MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-12 18:21:53+00:00
> By law, no more than 15% is going to the insurance company (which isn't just profit, that covers all the administrative costs of running the plan).

That's quite a bit to a middleman.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6179628/

"According to Reinhardt, “doctors’ net take-home pay (that is income minus expenses) amounts to only about 10% of overall health care spending."

It's also a big incentive for the insurer to increase prices. If they want more revenues, and more profits, they have to get overall spending to go up.

> Your basic family care provider living in Podunkville earns as much as a mid-career SWE in the Bay Area, and specialists earn way, way more.

Good. They should.
by ageitgey | 2025-09-12 18:23:31+00:00
QGIS is great. It's a slightly janky version of ArcMap, but ArcMap has always been janky anyway, so it doesn't matter for most things. And QGIS is super extensible.

There have been so many random times that QGIS has helped me out over the years. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to it!
by efeqasfcadvxcv | 2025-09-12 18:23:32+00:00
Rethink your ideas, you are very wrong here.

It is a fantastic escape from debasement of fiat, and always has been an escape from the perils of fiat currencies. It was created for this very purpose in 2009, and has absolutely achieved this goal. A 2019 $ vs a 2025 $ are significantly different purchasing power. Yet a 2019 BTC vs a 2025 BTC shows remarkable capital appreciation. You can pick any time scale you like, and except for very specific edge cases, it has in general been a great hedge against debasement of fiat, and will continue to be.

I have been able to preserve the purchasing power of my savings for over a decade now, and still keep buying every week.

Why would this be any different the next decade? (beyond the attenuation effect from more capital flowing into the space?).
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-09-12 18:24:57+00:00
So noise cancelling headphones that are worse at noise cancelling are better?

And the headphones are “overpriced” even though they are the same price as comparable devices that have worse ANC?

And a simple Google search tells you how to pair AirPods to none Apple devices

https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/airpods/dev499c9718b/w...
by freedomben | 2025-09-12 18:25:05+00:00
On a nationwide scale, yeah probably not, but nor do I think it should be done at the federal level. You could get economies of scale on purchasing and storage, but I suspect there would be more inefficiencies emergent from such a large scale thing than would be worth it. Each geographic area has very different needs, very different population makeups, and more, so somebody local is much better equipped to evaluate and plan. Even just "how much water to store" varies immensely. If you're on a water shed in an area with frequent rainfall, it would be wasteful to store a ton of water, but if you're in a desert water storage is one of the most important things. But even just communication setups like ham radio and designated response personnel is something that needs to be worked out locally.

I've been involved in several different cities emergency preparedness plans though, and there is actually a lot more happening in the US than most people think or know. It rarely if ever makes the news, but it happens.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-12 18:25:20+00:00
Journalism is kind of a weird thing... it's often been about truth to power and reporting even what the govt/establishment doesn't always want to see. Of course this also attracts a lot of activism. I think they've, for a long while, crossed over to more propaganda over truth in general. This combined with infotainment news business trends in general is a bad mix.

I think it was just yesterday, I saw an article about an ICE raid of the Samsung plant in Georgia. It was a pretty long article, and even the tone of the article was pretty level. That said, there was a critical and very important piece missing from the article altogether... "Why?" As in what law(s) were broken and how/why the raid was used. TBH, I don't know that a raid was necessary over revised negotiations between DoJ/ICE, Samsung, Korea and the people in question... That said, the fact the article clearly didn't even attempt to report the ICE reasoning was pretty damning of the author and the site.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-09-12 18:25:43+00:00
> Regardless of whether the driver is a derivative work of the kernel, the combination of the kernel and the driver is obviously derivative of both its parts and so you have to comply if you ship that, too.

If you ship the verbatim kernel (with its license intact), a 'GPL condom', and the rest of your driver that is unrelated to the kernel source (and is thus not "copied or adapted from" any part of the kernel "in a fashion requiring copyright permission"), then that would be an "aggregate" according to the GPL, and it does not impose any requirements on the rest of your driver.

My point is this:

> The most obvious way around it is to claim the thing you created is not a derived work.

Not being a "modified version" of any part of the kernel, in the GPL sense, does not require being 100% clueless about the kernel's semantics or behavior. If your code's relation to the kernel source stays within the threshold of fair use, then it cannot be infringement, thus it cannot have been adapted "in a fashion requiring copyright permission", thus it cannot be a "modified version" in the GPL sense.

