MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-10-28 20:50:46+00:00
I know you were just explaining why America puts up with this, but it's not my opinion that everyone does prioritize inflation over healthcare. It's a core issue for a lot of people.

> People getting surprise bills that their insurance will not cover is rare

Define rare. Because millions of people per year are forced into uninsured ER visits.

> A better way to think of this is like bad car accidents

A hard disagree.

Most people avoid the hospital until they need to go to the ER, because taking time off work to find out if you're even allowed to be treated is prohibitive. I can't talk to any medical professional anymore without going in. And with the doctor shortage, if I go to a hospital, I will be dismissed unless I'm experiencing severe sickness or pain because I'm wasting their time.

People are driving all the time. People avoid the hospital as much as possible, because they are understaffed and predatory, and there are many pitfalls where you can be ripped off. This is all assuming you even know how this stuff works. Not everyone realizes an uninsured visit could cost as much as a house. You don't get the bill until it's done. That's the fucked up part.

I don't know a single person making under 100k who is comfortable with their healthcare situation. They are terrified to be unconscious or misinformed, making a mistake that could financially cripple them for life. There are no guardrails for this. Yet there is more vitriol for AWS bills then there are for the healthcare system.
by kragen | 2025-10-28 20:50:50+00:00
Either Fil-C or a different implementation of the same idea seems essential to me. A great deal of software has been written in C, and without some way of running it, we lose access to that intellectual heritage. But pervasive security vulnerabilities mean that the traditional "YOLO" approach to C compilation is a bad idea for software that has to handle untrusted input, such as Web browsing or email.

Pizlo seems to have found an astonishingly cheap way to do the necessary pointer checking, which hopefully I will be able to understand after more study. (The part I'm still confused about is how InvisiCaps work with memcpy.)

tialaramex points out that we shouldn't expect C programmers to be excited about Fil-C. The point tialaramex mentions is "DWIM", like, accessing random memory and executing in constant time, but I think most C programmers won't be willing to take a 4× performance hit. After all, if they wanted to be using a slow language, they wouldn't be writing their code in C. But I think that's the wrong place to look for interest: Fil-C's target audience is users of C programs, not authors of C programs. We want the benefits of security and continued usage of existing working codebases, without having to pay the cost to rewrite everything in Rust or TypeScript or whatever. And for many of us, much of the time, the performance hit may be acceptable.
by ifyoubuildit | 2025-10-28 20:50:59+00:00
> No it isn't. Getting rubella while pregnant would be much much worse for the fetus, while likely mild for the woman.

Does the doctor give the pregnant woman that vaccine? (I meant same difference about "temporal recommendation" vs "recommending against")

> Ergo: The Jannsen vaccine is better than getting covid without it.

If you had already recovered from covid and were younger, the upside was negligible, so I don't think it would meet "grossly outweigh".

> It is blanketly recommended before coming in contact with HPV.

It seems to be recommended for ages 9 to 26, so presumably there is a downside for those younger than 9.

(https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/hcp/recommendations.htm...)

If you just compare the downsides of a successful vaccine (which is not all vaccines) to the downsides of the disease it targets, it should obviously always come out that the vaccine was a net win. But you can see how that gets pretty far from "there is no downside to any vaccine" right?

Chat gpt mentions oral polio. You're probably better off having had the oral polio vaccine if you are 100% going to be exposed to polio. But you wouldn't be doing a random first world resident a favor advising them to get the oral polio vaccine (which isn't suggested by "there is no downside to any vaccine")

So granted, you have an infinitely better argument than the original. And maybe that's the argument they meant to make.
by tptacek | 2025-10-28 20:51:11+00:00
How exactly do they make more money by not paying? They're required to spend 80% of their funds on provider expenses. The only obvious way to sustain the narrative that insurers are distorting the system for profit is the preceding comment's hypo that they'd be over-paying (and then driving rates up as their expenses increased). You propose the opposite fact pattern here.

(Net cost of health insurance, all expenses, is around 6.5% of total US spending, as against 51.5% of direct provider costs for doctors, nurses, and procedures, not counting prescriptions.)
by butlike | 2025-10-28 20:51:18+00:00
Please tell me if I'm off-base here, but something I always thought about and have been toying with is the notion that "there's no true random in this universe."

From a particle physics perspective, as an observer in the electromagnetic spectrum, we're always observing through a reference frame based on the speed of light in relation to the observed object. Because it's always in reference to a constant, c, anything perceived at random can theoretically be measured if you had the position of the observer at the time of observation, right?

Am I way off-base here?
by gruez | 2025-10-28 20:52:01+00:00
>Regardless of the origins of the term "sideload", the language implies a non-standard practice.

