MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atourgates | 2025-10-28 17:12:59+00:00
What the author calls criminal is the way hospitals typically bill Medicare and private insurance providers.

If the OPs brother-in-law had had insurance, the hospital would have billed the insurance company the same $195k (albeit with CPT codes in the first place).

The insurance company would have come back and said, "Ok, great, thanks for the bill. We've analyzed it, and you're authorized to received $37k (or whatever the number was) based off our contract/rules."

That number would typically be a bit higher for private insurance (Blue Cross, Blue Shield, United Healthcare, etc), a little lower for Medicare, and even lower for than that for Medicaid.

Then the insurance would have made their calculations relative to the brother-in-law's deductible/coinsurance/etc., made an electronic payment to the hospital, and said, "Ok, you can collect the $X,XXX balance from the patient." ($37k - the Insurers responsability = Patient Responsibility)

Likely by this point in a chronic and fatal disease, the patient would have hit their out-of-pocket maximum previously, so the $37k would have been covered at 100% by the insurance provider.

That's basically the way all medical billing to private and government insurance providers in this country works.

"Put in everything we did and see what we can get paid for by insurance" isn't criminal behavior, it's the way essentially every pay-for-service healthcare organization in the country bills for its services.

I don't say that to either defend the system, or to defend the actions of the hospital in this instance. It certainly feels criminal for the hospital to send an individual an inflated bill they would never expect to pay.
by Fwirt | 2025-10-28 17:13:03+00:00
I just had a thought, it's possible to completely disable ANC in settings, turning them into "dumb" bluetooth headphones. (Enable "Off Listening Mode" in Airpods Settings and the option will become available in Control Center.) If some of us who are able to replicate this effect consistently could try turning ANC off and seeing if the effect still occurs, that would narrow it down to being feedback related from Transparency/ANC or being something external like back EMF.

I just tested this myself and the two ways that I am able to get consistent squealing (stroking the upper body when in-ear and cupping them in the hand) both fail to replicate when ANC is off. So this does point to a feedback issue.

My other thought is that the APP3 may have microphones located next to the drivers in the ear canal, both for measuring fit, and for the new "own voice amplification" feature that appears in hearing control center if you enable Hearing Assistance. Maybe vibration is leaking through the body to the inner microphone.
by whimsicalism | 2025-10-28 17:13:07+00:00
we might be somewhat trending in this direction, but the reality is largely that the US states are pretty identical and have very similar laws on the books. the federal government is in charge of commerce usually.

most laws like CCPA also have some threshold where you already need to be pretty successful for it to apply to you.

for some select industries (biometrics & healthcare), yes you have a patchwork of laws.
Show HN: On-chain file authenticity via Solana NFT
by dude3 | 2025-10-28 17:13:33+00:00
DeepFakeSafety computes a SHA-256 hash of a file locally (never uploaded), signs that hash with your private key, and writes the resulting proof to Solana as an NFT.

Later, anyone can verify: - The file is unchanged (same hash) - Who signed it (public key) - When the proof was created (block time) - No centralized server is required.
by charles_f | 2025-10-28 17:13:35+00:00
I'm not against the idea, but licensing is a very complex subject, so this makes me think the license wouldn't hold any water against a multi billion firm who wants to use your stuff to train their AI:

> I am not a legal expert, so if you are, I would welcome your suggestions for improvements

> I'm a computer engineer based in Brussels, with a background in computer graphics, webtech and AI

Particularly when they've already established they don't care about infringing standard copyright
by alistairSH | 2025-10-28 17:13:38+00:00
Not just arcane subject matter, but numbers so high any sane person panics.

Hospital: "Here's your bill for $1,000,000." (a figure which is 100% fictional) Patient: <panic> "Oh shit, I don't have $1,000,000!" Hospital: "Oh, we'll reduce it to $30,000. Aren't we nice!" Patient: <slightly less panic> "I don't have $30,000 either, but it might not bankrupt me immediately, so I guess that'll do..."

Never mind that the same procedure in most of the EU was either "free" (to consumer at time of care) or a fraction of the cost.

The whole system is fucked.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-28 17:13:48+00:00
This is obviously not enforceable. It isn't even particularly meaningful.

Supposing the software I downloaded is scanned by a virus scanner, which is using AI to detect viruses. Who is in violation? How do you meaningfully even know when I has accessed the software, what happens if it does?

This license also violated the basic Software Freedoms. Why should a user not be allowed to use AI on software?
by hex4def6 | 2025-10-28 17:13:50+00:00
Many years ago, I managed to stab my face with a screwdriver (not my proudest moment), and had to go to the ER. After the stitches, I was asked whether I wanted to pay with insurance. If I did, it was something like $2,000. If I didn't, there was a 75% discount off MSRP. My deductible was like 25%, so it ended up basically being the same out of pocket either way.

