Hacker News Reader

mhh__on Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices

yes. It's completely insane that health insurance A) does all price discovery B) is tied to your employer.

Ask an American hospital how much something costs - you will get a completely fake price back, this is a sign of a totally broken market.

mhh__on Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices

PE staff are more intelligent and more shrewd than the people running the businesses they buy. Being a good doctor doesn't make you a good businessman.

I'm not a huge fan of PE but the point of economics to deliver cheap and quality goods to consumers not keep people in a job.

In healthcare in US in particular I think the main thing that capital should be (if regulators allow) boutique / specialists that e.g. are the best in the biz at doing MRI scans, in some states my understanding is that it's literally illegal to start a business aiming to make one small part of the process better.

mhh__on Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices

You know what american healthcare really needs is more regulation!

mhh__on San Francisco Onion Futures Company

All you need to do is quite a price that isn't vulnerable to arbitrage. As a dealer you should then charge a spread atop of that to cover make a profit after costs and adverse selection (even if trading was free you should charge a spread to protect you against informed traders)

mhh__on San Francisco Onion Futures Company

many users of derivatives willingly lose money on them because the purpose of these contracts is to transfer risk to those willing to hold it.

mhh__on San Francisco Onion Futures Company

Other than the name of the business

mhh__on San Francisco Onion Futures Company

> Treasury futures are far too big that no single person could ever corner it.

Well, you'd think, but squeezing the CTD bond was completely accepted practice well into the noughties until PIMCO flew too close to the sun and faced regulatory wrath.

mhh__on San Francisco Onion Futures Company

Is the price of onions really that seasonal? Shall have to check

mhh__on Replacing Pull Requests with Delta

frankly i think most of these "tools" are the result of people being addicted to watching the agent shit code out and as such quietly abolishing review.

mhh__on Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)

> brainwash

You have been brainwashed. Or was it Russia as well?

Everything started much longer ago. You can't go along in life just assuming everything will converge to some whig paradise.

mhh__on QueryBrew: System-Agnostic SQL-to-SQL Query Optimization [pdf]

Quite a cool concept. Seems that things are finally on the edge of moving again in database land (e.g. postgres is great but it's quite old)

mhh__on More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

I think it seems sensible to _assume_ anything the LLM reads (if you aren't inferencing it) has a chance of ending up in some database somewhere. Regardless of whether you trust the other party its a sensible thing to plan around.

mhh__on iPhone Duo

The folding phones are genuinely interesting although all the cool demos I've seen people do irl have been quite reliant on android being quite liberal as to what software you can run

mhh__on Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

small behaviours are fine, yes, what i was referring to was people making "foobar api skill" with just a bad compression of the foobar docs in a .md

mhh__on Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

They're literally just documentation with a hat on. I don't mind a skill saying where the docs are but an overreliance on skills is simply proof someone isn't able to reason about the gestalt

mhh__on How AI is breaking the British state

They already do, you need permission from local government to build almost anything in Britain.

mhh__on How AI is breaking the British state

The renters rights act is already seemingly leading to distortion in the market - it's not really the price controls as per se but the inability to do things when the tenant is in place.

mhh__on How AI is breaking the British state

Why are these cases only happening now? The article is clearly talking about the wider principle anywwy

mhh__on How AI is breaking the British state

Rent controls are great if you already have a place

mhh__on How AI is breaking the British state

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0817jd9dqo

The judge decided that, despite prices suggesting otherwise, the two types of labour here were the same.

mhh__on How AI is breaking the British state

> British state to ignore any possible volume of petitions

Do you live under a rock?

mhh__on How AI is breaking the British state

> Is the Economist seriously suggesting we should roll back workers and renters rights because AI makes it too easy for the average Joe to actually get those rights?

Yes, both of these pieces of legislation are extremely badly designed feel-good nonsense, which I personally hope will be shown to be so by an avalanche of claims automated by AI.

The employment rights legislation we have at the moment literally abolishes the market for labour - the final decision as to if your salary is "fair" is made by a judge.

mhh__on Muse Spark 1.3

I would expect, although have no evidence, that any obviously high entropy crap like base64 and so on probably would get removed whether it's a secret or not.

mhh__on British Museum hosted Peter Thiel in private viewing of Bayeux tapestry

this is very "data centres using all the water" coded. the guardian used to be above running this kind of nonsense, now every single issue has pages of prickly "ooh, not a good look!" stilletto-ing.

what does "no known interest" mean?

mhh__on Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

I don't think they do. The revealed preference is online safety this online safety that - although in fairness some of this is out of a desire to avoid deeper issues.

mhh__on Moderna reports first positive Phase 3 for mRNA neoantigen therapy in melanoma

How much do you trust the medical advice of a doctor in 2026?

mhh__on Moderna reports first positive Phase 3 for mRNA neoantigen therapy in melanoma

The idea that humans were basically retarded prior to about 1901 is a little hubristic