skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It thus seems up for debate whether these debts represent the financial health or creditworthiness of the consumer.

You’re missing my point, I think (feel free to tell me otherwise). It doesn’t matter that they ordinarily pay their debts and are responsible financially before their medical debt. If they have medical debt that they’re obligated to pay off, then it affects their ability to pay other debts and is therefore something I would want to know as a lender.

> It's commercial speech regarding a private concern and thereby subject to "intermediate scrutiny" (versus the strict scrutiny afforded to political speech)

I have not analyzed the SCOTUS precedent here. But I’m making a more generic claim that this violates free speech (a basic principle more fundamental than US law).

EDIT since I can’t reply deeper in the thread: this speech isn’t fraud so that feels like a false equivalence. It’s just informing others of the facts. That shouldn’t be limited, right?
created in 2014 with 54 karma?? You should be posting much more - I am sure you have some great ideas to share with all of us.
Windows 11. Pro version but it shoudn't make a difference.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2070861/windows-snipping-too...

I press Win+Shift+S then select the region of the text.
I think it’ll be more expensive. When I was looking at jlc it seemed to be $100/10 was starting point if you want assembly
Medical debt in the US is unlike other debt. Amounts are declared post-factum and a patient doesn't have total control over the process in reality. The most important and visible choice is whether the provider/facility is in-network or out-of-network, but even that is not bulletproof cause no one discusses the exact billing codes with their providers and cross-checks with their insurance. As one example, sometimes pre-authorization is needed but not given and you're SOL. No Surprises Act took off some edge off this atrocity but the system remains unforgiving.
Is there anything that’s self hostable that’s on par with Elevenlabs?
I worked for Google for almost 14 years. Never did they, any other engineer, or even product manager I know of, ever suggest to snoop into cloud customer data, especially those using Shielded VMs and Customer Managed Encryption Keys for attached storage (https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/using...). I've never seen even the slightest hint, and the security people at Google are incredibly anal to a T about the design and enforcement of these things.

This stuff is all designed so that even an employee with physical access to the machine would find it very difficult to get data. It's encrypted at rest by customer keys, stored in enclaves in volatile RAM. If you detached the computer or disk, you'd lose access. You'd have to perform an attack by somehow injecting code into the running system. But Shielded VMs/GKE instances makes that very hard.

I am not a Google employee anymore but this common tactic of just throwing out "oh, their business model contains ad model ergo, they will sell anything and everything, and violate contracts they sign to steal private data from your private cloud" is a bridge too far.
Main thing is iPhones get security updates for about 8 years. My iPhone 6S is still fine. Pixel in particular will now get 7 years, but this wasn't the case in the past. Random other Android phones don't have good support, and even third-party repairs might be harder.
but that is what a lookup table is -- something to turn the number on the die into the happy/meh/sad outcome. There would be nine on each card.
I think the ARC-AGI tasks was manually drawn with an early version of fchollet's editor.

Recently Michael Hodel has reverse engineered 400 of the tasks, so more tasks can be generated. Interestingly it can generate python programs that solves the tasks too.

https://github.com/michaelhodel/re-arc
There are "famous" people on YouTube who seem very telepathic-psychic - but I suppose people would really only become a believer if they have an anecdotal experience themselves that defies all odds.
> If they have medical debt that they’re obligated to pay off, then it affects their ability to pay other debts and is therefore something I would want to know as a lender

I'm curious for data on how medical debt affects creditworthiness.

There are limits on collecting medical debt, for example, that might make someone with a massive on-paper medical debt a good credit concern. Medical billing is also notoriously error prone in a way e.g. credit card billing simply is not. That further reduces the information in each medical-debt line item.

> I’m making a more generic claim that this violates free speech (a basic principle more fundamental than US law)

Yes, so does prosecuting someone for fraud. We've been balancing rights for centuries, in law and philosophy, particularly when it comes to commercial speech.
I don’t disagree with any of that but that’s a different problem which should be directly addressed. If someone has debts they legally must pay off then it seems like regardless of how that debt came about, it would affect the risk associated with them, since they already owe someone else lots of money. For example if I were to offer them a loan and wasn’t aware that they’re saddled with medical debt, wouldn’t that leave me in a bad position as a lender?
Hoo boy, you weren't kidding:

> The drivers were a colourful group of mostly English, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, or Americans, known for their drinking and whoring. In order to keep them out of brothels and know where to find them, the Nairns gave each one a house and a girl for company. One-eyed John Reid used a Cadillac to chase down and shoot a cheetah. Ryan, an Australian, was often drunk and filled his water bottles with arak, a local spirit.

