MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lenkite | 2025-12-31 16:41:14+00:00
> it has a problem of supply being nowhere near demand,

Get rid of the patents and this will solve itself in no time.

> The insurance company has no hand in this.

False. Insurance companies in the US own stock in big pharma firms like Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, etc. They maintain substantial investment portfolios and generate returns on premiums and reserves. They also have voting rights as institutional investors.
by nateb2022 | 2025-12-31 16:41:15+00:00
Yup. Phrases like "The Trap", "The Reality", "The Token Counter", "Batch Billing Lag", "The Loophole" all indicate markdown style thought processes that divide up the meat and potatoes of the idea into H1/H2 sections; also quoting words that people wouldn't normally quote ("stitching" together a codebase) is another telltale.
by zeristor | 2025-12-31 16:41:36+00:00
One thought I had was to go a very cold place and freeze CO₂ out of the air, about -80°C.

There’s the katabatic winds off of the glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, which could help things go through.

But I soon realised that CO₂ is so potent, that it’s so such a small proportion of the air that not much would be taken out.

There’s some renewable storage systems that liquify air, that could remove CO₂ but they don’t mention it;,but air liquification doesn’t seem to be growing fast as an option.

The other one from mere A-level chemistry is buffer solutions and using chemical reactions in the Oceans, apart from iron seeding for life, but a chemical that precipitate an insoluble carbonate.
Not ideal raining down precipitates, or using the Ocean as a test tube.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-31 16:41:41+00:00
I think Hoare is bang on because we know the only similar values in many languages are also problematic even though they're not related to memory.

The NaNs are, as their name indicates, not numbers. So the fact this 32-bit floating point value parameter might be NaN, which isn't even a number, is as unhelpful as finding that the Goose you were passed as a parameter is null (ie not actually a Goose at all)

There's a good chance you've run into at least one bug where oops, that's NaN and now the NaN has spread and everything is ruined.

The IEEE NaNs are baked into the hardware everybody uses, so we'll find it harder to break away from this situation than for the Billion Dollar Mistake, but it's clearly not a coincidence that this type problem occurs for other types, so I'd say Hoare was right on the money and that we're finally moving in the correct direction.
by ilamont | 2025-12-31 16:42:04+00:00
But prices are going up. Look at the statements your insurance company provides about the reimbursed "cost" of covered generics:

Some experts report that PBMs overcharge for generics; The Wall Street Journal estimated that Cigna and CVS Health, both of which own PBM services, are able to charge prices for specialty generic drugs that are 24 times higher than what manufacturers charge.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/5-things-to-know-ab...
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-31 16:42:32+00:00
Yes, no one is stopping US (or other countries’) taxpayers from paying for all the drug trials so that the resulting medicines are in the public domain.

> False. Insurance companies in the US own stock in big pharma firms like Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, etc. They maintain substantial investment portfolios and generate returns on premiums and reserves. They also have voting rights as institutional investors.

This is a wild assertion. The sum total of all 7 publicly listed insurance companies’ market caps is less than Eli Lilly, just one pharmaceutical company. I would need some evidence before believing that health insurance company leaders have any influence on pharmaceutical companies.

I would also be surprised to learn insurance companies hold specific stocks, seems like a risk insurance companies would not take, especially ones that have lots of routine cash expenses. They spend ~85% of their premiums on medical expenses, and probably at least 5% to 10% on their own staff, so they shouldn’t even have much extra cash left to invest for the long term.

https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2023/mar/...
by mwpmaybe | 2025-12-31 16:42:44+00:00
Unfortunately you had to run Windows NT, which was a leap for most folks and had poor support for games and some other software written for Windows 9x (e.g. software that required DOS mode and wasn't compatible with NTVDM). Windows 2000 (Pro) was a bit more approachable, and then of course Windows XP (Pro) smoothed out most of the remaining wrinkles.

