MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zaptheimpaler | 2026-01-11 01:30:53+00:00
Canada's healthcare is generally cheaper per capita, pays healthcare workers less and has far lower administrative costs than the US. The US spends 5x the average of other wealthy countries on administrative costs [1]. This line that the government is automatically inefficient and terrible at anything at all is not true, is not set in stone and does not preclude private industry being more greedy and inefficient than the government.

[1] https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-the-us-healthcare-syst...
by gusgus01 | 2026-01-11 01:31:39+00:00
The average effective tax rate stayed flat from 1945-2015, but the effective tax rate for the 0.1% and 1% fell during that time period. Bottoming out around the Bush years (although the graph only goes to 2015 so another source is needed to see how the Trump tax breaks have played out). The top for the 0.1% was almost 50% and the bottom was almost 20%. Now those almosts are working in the opposite directions so you should look at the graphs.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/effective-income-tax-rate...

Now the 1% is paying more of the overall taxes, about 40%, but that number is also skewed (and can be misleading) by the absolute massive disparity between what the top and bottom make now. Plus of course reporting and tax compliance has changed a bit, plus a whole host of other confounding factors that this 40% statistic subsumes, but it's worth mentioning because it's always brought up in these discussions.
by tombert | 2026-01-11 01:31:46+00:00
I have mixed opinions on the "AI=theft" argument people make, and I generally lean towards "it's not theft", but I do see the argument.

If I put something on Github with a GPL 3 license, it's supposed to require anyone with access to the binary to also have access to the source code. The concern is, if you think that it is theft, then someone can train an LLM on your GPL code, and then a for-profit corporation can use the code (or any clever algorithms you've come up with) and effectively "launder" your use of GPL code and make money in the process. It basically would be converting your code from Copyleft to Public Domain, which I think a lot of people would have an issue with.
by kalleboo | 2026-01-11 01:32:07+00:00
> But it’s just sooooo dorky

The hedonistic treadmill of family cars is so funny to me. First station wagons were the soccer mom car, so everyone got minivans, then minivans were the soccer mom car so everyone got SUVs, and now crossovers. What's next? When do we get to loop around like fashion does?
by beloch | 2026-01-11 01:34:05+00:00
Invading Venezuela is not even remotely the same thing as invading a fellow NATO country, and most Americans know it. If Trump tries to invade, he'll trigger a domestic crisis. i.e. Will congress block it? Will the military obey orders? How severe will the protests be?

If Trump quells all that and his invasion goes ahead, he'll trigger an international crisis too. Does NATO simply implode, or do the EU and other former-NATO countries form an anti-U.S. alliance? What kind of insurgency forms in Greenland? Does what's left of the old world order turn against the U.S. with economic sanctions? How loud will Putin be laughing during all this?

We can only hope Trump is merely trying to distract people from the Epstein files with a bluff.
Show HN: Fast, Low cost Pay as you go PDF API for HTML, Markdown and images
by zameermfm | 2026-01-11 01:34:14+00:00
I'm a backend, infra dev for a IoT based European startup for few years. After years of ups and downs with distributed computing ideas and being amazed by it, I badly needed a side project to exercise them on my own. For one, this is more of a exploration in that direction, but I also want to see if PDF API SaaS business still has legs.
by api | 2026-01-11 01:36:32+00:00
This is another thing that feeds into the Fermi paradox. Previous generations of stars and planets might be too low metallicity to give rise to very complex intelligent life. We might be part of the first crop to evolve as the metallicity of the cosmos reaches a threshold.

Life on Earth is mostly C, H, O, and N, but it makes use of many heavier elements to conduct complex chemical synthesis processes. Some are only used in trace amounts but are still necessary. Then there’s technology which could not have developed to this level without most of the periodic table. Low metallicity is likely to put a ceiling on what can evolve.

You’re not getting spacefaring aliens until you have the building blocks. Then it takes billions of years, and on top of that stable nurseries like Earth are probably rare.

So TL;DR my guess is that we are early and rare.