Software copyright is broad to begin with, but it is not infinitely broad.
by godelski | 2025-09-12 18:25:47+00:00
> get your state to use STAR voting instead of first past the post and you get more than two choices, and then liars can be evicted even if their state/district goes >60% to the left or right.

This. Or any cardinal voting, such ask approval, ends up being a huge win.

The system is flawed from its roots. People need a voting system that allows them to specify their conscious, not vote on strategy only. The latter only leads to a race to the bottom. Unfortunately ranked voting systems do not allow for this, and we've seen those predictions come true in places like New York.

> It's also the thing I don't understand about party loyalty.

What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal. My parents are some of these types of people, but it is also pretty common. Together we'll happily criticize any member of the left, we'll happily criticize the abstract notion of politicians, but as soon as a name like Donald Trump leaves my mouth there's accusations of communism. I've literally had conversations where we both agree Biden is too old, we both agree that the country shouldn't be run by geriatrics or anyone over 60, but as soon as the next part is mentioned about how this means I don't want Trump then they start talking about how he's a special case and will contradict everything that they said before. They literally cannot understand how I voted Biden but also happily criticize him and state that I think he was unfit to be president.

We've turned politics into religion. It's not just the right (though I'd argue it's more common), but so many people love to paint everything as black and white. Anyone who thinks the world isn't full of shades of gray is a fucking zealot and we've let that go on for too long.
by tietjens | 2025-09-12 18:25:56+00:00
Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.
by OutOfHere | 2025-09-12 18:25:59+00:00
The bias in favor of "dark matter" is a strong example of why academic physics is corrupt. There is absolutely no astrophysical evidence for dark matter, only gravitational anomalies of regular matter, yet significant money has been funded into it for decades, at the expense of ignoring other simpler satisfactory theories. The alternate theories have been prematurely rejected on false grounds without giving them sufficient attention or effort in their development.
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-12 18:26:08+00:00
> In the United States, insurance companies are legally mandated to pay out at least 85% of premiums as medical expenses.

Which means, of course, that their main option to increase profit is to increase overall spending on healthcare. Reducing cost is directly against their interests.

UnitedHealthcare buys up physician practices, and pays theirs higher rates. That's part of the 85% bucket, but they're profiting off it. https://www.statnews.com/2024/11/25/unitedhealth-higher-paym...

> Single-payer systems still have administrative costs.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20110920....

"According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, administrative costs in Medicare are only about 2 percent of operating expenditures. Defenders of the insurance industry estimate administrative costs as 17 percent of revenue. Insurance industry-funded studies exclude private plans’ marketing costs and profits from their calculation of administrative costs. Even so, Medicare’s overhead is dramatically lower."

> Realistically, switching to single-payer and doing nothing else would reduce costs by a single-digit percent.

I mean, that's a start.

If you chart the US against the rest of the OECD, we're doing something bafflingly expensive versus everyone else. It is certain to be multi-factorial, but our insurance setup absolutely plays a role. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_health_expendit...
Ask HN: Who reads the "newest" feed, and what do you look for there?
by rand_num_gen | 2025-09-12 18:26:09+00:00
Most people browse Hacker News through the front page (top / hot), since it's already filtered for quality by the community.

But the "newest" feed feels very different: it's raw, unfiltered, and often low-quality. Yet I notice some users clearly dig into it, upvote good posts, and bring hidden gems to the front page.

I'm curious: - Who here regularly reads the "newest" feed? - What kind of content are you looking for (early projects, research papers, niche blogs, etc.)? - Do you see yourselves as "content scouts" for the rest of the community, or just looking for things you personally enjoy? - How do you filter signal from noise?

I think this is an interesting part of HN culture that doesn't get discussed much.
by Herring | 2025-09-12 18:26:43+00:00
Maybe your society. Finland is doing great with media literacy and resilience to misinformation in Europe.

https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/europe/finland-f...

As a general rule, you can sit there and moan about problems or you can spend 5min to find proven solutions. It's hard to do both.
by throw4847285 | 2025-09-12 18:26:50+00:00
The irony is that people accused 20th Century academics of being "post-modern" and "post-truth" when really they were reporting accurately on how fragile our society is.

When Bruno Latour tried to argue that science was socially constructed, he wasn't trying to undermine it. He was trying to be challenge a certain naive understanding of the world in which science is clearly true, progress is obvious to all, and science/technology can be entirely divorced from the rest of society. In recent years, he has undertaken an active effort to shore up the authority of science, but this isn't him recanting. He always knew the scientific consensus was fragile.

