MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Goofy_Coyote | 2026-01-04 04:48:53+00:00
Canadian here, there is some essence of truth (though only a faint hint of it) in these statements (like long ER wait times), but it’s severely exaggerated by orders of magnitude.

This is coming from someone who DID believe the same statements, and wanted to move to the states for the this reason and a few others, then had a near-death experience which was handled by the same healthcare system.

Yes, I did wait for my MRI, or had one 40 minute and one 21 hour wait in the ER, although the second one (the 21 hour wait was in a case that was NOT an emergency i.e I wasn’t actively dying).

Was it the top notch “user experience” one can get from private healthcare? No.

The food sucked, the waits were annoying (but not dangerous), I couldn’t get a private room, but when I look back, all my complaints are just what they call the “first world problems”.

Did my state insurance cover everything? Yes (Which by my estimation is somewhere around 40k to 60k CAD).

Did the cadre left any stone unturned? Nope. Got an extremely thorough treatment and testing that left nothing to guess.

So yeah, you’ll get the treatment, for my fellow geeks, the backend is solid, the UX sucks, the results are satisfactory.

P.S: the 21 hour wait INCLUDED being admitted, and visited by the doctor, and laying on a bed waiting for a bed upstairs to become ready, it’s NOT the time sitting in the patient area waiting to be triaged.
by Natfan | 2026-01-04 04:49:18+00:00
i can see them with my own eyes. how are they not real? do you mean that they are fake? if i photoshopped an image of your face onto a similar looking (nude) model, would that also be a "fake" image? what if i shared it to your friends and family, and claimed that it was a picture of you? would the emotional impact to. you not be "real"?
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-04 04:50:18+00:00
>The truth is Americans do want this, they just don't like that they want this.

The truth is Americans mostly don't like this, but have little means to do much due to the political structure of how our government works. Our legislature is silently approving and it is clearly costing the seats, even thought it is still 10 months before the next cycle of elections for those seats. But that's 10 months away, and while tensions were strong for months this happened in a single day. It's so much easier to tear down than to build up.

And the truth is that most of us aren't going to try and perform a violent upheaval against a trillion dollar military complex. We lack the skills, resources, and even geography for that. I can't even afford a plane ride to DC at the moment.

I'm not a particular fan of the "you critique society yet you participate in it" argument. This assumes a lot of agency in the individual that doesn't exist without collective bargaining.

>As though the issue were being honest with what we are doing.

Every country has inconvenient truths it tries to hide. It being brazen about the evils it commits is the truly surprising part. The whole point of propaganda is convincing your people that they are the good guys, and there was none of that pomp here.
Show HN: AI compliance automation for startups and lean teams
by felixche | 2026-01-04 04:50:54+00:00
Regulance is an AI-powered compliance automation platform for startups and SaaS companies. It helps teams achieve GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and HIPAA compliance faster by automating evidence collection, policies, risk management, and audit readiness.

Background: While working on PCI-DSS compliance for IntaSend (my other company), we struggled to first collect evidence, which is very fragmented, keep track of things we need to do periodically, etc. We found some good solutions, but they are very expensive. I decided to build Regulance, which is basically a compliance management and automation solution that will enable small teams with little budgets meet compliance with ease.
by botanicalfriend | 2026-01-04 04:52:01+00:00
Paying maintainers doesn't give Red Hat a magic oracle for "which commits matter for security". What you actually end up with is cherry-picking + backporting. Backporting is inherently messy, you can introduce new bugs (including security bugs) while trying to transplant fixes, and omissions are inevitable. And CVEs don't save you here: plenty of security relevant fixes never get a tidy CVE in the first place, and vendors miss fixes because they often pretend the CVE stream is "the security feed".

Greg is pretty blunt about this in the video linked in the article: "If you are not using the latest stable / longterm kernel, your system is insecure" (see 51:40-53:00 in [1]). He also calls out Red Hat explicitly for ending up "off in the weeds" with their fixes.

