specification and find flaws in it which I might have missed.

4. I use a modified version of the Brainstorm Specification user prompt to refine the specification based on the critique and have a final version of the document, which I can either use on my own or feed to something like Claude Code for context.

Doing those things improved the quality of the code and work spit out by the LLMs I use by a significant amount, but more importantly, it helped me write much better code on my own because I know have something to guide me, while before I used to go blind.

As a bonus, it also helped me decide if an idea was worth it or not; there are times I'm talking with the LLM and it asks me questions I don't feel like answering, which tells me I'm probably not into that idea as much as I initially thought, it was just my ADHD hyper focusing on something.

[1]: https://github.com/jamesponddotco/llm-prompts/blob/trunk/dat...

[2]: https://github.com/jamesponddotco/llm-prompts/blob/trunk/dat...

[3]: https://github.com/jamesponddotco/llm-prompts/blob/trunk/dat...
by 9rx | 2025-08-08 15:17:02+00:00
> no general program will be the best at all tasks.

Perhaps I wasn't entirely clear, but AGI isn't expected to be the best at all tasks. The bar is only as compared to a human, which also isn't the best at all tasks.

But you are right that nobody knows how to make them good at even some tasks. Hence why everyone is so concerned about LLMs writing code. After all, if you had "true" AGI, what would you need code for? It is well understood that AGI isn't going to happen. What many are banking on, however, is that AGI can be simulated if LLMs can pull off being good at one task (coding).

> They want to be the first for bragging rights, hype, VC funding, and control.

That's the motivation for trying to create AGI (at least pretending to), but not AGI itself.
by orwin | 2025-08-08 15:17:04+00:00
To add a complementary point: Unions here are 'global', i.e while you have some sector-specific unions (police, farmers), most unions are 'piloted' by a central bureau, that can't actually force a strike or prevent one, but can add guidelines for strikes, present a plan, decide to organise sympathy strikes or not, decide on compensating striking workers on some specific strike to make it last longer: a postal strike limited to the single city I lived in pre-COVID lasted 6 weeks and you had white collar workers, sometimes in business suit, sometimes dressed like me (probably usually working in IT) doing the mail distribution. It only lasted 6 weeks because the central union decided to use their 'strike comp' budget on this topic that specific year.

And unions make you vote a lot. Once every year for my representative, plus almost every time a sympathy strike can be organised.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-08 15:17:25+00:00
> Model builders have been mostly focused on correctness, not aesthetics. Researchers have been overly focused on the extra fingers problem.

> While that might be true for the foundational models

Its possibly true [0] of the models from the big public general AI vendors (OpenAI, Google), its defintely not true of MJ (which, if it has an aesthetic bias to what the article describes as “the AI look” it is largely because that was a popular actively sought and prompted for look in early AI image gen to avoid the flatness bias of early models and MJ leaned very hard into biasing toward what was popular aesthetically in that and other areas as it developed. Heck, lots of SD finetunes actively sought to reproduce MJ aesthetics for a while.)

[0] but I doubt it, and I think they have also been actively targeting aesthetics as well as correctness, and the post even hints at at least part of how that reinforced the “AI look” — the focus on aesthetics meant more reliance on the LAION Aesthetics dataset to tune the models understanding of what looked good, transferring the biases of that dataset into models that were trying to focus on aesthetics.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-08-08 15:17:41+00:00
> The more boilerplate-y the part is, the better it is. I have not really found one model that can yet reliably one-shot things in real life projects, but they do get quie close.

This definitely feels right from my experience. Small tasks that are present in the training data = good output with little effort.

Infra tasks (something that isn't in the training data as often) = sad times and lots of spelunking (to be fair Gemini has done a good job for me eventually, even though it told me to nuke my database (which sadly, was a good solution)).
by doctorhandshake | 2025-08-08 15:17:48+00:00
I found that for a period of time Claude was almost excessively negative when reviewing its own work. It was only after some contemplation that I realized that it was the phrasing of my code review slash command that framed the review with a negative bent, essentially prompting Claude to dump on its own stuff. The phrasing of that prompt has been a focus of a lot of effort on my side since.
by grafmax | 2025-08-08 15:17:50+00:00
People who have less flow and no stock can increase their savings less than those with stock and the same flow. Many are not able to save at all. Those without stock receive only flow. Those with stock receive both flow and stock, and those with more stock profit more from rising stock.