I ran Slackware on my BP6 while I was in college. Of course CONFIG_SMP wasn't set in the default kernel config at the time so you had to build your own. Great for running bind, apache, sendmail, etc., and of course NetQuake servers. :)
by zoeysmithe | 2025-12-31 16:43:23+00:00
I'm not seeing that. The truck is a mess of a product. The self-driving is terrible compared to things like waymo, and the robot seems to be entirely fraud. Tesla cars was a good product but now lost the early lead and 2025 sales were unimpressive and certainly not remotely enough to justify the stock price.

So he gives 4, which but 1 are all terrible, and is rightly criticized. Then he inserts hateful regressive politics into our collective culture as the secondary price of using/buying/supporting his brand and products. If anything, he's under-criticized and keeps failing up.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-31 16:43:31+00:00
Happy NYE!

We started traveling a lot post Covid and after all of the stars aligned for us. But this is the first year that we have done any international travel besides flights Mexico (cruises don’t count).

We went to Costa Rica (Manual Antonio), London with a day trip to France and Canada (landed in Buffalo NY).

We are going to see if Costa Rica is a good Plan B when we retire on paper (I am 51) it looks good. We are staying for a month next year. I work remotely.

As far as side projects? I plan to continue my 30 year next year streak of never doing anything software development outside of work. Between continuing to learn Spanish, exercise, and spending time with family and friends, I’ve got enough on my plate.
by csfNight167 | 2025-12-31 16:43:46+00:00
This is so sad. The rule of law does not apply to the world’s hegemon or its closest allies.

Nearly four decades ago, the then senator Joe Biden told Congress that Israel was “the best $3bn investment we make”, claiming that “were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region”. The US regards Israel as an indispensable strategic asset, which is why it is the biggest ever recipient of US foreign aid, including military assistance. Washington will keep supplying the weapons that enable Israeli war crimes – and then threaten anyone who tries to hold the perpetrators to account.

Guillou and his colleagues issued their warrants after a lengthy, cautious legal process. The case against the Israeli politicians focused on the use of starvation, which Israeli leaders routinely confessed to.
by olyjohn | 2025-12-31 16:44:35+00:00
I just had some bloodwork done, myself. My provider accidentally billed insurance, which had lapsed due to being laid off. I got my "Explanation of benefits" and it was $1000 billed to them, but I was given a $500 "discount." So I only owed $500... Cash cost was $50. Makes no goddamn sense.

Also I went in for a colonoscopy and an endoscopy. Insurance was billed for $14000. I got statements from 4 different doctors, and the facility where it was performed. None of the statements matched the explanation of benefits from the insurance company. And when I called each doctor, to pay them, they all told me that I didn't actually have to pay them what it said I owed. So I just ended up paying $2500 to the insurance company. It again, makes zero sense.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-12-31 16:44:50+00:00
While it's true that the exposure of top European firms can be often 50%+ of total revenue from U.S, that:

- Doesn't make them non viable without the American market, just less rich.

- Doesn't reflect the 5 to 10 times higher price Americans pay for the same drugs.

You can have a healthy industries with plenty of billions to be around and have decently priced drugs.

What you get in the US is uber profitable industries and people scrapping around.
by halJordan | 2025-12-31 16:45:07+00:00
This is a good article. I disagree with its implications. I would agree that the average us citizen is much too far removed from the defense industrial complex and that creates these situations where a Google engineer (not necessarily this guy) is perfectly willing to help destroy American society with his advertising tech but balks at automating image tagging for the dod's big data lake because would rather have another 9/11 than be responsible for a false positive in the ME.
by qnleigh | 2025-12-31 16:45:08+00:00
Uuuuuum no?

e^(ix) = cos(x) + isin(x). In particular e^(ipi) = -1

(1 + 1/n)^n = e. This is part of what makes e such a uniquely useful exponent base.

Not applied enough? What about:

d/dx e^x = e^x. This makes e show up in the solutions of all kinds of differential equations, which are used in physics, engineering, chemistry...

The Fourier transform is defined as integral e^(iomega*t) f(t) dt.

And you can't just get rid of e by changing base, because you would have to use log base e to do so.