In a few billion years the galaxy might resemble Star Wars with aliens all over the place, albeit without FTL unless we are very wrong about core physics or there’s some huge aspect of reality we haven’t found yet.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-11 01:36:41+00:00
You mean like Bret Favre the millionaire conservative ex-NFL quarterback's welfare scandal stealing from the poor?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_welfare_funds_scan...

Or do you mean like Republican Senator from Florida Rick Scott who was elected AFTER he was involve in $1.7 billion dollars in Medicaid fraud (largest in history) and whom the Republican party embraces and endorses and has in a position of power today?
https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386....
by greygoo222 | 2026-01-11 01:37:26+00:00
I believe they're using CDC data, which states:

"Drug overdose deaths may involve multiple drugs; therefore, a single death might be included in more than one category when describing the number of drug overdose deaths involving specific drugs."
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm

Someone who overdosed after taking cocaine contaminated with fentanyl would be counted as a cocaine ODD.

The Oxycontin "reforms" caused the fentanyl crisis to begin with. People often moved onto heroin and fentanyl because pharmaceuticals were no longer accessible. The massive spike in overdose deaths begun after the decline in opioid prescriptions. See the Opioid Prescriptions & Opioid Overdose Deaths graph here https://drugabusestatistics.org/opioid-epidemic/
by TrackerFF | 2026-01-11 01:37:30+00:00
Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever experienced a product or service that took a turn for the better, after the company was acquired by PE.

There might have been a time where PE bought up mismanaged companies, and turned them around - but the PE acquisition spree we've seen for the past 10 years or so...it seems exclusively to cause enshitification. And it is happening everywhere. There will always exist some niche PE firms for every sector out there, nothing is safe.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-11 01:38:09+00:00
I honestly can't see a difference in housing sizes between Canada and the United States -- we've got the same McMansion sprawl all over the place here -- so strikes me this person's mother is just like every other human, and bad at statistics and handling their own biases.

The US does have a higher rate of wealth inequality than Oz and here in Canuckistan tho.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-11 01:38:52+00:00
The other way around would be having public options except where explicitly forbidden. The existence of a public option does not forbid private options. For example the existence of the USPS does not forbid UPS or Fedex or Amazon from operating delivery services, which may be preferable for many customers. But the public option guarantees that a certain level of service is available to anyone and makes it impossible for any private entity to secure a monopoly. It also is very sensible in cases of natural monopoly (power plants, international airports, prisons, wastewater treatment centers) where there's never going to be any meaningful competition that the government should own and operate the monopoly.
by kcplate | 2026-01-11 01:39:26+00:00
In the early 90s I had a new department director who would bring a kitchen timer to every meeting. Meetings started on precisely on time and the timer was set to 22 minutes. When that bell rung, you could finish the thought, but the meeting would break at the 25 minute mark. If you didn’t accomplish the agenda, another meeting could be set, but it needed to be at least 2 hours after the one that just broke. Even meetings without him had to follow the rule. He also had a request that were were supposed to follow if we could, which was to allow ourselves to only schedule one meeting in an hour.

Obviously it was pretty chaotic at first and I recall us being pretty brutal in our assessment of his “crazy meeting quirk”. However after a few weeks something pretty interesting happened:

- Brevity and productive discussion became common. People usually went with their best opinion

- we usually finished the agenda (probably because we set reasonable agendas for 22 mis) and rarely needed that rollover meeting

- we spent more time at our desks actually doing instead of just talking about doing. I recall that team being really productive overall.

Later when I moved into leadership roles I attempted to bring this methodology but my own leadership generally was not supportive enough to allow me to be as rigid and I didn’t see the same success with the method…but to this day 32+ years later I still think it had merit.

I had asked him where he had learned it. My recollection is that he formulated it after reading that the average person’s attention span in a meeting was 27 minutes and he figured no one was productive after that, so he decided it was pointless to go longer.
by kayodelycaon | 2026-01-11 01:41:02+00:00
Let me try again. I shouldn't have mentioned willpower. Let me restate the problem.

I try to do something and I have the physical sensation of hitting a wall that shouldn't be there. Thoughts never stop at that part of the brain.