So the relationship between stock and “flow” is absolutely relevant if we want to understand wealth inequality, because the working class primarily receives money through wages (most of it going out to pay for things such as basic necessities), with the ownership class accruing profit that they receive by virtue of ownership.
by aldousd666 | 2025-08-08 15:17:55+00:00
Those problems aren't just waiting on smarts/intelligence. Those would require experimentation in the real world. You can't solve chemistry by just thinking about it really hard. You still have to do experiments. A super intelligent machine may be better at coming up with experiments to do than we are, but without the right stuff to do them, it can't 'solve' anything of the like.
by techdmn | 2025-08-08 15:18:16+00:00
Can't speak for anyone but myself of course, but I was pretty disappointed with the way Democrats under Obama tackled healthcare.

One of the big differences between Obama and Clinton in the primaries was that Clinton was in favor of an individual mandate, and Obama was not. We still ended up with an individual mandate, which is both offensive on grounds that the government is forcing you to find and pay for insurance (not always easy on the exchange), and on the grounds that the primary purpose of the mandate is to ensure that insurance companies stay profitable.

Former Al Gore running mate and future republican Joe Lieberman is often given credit for stopping the nationwide insurance exchange in favor of state-level exchanges, again tipping the market in favor of insurers.

Ending denials for pre-existing conditions was nice, as were a few of the other details, but it felt like a far cry from the hope and change voters were promised. Mostly it exposed more-of-the-same pandering to the rich and powerful. Last I checked Medicare For All polls quite favorably.
by bichiliad | 2025-08-08 15:18:59+00:00
The problem is that the freight companies run these incredibly long trains now, which no longer fit into the siding (a bit of track that splits off from and then reconnects to the main track to allow one train to pass the other). So even if a freight train wanted to, it couldn’t let another train pass unless the freight companies invested in longer sidings or shorter trains.
by Earw0rm | 2025-08-08 15:19:21+00:00
It sucks for art almost by definition, because art exists for its own reason and is in some way novel.

However, even artists need supporting materials and tooling that meet bare criteria. Some care what kind of wood their brush is made from, but I'd guess most do not.

I suspect it'll prove useless at the heart of almost every art form, but powerful at the periphery.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-08 15:19:22+00:00
I'm all-in on SSR. The client shouldn't have any state other than the session token, current URL and DOM.

Networks and servers will only get faster. Speed of light is constant, but we aren't even using its full capabilities right now. Hollow core fiber promises upward of 30% reduction in latency for everyone using the internet. There are RF-based solutions that provide some of this promise today. Even ignoring a wild RTT of 500ms, a SSR page rendered in 16ms would feel relatively instantaneous next to any of the mainstream web properties online today if delivered on that connection.

I propose that there is little justification to take longer than a 60hz frame to render a client's HTML response on the server. A Zen5 core can serialize something like 30-40 megabytes of JSON in this timeframe. From the server's perspective, this is all just a really fancy UTF-8 string. You should be measuring this stuff in microseconds, not milliseconds. The transport delay being "high" is not a good excuse to get lazy with CPU time. Using SQLite is the easiest way I've found to get out of millisecond jail. Any hosted SQL provider is like a ball & chain when you want to get under 1ms.

There are even browser standards that can mitigate some of the navigation delay concerns:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Speculation...
by falcor84 | 2025-08-08 15:19:24+00:00
I think that's it's really cool to learn the algorithms, as tools that improve reasoning in math, in CS and in systems thinking in general.

What I dislike is the focus on avoiding errors. I think it's beyond silly these days to deduct points from a student when they got a couple of questions on a set wrong, but clearly understand the algorithm. We should figure out a way to teach algorithms without focusing on manual execution of them. For older kids, the proper way is possibly to get them to implement them in code, until they pass the given test cases, and for younger kids, I suppose that despite its costs, I'd go back to oral examination.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-08 15:19:27+00:00
> But if we did provide housing for all 500,000+ homeless people in the US we shouldn't be surprised when some do become slums.

That's what happens in a free society. We can't force people to be responsible adults when they don't want to.

(But we can, and should, contain any mess they create, which I think you and I agree about the bigger details.)
by ncallaway | 2025-08-08 15:19:32+00:00
> When you point out that the LLM does not know the number of R's in the word "Strawberry", you are not exposing the LLM as some kind of sham, you're just admitting to being a fool.