Edit: how do you escape equations here? Lots of the text in my comment is getting formatted as italics.
by larusso | 2025-12-31 16:45:27+00:00
Maybe some of the old beliefs regarding startup time etc are no longer valid. Maybe the programming model isn’t as verbose as it used to be. But I don’t want to distribute a 200MB+ binary. I have colleagues who tell me that c# scripting is so awesome. One only needs .NET installed or use AOT or whatever. Sorry but Go and Rust and good forgive a python script is smaller and mostly easier to read and write then most stuff I seen other languages shoehorning into. I have nothing against Java but it isn’t the right hammer for this problem. At least for me. And I wish people wouldn’t constantly strive for the single language for every problem mindset. Yes in a Java shop it might make more sense to write cli tools and scripts also in Java. But that doesn’t mean it is the most effective toolchain in the long run.
Show HN: A web-based lighting controller built because my old became a brick
by arianott | 2025-12-31 16:46:08+00:00
I’m a student and I built this because my old lightning controller (DMX) became a brick after the vendor’s control software was deprecated in 2025.

My focus was entirely on developing a robust backend architecture to guarantee maximum performance. Everything is released under GPLv3.

The current frontend is just a "vibecoded" dashboard made with plain HTML and JavaScript to keep rendering latency as low as possible. In earlier versions Svelte was used. Svelte added too much complexity for an initial mvp.

Video: https://streamable.com/95kd4r
Repo: https://github.com/Arian-Ott/hyperion

Technical Details: The system uses a distributed architecture where a FastAPI server manages the state in a Redis. State changes are pushed via WebSockets to Raspberry Pi gateways, which then independently maintain the constant 44Hz binary stream to the lights. This "push model" saves massive amounts of bandwidth and ensures low latency. In a stress test, I processed 10 universes (5,120 channels) at 44Hz with zero packet loss (simulated). An OTP-based pairing makes the setup extremely simple (plug-and-play).

I’m looking forward to your feedback on the architecture and the Redis approach!

Happy New Year!
by olingern | 2025-12-31 16:46:49+00:00
I lived in Japan and your level of written fluency paired with the patience to distill aspects of Japanese culture strikes me as AI. Even amongst long time foreigners, there’s this unspoken “we’re not explaining this to you, figure it out yourself.”

Your level of fluency would be incredibly rare, and I’ve never seen any Japanese person use romaji in casual online conversation.

“Gunma Banker Mode” would 1) be an insane commute to Tokyo where most banking occurs 2) is strange for someone who says they’re not a programmer, but a banker who is “switching their OS.”

Lastly, your comments just stink of AI because you point the obvious out in not—so-correct ways. “Code” is not the context, but I can see how HN could be reduced to that.

If both are true — this is an AI article and people are commenting with AI, then I fear peak dystopia is upon us and HN is losing its magic to information pollution. Sad times
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-12-31 16:47:02+00:00
While it's technically true that the UK has an Industrial Strategy (1), I do not think that this is really comparable to what China does in this regard. I'm not specifically knocking the current UK government, I think the same could be said of any UK government in the last 30 years, if not more.

1) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/industrial-strate...
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-12-31 16:47:03+00:00
Once they move product testing to the Engineering group charged with releasing the product, it was inevitable that Release would take priority over Exhaustive Test. Even if bugs surfaced during their sketchy testing, the group would be pressed to release anyway, to meet schedule.

This is obvious to anyone. The management at Microsoft was naive or ignorant to make this process change, take your pick.
by freeopinion | 2025-12-31 16:47:06+00:00
Beyond that, I now accept that many employers screen candidates with questions like, "Have you ever been fired?". Answering the why with, "I refuse to do things I consider to be unethical" is typically enough to screen you out.

While this can be irritating, I have come to see it as a good thing. It helps me screen out candidate employers. It is taxing to work in an environment that constantly challenges your ethics. Imagine having access to all your customers' supposedly private emails and being tasked with mining them without your customers' knowledge. Imagine being tasked with adding an obscurely worded line item to the monthly bill of all customers that your logging indicates haven't accessed their billing statement in the last 12 months.

