MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by w10-1 | 2025-11-11 23:29:36+00:00
TLDR: Current system rewards price manipulation, resulting in vertical integration to inflate list price & reduce competition. This blog post pulls together data showing how the largest does it.

This issue has been so well-known that it has been addressed in national legislation as early as 1992 and in federal court in 2009, but the new integrated PBM's managed to sidestep regulation and transparency.

Bulk contracts specify price as a percentage of various averages (like driving contracts off LIBOR or federal funds rate), but there are few enough players and prices are private, inviting list price inflation. Contracts are not actually using federally-regulated/defined metrics (WAC, NADAC) but legacy (unregulated) AWP.

The few owners of the main PBM's (roughly matching public capital value):

- Cigna/Evernorth/Express Script: Qualient (most expansive offerings)

- CVS: Cordavis

- UnitedHealth/Optum: Nuvaila

Integrated players give themselves a discount but charge others inflated rates. The insurers might also patients charge more for going to out-of-network pharmacies. Both are relatively normal mechanisms to capture benefits of integration.

Very helpful post (but structural solutions out of scope)
by icyfox | 2025-11-11 23:29:38+00:00
I bought a Sony TRV120 10+ years ago, back when I was doing this conversion project for the first time. It's built like a tank and still works today.

At the risk of being smited by professional archivists, I'm willing to wager that 99.9% of people can't tell the difference between a $5k archival rig and one of these higher quality camcorders. At this point it really feels like the biggest inhibiter to good quality digitization is the decaying of the tape versus the archival setup.

That said - for anyone with the time, patience, and soldering abilities I would love a more proper A/B test with RF signal capture software encoding. Something like this:

https://rastrillo.ca/digitizing-video8-tapes-with-vhs-decode...
by defrost | 2025-11-11 23:30:22+00:00
From the article:

London's original wall was 2 miles long, 6 metres high and almost 3 metres thick at its base

with a link to a graphic map and guide: https://colat.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/London-Wall-...

that states it ran from the Tower of London to the Museum in the Barbican.
Show HN: Find profitable YouTube niches (I wasted 8 months on $2 CPM)
by andybady | 2025-11-11 23:30:39+00:00
I spent 8 months growing a YouTube channel to 50k subs only to realize I was in a $2 CPM niche (gaming commentary). That channel barely made $200/month despite decent views.

So I built ApexVix to solve this for myself and other creators.

What it does:

Scans 400K+ YouTube channels to find what's actually making money (not just getting views) Shows you the CPM range for each niche BEFORE you waste months creating content Tracks 4M+ "outlier videos" (videos that popped off unexpectedly) so you can spot trends early Analyzes any channel in 60 seconds: revenue estimates, health score, posting patterns, what's working The data that surprised me: Some tiny niches with 10k subs are making $5k/month (luxury watch reviews, B2B SaaS tutorials), while million-sub gaming channels struggle to hit $2k. The difference? CPM rates range from $2 to $50+ depending on niche.

Most creators pick niches based on passion or what's trending on Twitter. Then they're shocked when monetization sucks. I wanted actual numbers upfront.

What's different from VidIQ/TubeBuddy: Those focus on SEO and keywords. ApexVix focuses on money. We show you:

Estimated monthly revenue per channel CPM ranges by niche and country Which faceless automation niches are exploding right now Competitor revenue tracking (not just sub counts) After using it myself for 6 months, I went from that $200/month channel to starting a new one in financial education that's on track for $3k/month at just 15k subs.

Some early users are finding 3-5 profitable niches they never considered in their first session. One guy pivoted from tech reviews to AI automation tutorials and tripled his RPM.

Recent updates based on feedback:

Added bookmark system for saving promising channels and video ideas AI-powered content idea generator based on proven outlier formats Thumbnail analyzer that predicts CTR before you publish Script optimizer for better retention Revenue forecasting based on your upload schedule Would love to hear from other YouTubers here. What's your biggest pain point when choosing content topics? Do you look at monetization potential before committing to a niche?

