MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What breaks in cross-border healthcare coordination?
by abhay1633 | 2026-02-07 13:52:37+00:00
I’m doing early discovery for a potential cross-border healthcare coordination service (patients traveling abroad for treatment), and I want to understand the real failure modes before assuming this is even solvable.

From the outside, it looks like a mix of hospital selection, intermediary incentives, pricing opacity, logistics, and post-treatment follow-up — but I suspect the hardest problems are less obvious.

For people who’ve seen this firsthand (patients, family members, clinicians, hospital admins, or operators):

Where does this process usually break down in practice?

What risks or incentives are most commonly underestimated?

What parts cause the most harm when done poorly?
by malfist | 2026-02-07 13:53:27+00:00
This is hogwash. It's incel and eugenic reasoning wrapped up all together.

Not every smart person (or even most) are engineers, and of the ones that are they don't all move to tech hubs, and the ones that do not all of them can't get laid.

And I'll give you a great reason why it's hogwash, the "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town
by LatencyKills | 2026-02-07 13:53:37+00:00
I spent 15 years as a senior dev on the Visual Studio team followed by 5 years on the Xcode team at Apple.

Individual engineers can be talented, professional, and end-user focused. Most of that effort gets lost when PMs refuse to work with each other in a coherent manner. Most of the major issues we ran into weren’t engineering bugs per se, they were the result of management refusing to allow teams to communicate effectively.

When we were first building out the original C# functionality, the C# team refused to talk to the existing compiler teams. I spent more time acting as a go-between than I did solving actual technical problems.

Good people can produce crappy software in that environment.
by Fricken | 2026-02-07 13:53:57+00:00
Now that I'm in my 50s my tendons have lost a great deal of elasticity, maintaining muscle mass is starting to feel like a losing battle, but my knee joints are great, and that's in spite of a lifetime spent ignoring all popular advice on how not to wreck them.

Of course, You don't have to look far to see pro-athletes or ex-pro athletes: runners, tennis players, basketball players and gymnasts who have been going hard on their knees for decades and are still physically impressive relative to any of us mortals.

If you've torn or damaged your meniscus at some point you are statistically prone to osteoarthritis later in life but otherwise you should be fine.

https://msklab.med.ubc.ca/how-to-save-your-knees-without-giv...
by robeastham | 2026-02-07 13:54:25+00:00
I'd find it easier to believe this comment is AI generated, given that the account is only 53 minutes old. The text on the t-shirt looks totally normal to me.

The fact that this blogger, who's blog I'm reading for the first time today, has been posting archive footage and imagery, using a pretty similar format, from the same factory since at least 2019 (https://arcadeblogger.com/2019/12/26/atari-coin-op-archive-f...), and also the fact that the new post is his first blog post in 18th months, makes me think it's highly unlikely that this the post AI generated in any way.
by treetalker | 2026-02-07 13:55:17+00:00
“You only have 2 controls: 1) The clarity, culture, and energy you give your teams; and 2) Resource allocation.”

But sir, that’s four controls.

“Four! You only have 4 controls: 1) The clarity, culture, and energy you give your teams; 2) Resource allocation. And a fanatical devotion to mandatory OneDrive storage!”

- - -

Jokes aside, I think the key to the piece is the hackneyed Navy Seals line: the speech describes little more than command-and-control, chain-of-command, classical militaristic mission assignment plus the scientific method. So there is a kernel of truth even if one disagrees with the cultural model and rejection of any hope for managing up.
by chmod775 | 2026-02-07 13:55:26+00:00
For literature: House of Suns if you feel like strapping in for a wild ride that nevertheless doesn't do unspeakable things to the laws of physics and logic. Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse if you're looking for a more "relatable" setting. Children of Time if you want an alien experience.

I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed to be good TV shows, but I haven't seen them yet.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-07 13:55:38+00:00
So you write a timer app that counts in milliseconds in an int variable, and it works on your machine where that's 32 bits. I compile it for Arduino, and I can't set a timer for longer than 32 seconds in the future. Isn't that a problem? You shouldn't have used int — you should have declared a maximum time value (99:59:59) and how many bits are needed to store that value.

