MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmspring | 2025-10-29 03:11:41+00:00
This is interesting. In the past 1/2 dozen years, I've ended up in the hospital twice (both via ER, one at Stanford, one at Dominican in Santa Cruz). In both cases, I was there for ~3 days (I push to get myself out as quickly as I can). We ended up paying barely anything (decent insurance), but the bills were interesting in what they charge and for what.

The Stanford visit was predated by a two night stay at Eastern Plumas Hospital (rural, interesting experience). EPH wanted as much for two days and Stanford charged for three. Seeing the billed amount and what insurance agreed to in each case was enlightening -- basically 1/3-1/2.

I would not want to deal with fighting this if I was chronically ill.
by Kreptaa | 2025-10-29 03:11:43+00:00
It's really crazy that there is an entire ai generated internet. I have zero clue what the benefit of using this would be to me.Even if we argue that it is less ads and such, that would only be until they garner enough users to start pushing charges. Probably through even more obtrusive ads.

I also need to laugh. Wasn't open AI just crying about people copying them not so long ago?
by jamiejquinn | 2025-10-29 03:11:55+00:00
I don't know if taste is the correct word here but I agree with the spirit of the article, especially the parts on tinkering being a form of practice. Play (in the form of enjoyable tinkering) is such a powerful motivator in learning. In saying that I've found two big limitations with this style of play-based learning:

1. It can easily devolve into meaningless tweaking (see author's point about touching dotfiles) which can still be satisfying but not very impactful. 2. It's hard to maintain motivation when something stops being fun. This is where external motivators like bosses, clients and scoreboards (e.g. Advent of Code) are actually valuable...
by ab_testing | 2025-10-29 03:12:24+00:00
I think the root cause of the problem is not insurance companies but they definitely do play a part. The real reasons are multiple but can be listed as below.

1 A very high cost of drugs due to no intervention by the government as part of free market philosophy. This means that the same insulin that costs $25 in Canada can be sold for up to $1000 per month. New introduced drugs for Alzheimer's or other diseases can cost up to 50k per year - again because no price controls.

2. Insanely high prices of services due to a captive market - example a ten minute ambulance ride can cost up from $1000 to $5000. The private ambulance companies know they can charge a high base rate because they are connected to a city or municipality via contracts. Bribes as campaign funds are popular here. E.g. a new York based ambulance operator paid 45k in campaign funds to NY's governor elect and got a contract worth one billion dollars

https://www.wkbw.com/news/state-news/report-nysdoh-awards-mu...

3. Overcharging by hospitals for medicines and services again due to a captive audience. The hospitals are free to maintain various price books and you are not told what each service will cost at the time of administration of service. lately the hospitals have been forced to open up their price books but they are so convoluted that no normal human can decipher those prices.

Thus a ten cent aspirin would cost you $25 in the hospital and a MRI can run up to 15k.

4. Very high charges for doctors due to strict control on the number of MD positions and no increase in colleges or D seats over multiple years.

https://www.aamc.org/news/press-releases/new-aamc-report-sho...

5. Insurance companies have a for profit motive and need to extract their profits from premiums paid. Thus they fight tooth and nail to deny procedures and medications and set up convoluted processes for appeals.

6. Extensive fraud on Medicare and other government run health programs especially in durable medical goods and fake billing. In fact one of sitting US senators medical care company was involved in the largest Medicare fraud fines in the US and he still holds his seat.

https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386....

Infact fraud billing Medicare for services not rendered is so popular that even Insurance companies do it

https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/enforcement/united-states-interven...

Combine all the above factors and you will see why the US consumer gets so little while paying so much for his healthcare.
by gsf_emergency_4 | 2025-10-29 03:13:00+00:00
How about Hans Zimmer and the gen-Z Swedish musician Nolan went with for Oppenheimer? Not dissonant enough?

I'm more curious if the periphery has declined in coherence thanks to "autocuration" as by TikTok & YouTube.

(creators of GangnamStyle or BabyShark have industrial funding to outdo themselves on their preferred axes just like Nolan but..?)

Opposite, less quantitative take:

https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-new-systems-of-s...

