MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tim333 | 2025-10-28 16:36:27+00:00
Comparing the Elon Musk articles between Grokipedia and Wikipedia, the first factual difference is with Tesla:

>..Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 as CEO and chief engineer, Tesla in 2003 ... (grok)

>Musk joined the automaker Tesla as an early investor in 2004 and became its CEO ... (wikipedia)

I think Wikipedia is more accurate on that one.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-28 16:36:30+00:00
I want to stress that this is not universal, and in some states, medical providers are pursuing this debt aggressively. This is not to say you should not be aggressive in countering their claims (I do this for folks in a volunteer capacity), but you should be knowledgeable as to your potential credit and financial risk exposure before proceeding.

NPR Investigation: Many U.S. hospitals sue patients for debts or threaten their credit - https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/12/21/1144491... - December 21st, 2022

Some Hospitals Kept Suing Patients Over Medical Debt Through the Pandemic - https://www.propublica.org/article/some-hospitals-kept-suing... - June 14th, 2021
by dekhn | 2025-10-28 16:36:42+00:00
I had an odd but successful experience with medical billing recently. My daughter went to urgent care for an urgent problem; after things were mostly cleared up, they transferred her by ambulance to an ER (even though there was no emergency). Both the urgent care and ER were handled by our insurance but the ambulance company sent us a large bill ($4K for a short drive) which felt too large to us (they had already tried to get my insurance to pay, but insurance said it wasn't covered). My wife was going to call the ambulance company to try to negotiate it down, but I recalled that I had recently received a random piece of mail saying that my employer subscribed to a service that could negotiate medical bills.

We contacted the service and provided our info (the context of the situation, the billing information, the actions we'd taken so far, etc) and a couple weeks later, the service reported that they had converted the ambulance ride from an uncovered insurance to covered by insurance (since the transport was between a covered urgent care to a covered EHR) and had our insurance cover the majority- we ended up paying $500 to the ambulance company.

While I am not surprised that such a service exists, what did surprise me is that it's just a division of my insurance company: they literally have a division that negotiates with another part of the insurance cmpany to get better coverage for patients. I was pretty lucky to notice the mail about this- there's nothing on my employer's site saying we have this coverage(!) and the vast majority of people in the US likely don't have this service.

If there is anything that will bankrupt the US, it's excessive medical charges and a lack of knowledge of how to address them. Maybe AI will help, but I really doubt it long term.
by el_benhameen | 2025-10-28 16:36:52+00:00
I have this happen outside of flights. Cupping your finger over the ANC mic is enough to trigger it.

The new tips (that’s my guess, at least) also transmit vibrations into your ears much more than the old tips or third party memory foam tips. This results in a popping noise when walking or moving around, and a horrible thumping sound when running with them in. I think the latter is partially caused by the “reduce loud noises” feature incorrectly identifying vibrations from heel strikes as loud noise.

I’m glad I’m apparently not the only one experiencing these issues. I hope they’re software fixable. I filed a bug report, but radio silence on that, of course. I would sing the praises of the second gen AirPods Pro to anyone who would listen, but the 3rd gen have been a huge disappointment. I had to buy a different set of headphones for running, whereas the second gen were my daily drivers. And I’ve been through three pair of the third gen, so it’s not a one-off issue.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-10-28 16:36:53+00:00
Hospital billing involves the 'mafia'-like influence game of having good insurance (which means being hired at the right company, with the right 'influence' over the hospital network in question) and covering the costs of the other patients who cannot afford it and refuse to pay. Hospital billing has the least teeth of any debt in the US. If you haggle a billing department long enough, they'll desperately take anything you give them.
by johtso | 2025-10-28 16:37:02+00:00
When you're having to work with someone else's godawful convoluted database schema you're sometimes really happy not to have to write the query yourself. Giving the LLM context with previously written queries can be quite effective.

The writing SQL experience is a product of both SQL's syntax, the structure of the database you're querying over and the complexity of your query.

