skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Before his confirmation hearing, RFK Jr was thinking of attacking the lucrative AMA revenue stream. As the Financial Times reported, “Kennedy’s team has discussed how the CPT process could be done in-house by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, according to three people briefed on the matter.”

Congratulations, the author managed to find the one thing where RFK Jr actually makes a good point.

The "economic termites" problem also applies to other parts of the economy. Software patents like Amazon's for "1 click purchases", the hot mess that is mobile phone standards where a wanna-be startup has to negotiate with a bunch of different patent pools (which is why you don't see new players other than Qualcomm, Apple/Intel, Samsung and MediaTek (who probably got started by just shitting on IP laws - if going by bunnie's old "gongkai" post, at least the people using their stuff in the old days certainly did), video/audio codecs that have the same situation, even ham radio has its issues - DMR for example is an ETSI standard, but the most commonly used voice codec theoretically has a patent that (IIRC) runs through end of the year, and Yaesu's C4FM is fully proprietary.

> 1. Liability Insurance: From what I understand, this cost has gone up faster than inflation.

The problem is, if you fuck up say a child's life during birth by noticing too late the child is running out of oxygen... two decades ago, the child would probably be dead by age 10 or even earlier. With modern medicine, it is manageable to keep that shell of a human alive until it dies at age 80 - that cost has to be paid for by liability insurance if it can be shown that the cause was a mistreatment. We have that problem with midwifes in Germany, who are dropping out in droves because insurance prices exploded [1][2][3].

[1] https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2014/49932222_...

[2] https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2015-07/hebammen-elternprot...

[3] https://www.br.de/nachricht/hebammen-mangel-bayern-102.html
A romance scam compound–and how people get tricked into being there
Launch Log 1
Quantum computers are on track to solve knotty mathematical problems
Here's a video of one being restored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bjdrKCmiE0

The keyswitches are foam and foil, and the CRT really is a blue/white color.
At least theres a valid reason for a TV to be connected though.
I think I have trouble understanding what this is doing other than maybe some fine-tuned prompts tailored to a specific stack? I'm looking at the data science kit and I don't see why anyone would use this, much less pay for it?

I guess you guys have some MCP connections too, but this seems like such a marginal value add (how often am I really pinging these services and do I really want an agent doing that).

Regardless congrats on the launch.
Let's stop this tail-chasing and get to the bottom of the true difference: US (and most common-law) judges are neutral arbiters, strictly opining based on what evidence is there (Adversarial System). This is not how it works in civil-law systems, especially Germanic ones (of which PRC has retained more-or-less despite its communist history), which are entrusted to discover the truth, even if it seems to favor a party, and can do things that would be very questionable in an adversarial system, such as directly calling witnesses (Inquisitorial System).
Will that change Denmark‘s position in the Corruption Perception Index?

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024

I always thought the lower the more realistic
> But overall the algorithm has kept HN an interesting place. Any good moderation policy has side effects and tradeoffs.

I don’t think so. From his follow-up:

> My thesis is that the above might once have been an accurate summary of how Hacker News functions, but hasn’t been for years, and that there now exists a cabal of moderator/admins with their thumbs on the scale, and their personal predilections are the primary steering force of what’s permitted to surface and what gets ghosted. This moderation cabal operates more or less in secret. Their actions, and thus even their usernames, are invisible — lest the HN community discover that it’s steering things about as much as Maggie Simpson is.

Sounds right to me.
Thank you for sharing the perspective of some doctors. You'll likely get down votes because it comes across as condescending and elitist.
The Minard System
The standard SRE one recommended by Google has a lucky section. We tend to use it to talk about getting unlucky too.
I know that HN practice is to use the headline verbatim, but I think it would always be better to replace the clickbait "this" with its antecedent, whenever possible.
Do people still do that? I thought that the whole "you can just google goobedygook" meme died already! ZIO for this reason has sane normal proper names for things for example.
When Getting Phished Puts You in Mortal Danger
I see many debates on this and other threads about whether a system is truly "full self-driving" if it requires human intervention in extremely rare cases. I think this misses the point. A system that requires human assistance only one in a hundred times is still automating away roughly 99% of the human work.

When customer support is 99% automated with the remaining 1% handled by remote humans it is often economically and societally the same as 100% automation.

The same applies to self-driving cars. If there's 99% automation and humans can handle the remaining 1% remotely, and if that combined system (including the handoff process) is safer in aggregate than a standard human driver, then you basically don't need drivers anymore.

