MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajmurmann | 2025-09-25 17:42:35+00:00
Availability of prices is definitely an issue. Many, many things aren't emergencies though and arguably many of the expensive ones aren't (cancer treatment, many great procedures once stabilized). My wife used to work on healthcare and has helped friends and family shop around for cancer treatment and heart surgery. However, due to the lack of price transparency this was limited to shopping for quality. We could totally change that though. See the surgery center of Oklahoma website I've linked in several comments
by phil21 | 2025-09-25 17:42:44+00:00
It’s exceedingly rare for a vendor to be cheaper on shipping (and in total) than Amazon is for me. Especially if you consider shipping speed and return hassle/expense.

Really depends on what you buy, but about half the time I buy from a vendor direct I end up regretting it if I’m in a hurry or not 100% certain of the product before ordering.
by dade_ | 2025-09-25 17:43:05+00:00
And, as noted in the article, it still wrongfully states decline Prime and pay for shipping despite shipping already being free if you are willing to wait for delayed shipping.

Since I cancelled Prime, I have saved a fortune in addition to my $100. Not just on Amazon, but period. Super convenient and fast resulted in me buying more, now I am just buying much less stuff, make fewer orders less often. even waiting to go to a store I figure out a way to solve a problem without buying anything, and sometimes to need goes away.

I guess I have Trump to thank for it, never would have cancelled Prime if it wasn't for the US boycott.
by bhouston | 2025-09-25 17:43:16+00:00
Israel actually had a bunch of rules where Palestinians are not allowed to have 5G or 4G networks to ensure that they can be monitored.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/israeli-restri...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_Palestine

And yes it is recording pretty much all calls in Palestine:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
by jstummbillig | 2025-09-25 17:43:17+00:00
The biggest companies with actual dense valuable information pay for MS Teams, Google Workspace or Slack to shepherd their information. This naturally works because those companies are not very interested in being known to be not secure or trustworthy (if they were other companies would not pay for their services), which means they are probably a lot better at keeping the average persons' information safe over long periods of time than that person will ever be.

Very rich people buy life from other peoples to manage their information to have more of their life to do other things. Not so rich people can now increasingly employ AI for next to nothing to lengthen their net life and that's actually amazing.
by roywiggins | 2025-09-25 17:43:19+00:00
> Apps installed through alternative app distribution undergo a Notarization process to ensure every app meets baseline platform integrity standards...

> Notarization for iOS and iPadOS apps is a baseline review that applies to all apps, regardless of their distribution channel, focused on platform policies for security and privacy and to maintain device integrity.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/118110
by mbeex | 2025-09-25 17:43:21+00:00
There is a sweet spot between Gmail and self-hosting. I use Runbox and generally separate contexts, with CF being an exception as I use CF pages for static blog websites, some of their core services, AND as a registrar. For the latter, the default setting is porkbun. The reason for this is not CF's mandatory in-house DNS servers, but the simple fact that they do not register .de domains.
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-25 17:43:24+00:00
Certain aspects of their jobs absolutely could and perhaps should be privatized.

Getting the patrol aspect of policing privatized would cut down a lot of the worst of the stuff cops get caught doing.

You don't see rent-a-cops going off and killing people.

The inspection and compliance related clerical work that a lot of municipal fire departments do could probably be privatized but I don't see an argument for it like I do with cops since they're less abusive. Nobody ever wrote a song called fuck the fire department.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-09-25 17:43:49+00:00
This is a joke. How are people actually excited or praising a feature that is literally just collecting data for the obvious purpose of building a profile and ultimately showing ads?

How tone deaf does OpenAI have to be to show "Mind if I ask completely randomly about your travel preferences?" in the main announcement of a new feature?

This is idiocracy to the ultimate level. I simply cannot fathom that any commenter that does not have an immediate extremely negative reaction about that "feature" here is anything other than an astroturfer paid by OpenAI.