When things get hairy, and you have a good number of representative queries already written that you can use as context, LLMs can be really nice tool.
by jack_tripper | 2025-10-28 16:37:08+00:00
>I've just ignored any medical bill

As a not-American, I wonder what are the rules of this "game". Can anyone in the US just ignore their bills and debt and it's all ignored anyway?

Because in most European countries, debt is a very serious thing. Even small debt like an unpaid 50 Euro bill can be sold to debt collectors who can seize your property or garnish your wage, pension or bank accounts to pay your debt plus the collection fee, so people here are incredibly weary of unpaid bills or taking debt for unnecessary things other than houses or cars.
by webdoodle | 2025-10-28 16:37:27+00:00
Citizen's United destroyed journalism by making it for profit propaganda for the wealthy, but its always been under attack.

Journalism has always been under attack from the wealthy robber barons of the time. Rockefeller famously bought out the magazine/newspaper that muckraker Ida Tarbell wrote for after she wrote a damning book about Standard Oil. However, it only hardened her and other muckrakers, who later led to the break up of Standard Oil, term limits, and other restrains on the abuse of power.

I find the parallels between then and now quite striking. Except today's boogeymen have rebranded and call themselves tech billionaires. They got ahead of muckrakers by owning journalism, media, and social media, and have used there Pinkertons (Trust and Safety Teams) to censoring anyone who speaks out against them.

There are good journalists out there though. I think a modern equivalent of Ida Tarbell may be Whitney Webb for writing One Nation under Blackmail about the Epstein Files.

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

https://unlimitedhangout.com/
by random3 | 2025-10-28 16:37:28+00:00
Can you elaborate what's ironic (what is "this" - higher CT)?

A note on the motivations - CT was not originally intended as a foundations. This is clear from both the name (General Theory of Natural Equivalences) and construction (based on set theory, which is was and still is the foundation for most of mathematics). There was indeed work in the foundational direction and there are relevant aspects, but I don't think that's even today the core aspect of it.
by lioeters | 2025-10-28 16:37:29+00:00
Glad to see someone commented on this. I just learned about the Strugatsky brothers, classic Soviet Sci-Fi writers. Their life story is interesting and I'm looking forward to reading their works.

About misogyny, unfortunately science fiction as a literary genre is as guilty as the rest of literature. I'll note it as part of the historical context.

Aside from that, there was something hopeful about visions of the future in the Soviet era, an optimism for technology and evolution of society. Maybe that was part of the official ideology, but I also see a similar kind of "retro-future" utopianism on the other side of the Iron Curtain. I think it was a general feeling in the 1950s to 60s, which gradually acknowledged the potential for dystopia.
by jack_tripper | 2025-10-28 16:38:39+00:00
Not really. You get a bill in any country when you're not insured not just the US.

But most people in most western countries tend to be insured by default through some national system if they have a legal job, or, if their system is private like in the US, then heath insurance is mandatory for everyone, unlike in the US.

US is kind of a "wild west" where people can live and work, sometimes illegally, and not be insured if they don't want to. Weird system.
by mjr00 | 2025-10-28 16:38:46+00:00
Yeah, US hospital billing is based on the idea that the patient has insurance and won't really care about what their insurer gets charged. (The wider implications of this are left to the reader.)

For the uninsured this sort of thing is actually really common. Had an online friend who had to get emergency treatment and they sent him a bill for $20k. His response was, "lol I'm uninsured and don't give a fuck about my credit score, so, fuck you basically." The bill was revised to $500, which he paid just to not have that debt on his record.
by gus_massa | 2025-10-28 16:39:31+00:00
Hi CZEC! Posting 6 comments usually will make people angry and will flag your post. Try posting only one comment.

The source is in German. There is a button to show the English version at the top right. Is it possiblt to link to https://hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/catalog/book/736#ln=en or something like that?
by 999900000999 | 2025-10-28 16:39:35+00:00
Not low enough.

You could probably tell them to eat dirt,the receiver of services can't be collected against as he's no longer physically here.