(author sorta argued that we're deep in the Perma_weirdo_cene)

It's easy on HN where "votes have won".. evenso I've given up and have resorted to reviewing what 1-pointers PaulHoule and his machine deign coherent enough to respond to
by protocolture | 2025-10-29 03:13:13+00:00
Prediction: Wifi captive portal vendors will not react to this until after 90% of their customerbase has their funding dry up.

It is incredibly common for public wifi captive portals to be built on a stack of hacks, some of which require the inspection of HTTP and DNS requests to function.

*Yes better tools exist, but they dont arent commonly used, and require Portal, WAP and Client support. Most vendors just tell people to turn new fancy shit off, disable HTTPS and proceed with HTTP.
by hedora | 2025-10-29 03:13:31+00:00
Ours died with a “cannot communicate with board A” error. The wiring harness (yes, an irreplaceable harness) between A and B looked fine. We replaced boards A and B, which were half the price of the machine and not returnable. Same error code. We threw it out and got a Speed Queen.

Our Samsung fridge’s manual says it’ll automatically and silently mesh network with any Samsung TVs in range, use AI and hidden cameras to recognize what’s in the fridge and when we use it, then have the TV inject targeted ads into programming based on its findings.

We’ll never purchase another Samsung product.
by gnabgib | 2025-10-29 03:14:30+00:00
Related:

In Colorado, a marriage of solar energy and farming (191 points, 10 months ago, 115 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42590903

~How a Solar Revolution in Farming Is Depleting Groundwater (124 points, 2023, 129 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39730784

Low on water, California farmers turn to solar farming (85 points, 2019, 51 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684288
by parineum | 2025-10-29 03:14:44+00:00
> $30-40k debt for a new graduate of an average university sounds crazy expensive to virtually everyone outside of the USA

That's the cost over 4 years. Most people will be able to get financial assistance to help pay for that and you easily manage to make 30k (or less with grants) in 4 years to pay for school. People making below 35k per year are going to pay practically zero taxes. You can work about 15 hours a week making $10 per or full time over the summer to pay for that.

There's no need to take on any debt.

People in the US make considerably more money than those in the EU and, generally pay less taxes so there's a lot more disposable income available. I think people here prefer to be able to just get what they can pay for rather than hope the government will let them pursue the education they want (there are aptitude tests and quotas in some EU countries).

It's not really better ir worse, it's just different.
by jmspring | 2025-10-29 03:15:24+00:00
I'm still typing this from an M1 MAX MBP w/ 64 gig of ram. I ended up needing more memory so, I swapped to this machine instead of my M1 air w/ 16gig. Both machines are completely capable for most tasks I deal with as a developer. Do I like my work m3? Sure. I wish I had the old m3 air I had to give back. But I'm happy with my machines.

It's funny that my ipad has a more current CPU than my two laptops.
by hopelite | 2025-10-29 03:15:56+00:00
That’s because all those languages are all essentially rooted in the languages/dialects of the Germanic tribes. It is why the Dutch get their English name from the German for German, Deutsch; and Nederland (Neder = Low) is German/Dutch for the Lowland Deutsch.

I’m sure everyone is aware that English comes from Anglish, i.e., the Angles as in the Germanic tribe.

Deutsch is derived from proto-germanic (as best we can tell) þiudiskaz, meaning “the people” i.e., the group of the different self associating tribes. It gets far more interesting in that it seems many of the strong dialects of especially southern Germany, Austria, and England have in fact retained some very old words and pronunciations that were lost in more standardized, conformed, and perverted dialects.
by lynndotpy | 2025-10-29 03:17:08+00:00
Makes me think of the voxel displacement renderer ( https://blog.danielschroeder.me/blog/voxel-displacement-mode... ) from a year ago.

I had an idea a little back about using hand-drawn mipmaps (.5x, 1x, 2x, etc) scales for sprites, with some method for nearest neighbor, (e.g. with a 3x scale taking pixels from the 2x and the 4x scale). I imagined I wasn't the first to have that idea, but it was just a passing thought. I wonder if OP is doing anything like that?