You don't actually need 100% AI-only automation to make dramatic economic and societal difference. You just need 100% coverage through the human-AI combination.
How does a stem cell with somebody else's DNA not trigger your own immune system? I'd understand if you could repurpose your own bone marrow (which is a type of stem cell, right?) or neurological stem cells, but I'd sort of expect the immune system to reject others similar to a bad organ transplant or wrong blood type transfusion.
I'm of two minds. I currently use 3 MCPs regularly (Atlassian, Git, and GitHub). And I suppose if GitHub or Atlassian actually hosted first-party MCP endpoints for their services, we probably wouldn't need to self-host?

But I wouldn't want to have a third party host where, all they're doing is just running the npx/uvx command themselves and I still have to give them keys, etc.

At that point, I'd rather just host them locally.
Elon Musk Pressured Reddit CEO Steve Huffman about Moderation
Very excited for this. The two painpoints I've had with LLM's lately:

- Mediocre knowledge of Erlang/Elixir

- Reluctance to use the new rune feature in Svelte 5

It sounds like I'd be able to point my local LLM to the official docs for Erlang, Elixir, Phoenix, and all the dependencies in my project. And same for Svelte 5.
I think there's a fundamental difference between a story and a math proof. A math proof is mostly there to give you new knowledge.

While a story definitely can do that, for many people, they're also about human connection. Even if the story isn't true, you feel like you're getting a look inside the author's brain by discovering how they weave storylines together. All the life experience they've head that lead them to write this story.

If I was instead told the story was written by AI, I would be far less interested in what data it was trained on to be able to produce this story, because I cannot relate to an AI having any "experience" whatsoever.
Yeah I get it. You'd think that home builders would be salivating at having so many new customers and building like crazy, but supply and demand doesn't work like we think it does with housing for some reason.
You will 100% need a 400-1600 word blog post hosted offsite to get the ball rolling.
How are you suggesting these ideas are here if humans didn't create them?
h/t to this FlowingData post, where I saw the link and learned that today is "Minard Day". Also, this astonishing fact about Minard's Napoleon map:

> Most who know the name associate it with Minard’s map of the Napoleon Russian campaign, but that work came later in life, post-retirement, at the ripe age of 88 years old.

https://flowingdata.com/2025/03/27/minard-day/
> (e.g. as pods in k8s, which is not serverless):

> There was not really anything in the article that should have lead you to believe that this was a "serverless only" issue, so I think the bashing against Netlify here is quite unwarranted.

It's not because you can use an external cache like Redis[1]. You can scale to hundreds of instances with an external redis cache and you'll be fine. The problem is that you can't operate on Netlify scale with a simple implementation like that. Netlify can't afford running a redis instance for every NextJS application without significantly cutting into their margins (not just from compute cost, but running and managing millions of redis instances at scale won't work).

Clearly Vercel has their own in-house cache service that they have priced in their model. Netlify could run a redis instance per application, though more realistically it needs its own implementation of a multi-tenant caching service that is secure, can scale, cost effective, and fits their operational model. They are not willing to invest in that.

[1] https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/examples/cache...
Someone on HN had a great summation in one of the art discussions that was essentially "Great human art rewards an interested viewer, AI art punishes them". Great art is full of interesting details, connections, and themes that the audience can get more from as their knowledge and attention increase. AI art is opposite. It's full of random details that make no coherent sense. A piece might look good at first glance but the more you pay attention the worse it becomes.

I think that concept applies equally well for writing. For random low value writing or an uninterested audience sure the AI writing will be fine, maybe even good. But as the desire for quality goes up the value of the AI product will go down.

This matches my own experience. Asking an AI to write a very brief story generally goes pretty well, but once you ask for more than a few simplistic paragraphs the quality falls off a cliff.
The AMA keeps the quacks out, to say the least. I know this is not a popular stance on HN.
AMA screws doctors too? I thought its main job was to screw patients by keeping the amount of doctors artificially low to keep prices high.
Hard to tell if this is a troll or not. If it isn’t: we have to govern for the majority, not for the minority.
So in addition to losing human readability, we are also throwing away the ability to nest (pseudo-)CSVs? With comma delimiters, I can take an entire CSV document and put it in 1 column, but with 0x1C-0x1F delimiters and banning non-text valid utf-8 in columns I no longer can. This continues to be a step backwards.
When I've briefly looked into this, the receiver stations on the ground are massive in a way that I thought was unavoidable.

Is that what you mean when you say real estate? That it's not a lot of area on the ground? Or that the space based part is small relative to the sky?

edit: the article makes no mention of this part. The UK proposal mentions that the ground antenna is the size of what was the largest offshore wind farm until 2018:

https://spaceenergyinitiative.org.uk/space-based-solar-power...

The cheaper that solar and wind and batteries get I think the worse this looks.

Maybe for near the poles? Seems like it'll always be comparitvely expensive and niche.
Yeah except for the fact I have to wait 3 months to see you to even pay that $300 for that 15 mins.