Getting the money from his estate would probably take years, if possible at all. I am not a lawyer, so I might be completely wrong, but suing a widow for 200k would be a nightmare for any hospital.

Anyway, maybe one day we'll join the civilized world and not bankrupt families for the crime of being suck.
by sajithdilshan | 2025-10-28 16:39:36+00:00
This cannot be stressed enough. In my experience working in multiple tech startups in Germany, the power compliance, legal and all other 2nd line has over engineering is quite immense. Most of the time they act as a hindrance for innovation rather than a supporting factor.

This AI law is a clear example of that. Pencil pushers creating more obstacles for the sake of creating more obstacles rather than actually taking a pragmatic approach.
by sublimefire | 2025-10-28 16:39:36+00:00
As a European citizen I think it boils down to access to the capital. EU/EEA is not a country and the market is sort of fragmented. The big players are UK, France, Germany, everyone else does not have the same access to money as say in the US. Folks want to do it but there is a glass ceiling. Hence you have these collabs among large institutions to tap into funds such as from Horizon which are academic in nature and do not translate well into products.
by martin-t | 2025-10-28 16:40:20+00:00
> You don’t hire someone then hand them, idk $50,000 in stock or options so they can leave the next day

Exactly, that's why I say ownership should be proportional to the amount of work done (and perhaps skill involved).

> No, you are making this up.

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

Many countries have similar clauses in their rulesets. And they don't only apply to the state, in many countries it would be illegal to pay a person less based on gender, race and similar characteristics (though of course difficult to prove).

Now, I am not saying everyone is equal[0], just that it's a very popular meme in society.

Finally, even if you get compensated by some share in the company, how large is it relative to the amount rich people own? They will still keep getting rich faster than you can, even if you work 80 hours a week and they 0.

[0]: E.g. intelligence is the only thing which separates us from other animals, and given the relative value of life ascribed to a human vs any other animal, it's laughable that the value of human lives is not dependent on intelligence to some level. Similarly, many people are so anti-social, they are actively harmful to almost everyone around them - morality should absolutely play a role in this value.
by mrgriffin | 2025-10-28 16:40:26+00:00
Making all registers caller-saved around context switches is a neat insight, it's intuitive how that could potentially lead to needing fewer instructions to execute when switching contexts.

I haven't yet digested exactly how the stacks are made to work. I think fig 8 should be obvious, but I'm getting stuck on picturing how the system guarantees that frame 1 can't grow into frame 2.

EDIT: Ah, I think I understand. It seems that they're taking advantage of a large virtual address space to give each stack loads of space, rather than them being contiguous like I assumed from fig 8.

> As modern 64-bit address-space is big enough for the allocation of many large continuous stacks [...]
by fredoliveira | 2025-10-28 16:40:29+00:00
Something happened today as I was closing my car door, where I had the Airpods (Pro 3 as well) make this low but extremely loud rumble-like sound. Something related to pressure and seal, perhaps?

I could replicate it immediately at will. ANC on, nothing playing, sat on the driver seat and closed my door with a little bit of force.
by mavamaarten | 2025-10-28 16:40:34+00:00
My opinion swings between hype to hate every day. Yesterday all suggestions / edits / answers were hallucinated garbage, and I was ready to remove the copilot plugin altogether. Today I was stuck at a really annoying problem for hours and hours. For shits and giggles I just gave Claude a stacktrace and a description and let it go ham. It produced an amazingly accurate thought train and found my issue, which was not what I was expecting at all.

I still don't see how it's useful for generating features and codebases, but as a rubber ducky it ain't half bad.
Show HN: We used mathematics to solve the forex data availability problem
by Christinadav | 2025-10-28 16:40:41+00:00
We built Queyn to solve the data availability problem in algorithmic trading.

Professional tick data are expensive. Most retail traders and researchers can't afford it. Even if they can, historical data only gives you one timeline—you can't test strategies against market conditions that never happened.