I'm talking about a fundamentally different mechanism than thinking something is too hard. It's a hardware interruption that I have no control over.

I've spent my entire life working around this and it's difficult. Especially when everyone thinks I'm just being lazy or I just need to do this one thing. I'm still trying to figure out how to explain it better.
by foresto | 2026-01-11 01:41:14+00:00
Debian Stable is my distro of choice these days, mainly because it respects my time by avoiding frivolous changes, without getting in my way when I want to change specific things.

Setting it up for modern gaming hardware required a couple extra steps, which I found to be worthwhile. I now have a system that has proved dependable whenever I need to get work done immediately, and very capable whenever I just want to have fun. (The Backports repository makes bridging that gap easy in most cases.)

Linux Mint is what I suggest to new users. It's based on the widely supported Ubuntu distro, has a good sized community, and seems aimed at people who haven't been doing unix stuff for ages. It also makes a point of stripping out problematic Ubuntu-isms, and has a Debian-based edition waiting in the wings in case that ever becomes unmanageable.

My desktop environment is KDE Plasma, which you can install on just about any distro even if it's not the default. (I used Xfce in the past, but its adoption of Gtk 3 transformed it into something that I found frustrating.)
by mlmonkey | 2026-01-11 01:41:54+00:00
> and redact info that could be harmful to others.

of course, these concerns are only applicable when these "others" are Americans and the American institutions.

Everybody else can just fend for themselves.

Whats good for the goose, should be good for the gander. If American journalists feel like there is no problem with disclosing secrets of, say, Maduro, then they should not be protecting people like Trump (just as an example).
by tavavex | 2026-01-11 01:43:50+00:00
Although it's rare for me, I have used some old software that was built for Windows 9X or old versions of NT. So far, the track record is perfect - native programs have worked just fine, though I obviously can't vouch for all of them.

Old, complex games are the worst-case scenario, and are the exception, not the rule. Since they were only beginning to figure out hardware-accelerated 3D gaming in the 90s, it meant that we were left with lots of janky implementations and outdated graphics APIs that were quickly forgotten about. Though, MDK doesn't seem to suffer from this - it should be capable of running on newer systems directly [1]. One big issue it does have is that it uses a 16-bit installer, which is one thing that was explicitly retired during the transition to 64-bit due to it being so archaic at that moment, only being relevant to Windows 1-3. But you can still install the game using the method described in the article, and it should hopefully run fine from there on. Since it has options to use a software renderer and old DirectX, at least one of these should work.

[1] https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/MDK
by T-A | 2026-01-11 01:43:51+00:00
1) They want a new source of funding, ideally one they develop on their own (e.g. a mining and refining industry), to maintain their welfare state. It's a preference of theirs, not something imposed on them by the evil Danes.

Finding a new "buddy" to replace Denmark makes no sense. Why would they want to swap their dependence on a country which likes its welfare state (and is demonstrably good at administering it) for one which takes a notoriously dim view on such things?

2) Greenland becoming independent implies changing the borders of the kingdom of Denmark. That obviously requires a decision by parliament, no way around it.

Anyone interested in the facts can see the law in question here:

https://www.lovtidende.dk/api/pdf/125052

It would obviously not exist if Denmark was hellbent on denying Greenland its independence. All it does is lay out an orderly and straightforward process for the transition.
by messe | 2026-01-11 01:44:05+00:00
It's not even that. Free markets by themselves (as implemented thus far) DO NOT ACCOUNT FOR EXTERNALITIES.

I have yet to see reasonable fix to the tragedy of the commons in a free market situation, and that's one of the most basic things one is fucking introduced to when studying economics and game theory.

