MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by twic | 2025-10-28 23:43:31+00:00
I couldn't run Delta Force [1], due to anti-cheat as far as i can tell.

Shame about Battlefield 6, some of my friends are playing that and it would be fun to join them. Oh well. Fortunately they're mostly still playing Helldivers 2 as well, and that works fine.

[1] https://www.protondb.com/app/2507950
by no_wizard | 2025-10-28 23:43:36+00:00
>A lot of people with FSAs will have insurance that disqualifies having an HSA.

Which should be illegal. It should be only HSA across the board. Its nonsensical that this is a thing.

I'd love an HSA, but I can't due to my plan (can't do a high deductible plan for $reasons).

I think there may be some loophole in setting up an independent HSA but I haven't looked into it enough, only recently heard of such a scheme
by philipwhiuk | 2025-10-28 23:43:53+00:00
The British system has a lot less transparency here. You get:

* First * Upper Second (aka 2:1) * Lower Second (aka 2:2) * Third * Pass * Fail

Some students put module scores down but they are basically meaningless.

And then like the US a degree from a top University is worth more than a degree from another University (by a class or more)

Part of the reason they are worth less is the lack of standardisation of course content. Part of it is grade inflation. Part of it is legacy.

One interesting case is that I know Cambridge grades to a curve. There will never be more than x% of the students getting a first in a single year.

Comparitively my University just had a overall % threshold of weighted module scores.
by DennisP | 2025-10-28 23:45:53+00:00
There is a middle ground here. Many European countries do not actually have single-payer, but still perform better than the US.

It's a bit out of date now but the book The Healing of America found that Germany, France, and Japan had world-leading healthcare results, measured by things like survival time after major disease diagnosis, but spent much less of a percentage of their GDP on healthcare. None of them had single-payer. Their systems were pretty close to the ACA, with private insurance companies and a mandate.

They were also different than the US in certain ways. Probably the biggest was a national price list for services. A lot of healthcare isn't really a functioning market; in many cases you're in no position to comparison shop. A result of the price lists was that doctors made a lot less money, but this didn't seem to affect quality.

Other differences included: no claim denials allowed for anything on the price list (which saves a lot of administrative staff), effective national digital records systems (ditto), and the insurance companies had to be nonprofits.

All three countries actually got better bang for the buck than Canada's single-payer system. Japan was the cheapest, spending only 5% of their GDP on healthcare, despite an aging population of heavy smokers. Germany was the most expensive at 13% (compared to US 18%) but covered things like week-long visits to the spa for stress relief.

The author did a spot check on the user experience by seeing a doctor in each country for a shoulder problem, and those three countries worked out really well for him. In Japan the doctor offered surgery the next day, at a very modest cost. They did make do with simpler equipment; the MRI machines were bare-bones but they got the job done and a scan cost $100.
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-28 23:46:05+00:00
Fonts are like my dotfiles, I fucked with fonts.conf a decade+ ago and have just lived with that since then.

So I get to be very particular, but also not have to care about tweaking, I did all the work back when I had time for that.

I will argue that if you stare at a screen for hours a day, might as well make it pleasant with good hinting/anti-aliasing/features and a professional font instead of Dejavu Sans lol
by t0mas88 | 2025-10-28 23:46:10+00:00
It's insane that somehow a 195k bill can change into a 34k one, without putting serious doubt on the validity of that final bill. How does this work in court? Are they going to claim their 34k bill is all correct while starting at 195k? Or would it be equally plausible if the debtor said "I've not received any of the care billed for, so I'm not paying"

They can't really claim their records are any kind of proof if apparently they now agree that 82% of it was wrong?
by gxs | 2025-10-28 23:46:58+00:00
Also, people don't realize that sometimes it doesn't even matter

Enough people don't care, don't notice, or in the worst case, even when they do, if the companies band together and don't give people a choice, eventually they will cave and thats what i predict will happen here

In the future i suspect most people's homes will have ads, except for nerds who will have rooted their devices. and hopefully their moms.
by ludamn | 2025-10-28 23:47:21+00:00
If it helps I played AC Odyssey w/o issues using Proton GE, the biggest issue for me was that when I launched the game through steam, steam would launch the Ubisoft launcher which then launched the game , so I had to manually close this launcher to prevent having proton running in the bg for too long

It's been a while since I gamed though (2022), but the game ran smoothly on a mobile RTX 2060 card
by peterldowns | 2025-10-28 23:48:06+00:00
I just ordered two cans of the cougar gold, one of the viking, and one of the mild cheddar. If it's not good I will blame you.