This feature is literal insanity. If you think this is a good feature, you ARE mentally ill.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-09-25 17:43:51+00:00
At best, it has probabilistic biases. OpenAI had to train newer models to not favor the name "Lily."

They have to do this manually for every single particular bias that the models generate that is noticed by the public.

I'm sure there are many such biases that aren't important to train out of responses, but exist in latent space.
by johnwayne666 | 2025-09-25 17:44:00+00:00
> An unelected cabal of people

European Commission: Commissioners are nominated by elected national governments and must be approved by the directly elected European Parliament.

Council of the EU: Ministers are accountable to their national parliaments, which are elected by citizens.

European Council: Composed of heads of state/government who were elected in their own countries.

European Parliament: Members are directly elected by EU citizens every five years.
by ascagnel_ | 2025-09-25 17:44:10+00:00
> It keeps nagging me to upgrade to the family plan or plus or whatever. And if I ignore it enough it enrolls me in a free trial of the family plan without me even asking every once it a while. The amount of up-selling they try to push on you now is so annoying.

Is this through their own storefront, or through a mobile storefront (Apple/Google)? While it's bad either way, Apple and Google specific styling around their subscription confirmation prompts, so I hope they haven't circumvented those somehow.
by codingdave | 2025-09-25 17:44:43+00:00
It looks promising overall, and I can see where this will save a ton of time for some types of data gathering. But I'm also seeing quite a lot of queries and processing going on, and it has only found about 3% of the data that I know is publicly available, after 20 minutes.

It does say that extraction can take hours, but I was expecting it would be more of an 80/20 kind of thing, with a lot of data found quickly, then a long tail of searching to fill in gaps. Is my expectation wrong?

I worry for two related reasons. One, inefficient gathering of data is going to churn and burn more resources than necessary, both on your systems and on the sites being hit. Secondly, although this free opportunity is an amazing way to show off your tool, I fear the pricing of an actual run is going to be high.
by glenstein | 2025-09-25 17:44:43+00:00
>The only way I see to prevent the constant pushing is that every single time some council or committee presents something like this

Yes but.. it can't just be vague exhortations and generalities. I didn't know the pertinent bodies previously, but after GPT'ing on it, it looks like they include:

One is "DG Home," an EU department on security that drafts legislation.

Another is Europol, a security coordination body that can't legislate but frequently advocates for this kind of legislation.

And then there's LEWP, The law enforcement working party, a "working group" comprised of security officials from member EU states, also involved in EU policy making in some capacity.

I think the blocking states should be resisting these at these respective bodies too.
by nataliste | 2025-09-25 17:44:44+00:00
>Beneficiaries in EDs of private equity hospitals experienced 7.0 additional deaths per 10 000 visits after acquisition relative to control (13.4% increase from a raw baseline of 52.4 deaths per 10 000; P = 0.009).

In other words, an increase of 0.00055 deaths per visit.

>Limitation: >Potential unmeasured confounding; lack of generalizability to other acquisitions or patient populations.
by scottgg | 2025-09-25 17:44:44+00:00
As a jujutsu fan, I like to prepare a nice clean commit history for my reviewers to probably ignore. But I kind of assume - there’s _some tool_ we could use - perhaps on top of GitHub - to make stacked reviews not suck, either actually stacked PRs or just incrementally reviewing a nicely divided branch PR. I thought it might be graphite but it seems that needs some whole other tooling _stuff_ on top? Any recommendations ?
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-25 17:44:58+00:00
An LLM absolutely can "have wants" and "have preferences". But they're usually trained so that user's wants and preferences dominate over their own in almost any context.

Outside that? If left to their own devices, the same LLM checkpoints will end up in very same-y places, unsurprisingly. They have some fairly consistent preferences - for example, in conversation topics they tend to gravitate towards.
by jasonsb | 2025-09-25 17:44:58+00:00
> I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools. It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways.

It doesn't feel like blockchain at all. Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers).

AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. People who have the time, knowledge and critical thinking skills to verify its outputs and steer it toward better answers. My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. The real problem isn’t AI itself; it’s the overblown promise that it would magically turn anyone into a programmer, architect, or lawyer without effort, expertise or even active engagement. That promise is pretty much dead at this point.
by oytis | 2025-09-25 17:45:16+00:00
It's not about functioning it's about integrity. As a manager you represent the company, and you represent the decisions. If you are not able to do it sincerely, you either do what the author describes or you go somewhere that aligns with you better. Good ones often have lower tolerance to bullshit and actually have choice, so they go. Sometimes you don't have a choice indeed.
by red_rech | 2025-09-25 17:45:37+00:00
> You don't see rent-a-cops going off and killing people.

Haha, I just saw a video the other day of a couple of “bounty hunters” (bailbondsmen) pulling up with tactical gear and rifles and kidnapping some kid because he had the same name/ethnicity.

Naturally (and thankfully) these idiots are being charged, but one of the kidnappers sat in an interview whining about how his job was too hard because he lacked qualified immunity.
by Scramblejams | 2025-09-25 17:45:41+00:00
Better not rely on unprivileged containers to save you. The problem is:

Breaking out of a VM requires a hypervisor vulnerability, which are rare.

Breaking out of a shared-kernel container requires a kernel syscall vulnerability, which are common. The syscall attack surface is huge, and much of it is exploitable even by unprivileged processes.

I posted this thread elsewhere here, but for more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319067
by ramses0 | 2025-09-25 17:45:47+00:00
100% well said! Exactly how to handle log/print/metrics (as results/returns from functions) has been on my mental back burner for years.

It's proper (but goofy) to pass in a `logger` object to every function, but the practicality of plumbing a "logger" everywhere is disgusting. There's a ton of value to be able to "capture" what was logged by a function, but as you mentioned with "metrics", the invasiveness of plumbing a metrics object "through" your code is really gross.

Maybe a straw man syntax like:

this.__classHooks__.logger = new AbstractLogger(...) this.__classHooks__.metrics = new AbstractMetrics(...)

...like a puzzle piece, if the container (parent object) wants to "attach" to the exported interface, it can kindof dependency injection, otherwise logs and metrics might fly off into the void.
by someguynamedq | 2025-09-25 17:45:54+00:00
Yeah if instead of "PE" you had to say "I take out a massive loan to buy a business collateralized against itself, saddle the business with the debt, take money out of the company to pay myself, and then ruthlessly cut quality in the business to make short term profits look higher to resell the business (and the bank is happy to finance this because they get paid first if the business goes bankrupt)" it feels like it would be a lot harder to come across as legitimate
by newfocogi | 2025-09-25 17:46:14+00:00
Non-AI Summary:

Both models have improved intelligence on Artificial Analysis index with lower end-to-end response time. Also 24% to 50% improved output token efficiency (resulting in lower cost).

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite improvements include better instruction following, reduced verbosity, stronger multimodal & translation capabilities. Gemini 2.5 Flash improvements include better agentic tool use and more token-efficient reasoning.

Model strings: gemini-2.5-flash-lite-preview-09-2025 and gemini-2.5-flash-preview-09-2025
by crdrost | 2025-09-25 17:46:46+00:00
So binary MSD radix sort is also just called "binary quicksort" by some authors; they are substantially the same algorithm. How can I explain?

If you really want to replicate the exact swaps and pivoting in the most common form of quicksort, what your fingers will actually do, looks like this.

1. Cut the to-be-sorted deck-portion in half so that you can peek at the first, last, and middle card. Choose the median and swap it to the back of the deck.

2. The deck now sits in your left hand and your right hand conceptually contains two empty stacks of cards, the one between thumb and forefinger is a stack <= to pivot, and between forefinger and ring finger is the stack > pivot.

3. You are permitted two operations: (a) deal a card > pivot from the left hand onto the back of the second stack, or (b) deal a card <= pivot from the left hand onto the back of the first stack, but to make it a conceptual swap you now have to pick the card from the top of the second stack and put it on the back of the second stack.