Different time.
Fantastic explanatory video by the author: https://youtu.be/sRbcw2sGkJw?si=USBnDyShTJNAeKVj

It’s a shame that the repo docs are so sparse in comparison.
> According to Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler, keeping a home steady at 75F requires about 30% more power when outside temperatures creep from 95F to 98F

That seems not correct, and it’s citing a Twitter thread so that doesn’t give me confidence. Heat flux is linearly proportional to the temperature delta between inside and outside. Electricity use for cooling is also proportional to heat flux (e.g. a heat pump will move some multiple of the wattage).
Four Tops singer sues hospital, thought he was mentally ill, not member of group
And in fact, from TFA,

It was actually for the Super Nintendo port of Wolfenstein that Carmack first researched and implemented binary space partitioning. In Wolfenstein, this was relatively straightforward because all the walls were axis-aligned; in Doom, it would be more complex. But Carmack realized that BSP trees would solve Doom’s speed problems too.
Do they have any compelling reason why "List<T>" isn't just "T List"? That's how they write it in OCaml. Then comma separated lists, are they mad? I much prefer how Uiua does this.
Weird article. Everyone stands on the shoulders of someone else. Even North Korean Linux
Well, point 1 is NATO and the EU are almost the same entity. Difference of sets and there are only a couple of countries left. The non-EU NATO countries are generally involved in the war (maybe not Turkey? I don't keep an eye on the Turks).

Point 2 is more an observation. Russia is currently taking significant casualties - we don't really know how many - from Ukrainian forces armed with NATO weapons, NATO ammo, NATO intelligence, NATO training in some cases. These NATO activities are being done in service of NATO strategic concerns and appear to be coordinated through NATO headquarters. The CIA - most certainly not an EU institution - has 12 bases in Ukraine [0]. Biden is the person who turns out to have the authority to green light strikes on Russian soil [1]. It would appear superficially that Ukraine is going to join NATO [2].

If the trigger was EU expansion then the Russians made a pretty basic mistake and should have hired Chomsky as a military advisor to warn them about the rather obvious threat to Russian interests posed by NATO and its expansion. Putin obviously figured out that mistake fairly quickly because I'm pretty sure I've read about him talking about NATO in a couple of speech transcripts. The threat to them is NATO #1, EU #several - taking its spot in the queue with China, Russian winters, and coups and whatever other problems might materialise for them in a decade's time.

> A might-makes-right approach can be effective, but it can also lead to world wars which are immensely destructive

That doesn't sound effective. Effective is getting what you want with minimum fuss.

[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/cia-maintains-12-secret-bases-212...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/30/politics/biden-ukraine-li...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-secretary-state-blin...
Let this thread be a lesson that no matter how nice you are and no matter your achievements, as long as you are trans you can't even die in peace.
They’re only “unworthy” because they live in the US, which has trapped them in a dysfunctional system they can’t escape to obtain reasonable cost healthcare.
Ukraine 'hits missile launch sites in Russia'
When Gruen used it, it was about the shopping center itself definitely not 'items on a shelf' like many use it today.

He wanted shopping centers to be like the a nice European town or city shopping street - self-contained shops around the outside and 'town square' type broad pedestrian spaces in the middle that were open, public/community focussed, full of light and trees, and hopefully connected for pedestrians to other areas of a town. He saw this as a good alternative to the car-clogged main streets (with frequently no open space and narrow, poorly maintained footpaths) that were common in post WWII America.

What he objected to was the 'square'/circulation area becoming psychologically overwhelming experiences (complex layout, sensory overload, full of advertising billboards, constant changes, no links to other pedestrian areas, etc.) which was adopted by most shopping centres as their studies showed that it meant people bought more (I think he called it 'a machine for spending' or similar) but (for Gruen at least) it killed any sense of a true benign European 'pedestrian street' or 'town square' that he wanted to bring to America.
Because if just touching fruit is going to hurt us, surely handling it is far worse? Why aren't we seeing obvious health problems from the plant workers etc? If it was that toxic, we'd know.
>Right, but they're complementary. Content review gets easier when you cut out 99% of crap at the source by fiat, and with a hard line drawn, the reviewers are much harder for marketers to compromise either.

Agreed. Walled gardens cut out the crap. Invitation only.
> the kid will stop you, point at a dog in the book, and ask "dog?"

