HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

cowsandmilk

5,358 karma · joined April 22, 2008

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/drhall; my proof: https://keybase.io/drhall/sigs/rPElcZsJLP2p_bk1GlHdeTD7ZEqQ4GuCNV0a8ybr6MQ ]
submissionscomments
cowsandmilk··on Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
It isn’t clear to me that the OP’s sister-in-law would be responsible to pay these debts and they couldn’t have just allowed payment from the estate. Since insurance had lapsed, I’m assuming the estate was not large.
cowsandmilk··on Study: MRI contrast agent causes harmful metal buildup in some patients
1. The correction doesn’t invalidate that previous study at all

2. I fail to see how the previous study is an “underpinning” of the new paper. The new paper is a chemistry paper about dissociation of GBCAs in the presence of certain chemicals. Maybe people care because it is a potential explanation for toxicity, but the paper is very focused on the chemistry findings.

cowsandmilk··on Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage?
What are the bad reasons that bias electrek’s coverage?
cowsandmilk··on Benchmarking Postgres 17 vs. 18
Where are the error bars? I don’t get why people run all these tests and don’t give me an idea of standard deviation or whether the differences are actually statistically significant.
cowsandmilk··on Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in US-East-1 Region
Except just in the DNS section, I’ve already found one place where he gets it wrong…
cowsandmilk··on Date bug in Rust-based coreutils affects Ubuntu 25.10 automatic updates
That’s an argument against creating uuutils; it is a project that aims for coreutils 100% compatibility. eza, bat, ripgrep, etc are more exciting for at least having different features than coreutils
cowsandmilk··on Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
Every time someone digs into this, it turns out Pelosi’s large wealth is much more tied to buying SF real estate long before the tech boom sent the real estate prices soaring. It doesn’t take insider trading for someone to have gotten rich in the SF real estate market. Plenty of people became millionaires just by owning a condo they bought in the 1970’s. It is no surprise that someone whose career has been real estate investing in SF since the 1960’s made some money…
cowsandmilk··on Tesla Recalls Almost 13,000 EVs over Risk of Battery Power Loss
+1 Toyota Sienna recall earlier this month was national news and was mentioned on my mother in law’s local news broadcast causing her to call us.

Hacker News seems to post Tesla recalls, but national news websites that publish recalls seem to do it for every single recall, not just Tesla.

cowsandmilk··on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
Does anyone vote for a president based on their ability to land on the moon?
cowsandmilk··on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1
Many AWS customers have bad retry policies that will overload other systems as part of their retries. DynamoDB being down will cause them to overload IAM.
cowsandmilk··on Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice
That’s impractical. Take binary search and the assumption the list is sorted. Verifying the list is sorted would negate the point of binary search as you would be inspecting every item in the list.
cowsandmilk··on Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
See https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/cisco-announces-intent-to-... for example, SamKnows is in millions of homes measuring performance and now sending the data to Cisco.
cowsandmilk··on Vite+ – Unified toolchain for the web
As someone who “owns” a framework at work that has been unfunded for several years, the answer is definitively yes. I haven’t touched the build toolchain in all those years and the project continues to build a dozen different JavaScript libraries with no issues across multiple Node.js upgrades.

The current version of webpack was released 5 years ago. You can keep using eslint 8 which was released 4 years ago. This really isn’t the constantly changing space it was in the 2010’s

cowsandmilk··on The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy and four times subprime
Why would the government bail out AI companies? They didn’t bail out the dot-com bubble. Bailing out the auto industry was about the UAW. Bailing out financial institutions went with programs to keep people from being foreclosed on and losing their homes. The AI bubble doesn’t have those incentives and is mostly (all?) private company valuations.
cowsandmilk··on Self hosting 10TB in S3 on a framework laptop and disks
What do you use self-hosted S3 for? I feel like all the use cases I can think of would be better served by a network attached file system.
cowsandmilk··on When private practices merge with hospital systems, costs go up
> doctors are rather good at providing care across corporate boundaries

I’ve found that to not be universally true. I say that as someone with eight different health systems in MyChart and who has been treated by two additional hospitals who don’t use MyChart in the past year.

Some systems are very competent about sharing across borders and good at it. I’m lucky my primary hospital is one of those. Others are god awful at it and take multiple calls to get them to even fax records.

cowsandmilk··on When private practices merge with hospital systems, costs go up
Most hospitals in the US are nonprofits
cowsandmilk··on When private practices merge with hospital systems, costs go up
That article isn’t about hospitals acquiring practices, it is about private equity acquiring hospitals. There is sometimes a relation, but not always.
cowsandmilk··on Ask HN: Why did COM/SOAP/other protocols fail?
There definitely is a simplicity in that I don’t actually need to use OpenAPI to generate data structures and can quickly just do a JSON.parse and easily get to the field I want. With SOAP, you either generate a client or do some quite annoying walking of the XML tree. The hurdle for quick and dirty parsing is a lot higher with SOAP.
cowsandmilk··on Ask HN: Why did COM/SOAP/other protocols fail?
This so much, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an API that matches Fielding’s paper.
cowsandmilk··on Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026
Wikipedia claims they aren’t being used in the 2020’s, but I’ve still seen stores in the past year pull them out when the internet is down.
cowsandmilk··on Solar panels + cold = A potential problem
Considering the electric code has an 80% rule for loads, anyone assuming they can use 100% of what is on a label probably should not be doing electrical work.
cowsandmilk··on I built Foyer: a Rust hybrid cache that slashes S3 latency
I prefer this abstraction as it is more widely supported (I’ve had to deploy to hosts that intentionally kill when you swap) and results in development assuming that the access may be at disk speed. When you rely on swap, I often see developers assuming everything is accessible at memory speed and then surprised when swap causes sudden degradation.
cowsandmilk··on US cities pay too much for buses
You’re assuming the federal government rubber stamps their 80%
cowsandmilk··on SimpleFold: Folding proteins is simpler than you think
1. I would be hesitant to not categorize folding@home as statistics based; they use Markov state models which is very much based on statistics. And their current force fields are parameterized via machine learning ( https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jctc.0c00355 ).

2. The biggest difference between folding@home and alphafold is that folding@home tries to generate the full folding trajectory while alphafold is just protein structure prediction; only looking to match the folded crystal structure. Folding@home can do things like look into how a mutation may make a protein take longer to fold or be more or less stable in its folded state. Alphafold doesn’t try to do that.

cowsandmilk··on SimpleFold: Folding proteins is simpler than you think
To sell computers? 20 years ago, Apple had scientific poster sessions at WWDC and worked to bring PyMol to the Mac. The pictures of proteins you see in the paper were generated with PyMol as are probably >50% of the protein images in scientific papers for the last 15 years.
cowsandmilk··on SimpleFold: Folding proteins is simpler than you think
MD simulations typically aren’t run for time scales that tell you anything about the folding process. Most people are looking at motion after the protein has folded.
cowsandmilk··on Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high
Interventional radiology is clearly different and requires more training than plain radiology reading images.
cowsandmilk··on Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high
2000 is only 1 of every 100,000
cowsandmilk··on Watches Are for the Poor
Except the arguments are exactly the opposite. In Graham’s essay, the manager works on shorter time scales while in this post, time scales increase as you go up the ladder.
← PreviousPage 5 of 34Next →