Latour is just one example of many. The concept of performativity, Adorno and Horkheimer on the failure of the Enlightenment, Feyerabend's epistemic anarchism. All attempts to understand society in a rigorous way that were dismissed or willfully misunderstood because a naive narrative of progress meant not having to worry about those kinds of things. We were going to get ever closer to the truth and build better and better things, with no negative consequences. That was the promise.
by shmerl | 2025-09-12 18:27:12+00:00
You can read about DX12 being worse here: https://themaister.net/blog/2021/11/

But that's not even the point. Everyone could collaborate on the common API and make it better. Where were Apple and MS? Chasing their NIHs instead of doing it, so you argument is missing the point. It's not about how good it is (and it is good enough, though improving it is always welcome), it's about it being the only collaborative and shared effort. Everything else is simply irrelevant in result even if it could be better in some ways.
by aj7 | 2025-09-12 18:27:23+00:00
This is ridiculous. I’ll tell you why. Here I quote:

“All parts in the assembled model must be made of paper. Each part must be a single, solid color. The parts must not use any printed textures or designs. The model must be represented as a simple polyhedron.”

Must. Must. Must. This is a game. Or an art school exercise.

Modeling is concerned only with attaining the necessary accuracy. Not conforming to a methodology.
by MarkusQ | 2025-09-12 18:27:30+00:00
It was arguably correct when we had such a small quantity of data that it made sense to _count_ it rather than _measure_ it. But those days are long gone.

If no one had ever seen more than a dozen grains of sand, it would makes sense to count them and say things like "Sue just showed me her awesome gem collection; she has a diamond, two rubies, and three sands!" But when you are ordering sand by the truck load, that starts sounding really stupid, and you need to shift to measuring it ("sixteen tons of sand") and not counting it ("four million trillion sands").

Mass nouns are measured by giving a quantifier and a unit (three bytes, 64 kilobytes) and do not partake of the singular/plural distinction, which only applies to count nouns.

The British / American distinction is actually easier to explain by saying that they don't partake in the "unitary collective" shorthand; the British parliament are a (countable) collection of politicians, while the US Congress is an undifferentiated mass of...something. The Jury is (are) still out which of these best captures the semantic situation, whereas with code and data we are well past the point where talking about an individual code or datum sounds about like talking about a water or an air.
by FloorEgg | 2025-09-12 18:27:49+00:00
How about this:

Regulation is a controlling mechanism that puts constraints on what people can and can't do. Some constraints will enable more things to happen because it reduces certain risks (e.g. property rights and laws against stealing enable investment and development of property).

But when there is too much regulation it has the opposite effect, and instead of enabling progress it stifles it. It acts as a calcification that slows change and makes society less adaptable.

So it's not that regulation is bad, it's that too much regulation can be bad.

Now in terms of regulating people's abilities to transact specifically: in a health democracy putting some regulations on transactions will probably have a positive effect because it can limit abuse and risk, and therefore increase freedom for honest people to make transactions. However when a civilization reaches the point in its life cycle when it is transitioning from a healthy plurality into authoritarianism, the risk of over-regulation of transactions skyrockets and the elimination of privacy when transacting is extremely likely to lead to tyranny.

When someone acts like regulating transactions is inherently bad, they're either repeating something they heard and didn't question, or they're assuming the people they are speaking to are educated in history and have a healthy fear of tyranny.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-12 18:27:51+00:00
This kind of thing. Particularly good “Ask HN”s fall through the cracks.

A few weeks back I was upvoting anything on the new page that wasn’t low quality posts about AI like “I vibe coded that almost works”, “Show HN: My me-too startup that’s just a Chat GPT” wrapper but that onslaught either stopped or I don’t care about it anymore.
by Freedom2 | 2025-09-12 18:28:35+00:00
Sabotaging? The candidate learned that their interviewers, and probably the company as a whole, isn't curious about languages or stuff that is outside of their wheelhouse.

What if the interviewers decided to ask the candidate about their language choice and trade-offs between different languages? Wouldn't that actually give them more signals into the skill of the engineer, rather than just blindly following their script?
by nailer | 2025-09-12 18:28:44+00:00
Sure. I lived in the UK for 15 years, and have lived in the US for 2.

In London, someone grabs your phone, threatens to take your watch with a machete, or tries to rape your child. In New York someone marches down the street wanting to punch anyone that gets close. You let yourself be victimised and then report it.