Instead of replacing backtesting, we complement it. We used math to generate synthetic forex markets that let you stress-test beyond historical scenarios:

- Bid/ask spreads that widen under stress - Volatility clustering - Statistically validated against real EUR/USD market behavior - Real-time streaming via WebSocket (not just static exports)

The interface lets you build custom scenarios with your own parameters—control volatility, trend direction, and liquidity stress to create conditions that don't exist in historical data. We've also built one fully validated session (London-NY overlap) that matches real market statistics.

Use cases: - Stress-test strategies against scenarios that never happened - Generate diverse training data for ML models (prevent overfitting) - Practice risk management

The demo streams live—no signup, just click start and run the simulator.

Think of it as a flight simulator for algo traders. Pilots don't just replay old flights, they practice emergency scenarios. Same concept here.

Anonymous feedback button works if you want to tell me what's broken or missing.
by deaux | 2025-10-28 16:40:54+00:00
> I think it is a complete misreading to point to protectionism as the reason for Chinese success, but having a big unified domestic market for consumers along with massive saving rates and capital controls probably does help.

Capital controls are protectionist measures, but anyway, no.

> Okay, what is the limiting factor?

Let's look at which countries have a significant local software industry compared to population size.

- China

- US

- Korea

- You can argue for Japan and India but that's already starting to stretch.

- Yup, effectively no where else. Even in an "out of the way" place like Myanmar everyone uses Meta, with a nice little genocide to show for it. Sure, in Vietnam they use Zalo, and other places have a few other local players. But most of the famous US tech apps are dominant.

Is the EU the outlier here? No. Everywhere else US tech dominates. Meta, Netflix, Apple, Google, Uber, Spotify, Microsoft, Match Group, Paypal, Amazon, and on and on. They don't just dominate the EU, they dominate the world.

Except for the countries I named above, where at least some of the markets that US big tech competes in, instead have bigger local players. And even there, guess what?

Their market share is almost 1:1 linearly correlated to the degree of protectionism in those countries, all the way from China, then Korea, then India/Japan, and then everywhere else! Who woulda thought!

Why does Korea have much less US tech dominance than, say, Germany? Despite German companies theoretically having a big advantage: the German public is 100x more privacy conscious than the Korean one, and much less trusting of US companies.

I can tell you that it's not less regulations; Korea's GDPR is much more onerous than the EU's and so are investment regulations. On every single regulatory aspect, German software startups have it easier. But they were never protected. US tech was allowed to waltz in, dump their products - that's what they did, it's hilarious how now China "dumping" EVs and solar is suddenly an issue when it's exactly the strategy that US tech continues to this day; the AI companies are doing it right now! And the Korean companies were protected. Both by the rules burden, that local companies had to deal with too, along with intentional protectionism.

When it comes to solar and EVs, we all understand that a foreign country dumping their goods kills local industry. It's the exact same with software.

But then half of HN has millions on the bank exactly thanks to the above - this is where all those fat SV salaries have come from - so I do get the lack of desire to understand it.
by LocalPCGuy | 2025-10-28 16:41:05+00:00
Just my results (n=1) and I don't think this is exactly what you were saying, but just in case other read it the same way I did at first: having had (lab tested) vitamin D deficiencies, vitamin D supplementation can help to restore levels back into the desired range. So supplementation can have the desired effect of improving vitamin D levels (more below). It is a simple test that most doctors don't quibble about adding on to other blood tests (i.e. during annual checkup, for instance), but isn't generally checked by default. (note: insurers may want it to be "diagnostic" rather than "preventative" in order to cover the test.)

Whether it has a "positive impact" on overall health (which I believe to be your point), that would be even more anecdotal and also impossible for me to narrow down whether that one factor had any significant effect, so I won't posit that. And I agree that from different studies I've read, the actual science on it is pretty varied and I haven't seen anything conclusive. Even this study notes their conclusion was "... among adults with suboptimal baseline vitamin D levels".
by al_borland | 2025-10-28 16:41:24+00:00
> Apparently a big chunk of Amazon doesn't even use AWS at all, and instead use proto-cloud computer services that are a throwback from the 90s take on cloud computing.