Because it is non-standard. Like it or not, the intended experience is that you get apps from the play/app store, and for most people that's exactly what they do. This is a descriptive statement, not a normative one. Accepting it doesn't imply you oppose the freedom to run whatever code you want. The language of "sideload" or whatever is directly downstream of this. Just because google is using language that reflects the current state of affairs, doesn't mean they're engaging in some sort of sinister psyop with their word choice, as the OP is trying to imply.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-28 20:52:03+00:00
Libreoffice is fine, better than we deserve. If they want it to be even better, maybe instead of throwing a few hundred million at MS, they could throw a few hundred million at Libreoffice. It's old as hell and kept up by charity.

The idea that Libreoffice is so bad that giving up your freedom to Google or Microsoft is unavoidable just shows your actual level of objection to being slaves to US companies is close to zero. You'll only be pried away from your dependence on the latest popular versions of US products kicking, screaming, and complaining the entire time. You wouldn't be satisfied with anything but a clone, and you'd complain that the clone lacked the most obscure features of the real thing.

And it's not just you, but a typical sort of aimless ridicule of FOSS product from people who feel guilty about not using them when their professed politics say they should. You'll talk a big game about independence, but your fictional pan-European office suite is far worse than Libreoffice, seeing as it doesn't exist. Couldn't be more feature-light.
by superconduct123 | 2025-10-28 20:52:06+00:00
When I was younger I used to hate on popular things and be that guy who is like "how can anyone like this, this is objectively bad" (for example pop music)

But I started a habit of re-framing it instead like "well if you don't understand why people like something, that is your own failure to understand human behaviour and culture, if you were smarter you would understand why its popular"

That habit of re-framing stuff like that made me look at things a lot more like a neutral observer/anthropologist and not be such a hater
by ben_w | 2025-10-28 20:52:15+00:00
By the current standards of US discourse, Dick Cheney and both Presidents Bush, and Reagan as per recent advert drama, are "left wing".

By British standards, the US Democrats are dangerously radical libertarians owing to the fact the Democrats support even the slightest right to personal access to firearms. There's only a rounding error of support in the British policians for "republican" policies, i.e. ceasing to be a monarchy.

Musk is, in the UK, supporting a man who identifies as "Tommy Robinson" (real name "Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon"), and has called for Farage, the leader of the UK's populist far right party Reform, to stop leading that party after Farage distanced himself from Yaxley-Lennon.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-10-28 20:52:30+00:00
I don't know, why do we need a term to distinguish brown from dark orange? The term emerged organically because the built-in app store is the most common way to install apps on mobile phones (and the only way on iOS), but on Android you can also install apps from other sources without needing Google's permission so people came up with a catchy name for that.

It's convenient because now we can say "Google is killing sideloading" as a very succinct way to describe what's happening when we're arguing against it. "Blocking users from installing apps not approved by Google" works equally well but is a bit more wordy. I personally prefer the latter because I think it's a little more precise, but trying to imply people have to phrase things that way or they're part of some conspiracy does nothing but alienate your supporters and distract from the real issue.
by floatrock | 2025-10-28 20:52:57+00:00
Yeah, I've seen it with windfarms. Always wondered why do they need to blink at the same time. The scale of the blink is pretty jarring at night (but also awe-some, in the same way any big enough infrastructure project inspires a kind of awe).

Wind farms have a certain amount of nimbyism because they "spoil the natural landscape." (So do regular farms -- nothing natural about grain silos or row crops, but that's a side topic...) Anyways, having that many towers blink in unison across that big a landscape is a weird effect when you first see it. I think there's an argument that if they blinked independently it would feel more natural in a way.

But since the blinking is all FAA requirements, I assume it's to help identify all the individual towers from the air. I suppose if they were all blinking independently, it would be a predator-trying-to-focus-on-a-single-zebra-in-the-herd problem, except in this case the predator is a pilot trying not to crash into a turbine.

Sure would emit more subtle 'part of the landscape' vibes though.

(Which I guess is exactly what you don't want when you're flying above them. Sigh.)
by hackingonempty | 2025-10-28 20:53:03+00:00
If someone puts their code on a web site like GitHub and invites the public to download it, then a copy made by downloading it there is a legit copy. I didn't agree to any contracts to download it and I don't need a license to use it. I do need a license to make copies or derivative works and distribute them. In this case the Copyright holder does provide a license to do so under certain conditions.
by Taikonerd | 2025-10-28 20:53:38+00:00
Oh, this was the plot of the Mexican sci-fi movie The Sleep Dealer: [0]

From Wikipedia: "A fortified wall has ended unauthorized Mexico-US immigration, but migrant workers are replaced by robots, remotely controlled by the same class of would-be emigrants."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbJGQl-dJ6c&pp=ygUUc2xlZXAgZ...
by js8 | 2025-10-28 20:53:48+00:00
There is no catch - I even describe the reduction in another comment below. You can convert a 3SAT clause to a combination of XORSAT and 2SAT clauses. I am not mistaken, either, I used this reduction many times on practical problems, so I know it works. I encourage you to try it.