Free plan available if you want to explore (no CC needed). All feedback welcome.
by firefax | 2025-11-11 23:30:51+00:00
>You're more trackable by using NoScipt and there's no good reason to use it if you know how to properly use uBlock

What data do you have to support this assertion? uBlock doesn't seem to have the ability to selectively enable only JS nessecary for functionality, and if it does, the UI makes it much more difficult to enable.

I just ran a test -- merely uBlock use renders me unique, whereas one in 5742.77 had the same fingerprint as me when using NoScript. (I suspect that's the number of people also using Firefox with NoScript who own this particular monitor size)

A big chunk of the fingerprinting techniques require JS -- it's pretty hard to ascertain what specific extensions are installed with it. I tested disabling it and it didn't seem to do much difference in terms of bits of entropy on EFF's tool.

I encourage you to try for yourself and then think hard on your advice.
by hamasho | 2025-11-11 23:31:01+00:00
I tried to find a terminal which can shows images, videos, and other media. I know it's not a UNIX way, but sometimes it can help. There are multiple options, but they didn't click in me.

But just showing a browser like Jupyter would be very useful. It can handle a wide variety of media, can easily show JS heavy webpages unlike curl, and with text option to show text based result like w3m but can handle JS, it will be more useful.

browser google.com/maps # show google map and use interactively browser google.com/search?q=cat&udm=2 # show google image result browser --text jsheavy.com | grep -C 10 keyword # show content around keyword but can handle JS vim =(browser --text news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45890186) # show Hacker News article and can edit text result directly)
by walterbell | 2025-11-11 23:31:19+00:00
> 0 motor memory gestures

It's worse than motor memory (no thought required) gesture, because it requires a more expensive non-motor-memory physical movement that depends on context of the human. Face ID requires moving and orienting phone close enough for the Face ID sensor to capture a 3D image of face and moving eyes for attention, so it's a function of both phone and human position.

TouchID is context free: grab phone and touch button in fixed position. By the time the phone has turned to facing the user, it is already unlocked.

Touch ID is much faster than Face ID.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-11 23:31:35+00:00
>The number of people who will call you "antivax" for that, for simply questioning the dosing schedule and taking a minor precaution is shocking. And that's what really made all of this so much worse.

Okay, but why does it matter what morons say? A doctor or immunologist would usually say "Eh, whatever" to this request. Did a doctor call you an anti-vaxxer?

>it's no different than if somebody is lactose intolerant, has a gluten allergy or a peanut allergy.

Guess what! A bunch of doctors 15 years ago were scared of peanut allergies and suggested without evidence "a simple precaution", of "don't give young kids peanuts", and now something like 8 million people have peanut allergies that could have been maybe prevented.

That's what this is all about. "Smart" humans don't exist. Tons of times what we expected is not what science finds. That 15 year advice that lead to millions of peanut allergies was overturned not by random people getting uncomfortable about not understanding things, but by doctors studying the actual question and coming to a conclusion that fit the data.

Is there any data any which way on your belief that a delayed vaccination schedule like that is "Safer"? Safer than what? Safer how? What theory is it done under? But your doctor didn't care. Tons of parents do that. Some researcher will pull those stats someday and say clearly "Eh, it doesn't do anything good or bad" or "it's clearly better/worse" and then we can make an educated decision.

Until then, it is unscientific by definition. Does that make you feel bad? It shouldn't, most of what humans do is unscientific. But that won't make it wrong.

There is zero "safe" things you can do to a human body. Giving someone a sandwich is not safe and in rigorous study would result in a "side effect" list a mile long, and maybe even a death. 1.7 out of 100k deaths are from choking.

>Nobody that I saw, prior to the Covid vax at least, questioned whether or not vaccines did what they said they do

There is tons of public information to the contrary. Jenny McCarthy for example was anti-vax two decades ago and shouting it from the rooftops.

>"If there can sometimes be side effects, in what circumstances are they likely? Are there any precautions that can be taken if we can identify what those circumstances may be?"

And we did that with the Covid vaccine and every vaccine ever made before it and it has always been clear that the vaccine is just as safe as any other. Anti-vaxxers are people who don't understand the statistics of that studying.