Now imagine working at a job where you are tasked to find all customers who haven't used an optional paid feature in the last 12 months and notifying them that there might be an opportunity to reduce the amount you bill them. Imagine working for an insurance coop that actively scours for ways to charge members less money without compromising their protection and without taking advantage of somebody else.

Imagine that your personal life choices automatically disqualify you from exploitative employers and lead you to more fulfilling employment. This is a real thing that many people don't have to imagine. They live it.
by ndiddy | 2025-12-31 16:47:06+00:00
It may also be due to legacy reasons. Japan was a pioneer in adopting HD TV years before the rest of the world, but early HD cameras and video formats like HDCAM and HDV only recorded 1080i at 1440x1080. If their whole video processing chain is set up for 1440x1080, they’d likely have to replace a lot of equipment to switch over to full 1920x1080i.
by observationist | 2025-12-31 16:47:22+00:00
A bag of fine flour tossed into the clean rooms, and using a taser on all the electronics and control boards makes entire fabs more or less worthless. They probably have multiple doomsday options that wipe out any utility the chip plants might have. I'd probably also have a technology and documentation package ready to be shipped to the US by a secret lawyer - if Taiwan gets taken, the fabs get destroyed, and the US gets the technology.

They're not weak or stupid, the level of retaliation and sabotage in store against any attempt by China to take over would go down in history as some of the most ruthless and savage of all time.

Xi is just beating his chest. China is currently simmering - protests, civil unrest, and dissidence in general is up significantly over the last year or so, and they need to make bold public speeches to look powerful and in control. I don't think there's any risk of widespread public revolt, but they play these games and push propaganda because they have to, not because it makes sense.

China's been threatening to "unify" Taiwan for decades, more or less like clockwork. They missed their best opportunity to actually do it during Biden and covid - the US would likely have just let it happen at that point. With new US fabs popping up, we may reach parity with Taiwan chipmaking capabilities within a decade or less, and that makes the utility of Taiwan even less.

Urban resistance fighters and guerilla tactics from a hostile population makes taking over cities and towns like that more or less completely impossible. Any attempt by China to take Taiwan would end up looking like the US trying to "liberate" Iraq, with constant PR hits, human rights violations, way more money than they want to spend, or risking inciting major unrest if they just wipe out the Taiwanese population like monsters.

I don't think there's any real upside to actually taking Taiwan, it's more useful as a perennial jingoistic narrative than anything else at this point.
by laxmena | 2025-12-31 16:48:04+00:00
Setting aside the tax discussion for a moment:

> In the end, the “shortcut” had cost her more time than if she’d just done the work herself from the start.

I had this same opinion on AI IDE Copilots about a year and a half ago. They were too nascent, and writing code manually saved me hours of debugging their buggy code recommendations.

Fast forward - today—IDE Copilots have grown leaps and bounds in its quality of outputs. They have real utility now.

It's important to note that - "This is the worst AI agents will ever be, it will only get better moving forward."

I'm confident these tools will keep improving and eventually create net productivity gains, including for the Excel use case you mentioned.
by astrobe_ | 2025-12-31 16:48:07+00:00
The question is how this is implemented, in particular age verification.

It's usual to say that MPs are old people that don't understand current technologies, but in law preparation committees they appear to be well aware; in particular, they mentioned a "double-anonymity" system where the site requesting your age wouldn't know your name, and the entity serving age requests wouldn't know which site it is for. They are also aware that people walk-around age verification checks with e.g. fake ID cards, possibly AI generated.

I'm not sure if it is actually doable reliabily, and I'm not sure either that the MPs that will have to vote the law will know the topic as well as the MPs participating in these committees.

I would personally consider other options like a one-button admin config for computers/smartphones/tablets that restricts access according to age (6-14, 15-18) and requiring online service providers to announce their "rating" in HTTP headers. Hackers will certainly object that young hackers could bypass this, but like copy-protection, the mission can be considered complete when the vast majority of people are prevented from doing what they should not do.