Anybody who thinks health care is best served solely privately should have to pay to be diagnosed for something; either that or they've been failed in their privately funded education.
by K0balt | 2026-01-11 01:44:37+00:00
I’ve been pleasantly surprised how useful it is for writing low level stuff like peripheral drivers on imbedded platforms. It’s actually-simple- stuff, but exactingly technical and detail oriented. It’s interesting that it can work so well, then go wildly off the rails and be impossible to wrestle back on unless you go way back in the context or even start a completely new context and feed in only what is currently relevant (this has become my main strategy)

Still, it’s amazingly good at wrestling the harmony of a bunch of technical details and applying them to a tried and true design paradigm to create an API for new devices or to handle tricky timing, things like that. Until it isn’t and you have to abort the session and build a new one because it has worked itself into some kind of context corner where it obsesses about something that is just wrong or irrelevant.

Still, it’s a solid 2x on production, and my code is arguably more maintainable because I don’t get tempted to be clever or skip clarifying patterns.

There is a level of wholistic complexity that kills it though. The trick is dividing the structure and tasks into self contained components that contain any relevant state within their confines to the maximum practical extent, even if there is a lot of interdependent state going on inside. It’s sort a mod a meta-functional paradigm working with inherently state-centric modules.
by aaronatedge | 2026-01-11 01:45:35+00:00
Three months ago I couldn't code. After walking away from failed RTO, left with no liquid equity, I taught myself TypeScript and started building.

hammrCDN (https://hammrcdn.com) is an open sourced edge-based CDN where you can upload assets and get hashed URLs for consistent identity, or pull/reroute assets from other sources. Built on Cloudflare Workers. I built it initially to solve the cached asset problem. This is especially deadly for tracking pixels and other artifacts that need to be replaced quickly.

Also shipped Relayze.app (busl 1.1 webhook testing) in 4 days as a side project – both are live now. I forced myself to ship even if some aspects of the sites are still in development.

Still learning but shipping fast. Feedback welcome!
by tialaramex | 2026-01-11 01:45:35+00:00
The specific language feature you want if you insist that you don't want this kind of leak is Linear Types.

Rust has Affine Types. This means Rust cares that for any value V of type T, Rust can see that we did not destroy V twice (or more often).

With Linear Types the compiler checks that you destroyed V exactly once, not less and not more.

However, one reason I don't end up caring about Leak Safety of this sort is that in fact users do not care that you didn't "leak" data in this nerd sense. In this nerd sense what matters is only leaks where we lost all reference to the heap data. But from a user's perspective it's just as bad if we did have the reference but we forgot - or even decided explicitly not - to throw it away and get back the RAM.

The obvious way to make this mistake "by accident" in Rust is to have two things which keep each other alive via reference counting and yet have been disconnected and forgotten by the rest of the system. A typical garbage collected language would notice that these are garbage and destroy them both, but Rust isn't a GC language of course. Calling Box::leak isn't likely to happen by accident (though you might mistakenly believe you will call it only once but actually use it much more often)

I think the main part of Ghostty's design mentioned here that - as a Rust programmer - I think is probably a mistake is the choice to use a linked list. To me this looks exactly like it needs VecDeque, a circular buffer backed by a growable array type. Their "clever" typical case where you emit more text and so your oldest page is scrapped and re-used to form your newest page, works very nicely in VecDeque, and it seems like they never want the esoteric fast things a linked list can do, nor do they need multi-writer concurrency like the guts of an OS kernel, they want O(1) pop & push from opposite ends. Zig's Deque is probably that same thing but in Zig.
by smt88 | 2026-01-11 01:46:48+00:00
> Doesn't this mean that any company that depends on headcount growth (every SaaS), loses?

Yes, assuming they aren't also scaling their costs down with AI.

But this is mostly a moot point because we don't yet have any evidence that AI is killing lots of jobs. Companies are doing necessary/planned layoffs after over-hiring for years, and some of them are making it look better to investors by saying it's because they're smart (for using AI) instead of the truth, which is that they stupidly over-hired.

You also have to remember that AI is way, way under-priced right now. That $200/mo. Claude bill should probably be double or triple what it is. All of the AI companies are plowing money into keeping prices artificially low.

The economics will change a lot once they can't do that anymore. Google will likely dominate because they can burn their own cash from other businesses instead of cash from VCs or retail investors.