In Texas, they generally don't do these things because they might get shot. People defend themselves.

In exchange, we accept there will be some unwanted violence. Kirk made an analogy here: we don't want road deaths, yet we don't ban cars. We don't want school shootings, but we don't ban guns.

South Africans in London have similar perspectives regarding being able to defend themselves.
by seangrogg | 2025-09-12 18:28:46+00:00
I don't consider myself fully qualified to speak to this, so please take it with a grain of salt.

From what I gather it seems like you could potentially create scenarios where TOCTOU is indeed a problem, but in considering the situations where it could come up I do feel like all my ideas are somewhat contrived in nature. And even when noodling on it I very much get the feeling that I return to my previous statement: consider what you're building. I think that the potential for TOCTOU could potentially compromise a hypervisor's security (i.e. letting an arbitrary number of user on a system make arbitrary io_uring calls) and even if I couldn't demonstrate how that could be weaponized I would avoid it. However, if you're writing an application that's going to do a read(2) or something, I don't see TOCTOU being a uniquely io_uring problem.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-09-12 18:28:49+00:00
From TFA:

"There’s zero intelligent content about the underlying scientific issues (is fundamental theoretical physics in trouble?), just a random collection of material about podcasts, written by someone who clearly knows nothing about the topic he’s writing about. The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal are turned over to uninformed writers getting their information from Joe Rogan podcasts. Any hope of figuring out what is true and what is false is now completely gone."

Now extend this to the state of all public discourse in the US degraded by propaganda.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-09-12 18:28:55+00:00
> A goldmine for social engineering.

Okay, I mean some medical studies collect data on millions of people, and those datasets too have the potential that, due to security arcana, can be data breached. Does that mean I should be able to sue all medical studies for collecting data on that potential? Of course I support some kind of penalties for data breaches, but you see that it something entirely different from, "data collection itself causes harm." You just can't show that...
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-12 18:28:56+00:00
> No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus.

Poe's Law strikes again, but for reference there are even several major categories:

Some things are nobody's business. If you have religious parents and you're gay, you may not want them to know that, even if your religious parents work for the government.

People have proprietary secrets. A drug company or tech company can't be spending a billion dollars on 95%-finished R&D only to have a random cop take a $10,000 bribe to hand it over to a foreign competitor.

It's important to protect the political opposition from the incumbents. The thing Nixon had to resign over? That.

Sometimes the bad guys work for the government. If your abusive ex is a cop, they shouldn't be able to trivially find you without a warrant.

The government shouldn't be able to go on a fishing expedition. If you do something that isn't illegal, or that you have a right to do, that shouldn't be an excuse to trawl through your life so you can be prosecuted for breaking a law that everybody breaks but only people who step on the toes of the powerful are prosecuted for.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu

"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden
by yks | 2025-09-12 18:28:58+00:00
I mean, you can ask this question about literally every war. It ends with a heavily armed border, and uneasy peace until Russia gets a leader that realizes that wars of attrition destroy attacker's nation wealth just as much as defender's. Maybe Putin achieves the immortality he's dreaming about, or maybe Russia never gets a leader like that, well, at least Ukraine would get an opportunity to build up a nation that is too costly to invade.
by legitster | 2025-09-12 18:29:09+00:00
By nature, journalists are not subject matter experts. Even in the height of our technological progress during the space race, the best they could do was call up a nationally recognized expert, get an oversimplified explanation, and publish a summary of that. The true knowledge was locked into a small set of researcher circles running out of exclusive labs and in whatever they published or lectured about.

Journalism is the one part of this equation that has changed the least since then. The way I see it, there are two bigger forces at work:

- The demand that normal people have for this sort of knowledge. People today believe they should have a front row seat to everything and be an active participant. And to a lesser degree we have encouraged this as a society through television, social media, or even the way we assumed every student needed a well-rounded undergraduate college education.

- Academia has exploded in size and scope in the last century. The prestige, the hierarchy, the social ladder climbing, the funding battles, the publishing race, the sheer number of graduate students in these programs. These programs are meat grinders that pump out all sorts of noise and failed academics with grudges. We have conveniently forgot that there is a massive ongoing replication crisis that is still largely being ignored.

Journalists and scientists can point fingers at each other as much as they want and claim the other knows nothing about what they are speaking of. But at the end of the day the sheer amount of information (right and wrong) at our fingertips is bearing down on our society like a great weight ready to destroy us all.