Anyways, very neat.
by georgehopkin | 2025-10-29 03:17:19+00:00
Using AI tools like ChatGPT for complex tasks leads people to significantly overestimate their performance, with those who consider themselves more AI-literate being the most overconfident, according to new research from Aalto University. The findings suggest a reversal of the typical Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE) when interacting with large language models (LLMs).

Typically, the DKE describes how low performers tend to overestimate their abilities, while high performers slightly underestimate theirs. However, this study found that all users overestimated their performance when using ChatGPT for logical reasoning tasks, regardless of their actual success rate.
by jenadine | 2025-10-29 03:18:30+00:00
> The Software, including its source code [...], may only be accessed, read, used, modified, consumed, or distributed by natural human persons

So that means that the source code must be handwritten and never be put on a computer and therefore never be downloaded.

Not sure a source code that can't even be compiled/interpreted by a computer is so useful.

Perhaps for cooking recipes at best?
by zdragnar | 2025-10-29 03:18:51+00:00
> rebrands of Chinese conglomerates

Eh, I've got a very reasonably priced Haier fridge that I've had no issues with at all. Maybe I'm just lucky, and it definitely helps that there's no built in ice maker or water dispenser (those things seem to break first) but it's lived longer than the refrigerators that the rest of my family have.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-10-29 03:20:39+00:00
European healthcare in my experience has capacity issues.

Typically hospitals are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of patients. Waiting times for procedures are incredibly long.

Where the system kind of shines is emergency care and long term illnesses, you go in and they save your life for free.

For any other kind of treatment you are generally better off turning to the private sector in Europe. You are going to have to pay depending on the country the cost might be outrageous but typically you will get access to procedures in days vs months.
by ATiredGoat | 2025-10-29 03:21:33+00:00
Alone, I've spent years weaving The Labyrinth of Time's Edge, a vast QBasic text adventure with over 4,000 interconnected rooms. Its newest chapter, The Ashen Coast, drags you to a haunted shoreline where the sky rains ash and the dead whisper through the waves. Every description, every echo, was written by hand to capture the feeling of being lost in another world.
by hollow-moe | 2025-10-29 03:21:41+00:00
Websites can choose to not accept your passkey manager ("accept" not "block" since it will obviously be enforced as whitelist). What could possibly go wrong ? If only there was a similar example with an existing system like TOTP and a big company like Steam.......... Link unrelated https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/discussions/9591 Eventually get debanked and go live in the woods ig
by SchemaLoad | 2025-10-29 03:21:42+00:00
Yeah for sure do enough research to avoid something awful, but as soon as you get to the reddit comments that are like "Nah don't buy that it's junk, buy this one" and "this one" is twice the price, it's probably best to ignore. And certainly best to avoid doing any more research or reading forums/reddit after the purchase is made.
by spiderfarmer | 2025-10-29 03:22:26+00:00
I just created a new account on X to see what it looks like nowadays. It was shocking to see that of the top 100 trending tweets on a fresh account that doesn’t follow anyone, at least 10 were people showing off how much they hate other people.

I’m not exaggerating. It’s a platform that thrives on hate, with maybe some useful information in between.
by unsungNovelty | 2025-10-29 03:24:10+00:00
Despite all the bad moves, one of the reasons why I use android and not iPhone is installing apps from places like fdroid.

If this stops, it fundamentally disallows me to have the privacy that Apple app store can't provide. The amount of garbage apps in play store is horrible. I don't try out any new apps from there cos of this. So I will just switch to iPhone.

Already degoogled for pretty much most things. This will be the last. And maybe switch my website from netlify which I think is using google cloud (need to check).
by narilth | 2025-10-29 03:24:31+00:00
I made an account just for you :) My opinion is: don't drop out.

1. The degree is useful. Having a Bachelor's opens up a lot of career paths because it shows that you committed to the Data Analytics program for four years. It also helps HR check off the "has a bachelor's" item on their list.

2. What you learn is useful. At the end of the day, you will be responsible for the code that the AI produces. How will you understand, explain, and justify your code to your colleagues and managers? "SQL, Python, JavaScript" and "theoretical Data Analytics knowledge" are both tools that will help you.