I'm sorry but that's not reasonable. Yes, I understand what you mean on an architectural level, but if a product is being deployed to the masses you are the fool if you expect every user to have a deep architectural understanding of it.

If it's being sold as "this model is a PhD-level expert on every topic in your pocket", then the underlying technical architecture and its specific foibles are irrelevant. What matters is the claims about what it's capable of doing and its actual performance.

Would it matter if GPT-5 couldn't count the number of r's in a specific word if the marketing claims being made around it were more grounded? Probably not. But that's not what's happening.
by 1659447091 | 2025-08-08 15:19:41+00:00
It’s not a long term trend. Definitely not long enough to do what you think or want it to do. Instead it’s only harming families.

If the reason was women felt safe enough to forgo the extra income then it could be a long term trend. But that is not this. This is forcing women out due to short sighted decisions just long enough for the current kids to get old enough to not need a parent at home all the time.

Only long enough for a couple hundred thousand couples to go from 2 incomes to one. The long term trend will be women seeing they are going to be the one to take a hit and decide to not have kids and keep working. It reduces population (for people that care about that) and keeps people working cause now they have to make sure they have money for being elderly with zero children because they couldn’t afford them. This idea that women are going to suddenly revert to wanting to be stay at home mothers by making life harder for families is some fantastical thinking.
by lordnacho | 2025-08-08 15:19:52+00:00
I went to one of those universities where a lot of people are hired by consulting firms.

I don't think I've ever met anyone in the business who thought they were doing what it says on the tin. This is a story you will hear over and over again: "The MD went and sold the project, but now a bunch of graduates are tasked with helping the company". I know someone who was advising a central bank, aged 22.

At best, the young consultants tell the company what they wanted to hear, and use the report as their excuse to do what they were going to do anyway.

You also have to wonder how much their public facing advice actually is based on experience, rather than being advertising. You often get these dressed-up white papers and pseudo-academic articles talking about some aspect of business coming from these firms.
by __loam | 2025-08-08 15:19:53+00:00
I find it really difficult to take this stuff seriously when the proponents of these tools are constantly flitting from tool to tool. There's tools and paradigms I've used for years at a time. Some things like vim have been used for decades.

This all just feels profoundly immature. You tell us one thing then two months later you're on to the next thing. There's no sense of mastery here.
by blitzar | 2025-08-08 15:20:01+00:00
> real world data about the country's economy

The data is backward looking, sometimes by as much as 3 months, rarely less than a month old. The only way the "data" knows there is a reccession is if it stared 3/4 of a year ago.

If you are a CEO or running a business and you are blaming your business decisions on the stats from 3 months ago that came out today you should get out of the chair and let someone with a brain sit in it.
by Epa095 | 2025-08-08 15:20:15+00:00
Feel free to look at dividend yields, but I can pretty much guarantee that it has not halfed in the period the stock market doubled. Most likely it stayed relatively flat, somewhere between 1.5% and 2%.

So if you had 100 million you would get 1.7 million as dividend 5-7 years ago, now it's roughly doubled, without selling any of your stocks.

Not that it really matters. Given how much faster the stock market grows compared to salaries you can sell a few percentages of your wealth every year, and still get richerer by doing nothing besides owning.
by cfors | 2025-08-08 15:21:06+00:00
I don't disagree that rock solid is a good choice, but there is a ton of innovation necessary for data stores.

Especially in the context of embedding search, which this article is also trying to do. We need database that can efficiently store/query high-dimensional embeddings, and handle the nuance of real-world applications as well such as filtered-ANN. There is a ton of innovation in this space and it's crucial to powering the next generation architectures of just about every company out there. At this point, data-stores are becoming a bottleneck for serving embedding search and I cannot understate that advancements in this are extremely important for enabling these solutions. This is why there is an explosion of vector-databases right now.

This article is a great example of where the actual data-providers are not providing the solutions companies need right now, and there is so much room for improvement in this space.
by throwaway29303 | 2025-08-08 15:21:13+00:00
I turned to Academic Torrents, a platform widely used by researchers to share datasets. There, I downloaded a large NSFW dataset often cited in AI research. I unzipped the file in my Google Drive to begin preprocessing. A few days later, my entire Google account was banned — without warning, without explanation, and without any clear path to appeal.