The archaic checkout system and the fact that this is a Washington State school agricultural product make me think that this will be the best cheese I've ever eaten in my life. Quite fond of their apples!
by derefr | 2025-10-28 23:48:10+00:00
Certainly, the truly rich person has never seen the main fridge their staff uses to store the ingredients for their meals.

But said rich person has at least one more fridge: a relatively-small, usually very elegant (in-wall, glass-door) fridge, located in the [badly designed for cooking, but pretty] "kitchen" that adjoins the butler's pantry [= nearest, usually secondary, real kitchen].

They use this "kitchen" to whimsically prepare avocado toast when hosting "guests" (e.g. people from Architectural Digest); or when vlogging / hosting their reality TV show about all the cooking they love doing. (At any other time, e.g. when hosting actual guests, if they want to make use of this kitchen [rather than simply speaking in their lounge until dinner is served in their separated dining room], it won't be by cooking there themselves, but rather by sitting around the kitchen island or the [probably open] secondary dining arrangement nearby, watching their private chef cook there, while they or their assistants try desperately to cover for how gimped their workflow is by having to use the faux-kitchen.)

And of course, even if the rich person does some whimsical/performative hobby cooking, the staff will have prepped and mise-en-placed anything they'll need from the butler's pantry onto the (huge) kitchen island in advance. (Like a cooking show!) So even then, they won't be needing the "kitchen" fridge. With the extreme edge-case exception of needing something to stay cool until the very moment it's needed; or needing to repeatedly chill it (think "making croissant dough", though I doubt a rich person would ever try.)
by mcpherrinm | 2025-10-28 23:48:10+00:00
Next week at IETF 124, there's a Birds-of-a-Feather session that will kick off the standardization process here.

I think Merkle Tree Certificates a promising option. I'll be participating in the standardization efforts.

Chrome has signalled in multiple venues that they anticipate this to be their preferred (or only) option for post-quantum certificates, so it seems fairly likely we will deploy this in the coming years

I work for Let's Encrypt, but this is not an official statement or promise to implement anything yet. For that you can subscribe to our newsletter :)
by xp84 | 2025-10-28 23:48:22+00:00
I'm always happy to help people stick it to crooks. Here's what I know:

The California Department of Insurance may be the regulator for your health insurer, but it may not be. If not, it's the Department of Managed Health Care. You should be able to find a reference to who their regulator is in their plan documents.

# DOI:

complaints start here: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/110-health/50-h-rf...

list of who they regulate here: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/110-health/20-look...

# CDMHC:

complaints start here: https://www.dmhc.ca.gov/FileaComplaint.aspx

list of who they regulate here: https://wpso.dmhc.ca.gov/hpsearch/viewall.aspx

My original ambulance thing was with an insurer regulated by DOI. Much more recently than my original story, I went to file with CDMHC, which requires that you first file a formal grievance with your health insurer first. I would definitely recommend to file a grievance. In my case, I filed a grievance and also contacted the office of the CEO, who emailed back and miraculously made another made-up problem go away even faster than the grievance process did.

But anyway, yours is an interesting case here. I can't be sure if the insurer is the one who screwed up here, also the ambulance company may not be allowed to balance bill you. The only thing I'm pretty sure of is that you shouldn't be responsible for more than an in-network ambulance would cost you, presuming you didn't just take an ambulance in a non-emergency, just for fun (as they seem to always assume).
by gmueckl | 2025-10-28 23:48:33+00:00
Sadly, your view isn't less paternalistic in reality. It effectively amounts to telling people who have better things to do than care about their personal IT security to just suck it up. Billions of smartphone users worldwide are in this position.