3. So far, senior engineers tend to have the most productivity boosts with AI. These engineers became "senior" before AI coding agents became mainstream, which means they know how to program. So based on this pattern, if you know how to program, then you will benefit more from AI.

Maybe you have other factors you are considering (e.g. money). My response is primarily based on the "existence of AI coding agents in the industry" factor.
by fiatpandas | 2025-10-29 03:24:43+00:00
1.0 - algorithmic ranking of real content, with direct links

2.0 - algorithmic feeds of real content with no outbound links - stay in the wall

3.0 - slop infects rankings and feeds, real content gets sublimated

4.0 - algorithmic feeds become only slop

5.0 - no more feeds or rankings, but on demand generative streams of slop within different walled slop gardens

6.0 - 4D slop that feeds itself, continuously turning in on itself and regenerating
by Retric | 2025-10-29 03:25:34+00:00
I expect the global peak annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry to occur sometime in the next 5 years largely dependent on economic activity. I’d give it something like 90% odds.

CO2 from land use (deforestation etc) has already dropped by half since the 1960’s, but I know less about that so I’m unsure of the details. That said it’s well under 10% of total emissions so probably not a major factor for now. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-land-use?mapSelect=~C...
by FarmerPotato | 2025-10-29 03:25:38+00:00
The important thing about wire-wrap sockets: they have square-ish pins.

As you wrap the wire around the square pin, there is a mind-boggling degree of force between the corner and the wire, creating a gas-tight seal.

It's tougher to get a good wrap onto a round pin. You can buy square-pin headers from peconnectors
by com2kid | 2025-10-29 03:26:19+00:00
> This community has pockets of people who like authoritarian control,

Alternatively, we've spent our lives helping our parents out. Last year my mom just got completely owned, total taken over of all her financial accounts. The most likely vector was that her phone was out of date and not receiving security patches anymore.

Luckily her bank's anti fraud systems kicked in before too much damage was done.

Prior to smart phones, many of us remember making monthly, or even weekly, trips to family members houses to remove malware and viruses from personal computers.

Things were bad.
by didibus | 2025-10-29 03:26:21+00:00
One reason I now often go to ChatGPT instead of many Google queries is that the experience is ads free, quick and responsive.

That said, don't be lured, you know they're already working on ways to put ads and trackers and what not inside ChatGPT and Atlas, those 20$ sound won't pay enough to recoup all that investment and cost and maximize profits.

So I think we should be careful what we wish for here.
by speff | 2025-10-29 03:27:26+00:00
If you know people affected, then you have more information than me and I'm not going to pretend like I have a better grasp on the situation than you.

However, the "last resort" comment I made was a guess to their reasoning - it wasn't an authoritative explanation. My core point is that Amazon seems to think they can do the same, or about the same, or an acceptable amount less with fewer people. If that's the case, then from their perspective, they're overpaying on labor. That's it.
by kamaal | 2025-10-29 03:27:40+00:00
I know of Indian immigrants who suffered for decades/years on H1B, endless anxiety and tensions, eventually make it to GC, then a passport.

Then all of a sudden fall ill, lose everything and return back to India.

People keep forgetting the US society is a giant stack/pyramid ranking system, the structure keeps getting narrow as you move upwards. You get pushed off the sides, in the ever narrowing funnel, and you need increasing levels of luck at every level to survive.

BTW, this is not just with regards to health care. You could lose your job, suffer from ageism. Lose your home, run out of money. A million different things can happen, that can cause the above said phenomenon.
by lock1 | 2025-10-29 03:28:33+00:00
In the end, it's still just a text editor. Don't expect that you will get things done n times faster than in vscode without extra effort added.

> I'm a VSCode user and when I hear people talk about neovim and it customizability

I think it's more customizable than vscode, but you need to learn some lua or vimscript to customize it. Back then I tried to create some custom keybindings in vscode and realized you can't add new ones, only modify what exists. While (n)vim provides you with out-of-the-box flexibility and more if you use something like LazyVim.

> Is it because it's faster?