RHEL as an entire distribution may provide good enough security for most environments. But that is not the same claim as "the RHEL kernel is secure" or "they know exactly which commits are relevant". It is still guesswork plus backports, and you're still running behind upstream fixes (many of which will never get pulled in). It is a comfortable myth.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLX1ehWjIcw&t=3099s
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-04 04:53:05+00:00
> I replied earnestly, I thought you might’ve skipped it.

So... you didn't read the second sentence of my two-sentence comment? Or do you have some theory where "you can guarantee that you win" means it isn't possible to guarantee that you win?

> The point I was making is that with more money you increase your chances to win. The fact that you may have to split the winnings isn’t relevant, you still won.

And here, you're still wrong. You can guarantee that you "win" the lottery instead of "losing" it. But if you're going to be buying seven million lottery tickets, it matters quite a lot whether you end up buying seven million tickets at a dollar each and making $1.05 per, or buying seven million tickets at a dollar each and making $0.52 per or $0.35 per. Collecting a jackpot by losing five million dollars is not a "win" in any sense, including the sense of people who like daydreaming about winning the lottery.

> I was explicitly responding to the “the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance” remark.

Note that everyone also has the same chance of buying out the lottery at a profit - it's not necessary to buy those tickets out of pocket, because you can do it with investor backing. The story in your link is the story of someone who bought out a lottery with investor backing. He's not alone; other people also buy out lotteries using money they didn't provide. This is one of the easiest investor pitches you can give.
by strken | 2026-01-04 04:53:07+00:00
When parts of the general public enjoy a character that the author intended to be bad, there's often a lot going on under the surface that outside critics don't realise. This results in articles that are hilariously wrong from the perspective of readers who are more familiar with the movement.

Consider Patrick Bateman. There are at least six things going on with Bateman memes: aesthetic appreciation for the movie and/or character, comedic irony, intentional contrarianism to annoy the sort of people who write articles about how much they hate Patrick Bateman, an obscure in joke, following the format without understanding the underlying work, and genuine unironic belief that he's a good guy.

If you are not familiar with the type of people who make memes about Patrick Bateman or name sandwiches after the Great Gatsby, you might misread them as misreading the work.
by mindslight | 2026-01-04 04:53:45+00:00
I'd say that as corporate lobbying succeeds with its lobotomization of public institutions, it fundamentally raises the bar for what constitutes legitimate democracy - for example ranked choice voting rather than raced-to-the-bottom plurality.

This should be doubly apparent in this thread, where this specific invasion would likely still be happening even if the fascists had lost in 2024. Admit it, this has military industrial complex's manufacturing consent and nation building all over it, regardless of it benefiting Trump to distract from the childrape files and whatever other corruption/stealing he can wedge in.
by culi | 2026-01-04 04:54:09+00:00
By "given" you mean sold and by "Cuba, Iran, Russia, China..." you mean the only countries that aren't gonna follow the US' absurd sanctions that have led to so much suffering inside of Venezuela

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/05775132.2019.16...

> This article analyzes the consequences of the economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the U.S. government since August of 2017. The authors find that most of the impact of these sanctions has not been on the government but on the civilian population. The sanctions reduced the public’s caloric intake, increased disease and mortality (for both adults and infants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans who fled the country as a result of the worsening economic depression and hyperinflation. They made it nearly impossible to stabilize Venezuela’s economic crisis. These impacts disproportionately harmed the poorest and most vulnerable Venezuelans.
by lurk2 | 2026-01-04 04:54:54+00:00
> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.

Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Prior to LLMs, my use case for StackOverflow was something like this:

30 minutes trying (and failing) to use the right search terms to articulate the problem (remember, there was no contextual understanding, so if you used a word with two meanings and one of those meanings was more popular, you’d have to omit it using the exclusion operator).

30 minutes reading through the threads I found (half of which will have been closed or answered by users who ignored some condition presented by the OP).

5 minutes on implementation.

2 minutes pounding my head on my desk because it shouldn’t have been that hard.