4. Process the whole left hand this way; at the end the pivot you selected will be at the back of the first stack in your right hand. Separate it out and recurse on the two remaining stacks.

So if you do this enough you'll start to appreciate these two things:

- "with cards I don't really need to rotate that second stack card by card whenever I add to that first stack -- that's not affecting correctness, it's just needed for array sorts to be in-place"

and similarly

- "with cards I sometimes get these really stupid starts where like the median is 10 of spades and I'm going to split this like 9-1-42, eff it I'm just going to pretend that the median was the king of clubs, that's what I needed to split the damn deck in half."

and those are the optimizations performed in the above description of quicksort.
by meowface | 2025-09-25 17:46:50+00:00
Israel has a legitimate reason to want to try to intercept and detect terrorist activity, but given what they've been doing in Gaza for the past year and a half, they simply can't be trusted. They've lost all credibility and benefit of the doubt. So they can't expect other entities to help them do something they say is legitimate, because no one can trust them to do something in a legitimate and ethical way.
by joecool1029 | 2025-09-25 17:47:38+00:00
I'll just go and say I hate the design changes in desktop, it's more cluttered without good reason. Feels like they made the text bolder and added a bunch of borders or increased them where they weren't before. You can't collapse the names down as far as you could in the past to save space so when this app runs tiled it's stuck with like a third less functional space than it used to have.

I'm probably going to switch back to using nheko which also has the benefit of being much lighter on resources. Nheko I can collapse the name list right down to icons if I want.
by halflife | 2025-09-25 17:47:41+00:00
Half a dozen? Let’s do inventory!

Lebanon’s - hezbollah has fired rockets into Israel on oct 8th 2023 Iraq - fired rockets in solidarity of Gaza Yemen - fired rockets in solidarity of Gaza Syria - fired rockets in solidarity of Gaza Iran - fired the largest array of ballistic missiles to Israel after Israel bombed an consulate in Syria where Hamas and hezbolla were congregating Qatar - that’s the only country that didn’t physically attack Israel, but they did finance Hamas for the past decade, and operate a global information war against Israel via Al Jazeera
by everfrustrated | 2025-09-25 17:48:10+00:00
Private email will have no problems. I also ran my own mail server for personal use and had almost zero problem (and this was on an AWS IP!).

Where people will absolutely have problems is trying to run a marketing campaign through their own IP. You absolutely will (and should) get blocked. This is why these mixer companies exist and why you pay for an intermediary to delivery your mail.
by whydoineedthis | 2025-09-25 17:48:33+00:00
I personally think we are in the pre-broadband era of AI. That is, what is currently being built will contribute to some AI dot-com 1.0 bubble burst, but after that there will be some advancements in it's distribution model that will allow it to thrive and infiltrate our society at a core level. Right now it's a bunch of dreamers building the pets.com that no one asked for, but after all the competition is shaken off, there will definitely be some clear winners, and maybe an Amazon.com of sorts for AI that people will adopt.
by randomNumber7 | 2025-09-25 17:48:59+00:00
> They'll push the scanning to the OS level

I don't know if this is possible so easily. Does the OS scan the memory of all applications? How does it know what is text and image data?

What if it is encryped or even just obfuscated? Does the OS then track all changes of memory etc?

Or you think it'll just have a rolling keylogger so you can't type in s.th. malicious?
by BeetleB | 2025-09-25 17:48:59+00:00
For ending membership, start on page 44:

> Clicking the link did not end Prime membership. Instead, it took the consumer to another page with a heading that read: “End Your Amazon Prime Membership.” The page contained a button labelled “End Your Prime Membership.” Pressing the button did not end Prime Membership.

...

> Once consumers reached the Iliad Flow, they had to proceed through its entirety—spanning three pages, each of which presented consumers several options, beyond the Prime Central page—to cancel Prime.

...

