Hacker News Reader

metaphoron Blindsight (Watts Novel)

This...coming from someone who did finish it. Such meh execution that it continues to baffle me whenever it makes front page.

metaphoron The softness of metal

Well, feeling rather bamboozled after clicking the link to discover that the article has fuckall to do with Rockwell, Vickers, Brinell, or materials science in general.

metaphoron What Sun got wrong

Scott McNealy had a few choice words in retrospect[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40950311

metaphoron Data collected by cars and sold to third parties

Just recently? The industry has been thinking about it[1][2][3][4] since before most of us were born.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US3576576A/en

[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US3611388A/en

[3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US3971029A/en

[4] https://patents.google.com/patent/US4095228A/en

metaphoron Data collected by cars and sold to third parties

> I'm security conscious and made sure to disable all the data collection I could find in the companion app before removing my account, turn off remote access services, dig through the infotainment to turn off what I could, etc.

Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, OEM mobile app...Bluetooth??

Consider the business case of leased Comcast (as the largest ISP in the US) modems broadcasting open side-channel xfinitywifi SSIDs...essentially everywhere.

metaphoron How Universities Should Prepare Founders

Similar in smell to political science degree --> career politician, I think pg nails it:

> The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it. And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance.

> Another thing that will tend to draw universities away from the optimal path is business schools, if they have them. Business schools were not designed to train founders. They were designed to train the managerial class of the large industrial companies that arose in the early 20th century; they're the West Points of industrial capitalism. That's why their official name is usually the School of Management. But while the skills they teach might be useful in running companies beyond a certain size, they're not the critical ingredient in founding them. And the skills that are are already taught by other departments. So to the extent business schools affect their parent university's strategy for preparing founders, it can only be by adding error.

metaphoron Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

> You have the right to a degree in XYZ...

No, you don't.

metaphoron Egg consumption inversely correlated with Alzheimer's

> Except that three saturated-fat-laden strips of bacon for breakfast prevents the need for lunch

Said no overweight American ever.

metaphoron Michigan spent $1.8B and only created 602 jobs

It's a distinct signal of pure ignorance that you conflate the highest levels of publicly elected executive leadership with "government employees".

metaphoron OneDrive data now has an expiry date

Data is on pragmatic lockout after 3 months, not 12.

For years, enterprises have been conditioned to lean into OneDrive and forget about it. Indeed, that dark pattern is a festering disease across consumer Windows.

This is classic Microsoft long rug pull.

metaphoron We've made the world too complicated

> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

metaphoron Greek Alphabet Cards

During undergrad years, IFC fraternity pledges had to memorize the Greek alphabet for obvious reasons. This is how the capital letters were taught amongst bros.

  A BRA
  EZ HO
  I KAM
  NEON
  PETY
  OXY O

metaphoron Missile defense is NP-complete

> This is what we had to build in the 60s...

>> drift less than 1.5×10−5 °/h

Wow...just wow. Not a GNC engineer, but that drift spec strikes me as exceptionally good today, let alone the 60s.

EDIT:

> Even modern laser ring gyros do not even share a dinner table with the precision and accuracy of the above singular component of the Peacekeeper ICBMs, and that was a long time ago.

No kidding; full transparency, that was my basis of comparison.

metaphoron Honda is killing its EVs

That's all motherhood and apple pie, but I'm sorry: the reality that we live in and incentives at play are such that if a capability can be exploited, then it will be exploited to the detriment of the consumer. Full stop.

metaphoron Rendezvous with Rama

In my mind, the prose of the sequels were so unlike Clarke when I read them as a teen that it created a long stint of aversion towards spending time on anything with co-authors. I owe Rendezvous a lot though; had I not discovered that book as a kid, there's little chance I'd be reading recreationally today.

metaphoron What's driving rising business costs?

The median US hospital is also a nonprofit; indeed, more than half are. I fail to see how focusing on this opaque median measure tells us anything meaningful.

Care to speculate on the trends I pointed out? I simply don't see how compensation for doctors is the problem.

metaphoron What's driving rising business costs?