With an LLM, if the problem has been documented at any point in the last 20 years, I can probably solve it using my initial prompt even as a layman. When you’d actually find an answer on StackOverflow, it was often only because you finally found a different way of phrasing your search so that a relevant result came up. Half the time the OP would describe the exact problem you were having only for the thread to be closed by moderators as a duplicate of another question that lacked one of your conditions.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-04 04:55:01+00:00
I touched on it elsewhere in this post, but many scholars believe that there are things you literally can not think if you don't have the language for the concept. This is called the strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity[0]. The weaker version is the same, but carves out space for things like spacial reasoning to exist independently.

I believe that some people don't think in words at all, and instead think in maths, images, or vague concepts, but I think the result is the same. Regardless of which type of token you use, if you don't have a token for a concept you can only express it as a relationship between other related concepts. This is a less efficient way to think, and is very limited when it comes to processing. It also makes it impossible to think about truly 'unique" concepts which can't be expressed by relationships to something else.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
by eugenekay | 2026-01-04 04:55:05+00:00
Publicly available data[1] on the pilot project in Nevada suggests a total of “50MW” generation capacity is planned across 10 rail lines, but the photos on the website seem to only show 1 set being built so far - and a claimed output of 5MW. The per-car mass of 720,000 lb (321 Tonnes) being lowered 229ft=70 Meters (510ft track length x sin(26.8) degrees) in Earth’s 9.81/ms^2 gravity field represents a maximum potential energy of only 220MJ, or 61 kWh per car. Reaching 5MW peak requires a car to be dispatched every 44 seconds.

This all seems reasonable - but is a far cry from the performance of existing Pumped Hydrostorage plants which routinely exceed 1GW since the 1970s, and can run for several hours per cycle. They do require lots of Water and a mountain’s worth of elevation change, which limits the site selection, whereas this system seems to work with any open-pit mine.

It will be interesting to see if this technology can be made competitive with existing grid-stabilization techniques, and what challenges will be encountered along the way.

[1] https://www.sandia.gov/files/ess/uploads/2021/LDES/Russ_Weed...
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-04 04:55:33+00:00
>You will not sacrifice yourself or your life for others, asking others to is just negligent.

I'm asking about 218 elected representatives and 67 senators to do their job. This isn't a matter of "we (the people) need to start a civil war to show our disdain for these actions". At least, not yet. There's so many channels to address this that doesn't involve "sacrificing ourselves", but the channels are at best clogged and at worst compliant, despite what they were voted to do.
by autoexec | 2026-01-04 04:55:47+00:00
Exactly. Some people don't have anything to say, and don't care about writing either. They just want attention, clicks/views, ad money, or followers. Others are passionate about something and want to share that passion, or just want to write for their own sake and it's just a bonus if someone else gets anything out of it.

As the internet fills with slop, it'll only get harder to find the people who actually care about what they're putting online and not just the views or the ad revenue which is a shame because those are the types of people who make the internet interesting.
by Jordan-117 | 2026-01-04 04:56:23+00:00
Any recommendations for writers or bloggers who write plainly/unpretentiously, but have really interesting ideas? First thought was maybe John Salvatier [1] or Adam Mastroianni [2].

[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

[2] https://www.experimental-history.com/
by bccdee | 2026-01-04 04:56:56+00:00
Nah, that misunderstands writing pretty fundamentally. Language is how we express ideas. An LLM that could write as well as a person would need to be able to think as well as a person, and they just don't. That's why nobody's publishing LLM books, and why the only LLM articles are SEO slop and advertorials.

We've had LLMs for years. Image models and coding agents have gotten remarkably good, and their output is all over the place. So where is the AI writing? Outside of automated summaries, formulaic essays, and overly verbose LinkedIn posts, nowhere.
by mopierotti | 2026-01-04 04:58:40+00:00
It's clever that the the author provides both his essay and an example at the same time! Sorry, that joke felt obligatory.