Certainly there’s a middle ground where there are enough doctors to meet demand while not having them below the salary of school teachers.
It feels like "Democratic and open" in the US has become "shadowy oligarchy and kleptocracy run for the benefit of whoever can control the media propaganda machine controlling the masses"
Why Your API Needs to Operate at the Edge
My sibling is a MS3 so know my question is not meant to be as antagonistic as it sounds.

What is the lesser evil - poor working conditions and financial outcomes for the healthcare system or prohibitively expensive treatments for patients? Are patient outcomes of French healthcare that much worse than the United States (and other public health systems such as that in the UK)? Are the wait times as egregious as the headlines make them out to be?

I believe the data supports your points, and there is a lot of data. But I also think the AMA and other institutions need a huge amount of improvement that will likely be very painful to implement - hopefully opioids won't be overprescribed for that pain management.

Thank you for your comment and for bringing expertise and meaningful experience to this discussion.
More Economical Context-Augmented LLM Generation by Reusing Stored KV Cache
I think we'll reach "most work done by unattended robots" around 2070. But we'd be better off if started working on post-labor-scarcity economics ASAP--might as well start learning to swim before the ship sinks. It might even be fun.
> Your karma doesn't reflect the score expected from the blogger behind the top #3 website of HN. This should tell us something.

Karma's a reflection of how much someone uses HN. Glancing at his account, it looks like he has never submitted anything before this article, and almost never comments. That account having low karma doesn't really tell us anything about him, beyond that he's not a HN regular.
> and can do things that would be very questionable in an adversarial system, such as directly calling witnesses (Inquisitorial System).

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_614

Rule 614. Court’s Calling or Examining a Witness

(a) Calling. The court may call a witness on its own or at a party’s request. Each party is entitled to cross-examine the witness.

(b) Examining. The court may examine a witness regardless of who calls the witness.

(c) Objections. A party may object to the court’s calling or examining a witness either at that time or at the next opportunity when the jury is not present.
Thank you for sharing this side of the story so well. The truth is that the AMA keeps the quacks out and standards high.
The only way this happens is if mods tell flaggers to hide instead of flag because anything flagged will just get vouched. People can hide a post and never see it again, but they aren't optimizing for themselves and not wanting to see it; they want to hide it from others, which is lame.
> The AMA keeps the quacks out, to say the least.

I'm sure it does! That's a very important function I am grateful.

> I know this is not a popular stance on HN.

You think so? I think keeping quacks out of medicine is popular. shrugs
Don't be so Amerigo-centrist. Europe and the Mediterranean Sea have been trading since litteral millenia. Guess why? civilization was born there because the tribes could share knowledge and goods like crazy.

Meanwhile, America didn't even exist for the Romans.
Excited to hear how it goes for you!

Our Models Add-On is intended to give the same flat monthly fee as you’re accustomed to with other products. What did you mean by leaning into pooled, just making it more front-and-center?
> Excel hates CSV

Does it though? Seems to be importing from and exporting to CSV just fine? Elaborate maybe.
From the article:

> Recipients were given immune-suppressing drugs to prevent their bodies from attacking the cells for six months after the surgery.
Well in the same vein, we can directly compare the decline of fully fledged MMORPGs to the psuedo-mmos that are Gacha games with essentially all the ambitious parts of the mmo that is stripped off.

That very much is an indictment of ambition and progress here.
http://archive.today/RVmD2
> It’s UX that kills the free alternatives.

Yup, that is a massive factor as well. My go-to example is OpenStack. It's incredibly powerful and malleable, but it shows on every corner that it is built by university nerds for university nerds - you either need to have a massive amount of highly educated manpower to deploy it, or you need to have a source of cheap or free labor where you don't have to pay for the onboarding time.
This is me! I actually just made a blog version of this with my code samples linked: https://zuplo.com/blog/2025/03/24/apis-at-the-edge
The idea that binary data doesn't go in CSVs is debatable; people do all sorts of weird stuff. Part of the robustness of a format is coping with abuse.

But putting that aside, if the control chars are not text, then you sacrifice human-readability and human-writability. In which case, you may as well just use a binary format.
You understimate what the Roman, Spanish and British empires could accomplish for its day.
Seemingly bad effort-to-reward ratio.

I still have several large projects on previous versions of Next.js, and I'm not motivated (financially or otherwise) to spend the effort upgrading them for no reason other than to keep up with the newest version. One project I did upgrade, I had a hell of a time solving weird compiler errors, and the compile time degraded noticeably for some reason.
Spotify's own Joe Rogan says 'He will never to go oppressive Canada again, he prefers going to Russia'.
It's a tiresome argument that "An AI can't possibly create anything" To strawman it there's a kind of fetishization of creativity (are your turds creative? is everything you do special?) and there is also Roger Penrose's bogus argument that he can do math because he's a thetan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind

The most articulate version is something you hear from religious types which is "you have the power to create because God created you" but if God can delegate its creative power to you why can't you delegate your creative power to something you created?