Unfortunately, putting the algorithms for XORSAT and 2SAT together is not trivial at all, they are quite different (but Grobner bases over GF(2) seem very promising in that).

But I agree that the fact that both XORSAT and 2SAT have polynomial algorithms is quite a strong indicator that full SAT has a one too. :-) (On the other hand, there is IMHO only very little actual evidence for P!=NP.)
by nostrebored | 2025-10-28 20:54:05+00:00
There are tools like claude-code-router. I've gone through the pain of getting gpt-5, gemini-2.5-pro, and other models wired together. The system prompt differences are too much though I think, claude still feels the best in claude code.

I'm at the point where I have so much built up around claude code workflows that claude feels very good. But when I don't use them, I find that I immensely prefer gpt-5 (and for harder, design influencing questions, grok-4 heavy which is not available behind an API)
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-28 20:54:16+00:00
> I have heard the US is a democracy.

It is certainly not a direct democracy where each individual policy is resolved by separate independent voting, no.

> So then insurance-based healthcare is what American people truly want?

Pretty consistently, no, but there is not any single alternative that a majority of the American people prefer recently (for a while, as far back as the 1990s, there was a clear popular majority for universal single-payer), and more importantly, it is not the only issue that factors into people’s voting decisions.
by tandr | 2025-10-28 20:54:20+00:00
Last decades? wipes the tear You surely forgot /s at end, I hope. The evil incarnation what is called "Samsung fridge" that I have in my kitchen required repairman's attention just 3 months after the purchase. And then every 3 months after. And children sacrifices, sorry - steam baths, for the ice maker every month or so.

Samsung appliances - never again.

PS. Repairman told me that Samsung have fixed already one of the problems my fridge has by the time he looked at it, kind of hidden recall and fix. Fridge's version (yes, they have versions) have advanced like 7 iterations already from the time I bought it. That means there were at least 7 serious design/manufacturing problems that they had to fix.
by fxtentacle | 2025-10-28 20:54:41+00:00
Yay to living in the EU! Since I would be allowed to get a full purchase-price refund if they'd try to pull this shit in the Europe, they limited the new "Cover-Screen-Widget" to only activate within the US.

I know, I know, I suffer daily from government overreach ;) But have you tried lobbying for your fellow humans?
by quotemstr | 2025-10-28 20:55:06+00:00
Leaving culture war articles aside, I think having on other subjects, a diversity of perspectives is legitimate. Consider a personal interest of mine, the dark ages in Europe after the fall of the western Roman empire.

The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)) is a one-sided presentation that begins with denying the historical reality of a period called "the dark ages", continues with a history of the term itself, and concludes with a brief section on non-academic use of the term and reiterates the claim that the periodization is a "myth of popular culture". The article barely mentions the events of the period.

If you read the Grokipedia article on the same subject (https://grokipedia.com/page/Dark_Ages_(historiography)), you'll find not only meta-discussion of the origins of the term, but also in-depth exploration of the events of the period, the causes of the decline in living standards, and arguments from prominent scholars on both sides of the debate about the utility of labeling this period a "dark age".

The Wikipedia article doesn't mention Ward-Perkins, a prominent scholar in the camp arguing that the dark ages represented real material decline. The Grokipedia article cites him extensively.

The difference is interesting because Grokipedia's presentation is much closer to the truth. The dark ages really were in fact dark. In some parts of Europe, literacy itself was almost lost. Trade did collapse. Living standards did fall. We have tons of archaeological and literary evidence attesting to this decline. Tabooing the term "dark ages" does nothing to deepen our understanding.

Yet the Wikipedia article is one-sided because, frankly, its editors see themselves as enforcers of academic orthodoxy.

There are thousands of disputed subjects like this outside the culture war everyone gets worked up about. It really is the case that Wikipedia presents one side of live academic conflicts and gatekeeps sources to minimize heterodox perspectives -- again, all having nothing to do with mechahitler or the culture war or whatever.

I'm glad there's more epistemic competition in the world now.
by vel0city | 2025-10-28 20:55:07+00:00
LG with their faulty Linear Compressors and craft ice makers that are doomed to fail? The one with the big lawsuit for their faulty fridges?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y54QbkCtFE4

I have an LG fridge. I like it. I think the linear compressor tech is cool, even if their implementation is potentially flawed. I don't expect this thing to last a decade.
by SolarNet | 2025-10-28 20:55:11+00:00
> I don't know, manufacturing seems to have learned pretty well that they can ship everything overseas and people will eventually accept products just aren't made the same way they used to be.

I mean this is true, but we aren't talking about the consumer here. We're talking about the industry which is to say the powerful people who own and run all these companies.