In what situation is plain int sufficient? If your values always fit in 16 bits, it works, but what's special about 16? A value that goes from 0 to 100 only needs 7 bits, so int is not efficient there either, you should have asked for 7 bits which would round up to 8 on most platforms. Arduino is an 8–bit platform that requires several instructions to add 16 bits to 16 bits — int isn't the most efficient type.
by ubixar | 2026-02-07 13:57:10+00:00
One of my favorite YouTube creators (Josean Martinez) for finding super productive dev / terminal tools has just made the jump from macOS to Arch Linux / Hyprland (like Omarchy). It's a great channel for finding out a Pro Hyprland setup tuned for terminal productivity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOsJr5EB2zc
by kace91 | 2026-02-07 13:57:17+00:00
I understand it doesn’t matter to the game they’re playing. It just seems off putting from my side, to brag in a way that is so divorced from the good or bad you’re doing to the world.

Perhaps it’s the use of general terms like success and value what irks me about corporate culture. Making millions in place of making the world better is ok, but idealizing it this way is another matter.
by lembergs | 2026-02-07 13:57:39+00:00
Fair. If you’re a dev watermarking a few images, Sharp directly is the obvious choice.

This exists for cases where Sharp is annoying, not hard:
- offloading CPU-heavy image work from your servers
- batch jobs (hundreds of images → one API call + ZIP)
- no-code / Zapier / Make users

Not targeting solo devs who like writing image pipelines. More for agencies, no-code users, and apps that want “watermarking as a service.”

Genuinely curious if “Sharp as a Service” is a clearer framing — or if this just isn’t painful enough to justify an API.
by jfengel | 2026-02-07 13:58:32+00:00
You can say "an anonymous source". That's a standard journalistic practice.

What shouldn't be standard is "we read this newspaper article and we're going to repeat it as if we originated the story". Which is what AI news always is, in addition to the vast majority of news outlets.

The origin of most news is wire services, repeating what local reporters write. Newspapers usually at least cite the wire service. Blogs, TV shows, and others speak as if they were the originators.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-02-07 13:58:57+00:00
Well dotfiles demonstrate that punctuation can have a special meaning in filenames.

I'm not convinced by "quicker to type" arguments as that's rarely the bottleneck, so I'm perfectly happy with using underscores in filenames and variables. I wouldn't use underscore as the beginning character of a filename unless it had a specific meaning to me (e.g. temporary files), so I'd be more inclined to use a two or three character prefix instead.
by mavhc | 2026-02-07 14:00:34+00:00
Every news organisation thinks they're the one you want to read, they want you to be a loyal customer to them and not read other newspapers. Google News used to have "see 349 other articles on this story" which really showed how pointless news organisations were, constantly rewriting/licencing other people's content.

Any news aggregator platform is only used by news organisations under duress.
by DSingularity | 2026-02-07 14:01:24+00:00
This take makes even more sense when you consider the costs of making a move to create the market. The organizational energy and its necessary loss in focus and resources limits their ability to experiment. Arguably the best strategy for Google: (1) build foundational depth in research and infrastructure that would be impossible for competition to quickly replicate (2) wait for the market to present a clear new opportunity for you (3) capture it decisively by focusing and exploiting every foundational advantage Google was able to build.
by rybosworld | 2026-02-07 14:01:33+00:00
Yeah I don't think this get's enough attention. It still requires a technical person to use these things effectively. Building coherent systems that solve a business problem is an iterative process. I have a hard time seeing how an LLM could climb that mountain on it's own.

I don't think there's a way to solve the issue of: one-shotted apps will increasingly look more convincing, in the same way that the image generation looks more convincing. But when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't quite correct enough to deploy to production. You could try brute-force vibe iterating until it's exactly what you wanted, but that rarely works for anything that isn't a CRUD app.