Look, I'm not saying that this outcome is ideal and I hate the idea of a single, almighty platform gatekeeper. But with the world being what it is right now, draconian device lockdowns of some kind are the best option that is immediately available.
by darth_avocado | 2025-10-28 23:48:39+00:00
I’m not sure what you mean by FAANG standards, but Meta and Netflix both pay way more and Google and Apple pay similar if not more with waaay better work culture. Tech companies of the last decade like Uber, DoorDash, Block, Snap, Airbnb, Snowflake etc. all pay more than Amazon while the new generation of AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are not even comparable. The only way you would consider Amazon pay to be very good is if you come from Microsoft or one of the old school companies like Cisco and IBM. I would put Amazon pay as middle of the pack or mediocre.
by tptacek | 2025-10-28 23:48:54+00:00
I agree. I'm a fan of the non-single payer European systems, and, especially, of the Australian system. Nobody can look at the American system and say we've got it right! I do like the private->Medicare compromise we have, but we also have the original sin (a strange and I think unintended consequence of the mid-century tax code) of employer-sponsored coverage.
by nzeid | 2025-10-28 23:49:13+00:00
> So, just using any old LCG wasn't good enough, you had to use one made by someone with a PhD in mathematics. Donald Knuth shook his fist at the world and shouted "Hah! I told you so!", published a book on how to do it Right that most people didn't read, and then went back into his Fortress of Solitude to write TeX.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, I believe every word of this.
by kemitchell | 2025-10-28 23:49:43+00:00
Copyright under US law does not require "artistic expression". One of the requirements is called "creativity", but it's very easy to meet. The key phrase is literally "some minimal degree of creativity".

The fundamental policy choice was to protect computer software under intellectual property law, with exclusive rights and market compensation. There were a number of ways that could have been done. Other jurisdictions toyed with new, software-specific laws. But in the end the call in the US was to bring it under existing copyright law with some tweaks to definitions and a small handful of software-specific rules.
by superbowl | 2025-10-28 23:49:48+00:00
Good point:

> Current AI capabilities map onto ["bullshit jobs"] with alarming precision. LLMs excel at generating plausible-sounding reports, drafting formulaic communications, summarizing information, and answering repetitive queries. They don't need genuine intelligence; they just need to automate the performance of administrative labor.

> In an era where Wall Street actively rewards companies for mass layoffs, AI presents a golden opportunity for cost-cutting disguised as "efficiency."

I had been thinking employers giving "AI" as a reason for layoffs were uniformly disingenuous, but they may be referring, in part, to performative roles.
by no_wizard | 2025-10-28 23:50:06+00:00
Off the top of my head:

- The Partnership for America's Health Care Future

- American Hospital Association

- U.S. Chamber of Commerce

- Various lobbying organizations related to private insurance and adjacent systems, like pharmacy benefit management organizations

Politico has a great article about the Medicare For All fight[0]

The opposition spent hundreds of millions of dollars fighting it.

[0]: https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2019/11/25/medicare-for...
by bigyabai | 2025-10-28 23:50:09+00:00
LoL didn't have kernel-level anticheat for the majority of it's lifetime; when it was added to the game, Apple had removed kexts from the OS entirely. And Valorant doesn't support macOS in the first place, presumably because it didn't run Riot's Ring 0 anticheat at-launch.

What point are you trying to make here?
by necovek | 2025-10-28 23:50:38+00:00
You've asked for an intrinsic difference between a class of devices: no, you are unlikely to want to run general purpose apps on your washing machine. Yes, you are likely to do so on your smart phone. Probable on your modern "smart TV". Low probability on your eReader.

Legislation like EU Cybersecurity Act hopefully pushes things into more of a fundamental rights thing by demanding that devices don't go into the trash pile as soon as the vendor stops issuing security updates by mandating an ability to keep operating these devices without negatively affecting Internet at large (by, for example, becoming a part of a botnet).

This is already possible with many general compute devices by putting a version of up-to-date GNU/Linux or FreeBSD or... on it. And for a smaller subset of GC smartphones, with AOSP-based Android.
by globalnode | 2025-10-28 23:50:44+00:00
my belief (without proof) is that in a world of big data, we're all likely on some sort of govt database with a note about what we do or dont do but as a privacy enthusiast I'll continue making it as difficult as possible for anyone to syphon off my data easily and for free.