But if prices go up and these companies charge enough to be profitable, people will start to question whether it's cheaper to just have people doing the work instead.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-11 01:47:34+00:00
Wait so are you doing the journalistic action? I can't wait for this to drop. Please give me more details if possible.

Massive respects to your journalism, I have a lot of questions regarding this tho, namely how long did it take you to build this expose and where are you gonna drop it because I searched net for Founderstowne but I didn't find anything special, are they the VC fund you are gonna expose?
by defrost | 2026-01-11 01:47:51+00:00
How would you explain the increase in hospitalisation, Emergency Services deployments, and fentanyl drug purity in Q1 2025 then?

Sudden unlearning of aquired knowledge seems unlikely.

See: Figure 1 graph set page 4 - https://www.science.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.112...
Show HN: Ferrite – Markdown editor in Rust with native Mermaid diagram rendering
by OlaProis | 2026-01-11 01:50:01+00:00
Ferrite: Fast Markdown/Text/Code editor in Rust with native Mermaid diagrams

Built a Markdown editor using Rust + egui. v0.2.1 just dropped with major Mermaid improvements:

→ Native Mermaid diagrams - Flowcharts, sequence, state, ER, git graphs - pure Rust, no JS

→ Split view - Raw + rendered side-by-side with sync scrolling

→ Syntax highlighting - 40+ languages with large file optimization

→ JSON/YAML/TOML tree viewer - Structured editing with expand/collapse

→ Git integration - File tree shows modified/staged/untracked status

Also: minimap, zen mode, auto-save, session restore, code folding indicators.

~15MB binary, instant startup. Windows/Linux/macOS.

GitHub: https://github.com/OlaProeis/Ferrite

v0.2.2 coming soon with performance improvements for large files. Looking for feedback!
by simonw | 2026-01-11 01:51:05+00:00
There's no translation from YAML to a different language.

The YAML describes the tests - like this file here: https://github.com/dbreunig/whenwords/blob/main/tests.yaml

Snippet:

- name: "5 hours ago"
input: { timestamp: 1704049200, reference: 1704067200 }
output: "5 hours ago"

- name: "21 hours ago"
input: { timestamp: 1703991600, reference: 1704067200 }
output: "21 hours ago"

When told "use red/green TDD to write code for this in Ruby", a coding agent like Claude Code will write a test harness in Ruby that loops through all of those YAML tests, run it and watch it fail, then write just enough Ruby that the tests pass.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-11 01:52:49+00:00
Actual competition and monopoly breaking/preventing.

"Free" markets tend to have transparent pricing : US healthcare does not.

"Free" markets tend to have large numbers of independent players that compete with each other : This is disappearing in the US market.

We have the worst of both systems currently. It's not ran by the government to control costs to the end user. And it's ran by a few monopolistic insurance/medical companies to reap as much profit as possible.
by reactordev | 2026-01-11 01:53:12+00:00
The moment you started talking about pages, I was like: “Ok, obviously memory pooled” and yup, it is. Then I said “obviously ring buffered” and yeah, essentially your scroll back reuse. Then I knew exactly where the bug was before getting to that part, not freeing the pages memory properly and sure enough - bingo! With some great looking diagrams of memory space alignment.

Kudos, that was a good read. Just remember that every time you do something novel, there’s potential for leaks :D
by thayne | 2026-01-11 01:53:15+00:00
Markdown is worse than other formats in many ways. It has several ambiguities, there are significant variations between implementations, fairly basic features like tables, footnotes, strikethrough, etc. are "extensions" that aren't widely supported.

The only real advantage of markdown is that it is has because more ubiquitous/popular than others, possibly in part because it is relatively easy to implement, as long as you don't care that much about exact compatibility with other implementations.
by pndy | 2026-01-11 01:55:00+00:00
Last summer Manjaro released usual heavy update and suddenly wifi on my old spare mbp was gone. Luckily digging around I found that a firmware was available in aur so I had to just plug ethernet in, install the package and reboot the system. But then another smaller update out of blue made system unbootable so instead of doing "forensics" I went by the easiest way of reinstalling the system and wifi again was working out of the box.