The fact that there seems to be a 4x markup means makes me think insurance companies are in bed with these hospitals. If you can mark up prices arbitrarily high, the insurance "discount" is fake.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-10-28 17:13:55+00:00
That such a thing is even possible shows how messed up the system is. Basically they are charging some fantasy amount of money. I would love Medicare for All but if we want to keep doing some kind of free market approach, let’s at least make sure there is a real market where everybody knows the price of things and can make an informed decision. Right now it seems you have to go to a hospital and just hope for the best.
by cm2012 | 2025-10-28 17:14:07+00:00
Basically the only thing debt collectors can do in the US (if the amount is too small to justify a lawsuit) is harass you with phone calls. I have DND except for contacts on anyway so I dont notice it.

Edit: also credit score of course. Almost anything does affect your score. Except for medical stuff for me for some reason - I have a good credit score.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-10-28 17:14:18+00:00
If anything, the main thing LLMs are showing is that the humans need to be pushed to up their game. And that desire to be better, I think, will yield an increase in supply of high-quality labour than what exists today. Ive personally witnessed so many 'so-so' people within firms who dont bring anything new to the table and focus on rent seeking expenditures (optics) who frankly deserve to be replaced by a machine.

E.g. I read all the time about gains from SWEs. But nobody questions how good of a SWE they even are. What proportion of SWEs can be deemed high quality?
by georgefrowny | 2025-10-28 17:14:33+00:00
Correct. It's continuing the general observation first made here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725408) that doesn't specifically mention GMO at all and a disagreement with the premise of the reply to that here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725551).

Obviously the argument is using GMO as the subject due to the context of the article, but you can have the exact same argument about powerful companies angling for capture of slices of many industries and even parts of the general human experience in many places where you can say "well if it wasn't going to be good for the farmers/taxi drivers/warehouse workers/software engineers/people looking for a date/restaurant chefs/whoever, they're not stupid and wouldn't agree to it".
by djeastm | 2025-10-28 17:14:53+00:00
No one is being glib here, this is a serious concern. Think about it, please. A human being choosing to spend hours of their time reading something produced by something that is an amorphous, unanswerable, unaccountable agglomeration of weights formed not by a human's lived experience, but by a for-profit company's selection of inputs and tuning. It's completely dystopian.
by keiferski | 2025-10-28 17:14:55+00:00
A big part of this IMO is that “money won”, for lack of a better phrase. There is no real concept of selling out anymore. Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago.

Someone will probably say this is because current generations have less financial security, and I’m sure that’s a factor. But I think it’s a cultural shift that is much older and tracks better to the decline of traditional sources of values (community, cultural groups, religion, etc.) and their replacement by the easily understandable dollar. So it becomes harder and harder for a cultural definition of success to not mean financially successful. And being financially successful is difficult if you have deviant, counter cultural ideas (and aren’t interested in monetizing them.)
by tpmoney | 2025-10-28 17:15:13+00:00
> and LLMs are probably transformative enough to be fair use, though that remains to be seen.

Arguably, at least in the US, it has been seen. Unless someone comes up with a novel argument not already advanced in the Anthropic case about why training an AI on otherwise legally acquired material is not transformative enough to be fair use, I don't see how you could read the ruling any other way.
by quuxplusone | 2025-10-28 17:15:23+00:00
Right. In fact "data destruction" itself can be implemented as "encryption" plus "throwing-away-the-key" plus (importantly!) "throwing-away-the-plaintext." If you don't throw away the plaintext after encryption, you're really missing an important step. ;)

"IP anonymization" is kind of a subset of "data destruction." We want to destroy some of the information — like, "is this address 127.0.0.2?" — but we want to preserve some of it — like, "is this one address in the same /24 subnet as this other one?". That's because we want to be able to say things like, "50% of our traffic comes from a single /24. Its anonymized name in this dataset is 28.238.72.0/24; we can't tell you what its real name is because we anonymized that away."

If your threat model includes things like "We really want not to be able to say things like that about our dataset," then obviously you should not use (only) anonymization. Because the whole point of anonymization is precisely to preserve the ability to say things like that about subnet structure, while anonymizing away the real addresses.

Perhaps it should have been called "IP pseudonymization." I would have said that ship has sailed, but after googling "ip pseudonymization" it seems like maybe precise terminology is trying to make a comeback due to things like the GDPR.

https://portolano.it/en/newsletter/portolano-cavallo-inform-...

> In the General Court’s opinion [...] the identifiability of the data subject should be assessed taking into account the concrete possibilities of the third-party recipient to identify data subjects. As such, when sharing pseudonymous data, the same must be considered anonymous if the recipient has no means to re-identify data subjects.

> [S]ince the third-party recipient did not have access to the additional information capable of identifying the data subjects, nor could it in any way have acquired such access, the transmitted data should be considered anonymous data and not pseudonymous data.
by sireat | 2025-10-28 17:15:31+00:00
It is interesting how much traction this 9B model is getting which is good.