Ask any of the image generators to build you a sprite sheet for a 2d character with multiple animation frames. I have never gotten one to do this successfully in one prompt. Sometimes the background will be the checkerboard png transparency layer. Except, the checkers aren't all one color (#000000, #ffffff), instead it's a million variations of off-white and off-black. The legs in walking frames are almost never correct, etc.

And even if they get close - as soon as you try to iterate on the first output, you enter a game of whack-a-mole. Okay we fixed the background but now the legs don't look right, let's fix those. Okay great legs are fixed but now the faces are different in every frame let's fix those. Oh no fixing the faces broke the legs again, Etc.

We are in a weird place where companies are shedding the engineers that know how to use these things. And some of those engineers will become solo-devs. As a solo-dev, funds won't be infinite. So it doesn't seem likely that they can jack up the prices on the consumer plans. But if companies keep firing developers, then who will actually steer the agents on the enterprise plans?
by lkbm | 2026-02-07 14:02:13+00:00
The blessing and the curse of the Internet. A few years ago, I was getting new bicycle tires and fellow overly analytic bicycle nerds had built a machine to measure the rolling resistance and puncture resistance of each tire[0], so I of course I "had" to spend hours pouring over all the different options.

This was probably a more sensible use of my time than when I spent hours trying to determine which pedals I should get. Is there a reason to get low profile? Oh, this one is 20 grams lighter--oh, but some people report it breaking more than this other one.

To quote on of the best article titles of all time, reality has a surprising amount of detail.

[0] https://www.bicyclerollingresistance.com/
by seyz | 2026-02-07 14:02:16+00:00
It's too late. I loved Heroku, but having 5+ major outages in a single year was unacceptable. The support was abysmal, and transparency was non-existent. After the Salesforce acquisition, we watched the company culture shift, getting worse and worse over the years. We were forced to migrate to AWS. Even though we were high-spend customers, the trust is gone. This post is a nice gesture of transparency, but it's way too fluffy for my taste. Heroku is dead to me, there’s no coming back from this.
by lossyalgo | 2026-02-07 14:02:30+00:00
DF gets all the news (rightfully so, it's an epic game that I've dumped a ton of hours into) but if you haven't already, consider checking out Songs of Syx. It's like DF but multiplied by 100. You can have tens of thousands of citizens, doing most of the things they do in Dwarf Fortress, and a lot more, including waging huge wars against the neighbors. The limits of DF kinda made me sad, actually, that you are limited to so few Dwarves (and don't say it's because you want to know the story of all of them, because after 30 or so you lose track of who is who anyways, so might as well up the limit from 100 to 50K, or more? ;) Songs of Syx has also routinely been getting massive updates since 2020 and I have a feeling the code is a bit cleaner so the solo dev can add features faster (unlike DF's code base which is, according to one of the new devs a nightmare to work with). It's a game that is never talked about but deserves a whole lot more love from gamers.

I don't mean to cast shade on DF, I really do love it, and am happy for its existence, I just think that DF fans should also look into Songs of Syx.

The defining difference for me are the generated stories in DF, which often are a lot of random trash but still give a feeling of a deeper meaning.
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-07 14:03:11+00:00
It doesn't ensure anything. But it does force an identity trail (you have to prove your identity), and more importantly allows Apple to have a rapid kill switch: If a developer uses their account to distribute malware, Apple revokes the cert and those apps will no longer run on user devices (as soon as the revocation hits).

Should it be $100 per year? No, that is ridiculous and usurious.
by sixQuarks | 2026-02-07 14:03:31+00:00
I feel the same way, but I’m not a traditional software engineer. Just an old-school Webmaster who’s been trying to keep up with things, but I’ve had to hire developers all along.

I’m an idea’s guy, and in the past month or so my eyes have also fully opened to what’s coming.

But there’s a big caveat. While the actual grunt work and development is going away, there’s no telling when the software engineering part is going to go away as well. Even the ideas guy part. What happens when a simple prompt from someone who doesn’t even know what they’re doing results in an app that you couldn’t have done as well with whatever software engineering skills you have?
by simianwords | 2026-02-07 14:03:55+00:00
I couldn’t read the full article but it raises a good point about using AI for dashboards and creating charts. Lots of people work in the jobs in which the requirement is to literallly pull the data and create nice looking dashboards.

