Thank you! Simplicity and speed were exactly what I was going for.
4,837 karma · joined March 9, 2009
The raw data is a 2.9 GB Parquet file. I built MedicaidSpending.org to make it searchable and browsable.
You can search by provider name or NPI, browse by state/city/specialty, and see individual provider pages with monthly spending trends, billing code breakdowns, and automated billing flags for statistical outliers.
Some of the patterns are striking. Brooklyn alone accounts for $31.8 billion in personal care services (code T1019) _ more than most states spend on all Medicaid combined. Some authorized officials control hundreds of billing entities. Early analysts scanning just 0.16% of providers flagged $90 billion in likely fraudulent payments.
Technical details: - Go single binary, ~15 MB - 3.3 GB SQLite database (read-only, pre-aggregated from the 227M rows using DuckDB) - 900,000+ indexable pages generated from 13 templates - No JavaScript framework _ server-rendered HTML, Chart.js for one chart per provider page - Runs on a single VPS behind Caddy
Data sources: HHS Medicaid Provider Spending dataset, NPPES provider registry, HCPCS code descriptions, OIG exclusion list, NUCC taxonomy codes.
All public data, no login required.
I’m sure that story sounds a little precious, but I’m finding real value in talking with these sorts of bots. Behind the screens, they’re just a thin wrapper around ChatGPT, but a bit of tuning for a specific use case seems to make the whole interaction much more natural. Please try it out and let me know what you think!
I had the idea because I’m a bit of a psychology nerd and, while I haven’t done a ton of therapy myself, I’ve got a lot of out reading people like Albert Ellis and Carl Rogers and using some of the techniques from modalities like CBT. I’ve also seen lots of people close to me struggling with mental health and finding and keeping a therapist seems to be a big part of that. Therapy can be great, but it seems to be hard to find someone you really connect with and limiting your interactions to a single, specific hour each week can leave you unsupported when you most need it. So the idea of a confidential and anonymous therapy-like chatbot, available any time you need it, seemed like it might have some value.
I’m just now diving into the world of therapy chatbots, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anything similar that’s as open and accessible as this. The closest I can think of is 7Cups, that’s that’s real people not AI. (Am a huge fan of 7Cups, though, and have been a listener there for years.)
Technically, it’s just a very thin wrapper on the ChatGPT API. Other than the interface, all I really supply is the prompt. The app itself runs entirely on Cloudflare Pages and the frontend is just Alpine.js and Simple.css. I’m a Rails guy, but Cloudflare Pages and Cloudflare Workers have become by go-to for rapid prototyping like this because it’s such so quick and easy.
Hope some of it you find it useful, and I’d love to know what y’all think!
I had the idea because I’m a bit of a psychology nerd and, while I haven’t done a ton of therapy myself, I’ve got a lot of out reading people like Albert Ellis and Carl Rogers and using some of the techniques from modalities like CBT. I’ve also seen lots of people close to me struggling with mental health and finding and keeping a therapist seems to be a big part of that. Therapy can be great, but it seems to be hard to find someone you really connect with and limiting your interactions to a single, specific hour each week can leave you unsupported when you most need it. So the idea of a confidential and anonymous therapy-like chatbot, available any time you need it, seemed like it might have some value.
I’m just now diving into the world of therapy chatbots, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anything similar that’s as open and accessible as this. The closest I can think of is 7Cups, that’s that’s real people not AI. (Am a huge fan of 7Cups, though, and have been a listener there for years.)
Technically, it’s just a very thin wrapper on the ChatGPT API. Other than the interface, all I really supply is the prompt. The app itself runs entirely on Cloudflare Pages and the frontend is just Alpine.js and Simple.css. I’m a Rails guy, but Cloudflare Pages and Cloudflare Workers have become by go-to for rapid prototyping like this because it’s such so quick and easy.
Hope some of it you find it useful, and I’d love to know what y’all think!
This very much cements the sentiment I've had all along that Fly.io is quite a special company.
No doubts there are plenty of more niche uses (if I were serving users internationally, I’d probably use Fly.io), but the use case just doesn’t seem as broad as the Heroku/PaaS comparisons make it out to be.
I deliver for DoorDash and make around $100 dollars a day from about five hours of work. My girlfriend (who’s disabled) rides along with me, so it’s sorta like I’m just getting paid to drive around and hang out. I drive a 2005 Honda Civic, so I spend less than $15/day on gas and the car is old enough the depreciation is minuscule. I buy my health insurance on the exchange. It’s excellent and with the premium subsidy I only pay $22/month. I have several chronic health conditions, so good health insurance (and particularly drug coverage) is really important to me. I’ve been able to get my insurance to cover all of the many medications I’m on (many of still under patent and not generic) and my copay is only $45/month. Visits to my primary care doctor are free and I’ve got a $500 deductible for everything else.
I can work as much or as little as I want on pretty much whatever schedule I choose. I tend to stick to about five hours a day because it doesn’t feel like a ton of work, but it’s enough to cover my expenses and then some. Rent is my only other major expense and I pay just $550 for my one bedroom apartment. I rarely cook at home, but even after spending way too much eating out, I regularly have $500-$1,000 leftover at the end of the month, so I’m certainly not living paycheck to paycheck. Since I save some of that extra money, I can take time off whenever I want (although I rarely do, since I enjoy getting out of the house and working). Sure, if I get sick and don’t work, I don’t make any money, but that’s why I keep a bit of money in savings.
It might be Uber or Lyft or Instacart instead of DoorDash, but I know several people in a similar position to me. And honestly it’s a pretty sweet life. I’ve got all my needs met and then some. I enjoy my work. And I’ve got lots of free time to purpose my intellectual interests like coding.