Miscellaneous reactions, in an elegant bulleted list:

- "Simple" sentences are certainly expressive, but "elegant" wording expands the set of meanings that can be conveyed. And vice-versa

- I think a lot of the meat of a sentence is conveyed in the connotations of words and not their literal meaning. "Simple" wording is necessarily more common, and therefore will necessarily have a less specific or reliable connotation. This is a blessing and a curse.

- More subjectively, I think ideal writing is also a window into the author's experience of the world (or moreso whatever topic they're writing about), and as a reader, I want that to come through in an authentic way that matches the author's experience. So, using a thesaurus and agonizing over sentence structure might end up 'elegant' but still vaguely bad, but on the other hand if you agonize over a sentence and come up with something more "sophisticated" that ultimately rings truer to you, then go for it.
by gfhifd42 | 2026-01-04 04:58:42+00:00
Nah. Farther back in time and psychologically deeper. Its in my, very short, comment history.

They told their community their motivation was to combat the selfish monetization of digital sharecroppers and then they monetized their digital sharecroppers.

They are frauds and eventually frauds are exposed and they exposed themselves for $1.8billion.

And SO it collapsed.

But thanks for speaking for me. Albeit incorrectly, ironically.
by dhosek | 2026-01-04 05:00:55+00:00
There was (maybe still is?) a handicapped artist working the Santa Monica promenade who created his work on an iPhone. It’s been a while, but I think he clutched a stylus in his teeth to do the drawing. As I recall he either had no arms or severely shortened arms, but again it’s been a long time and I never took a picture because that would have felt exploitative.
by BurritoAlPastor | 2026-01-04 05:01:15+00:00
I think it’s perfectly germane. When a medium is both a means for making a good living _and_ a form of artistic expression, there’s a natural tension that emerges from people who pursue both those paths at once, in addition to the people who eschew either path entirely. Obviously many people avoid cynical reasons for doing the things they do - I’m among them - but you can’t fail to recognize that there’s always a demographic that doesn’t care about the art.
by wahnfrieden | 2026-01-04 05:01:34+00:00
If this is the current state of it, I can spot a dozen details that are wrong or missing: https://x.com/imadetheseworks/status/1973765948218941771/vid...

Maybe it will get there... Meanwhile I would rather use technologies that provide the full experience on the platform where it matters, and would never want those liquid components on platforms like Android or Windows anyway.
by immibis | 2026-01-04 05:02:21+00:00
It's also disconnected incentives. SO users get numbers to go up by taking moderation actions so of course they do that. Also you literally get banned from reviewing questions if you don't flag enough of them to be closed. These are incentives put in place by the SO company intentionally.

It's not like only slimy people get to use moderator tools like on Reddit, since you need a lot of reputation points you get by having questions and answers voted up. It's more like (1) you select people who write surface-level-good answers since that's what's upvoted, and they moderate with a similar attitude and (2) once you have access to moderator tools you're forced to conform with (1) or your access is revoked, and (3) the company is completely incompetent and doesn't give a shit about any of this.
by defrost | 2026-01-04 05:02:41+00:00
Related:

Fortescue slashes electric train program but insists zero emissions 'on track'

September 04 2025 - https://www.boilingcold.com.au/fortescue-slashes-electric-tr...

Three years after Andrew Forrest pressed go to develop an electric "Infinity Train," most of the experienced engineers who joined Fortescue's zero-emissions crusade are laid off as the miner goes back to the drawing board on how to have fossil-fuel-free locomotives by 2030.

The engineers concluded that battery electric locomotives may be able to haul vast amounts of iron ore, eliminating 10 per cent of Fortescue's emissions, but the knock-on effects on its immense $21 billion a year integrated mine to rail to port iron ore business were unacceptable.

And: https://zero.fortescue.com/en/case-studies/infinity-train .. 404 Page not found.