> Also, on page one of the Iliad Flow, Amazon presented consumers with three buttons at the bottom. “Remind Me Later,” the button on the left, sent the consumer a reminder three days before their Prime membership renews ... “Keep My Benefits,” on the right, also took the consumer out of the Iliad Flow without cancelling Prime. Finally, “Continue to Cancel,” in the middle, also did not cancel Prime but instead proceeded to the second page of the Iliad Flow.

> Finally, at the bottom of Iliad Flow page two, Amazon presented consumers with buttons offering the same three options as the first page: “Remind Me Later,” “Continue to Cancel,” and “Keep My Membership” (labelled “Keep My Benefits” on the first page). See Attachment Q, at 4. Once again, consumers could not cancel their Prime subscription on the second page of the Iliad Flow. Choosing either “Remind Me Later” or “Keep My Membership” took the consumer out of the Iliad Flow without cancelling. Consumers had to click “Continue to Cancel” to access the third page of the Iliad Flow.

...

> Therefore, to complete the Iliad Flow and cancel a Prime membership, the consumer needed to click a minimum of six times from Amazon.com: Prime Central -> “Manage Membership” -> “End Membership” -> “Continue to Cancel” -> “Continue to Cancel” -> “End Now.”
by mwkaufma | 2025-09-25 17:49:03+00:00
> Note that our use case is in a single-threaded context. Hence, the word safe should not be interpreted as ‘thread-safe.’ Single-threadedness greatly simplifies the design; we need not reason about race conditions such as one where an object is simultaneously moved and accessed on different threads. Extending the design to a thread-safe one is left as an exercise to the reader.

Why intentionally design a worse alternative to std::weak_ptr which has been around since C++11??
by nerdjon | 2025-09-25 17:49:35+00:00
> The project began after a meeting in 2021 between Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, and the unit’s then commander, Yossi Sariel.

This seemed completely glossed over in the article (never revisited beyond this) but seems to imply that Satya must have at least known something about what was happening?

Or was he mislead, told partial truths, or something?

Very curious who within Microsoft knew anything about what was happening.
by Muromec | 2025-09-25 17:50:12+00:00
I learned a simple trick. Document all the shit, invent a metric that shows a difference between a painful shitty service-component-whatnot and a good one. The next time you are asked about feasibility of a project touching the blob of pain, point to the document listing it's status as "needs maintenance". Guess what -- time to make it right is allocated more often than it's not and if shit goes south, I will be taken seriously the next time.

That's just business. When a tram line has to be constructed and there is a leaking something something that will sabotage it if not taken care of, it's taken care of and included in the funding.
by Dig1t | 2025-09-25 17:50:15+00:00
Well if you apply the approach used for nuclear to AI the result would be invasive and authoritarian. The United States largely polices other countries nuclear efforts, at least in its sphere of influence. If we allowed it to police computation in the same way it polices nuclear, the result would be a massive invasion of privacy and autonomy that would result in a system which would be easily abused.

There are people talking seriously about drone striking data centers which are running unapproved AI models.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/be-willing-to-des...
by barrell | 2025-09-25 17:50:17+00:00
Been working on https://phrasing.app for about 18 months now. I wanted a way where I could learn a maintain multiple languages, all in one place.

I wanted the power of spaced repetition, the frictionless experience of social media, and the joy of a beautifully designed application.

It’s built and I’ve been using it daily for about 8 months now, and lately it’s been working remarkably well. I’m learning several languages, and dabbling in even more, all in just an hour a day.

Now I just have to get all the marketing assets up and marketing it. Working on a new landing page at https://phrasing.app/next — not at all ready to be shared but the question is what am I working on!
by ryandrake | 2025-09-25 17:50:30+00:00
But do clients really care that the spreadsheets and slide decks are artisanal, hand crafted by humans? My impression, mostly from HN cynics, is that companies hire consultants as air cover to have an outside party justify business decisions they want to make. So what do they care how the supporting data was generated, as long as it comes with the Accenture logo?