The conversation was had, anti-vaxxers don't like the outcome of the conversation.
by mingus88 | 2025-11-11 23:32:13+00:00
Oh you hadn’t heard? Tesla, the manufacturer of mid sedans, an objectively bad truck, and zero FSD deliverables is going to populate Mars with robots

https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-spacex-starship-mars-opti...

Whether or not this happens before they finally deliver the promised roadster or have a car that can navigate a city street is anyone’s guess!

Musk said it was expected to happen in 2026 so buy that stock today!
by Retric | 2025-11-11 23:32:13+00:00
I don’t want to go through every image, for the mountain:

It failed Remove background, Isolate the background, long exposed (kept people), Apply a fish-eye lens effect (geometry incorrect), Strong bokeh blur (wrong blur type)

Some were more ambiguous. Give it a metallic sheen looked cool but that isn’t a metallic sheen and IMO it just failed ukiyo-e Japanese woodblock print style but I wouldn’t object to calling it a vaguely Japanese style. Compare how colors blend with ukiyo-e woodblocks vs how OpenAI‘a sky is done.
by Havoc | 2025-11-11 23:32:20+00:00
>DoW will prioritize buying off-the-shelf things that already exist

Hey Hegseth. You could use SAP - that's off the shelf & I'm reliably informed by an army of consultants that they can customize it to fit the exacting needs of the department of war!

(psst China - if I pull this off you better slide me a couple billion as thanks)
by bsder | 2025-11-11 23:32:37+00:00
> It's not that it's hard, what it is is brittle. A vertically-integrated stack, by its very nature, cannot survive forces that jostle it in the horizontal direction.

Is this not exactly the whole problem, though? Fault tolerance.

My chisel doesn't need to integrate with my hand plane which doesn't need to integrate with my band saw. One of them breaking doesn't break the others.

This is why experienced developers gravitate toward powerful tools that they trust deeply but that have extremely hard boundaries. It's why we're still stuck with ASCII text as the primary artifact for coding, for example. The moment we try to move off of that a single fault can bring down the whole house of cards.
by dbg31415 | 2025-11-11 23:32:48+00:00
This whole thing is sure a tangle.

Open source projects want people to use their work. Google wants bugs -- especially security ones -- found and fixed fast. Both goals make sense. The tension starts when open source developers expect payment for fixes, and corporations like Google expect fixes for free.

Paying for bug fixes sounds fair, but it risks turning incentives upside down. If security reports start paying the bills, some maintainers might quietly hope for more vulnerabilities to patch. That's a dangerous feedback loop.

On the other hand, Google funding open source directly isn't automatically better. Money always comes with strings. Funding lets Google nudge project priorities, intentionally or not -- and suddenly the "open" ecosystem starts bending toward corporate interests.

There's no neat solution. Software wants to be used. Bugs want to be found and fixed. But good faith and shared responsibility are supposed to be the glue that holds the open source world together.

Maybe the simplest fix right now is cultural, not technical: fewer arguments on Twitter, more collaboration, and more gratitude. If you rely on open source, donate to the maintainers who make your life easier. The ecosystem stays healthy when we feed it, not when we fight over it.
by yencabulator | 2025-11-11 23:32:58+00:00
> I get ~12 tps with 16k context

FWIW Ollama at its defaults with qwen3:30b-a3b has 256k context size and does ~27 tokens/sec on pure CPU on a $450 mini PC with AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS. Unless you need a room heater, that GPU isn't pulling its weight.
by jasomill | 2025-11-11 23:33:51+00:00
I just replaced my 2013 Mac Pro's 256 GB factory SSD and an external SSD array with a 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro with one of these in an old Thunderbolt 2 PCIe 2.0 enclosure I had sitting on the shelf, and it works perfectly.

It's obviously limited by Thunderbolt 2 transfer rates, but it's still faster than both the sluggish factory SSD and the SSD RAID, consisting of 4 Samsung 850 Pros in an 8-drive Areca SAS enclosure that also contains 4 2 TB HGST Ultrastars that are somehow still running without a single uncorrectable error after more than 13 years of 24/7 operation in a dusty apartment with questionable climate control.

