Hacker News Reader

pnutjamon The American Healthcare Conundrum

Why wouldn't you wait for one your insurance would approve? You're probably paying them thousands every month.

pnutjamon The American Healthcare Conundrum

"And don't you dare ask for a second opinion, you'll get the doctor that has been assigned to you and accept whatever they tell you."

This happened to us with private healthcare. There is basically one specialty group for the procedure my family member needed so any 2nd opinion request just got routed back to the same doctor, "Oh, your Dr X's patient". Also, we could barely afford the procedure so we missed out on some follow up testing that would have verified things worked properly and basically got blacklisted from that practice so hopefully it's resolved...

pnutjamon Using an engineering notebook

I use a daily log system. I just run this bash script to open my log for the day. This opens the same file all day, so I can add stuff, and I know how to find old stuff, it's easy to grep, etc..

    ## create new log file for personal logging

    vi ~/daily_logs/personal_logfile_$(date +%j_%m%d%y)

pnutjamon UK accounting body to halt remote exams amid AI cheating

Yeah, I'm not a frat guy, but don't groups like Fraternities build "Study Guides" that are often just brain dumps of tests with correct answers?

pnutjamon I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

Sure, you can work around it; but it blows up the savings alot of people expect when they don't include this in their math.

Also, SAN is often faster then local disk if you have a local SAN.

pnutjamon I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

This looks pretty informative. The terminology can be hard to follow. https://medium.com/@bounouh.fedi/understanding-iops-in-aws-w...

I/O is hard to benchmark so it's often ignored since you can just scale up your disks. It's a common gotcha in the cloud. It's not a show stopper, but it blows up the savings you might be expecting.

pnutjamon I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

The most consistent misunderstanding I see about the cloud, is disk I/O. Nobody understands how slow your standard cloud disk is under load. They see good performance and assume that will always be the case. They don't realize that most cloud disks use a form of token tracking where they build up I/O over time and if you have bursts or sustained high I/O load you will very quickly notice that your disk speeds are garbage.

For some reason people more easily understand the limits of CPU and memory, but overlook disk constantly.

pnutjamon How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods

half the time, no sugar means sugar substitute. It is definitely confusing.

Glad you're hear to tell people they are dumb and they should work around systemic problems instead of trying to fix the system.

pnutjamon OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

"At some point OpenAI's investors are going to want their money back."

They do now, that's why they are using a shell game to pump up the stock value.

pnutjamon China is run by engineers. America is run by lawyers

The one thing Democrats and Republicans always agree on is "No Progressive's allowed".

pnutjamon A postmortem of three recent issues

Yup, these guys aren't the customers anyway. The investors are the only ones they care about because the customers don't come close to paying the actual costs.

pnutjamon In Search of AI Psychosis

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/605/transcript

pnutjamon Snapshots of Kids Bike Jumping in the 1970s

I distinctly remember a kid dying by falling off her bike in the late 80's. She was in the class w/ my younger brother but we didn't really know her. It was obviously a big deal at the school.

pnutjamon I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file

pnutjamon Samsung Removes Bootloader Unlocking with One UI 8

You mean w/ DNS? or an app?

pnutjamon An Introduction to Tribalism for the Modern World That Has Forgotten It

You're talking about conservatism. He's talking about American Conservatism. It's just a name, like "Pro-Life" or "Death Tax". It has no bearing in reality. Similar to how the National Socialist Party was not Socialist and most of the world's Communist parties ceased to be Communist long before the stopped calling themselves communist.

pnutjamon An Introduction to Tribalism for the Modern World That Has Forgotten It

Who said exclusively?

pnutjamon An Introduction to Tribalism for the Modern World That Has Forgotten It

Exactly my point, this has been going on in America for a long time.

pnutjamon An Introduction to Tribalism for the Modern World That Has Forgotten It

wow: "Why would a clan that guarantees its own justice ever yield to a system that promises justice to its enemies? To do so is to voluntarily surrender its greatest strengths: the power to protect its own, punish its rivals, and maintain its position in the world. It is not merely a loss of advantage; it is the dismantling of the clan’s very foundation."

White nationalism and conservatism in a nutshell...

pnutjamon It's the end of observability as we know it (and I feel fine)

The quality of any individual part of the code might be better, but the architecture is way worse and unsustainable long term.

pnutjamon The Era of the Business Idiot

But it is. This the the same argument against minimum wage. It's just wrong. The government should absolutely set a floor on wages and discrimination. There must be a standard to minimize friction. It's just not something that anyone can do by themselves.

pnutjamon The Era of the Business Idiot

The classic, I'm not a "whatever terrible thing", but those terrible people are ok and it's fine for them to be terrible.

Guess what that makes you?

pnutjamon I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

The arguments are so facetious and facile. India has more corruption then the US and they can handle a free lunch program for all kids. Why can't America?

pnutjamon I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

This is why the wealthy should be required to use public schools.

pnutjamon How the U.S. became a science superpower

Why does less then replacement rate equal extinction? It just requires a reimagination of the economy it's not an extinction level threat. That's just scare mongering.

pnutjamon How the U.S. became a science superpower

Taxing the rich will have all sorts of positive knock-on effects that will also go a long way towards fixing these issues.

pnutjamon Audiobooks vs. Printed Books: a debate as a reader and an author

I don't see anyone else saying this, but I don't like audiobooks because of the voices and over production. If I want to listen to a book, I use TTS, it's gotten very good. I can pick the voice and I just hear the story. I can also switch back to reading without trying to figure out where I am since the Text to speech is using the same epub I'm reading.

pnutjamon Whistleblower details how DOGE may have taken sensitive NLRB data

https://documentedny.com/2025/04/14/ice-bukele-cecot-tren-de...

Probably more then one.

pnutjamon Whistleblower details how DOGE may have taken sensitive NLRB data

This checks out because all those DOGE hires appear to be hackers, and they are now state sponsored. Most of them could never pass a basic background check, much less a TS or even public trust from one of the more invasive Federal agencies.