This job is clearly going to be modified in some way.

We finally have a legitimate way to query data using natural language and create dashboards. I don’t know what the point of learning sql is now - at least for olap users.
by AIorNot | 2026-02-07 14:05:30+00:00
The great Irony of showing a Google NotebookLLM generated infographic for this Microsoft pep talk..
(after how many billions MS is spending on Gen AI infra and Copilot)

Yup, Navy Seals and all that..

Seems like Satya may have over allocated his “success” there

Sure, they’re a successful organization but they’ve built their success on the backs of a ruthless layoff of thousands of they’re own loyal employees, and the transition of the American information economy to Indian offshore workers
by kergonath | 2026-02-07 14:05:54+00:00
> Asimov's sci-fi has both hard and soft parts (especially his later works).

Yeah I know Asimov. I actually really like his writings, which is why I am a bit surprised because this review is short-sighted and mean, and I think, misses the point.

> Like how he immediately goes to the feasibility of non-human total surveillance when concluding that the total surveillance of a population on the level of 1984 by humans is infeasible.

Right, but he still misses the point. As a physicist I can think about a dozen reasons why positronic brains make little sense. I accept this as some of the disbelief I have to suspend to get to the actual substance of the books. It’s no different. Me being a nerd does not mean that I have to be a jerk just because someone writes something I find implausible.
by sh3rl0ck | 2026-02-07 14:06:00+00:00
'Before you joined' seems to that she doesn't anymore.

I find it a little amusing that AI companies provide free AI subscriptions to their employees and their families. Perhaps because I'd never thought of it that way.

That's kinda nice actually; I assume employees get early access to models to test (5.3 codex, for example). Do families get it too?
by Nextgrid | 2026-02-07 14:06:05+00:00
Given the “quality” of Microsoft’s output since his arrival, nobody should take any leadership advice from this moron.

It’s not hard to abuse a dominant position and/or locked-in customers to drive short-term profits, at the expense of destroying the company in the long run and making the world a worse place. Hell a criminal enterprise such as a protection racket would yield even more profit margin, yet at least those guys have enough self-respect to not see themselves as some visionary leaders.

Good company leadership is driving profit without burning down the whole ship in the process, something very few recent tech CEOs are capable of. Steve Jobs is the last example I can think of.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-07 14:06:12+00:00
Looked so backwards to me, too. However, I decided to give it a go, anyway. Now, I have some scripts and small commands which start with a comma, and it looks neat and time saving.

Yes, I can do path ordering to override usual commands. However, having a set of odd-job scripts which start with a comma gives a nice namespacing capability alongside a well narrowed-down tab-completion experience.

While it's not the neatest thing around, it works surprisingly well.

Another idea which looks useless until you start using is text expanders (i.e.: Espanso and TextExpander).
by varispeed | 2026-02-07 14:06:18+00:00
In big corporations that's how it is. Developers are told to only implement what is in the specs and if they have any objection, they need to raise it to PM who will then forward it to the system architect etc.

So that creates the notion as if the design was something out of reach. I met developers now who cannot develop anything on their own if it doesn't have a ticket that explains everything and hand holds them. If something is not clear they are stuck and need help of senior engineers.
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-02-07 14:06:49+00:00
> We also struggle to attract this kind of talent.

i would go further and say, any kind of productive/disruptive talent - or experience. Plus the reek of office-politics is everywhere, and that does not help either.

You know, after 3+ decades in the industry, at various levels from bottom to top - mostly just-do-it-all-hats - last two years i have trouble landing a job. Go figure..
by avidiax | 2026-02-07 14:07:14+00:00
This speech is anything but clear from an engineering or analytical perspective.

"Outsized success" is always in relation to the value of the allocated resources. "Conventional success" is making slightly more than liquidating those resources and following a passive investment strategy, like index funds yielding 8% APR.