At this point, my money's on both the enclosure and at least two SSDs failing before any of the hard drives.

I'd say they don't make 'em like they used to, but since I've yet to see a failure or uncorrectable error on any of my newer 8 TB and 16 TB Ultrastars either, I lack data to support this conclusion.
by sfpotter | 2025-11-11 23:34:19+00:00
Thanks for clarifying.

I think the argument you're making is compelling and interesting, but my two concerns with this are: 1) how does it affect compile time? and 2) how easy it to make major structural changes to an algorithm?

I haven't tried Rust, but my worry is that the extensive compile-time checks would make quick refactors difficult. When I work on numerical algorithms, I often want to try many different approaches to the same problem until I hit on something with the right "performance envelope". And usually memory safety just isn't that hard... the data structures aren't that complicated...

Basically, I worry the extra labor involved in making Rust code work would affect prototyping velocity.

On the other hand, what you're saying about compiling everything together at once, proving more about what is being compiled, enabling a broader set of performance optimizations to take place... That is potentially very compelling and worth exploring if that gains are big. Do you have any idea how big? :)

This is also a bit reminiscent of the compile time issues with Eigen... If I have to recompile my dense QR decomposition (which never changes) every time I compile my code because it's inlined in C++ (or "blobbed together" in Rust), then I waste that compile time every single time I rebuild... Is that worth it for a 30% speedup? Maybe... Maybe not... Really depends on what the code is for.
by amluto | 2025-11-11 23:34:23+00:00
> The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1].

Wars are incredibly expensive, and the US should not be producing weapons, in peacetime, at the rate they would be expended during an active war. What we should have the ability to rapidly scale production.
by jen729w | 2025-11-11 23:34:30+00:00
For more of this sort of thing, check out the Old Structures Engineering blog. Don does a post a day, day in, day out -- so obviously some are more detailed than others. I enjoy having it in my feed.

Recent examples:

https://oldstructures.com/2025/10/24/not-quite-a-tunnel/ https://oldstructures.com/2025/10/21/relieved/
by crazygringo | 2025-11-11 23:35:11+00:00
Unfortunately, I have to disagree.

On the one hand, the scenarios described by "vertical integration" sound like a paradise to use.

On the other hand, in real life it's going to far too complex, far too brittle, and ultimately unworkable to maintain.

Tool boundaries exist for a good reason -- so you can swap tools in and out easily, and the toolmakers can stay sane by focusing on doing one thing well. With vertical integration, nothing is swappable, because you can only use tools built for your specific architecture. You become isolated from the broader ecosystem, and locked into one.

And then, that architecture is going to be this bespoke thing that becomes so enormously complex and hard to work with that everybody just gives up. Because every time somebody wants to change a tool, it turns out to be 10x more work to figure out how to make the change work with this vertically-integrated architecture.

Vertical integration isn't the "only thing that matters". Flexibility and swappability matter too, as does saving time and money by following common industry technologies and not inventing a bunch of custom architecture if it's not your core product and not absolutely necessary.
by thereisnospork | 2025-11-11 23:35:17+00:00
It doesn't take 20 years to do that, it takes 20 years to do that and wade through the bureaucratic morass. The SR-71 went from initiation to deployment in under a decade, more than half a century ago. With the myriad of advancements in everything from engineering, computation, to business development/management practices, building new cutting edge planes is the sort of thing we should be getting better and quicker at.

Design iteration cycle-times should be decreasing due to CAD, experimental cycles-times reduced due to the proliferation of rapid-turn 5-axis CNC mills, experimental cycles reduced due to simulation, business processes streamlined due to advancements in JIT manufacturing and six-sigma/kaizen/etc, and so on and so forth. That this isn't occurring is a giant blinking red light that something is wrong, and that we are going to get our lunch eaten by someone who researches, designs, and manufactures with a modicum of competence. Ostensibly China.
by godelski | 2025-11-11 23:35:24+00:00
I think something to consider is that you can't have a paradigm shift by following the current paradigm. Over and over we have stories of scientists, inventors, leaders, and so on that went against the grain and that their resilience is what led to success and massive change. How many examples do we need to account for this phenomena?