Of course for a human this can either mean "I have an idea about what a dog is, but I'm not sure whether this is one" or it can mean "Hey this is a... one of those, what's the word for it again?"
Why would OpenAI not build their own data center?
Gurbaksh Chahal hates it if you talk about his domestic violence convictions. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=gurbaksh+chahal
PIPs aren't about unemployment insurance; they're about reducing the risk of a wrongful firing lawsuit.
I wrote about a small fraction of this, CFRunLoop: https://blog.meldstudio.co/macos-cfrunloop-internals-schedul...

libdispatch source code is an enlightening read for those interested in diving deeper into the C Runtime powering Swift concurrency.
Maybe + for push and - for pop?
A few ways that housing can continue to increase as a percentage of income:

1.) Go from a single income supporting to a house to multiple incomes supporting a house. This is actually happening, with the shift from single-earner households in the 1950s to dual-income households to groups of unmarried professionals living together as roommates. The preponderance of post-1950s data can also overweight this effect: historically, the norm was far large extended families to live together in one household, and the single-earner U.S. nuclear family was an aberration created by suburbanization.

2.) Have reset points. How can real estate continue to return 7% real returns for 120 years? Well, return 7% for 40 years, at which point your investment is up 15x. Then bomb the house and kill the owner. Then give the land to the guys who helped you kill the owner at a low, low price, help them build a house on it cheap, and start the 7% appreciation calculator over again from a new low baseline. This is also very close to what actually happened over those 120 years, between WW1, WW2, the Russian/Ottoman/Austrian revolutions, the fall of the Warsaw Pact, the Chinese Civil War / Cultural Revolution / Great Famine, and so on.

3.) Have a smaller percentage of people owning houses. The average housing price can absolutely escape the confines of the median income, if the median person does not own a house. The study's use of rent and imputed rent partially controls for this, but the broad answer for "Housing prices can't outstrip incomes forever, can they?" is "Sure they can, if nobody can afford houses."

4.) Have more people. If you're talking the returns to an asset class, and you own all that asset class, and then suddenly there are more people that need that asset, you're going to make money. This, to a large degree, actually happened during those 120 years.
"Although she had hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed her intention to transition.[20] IBM apologized for this in 2020."

Good grief. Took them long enough.
If it’s real, it will survive scrutiny and people will believe the evidence.
The section on AI tools made me laugh out loud.

Kids, do you know how many hype cycles have seen? Ask your AI what NFT you should buy, better yet ask it about flooz.

I miss fucked company.
The sources are dodgy. But so is the premise.

Gaolers are sadists, is well established. The large amount of rape in prisons is due to guards sadism, (not all guards, not all gaols). Trans prisoners are no harder to deal with than any other class, but bigotry...

Ditto for refuges. There are a lot of troubles around refuges, trouble from trans women is just another set of troubles.

Professional sports, and record keeping in sports does seem to have a reasonable objection, if you accept the premise of competitive sport. (I could hardly care less about competitive sport, but I recognise it is a problem for them). A small part of our society, and a special case. So what.

But bigotry, and a totally bizarre interference in other people's personal lives.

I really do not get it.

What fabulous work trans men and women are doing breaking down the arcane tyranny of gender that is a major fault line through our whole society.
> debts they legally must pay off then it seems like regardless of how that debt came about

Many medical debts aren't paid off. I've disputed my fair share of them until the hospital agreed in writing to waive the charges. (Never went to collections, granted.)

The first step in each of those cases was refusing to pay.

> if I were to offer them a loan and wasn’t aware that they’re saddled with medical debt, wouldn’t that leave me in a bad position as a lender?

Yes, probably. This rule likely needs a sibling regulation reducing the capacity of collectors to collect on medical debt in ways that financially impair the consumer.
Medical debt should not exist. Making the situation slightly less awful isn't do-gooder idealism, it's a tiny step in the direction of a sane healthcare system that nearly every other developed country on the planet somehow is able to have.
Disagree, now is the best time to be increasing energy production and expenditure — it is the hallmark of development of a civilization. Using less energy means the stagnation of our civilization.

How are we going to advance our technology without spending more energy?

The scale of energy usage today are fractions of what it will be in 20, 50, 100 years…

We must build big, build now.
It is true, games were present but it wasn't in the objectives of the hardware manufacturers to have "better game support" at this time.
In most cases the firing decision has already been made because all the sustainable levels of informal support have already been exhausted.

After the team lead has endlessly explained, reassigned, and simplified a person's tasks, and just generally tried their best to make the person a productive member of the team _and failed_, then they've given up and put them on a PIP so they can be let go.

AFAICT PIPs are must CYA's.
Show HN: PDF to Podcast – Convert Any PDF into a Podcast Episode
Hi HN!