"Uniqueness" is not real creativity, I mean, the Python script

from uuid import uuid4
print(uuid4())

creates something the world has never seen before and will never see again and would be completely indifferent to except for the fact of its uniqueness. Practically creativity has some element of being useful or expressive within the bounds of some constraints. If I was hiring you to be a writer or I commissioned an artwork I'd have some specification of what I want. Can an AI of some kind do that? Sure.

From the viewpoint of being compelling, some people are easy to satisfy. An AI might be able to satisfy them better you can because what that person needs might be squicky to you or at best tiresome and your "self" will get in the way of seduction, yet the AI can always respond the way it wants you to respond. I'm highly satisfied with the selections that are made by my YOShInOn smart RSS reader even though these are just selections and not "creations", however I'd imagine a system which you work with over a long time and that learns you preferences could "create" things that satisfy you much better than what you can find on the internet.
Show HN: SSH LLM Honeypot Caught a Threat Actor – Here's What I Learned
First documented case of a threat actor interacting with an AI-based honeypot.
HTTP also works locally(over local files including stdin/stdout), not just remotely.
The ferry is not originating or stopping at every possible destination on the shoreline, so the ferry is only useful if its passengers 1. have a second way to get from their origin to the ferry and a third way to get from the ferry to their destination. And if the ferry does stop at every possible origin and destination along the shoreline, then it's going to take much longer on average than a point-to-point jetski.
Just as context for anyone curious:

Scala is even more "powerful" than TS or Rust as it has real HKT (higher-kinded types), and for example Effect.TS needs to emulate/simulate it.

https://github.com/Effect-TS/effect/blob/main/packages/effec...
Zoom bias: The social costs of having a 'tinny' sound during video conferences
OpenAI just made it harder to turn your pics into Studio Ghibli-style images
They mostly aren't. The lack of transparency around how many parameters frontier models have and how long they're trained is a big obstacle when it comes to estimating the energy impact of training very large models.

A group at Stanford has been benchmarking model providers by transparency here: https://crfm.stanford.edu/fmti/May-2024/index.html

I think a great way to create positive change in the world is to pressure OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, XAI, and Meta to all share details about the energy cost of training and inference for their models. If every major provider provided this transparency, it would be less valuable to keep that info secret from a "keep your competitors in the dark" perspective. It would also allow customers to make decisions based on more than just performance and cost.
I think it's more about making housing cheaper than being pleasant. Plenty of people live in apartments or condos, so I suspect there is a market for it.
It doesn't really matter if they can or can't do the work. If enough execs are convinced AI can replace the workers, they will replace the workers, and management will have moved onto other things before they suffer consequences.
> I'm not talking about "prefers roleplay over combat". I'm talking about "gets angry if you break character and make meta-comments about the game"

Oh yeah, that's annoying. I'd leave that game.

> It shouldn't be, but unfortunately we can't seem to trust the general RPG community to not be inappropriate weirdos without stating explicit rules and expectations for behavior
> If someone comes to your house party and shits on the floor you don't invite them back. No need to create a rule saying "don't shit on the floor" that all guests need to agree to next time there is a party

I don't think I agree with this characterization. Of course there are baseline rules for living in a society, but a session zero is for more than reminding players that they cannot fucking make sexual innuendos directed at the only woman at the table - it's for making sure everyone is aware of the style of game played, and to make sure it's the right game for them.

Some people might want a hack-and-slash through a dungeon, cycling through characters as they get fed into the meatgrinder. Some people might want a game of court intrigue. Some people want high-magic, some people want low-magic. Some people want to explore something from their personal life and treat the game seriously, while others want a light-hearted game.

To go back to the party analogy you brought up, of course nobody is allowed to shit on the floor, but if I'm being invited to a party, I would very much like to find out if it's a frat party, or fancy cocktails, or a child's 3rd birthday. I might bow out of an invitation if it's not something I want to attend.
Azure has the same level of isolation for VMs at a hardware level as AWS.
I had never heard the story of Sloot Digital Coding System [0] linked from that Wikipedia entry. Truly not trying to be judgmental or negative but I was exhausted just reading the article, let alone the idea of chasing that particular albatross as my life's pursuit lol.

Really fascinating bit of trivia though!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System
It will be interesting to see how the shareholders of the publicly traded company respond when the FBI, etc. start getting involved with the threats being made on that platform.