Looked good for a while there: Fortescue rides the Infinity Train - https://www.electrive.com/2025/07/01/fortescue-rides-the-inf...
by lifetimerubyist | 2026-01-04 05:03:29+00:00
KDE has come a long way but I still find it just too buggy to be usable as a daily driver…which is unfortunate because I don’t really like Gnome either but it’s the least worst of all the real options at the moment. Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day just doing regular things but I can’t even remember the last time Gnome crashed on me. The ghost of KDE4 still haunts me.
by renegade-otter | 2026-01-04 05:04:00+00:00
Someone said "attention", and that is right. We are in the attention/extraction economy now. You are no longer a citizen - you are a walking number with a wallet.

Did you see the NYC ball drop by any chance? It was plastered with ads. Ads on screen, ads on people, giant KIA ad below the ball that ruined the shot on purpose. Everything is a money grab now, because we are just eyeballs that see shit and buy it.

If you think it's just the old me remembered things differently, here is 2002:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB6OzLUQE3I
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-01-04 05:04:20+00:00
Trouble is that Trump's ideology is all but explicitly rapacious and amoral.

I think you are correct that Bush had a very different ideology. I view him as more of a buffoon than a robber baron. (We spent $2-3T in Iraq -- if it was robbery, it was not effective.) I doubt it makes much difference to people whose lives were ruined. But it could be important in the broader context of predicting US behavior: Bush started the PEPFAR program which saved millions from AIDS in Africa; Trump wrecked it.

One very sad possibility is that Bush discredited the ideology of "compassionate conservatism" in the US through his bumbling, and that contributed to the relative popularity of Trump's "amoral conservatism".
by arjie | 2026-01-04 05:04:28+00:00
This is fun. I thought at first it was my TERMINFO (xcolor-ghostty) but it's actually that it just takes a short while to load in the SSH public key before you can login.

Sadly I can't see anyone else's databases. I thought that's where the fun would be! Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Anyway, look in prespecialize.public.messages for a message!

I tried putting something at https://www.public.outband.net/home/prespecialize/index.html but I must have the permissions wrong, alas! Anyway, fun project :)

I thought it was clever you used IPv6. Places a tiny little barrier to entry.
by 0xfaded | 2026-01-04 05:06:48+00:00
Thanks for pushing this, I've never gone beyond "zero" shotting the prompt (is it still called zero shot with search?)

As a curiosity, it looks like r and q are only ever used as r/q, and therefore a sqrt could be saved by computing rq = sqrt((rxrx + ryry) / (qxqx + qyqy)). The if q < 1e-10 is also perhaps not necessary, since this would imply that the ellipse is degenerate. My method won't work in that case anyway.

For the other sqrt, maybe try std::hypot

Finally, for your test set, could you had some highly eccentric cases such as a=1 and b=100

Thanks for the investigation:)

Edit: BTW, the sin/cos renormalize trick is the same as what tx,ty are doing. It was pointed out to me by another SO member. My original implementation used trig functions
by w10-1 | 2026-01-04 05:07:14+00:00
The threshold question is crossover: what Android development experience is required for Swift developers, and what Swift experience is required for Android/Kotlin developers? By saying "without touching XML, Java, or Kotlin", are you implying that Swift developers without Android experience could be successful?

Then the questions is: roughly what percentage of Kotlin or Flutter apps could be writable in Swift? Today and next year?
by culi | 2026-01-04 05:07:34+00:00
This isn't universally true. There are actually a very large amount of cultures where we have ZERO evidence of violence. E.g. for the Sámi in southern Scandanevia we have zero evidence of violence. Similarly the Tripolye culture in modern Ukraine/Moldova/Romania is famous for building megaworks and housing for up to 15,000 people. But despite this large population there is virtually zero evidence of walls/forts/moats/any defensive fortifications. Not specialized weapons.

Evidence of large-scale warfare in prehistoric periods is also extremely rare in general. Most violence we have evidence for seems to be driven by personal conflict. This could just be due to decreased population densities but the conclusion that humans have always widely used war or organized violence is certainly not supported by the existing evidence