So what "Satya" is saying here is "I want higher risk, higher reward strategies", but "don't be unlucky" (don't "make a habit of" failure).

I'm no exec, but I'm my opinion, this is a poor strategy in the consumer and especially enterprise software and services space.

"Satya" is wrong: there are 3 knobs. The missing knob is risk allocation. This works in two ways: some areas are intrinsically risky, and some areas you choose to take risk in. Either way, you allocate that risk with strategy and resource allocation (the other two knobs). If an area can't fail, you may spend more resources to de-risk or hedge, or strategically avoid change or the area. If an area has outsized opportunity, the strategy and allocation takes more risk there.

"Satya" is telling the whole room that their area should favor high-risk, high reward strategy and allocation, when he should be telling them that they must determine if their area should favor or avoid risk to maximize the entire company's return on investment.

The real estate team should not be a risk center. It should not fire 90% of the janitors in favor of "AI first" robot vacuums. It should not decide that real estate as a service (WeWork) is a good strategy over buying real estate in advance of need. It should avoid capacity crunches while putting holdings in LLCs to reduce downside risk. It should vertically integrate the data centers (land, connectivity, power, water, regulation/politics/PR).

Lots of Microsoft failures look like risk misallocation to me. Windows phone was allocated risk too late in moving away from Windows CE. Windows Vista took too much risk and failed to release until features were rolled back. Windows 11 (financialization of the OS) seems like they are betting the farm to secure some ad and subscription revenue, and keep their low margin PC maker partners happy, while they make the platform the least attractive it's ever been.
by iwanttocomment | 2026-02-07 14:07:56+00:00
It totally would have been normal to have a custom shirt like that back in the day. I had a few.

In the late 70s and early 80s, there were custom "iron on" T-Shirt shops in most malls. They would have a wall of larger iron-on decals, primarily logos of sports teams and rock bands, but they also had custom letters, usually in the Cooper typeface. You'd tell them what you wanted, the size and color of your shirt and lettering, and they'd go in the back room and iron what you wanted on your new shirt for a few dollars. This was especially popular with youth sports teams in lieu of professional uniforms, families who wanted to match for a big trip (often with custom names like this), and, as you can see here, jokey custom workplace team shirts.

If you watch a late-70s or early-80s episode of The Price is Right, you'll almost certainly see contestants or audience members in these custom iron-on shirts - same font, same slightly disjointed look.

The left-hand text on Dave Compton's shirt is slightly blurry and unreadable given the resolution, not garbled. But it's not some AI nonsense.

DAVE

COMPTON

(King?) OF PACKERS

(He'll?) PUT IT IN ANY BOX

This isn't just a rah-rah team spirit shirt or something obscure, it's a peculiarly '70s innuendo combining thoughts about his job... and his sexual prowess. Sure, that kind of shirt would cause a modern workplace to, uh, send him packing. As they say, it was a different time.

Here's a thread on Reddit about one of those mall custom iron-on t-shirt shops: https://www.reddit.com/r/70sdesign/comments/hf6f0q/tshirt_ir...
by dw_arthur | 2026-02-07 14:08:04+00:00
Is the progress of LLMs moving up abstraction layers inevitable as they gather more data from each layer? First, we fed LLMs raw text and code and now they are gathering our interactions with the LLM regarding generated code. It seems like you could then use the interactions to make a LLM that is good at prompting and fixing another LLMs generated code. Then its on to the next abstraction layer.
by strken | 2026-02-07 14:08:10+00:00
The difference is that we've more or less hit a stable Pareto front in education and healthcare. Gains are small and incremental; if you pour more money into one place and less into another, you generally don't end up much better off, although you can make small but meaningful improvements in select areas. You can push the front forward slightly with new research and innovation, but not very fast or far.

The current generation of AI is an opportunity for quick gains that go beyond just a few months longer lifespan or a 2% higher average grade. It is an unrealised and maybe unrealistic opportunity, but it's not just greed and lust for power that pushes people to invest, it's hope that this time the next big thing will make a real difference. It's not the same as investing more in schools because it's far less certain but also has a far higher alleged upside.