I'm not saying we should just have a free for all but that the frequency of so called "dark horses" should make us really question if we're doing things the right way. Sure, maybe it's the right way 99% of the time, but if that 1% is extremely impactful then we shouldn't discount it. And in certain areas, like academia, I think this should probably be actively encouraged rather than discouraged. It's a matter of what our objectives are. Is it to produce impact or is it simply to produce?

Another important factor, and I believe this ultimately leads to a "Great Filter" (longer discussion), is that as we advance complexity grows faster. As just a naïve example we can look at a Taylor approximation of some given function. The trend will be that low order approximations are simple to calculate while computational complexity explodes as we move to higher order ones. It's not difficult to see how this is happening in our world. The first airplane was much easier to improve upon than any modern one. Just like the first computers were easier to improve than current ones. We could say the same about almost everything, from physics to chemistry. The barrier to entry for contributing is growing, even if some low hanging fruit exists there's certainly fewer of them than before.

So I agree. Attention, and specifically attention to detail, are a critical resource. But it's becoming more critical. The problem I see is we're actively discouraging this attention and such attention is difficult in the first place. Low order approximations don't help us is a world where higher order effects dominate.
by wqaatwt | 2025-11-11 23:35:59+00:00
> This has nothing to do with “inflation” (which, by definition is the evolution of CPI).

Housing is part of the CPI. And no, the “inflation” is not be definition equivalent to CPI inflation.

> you'll see that there's no link between inflation and the money supply).

Making conclusions like that from a single datapoint is not particularly scientific.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-11 23:36:17+00:00
The answer to that is surprisingly simple: no. Because Haskell didn't exist at the time. Neither did Erlang. But LISP did, but was just too expensive and memory hungry for mere mortals such as me. I had to learn all this on a shoestring budget working an 8 hour job and barely having left over enough money for food after rent, taxes and insurance. It took a long time before I was able to afford a floppy drive, much less a half decent computer, one that would be able to run LISP. And those language packs weren't cheap either and open source wasn't really a thing yet (but shareware actually was).
by atmavatar | 2025-11-11 23:36:23+00:00
> but we wanted to avoided giving more than 2 per month so we altered the schedule slightly.

Why do you consider this a rational concern/precaution? What evidence lead you to believe the vaccination schedule, which is generally-accepted in the medical community, should be spread out?

I can give you a reason it's likely not rational: babies are protected by their mother's immunity for approximately 6 months after birth. The current vaccination schedule[1] is largely built with this in mind. Delaying vaccines for no other reason than "it's too many too fast" concerns does nothing but increase the chance your child ultimately gets infected with one of the pathogens vaccinated against.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-schedules/child-easyread.ht...
by stinkbeetle | 2025-11-11 23:37:26+00:00
> Move fast [is] not so great when brand new jet acts up and results in crashes.

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

https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/air-force-blames-oxygen-depri...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base_B...

https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/2017/07/21/f-35b-helmets-ni...

(etc)

The reality is that developing bespoke solutions with bleeding edge technology is going to result in brand new jets crashing, no matter how much bureaucrats and processes slow down the process. Nothing can substitute for using it.

> Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.

Where "misuse of money" means money not being spent a manner convenient to those who wrote the rules. Which means starting illegal wars, cost-plus contracts, lies about WMDs, no-bid contracts, arms trafficking to dictatorships, pork barreling, and *nudge* *wink* 7 figure do-nothing "consulting" gigs for bureaucrats and generals after they leave the government. Nothing is going to solve that, but if you threw out the whole rule book and started again, it would require a monumental effort to do worse than things have been.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-11 23:38:31+00:00
New York City had to bring in extra capacity to store and transport the dead bodies. It happened here. It was that bad here

It was not overblown.

Covid was the #1 killer of cops for a while. It killed enough old people that it is mathematically possible that it caused Trump to lose the election.

Tons of people are permanently disabled.