Still two month earlier 19 European language model with 30B parameters got almost no mention:

https://huggingface.co/TildeAI/TildeOpen-30b

Mind you that is another open model that is begging for fine-tuning (it is not very good out of box).
by stackedinserter | 2025-10-28 17:15:38+00:00
> If you're gonna do this, you have to be prepared to use lethal force against another human being.

Many people, me included, would gladly do that, if they were allowed to. The problem is that when dust settle, the criminal will remain a criminal with one more record in his file, but the whole legal system will steamroll me if I don't precisely calculate force in split second and apply 3N more than absolute necessary minimum.

Here in Canada there were cases when people defended themselves and ended up in legal kafkaesque hell, imposed by country. Even after acquitted of all charges, they would spend lifetime savings, lose jobs and actually have to rebuilt their lives from almost zero.

We voted for all of this and I don't understand how it happened. Aliens dispersed something so we all became that stupid?
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-28 17:15:45+00:00
Speaking of Mission Accomplished and 9/11, I recently watched Tucker Carlson's 9/11 series. I was expecting garbage but it actually did an amazingly good job building off of Fahrenheit 9/11 using the stuff that's come out in the 20yr since. If you take a step back the contrast does a really does a good job illustrating how just by sprinkling bullshit into the data the state, the media, etc, can do a sufficiently good job keeping people from connecting the dots or knowing what questions they ought to be asking.

Moore knew something stunk, but he was groping around in the dark in a totally different political climate less receptive to questioning authority.
by hrimfaxi | 2025-10-28 17:15:51+00:00
> I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.

> You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.

I learned yesterday about the skull breaker challenge, where you and two friends line up and jump at the same time to see who jumps highest, except the outside two people conspire to kick the legs out of the middle one. Is that being a kid? If anything, the proliferation of social media is enabling the normalization of deviance in the form of these meme challenges. People are going around spraying bug spray on the produce at the grocery and posting it on TikTok.
by troupo | 2025-10-28 17:16:08+00:00
Levels is engagement farming. Instead of uncritically reposting him you could've gone ahead and read what the cluster is for: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1982927767286231403

Cluster: for public benefit, cutting edge research in biotech, medical, robotics.

Levels: I want to create AI photos of people for my AI Slop startup
by tannhaeuser | 2025-10-28 17:16:14+00:00
> However modern standard Dutch (Nederlands, Hollands) is based upon Franconian, rather than Saxon dialects.

> Some of these [Old Saxon] speakers took part in the Germanic conquest of England in the fifth century AD. While it is not true that English and Plattdeutsch derive completely from the same source, the Old Saxon input into Anglo-Saxon was of primary importance and this linguistic group contributed greatly to the Anglo-Saxon dialects which our English forefathers spoke.

[1]: http://www.plattmaster.de/plattoew.htm
by pavel_lishin | 2025-10-28 17:16:17+00:00
> The author reasonably accused the hospital of gouging and the hospital came back with a much lower offer.

This will always happen, especially if you don't have health insurance. I had to have surgery without insurance in the early 2000s, and I was able to knock off a large percentage of the bill (don't remember how much, it's been decades) by literally just writing back to the hospital and asking them to double check and verify the line items I was being charged.

(edit: more stories along similar lines in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45735136)
by ericmcer | 2025-10-28 17:17:00+00:00
Isn't this saying business layer should not be on the top?

Business layers should be accessible via an explicit interface/shape that is agnostic to the layers above it. So if the org decides to move from mailchimp to some other email provider the business logic can remain untouched and you just need to write some code mapping the new provider to the business logic's interface.

Maybe our visualizations are mixed up, but I always viewed things like cloud providers, libraries etc. as potentially short lived whereas the core logic could stick around forever.
by hagbard_c | 2025-10-28 17:17:03+00:00
Let the battle... commence.

Wikipedia is a collaborative, multilingual online encyclopedia consisting of freely editable articles written and maintained primarily by volunteers worldwide, utilizing wiki software to enable open contributions under free content licenses. Launched on January 15, 2001, by American entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger as a wiki-based complement to the slower-paced expert-reviewed Nupedia project, it rapidly expanded due to its accessible editing model.[1][2] Since 2003, Wikipedia has been hosted and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides technical infrastructure and promotes free knowledge dissemination.[3] As of October 2025, Wikipedia encompasses over 65 million articles across 357 language editions, making it one of the largest reference works ever compiled, with the English edition alone surpassing 7 million entries.[4] Renowned for its unprecedented scale, accessibility, and role in democratizing information, Wikipedia has nonetheless encountered persistent criticisms regarding factual reliability, susceptibility to vandalism and hoaxes, and systemic ideological biases—particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics, as evidenced by computational analyses associating right-of-center entities with more negative sentiment and acknowledged by co-founder Sanger who has described the platform as captured by ideologically driven editors.