What has happened is that those overseas countries now have all the experienced engineers over there and they know it. So you see things like the Trump admin begging Korean companies to keep their workers in the US because they understand how to actually do these things. And the reason the Trump admin did that is because they owe favors to the rich people who want to profit off of factories in the US.
by isodev | 2025-10-28 20:55:14+00:00
Then perhaps the problem is open APs? There are still legitimate uses for HTTP including reading static content.

Say we all move to HTTPS but then let’s encrypt goes away, certificate authority corps merge, and then google decides they also want remote attestation for two way trust or whatever - the whole world becomes walled up into an iOS situation. Even a good idea is potentially very bad at the hands of unregulated corps (and this is not a hypothetical)
by peter_d_sherman | 2025-10-28 20:55:15+00:00
Forgive me for writing this, but this whole story possibly reeks of somewhat questionable journalism...

This whole story reads like:

"Something bad happened to Person A. They were accused by Person B of something they didn't do. They were the victim. The victim. Flock doorbell cameras were nearby. They're sort of similar to Ring doorbell cameras but they're Flock. Flock. Did we mention Flock? Person A was a victim, and Flock cameras were nearby. Flock. Flock. Did we mention Flock? Flock cameras were nearby..."

But maybe some people don't see the pattern, so (again, forgive me for writing this!) let me write another story using that same "journalistic" pattern:

"A group of people tortured, raped and killed (or allegedly tortured, raped and killed) a second group of people. The first group of people we'll call a "gang" or a "junta" or a "militia" (as opposed to "a group of people"), the second group of people we'll call "The Victims" (as opposed to "a group of people" -- which was probably another gang, junta or militia!). The second group were Victims! Victims! And during the time of their victimization, their intense victimization, a bunch of Oreo Cookies(tm) sat on the table near where the atrocities (or alleged atrocities!) took place! Oreo Cookies! Oreo Cookies! Did we mention that Oreo Cookies were nearby when the victimization occurred? Oreo Cookies! Oreo Cookies! Oreo Cookies were nearby when the atrocities occured! Did we mention Oreo Cookies? Oreo Cookies were on the table near the victims!"

(Again, forgive me for writing this...)

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

(AKA: "Guilt By Association")
by lawn | 2025-10-28 20:55:19+00:00
Except if you have health insurance and the medics choose the "wrong" medicine which isn't covered by your particular insurance.

Or when an ambulance from the wrong company shows up.

Or as in OP when the hospital makes up the charge.

And add the 8% of uninsured Americans, which is still almost 30 million people!

Only in America will this all add up to "scary stories" and they will shrug and defend the system.
by rodrig3 | 2025-10-28 20:55:20+00:00
Interesting article!

We always talk about the Mediterranean diet as being one of the best for reducing mortality - interestingly a typical Mediterranean diet would have approximately "14g of vegetable fiber for every 1,000 kcal per day, which is more than double what is consumed every day in many industrialized countries" (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7190876/). Aside from its healthy fats, omega 3s, etc. there may be a big role here for the fiber in this dietary approach.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-28 20:55:30+00:00
I've always found the timelapse videos from ISS much more interesting than from satellites in geosync at least artistically. The angles are more interesting. I love the ones at night where you can see the city lights, the stars in the background, the Kármán line, auroras, and lightning.

One of the first projects I when I was learning how to be a proper hacker by using curl (at least according to certain states) was from NASA images which I would then turn into timelapse videos as well. I used imagery from SOHO to watch the sun on a weekly basis with a cronjob that would run once a week and deliver a video.
by brucehoult | 2025-10-28 20:55:51+00:00
That will be amazing when it happens, and a year is VERY soon!

Tenstorrent's first "Atlantis" Ascalon dev board is going to be similar µarch to Apple M1 but running at a lower clock speed, but all 8 cores are "performance" cores, so it should be in N150 ballpack single-core and soundly beating it multi-core.

They are currently saying Q2 2026, which is only 4-7 months from now.
by mywittyname | 2025-10-28 20:55:52+00:00
They pointed out the R&M reference in the paper.

> The tasks in Butter-Bench were inspired by a Rick and Morty scene [21] where Rick creates a robot to pass butter. When the robot asks about its purpose and learns its function, it responds with existential dread: “What is my purpose?” “You pass butter.” “Oh my god.”

I wouldn't have got the reference if not for the paper pointing it out. I think I'm a little old to be in the R&M demographic.
by gruez | 2025-10-28 20:56:23+00:00
>Debian has had a "first party store" since the early 90s, and the truth is the diametrical opposite of "they're sufficiently unpopular that people don't think of them as the primary source to get apps".

Aren't those all considered first party apps? Sure, debian aren't the authors of nginx or whatever, but they're the people building, packaging it, and adding patches for it. It's a stretch to compare them to the play store or app store.