What I retroactively like about (n)vim is that, after the initial learning cost, it turns out the default nvim keybindings are transferable to many UNIX tools (less/more, man, journalctl, etc). It feels much more comfortable to write some code in nvim, open up a terminal, and then `man X` without mentally switching the keybindings.

> Maybe it's because it's an editor you can easily use while ssh'd into a remote machine?

Actually, rather than nvim itself, it's more like vim is already preinstalled in many popular server distros. It's sometimes a huge time saver in cases where you're unable to install additional packages to edit some config/code/text files, just type `vim`/`vi` and you're good to go.

I did convert myself from a minimal vscode setup (disabled everything & only LSP extensions) to LazyVim nvim a few months ago. I had to tweak my .config/nvim, relearn Lua again, and read the manual. It took me about a week to settle things down and get used to basic nvim bindings.

After another week of suffering trying to fix JDTLS (Java LSP) integration, I'm enjoying my nvim setup. Unlike vscode sync which requires you to login, I could just git clone my `.config/nvim` and I'm good to go.
by dacox | 2025-10-29 03:28:37+00:00
Cool app!

I think I found a broken problem (or it’s worded strangely?) and I’m unable to progress beyond it

“Pick 2 that beat villain on board”

“QQ552”

In submitting Queen and 2 to make a full house but it just says

“Incorrect. Two pair on board. Win with a full house or ace kicker”
by tomhow | 2025-10-29 03:29:24+00:00
I'm late to this but I figure it's worth replying to if only to not leave the record uncorrected.

> So yes, the scope of HN is quite literally anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity, which for a lot of people involves political topics. Therefore, one is indeed doing those users a great disservice by flagging such stories.

There's a big difference between discussing a topic in the spirit of intellectual curiosity vs ideological battle. One can try to characterise the latter as the former as a way to justify anything as being within HN's scope, but it's quite easy for objective observers to see the difference in the way someone conducts themselves. Stories are off-topic on HN if most of the interest in those topics is from people who want to engage in ideological battle about that topic.

Also, re. this:

> I have no idea why I'm getting into this argument with a throwaway who might very well be a sockpuppet, but what the hell, let's do it

Please don't be snarky in response to another user who had posted a perfectly legitimate comment. Their account has been active for over four years and has > 3500 karma, so they're clearly an established and valued contributor to HN.
by iLemming | 2025-10-29 03:30:02+00:00
I don't want to sound like "advising", because long-term recommendations often carry the personal weight with them- whatever I tell you worked (or didn't) for me had an effect on me - it's never guaranteed to have any implications on someone else's life.

But here's what I learned after a long time trying different things and what's worked.

Don't try to find objective reasons for making big shifts in your workflow - be that a change of your major tool, language, technique, or paradigm. What I mean is: don't try to decide if any concrete tool would be good for you. Instead, try to understand the big underlying idea behind the tool. Once you comprehend the abstraction, choosing a concrete implementation of that idea wouldn't really matter - you can carry the big idea with you regardless of one concrete implementation.

In practice, here's what I mean: the idea of vim-navigation is absolutely beautiful, pragmatic, and fantastic, and it's positively worth every minute of the initial learning curve. It's really not that hard - it only requires just a bit of dedication and discipline. I honestly don't understand programmers who choose to be in this field, yet outright reject the mere idea of it after trying it for like six minutes.

Just go with it - you probably will hate me, everyone else in this thread, and yourself for a few days, but then it will grok. Once you have a good understanding of its tenets, you could easily take it to whichever medium you choose to stay in and it doesn't even have to be neovim.

Neovim might be great for you, and maybe not even as a concrete tool to achieve defined goals, but even as a head-start medium to understand the 'big idea' of vim-navigation.

Finally, whenever picking up a new thing, maybe don't try to find elevator pitches. After the initial acquaintance - Wikipedia, GitHub pages, etc. - google instead: "Why does [that thing] suck..." and maybe try instead to find compelling reasons to remain skeptical. Trying to remain unconvinced may help you find perspectives for why a certain idea is a matter of fact might be a good one to have in your pocket.