(source Grokipedia)

https://grokipedia.com/page/Wikipedia
by pkilgore | 2025-10-28 17:17:27+00:00
Within the limits of their knowledge/ability, yes. Some bosses make it clear they do not like being told no, however. YMMV if you continue to work for such people.

The bar there is very high. This case might be embarrassing but probably isn’t sanctionable. And the only lawyer that would get sanctioned would be the ones that signed the papers not the drone that hired them.
by metabagel | 2025-10-28 17:17:29+00:00
Anecdotally, The Guardian has a lot of U.S. readers. I regularly read and donate to The Guardian. Their U.S. and California coverage is very good and seems to be continually improving.

Axios has an article about The Guardian's success in the U.S., but I don't have access behind the paywall.

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/06/the-guardian-us-expansion

Better resource:

https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/Guardian_Annual_Report...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-28 17:17:42+00:00
So build faster and better than YC to defend society|humanity against YC portfolio companies (not all, of course, just the harmful ones) until politics can close the gap. There is no speed limit. There is no moat. The only thing you don't have is ~$500k in investment [1]. Constraint breeds creativity. Be creative, stay curious.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/deal
by nostrademons | 2025-10-28 17:17:49+00:00
If you want to get even more radical, abolish standardized time entirely and just have everybody maintain a personal calendar that reflects the times they are awake, when they are busy, and when they're available. The proliferation of electronic devices gets us halfway there already, eg. iPhones have sleep/wake hours that tie into alarms and do-not-disturb, Google Calendar lets you set working hours, etc.

Way back in my pre-parent days, I used to wake up around noon, roll into work between 1-2 PM, work until around 10 PM, and then go to bed around 4:00 AM. There was briefly a proposal to give me and a few other late-rising coworkers rollback privileges to the Google Maps codebase, because between the Maps team in Zurich, the Maps team in Sydney, the Maps team in NYC, and a few night-owls in California, that would give them 24 hour coverage with significant overlap for handoffs. It went nowhere because we didn't work on Google Maps and some VP probably balked at having people not in their org with full owners privileges, but it's an interesting example of combining timezones + personal schedules to get better time coverage.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-28 17:17:55+00:00
I've been thinking of something similar for a while now [0] except it's based on clickwrap terms of service, which makes it a contract law situation, instead of a copyright-law one.

The basic idea is that the person accessing your content to put it into a model agrees your content is a thing of value and in exchange grants you a license to anything that comes out of the model while your content is incorporated.

For example, suppose your your art is put into a model and then the model makes a major movie. You now have a license to distribute that movie, including for free...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42774179
by ericmay | 2025-10-28 17:17:57+00:00
There are no red or blue cities or states. This is a made up fiction and we should stop using those terms because they are divisive and only serve to make the country weak.

> Can you actually come up with a scenario where a few yokels in the south running around the field playing militia could overthrow the US government?

No because that's a strawman. Though those yokels on January 6th sure gave it a try.

> If today, the National Guard dropped a non nuclear bomb on a blue city, 40% of the US population would shrug if not outright cheer.

This would never happen unless there's a zombie apocalypse or that city was invaded by another country. No American would cheer a nuclear bomb being dropped on New York or Houston or something - why are you even entertaining such outlandish nonsense?
by glimshe | 2025-10-28 17:18:04+00:00
Does anyone know of any application/tool that can perform palette dithering? The idea is "here is the n-color palette specified in their RGB values, here is the full-color RGB image, give me the best possible dithered image using the provided palette". The tools that I've used were underwhelming and produced results full of banding and artifacts.

Basically, great dithering in color instead of B/W.
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-10-28 17:18:20+00:00
Nuance is needed here.

"You <-> ISP <-> Bank webpage" is an entirely different security threat model than "You <-> Server you rent from an ISP".

Also, unsanctioned wiretapping is an entirely different criminal offense than stealing leaked credentials.

You can't make blanket statements like that without understanding ISP peering agreements and how data is stored and where.

Let's not pretend like slapping cryptography over L3 is the entirety of being secure. Often (most of the time?) cryptography doesn't even matter much for security.

P.S. Security (prevent stealing sensitive data) and verification (making sure nothing extra is added during transfer) are different problems.
by smarek22 | 2025-10-28 17:18:30+00:00
I'd go with

1) sign a petition on change.org against that APK lockdown (currently 10.5k votes) - https://c.org/BHZzNvR6pr

2) In your Android device or Google account use "Send Feedback" and articulate yourself or "Contact us" in Android under "System settings > Tips and support" or best, if you are paying subscriber for any Google LLC service, send the feedback through the subscription management channels (such as feedback in Google One, Workspace or any other paid service)