Why did you think this was a good idea?
by self_awareness | 2025-08-08 15:21:18+00:00
> From this statement alone I'd guess not because saying life "is not bad" when it's a constant stress about how to make ends meet

Will we both race who is more poor now? I know some poor people who paid $0 for the homes they live in. And I had to sign a loan contract for 20 years. I know some poor people who read books all day and have their small youtube channels for fun. Yet I'm the one who loses the majority of the day to sit in the office. The poor people I know are very different from your imaginated vision of poverty.

> In my world the rich would be paying much more

And how would you make them to pay more? When they control the legislations. How would you make Donald Trump to pay 75% taxes of his wealth? If he'll want then he'll become the president.

Also people like you always seem to want to have the power of defining who is poor and who is not. This is poor. This is not poor. I don't want to be judged like this. Not by people who think they have seen it all, but it appears that all they've seen was just YouTube.
by ileonichwiesz | 2025-08-08 15:21:27+00:00
It’s plausible in a sci-fi sort of way, but where does the model come from? After a hundred years of focused study we’re kinda beginning to understand what’s going on inside a fruit fly, how are we going to provide the machine with “a perfect model of all interactions between biological/chemical processes”?

If you had that perfect model, you’ve basically solved an entire field of science. There wouldn’t be a lot more to learn by plugging it into a computer afterwards.
by aosaigh | 2025-08-08 15:21:34+00:00
I’m not sure I agree that I’ll never look at the code. I think it’s still important to know how the code is working for your own mental model of the app. So in this case I’ll be testing and reviewing everything to see how it’s implemented. With that in mind it’s useful for me as well as serving as context for the AI. That said, you may be right.
by throwawayb2025 | 2025-08-08 15:21:44+00:00
Recursive improvement without any physical change maybe limited. If any physical change like more gpu or different network configuration is required to experiment and again change to learn from it that might not be easy. Convincing human to do on AGI behalf may not be that simple. There might be multiple path to try and teams may not agree with each other. Specially if the cost of trial is high.
by Izkata | 2025-08-08 15:21:46+00:00
It's more of a "holding it wrong" situation with the datastores used with React, rather than directly with React itself, with updated data being accessed too high in the tree and causing large chunks of the page to be unnecessarily rerendered.

This was actually the recommended way to do it for years with the atom/molecule/organism/section/page style of organizing React components intentionally moving data access up the tree into organism and higher. Don't know what current recommendations are.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-08 15:22:07+00:00
I think they think that government is inherently bad (with the exception of the military and certain law enforcement) and reducing it is automatically good. I think this because I heard Rush Limbaugh saying it for three hours a day every day for years. It’s not hard to figure out their motivations. Just listen to them. Understanding those motivations can be tough, due to a combination of very different values and a reliance on various facts that happen to be untrue, but you can at least figure out the first level pretty easily.
by FabHK | 2025-08-08 15:22:21+00:00
Suppose you don't have a hammer, but just hammer at things with bare hands. Then you find some primitive rock - artificial general hammering! With that you can over time build some primitive hammer - now we're talking superhuman general hammering. With that you can then build a better hammer more quickly, and boom, you have recursive self-improvement, and soon you'll take over the world.
by codingdave | 2025-08-08 15:22:22+00:00
> Unique wobbly character mechanics create unpredictable gameplay

Yep, that was my complaint. The game itself was fine. A little basic, but nothing wrong with it, fun for a few minutes. But like you said - the physics make it unpredictable. That adds frustration, not fun.

Now that you've coded it, though, maybe figure out a better genre of game, one where unpredictability adds to the gameplay. A platformer game just doesn't seem like it, because you want your movement to be predictable when the whole point is to move over obstacles.
by ipython | 2025-08-08 15:22:25+00:00
I would demand an itemized bill from that urgent care and play hard ball with that provider. That's absurd, even by US standards. I've had ER visits that total less than that. My son had a cast that fell off while on travel in Florida, and we stopped by an ER (only place that was open and could fit a new cast). Total cost out the door _at the ER_ was less than $500, which while expensive, is nowhere near what you're talking about.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-08-08 15:22:39+00:00
> Who actually asked for keyless entry?

Me. I have problems with short-term memory and I kept forgetting my keys in the ignition.

This isn’t due to laziness or lack of trying. It’s a hardware problem that makes developing or following habits in certain situations nearly impossible. It’s like asking a blind man to organize things by color.

Now that I don’t have to take my keys out of my pocket, I’ve never left them in my car.