Ahh, grokked. Thanks for helping me better empathize with such a nuanced situation.

metaphoron What's driving rising business costs?

Appreciate the perspective.

> A not small number of the rural docs are foreign born and trained and they essentially work this crappy jobs until they have permanent residency and then they move to more desirable markets.

Not sure that I follow how "rural" necessarily begets "crappy" though. Is the working quality of life somehow that much worse, or is it the relative social isolation and/or lack of recreational options while off duty, or is it really just a case of urbanite out of their accustomed habitat?

metaphoron What's driving rising business costs?

Hmm...sniff test sampling:

- HCA[1]: FY25 profit margin = 9.0%

- UHS[2]: FY25 profit margin = 8.6%

- THC[3]: FY25 profit margin = 6.6%

Yeah, a bit of disaggregation is likely needed here, but in these companies, labor expense as a percentage of revenue is on a declining YoY trend while revenue continues to grow.

What's the prevailing ballpark ratio of doctors to all other hospital staff again? And what details are buried in that ever so opaque and increasing "other operating expenses" line item?

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/860730/0001193125260...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/352915/0001193125260...

[3] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/70318/00000703182600...

metaphoron What's driving rising business costs?

> There were 147 unfilled slots for pediatricians, 805 for family medicine, and 357 for internal medicine. They don't have the applicants; it's not the slots.

You lost me...from your cite[1]:

  | Specialty         | Positions | Applicants | Matches | App/Pos | Deficit |
  |-------------------|-----------|------------|---------|---------|---------|
  | Pediatrics        |     3,135 |      3,998 |   2,988 |    128% |    4.7% |
  | Family Medicine   |     5,357 |      7,337 |   4,552 |    137% |   15.0% |
  | Internal Medicine |    10,941 |     17,131 |  10,584 |    157% |    3.3% |

I'm curious what conditions merit a "match".

Aren't a lot of these shortages scattered around rural areas where young doctors really don't want to move to? I understand from a buddy who is currently in med school that there are all sorts of incentive carrots being deployed to attract doctors to these underserved communities.

[1] https://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Main_Match_R...

metaphoron What's driving rising business costs?

> The dirty little not-so-secret is that we pay doctors too much in the US.

Doubt.

> That's partly because we have a doctor shortage here (medical schools collude to limit the number of new doctors created each year).

Now explain this trend[1].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1T22Y

metaphoron Lena by qntm (2021)

I assumed it was a wink to the Nov 1972 Playboy model[1] whose centerfold face became a de facto baseline test image for DSP algorithms without consent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

metaphoron Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

Who said anything about beating GPS or other functionally equivalent GNSS?

metaphoron Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

What makes you think cell tower triangulation is the only data point being exploited to minimize position error?

metaphoron I canceled my book deal

I don't think he ever got the first half of the advance...cherry-picking from the TFA:

> They offered a $5000 advance with the first half paid out when they approve of the first third of the book and the second half when they accept the final manuscript for publication.

> I continued to get further behind on delivering my revised draft of the first 1/3.

> Around this time, there was a possibility of me changing jobs. Oh, and my wedding was coming up. That was the final nail in the coffin.

> There were too many things going on and I didn't enjoy working on the book anymore, so what is the point? I made up my mind to ask to freeze the project.

> They agreed.

metaphoron NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut

> ...and hopefully had a 10 or so satellites in view.

I believe you'll need 12 GPS sats in view to gain incremental accuracy improvement over 8.

metaphoron NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut

> accuracy is a mix of both granularity and divergence

I respectfully disagree.

In context, "granularity" is nothing more than a resolution constraint on reported timestamps. Its inclusion adjacent to the specified "divergence from UTC" is a function of market manipulation surveillance objectives as discussed in preamble item (2), and really doesn't have anything to do with accuracy proper.

metaphoron Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks

I've noticed a lot in the SFF genre, including my current fiction read: Joe Abercrombie's latest release The Devils[1].

You'll see something like the following on the bottom of book details:

> At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D3CB76TV

metaphoron Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

Which is funny reading how TFA tries to feign ignorance:

> When we shipped Actions in 2018, we had no idea how popular it would become.