I've also recently become aware of the depths of how insecure our data really is. windows recall is one problem, but they make the o/s, whos to say they arent sending data to hq about you anyway. then you have firmware that can do what it wants before you even get to the o/s layer.

encryption is nice if you own all the hardware and software before you hit the network (like on an embedded device for example) but then what about the security at the receivers end? even the pro's make mistakes in this area.

so while i try not to give away my data for free, if youre networked, your not 100% secure. im not even sure what other toys eavesdroppers have to get around problems but it sure is an interesting field!
by bigyabai | 2025-10-28 23:50:51+00:00
> How much innovation is there to do in the OS at this point?

1) Sign Nvidia's drivers again, at least for compute (there's no excuse)

2) Implement Vulkan 1.2 compliance (even Asahi did it, c'mon)

3) Stop using notifications to send me advertisements

3.1) Stop using native apps to display advertisement modals

4) Do not install subscription services on my machine by-default

5) Give macOS a "developer mode" that's at-least as good as WSL2 (if they won't ship GNU utils)

6) Document the APFS filesystem so the primary volume isn't inscrutable, akin to what M$ did for NTFS

If they're trying to get me to switch off Linux, those would be a nice start. I don't think any of that is too much to ask from a premium platform, but maybe my expectations are maligned.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-10-28 23:51:45+00:00
~5000 IU daily between February and May was barely enough to raise 25(OH) D level in my blood from 9 to 30 ng/ml.

Depending on who you ask, 30 is either the bound between "deficient" and "insufficient", or between "insufficient" and "sufficient". Regardless of who you ask, there's plenty of headroom until "excess".
by phire | 2025-10-28 23:51:47+00:00
The question is not so much when the first CPU ships with the instruction, but when the last CPU without it stops being relevant.

It varies from instruction to instruction, but alternative code paths are expensive, and not well supported by compilers, so new instructions tend to go unused (unless you are compiling code with -march=native).

In one way, RISC-V is lucky. It's not that currently widely deployed anywhere, so RVA23 should be picked up as the default target, and anything included in it will have widespread support.

But RVA23 is kind of pulling the door closed after itself. It will probably become the default target that all binary distributions will target for the next decade, and anything that didn't make it into RVA23 will have a hard time gaining adoption.
by tanelpoder | 2025-10-28 23:51:50+00:00
Interesting. I just posted the link from this X post [1] without modifying it (and it wasn’t 0.0.0.0…). I think one thing HN does is that when it detects a HTTP redirect, it will start using the referred to URL instead…

[1] https://x.com/julianhyde/status/1982637782544900243
by jongjong | 2025-10-28 23:52:07+00:00
I love tinkering but I'm very minimalist as far as tooling is concerned. I don't like to use too many tools. I only use tools to automate activities that I do frequently. I don't try to micromanage and automate every aspect of my existence. Some stuff is better left uncounted and unplanned.

A lot of other people who like tinkering seem to have a kind of obsession with using all the latest gadgets to solve the tiniest problems. IMO, there's a point when you're so into automation that you end up looking for problems to use your tools on. You end up introducing new problems into your life, just so you can solve them using your tool of choice. Your life becomes like a Rube Goldberg machine.
by anyfoo | 2025-10-28 23:52:11+00:00
Maybe you'll get a kick out of this, I did it in a bored afternoon a while back:

echo -ne '\e[8;32;90;t';n=20;t=524292;l=$((t-1));m=$((2**n-1));c=0;xs=(1);ys=(1);for ((i=0;i<n*m;i++));do b=$((l&1));l=$(((l>>1)^(b*t)));c=$(((c<<1|b)&m));[ $((i%n)) -eq 0 ] &&{xs=($c $xs[1,4]);y=$((((xs[4]-xs[0])<<30-0x3fffd60f*ys[2]+0x7d32617c*ys[1])>>30));ys=($y $ys[1]);yd=$((120+(y >> 24)));printf '\e[48;5;%um ' $yd};done

It is entirely self-contained (but needs zsh, not bash, for dumb reasons). Terminal at 90 columns works best.