Is there more information on this somewhere. I had leadership telling me and a few others that we needed to replicate something on-par with AWS for internal use (with about 10 devs and less than a year timeline). I thought this sounded crazy, and it would be interesting if Amazon themselves didn’t even have what was being asked of us.
by bgirard | 2025-10-28 16:41:39+00:00
I used AI to deal with customer support when a company tried to assign me the rental contract from the previous owner. ChatGPT correctly quoted the relevant Ontario Consumer Protection Act sections that applied. I just did quick verifications to make sure it wasn't hallucinating (it didn't). They tried to push back, but I had ChatGPT write a few responses standing first and they relented after a few exchanges.
by nradov | 2025-10-28 16:41:54+00:00
Most of the vitamin D supplement studies have been very low quality in that they give all subjects in each group a fixed amount (or placebo). Ideally they should periodically test blood levels and titrate the dose to hit a target range. This would get us closer to establishing causality (or lack thereof) including a response curve. The amount needed to hit a given target will be wildly different for many individuals based on factors that are still not well understood.
by wongarsu | 2025-10-28 16:42:05+00:00
For a 9B model like EuroLLM, fine tuning the base model is pretty viable. You don't need a lot of samples, on the order of 300 high quality examples can produce good results, and the GPU time is pretty manageable with rented GPU instances

Just the base model and a template like "English: {text}\n{language}:" can also work with a bit of filter and retry logic
by hollerith | 2025-10-28 16:42:19+00:00
The symptoms are hard to describe (but did not include kidney stones), but it was obvious that something was drastically wrong and the drastic wrongness went away in response to my completely avoiding all sunlight and dietary sources of vitamin D and my doing a few other things described below.

Most people could probably take as much supplemental vitamin D as I did without incurring this adverse effect, but there is no straightforward way for a person to know whether they are in the minority of people who will incur the effect. (I do remember that having Northern European ancestry makes the effect more likely.)

The drastic wrongness started showing up after only a few months of whatever high dose of D I was taking (and I regret that I cannot provide this information: I did search for it briefly; but it was definitely not an "absurd amount") so if you've been taking the 8000 D3 for years, then the drastic wrongness is unlikely to suddenly show up in your case -- and if it does show up it would probably be because you contracted some sort of chronic infection.

The presence of certain kinds of chronic infections and genetics are the main causative factors according to the information I relied on 25 years ago. Actually, here is the basic information. I followed most aspects of the protocol including my obtaining a prescription for olmesartan, but then I lost interest when the drastic wrongness went away (after not much longer than 4 months IIRC). I was also probably on an antibiotic during this recovery.

https://mpkb.org/home/patients/protocol_overview

P.S., I take as much MK7 as you do (i.e., twice as much as the "suggested usage" on the label) and have for many years, just without supplemental vitamin D.
by evanjrowley | 2025-10-28 16:42:25+00:00
>The global shift, she continued, can be traced to one common cause: the increased agency of women, who during the last century became increasingly able to opt out of traditional family roles to pursue other options, such as education and careers.

This seems like an intuitive argument, but perhaps it would be better to focus more on the fact that it's affecting wealthy nations first an foremost? Even women who want children and prefer traditional gender roles are put off by economic costs that are much higher than what previous generations had to pay.
by 4cidBurn | 2025-10-28 16:42:28+00:00
Yes, this game is quite similar to JezzBall, or to a more modern example, Just Fillin’, which used to be available on the iPhone. I remember playing JezzBall back in the day on a floppy disk, and Just Fillin’ during the early days of the iPod Touch. It’s no longer available, but when I mentioned it, my 11-year-old son tried to recreate it, and honestly, I think he did a pretty great job.

Just Fillin’ iPhone gameplay can be seen on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqvnk05iTbs

My son’s game, Bleachclaw Bubble Bash, is available at: https://lotsofnoise.github.io/