Alternatively one could consider the creation of a top-level domain with a "code of content" (which could include things like "chat control") enforced by controlling entity. Then again, an OS-level account config button could restrict all Internet accesses to this domain.

Perhaps an national agency could simply grant a "child safe" label to operating systems that comply to this.

This type of solutions would I think also be useful in schools (e.g. school-provided devices), although they are also talking about severely limiting screen-time at school.

For the french speakers, see:

[1] https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.17950525_6942684...

[2] https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.17952051_6942761...
by FriendlyMike | 2025-12-31 16:48:12+00:00
I've been a Java developer for twenty years. I've used it for everything front front end to distributed systems. I've built gradle plug-ins and clips with JAVA. I have every shortcut in intellij memorized.

Even with all this it takes me substantially less time to get go, python, or ts working as a cli. Java cli is a solution looking for a problem
by 112233 | 2025-12-31 16:48:18+00:00
Meh. No human has written the horrors llm produces. At least I am yet to see codebase like that. Let me attempt a theatrical reenactment:

// Use buffer that is large enough to hold any possible value. Avoid using JSON configuration, this optimizes codebase and prevents possible security exploits!
size_t len = 32;

// this function does not call "sort" utility using shell anymore, but instead uses optimized library function "sort" for extreme perfomance improvement!!!
void get_permutations() {

... and so on. It basically uses comments as a wall to scribble grandiose graffiti about it's valiant conquests in following explicit instruction after fifth repeat and not commiting egregious violence agains common sense.
by dylan604 | 2025-12-31 16:48:19+00:00
> "Rome said the companies seem to be maximizing prices while negotiating discounts behind the scenes with health and drug insurers and then setting yet another price for direct-to-consumer cash-pay sales."

This sounds like typical negotiating 101. You know you are going to be forced to lower from your starting position, so increase your starting position so when you do negotiate down you are closer to where you wanted to be.
by imoverclocked | 2025-12-31 16:48:34+00:00
There are applications where weight still makes battery storage impossible. By capturing carbon, we may give ourselves the ability to harvest fuel from the air instead of the ground. Given the sometimes negative cost of electricity, this could make it more cost effective to do so. If we replace fossil fuel drilling with sequestration then we are at net zero.

This may be part of the solution … or maybe we find a way to make a utopia where we can all agree to just stop polluting. Historically, the utopia has no precedent that I am aware of.
by tim-tday | 2025-12-31 16:48:59+00:00
You don’t need tech skill upgrades. You need to connect with people building something you’re interested in. The closer that alignment the better it will work out.

The skills I’ve seen thrive at a startup: emotional intelligence, stamina, high frustration threshold, clarity of thought under pressure

There are tons of programs to connect technical people to startups. Start getting plugged into those.
by db48x | 2025-12-31 16:49:20+00:00
You can do it in any train system designed to be resilient to failures. The Germans have apparently designed a system that incentivizes (or even forces) the conductor (or the dispatchers) to do ridiculous things that waste hours of their customer’s time to fix instead of simple and obvious things that take minutes to fix like just stopping at the next available station.

Around here if the Conductor gets a call from dispatch telling him that a station is unavailable, the dispatcher will already have cleared the train to stop at some logical alternate location. That might mean another train station in the same city or a specific level crossing. It might mean delaying or stopping conflicting traffic. They’ve thought ahead and planned a way to fix the problem _without_ carting passengers an hour out of their way.
by skydhash | 2025-12-31 16:49:39+00:00
Tech debt grows only when you don't care. We have codebases that are old enough to drive where the debt is not growing at all. You got there by the code being a good representation of the domain requirements in the technical space. If the domain don't change much (they rarely do), you don't have to do much work in the technical space. And if the latter change (platform and library updates), it's gradual enough that you can spread the cost over time.

You got tech debt when rushing to implement stuff while having an incomplete representation of the problem. And then trying to patch the wrong solution instead of correcting it.