It is just a very simple integer LFSR as a random number source, followed by a hand-made integer IIR filter (manually placing poles on the z-plane). All of this entirely with trivial integer operations only (effectively using 32 bit fixed point arithmetic)

So without any external input or tools at all, and not even using zsh's $RANDOM, it makes an "analog" weavy pattern.

The LFSR is this part:

b=$((l&1));l=$(((l>>1)^(b*t)));c=$(((c<<1|b)&m))

The hand-made filter is this part:

xs=($c $xs[1,4]);y=$((((xs[4]-xs[0])<<30-0x3fffd60f*ys[2]+0x7d32617c*ys[1])>>30));ys=($y $ys[1])

I specifically tuned the filter peak just slightly away from being an integer divisor of 90 columns, to give the pattern a slight "rolling" effect.*
by tyoma | 2025-10-28 23:52:24+00:00
Surprise ambulance bills are mostly (but not completely) illegal in California as of Jan 1 2024. Ask the LLM of your choice about AB 716 and whether it applies to your situation (it likely but not certainly does). Have the LLM draft a letter and send the physical letter to the ambulance company. If they are bothering you, request they only contact you by US mail.
by kragen | 2025-10-28 23:52:31+00:00
This reads like fiction rather than informed ethnography.

I think I've only been in one hectomillionaire's kitchen, though it can be hard to tell, and the only resemblance to your description is that he had a large household staff. But it wasn't his main house, and I don't know if you consider someone who isn't even a billionaire to be "truly rich".
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-28 23:52:48+00:00
The Vision Pro is a technical marvel, but as a hardware product it's uncomfortable (too heavy), bloated (useless front screen) and badly designed (straps are finally getting decent if we can trust the reviews).

These decisions IMHO fall on the hardware team, and they're not doing a good job IMHO. Meta's hardware team is arguably pulling more weight, as much as we can hate Meta for being Meta.

> headphones

Here again, the reception wasn't that great. The most recent airPod Pro was a mixed bag, the airPod max had most of the flaws of the Vision Pro and they didn't learn anything from it.

> camera

The best smartphone cameras aren't the iPhone by far now, they're losing to the Chinese makers, but don't have to compete as the market is segmented.

> MacBook and iPad are almost as thin

I wouldn't put the relentless focus on thinness as a net positive though.

All in all I'm not saying they're slacking, I'm arguing they lost the plot on many fronts and their product design is lagging behind in many ways. Apple will stay the top dog by sheer money (even just keeping TSMC in their pocket) and inertia, but I wouldn't be praising their teams as much as you do.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-10-28 23:53:22+00:00
Insurance companies are required to spend something like 80% of premiums on claims.

This sounds like a really good thing, almost everything coming in has to go back out…

What it really means is they love high “allowed” prices. They live on the 20% and want to see the pie as large as possible.

Healthcare costs go up? They raise premiums — win-win.

The road to hell is only paved with good intentions.
by t0mas88 | 2025-10-28 23:53:26+00:00
Sure 92% of Americans have insurance, but they pay 5-10x the monthly premium compared to most Europeans and then on top of that the co-pay is thousands of dollars more than the small (or zero) amounts Europeans have. And insurance is not guaranteed, it's all linked to your employer. It's bad for nearly everyone, but enough people accept it so it doesn't change.
by fn-mote | 2025-10-28 23:53:46+00:00
I agree that European schools are heavily tracked, but I’m not seeing the connection between that and the tuition costs.

It seems like these are unrelated issues.

Does the wider freedom of choice in US education somehow cause college to cost more? Because more people want to go?? I don’t get it.

> Europeans solve these problems just by caring more about human values
by epcoa | 2025-10-28 23:54:10+00:00
HSAs are triple tax advantaged retirement accounts. Not taxed on contribution, gains, or withdrawals for qualified expenses. In the worst case it becomes like a pretax IRA because after age 65 you will not pay a penalty on non qualified expenses - but qualified expenses tend to increase with age. For many it should be their primary retirement account. Even for people with certain chronic conditions (not in perfect health), depending on how good/expensive the PPO offered by the employer, it might still work out better to do HDHP/HSA. You can get as many basically free HSA accounts from Fidelity.

An FSA really has nothing to do with an HSA.