I'm stoked to share a project I've been working on called PDF to Podcast. It's a free, open-source tool that automatically converts PDF documents into engaging, informative podcast-style audio content using large language models and text-to-speech tech.

Inspiration:
The idea for this project came from the NotebookLM demo at Google I/O, where they showcased generating audio dialogue from uploaded PDFs and other sources. However, that audio feature hasn't been publicly released yet, and I wanted to challenge myself to build something similar using existing tools and APIs.

How it works:

The user uploads a PDF
The tool extracts the text and feeds it into Google's Gemini Flash language model
Gemini Flash generates a natural, engaging podcast dialogue script based on the key information in the document
This script is then converted to audio using OpenAI's text-to-speech API
The user can listen to the generated "podcast episode" and read along with the transcript
I chose to use Gemini Flash for the language model because it's good at writing high-quality prose while being fast and cheap. We use OpenAI's TTS API to then bring the dialogue to life.

Under the hood, it's built with Python, FastAPI, Gradio for the web UI, and my own library, promptic, for calling the LLM and getting structured output. The code is open-source and available on GitHub.

Apart from the tool's practical utility, I'm hoping this project can serve as a helpful example for others looking to build applications on top of large language models. It demonstrates an end-to-end flow from document intake to language model usage to audio output, with a simple web interface on top.

I would love to hear any feedback or ideas from the HN community! I think there's a lot of potential to expand on this concept and make all sorts of written content more accessible and engaging through audio conversion. Let me know what you think :)
Hello again, and thank you for checking!

It's been a while since I've worked on anything Creatures-related. Are you still working on getting old things working on more recent platforms?
Amazon Flex drivers file arbitration claims for misclassification as contractors
Your dishwasher is better than you think (tips, tricks, and how they work)
Are you saying that medical debt does not exist in every other developed country on the planet?
Related:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kp3bjm55xw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll6-eGDpimU
I've been seriously noodling planting a bunch of trees around my house for shade but I feel like insurance will rip me a new one
It's far less likely to completely ruin your life than in the US.
I don’t think the author meant that computers weren’t designed for games, I think they specifically were referring to 3D games.

Wolfenstein only worked, as the article pointed out, by significantly constraining the problem. While Doom wasn’t as unconstrained as Quake it enabled a significant amount of complexity compared to Wolfenstein.
Stop Using LocalStorage
I wonder how they defined a syllable. One example from the home page I saw was "shlayr", which seems like two syllables - of course depends on pronunciation. On a quick look, it seems they used a version of CMU pronunciation dictionary split into syllables, so I supposed that appeared somewhere in there.
Doesn't R2 have no egress fee?
Dumb throwaway here as stupidly my real name is attached to my primary account.

I just got PIP'd, and then fired. The objectives of the PIP were impossible to complete, dependent on externalities that I couldn't control. A box checking process indeed. Although, I dont think my boss entered it in bad faith, I'm pretty sure his boss made the decision.

WHat sucks is that I've been fighting some medical issues for the past 1.5 years thats made it difficult to focus and think. Things are starting to resolve, but I've had to completely change care teams. And, I was shitcanned despite letting management/HR know about the issues, having letters from two different docs.

I did my best to complete the objectives, even knowing I wouldn't. I did use the time to look for work, but unfortunately, didnt get anything nailed down before the termination.
If you cannot broadcast medical debt then you cannot bound accumulation of such. I expect this to be counterproductive like subsidized mortgages and student loans.

At the end of the day, hospitals need to pay people, if this increases the losses for hospitals it’ll be bad in the end.

A better rule IMO would be not just transparency which is law, but forced disclosure. Hospitals should have to disclosure full costs and breakdown to insurance and to you for procedures before actions are taken. Bonus points if said procedures are then compared to local, state and national averages.
I built a large remotion powered video generation pipeline for a major AI video company and one of the major challenges was cost of generating a video. 1 instance of Remotion at best generates 1-2 fullhd frame per second on server and that turns out to be quite expensive for slightly larger videos. From my benchmarking, taking screenshots was the slowest part of their pipeline. Any sense on how many frames revideo can generate. Since you could do canvas.toBlob, I am wondering if it's faster.
That's a cool clock. Do they make one that is radio controlled by US transmitters? If not, maybe txtempus[1] and a Raspberry Pi Zero W can help. Or pico_dcf77_tx[2] and a Pico W.

1: https://github.com/hzeller/txtempus

2: https://github.com/elehobica/pico_dcf77_tx